God brings us into the light of day – Mal 3:19-20

33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the sun. Not the Son of God, Jesus, I mean the big fiery thing in the sky, the sun with a ‘u.’ Most pragmatically, like all life on this planet, of course, we’re totally dependent on it, both for warmth and so that plants can grow and give us things to eat and oxygen to breath. It also feels good. There’s just something about a sunny day that just feels better. This time of year, the sun gets up right up when I do, which makes getting up a lot easier. “Feeling the sun on your back” is a common expression for the pleasantness of being out, being active, on a sunny day. But, given that there is not a lot of a sun in the land of my people, my skin is pretty terribly adapted to sun. I burn really easily. I have so little pigment in my eyes that it’s actually really hard for me to see well on a very sunny day, without shades for my glasses. Actually, in one place I lived, the place I went for my eye exams was an optometry school, and the students and instructors would always get excited when they started examining me because I’m so low on eye pigment that, apparently, you can see various features of ocular anatomy on me that you can’t easily in most people, because of the greater amount of pigment, and they’d generally start calling people over to look at my eyes. Less personally, I know what increased exposure to the sun’s rays is doing to our planet, and its capacity to be hospitable to human life. Heat and light and the sun play ambiguous roles in our lives: necessary, often pleasant, sometimes onerous, potentially dangerous.

God gives us windows to holiness, and will open them fully – Luke 20:27-38, 2 Thess 2:16-3:5

32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been to the Broadhead Center at Duke. Formerly known as West Union, it’s the central campus dining location, and it’s a really beautiful building (as well as having reasonably priced good food!). One face of the building is glass, or at least some other transparent material, and because of a kind of cut away in the first floor, from the garden level up, you have two stories of continuous glass-like wall, letting in natural light and opening the space up. One day, I was sitting in that lower, garden, level, facing towards that wall that is a window, but reasonably far back from it, and I saw a student, one of the brightest and best that we pride ourselves on attracting at Duke, walk towards the glass wall, and walk straight into it and get knocked back. Once a few people had verified that this student was entirely uninjured, apart from with respect to his pride, someone shouted out, “That is the best compliment you could pay to the cleaning staff.” The student had failed to notice the window was a window, and thought it was just the outside.

God sees past our sin – Luke 19:1-10, Wis 11:22-12:2

31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

More than one astronaut has talked about their surprise at going up into space, all excited about going to space, to explore radically new things, dreaming of investigating moons, planets, stars, and then being suddenly taken aback by their view of something that they thought was familiar: earth. NASA astronaut Ron Garan calls this the “orbital perspective.” He described his sudden awareness that “we’re all travelling together on this planet and, if we looked at it from this perspective, we’d see that nothing is impossible.”

God urges us on in struggle – Luke 18:1-8, Exod 18:8-13

Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I wonder what you might come up with if you were asked to tell a story that encapsulates your image of prayer. I think that could actually be a really interesting spiritual exercise, especially for people who naturally like to make up and tell stories, to think through what story you would tell if wanted to talk about prayer through a narrative. It could be something from your life, a story from the life of a saint, or a completely made up story that nonetheless is deeply true. To maybe spark your imagination, and I hope not to shut it down, Exodus and Jesus’ parable in Luke give us two such stories, or maybe, actually, three, and I’ll get to why I think there are three stories there later

God heals the fear that makes us shun – Luke 17:11-19, 2 Tim 2:8-13

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I think the worst thing we could ever teach someone is that they should keep their distance from Jesus.  Yet, this is what these ten lepers were taught.  Not specifically from Jesus, of course, they’d been taught to keep their distance from everyone who didn’t share their disease.  When the first signs of leprosy were noticed on someone’s skin, there would be a funeral style liturgy in which the victim would be mourned as if dead when cast out of the community, shunned, told to remain perpetually separate, to cry out to warn people not to come near them.  They were taught that their skin was so dreadful, literally, something that people dreaded so, that they must keep away, because they were dangerous, because they were to be feared.  They were taught to hate their own skin, taught that the only useful thing they could do with their lives was to help others avoid them.

God looks upon our faith – Luke 16:1-13, Amos 8:4-7

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time; Holy Infant parish.

In general, the beginning is a very good place to start, but there are some stories with which it’s best to start at the end. I think this parable, which is confusing and strange in a lot of ways, is one of those.

God seeks out the lost – Luke 15:1-10

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant.

Have you seen the AT&T ads about times when just OK is not OK? There’s one about a carnival worker who claims he did an “OK job” assembling a thrill ride, and so the fair goers swiftly walk away. There’s another about a tattoo artist who says, “Don’t worry, your tattoo is going look OK.” And when the tattoo-recipient asks him if he’s meant to sketch it first, the artist replies, “Stay in your lane, bro.” Well, I’ll admit that sheep care is not exactly my lane, but I think I’d do a pretty OK job at it. I mean, if I managed to keep 99% of my sheep, I’d view that as a pretty good batting average, actually. I’d probably do a pretty OK job at looking after the 99, and sell some wool to make reasonably OK sweaters now and again. If one wandered off, I’d probably say to myself something like, “Oh, don’t sweat the small stuff.”