Christ leads us up the mountain – Luke 13:2-30; Isa 66:18-21

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know how many of you have climbed a mountain. If you haven’t, spoiler alert, it’s quite difficult. And I’ve never done any of what they call “technical climbing,” where you actually need ropes and harnesses and things, but I have made it to the top of Pike’s Peak, one of the many 14,000-foot-high mountains in Colorado. If you want to walk it, as I did, you start at an altitude of around 7,000 feet, and over the course of walking 14 miles, you ascend the other 7,000 to make it up to 14. Between 11,000 and 12,000 feet is what they call the tree line. That’s the altitude above which no trees grow. One of the many realizations I had on that walk was that the trees are probably a good deal smarter than we are. Air that low in oxygen is really hard to walk through. The whole climb took me about seven hours, but the last mile, over which we climbed almost 1,000 feet, took me an hour. Now, Pike’s Peak also has a Cog railway that you can take to the summit, as well as a road. You can drive up. And at the top, is a little café and gift shop. All I remember about the café is that they served chili, and, at that moment, the chili was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

Christ leads us through conflict to ultimate peace – Luke 12:49-53; Heb 12:1-4

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I think it would have been understandable for the people listening to Jesus to have said yes. “Yes, I did think you were here to bring peace.” I thought that, because, isn’t that what the angels sang when you were born? Well, the angels wished peace on earth, but they didn’t say it would be the first thing Jesus would bring. And Simeon, who prophesied in the Temple when Jesus was just a few days old, prophesied that he would be a “sign of contradiction,” and told Mary “a sword will pierce your heart too.”

God raises us with Christ – Luke 12:13-21; Col 3:1-11

18th Sunday in OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

There’s a scholar called Sakari Häkkinen who studies Jesus’ parables by traveling to subsistence rural villages, in East Africa and the Middle East. He goes to those villages, and tells the stories Jesus told, and asks them what they think. Part of the reason he does this is that when we read these stories with Western eyes, we miss things. When we read these stories with several layers of remove between the work we do and food on our plates, we miss things. If we don’t know food insecurity, if we don’t look at the sky and feel in anticipation either fullness or emptiness in our stomachs, we miss things. That’s not to say that the cultures in the villages that Häkkinen visits are identical to the villages in which Jesus would have preached. But they might have some insight that we don’t.