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.”

God, and God alone, is enough for us – Luke 14:25-3

23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

When most of us hear this gospel reading, I think we’re more shocked by Jesus’ command to hate their family than to take up their cross. And I think that’s because we’ve domesticated the cross. And I’ll get back to what Jesus says about family, but we need to start with the cross.

Christ has brought us to the holy mountain – Luke 14:1, 7-14; Heb 12:18-24

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

If you looked in last week’s bulletin or online at what the readings would be for this week, (and I definitely do recommend reading the readings before Mass if you can) you might have noticed that what we just heard from Luke’s gospel was chapter 14, verse one and verses seven through fourteen. If you’re anything like me, that immediately gets you fascinated to find out what goes in verses two through six. What are we skipping? What we’re skipping is Jesus healing a man with dropsy. The Greek term Luke wrote that we translate “dropsy” means basically “water-logged.” The understanding of this disease was that it was an insatiable thirst. Someone suffering from this disease would keep feeling thirsty even though they were perfectly well hydrated and would take on more and more fluid until they swelled up. And I know, we have lots of medical personnel here who could talk all about modern understandings of this, and how it relates to edema… what matters is how Luke understood the disease.