God has won for us – 1 Cor 15:54-58, Luke 6:39-45

Sunday of the 8th Week of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I don’t know if you noticed, but two weeks in a row now, we’ve had readings in which Paul has used the image of clothing to talk about what God is doing for us in Christ. Last week, he said we will wear the image of Christ. This week, it’s this image of what is corruptible (by which Paul means perishable really) putting on what’s incorruptible; what’s mortal putting on immortality. Well, in my family, I’m not really the expert on clothing. That would be my youngest sister, who’s a professional fashion stylist. So, I thought I should get in contact with her and talk this over, talk over how clothing really changes people. And she shared with me a quote from that great mid-twentieth century sage, Marilyn Monroe. Ms Monroe, apparently, once said, “Give a woman the right pair of shoes, and she can conquer the world.”

Jesus dresses us – 1 Cor 15:45-49

Seventh Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish, Mass with baptism.

Tomorrow night, the winners of this year’s Academy Awards will be announced. But, before the ceremony officially begins, we’ll have the pre-ceremony, the red carpet walk. Person after person, especially the celebrities who are women, but increasingly the men too, will be asked: “Who are you wearing?” Not what, but who. The radio station I normally listen on my drive into work each morning was inspired by this, this past week, to ask the same question of people who workin their office, and received such answers as, “I’m wearing H and M” or, “tonight, I’m wearing Targé(t).” For the record, my alb’s by Patti Schlarb and stole and chasuble by Slabbink. But, the deeper answer, the answer that St. Paul told the Christians in Corinth, is that we are wearing Adam, and we will wear Christ.

God makes the hungry full –Luke 6:17-26, Jer 17:5-8

6th Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

The beatitudes are wonderful to hear, aren’t they? The woes… not so much. We like hearing about the last becoming first, but it’s not so nice to hear about the first becoming last, especially when we take honest stock of where we stand in the line. Blessed are the poor, great. Woe to the rich, a little more troubling, especially when we consider that thinking globally, if we can turn on our taps and have something drinkable come out, we’re rich. Now, it should be noted that Jesus doesn’t talk about any kind of punishment for being rich, but there’s still this idea that the rich have already got what they’re going to get. And we want more.

Jesus calls us – Luke 5:1-11

5th Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant Parish.

Do you wonder why, at the start of this reading, Peter isn’t listening to Jesus? There’s a whole crowd pressing in to listen to him speak, speak the word of God, but Peter is sitting a ways off, having gotten out of his fishing boat and he’s sitting there tending to his nets. It probably isn’t that Peter doesn’t know who Jesus is. The way Luke tells it, Jesus had healed Peter’s mother-in-law the day before, and when Jesus talks to him, Peter does seem to know him. It seems that Peter genuinely believes himself to be too busy to put down his nets and listen to Jesus.

Jesus frees us through and for joy – Luke 4:14-21

3rd Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

“Jesus taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.”  What a wonderful way to start our Ordinary Time walk through the Jesus’ earthly ministry, guided this year by Luke.  We start out hearing of Jesus teaching, to universal praise and acclaim, becoming a revered teacher given an overwhelmingly positive reception.  We know that that’s not going to last.  In fact, by the end of this very chapter, the people who hear him teach react so negatively that the try to push him off a cliff!  When I started praying with this lectionary selection and preparing myself to preach, it seemed a little odd to me that the lectionary kind of gives us two and a half bits of Luke here. We read from the dedication page, which tells us about Luke’s purpose in writing (to build up our faith), then we jump to this little summary ("Jesus taught in their synagogues and was praised by all”) that comes comes right after the Temptation in the Desert, and then we start a story that kind of ‘zooms’ in on one instance of Jesus teaching in a synagogue, but one that doesn’t end quite as well as all the other examples that got summed up in one sentence. It almost feels like we should have ended with a ‘to be continued’ sign, because (sorry for the spoilers), the gospel we’ll hear next week is the negative reaction that Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth gets.  But, as I sat more and more with the reading, and the lectionary’s choice of how to carve up this pie, I began to see the wisdom.

Jesus expands our joy – John 2:-12, 1 Cor 12:4-11, Isa 62:1-5

2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Once, at my last parish in Indiana, our sacristan had to take a couple of months off to recover from surgery, and I thought I’d figured out everything she did each week and either arranged cover or just decided to do it myself.  But, over those couple of months, I gradually starting noticing more and more things that just somehow got magically taken care of when she was around that I’d never really thought about.  During the first week she was gone, one of our parish school kids, a little second grader, came up to me with a panic struck expression: “There is no blessing in the church!”  I was pretty worried about this exile experience she seemed to be having, so I tried to figure out what was actually wrong, and eventually understood that all of the holy water stoups were dry.  I could fix that problem. Spiritual crises aren’t normally the kind of thing you can fix, so it was nice to get a win for once!

Jesus baptizes us – Luke 3:15-16, 21-22, Isa 40:1-11, Titus 2,3 extracts

Baptism of the Lord, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Jesus’ baptism is clearly important.  In Luke’s gospels, it’s our introduction to the adult Jesus, all four of our gospels narrate it, (which means it beats out Jesus’ birth by a factor of 2:1 there). The first parish I served first as deacon and then as priest had a beautiful stained glass window of the scene, which was important enough to me that I picked an image of it to put on the holy card we gave out at my priestly ordination.  Yes, Jesus’ baptism is clearly important.  But, Jesus getting baptized isn’t what struck me as the most important thing in this gospel.  Studying and praying with it over this week, one sentence stuck with me: “He will baptize you.”