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.

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.

God hears us – Luke 11:1-13; Col 2:12-14

Seventeenth Sunday of OT, Year C; Holy infant parish.

There’s a story I once heard from Amy-Jill Levine, who’s probably the foremost Jewish scholar of the gospels around. It’s about how she first learnt what we call the Lord’s Prayer. It was in her public elementary school in the fifties, when they would start every day with the Our Father, followed by the pledge of allegiance, followed by the Star-Spangled Banner. As a child, she didn’t think there was anything odd about that prayer, although it wasn’t one she could ever remember hearing in the synagogue, because it seemed so like the ones her family prayed there and at home. Calling God Father, talking about the holiness of God’s name, talking about food, and forgiveness; this was exactly how they prayed. And it wasn’t just Amy-Jill as a child unable to pick up on some subtlety; this is a very Jewish prayer.

Jesus hungers to speak with us – Luke 10:38-42; Gen 18:1-10a

Sixteenth Sunday in OT, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

One parish I used to be a part of would serve a meal one Saturday each month for those who were homeless or who otherwise knew food insecurity. It was normally kind of an assembly line type set up, which is a very efficient way of feeding a lot of hungry people in a reasonably short period of time with limited volunteer resources. But, for the meal that fell during the Christmas season, they got a lot more people involved, and did two sittings of a family-style table service meal. Each table would be hosted by parishioner. That host would bring trays of food from the kitchen, would make sure each bowl or plate or jug of goodies circulated around the table. They’d also be responsible for making conversation, for welcoming the people they were dining with, and listening to them. They would also explain why Christmas means so much to us, why when the stores are packing their supplies away, we keep on celebrating, and why we want to celebrate with them. More than one type of hunger was fed at those meals.