August 31, 22nd Sunday in OT, Cycle A

Ah, poor Jeremiah! A man torn apart in his lifetime. Here, we see him cry out to God, wishing his fate might be other than it is, yet knowing he has to live out his destiny. And in the Gospel, Jesus, too, senses the pain involved in living out His Destiny. And, like us, Peter cries out, “NO!” He doesn’t like pain–for himself, or for Christ! (I don’t either; I hate pain! And, I’ll bet YOU don’t like it much, either.) But, Christ is adamant. There is a pain in living that can not be avoided. And, if one wants to live a kind and gentle life, the pain may be brutal. No wonder St. Paul asks us to make our lives a “sacrifice” to God. What we are to see is that Jeremiah, St. Paul and Jesus–all men who chose to live gently and kindly on the earth–doing good, and not returning evil for evil, but absorbing it, and transforming it into something gentler and peaceful–these men were NOT masochists, loving pain and sacrifice and agony. They merely point out that every life has it price. The price of a kind and gentle life looks high, from the outside looking in, but, in the end, it is probably the far, far better option. The price of shallowness and dissipation is truly tragic. So, this weekend we are asked to look at OUR lives, and make decisions. God bless. 

August 24, 21st Sunday in OT, Cycle A

We had this Gospel where Jesus asks, “Who do people say I am?” not long ago. And we saw how it was a statement of Who the Christ is as compared with what other religions thought of as divinity. But, this weekend we are asked to look at it from a different perspective: that of what it says about the Church and the believers in the Christ. Just as the “Master of the Palace,” Eliakim, carried ceremonial keys in procession, symbols of the keys he held to “every part” of the palace of the King of Israel–all its secret cubby holes and nooks and passageways, so, too, the Church is entrusted with the “keys” to the mysteries of God, Whose ways are deep, inscrutable, and unsearchable. One other time this year, I believe (if I’m not mistaken,) we’ll have this reading again–closer to the end of October which Protestants celebrate as “Reformation Sunday,” and we’ll read this Gospel and meditate on the role of “Peter,” and order in the Church. Today, though, it’s all about wandering through the rooms of the palace of the King of Kings. Do you feel you have lots of keys to those passageways and cubbyholes of Grace? You do, you know; you truly do. That’s what it means to be Graced. God bless. 

August 17, 20th Sunday in OT, Cycle A

God’s aggravating universalism is the subject of all three readings, this weekend. On the one hand, we like a God who loves everybody. On the other hand, we like a God who “gets even” with those who don’t follow His teachings, and frankly, we would like Him to “draw some clear lines in the sand,” so that the “good” (we) are clearly distinguished from the “bad” (them.) Isaiah subverts that desire, and lets us know that God is the Lord of all, and finds a way to welcome all. Paul, says, something to the effect: you “Gentiles” are not better than the Jews you aren’t getting along with, nor are they “better” than you; so, be nice! And the Gospel is a remarkable account of Jesus, Himself, wrestling with the universalism demanded of Him–whether to heighten the suspense and thus teach His disciples more profoundly, as the early saints thought, or whether He, Himself, had to “grow,” too, as some modern commentators feel. One way or the other, God is bigger than we want Him to be, and His love more broad than we are comfortable with. (These readings should be “the” readings for all priestly and episcopal ordinations and all solemn religious professions! If those who lead don’t remember this truth, and try to own it, how shall the rest of us do so?) 

August 10, 19th Sunday in OT, Cycle A

In the first reading, we encounter a prophet trying to re-find God, and we are given the contrast of “Shock and Awe” vs. Silence as a “clue” to how he found Him. And in the second reading, Paul addresses the community of Christians in Rome, who, too wish to find God, and he urges them to pay attention to the silent heritage of Israel, a heritage not expressed in bombast, but in the silent page, open to be studied and learned from. And, then, poor Peter, in the Gospel who can’t overcome the seduction of the “bombast” to find a calm, holy center, and nearly drowns–a metaphor for all of us, most of whom will never walk on water, but who may nearly drown, nonetheless. True “religion,” the encounter with God, the Lord of our lives, isn’t complex, and needs no pyrotechnics. Nor does it need our personal shame to turn us around. It’s enough to be touch the source of Healing, and let the healing power flow. Then, we, too, like Christ, can become the “hand that lifts” the drowning.

August 3, 18th Sunday in OT, Cycle A

For the English speaking crowd, one of our favorite hymns is a musical setting for Isaiah’s elegant words, “Come to the water.” The prophet reminds his hearers and readers that the “Water” is always free, given at no cost whatsoever. What does he mean? What was “costly religion” in his day? It was the competing religions. There was Baalism, the traditional religion of the area, a religion centered in how to get and keep wealth, or there was Dagonism, the religion of the Philistine neighbors to the west, which was the religion of power and how to get it and keep it; the religion of Egypt, with its mysteries that sought out the meaning of the heavens as it tried to secure an afterlife, was always tempting, and the religion of the Ammonite neighbors to the east, Molechism, was a religion of rage, vengeance and disrupting all order to one’s gain. We have those religions with us, today, too; now they bear different names, and some of them have co-opted the name of the Prince of Peace as their champion. But they always were, and they still are, terribly costly, not only to the practitioner, but to the whole society. Then, there was Torah, the “Water of Life,” teaching simple justice in the "here and now," there for all to read and to study–free of charge. And when one delves into the Scripture and finds one’s Life there, there is nothing that holds us back on our path to each other and to God, as Paul would say. Matthew’s Gospel wants to say to us that the teaching of Jesus is nourishing to the Nth degree...water of life and bread of life, and, it, too, is there, for free–at no cost, other than the time one must invest in studying it and learning to enter into it so as to embody it. So, what’s stopping us? Hmmmm.