Lectionary Readings: Year A, Proper 13 I’d like to tell you a story about a young seminarian. Many seminaries around the country require a hospital chaplaincy to graduate. The hospital this seminarian ended up at was a large urban hospital – a Level 1 trauma center. It was the hospital that dealt with major accidents,…
The Jesuit mystic, Anthony de Mello said, “If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are the perfect images of the kingdom. For them live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. So they are spared the guilt and the anxiety that so torment human beings and they are full of the sheer joy of living.”
As I was preparing for today, one of the first things that jumped out at me was the words in the Collect of the Day: “Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life.”
That word “follow” sticks out. When we think of the word “follow” we can see it as no more important than “I follow the news.” “I keep up with, pay attention to, the news.” Maybe we even think that having the news on 24/7 on the television – even if in the background – means that we are “followers” of the news.
Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. – 1 John 2:18 When I was growing up, one of the things that seemed to be on everyone’s mind was this notion of the Antichrist, since, according to some big names, Jesus was coming…
Have you ever gone to watch a motivational speaker? Someone who has in mind to help you bring out the very best of yourself, to help you achieve more than you are now, and to bring you up to your full potential? That was really more of a thing back a few decades ago, but if you went to a seminar like this, at the end of the seminar you probably found yourself excited about life, about the possibilities of what you could accomplish, or about how your life could improve.
I went to one of these seminars over twenty years ago, and during that time several of us overcame our fears – long held irrational fears – and we began to create new visions of our future, and answer the age old mysteries. In fact, at that seminar, I understood the answer to the mysterious question: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” It was a moment of grand dreams and visions of an exciting future, filled with plans that would improve my life.
Every single one of us has heard the story – some of us probably hundreds of times. We know what’s going to happen by the end of the story, so we don’t think about it much anymore. The mystery has faded, and the excitement at the mystery of the incarnation – the death and resurrection – seems to have dried up as well.
Because of this, it’s hard to put ourselves into the minds of these women in the Gospel – the two Marys.
Lectionary Readings: Year A, Holy Week, Good Friday In 1883, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared “God is Dead.” You’ve probably heard the phrase thrown about when discussing atheism, because Nietzsche is saying that God is just a social construct used to justify all sorts of evil and violence. If you read his work, you…
Have you ever had a moment in your life where everything all came crashing in at once? Not in a bad way. Not like things in your life were falling apart. But that things all came together in one single moment, and everything made so much sense – a true sense of clarity – that you could no longer understand or look at things the same way again.
Where Would You Rather Be?
Lectionary Readings: Year A – Proper 14 In the movie Jaws, there’s a scene where Martin Brody, the sheriff in town is sitting on the back of the boat, throwing out chum into the water, hoping that they’ll be able to attract the shark that they are hunting. He’s absent-mindedly talking to the ship’s captain…
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