Posts

Sermon on the Good Shepherd

-
Image
Ancient shepherds were pretty bad-ass, when you think about it, even though they held a very low status in society. Imagine being all by yourself with a hundred head of   pretty foolish livestock to protect. Imagine you don’t have a gun, just a rod and a staff—basically a couple of big sticks—and your flock is in constant danger from wolves, and lions, and rustlers who try to jump the portable fence you’ve put up for the night. Imagine there’s no closing gate to this temporary enclosure, just you with your two sticks, sleeping in the opening, so anything coming to trouble the sheep will have to go through you. And then when day comes, your job is to call each sheep by its name—and every one of them has a name—and lead them all to good pasture, walking in front, where you’re the first to face any hazard. Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.   All who came before me  are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. When Jesus calls himse
Post a Comment
Read more
-
Image
  “There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out…”                                               Mark 1:23                                                   We don’t call them demons anymore When you’re raving, howling out your reality To the pious void. In our less benighted time, This is not an unclean spirit but a case Of schizophrenia, a distressing medical phenomenon Treatable with the new alchemy of neurotransmitters. You don’t Need an exorcism. Take your meds. Be silent and come out. And yet, There is some verity that will not be quieted, even With Lithium. The words Of the rebuked disorder are Recorded for the ears of generations. While those in their right minds, Impressed by the magic trick, Miss the unplumbed secret, that this weirdo from Nazareth Has, in fact, come to scour out uncleanness Of every kind. These sane folks make him a star, Yet they don’t perceive the convulsive radiance shaking The poor madma
Post a Comment
Read more
-
Image
  The Feast of Christ the King November 26, 2023 Those poor goats. What did they do to be cast as the bad guys? Goats are nice animals. They’re very helpful to humans. It doesn’t seem fair to make them a metaphor for all things mean and unjust. Well, a lot of Jesus’ parables use these kinds of absolute binaries: wise vs. foolish bridesmaids, wheat vs. weeds, sons who give lip service vs. sons who get the job done. Binary options like this accentuate contrasts between ideas. In the real world, of course, things are rarely black and white. Interestingly, some sheep breeds common in that part of the world look quite a bit like goats, and they are often grazed together. Separating them may require the Shepherd’s practiced eye. More about sheep and goats later. This last Sunday before Advent is known as the Feast of Christ the King, so I want to start with some thoughts on that idea. Once on a Christ the King Sunday in the Diocese of Chicago—the land of smells, bells and well-used
Post a Comment
Read more
-
Image
  Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52: Five Parables of the Kingdom   This week’s Gospel lesson is a whole boatload of parables about the Kingdom of Heaven, something Jesus talked a lot about but never described in plain words. He told little stories and vignettes about what it was like, stories that may seem simple on first reading, but the more you think about them, the less obvious their meaning becomes. If there’s one thing these particular parables have in common, it may be the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is something that requires patience. The word “parable” literally means putting one thing beside another. It’s not as clearly defined as an allegory, in which every image has a direct, one-to-one symbolic meaning. Parables simply set two ideas in juxtaposition and let the listener sort out the similarities. The earliest versions we have of most of the parables of Jesus do not include explanations; these were likely added by later editors in the communities where the Gospels grew
Post a Comment
Read more
-
Image
  Tomorrow is what's known as Trinity Sunday, probably the most confusing festival of the church year. We celebrate a God who is one Person and at the same time three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It's an idea that became codified pretty early on in the history of Christianity, but theologians have struggled down the years to explain it to lay people. For an exhaustive (and exhausting) exploration of the subject, you can check out the Creed of Athanasius, which includes such riveting prose as: "...we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost." He goes on in that vein for several pages. The concept even appears in my work-in-
Post a Comment
Read more

Listening in Tongues in Venice

-
Image
Tomorrow is the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit infused the Apostles and, by Luke's description, lit up their heads with "tongues" of fire. Above is one Eastern Orthodox artist's idea what this might have looked like. Just before the flames, there was a sound of a strong wind. Strange weather, all in all. I love this story. I get to read it tomorrow when St. Andrew's Episcopal Church meets for the first time in person on church grounds (still staying outside) since the Covid thing drove us from the premises and onto Zoom. We'll still be masked in the parking lot, but we're allowed to sing with our masks on, which is a new privilege since last Fall's outdoor service at two parishioners' house.  In past years, I've had the fun of reading it in Italian at St. Paul's in Concord. While St. Andrew's doesn't do the multiple languages thing, I'm still looking forward to it. You see, something like it actually happened to me onc
Post a Comment
Read more

A Rude Epiphany

-
Image
  It might have been almost poetic if it weren't so horrifying. An attack on the seat of our government took place on the Feast of the Epiphany, the day we remember sages from a distant land journeying to see a little kid who would one day be known as the Prince of Peace. When the Magi told King Herod about it all, though, the paranoid ruler saw the child as a prince of a very different sort, as a threat to himself. The notion that Jesus intended to overthrow the Roman Empire and with it Herod's tetrarchy was fake news that led to violence. The tyrant imagined a danger, believed his own imagination, and sent his men on a rampage that ended in deaths. Herod was not in danger, and his hangers-on were not being oppressed (at least not by the child and his family). They feared losing power, and that fear is also what motivated the rioters of January 6, 2021. They were largely folks who felt that letting other folks have more rights would diminish their own hegemony, though they wou
Post a Comment
Read more