Sermons

I wonder whether Jesus knew what to expect, going up onto the mountain. I wonder whether Moses knew what to expect going up onto the mountain. It’s pretty clear that Peter and James and John had no idea what to expect. Peter, as he frequently is, is caught completely off-guard and is sort of babbling–like, oh, there’s Jesus…and now he’s glowing, and there’s Moses and Elijah, and maybe we should build them houses, that seems like a good thing to do!1 He doesn’t quite recognize the exact meaning of what’s going on, but he certainly recognizes its significance. He sees…

Jesus is full of contradictions today, as he so often is. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the persecuted. These are not people we usually think of as particularly blessed. And they are not the people who end up in power. They are not people who end up winning fights. They are not even necessarily the people who are best placed to help others. They are the powerless. Jesus’ instruction to embrace, to accept, our own powerlessness and our own smallness doesn’t make much sense if we want to build up our own power.…

When Jesus first meets Nathanael in John’s gospel, he promises him something extraordinary: “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Angels are all over our scriptures. From Genesis to Revelation, from Jacob’s dream to Gabriel’s annunciation, from the songs of the heavenly host to the battles of Michael and the dragon. They are in our liturgy every single Sunday—“therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven.” They’re in our hymns, our prayers, and on the tympanum above our door. And yet, it seems that many…

A little while back I was watching some television show, and for some random plot reason or another one of the characters ended up in a monastery which was under a vow of silence. She was assigned to clean a wine vat with another resident, and there was a rather comical scene, because the vat was big enough that they were both inside it to clean it, but with a rounded “floor” to stand on, they kept falling and giggling, and the one who lived there showed our character how to strap rags to her feet which helped keep traction…

Today, I feel called by the scripture to talk about anxiety. I think about anxiety a lot, to be frank—I’m a very anxious person, by nature. And the most fabulous—and resonant—definition of anxiety I’ve ever heard is that anxiety is using your imagination to be mean to you. Whoof. And yet… well… yes! Thing is, […]

The scene we just heard from Luke’s gospel is a familiar one to anyone who regularly prays the Angelus. For a time, I prayed it twice a day, six days a week while a brother with the SSJE. The community’s tower bell rings the Angelus daily at noon, three hundred and sixty three days a year, silenced only to mark the solemnity of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. I confess that in preparing this homily, I struggled with this text’s familiarity. Centuries of representation have layered upon the narrative the assumptions and preoccupations of so many ages. These layers of…