Monthly Archives: November 2009

Reflecting on Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

Well, we made it.  This time last year we were all reeling from the stomach-churning stock market dips and ominous job market.  We are all changed now.  Many of us are unemployed, many are underemployed, and all of us know that our best health insurance is to not get sick.  But we made it, and with the comforting scent of evergreens and violet/rose candles we settle in to the dark, sacred weeks of Advent that mark the new liturgical year.

I’ll tell you a secret.  This is the season most pastors I’ve known most love.  Those thirty-four weeks of Ordinary Time, with its endless greens and difficult preaching challenges, are finally behind them.  Liturgists start looking longingly at the Advent decorations in the closet around mid-October.  And those of us in the pews feel a certain relief, a blessed time-out, when we come into the church on this first Sunday and relax into its beautiful colors and scents, and the minor keys of Advent carols.

The events Jesus talks about today may have already happened way back in the year 70 AD when the Roman army laid siege to Jerusalem.  He certainly is also warning about the end of the world, and the day when he will come again in glory.  Maybe he’s talking about both.  Either way, after all the Advents of my life, I’ve decided to trust in the God who tells us, in the most-oft repeated phrase in Scripture, to be not afraid.  That’s my new year’s resolution.

Sharing God’s Word at Home:

What anxieties in your life are you willing to put aside for these four weeks of Advent?

Reflecting on John 18:33b-37

The oldest scrap of New Testament ever found comes from the sentence immediately following the end of today’s Gospel from John.  “Are you a king?” Pilate badgers Jesus.  “It is you who say I am,” Jesus replies.  That’s John’s ironic way of saying, “Look who gets it.  Pilate gets it.  Pilate himself knows that Jesus is the King.  He’s just come out and said it.”  Jesus then lets him know that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice.

Jesus before Pilate

We can almost picture Pilate now as he looks on his prisoner, obviously a religious fanatic who has gotten under the skin of the religious leadership so much that they’ve turned him into the Romans.  Pitiful Jew.  But still, there is something disturbing about him.  Something unsettling, yet oddly familiar.  Something ever ancient, ever new.  “Truth,” says Pilate, “what is truth?”

That’s the question found on the tiny piece of parchment recovered from the dry sands of Egypt, the question that echoes through the millennia, from the beginning of time until the day the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven.  “Truth….what is truth?”  I think Pilate knew the answer as he was asking the question.  Truth was standing before him that day.  Truth is living inside us today.  Thus it has ever been with Christ our King.

Sharing God’s Word at Home:

What truths in your life set you free to be a faithful disciple?

Picture from the movie “Jesus of Nazareth” by Franco Zeffirelli

Reflecting on Mark 13:24-32

We have lots of reasons to be fearful these days.  The weather is weird, the economy is poor, there are wars and rumors of wars.  The oceans and the skies and the earth may all be coming to an end, and we’ve heard more than once that our generation shall not pass away until all these things have taken place.

But when Jesus talked about the end times he wasn’t talking about the Romans, and he wasn’t predicting global

No one knows the day nor the hour

warming either.  He was warning of that day when “the elect” would be gathered and saved while the world as they knew it burned away.

That’s the design of the liturgy and Scripture readings in these last weeks of the church year.  We feel the momentum of the story as it comes crashing to that final judgment.  This is the last Sunday that we will read Mark until 2011.  Next week it will fall to John’s Gospel―the Gospel set aside by the Church for the great feast days― to take us to the end of the year, and the victory of Christ the King.

Sharing God’s Word at Home:

In what ways can you be a better steward of the earth’s resources?

Reflecting on Mark 12:38-44

It must have been great to be a scribe in the Temple at the time of Jesus.  People bowed and scraped and made sure you got the best seat, the best food, the best deal.  After all, you were the expert on the Torah, and that made up for a multitude of sins.

She, from her poverty, has contributed all she had

Like taking care of the widows, for example.  Any beginning Torah student knew that God had been very, very clear― from the sands of the Sinai to the cities of the prophets―that Israel was to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the alien in the land.  And yet, how complacently they all watched, these experts in the Law, as the poor widow fulfilled her Temple duty by placing those two tiny coins in the treasury.

Where was their shame?  Where was the scribe who stood and said, “This is a disgrace!  This poor widow has just placed all she had to live on in our coffers.  Why is she so desperately poor?  It was our duty to take good care of her, but we have ignored her.  She, on the other hand, has not ignored us, but has continued to give from her great want so that we could be comfortable.”  Notice that the early part of today’s Gospel says the scribes “devoured the houses of widows”.  It probably happened little by little, week by week, desperate penny by penny.

I’ll bet that was what Jesus meant when he drew attention to her.  He wasn’t praising her for putting her life at risk by donating her last coin to the Temple.  He was lamenting the blatant sins against the covenant that had put her in that terrible position to begin with.

Sharing God’s Word at Home:

How can we take better care of the poor among us?

(Kathy offers a special thanks to Angeline Hubert for the inspiration for this column.)

Reflecting on Matthew 5:1-12a

Ah.  It’s November again.  Can you feel it? It’s that sacred month that begins with two days of remembering those who have already gone home to God.  These are ancient Catholic traditions, ancient instincts that we are not alone here, but are all mystically connected in some wonderful way.

Do you have a favorite saint?

Today’s great feast begins a whole month of acknowledgment that the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our God.  The saints are with us, in this very room!  Haven’t we always sensed that we are being guided and accompanied by the loving presence of “those who have survived the great time of distress”?  We have friends in high places, and they are interceding for us always. The patron saints of all of our earthly travails—lost love, lost health, lost faith—have been so identified because there was something in their lives, on one side or the other side of heaven, which gained some victory over these earthly enemies.

We too are God’s children, and what we shall be has not yet been revealed.  We wait in joyful hope for that day when we are greeted by the smiles of the martyrs, and our own beloved dead who loved us on both sides of the grave.

All you holy men and women, pray for us!

Sharing God’s Word at Home:

Do you have a special connection with any particular saint?

Tapestry from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, CA