Blog

I suppose if we were like many Protestant churches and had a sign outside advertising the title of this Sunday’s sermon, it would probably read: Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. That is a direct quote from the second reading, from the Letter of St. James. The deception, James is referring to, is that we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can live the Christian life without any inner conversion. If we hear the word of God, and think that’s …

I think the three greatest gifts God ever gave us are: the gift of our very own lives, the gift of God’s life in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, and the gift of free will (the ability to make choices, good or bad. We are not robots programmed by God; we are autonomous beings). I would like to focus a bit on this third gift, our freedom in making choices, because it seems to be the focus of …

Once again, the first reading is rich in meaning but needs to be put into context if we are to draw that meaning out and apply it to our lives here and now. Elijah, the main character, is a prophet of God who lived about 800 years before the birth of Jesus. At that time, the Jewish king, Ahab, had married a pagan woman named Jezebel. (That should have been the first indication that there was going to be …

Each time we hear readings from the Hebrew Testament (Old Testament), it takes a little more work to get into them than do the Jesus stories, which are more familiar to us. But let us see if Jeremiah, who lived 600 years before Jesus, has something to tell us.

Jeremiah prophesied at a time when his country, Judah, was about to fall to the enemy, the Babylonians. The leaders of Judah instead of turning to and …

In last Sunday’s gospel reading, we heard how Jesus was not welcome to speak God’s word in his own hometown of Capernaum. A long line of prophets came before Jesus, like Amos in that first reading, and experienced the same indifference and violence when they dared to speak God’s word. Likewise, a long line of prophets came after Jesus and fared no better. Perhaps that is why Jesus told them that if they were not welcomed in one place, …

Biblical language is the deepest language of all. It is deeper than psychological or sociological language, or any other language. Biblical language is archetypal language. For example, you are feeling run down. Medical language says you have chronic arthritis. Psychological language says you are experiencing mid-life crisis. But biblical language says you’re in Gethsemane. On a recent visit to a parishioner in hospital, when I asked her how she felt, she replied, “I feel like hell.” This is the …

One of the ways Jesus described himself, while he walked among us, was by saying, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He praised anyone and everyone who was seeking the Truth, even if that person had a sketchy past as a despised tax collector or was known as the village prostitute. That did not matter to Jesus as long as you were seeking the truth. Jesus praised those who were sincerely seeking the truth and tried …

Every time Jesus tells a parable or performs a miracle or teaches us something, it is always a revelation. What is being revealed is God and the Kingdom of God. If we walk away in amazement, as many do in the gospels, we lose the revelation. But if we ponder the teaching, the parable, or the miracle, we not only learn the truth about God and God’s Kingdom, we also learn the truth about ourselves.

In …

When the news broke a couple of weeks ago concerning the discovery of 215 bodies of children buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, B.C., I, like the rest of you, was shocked, disappointed, angry, embarrassed, saddened (and the adjectives go on). While I am still processing the magnitude of this tragedy, I just feel I have to say something knowing full well that this something will always be inadequate.  I want to try, nonetheless.

You don’t have to live long on this earth to have had an experience that has threatened your peace or well-being. Perhaps the image of a storm is the best metaphor to express what that was like. Job, in the first reading, is the one who epitomizes the expression, “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Everything was taken from Job (crops, livestock, family, and his health). It was like he was in a storm that would …