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1st Sunday of Advent

          Merry Christmas, everyone!   Now, doesn’t that sound a little odd, a little premature maybe?   If it doesn’t, it really should.   And yet for much of the world around us Christmas started the day after Halloween.   But for us, things are different.   At least they ought to be different.   Today we begin the season of Advent, which is our solemn preparation for Christmas.   It is not our anticipated celebration of Christmas.   I don’t say this to be “that guy,” the “Advent enforcer,” much less because I am some kind of scrooge – far from it.   I make this point because I think if we get swept into the Christmas frenzy too soon we will have robbed ourselves of something truly wonderful.   I would dare say that if we approach Christmas without proper preparation, we run the risk of robbing ourselves of the very meaning of Christmas itself, and that would indeed be sad.           It reminds me of a few years ago when I was covering for a parish on Ash Wednesday.   At the e
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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

          The readings this Sunday invite us to really examine our lives in terms of our relationship with God.   And there are some questions that come to mind, at least for me:   Is God first in our lives?   Or is God an afterthought?   Do we really trust God?   Or are we afraid that God will take something from us?   Do we give God our best?     How much does God want of us and is our relationship with Him really that important?           What doesn’t help us in considering these questions is the fact that in many ways we have become “master budgeters.”   The demands of living in this modern economy seem to require that we carefully calculate out just how much money something will cost, how much time something will take, how much energy is needed for a particular task.   And along with this, we are also notorious “bargain hunters.”   Ironically, even though we are “master budgeters,” we also find ourselves buying things we don’t really need because the price is just too good t
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31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

          “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”   Now that is something you want to hear Jesus say to you!   Likely, the scribe to whom Jesus said this did not realize at the time the full significance of Jesus’ statement.   To have the eternal Son of God and the author of our salvation make such a declaration is no small thing.           But what is more interesting to me in this exchange is that it took so little to elicit this statement from Jesus.   The scribe merely “parrots” back to Jesus his own answer to the question about which is the greatest commandment in the law. There must have been something more happening here, something under the surface that we can’t see in the text or read in this man’s face, something at the level not just of the mind, but of the heart, as he proclaims, “You are right in saying, ‘[God] is One and there is no other than he’. And ‘to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighb
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30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time October 28, 2018           I remember a woman from one of the nursing homes in my first assignment.   Her name was Barb and she was blind.   I always knew when to start Mass at the nursing home where she lived because she had one of those watches that on the hour would say, “The time is 11:00 o’clock.”   That was my cue.   At the end of every Mass at I would always go around and greet as many of the residents as I could.   Every time I came around to Barb she would take firm hold of my hand and say to me, “Father, pray for me that if it is God’s will I would see again, but most importantly that I would get to heaven.”   And I would always tell her, “Barb, you’ve got your priorities straight.   I think you see better than most.”   I couldn’t help but think of Barb as I looked at the Gospel for this Sunday in which Jesus encounters Bartimaeus.   There’s a lot we can learn from Barb and there’s a lot we can learn from Bartimaeus.   I never re
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29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

          I don’t know if you noticed in keeping up with readings from week to week, but there is something missing between last week’s Gospel and this week’s Gospel.   In fact, there are three whole verses between the ending of last week’s passage and the beginning of the passage we just heard.   Now, that may not seem like much and we might not feel like we have missed a whole lot, but those three verses are very important for us if we are to understand the passage for today.   Last week, of course, we heard about the rich man, who went away sad, because, though he had kept all the commandments from his youth, there was still something he lacked, and that was to let go of his possessions.   Then, this week we find James and John are “jockeying for position” Jesus’ glorious kingdom.   But in the three verses between these two episodes, Jesus predicts His passion, death, and resurrection for the third and final time in Mark’s Gospel.   He says, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusa
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28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

          The Gospel for this Sunday contains, as always, a challenging message for us.   And it is not just for those who have wealth, as we might initially think, but really a message for us all.   And though it may at first seem difficult, I think if we would hear this message out, we would find it to be very liberating.           A man approaches Jesus and, like so many people, he is looking for answers – perhaps an easy answer.   More specifically, he wants to know what he has to do in order to “inherit eternal life.”   He has kept the commandments from his youth, he says, but there is still something more he feels he must do.   “Jesus, looking at him, loved him , and said to him, ‘You are lacking in one thing.   Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’”   He loved him .   How interesting that before Jesus tells this searching soul what he must do, it first says he loved him .   Sometimes we think that the d
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27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

           In the Gospel today there seems to be a reversal of what we usually see in these regular sparring matches between Jesus and the Pharisees.  Usually , it’s the Pharisees who are taking the “hard line” about some teaching of the law or another, whether it is about ritual purity (complaining that the disciples of Jesus do not meticulously wash their hands as they do) or about the Sabbath (criticizing Jesus for curing on the Sabbath), or other things along these lines.  And then it is Jesus who contextualizes and approaches these laws with a little more nuance and pastoral prudence, explaining, for example, that interior purity is more important than mere external observation of the law, or reminding us that the Sabbath was made for us and not the other way around.  So, we’re used to the Pharisees being the hardline “rules guys” and Jesus being the guy who – in so many words and ways – says “Lighten up already” or at least “Get your priorities straight.”           But in
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