-
Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings Today’s Gospel is perhaps a bit more vivid for me this week, because on Sunday I spent time weeding the side yard at my mother’s house. It’s not a task I really look forward to, but it is kind of good in that when you finish a job like that, you can look…
-
Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle B
Today’s readings The Bread of Life Discourse: an outline Bishop Kaffer used to say that every celebration of the Eucharist was a greater creative act than the creation of the universe. Now I think greater theological minds than mine would likely debate that, but what Bishop Kaffer gets at is worth considering. The Eucharist is…
-
St. James, apostle
Today’s readings “Can you drink the chalice of which I am going to drink?” What does that even mean for us? We know what Jesus’ chalice was like: it led him through sorrow, and abandonment, and ultimately to the cross. If we have ever been in a situation in which we have felt intense grief,…
-
Friday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings Maybe you remember memorizing the Ten Commandments as a child. I do. I sometimes think that memorizing things is a lost art. Certainly memorizing things like the Ten Commandments doesn’t happen as much as it used to, and that’s too bad. The Psalmist is the one who tells us why today: “The precepts…
-
Thursday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings During the summer before my final year of seminary, I worked as a hospital chaplain. It ended up being a pretty rough summer for me and the other men and women in the student chaplain group: we had a record number of deaths and tragic accidents to deal with, and it was, as…
-
St. Mary Magdalene
Today’s readings Today’s feast of St. Mary Magdalene is a good opportunity to set the record straight. Mary Magdalene was not the woman caught in adultery, nor was she the unnamed “sinful woman” who anointed the feet of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel. That said, she is the woman from whom Jesus expelled seven demons, also…
-
Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings A perfectly respectable reading of the whole Exodus story is the allegorical one. In this reading, the Egyptian army, its chariots and charioteers and even its horses, symbolize the forces of evil and sin. God loved the Israelites, who are God’s chosen people, and in a sense, you and me, so much that…
-
Monday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings It’s easy to have faith when our enemies aren’t pursuing us, isn’t it? When things are going well, we can be people of faith with the best of them. But it does take a certain amount of sainthood to have faith in the face of opposition of whatever kind you can imagine. For…
-
Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]
Today’s readings You know, as a shepherd of souls, whenever I hear Jeremiah’s words, I am given more than just a little pause. These words quite properly give me pause to think about the ways that I have led people – is this the way God would want it done, or have I scattered the…
-
Friday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings Today, Jesus gives us what might be considered to be his mission statement: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Or at least we might consider this to be his statement of what he wants from us, his people. And we, like the Pharisees, might be tempted to make all sorts of sacrifices. That might…
You must be logged in to post a comment.