HOMILY: Standing up for what’s right and compassionate is to risk/live your life. Paranoid powers – gluttons and abusers like Herod – deeply resent social and political criticism, and prophets like John the Baptiser are undermined, ridiculed, imprisoned.
REFLECTION: This is an exciting and challenging time for the SSUC congregation-community-garden.
HOMILY: The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) says that a person is both spirit and matter, eternal and temporal, and that despair (Kierkegaard’s word for sin) consists in clinging to one or the other.
HOMILY: My heart is like a singing bird …
HOMILY: You will all be aware of the conflict that is happening in the middle west (middle east) at present. How could you not?
HOMILY: A poetic utterance by Jesus (in the context of friends troubled, bewildered) evokes all manner of settings. Rooms, mansions …
HOMILY: A voyage to the other side may evoke curiosity, connection, communication; reaching out for help, overcoming confusion, affirming differences; transition, translation.
HOMILY: “[W]e must not seek Christ’s presence in the dense reality of unbroken bread”, writes theologian G.P. Ambrose (The Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet, 2012).
HOMILY: What Jesus says today about the Holy Spirit and about inclusivity/family can help us with our table talk about church repairs and future directions.
HOMILY: Our icon for today is a Byzantine mosaic which depicts Jesus healing a person with a withered hand. “Stretch out your hand,” says Jesus.
