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Friends, I always love preaching on the Feast of the Holy Family because I think the biblical message here is very surprising. We say the Bible is associated with family values, and indeed it is, but they're probably not the ones we would automatically think of. We see this in the two stories that the Church brings to our attention today: the story of Hannah leaving Samuel at the temple in Shiloh, and the story of Mary and Joseph finding Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem.
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Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, we come to the Advent figure par excellence: the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. What I want to do in this homily is to look at some of the Churchâs classical titles of Mary. These are not simply pious exclamations, but rather very substantive insights into her role in bringing Christ to birthâboth in history and in us today.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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Friends, on this Third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday, I want to draw attention to our second reading, which is from St. Paul to the Philippians. These lines about joy, anxiety, prayer, and peace can run right through our minds, but theyâre actually breathtaking, and they open up something at the very heart of the spiritual life.
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Friends, in our readings for the Second Sunday of Advent, there is a lot of talk about building highways. In the Bible, both Old Testament and New, we find the theme of exile. Very often, Israel finds itself sent away from its own Promised Land, and a great hope is that one day, the exiles will return home on a highway that God has built. This is a symbol of spiritual exileâand to meet the highway that God has prepared, we have to do some preparation ourselves.
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Friends, we come to the First Sunday of Advent, which is the commencement of the new liturgical year. âAdventusâ in Latin means arrival or coming, and one way to look at Advent is to see three comings of Christ. There is the coming of Christ in history in Bethlehem, the coming of Christ now as he approaches our hearts, and the coming of Christ someday in the future. All three of these dimensions belong to our Advent preparation.
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Friends, we come to the end of the liturgical year with the Feast of Christ the King, where we meditate upon the kingly reign or rule of Christ. Now, we in the modern liberal West have a hard time with kings; we like democratic polities. The United States emerged out of a great rebellion against the king. But we should get over this modern hang-up, because kingshipâfrom Adam all the way up to Christâis a basic biblical idea. And the importance of todayâs feast is that it forces a decision about which king we follow.
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Friends, we're coming toward the end of the liturgical year, and as is typical, the Church gives us readings of an apocalyptic nature dealing with the end times. âApocalypseâ means âunveiling,â and whatâs being unveiled in our readings is the emergence of a new worldânot so much in the literal, cosmic sense as in the sense of how we navigate and understand the world. Something has fallen apart; the old world has given way.
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Friends, our first reading is that wonderful story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, which is a kind of hidden gem in the Old Testament. Like so many of the stories in the Bible, it is very understated, but chock full of spiritual meaning. And it has to do with how we respondâand the strange and surprising ways God might respond to usâ when things are toughest.
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Friends, the readings for this Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time take us to very holy ground. In the first reading, taken from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, we hear the âshema,â a prayer fundamental to Jewish theology and spirituality. And in the Gospel, when one of the scribes asks Jesus which is the greatest commandment, the Son of God, the Torah made flesh, recites the same prayer. We canât get any more sacred or any clearer indication of how we should govern our lives.
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Friends, all three readings for this Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time have a golden thread running through them, which is the idea of the callâof the primacy of Godâs action in the life of salvation. Whenever we start thinking that this is our own ego project and that we are in command, we are ipso facto on the wrong path.
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Friends, our Gospel this Sunday is taken from the tenth chapter of Mark, and it is high-octane spiritual business. Something pivotal is being laid out for us in this passage, and it has to do with power, suffering, and a willingness to go where Jesus goes.
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Friends, for this Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our first reading from the marvelous book of Wisdom presents an old biblical trope: If you were to ask God for something, or if God were to come to you and say he will give you whatever you wantâwhat would you ask for? This is a really clarifying question. And while many things might come to mind, the answer of the paradigmatic wisdom figure is instructive.
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Friends, the first reading from Genesis and the Gospel from Mark this week are of great importance. They have to do with what we call Christian anthropologyâthe biblical understanding of who we areâand most specifically, in relation to marriage and family. This question of how we define ourselves is of course on the minds of many people today, and the readings, in a beautifully compact way, bring out the Christian answer.
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Friends, why was the story of Jesus with the little children, versions of which appear in the three synoptic Gospels, so vividly remembered by the first Christians? I think they intuited that it got very close to the heart of Jesusâ teaching. The way Mark sets up his account of this story in our Gospel for this weekend is frankly funny, and itâs an example of the disciples completely missing the point of everything.
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Friends, âfools rush in where angels fear to treadââand this week, I am going to go once more into the issue of faith and works, which has been dividing Western Christianity since the Reformation. Our second reading from the Letter of James is a key text on this issue, and its metaphor of healingâtogether with Paulâs forensic metaphorâorient us to the Catholic view of justification.
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Friends, our Gospel for today is the evocative scene of Jesus healing a man who cannot hear and cannot speak. This man is beautifully symbolic of many in our culture today: we donât listen to God, and therefore we canât speak clearly about God. To us, as to him, Jesus says, âEphphatha!ââbe opened to the Word of God!
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Friends, as Americans, we have a very ambiguous relationship to law. On the one hand, we are a nation of independently minded people; we donât like the law imposing itself on us. At the same timeâletâs face itâwe are a hyper-litigious society. We see the same ambiguity about lawâboth its beauty and its shadow sideâin our three readings today.
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Friends, we come now to the close of this great discourse of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John, where we see the aftereffects of his teaching on the Real Presence. The Eucharist is a standing or falling point of Christianity, and the question Jesus poses to the Twelve is posed to every one of us today: Do you also want to leave over this teaching? Do you reject it, or do you accept it?
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Friends, we continue reading from the sixth chapter of John, this pivotal section of the New Testament where John lays out his Eucharistic theology. And we come today to the rhetorical high point of this discourse, where things really come to a head. It is the ground of the doctrine of the Real Presence: Jesus is not simply symbolically present in the Eucharist; heâs really, truly, and substantially present under the signs of bread and wine.
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