“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind—and your neighbour as yourself.” Love! It is almost a love story itself, this little snippet—the scribe with all his hopes intent on Jesus. Jesus himself with that response burning from his opening heart. And then our …
Category Archives: Berkeley
Sunday Week 3 of Lent Year C
“The Lord is kind of merciful, the Lord is kind of merciful …” Kinda. Let’s not go overboard here! God is pretty good. Quite compassionate. Kinda kind. But … There are disadvantages to preparing a homily in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I get migraine headaches from time to time. If you’ve ever …
Ash Wednesday
Lent never starts at the right time. It always comes as an interruption—an unwanted interruption. When did you last hear someone saying, “I can’t wait for Lent”? Or think to yourself, “I wish Ash Wednesday were here!” No, we are just getting used to ordinary time and a rhythm of life when the whistle blows …
Ss Cyril and Methodius
I love the rhythm of these two readings. I love the trial and error. Put the spit on this guy’s eyes … oops nearly … try again. Send out one bird … no luck … send out another. There’s a simple pragmatism there that might make you think both Noah and Jesus were Americans before …
Sunday Week 5 Year C
Take a dog … this is a recipe … take a dog. Shrink it down in your imagination to … yeah big. Shorten the legs a little. Make the head a bit bigger, the ears bigger still—nice and floppy—and the eyes: grow them large and liquid. Let the coat be fluffy, and the tail short …
Epiphany Sunday
“What are you preaching about tomorrow?” someone asked me last night. “Doors and camels,” I said, off the top of my head, “doors and camels and something else.” That door in St. Peter’s! That door has been bothering me for days. The Holy Door was opened last Christmas to inaugurate the Holy Year of Jubilee. …
Sunday Week 3 of Advent Year C
“What should we be doing?” I’ll say one thing for George W. Bush … he’s not afflicted by overwork. … A friend of mine, a teacher, was telling me how busy school kids are, going non-stop from dawn to dusk—from class to class, 2 or 3 meetings in the lunch break, then after school stuff, …
Sunday Week 1 of Advent Year C
As a kid something always happened to me once the autumn clocks changed. Something to do with my own personal checklist of fall: the smell of burning leaves; frost on the corpses of tall grass; headlights yellow in the early dark on the way home from school; the ache in the air as my nose …
Sunday Week 32 Year B
Can’t you just see that widow? She’s been haunting me half the week so I’ve given her a name. Mrs. Cohen. A little, old, Jewish lady, wrinkled by the years, and hardly able to make it where she’s going. Bent over, thin-wristed, shabbily dressed, among the well-to-do who seem to make an outing of this, …
Tuesday Week 31 Year II (Election Day)
Larry King was interviewing Jesus … “So, Jesus, you say this nation should be governed by God. Who are you going to vote for today?” In reply Jesus told him a story … Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there was a man who was running for election. And when election …