Between memory and hope

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 29, 2010 – St. John’s, Goshen

Two weeks ago, we heard the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews refer to the great figures of the history of Israel as a “cloud of witnesses” that surround us, and which we could expand to include the great figures of our Christian history, down to grandparents and parents, down to the generation that led us to faith and love of God. Today’s reading ends the same chapter and this time looks forward, looks toward the future, the complete gathering of God’s people in the Kingdom, at the end.

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Our father in faith

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 8, 2010 – St. John’s, Goshen

The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, from which our second reading is taken, is a lengthy recollection of the great heroes of Jewish faith. The list begins with Abel and his offering of a sacrifice pleasing to God and moves on then to Enoch and Noah and to the great patriarchs before concluding with Moses and an evocation simply by name of other great figures of the Old Testament. Of them all the author has two wonderful things to say: not only that “the world was not worthy of them,” but that “God himself was not ashamed to be called their God.” The God who refused to give the name that would reveal his inmost being was not ashamed to call himself the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”

The figure of Abraham is singled out in the portion of the chapter we have heard.

The coats in our closets

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 1, 2010 – St. John’s Goshen

All three of today’s biblical readings warn us against greed and against placing the meaning and the value of our lives in our possessions. The first reading is from the book of Ecclesiastes in which we hear another one of the gloomy assessments of the world-weary man named Qoheleth. (Today we would probably say that he suffers from depression!) “Vanity of vanities,” he sighs, “Emptiness of emptiness!” “Nothing is worth anything,” “Everything is useless,” we might paraphrase. A man labors all his life to gain possessions, but then has to leave it to someone who’s never worked. Perhaps our example today would be the man who works and works to accumulate as much pension as he can, and then dies a week after he retires. And then there’s all the worry that comes from possessions, worrying about thieves and other problems. He’s lucky he didn’t know about stock market fluctuations. All this is the somewhat jaded common sense that comes from long observation of the human comedy.