Today is Father's Day. "Father" is a powerful title in every culture. It refers to the man biologically responsible for your existence. But it's also a term of respect for any male elder or superior in the community.
Two wonderful confrontations are juxtaposed for us this week. First we have Nathan the prophet, having it out for God's sake with David. With brutal honesty Nathan fills one side of the balance with God's goodness to the former obscure shepherd boy: I made you king.
Separateness and belonging. What would human experience be like without these two polarities? Many of us form our core identity alone and within. But we sustain it externally in supportive relationships.
Of all the amazing things that are reported of Jesus in the gospels, only one is so phenomenal that it manages to get recorded in all four accounts.
Scripture scholars have called this section of John’s gospel one of the clearest New Testament passages about God as Trinity in unity. If that’s true, it only goes to show how oblique the other passages are.
Jesus is Lord! Let’s say it together: Jesus is Lord! Does it sound strange on the tongue? Are we shy to pronounce these words?
On Mother’s Day, we’re reminded to “say it with flowers.” The IT we’re supposed to be saying is I love you, but apparently that’s too intimidating for most of us to come out with.
A lot of folks have trouble with authority. Some of that is leftover stuff from childhood, when parents, teachers, or other authority figures may have misused the power vested in them and made the idea of an overseer repellent ever after. But no matter how we feel about it, authority is here to stay.
The closest thing to apocalypse most of us will experience in this life is falling in love. In the biblical Apocalypse, God reveals the great mystery at the end of time in these terms: “Behold, I make all things new.”
At the anniversary of a priest’s ordination, the homilist said something surprising: “The mystery of the Christian priesthood is this: A priest is a fallible, ordinary man. A man of dust who remembers he will return to dust, even though he presently wears a chasuble.”