Foot-washer

  Holy Family Catholic Church Gold Mass (Feast of St. Albert) Wis 13:1-9  Mk 9:2-10 How many of you have heard of “Tiktaalik?”  Do you know what a “Tiktaalik” is?  I’ll say the word again: Tiktaalik.  Tiktaalik is the name of an animal that lived 375 million years ago.  It was a fishlike aquatic creature that was among the first to evolve the ability to crawl out onto dry land. Tiktaalik’s fossils were found by paleontologists Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin twenty years ago in the arctic on Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, northern Canada.   Tiktaalik is called a “transitional fossil,” which embodies a transition from one major evolutionary stage to another. A second example of this is archaeopteryx, which embodies the transition of dinosaurs to birds.  Tiktaalik is sometimes referred to as “a fish with wrists” having fish-like qualities, but limbs that could support its weight as it crawled onto land, as an early ancestor of the amphibians....

  St. Agnes Catholic Church 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102724.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes.  I want to begin with a bit of Catholic trivia.  Ancient Greek was the most common language of the Mediterranean region.  It’s the language that the New Testament was written in and our earliest liturgies were prayed in. To this this day, there is one part of our Catholic mass that is still (occasionally) said in Greek.  Do you know what it is? I actually gave you a tip off earlier in the liturgy.  It’s in the penitential rite where we pray, “Lord have mercy,” or in the Greek ‘Kyrie Eleison.’  We hear the Biblical origins of this prayer in today’s Gospel reading.   On it’s surface, the reading today appears to be about another healing of a blind person—the restoration of sight to blind Bartimaeus.  I’d like to suggest that the Gospel actually about prayer.   Bartimaeus repeatedly shouts t...

Bellarmine University 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102024.cfm Jesus gives us a challenging instruction today: “whoever wishes to be great among you will … be the slave of all.” We might understandably be repulsed by Jesus’ language of slavery. Who would want to be a slave? We have a horrifying legacy of enslavement in the United States, a legacy that extends to the Caribbean and Central and South America. Slavery has never been a positive force in the world, including in the Greco-Roman culture where Jesus lived. So, it is a shock to Jesus’ listeners then and to us to today when he calls himself a slave and tells them he will be a human sacrifice. By calling himself a slave, Jesus is not saying that he doesn’t have dignity and value, as he is a human being created in the image of God. Nor that his labor and his body can be used up and thrown away by others. Rather he is attacking the human desire to use other people in this way. So-called “gr...

Galt House October 11, 2024 Mercy Education Conference  Jer 22:1-4 Matt 25:31-46 In 1960, an 18-year old Black man stood over the Ohio River looking down from the Second Street Bridge two blocks east from here.  He had just returned from Rome with an Olympic gold medal around his neck.  Filled with pride, he wore the medal everywhere, expecting every door in his hometown to be open to him.  And yet, he found that in Jim Crow Kentucky, the color of his skin mattered more than the color of his medal.  It mattered more than his talent in the ring, more than the poetry than flowed from his lips, more than his good looks.  “I’m prettier than a girl,” he boasted.   The young Muhammad Ali gazed down at the muddy water—a river that had been a symbol of freedom to his ancestors fleeing slavery to the north and a symbol of hell for slaves sold down river to the cotton fields of the Deep South.  Ali took his medal and threw it into the Ohio River....

26th Sunday of Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072824.cfm There was a boy named Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone who lived in a little town in central Italy in the 13th century. His father was in France on business when he was born and so began calling him “Frenchy” or Francis. As a young man, his great ambition was to become a troubadour and a jongleur—a kind of wandering musician and poet, but also an acrobat and circus performer. Francis was often found walking around on his hands with his feet pointed towards the sky. To many people, he appeared foolish, but standing upside down gave Francis a unique perspective on the world. From his vantage, everything seemed to falling into nothingness. His feet were not grounded. Even tall buildings and impressive battlements appeared to rest on the clouds and were in danger of floating away. The young Francis, who would of course become known as Saint Francis, recognized that the world is radically and completely ...

Corpus Christi Sunday https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/060224.cfm This summer, the Olympics games will be held in Paris, France, and there is good news from the City of Light, the exterior of the Cathedral of Notre Dame will be restored in time for the games. You may remember that five years ago, on April 15, 2019, a massive fire engulfed the historic church. As onlookers watched, it appeared as if this famous 800-year-old church, a symbol of France and one of the greatest churches in the world, was going to be gone forever. It is truly remarkable that Notre Dame survived and has been repaired. I want to take us back to that day five years ago what the church was ablaze. On the scene was Paris’ famous fire brigade, which is actually a unit of army. They rushed into the church to try to control the fire and save some of the treasures inside. It was a hellscape inside. Father Jean-Marc Fournier, the priest-chaplain, described the interior. He said, “A rain of fire was fa...

St. Agnes Catholic Church 5th Sunday in Easter Cycle B https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/042824.cfm If you could be any plant what would you be? I often start my Theology classes at Assumption with a “check-in question,” a quick icebreaker that lets students share something about themselves. It’s a practice that builds community and ensures that everyone’s voice is heard at least once a day. When I read Jesus’ “I AM statements” in the Gospel of John, I like to imagine that he preceded it with a check-in question for his followers: What is your spiritual animal? If you could be any type of food, what would you be? So, let’s turn to today’s—if you could be any plant what would you be? I think many of us would choose something might and huge like, a giant sequoia or California redwood. Perhaps you might choose a beautiful flower like an orchid or a sunflower. Or something unique like a Venus flytrap or a saguaro cactus. Jesus rejects all these interesting options and tells...