Foot-washer

St. Agnes Catholic Church Feast of the Holy Family https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122924.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes, Merry Christmas and happy Feast of the Holy Family.  My maternal grandmother, Barbara Emrich, grew up in the Highlands.  She and her family lived in a little house on Princeton Dr. not far from where Bellarmine University is now.  Her father, Joe Emrich, was a railroad man, working for the old Louisville & Nashville or L&N company.  Her mother, Nona, stayed at home and raised 9 children.   There were five boys and four girls in the Emrich family.  They were a deeply Catholic German family; two of the sons became priests and one of the daughters an Ursuline nun.  They embodied, in a way, an old model of what a Catholic family looked like.   In that little house, the boys had one bedroom and the girls another and they  shared one, solitary bathroom.  My grandmother was the baby of the fam...

  Bellarmine University Our Lady of the Woods  Christmas Eve Vigil Mass  https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122524-Night.cfm  Pray for Peace, People Everywhere  Merry Christmas, Bellarmine, to you and your families.   If you’re like my family you’ve been hearing and listening to Christmas songs for about a month nonstop.  We’ve heard them on our smart speaker, the radio, at Christmas concerts, piano recitals, and St. Agnes’ Christmas pageant.   Miriam, Max, and Petra, who are all five years old, have been really into “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  Something about the repetition in the song really appeals to their age … while also driving adults a little crazy.  When EJ, our oldest, was three, he sang “Jingle Bells” for a solid year.  The next year, he started up on “We Three Kings.”  Again for a whole year, we were hearing  ”Woah … hoh....  Star of wonder…!” Christmas songs can be overwhelming and ines...

  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...

  Bellarmine University  Our Lady of the Woods Chapel Easter Sunday https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/033124.cfm    Happy Easter, Bellarmine.  Christ is risen today, Allelulia.  The Easter eggs came out two weeks early in our house this year.  My wife, Kate, brought them out of the basement to get ready for our egg hunt.  Our four kids started to play with them before the Easter bunny could fill them.  Max, one of our four-year old triplets, pulled out this egg here and brought it to me early on Saturday morning (while I was still in bed).   I’m not sure if you can see this well, but this yellow and orange egg has three crosses on it: the cross of Christ and those of the two thieves.  Max said to me, “look Dad!” pointing to Christ’s cross, “Jesus died here.” Then he popped the egg open and said, “it’s empty inside.”  But then he looked a little closer and said, “there’s the sun in there!”  Sun spelled s-u-n....

  St. Agnes Catholic Church  March 2/3 3rd Sunday of Lent  https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030324-YearA.cfm  As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. It is you I seek! For my body yearns, my soul thirsts for God, the living God (Psalm 42:2-3a, 63:2). My high school students have a very strange problem.  [pause for dramatic effect].  They are overhydrated.  I know you are familiar with dehydration.  It may sound strange to hear that a person could be overhydrated, but I see my students carrying around large water bottles at all times—Stanley cups, Camelbacks, Yetis—which they are constantly draining and refilling.  Consequently, they can hardly sit for whole class period without needing to visit the restroom.  And on the way, they refill their water bottles.  This situation would be utterly alien to the people of Jesus’ world, who experienced water scarcity when wandering in the Sinai desert, an...

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012824.cfm Discerning the Spirits When I was a child attending this church on Sundays with my family, I always looked up at the high altar in the sanctuary. I wondered what the heck the big stone things were on the corners up there. Were they gargoyles? Sphynxes? I couldn’t tell from where we sat in the middle of the church. Do you know what they are? [pause] Angels! There are little baby faces faced at a diagonal angle. The rest of their figures are wings with no bodies. Whoever designed this church really liked angels. I’m going to give you fifteen seconds to take a look and see how many you notice [pause]. I am quite sure that if I don’t tell you right now how many angels there are, you will spend the rest of my homily trying to count them and won’t hear a thing I say, so let me tell you. By my count, there are 50 angels: eight are on the high altar and the tabernacle, including two inside the tabernacle ...