Foot-washer

  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....