Foot-washer

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062826.cfm Today, I am going to preach about an incredible religious experience that Kate and I had while visiting Peru ten years ago.  I am going to start by speaking about the Peruvian custom of mummifying the dead that was practiced during the Incan Empire before the Spanish conquistadors arrived.  I will then apply those customs to Christian beliefs about the resurrection, okay? Got that: Peru, mummies, resurrection.  Here we go. Most of us learned about mummies when we studied ancient Egypt as kids.   You can go to the Louisville Science Center and see a couple of examples on display here in town.  But the Egyptians are only the most famous of dozens of cultures that mummified their dead.   In the days of the Inca Empire (the 1400s) in what is now Peru, the Incan emperors were believed to be descendants of the sun god Inti.  When they died, the emperors were taken up t...

Green Mass (Care for Creation) Wis 13:1-9 ; Psalm 104; Matthew 6:24-34 Seeing Christ in Creation Nine years ago, I led a group of Bellarmine University students on a study abroad trip to Peru. One night, we took a bus ride that wound through the Andes Mountains. The driver made an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere and let us all off to into a field. There was no moon that night. The inky darkness was broken only by the light of the stars. We gazed upon them and were unexpectedly disoriented. Instead of the familiar constellations that had accompanied us our whole lives in the northern hemisphere, there was an alien, antipodal sky with a strange configuration of unknown stars. Floating on the horizon just above the mountain peaks appeared the constellation known as the Crux, or the Southern Cross, composed of four of the brightest stars in the sky that form a distinct cross-shape.     Long before being introduced to Christianity, Peruvians held the cross as sacred...

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...