Scripture Reflections Seeking Understanding

For the past twenty years, as our family has grown, we've piled into the car around this time of year and taken a drive around our suburb. We head to the same streets each year - the ones that we know will have Christmas lights - and one particular house that transforms a large pine tree growing in its front yard into a giant Christmas tree, complete with a four-foot light up star a good thirty feet in the air.  This, and my wife administering my in-laws Secret Santa draw are the hallmarks that Christmas is coming.  And every year, this last four weeks before Christmas passes so quickly and so slowly at the same time. Time seems to do funny things once the tree goes up - and it is no different in the life of the Church.  This Sunday marks the beginning of Advent which the Church describes as a time of joyful anticipation. But reading Luke's Gospel it seems that Jesus didn't get the memo. Instead, he issues a warning about nations in agony and men dying from fear.  'W...

Can it really be twenty-nine years ago that Diana, Princess of Wales famously said, I don't see myself being queen of this country... (but) I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts?  At the time it was a poignant statement that drew a great deal of international attention and sympathy. Here was a member of the royal family expressing her vulnerability in a way that had never been seen before.  Diana was a complex character, and not a blameless one, but the image of her embracing AIDS patients, of her walking through a landmine field in Angola, and these words remind me of what it is that the Church celebrates as we come to the end of the liturgical year this Sunday.  We hear again the prophetic vision of Daniel that the son of man will reign forever - a sovereign whose realm will never pass away. And from the Book of Revelation that Jesus will reign over all the earth with power for ever and ever. So what do we make of Jesus' own statement before Pilate that his kingdo...

This Sunday we are presented with the apocalyptic vision of Daniel - of great and unparalleled distress. A vision that Jesus then draws upon in Mark's Gospel, with stars falling from a sky darkened when both the sun and moon lose their brightness.  It is difficult not to see the parallels between these images and the political rhetoric of the last days of America's general election, and the distressed reaction of some media commentators to the president elect's announcements of cabinet appointments in his upcoming administration. Some are saying that it is in fact the end of the world as we know it. (Ironically, the Trump campaign themselves used R.E.M.'s song of this name in many of their earlier rallies before the band issued them with a cease and desist) .  My point here is not to pass judgement on U.S. politics, but to note that there have been many times in my lifetime that I have heard the same lament. The ARL/Superleague war, World Series Cricket, AI...

As a kid one of the triggers of my asthma was identified as dust mites. Tiny little creatures that cannot be seen without a microscope - scavengers that live off discarded skin cells and inflame the airways of those that are vulnerable. So when I heard the story in this Sunday's Gospel reading referred to as the widow's mite, I was happy for God to take all the mites he wanted. I'd have been better off without them.  But as I've heard this same story year after year, I have come to think of it not as the widow's mite, but the widow's heart. And the Psalm that we hear along with it has something to do with that.  In this hymn of praise the Psalmist tells us that it is the Lord that gives bread to the hungry, who protects the stranger who raises up those that are put down by others, who sets prisoners free. It is the Lord that is just, and generous, and loving. When we do these things then, when we are just and generous, we are living a life that reflects the hear...

In 1963 Pope John XXIII drafted a message to the people of God addressing the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people. It was a lament - a statement of sorrow and regret - for the Church having laid the blame for Jesus' crucifixion upon the Jewish people, and the culture of antisemitism that grew out of "the curse we falsely attached to their name." Upon his death it remained one of his unfinished works.  In 1965 Pope Paul VI took up the spirit of John's work and, with an added focus on the Church's troubled relationship with Islam, published Nostra Aetate - a Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian Religions.  The briefest of the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council,  Nostra Aetate  is remarkable in that it  directly  and succinctly  challenged the prejudice and animosity held by many Christians, and many Christian leaders, towards Jews and Muslims.  Consider this incredibly powerful statement  "W...