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FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Practicing faith
Did you ever go searching all over the house for your car keys only to find them right where you left them on the kitchen table? We tend to expect what we believe. When we’re looking for those keys, there’s a little voice in our heads chanting the mantra: I have to find my keys, I have to find my keys. And so it is. Faith is to believe despite all evidence to the contrary. Our single task as Christians is to practice our faith, to train our minds to believe, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. “I will find my keys” is a good start.
TODAY’S READINGS: Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6a
“And he could do no deed of power there . . . . And he was amazed at their unbelief.”
to your soul-searching questions
More than nice gestures
Why do Catholics bless themselves, genuflect, and so on?
Many rituals that your parents may have performed or your parochial schoolteachers insisted on when you walked into sacred space fall under the heading of personal pieties. Enter any city church and you’re likely to see a host of ethnically rooted expressions of faith: people kissing statues, moving up the aisles on their knees, leaving rosaries around the necks of madonnas or handwritten prayers rubber-banded to the hands of Jesus. Dollar bills origami-ed into the shape of hearts are be ...
The Way to the church
Did Jesus establish a church? How did we get from following “the Way” of Jesus to this big institution?
The scholar E. P. Sanders has the most quotable quote on this matter in his book Jesus and Judaism: “Jesus proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God, but it was the church that arrived.” To some folks’ reckoning, that’s a bit of a letdown. Although kingdom coming is a realm where every tear is wiped away, the concrete manifestation of the church at any point in history might just as often give you reason to cry. We’re reminded that the church is made up ...