Faith in Progress

15 Pentecost, Proper 21, Year A September 25, 2011 (Exodus 17:1-7, Matthew 21:23-32) Can you imagine someone running into St. Aidan’s right now yelling insults about our worship and our faithfulness and trashing the place? Well, that’s pretty much where the story begins in our Gospel reading for this morning. It’s Monday of Holy Week. Just yesterday, Jesus stole a donkey to ride into Jerusalem in a parade of palm branches. When he got to the city, he headed straight for the Temple, the center of Jewish religious life, and started knocking over the tables of the money changers and chasing out the merchants. He called the Temple a “den of robbers.” Unsurprisingly, this did not win him many friends among the chief priests and proper religious people. This was an incredibly busy and important (not to mention profitable) time in the Temple – almost Passover! And there was Jesus, interrupting their work, turning their temple into chaos, insulting them. And then Jesus had the nerve to c...

September 11, 2011 Pentecost 13, Proper 19, Year A Matthew 18:21-35 Where were you on September 11? It’s one of those days that people of a certain age will always remember where we were when we first heard, and there aren’t too many of those. Holden and I were on our honeymoon and had spent the day exploring Rhodes, Greece. We had returned to the cruise ship before it was set to sail. I was lying on the bed in our room, thinking about taking a nap, when Holden, who had been doing a load of laundry, came rushing in with the news of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center. We turned on the TV in time to watch in horror as the second plane hit. Then to hear about the Pentagon, concern over possible explosions on the National Mall and at the State Department, and another hijacked plane that was unaccounted for, and finally the awful sight of those towers falling. We spent the rest of the afternoon glued to CNN along with the rest of America, trying to figure out what h...