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Be Open!

Leaking and leakers are always hot topics in the news. This sort of thing goes on all the time in politics. Reputations are made and broken sometimes with one careless remark that gets out to the media. Then of course there are calculated leaks. Such leaks are sometimes designed to destabilize political opponents. Jesus was a leader who was concerned about leaks. There were some things, like his identity, that he wanted to keep secret until just the right moment. New Testament scholars often refer to this as the Marcan Secret. Yet here, as elsewhere in Mark’s Gospel, we do not simply see the good news about Jesus leaking out. Rather, it is pouring out, as people find themselves unable to be silent about what Jesus is saying and doing. Let us read together Mark 7:31-37 and see what God might have to say to us through this story… Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who...
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How to Handle Interruptions

Have you ever wanted just to get away from it all?  When I was in college I went through a very difficult time where I was trying to go to school full time and work full time.  I quickly got burnt out.  One day I decided to put down everything I was doing and travel up the California coast. I took some money out of the bank, a change of clothes, borrowed a friend’s tent and camped along the way. No sooner had I reached my destination of Big Sur then I realized I was ready to go back home, face and deal with my problems one by one. Over the last two Sundays we have read about Jesus’ continuing battle with the Pharisees. We get the sense in our passage for today that Jesus was growing weary in battle. He wanted to get away from it all and just have a break. On this occasion, for his break Jesus went clear outside the boundaries of Israel, into the region of Tyre and Sidon. This region represented an ancient enemy of Israel (Jeremiah 47:4; Joel 3:4; Matthew 11:21). Let’s rea...
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Clean & Unclean

Peter Falk was an actor who spent his career playing a wide range of roles in comedy and drama. Most notably, he played an eccentric, rumpled but ever-triumphant detective in the hit television show  Columbo.  In real life, Falk had a glass eye, resulting from an operation to remove a cancerous tumor when he was three years old. Despite his missing eye, he was a high school athlete. In one story he liked to tell (after being called out at third base during a baseball game) he removed his glass eye and handed it to the umpire. “You’ll do better with this,” he said. [1]   I think we are all just a bit like Peter Falk. We would all like to think we are the best umpires of our own lives, the best judges of whether we are safe or out, clean or unclean, righteous or unrighteous.   However, there is someone else, who in the Gospels asserts his right to be the ultimate umpire. His name is Jesus. Let us see what he has to say about being safe or being out, clean or unclean, f...
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God's Word & Human Tradition

The story is told of two boys who were good friends. One was a Catholic and the other was a Baptist. Because they were good friends, they decided to attend each other’s churches on two consecutive Sundays, with their parents’ approval.   On the first Sunday, the Baptist boy visited the Catholic Church. Just before they sat down, the Catholic boy genuflected. “What’s that mean?” the Baptist asked. All through the mass, the Baptist boy wanted to know what this and that meant, and the little Catholic boy explained everything very nicely.   The next Sunday it was the Catholic boy’s turn to visit the Baptist church. When they walked in the building, an usher handed them a printed bulletin. The little Catholic boy had never seen anything like that before in his whole life because his Catholic parish did not have bulletins. “What’s that mean?” he asked. His Baptist friend carefully explained. When the preacher stepped into the pulpit, he carefully opened his Bible and conspicuously t...
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