It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.
One of the highlights of my summer, and indeed, of my entire life, was going on a weeklong backpack adventure, up and down the hills of West Virginia along the Allegheny Trail, with my son, because it gave each of us the opportunity to come to know each other better as grown men, and at sixty-nine years of age, I don’t have any time to lose.
Read MoreHardness of heart: that’s the universal human ailment that Jesus came to treat and to heal by giving us a new heart. Jesus reminds the Pharisees that the best Moses could do was to make an allowance for divorce for those who suffered from hardness of heart. Jesus’ fellow Jews were of two minds on how hard a person’s heart had to be before divorce could be allowed under the law of Moses. For some, any amount of hardness of heart, even minor irritations, was enough to justify divorce. For others, infidelity, physical or emotional cruelty, or the welfare of the children were substantial and legitimate grounds for divorce. Jesus himself, according to St. Matthew’s version of today’s gospel, permitted divorce in the case of adultery, though even there, I would claim, Jesus never meant to imply that in the ultimate betrayal of adultery, God’s grace was incapable of healing such a destructive case of hardness of heart.
Read MoreOn September 21st, 1987, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the United Nations. In an appeal to our common humanity, he said something that drew mocking humor from commentators, comedians and critics, yet all of them also had to admit that what he said was true. He said, “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
It’s undeniably true. We can see examples in any crisis or calamity of the many ways that human beings of all backgrounds, creeds and station will rally together to help. We see it with natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes – or the tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. A couple of weeks ago we remembered 9/11, and how the entire nation and much of the world came together, if briefly.
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