The Rev. Noah Van Niel

The Chapel of the Cross

March 17^th, 2019

Year C: Genesis 15:1-12,17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

There are two Herods. There were actually two Herods who factored into Jesus life. You would be forgiven for not knowing this though, because the Gospels refer to them both as “Herod.” The first Herod was “Herod the Great,” and to many he was just that: a war hero, tight with the Roman luminaries Mark Antony and Octavian Augustus. Proclaimed King of the Jewish people by the Roman Senate, he ruled over the province of Judea for 37 years. He expanded the Temple, and undertook other impressive, large-scale building projects. He was tyrannical and he was feared but he was successful by many measures. This was the Herod who ordered the slaughter of every baby in Bethlehem when the Magi gave him the slip after visiting the baby Jesus. He was a ruthless, but he was legendary. Continue reading →

The Rev. Noah Van Niel

The Chapel of the Cross

February 24^th, 2019

Epiphany 7: Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Ps 37:1-12, 41-42; 1 Cor 15:35-38, 42-50; Luke 6:27-38

My wife and I don’t have much time to watch TV, but lately, at the recommendation of many people (probably because I’m a priest) we have been enjoying working our way through the sitcom, The Good Place. The basic premise of the show is that the lead character, Eleanor Shellstrop, finds herself in Heaven (the “Good Place”) by mistake. She was a pretty terrible person in her life on earth but a glitch in the system has placed her in the wrong afterlife. Eventually this mistake is discovered, and the only way she will be able to stay in the Good Place (which she desperately wants to do) is to up her “score,” the tally of all her actions on earth which, because she was such an awful person, was way in the negative. (If this all sounds rather bleak for a sitcom I can assure you it is done with a lot of wit and good cheer.) So Eleanor runs around the neighborhood trying to up her good person points, but without any success. And finally it dawns on her that the reason she isn’t moving the moral needle is because her motivation for doing all these good things is ultimately still self-serving. And she has to figure out how to change her motivation if she has any hope of staying out of, “the bad place.” I’ll leave it there so as not to spoil the rest of the show. Continue reading →