According to the Los Angeles Times, Ascension parishioner, composer and performer Eve Beglarian “is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” She was awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.” Eve’s current projects include Descent, an immersive music-theater piece about a downed female aviator; the long-term undertaking A Book of Days, text/music/visuals, one for each day of the year; and Brim, the ensemble and repertoire she has created in response to her 2009 journey down the Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle.

Despite the suggestion that the tension between Jesus and his family or hometown may have been an on-going sub-plot of Mark’s story, Jesus rises above this first depiction of that tension, and provides himself an alternative. He gives himself a new name. By referring to himself as a “prophet”…

O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving­-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Ultimately, a parable may leave multiple impressions over time. Why? Perhaps because Jesus is asking his hearers not only to listen, but to think as well. And that’s a combination that is not only a challenge, it’s an art – some would say a lost art. Lost because it involves too much effort.

O God, from whom all good proceeds: Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Karl Rahner was a German Jesuit, a brilliant man, a deep thinker and a very familiar name in Christian theology – some would say his work fairly dominated Christian Theological thought in the 20th century. And yet it’s said he claimed that if the doctrine of the Trinity were to quietly disappear out of Christian theology, never to be mentioned again, most of Christendom would never even notice its absence. That sounds like a pretty provocative statement, but, let’s face it…