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Advent 2 December 6, 2009

Baruch 5:1-9                                                                       

Philippians 1:3-11                                                              

Luke 3:1-16

I had a John the Baptist in my life. His name was Grant Gallup, and he died this past Thanksgiving evening. Grant was a priest who spent his entire active career, as he liked to say “in a fit of absent mindedness,” as vicar of a tiny African American mission in the slums on the West Side of Chicago. In retirement, he went to Managua, Nicaragua, as a representative of the Diocese of Chicago, which had a companion relationship with the Diocese of Nicaragua. There he ran Casa Ave Maria, a house of “pilgrimage and mission” or, as he would sometimes put it, a “halfway house for recovering capitalists.”