Fifth Sunday in Lent I confess. I am fascinated by the discoveries of science that help us understand the development of life and the rich variety of life on earth. I also celebrate the knowledge that every life form is the way it is because it needs to be the way it is! Yet I […]

Fourth Sunday in Lent No wonder we mortals have difficulty grasping the word of God and applying the divine address to our lives here and now. God does not fit any of the categories by which we manage our lives and the affairs of the world. The Bible makes no qualms about the differences between […]

Third Sunday in Lent We can all understand, I think, that when people of faith experience hardships in their own lives and observe the sufferings of others, they often lose their faith in the God they worshiped. Such a response is quite common among people during grief and trauma. It is more difficult to understand […]

Second Sunday in Lent Many stories tell about a journey. The Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic is about Gilgamesh’s long journey to attain immortality. Homer’s The Odyssey relates the trials and tribulations of Odysseus as he travels home from the Trojan battlefield. J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings dramatically relates the journey of Frodo and his […]

First Sunday in Lent As I was listening over the past few weeks to some lectures on music, I became particularly interested when the teacher waxed eloquently about Pythagoras, the 6th century B.C, philosopher, mathematician, and most everything else. Pythagoras and his disciples (the Pythagoreans) developed a theory of numbers, often in terms of the […]

The Transfiguration of Our Lord The Sunday celebrating the Transfiguration of Our Lord has been set in a particularly strategic position. In one sense, the Sunday is also the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. In another sense, it is the transition to Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season. Typical of the Epiphany season, the Transfiguration […]

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany The Epiphany season challenges us to discern the meaning of symbols in order to grasp the messages about the identity of Jesus. Removed by almost two thousand years, the biblical symbols that convey this powerful news are almost exclusively words. Word symbols relate meaning, however, only in particular contexts. For […]

Christmas Eve The birth of Jesus, and the way Luke and Matthew tell the birth stories, challenged much of the thinking of ancient times. The Christmas story, comforting and mysterious as it is, challenges us also—if we are willing to allow it. The challenge is primarily this. Thanks to worldwide influence of Plato’s philosophy, all […]

First Sunday of Advent, Year A Visionaries fascinate us. Many people stand in awe of the prophetic visions of Nostradamus to predict future events. More appropriately, we marvel at the visionary writings of Jules Verne who in the latter half of the 19th century wrote novels about traveling up into space and down to the […]

Christ the King Sunday As the season of Pentecost comes to an end, the entire church year concludes as well. How fitting that every church year ends with Christ the King Sunday. While the title for Jesus is not well attested in the New Testament, the announcement that the Reign of God has dawned in […]