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“The fever left her, and she began to serve them.” Most of us are familiar with Lourdes, the Roman Catholic shrine in southern France at which the Blessed Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a saintly young woman named Bernadette a century and a half ago. Pilgrims today continue to throng the shrine,…
Today’s Gospel recounts an outstanding educational experience. The people of the Capernaum synagogue find that they have run right smack into the truth. Their encounter with Jesus leaves them awestruck. In contrast to their usual teachers, he speaks and acts with an authority that is undeniable. What do these people learn from hearing Jesus? What…
We all remember the story about Jonah being swallowed by a whale, but what we might have forgotten is why. This is the story: God asks Jonah to go to Nineveh, a corrupt city, and tell them that if they repent, God will not destroy them. This annoys Jonah, who thinks that the Ninevites deserve…
We’ve all heard little kids holler at each other, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” For a mother, that phrase can be horrifying because it usually means the kids are doing something like hanging upside down on a tree branch they had to climb pretty high to reach in the first place or daring each other…
“The voice of the Lord is upon the waters… the Lord is upon the mighty waters.”– Psalm 29 There is a temptation to say too much about this Feast of our Lord’s Baptism and the lessons before us. The texts speak mightily for themselves: The spirit-wind of God and God’s voice is upon the mighty…
I want to give a personal two thumbs up to the movie Big Fish. Big Fish is the story of a father and a son that begins and ends at a river. The father, Edward Bloom, is larger than life. On the day of his son William’s birth, he catches the biggest catfish in Alabama’s…
The celebration of New Year’s Day tends to be a feast of exhaustion, particularly if one stayed up to see the new year in. After the Reformation in Scotland, the old church feasts were abolished. As is often the case, if people are deprived of things to which they are deeply attached, they find other…
“Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.’” There is a clergy person who, like many others,…
The birth of the Messiah in a lowly stable is current news. Just a year ago Newsweek devoted a December issue to the topic. It was quite good! It talked about how modern scholarship attempts to unravel what happened or didn’t some 2,000 years ago. It leaves the reader with a lot of unanswered questions,…
Why Mary for the mother of God? Why Mary? Mary was apparently an ordinary person. She was not rich or well-born. Wasn’t she an unlikely representative of humankind to give birth to the Savior? Mary was so simple, so plain, so ordinary, so much like the rest of us. And that’s the answer, isn’t it?…
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