Good morning to my younger friends at Emmanuel! I hope you all have had a good week. I am so happy to be with you all this morning talking about our Gospel. In our Gospel Jesus is preaching in Galilee which is near the sea. And he tells people “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom…
Our texts this morning have a very apocalyptic feel. We start with Jonah telling the people of Nineveh “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Then Paul reminds his brothers and sisters in Corinth that “the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they…
NOTE: Parents, this is a homily you should definitely listen to and talk about with your young ones. It’s also longer than usual. This week we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.: a pastor and a civil rights leader who is also a saint. He is a saint because he stood up for justice and equality…
After being ordained as a priest for eight years, I was assigned as the Executive Director of Catholic Charities for the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia. I was in my thirties at the time and going into the new position I felt alarmingly unprepared. From the moment I received the assignment I wondered about the sanity…
Wednesday this week was a history making day. One that will live in infamy. Depending on your generation, you can probably answer one or more of these questions: Where were you on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day? Where were you on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated? Where were you on September…
Epiphany used to be quite a big deal in the church. It still is, of course, but now it’s often eclipsed by Christmas. Yet Epiphany was around long before Christmas, it turns out. It was the third great feast day of the church after Easter and Pentecost. If Easter celebrates Jesus’ resurrection and Pentecost the…
Read more “God became like us, so that we might become like God.”
It’s January 3rd, so Christmas is over, right? Wrong! Christmas is more than a day, Christmas is a season. It’s the shortest season of the church year — it lasts twelve days! A dozen days of Christmas. It begins Christmas Eve and ends on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany when the Magi show…
A couple of years ago, I read in The Times that the skies lit up over New York City. “There was a boom and a hum and smoke and the sky turned fluorescent blue.” Twitter like mindedly lit up with eerie lights. “It was spectacular”, a deputy inspector in the 114thPrecinct said. “You could see it a…
