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…
One night in the hospital, while recovering from my surgery, I found myself unable to remember the prayers I had known since childhood. I would start one prayer, get somewhere in the middle of the prayer, and my mind would then jump to a different section of the prayer, or to a completely different prayer,…
Maybe it’s crossed your mind that it’s a race to either the vaccine or the virus and only time will tell which one will get to us first. Of course, like you, I pray – on my hands and knees – that I get to the vaccine before the virus gets to me. We find…
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…
It will come as no surprise to many of you that I have been a bleeding-heart liberal from my earliest days. A teenage rebellion, I am sure against my tastefully conservative Republican mom and dad. A straight A student, I rebelled in hippy dippy ways. I skipped school to protest the Vietnam war. I served…
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…
Or listen to audio only. Today in the book of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible, we hear the story about the very first day of creation. It is a story of beginnings. That is what Genesis means. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a…
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…
