Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)  (Matthew 1:23).   One of the things that makes Christianity unique is that we do not simply worship a God who is far off and has little to do with us. Instead, we have a God who, in his incarnation, intimately involves himself in the messiness of our world and of our lives. Jesus gets his hands dirty, putting his healing touch on the sick, the lame, the leprous

God’s Promises You cannot fully tell the Christmas story without speaking of King David. Many centuries before the Messiah was born, God gave David—the man after His own heart—a promise: When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever (2 Sam. 7:12-13). How long did

“Prepare the Way of the Lord!” The Bethesda Fountain in Central Park in one of Manhattan’s many iconic settings.  The fountain is dominated by a statue known as The Angel of the Waters.  This location was the a setting for one of the opening scenes of the 1973 film adaptation of the off-Broadway musical Godspell .  To see a video clip of this scene, click on the image below:    In this scene, harried, hectic New Yorkers walk away from their stressed out lives to answer the ca

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. “Lift up your hearts.” “We lift them to the Lord.” These familiar eucharistic sentences remind us that it is not our own self-assessment that regulates whether our hearts could be lifted up to the Lord. Our heart condition is part of why the Lord comes to us in His Holy Word and His Holy Meal, why He came as a child two millennia ago, and why He promises to return in glo

Lent 5 April 9, 2025 The hymn from which our Lenten theme, “What Kind of Love is This?” is...

Lent 4                                              April 2, 2025 As fallen creatures, we have a natural tendency to minimize sin. Of...

Lent 3                                         March 26, 2025 The question we are focusing on this Lenten season has been on What Kind of...

Second Wednesday in Lent March 19, 2025 It was Christ’s love for you that brought Him to Golgotha, where He bled...

First Wednesday in Lent March 12, 2025 Can we even call it love, given the comparatively poor emotion we’ve ascribed to the word? Human...