Episodes

Saturday Jan 06, 2018
The Three Strangers
Saturday Jan 06, 2018
Saturday Jan 06, 2018
Each of the popular names given to today's Gospel characters adds its own nuance to the Epiphany story, but the mostly fogotten name is the most important: The Three Strangers!
(Apologies for the raspy voice...recovering from the Great Flu Epidemic of 2018!)

Sunday Dec 10, 2017
The Baptist: Nothing Cherubic about this Man of God!
Sunday Dec 10, 2017
Sunday Dec 10, 2017
Renaissance artists often pictured John the Baptist and Jesus as cute-as-can-be-infants together as cousins. Mark has none of it! In his gospel, John is a full-grown, wild-eyed prophet with divine fire in his heart!

Saturday Nov 25, 2017
Beyond our Imagining: God With Us!
Saturday Nov 25, 2017
Saturday Nov 25, 2017
As our human imagination fails us in picturing that which we have not yet seen, as with our earth before the Apollo missions or the universe before Hubble, so it is with God. Our images of God were so feeble compared to the reality of "God Among Us", Jesus Christ.

Sunday Nov 19, 2017
Perfect Thanksgiving
Sunday Nov 19, 2017
Sunday Nov 19, 2017
We can learn from television's domestic diva how to set a perfect Thanksgiving table and how to cook the perfect Thanksgiving turkey, but it is easy to find we have celebrated the great feast of Thanksgiving without much giving of thanks. Today's parable from Matthew's Gospel helps pull us back to the foundational attitudes of the heart that put the "thanks" back into Thanksgiving.

Sunday Nov 05, 2017
Practice What You Preach
Sunday Nov 05, 2017
Sunday Nov 05, 2017
"Practice what you preach!" Great advice, but so hard to live. In fact, how could we actually, fully practice what we preach when what we preach, profess, proclaim, and teach is this beautiful Way of Jesus? We fail at it all the time! So what is to be done...not preach? Maybe not...look to Paul who knows he is a fragile vessel of the Word of God, yet proclaims it anyway!

Saturday Oct 28, 2017
Commandments, Laws, and Love
Saturday Oct 28, 2017
Saturday Oct 28, 2017
Ten Commandments to guide us, innumerable laws to keep us on the straight and narrow, and then there is love! Loving God and Neighbor is the fulfillment of the Law, says Jesus.

Saturday Oct 14, 2017
One Weird Wedding
Saturday Oct 14, 2017
Saturday Oct 14, 2017
This is a tough parable for many of us...it has some big twists that leave us scratching our heads. Once told, we can't help but wonder why the one guy who came in from the street was summarily thrown out of the King's wedding feas for his son. Hmmm...

Tuesday Oct 10, 2017
Vineyards, Vineyards, and Vineyards!
Tuesday Oct 10, 2017
Tuesday Oct 10, 2017
The three consecutive vineyard parables of Matthew's Gospel culminate today in the most challenging of all. Jesus lets the Jerusalem big-shots have it with this third tale to be staged in a vineyard.

Sunday Sep 24, 2017
Jesus is Just Wrong!
Sunday Sep 24, 2017
Sunday Sep 24, 2017
A lot of folks don't like today's parable from Jesus! It is just not fair...it is just not just, that those who work one hour get paid the same as those who work eight or ten! But is this really the point of Jesus' parable? Nope!

Sunday Sep 17, 2017
Wrath and Anger are Hateful Things
Sunday Sep 17, 2017
Sunday Sep 17, 2017
With a school community not far from us having just experienced the horror of a "school shooting" (one student lost, three others injured), today's readings are very much apropos to the hard realities of the human heart's dark side...and a serious examination of our own hearts. Do we ourselves "hug tight" wrath, anger, and vengeance or do we follow the way of Jesus: praying for our persecutors and asking the Father to forgive them for they do not know what they do?