Transfiguration 2026

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Peter, James, and John see Him transfigured, changed, metamorphosed. His face shines like the sun; His clothes dazzle with uncreated light. The holy prophets Moses and Elijah appear.

Yet even this inner circle of the disciples does not understand. They see Jesus as one of these holy prophets. There are like a recent Uber driver of mine. He had a distinctly Islamic name, but he was listening to the local Christian radio station. So I asked him if he was a Christian. He said, “No, I’m Muslim, but we believe in Jesus too.”

He’s right….

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The Feast of the Holy Innocents

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“These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation.” This day’s liturgy applies those words to the little children of Bethlehem cut down by Herod’s sword. “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation.” The little children suffered the great tribulation. But it is not limited to them. The great tribulation is a vast span of terror, from the babies Pharaoh ordered thrown into the Nile, to today’s little children dismembered by the billion-dollar abortion business….

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The Purification and Presentation 2025

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She felt cursed by God. Her husband loved her. But in her body, and in her soul, she felt cursed. Echoing in her heart were the ancient words spoken to our first mother: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children.”

The pain applies to the birth, to be sure. But there is sorrow here, too – sorrow in conceiving a child, or rather, the difficulty thereof. The woman in today’s Old Testament reading spends years in the sorrow of barrenness.

Why does this happen, these trials of infertility, secondary infertility, and miscarriage? …

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The First Sunday after Christmas 2024

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Outside the temple there is no peace. You have challenges in your family. You feel arthritis settling in, or some other part of you is aging. Friends turn against you. Irrational people will give you no peace.

But here, in Jesus …

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The Vigil of Christmas 2023

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Joseph is in agony. He’s spent the very first season of Advent contemplating divorce. Joseph is betrothed to Mary. Some Bible translations render it “engaged,” but it’s much more than that. Betrothal is a legally binding marriage that is not yet consummated. Today, you can break an engagement without any consequence except the down payment on the reception venue. But Joseph and Mary are not engaged, they are betrothed, and the only way out of that is divorce….

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The Second Sunday after Christmas 2022

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“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.” It’s not an example. Many of our dreams are the fruits of anxiety or indigestion. I once had a dream that Fritz Pauling and I were in Italy stealing a pipe organ. I don’t plan to do what I dreamed. (Although it might make a pretty good buddy caper movie.) The kind of dream Joseph has is extremely rare. But it should remind us of another Joseph: the son of Jacob who had that amazing technicolor dreamcoat. His dreams got him thrown into a pit, then sold into slavery. To where? Egypt. See the similarities? With this new Joseph, and the Mother and Child, God is going to redo the Exodus.

So the “Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying.…” Angel means messenger. An angel speaks; that is his purpose: he brings God’s Word to particular people. What’s the message?

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Circumcision and Name of JESUS

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“Eight days were completed.” Completed … or better, fulfilled. For this is no mere random passage of time. “The days were fulfilled” reveals the jurisdiction of God over all things. God is sovereign over time itself. This event, and every event recorded in Scripture, is governed by His plan.

We track the passage of time with calendars. Modern life requires us to juggle multiple calendars: civil holidays and tax deadlines; work calendars, school calendars, family birthdays and anniversaries. We Christians have our own calendar, often out of step with what everyone else is doing. The liturgical calendar reminds us that Christians are to be different.

We learn from the Gospels something about Joseph and Mary: they are pious. They follow the liturgical calendar, and they also conform their personal lives to what the Law of Moses expected, down to the day. “And when eight days were completed for the circumcision of the Child, His name was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.”

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Annunciation 2019

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What happened in Mary’s womb was not a miracle to grab the world’s attention, like some juggler or illusionist. The world-altering event takes place in secret. It happens through God’s Word to one woman, without an audience.

But it is world-altering in the same category as when God first said, “Let there be light.” To God’s fallen creation God Himself enters.

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