Jubilate 2025

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We should not expect great success or worldly prosperity. Sorrow and crosses come to conform us to the image of Christ. When a sculpture is being fashioned, much stone is chiseled away. When the branch is pruned, the scissors bite. In suffering we experience the chiseling, the cutting.

Jesus said it would be like this: “If anyone wishes to follow Me, let him take up his cross and follow Me” [Mt 16.24]. And St. Paul says, “All who wish to live piously in Christ shall endure persecution” [2 Tim 3.12]. And he says that even in the visible church, the Antichrist will rule until the final judgment. And especially for today, Jesus teaches us not to be surprised when we now have sorrow while the world rejoices. That’s how it is in an upside down world….

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Cantate 2023

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Most people sense that something is deeply wrong in the world; everything from riots in the streets to the incredible rise of depression and suicide indicate this. The US surgeon general recently declared America has an epidemic of loneliness.

What’s been the response? American Christianity from Evangelicalism to the mainline churches set forth a vision of God as a feminized fuzzball of felicitous friendship. All have won and all must have prizes. Meanwhile, the “Tolerance” bumperstickers are gone, and politicians only make demands for reparations, recriminations, or retribution….

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Jubilate 2023

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The world hates Christians. “They speak against you as evildoers.” It’s tempting to want to argue with them. People don’t get argued into the faith. Arguing just pulls us down into the passions we are called to avoid. God’s Word today tells us not to respond to evil with evil, but to respond only with good deeds….

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Jubilate 2022

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Jesus says, “human being,” (anthropos in Greek), and not “child” or “baby” or “infant.” Why? Because in this little parable Jesus is referring to Himself. Jesus is the human being, the man, the anthropos; He is the One born of a woman, born of a virgin, born under the law that He might redeem those who were under the law.

The whole story of mankind, our fall, our death, and our salvation, is here, in these little words, “joy that a human being—[a man]—has been born into the world.” …

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