Today we celebrate the Nativity in the flesh of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ and our Gospel reading from St. Matthew picks up where we left off on Sunday. Once more we have political intrigue and are among the wealthy and powerful – the magi from Persia. They were priests of the Zoroastrian […]

Yesterday and this morning we heard Matthew’s infancy narrative of Jesus. The themes were: Fear, danger, conflicts, conspiracies, political struggles and murder. This evening we hear the account of Jesus’ birth from St. Luke. His themes are a contrast to St. Matthew’s: peace, joy, light, glory, praise of God, salvation and the Lordship of Jesus […]

Fear, danger, conflicts, conspiracies, political struggles and murder. Sound familiar? It should. All of this is in St. Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus. Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus – that long list of names. Most people have no idea who these men and women were or why they are important enough […]

Rarely does anyone of us think of our spiritual lives in the terms of warfare, but in today’s passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians he presents it to us precisely in this manner. That he does so is, first of all, a reminder to us that Christianity is not a withdrawal from struggle. […]

And the rich young man went away sad. He went away sad, true, but he still went away. He couldn’t give up all of his possessions, even to be able to follow Jesus around, to spend 24/7 with him, to hear every word Jesus would say and be one of his special few. He couldn’t […]