The Church’s messaging on the Sundays following Christmas Day might best be summed up as promises fulfilled with more to come, or light shining with ever-increasing brightness. The Christmas 1 readings are the same all three years. It is on this Sunday that we receive as a Gospel selection the famous prologue to John’s Gospel,…
Today in the Spirit: Advent 4B
The festival day is at hand, yet the Church would have us linger longer in Advent, contemplating all that God the Father has done to foretell and prepare the arrival of “Yeshua” (“the one who delivers”) into the world. In Advent 4, Year B, the assigned Gospel reading from Luke 1:26-38 relates the narrative of…
Today in the Spirit: Advent 3B
It is the Advent 3B selection of readings that really puts the joy in “Joy Sunday.” All four readings include either an explicit exhortation for God’s people to rejoice in the Lord or a testimony of joy from the narrator’s heart. Since all that Mark has to say about John the Baptist before Jesus’ arrival…
Today in the Spirit: Advent 2B
Like many of our favorite movies, Advent 2 takes us, suddenly, to a flashback in time from the noise and upheaval of the Son of Man coming on the clouds to the silence of the Judean wilderness and the sight of a strange man dwelling there. In the Gospel of Mark, though it is shorter…
Today in the Spirit: Advent 1B
Happy New Year, Saints! We return to what the Church calls the Incarnation Cycle in the Sunday lectionary. In Year B of the three-year cycle, we embark this Sunday on the second of three pilgrimages, walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, this time with the Gospel of Mark as our main guide. Having heard…
Today in the Spirit: Proper 29A (Christ the King)
The last Sunday in the Pentecost season, and the weekdays following it, mark the end of what liturgical churches call the Paschal (Easter) Cycle of the church year (On Advent 1 Sunday, we begin the Incarnation Cycle). Since the early development of a three-year rota of lectionary readings (since Vatican II), this Sunday has been…
Today in the Spirit: Proper 28A
We now move to the second of three weeks in a pre-Advent period at the end of the Pentecost season, Year A. The Gospel reading assigned in Matthew 25:14-30 is our Lord’s telling of The Parable of the Talents (also found in Luke 19:12-27, but in a distinct form and different time of Jesus’ ministry)….
Today in the Spirit: Proper 27A
For us as worshipers, the next few weeks of the Sunday lectionary readings in Pentecost make for a pre-Advent period of preparation before the new church year. The focus of our attention is moved to the theme of right living in readiness for the end times. In Year A, that shift takes place with the…
Today in the Spirit: Proper 26A
It is in these latter weeks of the season after Pentecost, prior to the pre-Advent presentation of our Lord’s teachings on the end times, that the church assigns the hardest teachings of Jesus on Christian living. Throughout these weeks in Year A, it has been a hard slog through teaching on the theme of hypocrisy,…
Today in the Spirit: Proper 25A
We continue in the liturgical year through the period leading up to his crucifixion in which Jesus is tested by the religious leaders of Jerusalem. In Year A, we skip the narrative with the query of the Sadducees about marriage at the resurrection (that comes in Year C) and move to the Pharisees’ questioning Jesus…
