Sunday Scriptures

Have you ever had an experience so profound and so out-of-the-norm that you were tongue-tied in trying to convey to others the impact of that experience?

“God called out to him from the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!’ He answered, ‘Here I am.’ God said, ‘Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’”

In high school, my best friend’s dad was a Protestant minister. While both my friend and I are true mutts with a variety of ethnic heritages, we nonetheless had at that time a great fondness for our Irish ancestry, and one can easily imagine how that played out: the Irish Catholic and the Irish Protestant, jabbing one another with a constant playfulness as to who was the real Irishman, the real Christian.

Before Jesus’ ministry, the law prescribed an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth when seeking revenge. And so David would be justified in dispatching King Saul — yet he extends mercy.

For the person in biblical times, there was an intuitive dread about suddenly encountering the living God.

Having taught in the St. Paul Seminary for 15 years, I am regularly approached by the faithful about how a recently-ordained priest or deacon preached. They ask me, “Did you teach him that?”

Although centuries of theological reflection have made a connection between the baptism of Jesus and Christian baptism, the ceremony narrated in Luke recounts a mass baptism administered by John the Baptist. In the context of this ceremony, Jesus aligns himself with the Baptist’s message and submits to the ritual activity prompted by his preaching.

According to Forbes Magazine, American holiday spending exceeded $1 trillion in 2016, and it dropped to a little more than $700 billion in 2017. As we are now just a few days away from Christmas in 2018, no doubt Americans have started to rack up an impressive amount of spending again this year.