And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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Today, the First Sunday after Epiphany, is the day on which we commemorate the Baptism of Christ. It’s one of the four feast days of the liturgical year on which it is particularly appropriate for people to be baptized. So, even though we don’t have anyone to baptize today, it is still the observance of the Baptism of our Lord nonetheless, and thus it provides us with a good occasion to refresh ourselves about what baptism is and why it was fitting that Christ was baptized himself.

​And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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Between the Nativity of our Lord that we began celebrating last week and the Feast of the Epiphany this coming Wednesday, we’re jumping out of order in the story a bit in our Gospel reading this morning. So, while keeping ourselves in the Christmas state of mind, let’s turn our thoughts and attention to a twelve-year old Jesus, joining his parents as he had every year of his life so far to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover.

Almighty God, who hast poured upon us the new light of thine incarnate Word: Grant that the same light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives….

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Merry Christmas! I hope the past few days have been joyous ones for you and your families -- and there’s plenty of days of Christmas yet ahead of us!

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to Alice and Charles, my two older kids, at night for the first time. They’re already pretty familiar with it, as we’ve had a longstanding tradition of watching The Muppets’ Christmas Carol every December -- which is in fact the best cinematic version of the story in existence. But as with every story that was first written as a book, there’s always a wealth of details to be found once you read it, even if you’ve watched the movie version before. And A Christmas Carol is no exception.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Merry Christmas! Tonight we enter into all the wonderful festivities of Christmastide -- the twelve days (I repeat, twelve days!) of celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation of our Lord, the Word made flesh who dwelt among us. In the Nativity of Christ, the union of God and humanity, heaven and earth, is born to us. Here we find, to our wonder and surprise, the Son of God -- given for the life of the world by the infinite love of God the Father and the holy devotion of Mary, his Mother -- she who is none other than the Mother of God.

​For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the themes of the readings over the past few weeks have been rather repetitive -- if so, well, you’re not wrong! But they’ve been that way on purpose. The season of Advent does has a clear theme, namely, the theme of waiting and preparation. And we see this theme again in our readings today. John the Baptist returns front and center -- only this week from John’s Gospel as opposed to Mark’s account that we had last week -- but we see basically the same message again. According to the first chapter of John’s Gospel, John the Baptist “was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light”; his “testimony” that he was not the Christ, but “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” preparing the way for the one who stands among you “whom you do not know” -- the one “who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” As with last week and the week before, waiting and preparation are again the tasks at hand.