“The heavens will be dissolved in flames and the elements melted by fire” (2 Peter 3:12). Yikes! That was a hard start to our first reading. To modern ears, the language sounds catastrophic, end of the world kind of stuff. “Frightening” would be a bit of an...
As you may or may not know, in days long past, I served aboard U.S. nuclear submarines. There are lots of sea stories that I can tell. There are lots of questions I am asked about life aboard a submarine: how a submarine operates, if I did this one thing or another,...
Our first reading today, 1 Peter 1:10–16, comes near the beginning of the letter and follows Peter’s reflection on the living hope Christians have through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It has some expressions that might strike the modern listener as odd and so I...
Over that last two weeks and more we have heard passages from the Gospel of John that together are known as the “Farewell Discourse.” The discourse covers four chapters and often seems to be repetitively redundant. Today’s gospel is known as the beginning of the...
The words of today’s Psalm reveal something essential about the heart of God: “The father of orphans and the defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling. God gives a home to the forsaken.” This is not a small theme hidden in Scripture. It is one of the great...
