luke on Halloween

Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the holiday shopping season for men is Christmas Eve.

My kids are still young enough that they ask cute questions. My youngest is still learning what all the measurements mean. He’ll ask, “Mom, how long until we leave?” “15 minutes.” “Is that long?” “No,...

Christmas (a shortened form of "Christ’s mass”) has been an embattled holiday for much of its history— and not just because talking heads on TV like to argue about the “war on Christmas” every ye...

Gracious God, we confess that we think of Easter as the springtime holiday rather than the mystery holiday, the hope-time holiday, the now-its-up-to-us holiday. We’re more at home with bulbs and bunni...

Now Christmas is come, Let us beat up the drum, And call all our neighbors together, And when they appear, Let us make them such cheer, As will keep out the wind and the weather.

I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished—I am terrified that, this year, it won’t happen; tha...

Christmas is fast approaching. And now that Christ has aroused our seasonal expectations, he’ll soon fulfill them all!

The season which Engages the whole World in a Conspiracy of love.

It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.

If we’re ever concerned with being wrapped up in Christmas busyness, it may be worth considering the Italian legend of La Befana. The elderly Befana was in her home when suddenly she was visited by th...

Palm Sunday is the Trojan horse of the church year. You remember the story from Greek mythology: a huge, splendid wooden horse was accepted by the Trojans as a present from the Greeks (so it really ou...

Christmas, like God himself, is both more wondrous and more threatening than we imagine.

How shall we celebrate the day, When God appear’d in mortal clay; The mark of worldly scorn; When the Archangels heavenly lays, Attempted the Redeemer’s Praise And hailed Salvation’s Morn.

It was Easter Sunday and the pastor gathered the children at the front of the church to ask them about the meaning of Easter. The pastor was disappointed as he listened to the first response: “Easter ...

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Death is defeated! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Hope is here! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

Christ is risen: The angels of God are rejoicing. Christ is risen: The tomb is empty and still. Christ has indeed arisen from the dead. Glory and power are Christ’s for ever and ever. Amen.

Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery ...

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

Ann was a working mother in her 30’s, and one of the millions of women who saw the marshmallow castle on the December cover of a popular women’s magazine. Ann confessed, later, that she felt like a “b...

The atheists have produced a Christmas play. It’s called Coincidence on Thirty-Fourth Street.

Joining the Pilgrims on the Way to Jerusalem For most Christians observing Lent, Holy Week marks the height of the drama of the Christian year. The pilgrims who have made the long journey through Len...

Is Advent a preparatory fast in preparation for the liturgical commemoration of the historical birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, or is Advent a season unto itself. A sacrament of the end of time begun in t...

It was a time like this,  war and tumult of war,  a horror in the air. Hungry yawned the abyss— and yet there came the star  and the child most wonderfully there. It was a time like this ...

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

There were three annual festivals in Israel—Passover along with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), and the Feast of Tabernacles. You can read about them in Leviticus 23 and...

The church prepares our devotion before Christmas Day with four Sundays in Advent, which bring Christ nearer and nearer to us and remind us that he is coming to enable us by a further examination of o...

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year.

So he took the paint brush and went out back. She forgot about it until sometime later when there was another knock at the door. It was him. He obviously had been painting because there was paint spla...

There was a woman who was baking her Christmas cookies and she heard a knock at the door. She opened the door to find a man who was dressed in pretty tattered clothes, and he was obviously poor. And h...