Luke 2.22-40 Today is New Year’s Eve. For so many of us, we’ll begin new diets and exercise plans. Others will make this the year to get their finances together. Maybe we’ll begin a search for a new job or a new house. Maybe this is the year that we finally spend more time doing the things we love and seeing those who are most important to us. Why does it take the change of the year to do this? After all, no one starts their new diets on December 15. What we’re talking about

READ Luke 2.1-20 In my hometown in Upstate New York, the house I grew up in was on a dead-end road, which terminated in some scraggly woods about 100 yards from the banks of the Mohawk River, which ran through town. As child, my dad would take me on these great hikes through the single track trails that ran beside the river. He told me these were once old Mohawk Indian trails. I believed him; it’s plausible. Later, as a teenager, my friends and I would wander endlessly throug

Read: Luke 1.46b-55 Sometimes, when I read these passages about Mary, they seem so distant — so far away. What I mean by that, is that it’s almost unfathomable to us. Forget for a moment the miracle of the Angel Gabriel coming to tell this 12- or 13-year old girl that she will conceive a child through the Holy Spirit. That’s hard enough. But the fact that a girl this young has the devotion, faith and courage to be so obedient to God. I was thinking about all this. You see, an

Based on Mark 1.1-8 A few years ago, I remember a particular Christmas season. It was before I began the process of becoming a pastor, and I was a worship leader at a church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. That particular Christmas, though, was pretty lean. The boys were still pretty small, and we were living outside Harrisburg in a modest duplex, and I was working through my Master’s Degree in Communications from Clarion University. School was an added expense. As was electric he