Remember Amalek!

Last night I traveled down to Mary, Mother of God Parish in White Oak to celebrate and preach a Mass for their parish novena. I was asked to preach on the Blessed Mother (obviously), but I also wanted to work in the saint of the day, Saint Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians. This was the result.

Also this weekend, I voyaged back north to Ss. Martha & Mary Parish to celebrate Mass and then give a talk to the Upper Room program, which is faith formation for the 7th and 8th graders. My assigned topic was Jesus’ first miracle, which was turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana.

I had done some preparation, but I had no notes with me. And I was pretty worn out by that point; I was awakened at 4 AM to go to the hospital to anoint someone; then I had Masses at my parish, plus our monthly anointing of the sick service. Watched a little football, then drove north…and just as Mass started, the power went out. Didn’t come back on until right after the homily because of course it would wait until after I preached. So anyway…here’s the talk.

In which I use a Pirates-White Sox game from 1997 to try and make a point about the Scriptures. It was ok.

Another week where I was much better Saturday night than I was Sunday morning. That’s unusual. Normally Saturday night is the warm-up and I do better on Sunday. Don’t know what’s going on there. That said, I do a little bit of an interesting exegesis on Paul’s letter to Philemon.

I feel like I did a better job with this Saturday night, but I also feel like I was more fired up on Sunday morning. You get the Sunday morning version.

And my second book review should be out this week. It’s about 90% done at this point.

It’s on the short side, but what do you want from me? I had a wedding Saturday afternoon, a ton of funerals during the week, and my mind was already in vacation mode…

No Taylor Swift references this week. No Greek lesson either. I didn’t love it, but some people did, so here it is…