Posts

Image
  Tuesday – 10 th Week in Ordinary Time Gospel – Matthew5:13-19 Let’s Get Cooking! Spice Shop in Jerusalem Ginger and I watch a lot of food shows, most of them cooking competitions like Top Chef, Food Network Star, Hell’s Kitchen and Chopped.   And with all of those shows, it boggles the mind how often someone gets booted off the competition because their dish “lacked flavor”, because their dish either lacked or needed just another pinch of salt! I have to admit I like my share of salt.   To Ginger’s chagrin, I am always adding more salt to the dish.   I recall someone once saying that they would never trust anyone who salted their food before they even tasted it.   To each his own, I guess. We tend to forget how important salt was in the ancient world.   Yes, it was used to season food and to enhance or bring out the innate flavor of the dish.   But it was also used as a preservative.   At a time of no refrigeration or freezing, that was...
Image
  Monday – 10 th Week in Ordinary Time Gospel – Matthew 5:1-12 Go Tell it on the Mountain Front Porch, TN This is an all too familiar Gospel reading – the Beatitudes!   Whenever my Scripture classes got to this passage, I always joked that these should be the “A” attitudes, not the “B’ attitudes!   These are the ideal of how we should act.   Yeah, I know, corny!   It’s what I do! But consider today not just WHAT Jesus says today; consider WHERE He preaches.   On a mountain top!   That should be a familiar setting.   After the Flood, Noah and the ark settle on Mount Ararat where Noah offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God.   Abram takes Isaac to the mountain top to sacrifice him and instead God extends to Abram the first covenant.   It is on Mt. Sinai that God give Moses the tablets of the Law.   The Jews went up to Jerusalem to the Mount to worship in the Temple.   Many times, Jesus went off to a mountain to be alon...
Image
  Sunday – Feast of Corpus Christi Gospel – John 6:51-58 The Joy of the Eucharist Server Training For over 15 years, I have been blessed and energized by my ministry to our altar servers at SRB – training them, mentoring and encouraging them.   Throughout these 15 years, I would visit the 4 th graders and invite them to become servers.   But this past year was different!   This time I decided to include the 3 rd graders in my ‘server appeal’.   When I opened the church doors after school for training, imagine my shock when I saw the crowd (and I do mean crowd) coming in the doors.   I thought, for sure, maybe there was a children’s choir practice.   But NO!   They were all there for server training!   Over half the 3 rd grade class were trained that day.   WOW! They were so excited, so energized and so attentive, the most attentive group of ‘newbies’ I have ever seen.   The reason seemed obvious.   They were still ba...