The Good Word

Advent done Christmas time done Lent and Easter and Pentecost too From those momentous events we come into a long period of Ordinary Time The color is green No more long-lived white nor fretful purple just green It is Ordinary Time But what a wonderful color is green of many shades

The Apostle Paul packs a mighty punch in his letters even when delivered in small doses this Sunday s Second Reading Romans 3 21-25 28 is a short passage that delivers great power It can be difficult today to understand the challenge of the theological issues buffeting the early Church espe

Many years ago now Pope John Paul II went to Lima Peru There he was met by a massive crowd of two million people Instead of the usual greetings from the President and the Cardinal two people from a shantytown stepped forward to the microphone Their names were Irene and Viktor Charo As the hug

Two things are immediately brought to mind by the Gospel reading for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity John 3 16-18 One is the ubiquity of John 3 16 amongst evangelical Christians a key verse in the Four Spiritual Laws see Law 1 at http www godlovestheworld com I grew up with this ver

The Feast of Matthias Apostle falls on May 14 How are you celebrating this year Matthias according to Luke in Acts of the Apostles 1 15-26 was chosen to fill the place abandoned by Judas And that is the first and last we hear of Matthias in the New Testament The passage is intriguing at many

Pentecost is a day of peculiar significance in the Acts of the Apostles First while the Old Testament knew from the prophet Joel that God would one day share His Spirit with the world of believers the one who actually pours out the Spirit is Jesus – he who received the Spirit from his Father for

Many years ago now when I was a teenager I went to visit a girl I knew in Texas over Thanksgiving She had a brother at Oral Roberts University so we took the bus from Lubbock Texas to Tulsa Oklahoma to visit him and the campus I did not know much about Oral Roberts but I was sweet on the gir

Luke is the one in his Acts of the Apostles who describes the event we celebrate this Sunday May 4 It is in contrast to the ascension he describes at the end of his Gospel In the latter there is great joy at Jesus going to his Father the ascension is the triumph or part thereof which f

The Bible is populated with many characters that appear briefly and then vanish from the scene Philip the most prominent person in Acts 8 is one of these Except for a brief mention of his name in 6 5 and 21 8 all we know about him involves two scenes of preaching–one to the Samaritans and one