New Years is one of those funny holidays. You can celebrate it several times during the year if you like. You can celebrate the Jewish New Year in the autumn, and the Chinese New Year in the winter. And of course, you can celebrate the New Year along with Dick Clark. When I was a boy, it was Guy Lombardo. He always said that when he died he would take New Years with him. He didn’t, and in the course of history New Years will come and go whether any of us are here to see them or not. But why are there so many New Years? The reason we have so many New Years Days is because we don’t all use the...

I attended a lecture a couple of weeks ago about teaching children to follow their intuition.  We don’t do that a lot.  Think about the last time you just “had a feeling” about something.  I once drove to Arizona for the holidays and the trip there was a disaster.  The car broke down in Indio.  I was stuck there for hours.  This is not unlike being in purgatory.  You know, the funny thing about that ill-fated trip to Arizona was that I had a funny feeling something was going to go wrong on the way. From time to time in my life I have had those feelings. I’m sure all of you have....

Well, today is Christmas Eve. And this day always brings images of Mary and Joseph coming into the little town of Bethlehem looking for some place to lay their heads and for Mary to give birth to the child who would grow up to change the world forever, or at least as long as there are people here. It’s a beautiful story; it really is. I hope it’s true, or at least most of it. Of course there are a lot of historical problems with the story. And this all stems from the simple fact that the only sources we have for this story come from two of the gospels, Luke and Matthew. Mark and John...

Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are...

It must have been really hard for John the Baptist. The first we hear of him in any of the books after his birth is some thirty years later when he is out in the wilderness ranting and raving and calling for the people to repent, to change their way of seeing the divine. But something he said must have hit a chord within the people because they came. Maybe they came because they thought he was a little weird and they wanted to see the weird guy ranting and raving in the hair shirt eating the locusts with honey. But a lot of them stayed. So we can guess that a lot of those people felt the same emptiness...

The Advent season to all that believe in the story of Jesus is a very special time, not only as a celebration of the birth of a poor itinerant preacher from Nazareth. It is a celebration of hope. And the meaning of this celebration goes back far beyond the birth of Jesus. We all know that Jesus was most probably not born on December 25th, or anytime during the winter for that matter. It is fairly accepted by most scholars of church history that the holiday, or holy day, which celebrates his birth was selected arbitrarily to coincide with various holidays practiced by non-Christians during...