A few weeks after my installation as Pastor, I received an anonymous gift from a parishioner. My secretary found a package beautifully wrapped with an envelope taped to it with my name on it.

Over the last 12 years of my priesthood and during much of my time as a seminarian, people would ask me about my vocation story. The question would always begin with the phrase, “How did you hear the call?”

I confess that I’ve preached some dreadful homilies. Calling them to mind makes me wince with embarrassment.

I hope I won’t be judged irreverent by suggesting that if Saint Paul hadn’t succeeded as an apostle — which he most surely did — he might have made it as a comedian. Seriously!

First century Corinth was a complicated city, and the same can be said of 21st century Brooklyn and Queens!

One of my favorite assignments in a course I often teach invites students to “describe, from your perspective, your image of God, what you picture or imagine (with or without a visual image) when you consider ‘God’.”

Never lose sight of the Saving Divinity of the Son of God, the Word made Flesh, the Splendor of the Father.

In the epistle, the second reading of todays’ Mass, we hear from the Letter to the Hebrews. It is always amusing to hear lectors at Mass state: “A Reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Hebrews,” and I must admit that I have at private Masses when I have no readers and I have to proclaim the epistle myself, I also have slipped into this!

Look for the prophets in our midst — they are there if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

In the Gospel we proclaim this day with which the Lord has blessed us, we see the true beauty of the work of the Evangelist whose telling of the Good News we have this liturgical year — St. Luke. Look at all the details he gives us in the Gospel today, all meant to situate the reader in the time period.