Remember the day of your baptism? It's highly unlikely, but your parents and godparents and an assortment of relatives probably do. Perhaps they remember the event itself, or the party, or something ...

"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17). This verse is from the Gospel of Matthew, one of the three synoptic Gospels in the New Testament of the Bible, and is about the ...

My dad grew up with two relatives who were eccentric, to say the least. One was an uncle who showed up periodically to sleep on the front porch — often deciding that clothing was an unnecessary ...

The Sunday after Epiphany is always the Baptism of the Lord (unless Epiphany is observed on Jan. 7 or 8 in those countries like the United States where it is transferred to a Sunday, in which case the ...

To many Christians the baptism of Jesus seems almost as much of an enigma as it did to the Baptist. It serves as a precedent for our own baptism. It also forms an introduction to Christ’s ministry.

The title “servant of God” (Hebrew, ebed) in Isaiah, which appears in a number of “Servant Songs,” is a complex one. When ebed was translated from Hebrew to Greek in the Septuagint, it was translated ...

Our journey begins where Jesus’ own public ministry began. In this episode, we will walk with Jesus from his home in Nazareth to the Jordan River, where he is baptized by John the Baptist. Walk with ...

For centuries, Christians have debated an important question. Can someone truly follow Jesus without baptism? Some churches ...

The baptismal text begins a pattern in Jesus’ ministry that I’m not sure is taken with enough seriousness: Jesus continually empowering the church for service rather than limiting that power to ...

The Baptism of the Lord closes the Christmas season. The next day begins the First Week of Ordinary Time, Lent following in five weeks on Feb. 17. The Christmas season is full of theophanies, i.e., ...

Rather than narrating the back-story of John or a relating a history establishing the lineage of Jesus, the beginning of Mark’s gospel cuts straight to the chase. It is like a gurney waiting in the ...