The Gospel reading for December 19 contains the familiar story of Zechariah in the temple. You can read it here. It is the occasion when the Angel Gabriel appears to him to announce the birth of John ...

Zechariah prophesied to a battered Jewish people during the return from Babylonian exile. Jerusalem lay in ruins, the Temple was only beginning to be rebuilt, and the Jewish community was small, ...

We all love a good story. A well-crafted story contains a beginning, middle, and end. The plot keeps the reader engaged as conflict moves to resolution. However, it’s the characters in the story that ...

As familiar as we are with the songs of Christmas, there are four songs recorded in the Bible sung by people surrounding the birth of Jesus that aren’t sung much at all now. The angels sang a song to ...

Curiously, there are more than thirty Zechariahs in the Old Testament yet only one mentioned in the New Testament. This New Testament Zechariah was recorded by Luke as having been a very good and holy ...

As a rabbi in the late 60’s and 70’s, I remember trying to make Tisha b’Av relevant to my congregation by references to the Vietnam war. In the 80’s and 90’s the temporal proximity of Tisha b’Av to ...

Some preachers have a nightmare of being in front of a congregation and realizing that one’s sermon notes are missing. In my days as a preacher, I sometimes dreamed that I was late for the service and ...