Tag: advent

What’s In A Name: Homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent 2025

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4th Sunday of Advent, A                                                                  December 21, 2025Fr. Alexander Albert                                                            St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville https://youtu.be/KGRQCZBwWtE Myth. Legend. Liar. Lunatic. The cause of wars. The symbol of oppression, hatred, and discrimination. The angry judge. The source of guilt and repression. The role model. The teacher. The nice guy. The Lord. The Savior… When you call upon Jesus, when you think or speak of him, how do you name him? Because everyone of those titles, every one of those “names” has been applied to Jesus of Nazareth. But this is not a sociological question. It is a personal one. What do...Read More

The Joy of Poverty: Homily for Gaudete Sunday 2025

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3rd Sunday of Advent, A                                                             December 14, 2025Fr. Alexander Albert                                                         St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville N.B. Technical Difficulties meant the recording failed this week. You don’t have to feel Catholic in order to be Catholic. You don’t have to feel Catholic in order to be Catholic. Somehow, American Catholics bought into the lie that practicing a faith you don’t feel deep down makes you a hypocrite, that acting Catholic while you have doubts makes you a hypocrite. It doesn’t. How do I know? Because we have an example no less illustrious than John the Baptist himself. Look again at what...Read More

In Accord With The Kingdom: Homily for 2nd Sunday Advent 2025

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2nd Sunday of Advent, A                                                                December 7, 2025Fr. Alexander Albert                                                           St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville https://youtu.be/gL_YwlId6KI I feel as though being a priest, a spiritual father entitles me to the occasional dad joke, so here’s a bible dad joke: What kind of car does Jesus have? A Honda, but he doesn’t drive it: “I came not of my own accord, but he sent me” (Jn 8:42, RSV). Really though, what is this “accord” scripture speaks of? St. Paul today in our second reading prays that “with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our...Read More

The Hour of His Coming: Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent 2025

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1st Sunday of Advent, A                                                                 November 30, 2025Fr. Alexander Albert                                                           St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville https://youtu.be/kKP5CynznWw One Sunday when I was a boy, we were running late for reasons I don’t remember. My dad insisted on going to Mass every Sunday; that’s one of the only times I remember us not making it. Pulling up to the Church and seeing Mass about to end, my father decided we’d pray in the adoration chapel. He told us to spend some time in prayer to make up for missing Mass. So we did. I went in, knelt down, and told God sorry....Read More

The Temple of Time: Homily for Dedication of St. John Lateran 2025

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Dedication of St. John Lateran                                                            November 9, 2025Fr. Alexander Albert                                                            St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville https://youtu.be/BVmAcUUki58 It’s like a mythical alignment of the stars that novels and movies sometimes use for important plotlines; a rare coincidence that only happens once a decade or century or millennium. In this case, it’s every seven years. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the surprising number of special feast days that happened to fall on Sundays in the year 2025. Normally in the Church, Sundays are important feasts in their own right. Easter is also always a Sunday. Most of our other...Read More

Hope Fleshed Out: Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Advent 2024

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2nd Sunday of Advent, C                                                                                December 8, 2024Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville https://youtu.be/XVSMWcTmRuA “I’m spiritual but not religious.” “I’m an open Christian.” “I am a spiritual person.” These kinds of sayings can be pretty appealing. For a little while, when I was younger, it was popular to be agnostic or atheist, to act like only dumb people believed in God or anything spiritual. Nowadays, however, most people are open to some kind of higher power or spiritual truth. The reality is that human beings need the spiritual. As soon as people start to...Read More

Hoping Through The End: Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent 2024

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1st Sunday of Advent, C                                                                                 December 1, 2024Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville https://youtu.be/C0K8xlqVWJ8 Remember Y2K? The great “end of the world” scare in the late 90s? Most early computers were programmed to only list the last 2 digits of the year: 85, 93, 99. I don’t know how, but the idea spread that, when we hit the year 2000 and computers rolled over to the number ‘00’ in their programming, something terrible would happen. As a kid in middle school, the impression I got is that there was a chance this computer glitch...Read More

Surviving the End of the World: Homily for the 33rd Sunday OT 2024

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33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, B                                                                   November 17, 2024Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville https://youtu.be/eg_n8cldRbY Repent! The end is near! No, really it’s true. I mean, it’s been true since Jesus ascended into heaven, but you really do need to repent nonetheless. Jesus could come back at any moment. Our own deaths could happen at any moment. So, we should be ready now. And if we are not, then we need to start getting ready now. We are two weeks away from Advent, which is the beginning of our liturgical year. So, on the Church’s...Read More

Your Will Be Done: Homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent 2023

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4th Sunday of Advent, B                                                                                 December 24, 2023Fr. Alexander Albert                                                              St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette https://youtu.be/8yjMcR6JPEo Some of the most useful and most underrated words in all of Scripture are the ones the prophet Nathan says to King David in our first reading: “Go, do whatever you have in mind, for the LORD is with you.” These words can pull you back to the center from one of two dangerous extremes: excessive self-reliance and crippling uncertainty. By far the most common one is excessive self-reliance. Even being too worried about what other people think is relying on...Read More

The Flight of Joy: Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Advent 2023

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3rd Sunday of Advent, B                                                                                 December 17, 2023Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette https://youtu.be/hGXZtli3eJ8 Fly! Go on, start flying! It’s not like you don’t know how, there are about a million people in the air right now. So why aren’t you flying? Probably because it’s not as simple as just deciding “I’m flying now.” We can only fly in specific circumstances. It is the result of several forces beyond our control, it took us thousands of years to figure out how to do it. Flying is the fruit of a complex process. Despite being possible,...Read More