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My father and my niece have a wonderful tradition.
Born just 69 years and one week apart, they have celebrated their birthdays together for as long as my niece has had a birthday. Last night, we all went out to eat and then went to my sister’s house to open presents and have birthday cake. I live just a few blocks from a wonderful Italian bakery. They make the best chocolate cake ever, so I offered to bring the cake.
If you follow Seward County Community College on social media, you have probably seen a series of photos this month, featuring students, faculty, and staff. Each of them holds a placard with reflections on what community means to them.
Some of their answers are classic: community means working towards a shared goal, unity, and showing up when someone needs help. Others tap into humor, like the student who defines community in terms of baseball. One of our Saints wrote simply, that community is “Everything.”
Here’s a healthcare puzzle. When a doctor administers chemotherapy in their office, Medicare pays one rate. When the same doctor performs the same procedure in a hospital’s outpatient facility down the street, Medicare often pays more.
This disparity is at the heart of a push among some lawmakers for “site-neutral payments,” which would broadly require Medicare to pay the same rate for the same service regardless of where it’s performed. A bipartisan framework from Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., estimates that site-neutral payments could save Medicare over $100 billion in the next decade.
My local public library has perhaps the best marketing of a tax-provided service ever. Patrons who check out items there receive a receipt that details the savings achieved by using the library. In 2024, my wife and I “saved” close to $5,000, according to this accounting.
There are some generous assumptions made to achieve that figure. The biggest, of course, is that we would have paid the retail price for every book we checked out. Then there’s the matter of the property tax we paid directly to the library, which would knock about $200 off the alleged savings.
Continuing a study of the historical Messiah, Galatians 4:4 has been a theme: “when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law.” Today we’ll try to examine what it means that Jesus was “born under the Law.”
There were two events in Jesus’ childhood, one shortly after His birth, and the other about 12 years later, that fulfilled the Mosaic law. (Later in adulthood He would sometimes forego cumbersome regulations, but they were some that had been added by religious leaders.) In the first instance, an elderly man Simeon entered the temple in Jerusalem the same day that Mary and Joseph came to present the child and fulfill two legal requirements - the redemption offering for a firstborn son, and the purification of His mother. After the rituals, and Simeon and Anna’s astonishing pronouncements (Luke 2:27-38), scripture tells us, “And when they [Joseph and Mary] had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth” (Luke 2:39).
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