In July 1985, after two years in Dallas, I moved to my second job in the church as curate for the then-new rector of Saint Luke’s Church, Baton Rouge, and later bishop of Louisiana, Charles Jenkins. In the large parish in Dallas, I was one of five priests, in Baton Rouge, one of three. More Sunday preaching came my way. That fall, I bought the first of a series of short books—collections of articles—written for clergy and adult education, by Father Raymond Brown, for many years a professor at Union Theological Seminary here in the city. He died in 1998 and was widely regarded as the leading American Roman Catholic New Testament scholar of his generation. The small paperback book was: An Adult Christ at Christmas: Essays on the Three Biblical Christmas Stories.[1] These essays were based on one of Brown’s major works, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.[2] Brown’s approach in these articles helped make preaching on the gospel come alive for me.
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