According to the official OCA service book, the Divine Liturgy begins when the deacon “bows his head to the priest and says, ‘It is time to begin the service to the Lord. Bless, Master’”. (The words translated thus are rendered in the venerable Hapgood version as “time to sacrifice unto the Lord”.) The Greek original is kairoz tou…
In his first epistle to Timothy, Paul wrote, “It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am first” [1 Timothy 1:15]. The last part of Paul’s words is familiar to us Orthodox, since it forms part of our pre-communion approach to the Chalice, when we pray, “I…
Eventually every pastor will be faced with the question of what to do about the theological issue of suicide, either because he will be asked to preside at the funeral of someone who has taken his or her own life, or because he will be asked to offer prayers for their repose. What is the proper response, both theologically and pastorally? May one…
The Great Feast of the Meeting of Christ in the Temple, which we recently celebrated, is a feast of the elderly. When the Holy Family entered the Temple courts to offer the required sacrifice for the purification of Mary after her giving birth to Jesus, her Son was recognized as the Messiah by only two people, picked out by the power and…
In his list of virtues which comprise the fruit of Spirit working in one’s life, Saint Paul lists that of “goodness” [Greek agathosune] about midway in the list [Galatians 5:22f]. One scarcely speaks of goodness as one of the virtues anymore. In our culture, describing something as “good” is rather tepid praise; it is like saying…
Christmas Day and the post-Christmas season usually bring with them a number of things not overwhelming helpful—Boxing Day stampedes, post-Christmas let-down, unwelcome news when stepping on the bathroom scale, and polemical digs about those benighted people using the “papal calendar” instead of “the Church’s Traditional Calendar”—i.e.…
If you haven’t yet purchased a “Hipster Nativity Set,” you might be too late — despite the $129.99 price tag, they are flying off the shelves, even at a limit of three to a customer. The set includes the traditional figures, but all in a distinctly contemporary form. Joseph has a man-bun and is taking a selfie. Mary is holding a Starbucks…
In 1970, when our Church first received its autocephaly from the Russian Church, it immediately did two things. First, it changed its name from the somewhat unwieldy “the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America” to the more accurate “the Orthodox Church in America”. Secondly, it canonized Herman of Alaska. This latter task was…
Lately I came across an interesting bit of theologizing. The author (who shall remain nameless) spoke of his love for Psalm 139 (“one of my absolute favorite psalms”). In it he said that “right smack dab in the middle of this Psalm, King David calls for God to slay his enemies and declares that he has nothing but hatred for them.” He…
Today, we commemorate the first time the young girl destined to be the Mother of God entered into the Temple at Jerusalem.
Though now long gone, the Temple must have presented an awe-inspiring sight to the young child, with its white stone glistening in the Judean sun, its vested priests, its blowing trumpets, its smell of incense, the crowds of…
If one didn’t know better, one might guess that our salvation started with the birth of Christ at Bethlehem. After all, that was when the eternal Word took flesh and was born among us for our salvation. But since we keep the Great Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos, we do know better, and recognize that our salvation really began not with…
Missionary work no longer commands the cultural respect it once did. Indeed, missionary work is often grouped together with other forms of cultural and colonial imperialism, and derided as an insensitive imposition of foreign culture, one rooted in a lack of appreciation for the self-evident values of the indigenous peoples. In a word, who do…
The Nicene Creed was created to exclude. This goes against the grain of our modern secular society, where the word “inclusive” has become a magic word, conjuring up warm feelings of virtue, righteousness, and goodness. To be inclusive is to be good; to exclude is to be bad. The magic is, I think, rooted in the American Civil Rights Movement,…
As I continue to age, I find increasingly that a generation gap opens up unexpectedly at my feet. The first time it happened was in my first (Anglican) parish, in 1980. I had just heard that John Lennon had died, and I shared the news with a teenaged boy in the parish. “David,” said I, “John Lennon died!” He just stared at me blankly, so…
I remember Elmer. Elmer was an elephant, whose image adorned the backs of our notebooks when I was in elementary school, and whose face flew on a flag on our school flagpole. Elmer was “the Safety Elephant,” whose rules we were encouraged to always remember (like an elephant, since “elephants never forget”). His rules consisted of such…
From the prophecies of Isaiah: “It will come about also in that day that a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were perishing in the land of Assyria and who were scattered in the land of Egypt will come and worship the Lord in the holy mountain at Jerusalem” (Isaiah 27:13). The prophet here surveys the world around him, and sees how the…
In the Western liturgical calendar we find the Feast of “Christ the King” (often changed to conform to the draconian canons of political correctness as “The Reign of Christ”). Someone once asked me if we Orthodox kept such a feast, and I answered, “Yes, we do. It is called ‘Palm Sunday.’”
On the first Palm Sunday, Christ entered…
Recently, on the First Sunday of Great Lent, we read the Synodikon in church—well, actually just a tiny snippet of it dealing with the legitimacy of icons and that this faith had established the world, while offering a heartfelt “Memory Eternal” for those who had died defending it. We did not read the entire Synodikon, because it is quite long…
Recently I was finishing up in the altar while the choir was practicing, and I heard them sing (beautifully, as always) the pre-Lenten Matins hymn, “By the waters of Babylon.” After it was all over, I stopped to ask them, “Do you know where Babylon is?” After a few blank stares, someone tentatively offered, “East of here?” It was a…
If the Biblical teaching about hell suffers in the popular imagination, being thought of as a kind of subterranean torture chamber erected and run by an all-powerful divine sociopath, the Biblical teaching about heaven and the Kingdom doesn’t fare much better. The word “heaven” conjures up semi-comic images of people in long white nightgowns…