“Thoughts in Christ”

I’m ever intrigued by the impressions that our sacred services have upon visitors who attend Orthodox worship for the first time. The most evident feature of our weddings is the use of imperial crowns. Like royalty in general, crowns are a throwback to times past; even the queen of England wears her crown only on rare occasions. And what impresses…

The Last Supper has ended; Judas Iscariot, His betrayer, had gone off into the night’s darkness to perform his wicked deed, and our loving Lord lifted up a prayer to the heavenly Father. He wanted the apostles to hear what He was praying.

It’s a prayer full of joy. One might think it odd that He would be in high spirits at a time like this, when He…

This is the moment Leonardo da Vinci lifted up in his famous painting of the Last Supper. Yet his painting along with all western paintings of that event missed the poignant contrast between love and betrayal. We learn from Luke’s gospel that even on that very night the apostles had been arguing with one another over priority of placement in their…

Now here’s a challenge to set before our entire parish as an inspiration and an aspiration! It appears in reading the whole epistle that St. Paul may have been exaggerating in ending his second letter to the Church in Thessalonica. He spent much of the contents explaining that they must be vigilant. They must not waver, nor fall prey to false…

I made myself a mini-experiment during this holiday season. I decided to greet the cashiers, check-out persons, ticket booth operators and others in the public with the greeting, “Merry Christmas!” Actually, I don’t much like the phrase because it has the overtones of Santa Claus, commercialism of the department stores and the syrupy generalized…

The trauma of Christianity is the great number of communities called by the Name of Jesus Christ. We have many elements of faith in common, but we are not a community. Some see it as unfortunate, even a scandal, while others consider it normal and even inevitable. It’s worth mentioning that in the early fourth century, when Christianity was no…

Hard words for a soft society. The Lord Jesus puts us to the test. He challenges us to question our values. What are we living for, and what would we die for? We go to Him with our worries, and we may wonder why we don’t feel that we are getting the answers we expected, needed or wanted. Silence is the response, and we lose faith. Prayer “doesn’t…

For a nanosecond I felt a twinge of guilt as I twisted off the car radio just as Rudolph was bearing gifts from afar, or was it Santa roasting chestnuts by an open fire? Guilty, because the ex-pats I correspond with across the Atlantic say they pine for the American way of celebrating Christmas. But we who live here must endure the seemingly endless…

St. John rarely repeats what the other gospels relate. We already know the scene in Gethsemane garden. Here he shares with us the intimate struggle that went on in the mind of our Lord Jesus. We sinners can only imagine the agony of One who had never known what it’s like to be anything but open, honest and truthful, yet being hated and persecuted by…

The mystery that St. Paul is referring to is the incarnation of Jesus Christ, which was part of God’s plan before creation. This mystery is deeper than even the creation of the universe, since it involves the entry into time, space and creation—in a word, into a human life—of Jesus Christ. And the reason for His coming to be one of us while…

Is it any wonder that those who first heard that glorious, astounding promise left everything they owned or valued behind just to follow the Speaker? And the invitation resounds down through the centuries, remaining just as bold and fresh as the day that it was first proclaimed. It’s why we call ourselves after His name, Christians.

But the promise…

There are such persons who cannot be persuaded to change their attitude regardless of what is told them or shown to them. So it was with Pharaoh. He was confronted with Moses, the man of God, who performed mighty miracles to prove that God was with him, and the Lord was determined to help Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Pharaoh was a classic…

It’s not just one mountain but rather three huge mountains that stand before us as we travel through this lifetime on our way to the Kingdom of heaven. They are: Greed, vanity, and the desire for pleasures. They are constant obstacles that get in our way and make it so difficult to advance towards the place where our Lord is waiting for us. And the…

This reading concludes the passages of Great Lent. We then move to Palm Sunday and the Passion Week. My soul is warmed when I listen to these parting words of Jacob to his twelve sons. He died content. He had fulfilled his, or rather God’s purpose for him on earth, and he was certain that his offspring would continue to fulfill the sacred covenant…

Don’t the Athenians seem so much like people today? It’s hardly worth explaining to us that “they spent their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.” That’s why it’s called “news.” Many are addicted to news. They cannot go to sleep before the eleven o’clock news is over. They read the same in the morning papers, and they surf the…

It was a village church in central rural Russia where we stopped by to visit and pray. There was nothing really extraordinary about the sensibly constructed square wooden church, but it was the cemetery surrounding the temple that caused me to reflect on how far even we Orthodox Christians in America have gone in our relationship to our beloved ones…

Our Lord Jesus is quoting from memory what all good Jews knew—neighbors were basically other Jews; all others were in the category of gentiles. He had the courage to advance His native religion from tribalism to a universal attitude to all humankind. And He paid the ultimate price for His bold insight regarding the Father’s love for…

It’s the story of the prophet Jonah. Prophets are those who hear the word of God and proclaim the tidings to the people. They also are God’s students. They too have to learn what the Lord’s will is. Sometimes they pay an enormous tuition for the tutorial.

Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the capitol of his people’s greatest enemy, the nation that…

The difficulty many of our people have in explaining the joy and beauty that comes only by faith in the Holy Trinity experienced in the Orthodox Church is that there is just so much to tell, and the expression of our sacred faith can appear to be overwhelming. Salvation itself is a process leading to deification. It’s not one simple point about…

Consciousness, or the awareness of what is happening to us—our thoughts, impressions, reflections on our experiences, are stored up in our memory. What is immortal in us has to do with our memory. When we leave this lifetime, we shall take with us the memory of our existence here on earth. It will be painful for us to recollect the bad, wicked and…