Reflections in Christ

by Fr. Lawrence Farley

The True Beginning of our Salvation

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…

“That’s an Outrageous Thing to Accept”

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…

An Exclusive Creed

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,…

Confessions of a Jesus Freak

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…

Elmer the Safety Elephant

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…

Holy Pascha: The Blast of a Trumpet

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…

Christ the King

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…

Defending the Synodikon

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…

By the Waters of Babylon

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…

What God Has Prepared for Those who Love Him

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…

The Consensus of the Fathers

How can you be sure what the Bible teaches?  I get this question a lot from enquirers and catechumens.  Most of them come from Protestantism, where their experience has taught them that the Bible is not self-interpreting and that appeals therefore to sola scriptura are in vain.  Indeed this was not a recent lesson; from the early days of the…

Will Everyone Eventually Be Saved?

When they are in fashion, fads are never recognized as fads.  Those under their influence and promoting them feel that they have come across “An Important New Truth,” or (if Orthodox) “An Important But Neglected Part of Our Tradition.”  Recognizing them as fads would only serve to dismiss them from serious consideration.  Thus fads never ’fess…

Theophany: The Feast of Humility

Theophany is the feast of God’s humility.  Humility is not something normally associated with power.  Powerful people and rich people and important people aren’t usually humble, because they don’t have to be.  It is the poor and powerless who have to be humble.  The powerful can dictate, and rage, and give orders, not caring whether or not…

Fire in the Desert

The Sunday before the Great Feast of the Theophany is dedicated to the work of John the Baptist (or Saint John the Forerunner, to give him his liturgical title).  To appreciate him fully, we need to place him in his historical context, and realize that he came to Israel as a thunderstorm at the end of a long drought.  Or, to vary the metaphor, as a…

The Shining Glory of the Little Local Parish

Orthodoxy is known for its pomp—or rather, as our apologists and partisans like to say, for “its glorious worship.”  We like to share the old story of the members of the delegation from the then-pagan land of the Rus’ who attended an Orthodox Liturgy in Constantinople in the tenth century and who were so impressed with its liturgical pomp that…

Apocalyptic Spirituality

There are three Hebrew words which the first century Church used often in their worship, and we have retained only two of them.  These Hebrew/Aramaic words were so important that they were carried bodily and untranslated into the worship of the non-Hebrew Gentile churches, where they functioned not as Hebrew words but as international Christian…

That Was Then, This Is Now

I was born and raised in the greater Toronto area (known to locals as the “GTA”) and came to faith in the early 1970s.  For the students of ancient history among us, that was the time of the so-called “Jesus Movement,” when tens of thousands of young people came to Christ, many of them former hippies and drug-addicts.  It was a brief blip on the…

Christ as Hierophant

Every Sunday our little parish celebrates an abbreviated Matins service before the Divine Liturgy, and part of that service contains a hymn called the “Exaposteilarion,” or “Hymn of Light.”  During the Sunday Matins, it consists of a brief meditation upon the Gospel reading narrating one of Christ’s Resurrection appearances.  In one Hymn…

A Poor Man Named Lazarus

Our Lord’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man is unique among the parables, for in this parable alone one of the characters has a name.  The parable begins, “There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.  And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus.”  Compare how the parable of the…

Byzantium and the Glory of the Cross

Beginning with the Great Feast of the Elevation of the Cross on September 14 and continuing throughout the week that follows, a flower-bedecked Cross will remain in the center of our churches, there to be kissed and venerated with love.  The feast has its roots in the Constantinian revolution in the fourth century.  Prior to this revolution, the…