~Sermon Preached by Father Antony Hughes on Sunday, October 17, 2004 We must consider what it means to be the light of the world. The importance of this is self-evident. We are the hands of God in this world. What we do is supposed to reflect Him. We are mirrors, no, even more! We are bearers of mercy and grace. Jesus said of Himself that He is the Light of the world and He has
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on October 20, 2013 Luke 8:26-39 I do not like to talk about demons much. They are so into themselves that I don’t want to cooperate in their narcissism. Also, I accept completely the Orthodox understanding that sin, death, and the devil (along with the demons) were defeated when Jesus died on the Cross and was resurrected, so It seems a little un-Orthodox to give demons as much credit
Meditation: The Danger of Busyness When God came into the world at Christmas, people didn’t have time. They were too busy. There was no room for Him in the inn. “He came unto his own, and they that were his own people received him not.” And it seems that still today we have no room. We crowd Him out with so many things, especially with our busyness. In Luke 14:16-24, the Lord Jesus tells a
Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew by Olivier Clement Everything, the patriarch adds, centers on the concept of the “person.” According to Buddhism, the person does not exist. The Christian, however, affirms the existence of the person. But Orthodoxy does not identify the person with the individual, with the “individual substance of a rational nature,” as Boethius awkwardly stated in the Latin world. This would mean that the person is nothing more than a mask, which
The Love of Enemies The theologians of violence forget the Beatitudes. The theologians of non-violence forget that history consists of tragedies. But amongst the violence of history, it is the duty of Christians to manifest the love of enemies, which is the strength of Christ himself. The love of enemies, exercised in the most extreme circumstances, is the only cure for our political neurosis, the desire to escape one’s own death while projecting it on
The hiding place of God, the revelation place of God, is the material world. You don’t have to put spirit and matter together; they have been together ever since the Big Bang, 14.6 billion years ago (see Genesis 1:1-2 and John 1:1-5). You have to get on your knees and recognize this momentous truth as already and always so. The Eucharist offers microcosmic moments of belief, and love of what is cosmically true. It will
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