Published by Pemptousia Partnership, January 14, 2017 According to the Biblical concept, ‘patricide’ is essentially the same as the sin of Adam and Eve. Their effort to become gods through the forbidden fruit and not through the alignment of their will and their actions to the commandment and will of God is the first attempt to remove God from the world and from our life. It’s the first attempt to expel God from the human
Published by Pemptousia Partnership, October 23, 2014 By Abbot George Kapsanis of Gregoriou We usually characterize people as rational and independent beings. These attributes are correct enough, but don’t convey human nature in its completeness. Through the liturgical experience, we feel that, more than anything, people are liturgical beings. They were made to serve, to offer themselves and the whole world to God with gratitude, praise and worship, to unite with God, to be sanctified,
Sermon Preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, April 1, 2007 In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! The crowd in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday long ago was mistaken. Jesus was not the Messiah they had hoped for. He did not come to overthrow Rome or to establish an earthly kingdom. They would have known that if they had listened
Finding God in an unbelieving world By Abbot Tryphon, August 21, 2020 God is quick to forgive, quick to show mercy, and quick to embrace us when we turn to Him. In all of eternity our God chose to create humankind in His image and likeness, offering His creatures the opportunity to commune with Him in the endlessness that is time. He’s given us free will, allowing us to choose, or not to choose, a
Taking on the Image of Christ To be a Christian is not about conformity to the image of other people, but to the image of Christ By Abbot Tryphon, January 9, 2020 When we enter into communion with one another in the life of the Church, we come broken, and far from the image and likeness that God intended when He created us. We, to a one, are in need of the healing that comes
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, January 29, 2016 How is your marriage progressing? This simple question is a way of focusing our attention on right-thinking about progress and the Christian life. I posed the question to myself – I have been married now for 40 years. My first thought was, “What would ‘progress’ in a marriage mean?” Do I love my wife more, or any less? What would more love look like? The truth of marriage
In the beginning God says, “Let us make humanity in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves” (Genesis 1:26). The use of the plural pronoun here seems to be an amazing, deep time intuition of what Christians would later call the Trinity—the revelation of the nature of God as community, as relationship itself, a Mystery of perfect giving and perfect receiving, both within God and outside of God. The Body of Christ is another metaphor for
The glory of God is a human being fully alive. —St. Irenaeus of Lyon [1] Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will
All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image that we reflect. This is the work of the Lord who is Spirit. —2 Corinthians 3:18 We are created in the image and likeness of God from the moment of our conception. The Creator gives us our core identity as sons and daughters of God, “from the beginning” (Ephesians 1:4-5). Throughout our lives we co-create our
By Abbot Tryphon, October 19, 2019 The place of holy relics in the Orthodox Church Because of the revolution during the period of the Protestant Reformation, the veneration of the saints, came under attack, leading to the burning of the bodies of saints, depriving them of even a Christian burial, and thus leading to perhaps the worst sin of iconoclasm. We see a continuation of this iconoclasm demonstrated by our fear of the dead by
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