ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN! Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 3, 2020 A question came up at Subdeacon James’ Adult education class last Thursday about remembrance, like when we say, “May her memory be eternal,” and “Remember us, O Lord, when you come into your kingdom.” That got me thinking. We have done a lot of remembering over the past few weeks and what have we gained from it? If Holy
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, February 5, 2022 The Odes of Solomon is a first or second century document known to the Holy Father’s and quoted by a few. Olivier Clement used it to great effect in THE ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. Here is the quote. “Blessed are the men and women who are planted…in your garden, who grow like trees and flowers grow, who transform their darkness into light. Their roots
Indeed silence does more than tiptoe around the house. Silence moves through all sound like water through netting. The deeper our own interior silence, the more we take on its gracious ways of opening up the tight mind that clenches its teeth around what it wants and spits out what it doesn’t want. The optimal environment for prayer is physical silence. Saint Augustine, surely one of the most eloquent people in history, thought it was
FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT Mary like any Christian contemplative had to learn to walk by faith. We can believe that the great faith she needed to give her fiat to the message of the angel had been prepared by series of acts of faith developed throughout Mary’s life as she contemplated God’s message unfolding in her life before the Annunciation. We see her deep spirit of contemplative faith when we examine Lk 1:37, “For nothing
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, February 26, 2017 The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew. (6:14-21) As we prepare to begin the Great Fast, here are a few important points to remember. First, God is love, a kind and compassionate father to us. We must never forget that because love is the reason for all spiritual effort. “God does not love us because we are good, but because he
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, December 19, 2021 The primary reason for making our way through Matthew’s Genealogy is to affirm that the Word and Son of God has a human face and human ancestry. A “human face” so that we can look upon him and a human history to confirm that the Son of God became truly one of us. This Gospel reading is a resounding proclamation of our belief in
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, July 8, 2018 at St. Mary Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA. I want to begin today by drawing a comparison between the healing of the paralytic in today’s reading and the healing of the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda in John’s Gospel, especially the Lord’s exhortation to go and sin no more. We know that the word sin most used in the Gospels is hamartia or
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, July 5, 2020 I search for inspiration everywhere and find it everywhere. All we have to do to see it is to be open and receptive. The wind of the Spirit is always blowing. We just have to raise our sails. I remember my homiletics teacher who taught us one significant thing that I have never forgotten: to develop what he called “homiletical eyes.” Simply put that
Sermon Preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, January 17, 2021 Every person, every organization, every religion, every community, every parish has a framing story. That story is the glue that holds the group together, and gives it meaning and purpose. The Gospel gives us an example of that on a small scale. The 10 Lepers formed a cohesive group bound by their disease and the social stigma that came with it. The framing story,
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, June 27, 2021. I want to talk today about what it means to acknowledge Christ before the world. It cannot be limited merely to the pronouncement of all the right words. We know this because Jesus tells us so. “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven,” even those few who manage somehow to raise the dead or heal the sick.
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