Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, July 11, 2021. From time to time the image of God becomes blurred and almost forgotten. People forget what God “looks like,” how he sounds, how he is, and in the resulting vacuum create idols like the children of Israel and their Golden Calf. The search for an earthly savior always ends in the creation of an anti-Christ. I truly believe our abuse of the earth is
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 14, 2017 at St. Mary Orthodox Church Here is a most remarkable exchange. Over the years what have we said about the Lord’s encounter with the Samaritan Woman? We have talked about the Lord’s crushing of societal and religious norms in this remarkable encounter. Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, Jewish men did not speak face to face with women, particularly sinful and impure heretics
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 3, 2020 at St. Mary Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA. 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
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, April 9, 2017 Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ, Glory to Jesus Christ! It is important to remember as we celebrate Holy Week that it is not about recreating the past. It is about taking the time at this particular moment to open our hearts and minds to Jesus as his Passion is remembered. Few of us take the time to open our hearts and minds to
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, February 18, 2018 In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! “It is a lie, any talk of God that does not comfort you.” That is one of my favorite quotations from the great Western mystic Meister Eckhart. Growing up as a Southern Baptist kid in Tennessee, I heard many things said about
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, August 19, 2018 at St. Mary Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA. The Reading is from Matthew 19:16-26 The way the young man addressed Jesus met with a mild rebuke. He calls him “Good Teacher” and the Lord replies, “Why do you call me good? There is only one who is good and that is God.” Jesus is referring to the Father from who all goodness comes. Jesus
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, July 25, 2021. …. So, I want to…say a few words about one verse in particular, “You are the light of the world.” Ilia Delio is a brilliant theologian and scientist in the mold of Fr. De Chardin, creative and most provocative. Let me begin with a Delio quote: “God is doing new things, Jesus proclaimed, but only those with new minds and hearts can see a
Just as some Eastern fathers saw Christ’s human/divine nature as one dynamic unity, they also saw the Trinity as an Infinite Dynamic Flow. The Western Church tended to have a more static view of both Christ and the Trinity—more a mathematical conundrum than an invitation to new consciousness. In our attempts to explain the Trinitarian mystery, the Western Church overemphasized the individual names—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—but not so much the quality of the relationships
Meister Eckhart, the German Dominican mystic (c. 1260-c.1328), said that spirituality has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. [1] Yet our culture, both secular and Christian, seems obsessed with addition: getting rich, becoming famous, earning more brownie points with God or our boss, attaining enlightenment, achieving moral behavior. Jesus and the mystics of other traditions tell us that the spiritual path is not about getting more or getting ahead, which
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one, received not in essence but by participation. Just as if you lit a flame from a flame, it is the whole flame you receive. —St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) [1] The path of descent involves letting go of our self-image, our titles, our status symbols—our false self. It will die anyway. So don’t make anything absolute when it is only relative. This is one
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