~Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, November 8, 2020 Today, once again, Jesus, through his compassionate words and actions, tells us the truth. People are what matters, not the Law, not ideology. People. The welfare of human beings in the eyes of our Lord trumps everything. That is the meaning of the Lord’s words, “The Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath.” Did Jesus condemn the Woman with the Issue
Sermon preached on Sunday, September 18, 2022 by Fr. Antony Hughes I discovered something in the Gospel reading a few Sundays ago I had never noticed before. (Matthew 19:16-26) A young man kneels before Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life.” Jesus answers, “Obey the commandments” to which the lawyer replies, “Which ones?” Now, you might think that the Lord would simply recite the Ten Commandments and be done with it.
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, June 21, 2021 Pascha (Easter) comes with a great note of joy in the Christian world. Christ is risen from the dead and our hearts rejoice. That joy begins to wane as the days pass. Our lives settle back down to the mundane tasks at hand. After 40 days, the Church marks the Feast of the Ascension, often attended by only a handful of the faithful (Rome has more-or-less moved the
ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN! Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on May 29, 2022 Confronted by the inconvenient healing of the Blind Man the Pharisees employed a classic defense. Deflection. Notice how hard they tried to deflect attention from the healing. Look over here! Nothing to see over there! They attempted to undermine the veracity of the healing by trying to get the man to say he had not been born blind. Failing at
ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΑΝΕΣΤΗ! CHRIST IS RISEN! Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 14, 2023 When we are troubled, God draws nearer to us (if one can say God is ever not “near”) it can certainly seem that way. Actually, as Rebbe Barukh taught, “Faith and the abyss are next to one another.” Carl Jung added his two cents writing that mystics swim in the same water in which psychotics drown. Before the dialogue
Introduction On Great and Holy Saturday, the Orthodox Church commemorates the burial of Christ and His descent into Hades. It is the day between the Crucifixion of our Lord and His Glorious Resurrection. The Matins of Holy Saturday is conducted on Friday evening, and while many elements of the service represent mourning at the death and burial of Christ, the service itself is one of watchful expectation. Commemoration of Holy Saturday On Great and Holy
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, December 6, 2020 In the year 313 AD an imperial edict proclaimed Christianity to be the preeminent religion of the empire. Something was lost in that moment. I am not the first to say it, nor will I be the last. What was largely lost was the prophetic voice of the Church. The Church was from the beginning a counter-cultural movement. It became an arm of the
By Father Stephen Freeman, February 22, 2018 Your judgments are like the great deep, O Lord, You will save men and beasts. (Psalm 36:6) The notion of justice in Scripture is rather straightforward. It has to do with proper order and balance. The one who has much should not exploit his advantage and oppress the one who has little. In all things, there will be an accounting. And in the accounting, things will be “set
After the Saviour had miraculously healed the paralytic, the Jews, especially the Pharisees and Scribes, were moved with envy and persecuted Him, and sought to slay Him, using the excuse that He did not keep the Sabbath, since He worked miracles on that day. Jesus then departed to Galilee. About the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, He went up again to the Temple and taught. The Jews, marveling at the wisdom of His words,
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 11, 2014 The Lord Jesus asks the paralytic man a simple, direct question, “Do you want to be healed.” He does not get a direct, simple answer. Instead, the paralytic deflects the question and tells Jesus a story that sounds rehearsed. I imagine he had told it a hundred or more times before. It always sounded a bit fishy to me. “The reason I have been
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