Sermon preached by Dn. James Wilcox on Sunday, January 28, 2024 Luke 18:35-42; 1 Tim. 1:15-17 Alan Watts in his illuminating book, “Behold the Spirit,” writes the following: In this very moment we are looking straight at God, and he is so clear that for us complex human beings he is peculiarly hard to see. To know him we have to simplify ourselves, and the mind is so dominated by the complexity of pride that
– Archpriest Andrew Phillips In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So we have come to the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord. Thus we have come to the last day of Christ’s physical presence on Earth. This marks the fulfilment of all things, since His Conception at the Annunciation to the Holy Virgin, His Birth and all the events of His earthly life, recorded for
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
Alexandros Christodoulou With His incarnation, His humanization, God entered the innermost core of our lives in the most obvious way. He entered our circulatory system, our heart, the centre of everything, the centre of the universe. After He’d been expelled from our world, our body and our soul through our voluntary sin, He returned, through His incarnation, to our world, our body and our soul, becoming completely human and working for us as a human
When someone says 9-11 almost everyone in America will know that it refers to September 11, 2001, the day of the infamous attacks on the United States by 19 hijackers who flew two airline passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon near Washington DC, and one that crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, while it was undoubtedly bound for the Capitol or White House. 9-11 became a
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 Alexander Schmemann In the baptismal rite, which is an act of liberation and victory, the exorcisms come first because on our path to the baptismal font we unavoidably “hit” the dark and powerful figure that obstructs this path. It must be removed, chased away, if we are to proceed. The moment that the celebrant’s hand has touched the head of a child of God and marked it with the sign of Christ, the Devil
By Alexander Schmemann The “modern man,” even an Orthodox, is usually quite surprised when he learns that the baptismal liturgy begins with words addressed to the Devil. The Devil indeed has no place in his religious outlook; he belongs to the panoply of medieval superstition and to a grossly primitive mentality. Many people, including priests, suggest therefore that exorcisms simply be dropped as “irrelevant” and unbecoming to our enlightened and “modern” religion. As for the
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, April 12, 2018 A series of recent conversations with a parishioner turned up the problem of “bookends,” that is, questions of the beginning and the end. It is only natural in our day and age to attack problems in this manner. “How did it start?” is a way of saying, “What is it?” The end, of course, is not so obvious, other than its connection with our insatiable desire to know how
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