“Thoughts in Christ”

St. Paul builds upon this analogy of the temple and the human being. “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” (I Corinthians 3:16, also 6:19, II Corinthians 6:16). Such a bold, exciting idea would appear to be incredible were it not for the fact that it comes from the words of the Word of God Himself,…

I take every opportunity to preach at funerals, requiems, and even internments. I realize that those “paying their respects” aren’t always listening, but I speak about the subjects that matter most in life—living, dying, and what happens in between. Several reasons prevent my words from touching the sensitive nerves of the respectful ones:

1. The…

Moses could not have imagined how that divine admonition might apply to our contemporary American culture. Ph.D. candidates and future scholars ought to analyze the American way of promoting certain celebrities into the category once shared by certain Roman emperors—those like Caligula and Diocletian, foolish and egocentric enough to take…

Heresy happens when a portion of the gospel of Jesus Christ is extracted and made to appear as though it were the entire message. To do so with time is to deny or reject the record of the past, both the commandments from the Bible and traditions from church history, and to ignore implications of present deeds and practices for the future. This is…

When we do as the apostles, taking their cue in giving our lives meaning by accepting the invitation of Jesus to “Follow Me,” we learn why the early church’s first title was The Way (Acts 9:19,24). Learning is a process, not just a goal. We measure our intelligence and wisdom not by a diploma or degree, but by what we’ve been discovering and…

This beautiful admonition from the epistle of St. Peter has a few presuppositions: A. that you have such a gift of hope motivating your behavior others notice and will ask you why; B. that you understand the cause of your positive attitude towards the world and yourself; C. that you are ready, willing and capable of explaining it, or using…

Our Lord Jesus is telling us to find our innermost secret room where we may learn how to pray. We soon realize the melancholy fact that we are not having the same relationship with the heavenly Father that Christ does. That could come later, after we establish a spiritual relation with our Lord, God and Creator whom Jesus is telling us to relate to…

The transition from Pascha and Ascension to Pentecost emphasizes the prominence of the Holy Spirit in guiding our lives in Christ. Once again we pray the familiar address to the Spirit: “O heavenly King.” The appeal to the elusive Holy Spirit who makes His icon our own faces as He energizes our souls with His invisible presence. Again we plead for…

The Sadducees, the Jewish sect that did not believe in the resurrection from the dead, were baiting our Lord Jesus, taunting Him with their limited understanding of life. For them this lifetime is all there is, and they assumed any existence beyond the grave would be a repetition of this lifetime. Jesus attacked their presumption. After this life…

It was a powerful vision—that the building most beloved of anything built by humans to honor the Almighty would be in a few decades razed to the ground and would remain that way to this day. It was for all Jews both symbol and evidence of the Lord’s covenant with Abraham’s offspring regardless of the occupation by the Romans. Countless tears have…

On the icon of the First Ecumenical Council we observe the fathers of that seminal assembly large and filling the central frame in an imitation of the apostles on the Pentecost icon. Beneath their feet, huddled in a twisted form, is their turbaned adversary, the infamous Arius, leader of the opposition to the champions of the Nicene Creed’s…

Now and then a young person will say to me that he or she would like to make a career of service to the Church and to Jesus Christ. I listen for a sign of radical commitment to their intention, and I try to explain the implications of what they feel they want to do with such a vocation. Regardless of what I may say or suggest, nothing can make the…

Moses alone was spiritually prepared to meet the Lord. The people were caught up with their immediate concerns, the trauma of having left everything behind in Egypt to follow Moses to a place that he himself was not sure he would find. Nobody can blame them; in fact, they’re much like us. At the moment, our nation is plunged into economic mire that…

The hidden child within each of us goes on in search of fulfillment of what are clearly affirmations of those elements in experience that verify his or her instinctive awareness of the good, right, enjoyable, happy discoveries in the world outside of himself. That happens throughout our lifetime. They even continue beyond death, as St. Gregory of…

The glorious promise comes to us as the last words of Jesus Christ in the gospel of Matthew. All who are baptized in His name shall never be alone. This guarantee gives meaning to the theology of covenant. In a gospel written by a Jew about a Jew, the message is to the Jew and Gentile alike—whether you grasp the meaning or not, nevertheless, it is…

In reading certain theologians, you find them consistently referring to Jesus Christ as the God-Man. They do it to stress the actions of our Lord God and Savior to be that of the Father and the Holy Spirit in consort with Him. Nothing He does, says or intends is accidental, arbitrary or impulsive. All is part of the mystical plan for the salvation…

We hold palms and pussy willows, celebrating the Palm Sunday procession from Bethany hill across the Kedron valley through the eastern gates of Jerusalem; we reenact the joy of our Lord’s followers on that glorious proclamation of His claim to leadership as the long-awaited Messiah of Israel. We are full of joy, even if, unlike the disciples on that…

To evaluate the world’s major religions in light of their relation to the world, Hinduism is not concerned to spread its beliefs, since it’s not a matter of trying to convince others of what is more philosophy than religion. All life is an eternal river, and living things are born, carried along in the stream and at some point die and return to the…

This short phrase of simple words describes the battle continued on earth through history between good and evil, Christ and Satan, cosmos and chaos. KJV is the familiar and now somewhat obsolete King James Version, the English translation of the Bible many Protestants consider the only true text. The RSV [Revised Standard] offers this rendering:…

Was it just pique, a way to get back at the Jewish religious leaders who forced the hand of Pilate to give in to their demands to put our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ to death on the cross, that he had His inscription written as it had been? In that bit of irony, Pilate proclaimed the very truth that the chief priests called blasphemy. Indeed…