“Thoughts in Christ”

An axiom of preaching—never speak on a subject that you do not understand. I’ve always tried to keep to that admonition. Almost. Thanks be to the glorious Lord, I’ve never known the experience of abandonment. And yet I’ve felt its sharp pangs through the lives of others. If we wonder at the lengths many adopted persons go in order to find their…

The first American-born bishop of the Orthodox Church in America, Benjamin of Pittsburgh, created the first bilingual Orthodox service book in both Russian and English. I still own the copy that my grandfather gave me as a child. It contained morning and evening prayers, the Divine Liturgy, and certain verses of the special feast day hymns. There…

The word rejoice comes to the ear of my mind sung in the prayer form called “Akathist.” I conjure up many times in a variety of churches I was blessed to share the joyful tribute of praise to Sweetest Jesus, to the Mother of God, to the Holy Trinity, or to one of the saints. A common phrase: “Rejoice, O our joy,” is an invitation to remind ourselves…

What do you live for? What would you die for? The answer for the holy apostle Paul is a name: Jesus Christ. To know Christ was the consummate passion of St. Paul’s life. It would appear to be a truism that all Christians share with him—but how many of us would dare make that affirmation? Put another way: What does it mean to know Jesus Christ?…

The high expectations that St. Paul has for us are shown in the potential for spiritual development that he insists we must reach. What is he asking from us—that we should have a mind like that of Jesus? Put our thoughts into the thoughts of the Son of God? It takes a saint in the state of grace to propose that the Holy Spirit is at work within us…

Contemporary challenges to traditional Orthodox Christian funeral and burial rules and customs cause problems for us priests. Nowadays people ask to be cremated; the Church forbids that way of disposing human remains. We argue: That defies the Church’s teachings; and we hear that the Roman Catholic Church now permits cremation, as though that…

With the election of a new Metropolitan, we are making a new start on our journey to spearheading the future Orthodox Christian Patriarchate of N. America. You may yourselves draw the parallel in timing with the election of a new President of the United States of America. Like Mr. Obama, we are energized with hope, optimism and change. He has the…

If you are like me, you spend so much of your life explaining and describing Orthodox Christianity. Yes, we are Orthodox; no, we’re not Jewish. Yes, Christians, but neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant. So we explain through tradition, from 33 A.D. Or we try to tell of the divisions after Constantine into East and West, but we notice a glaze in the…

How many times have we sung that awesome mystical song? How beautiful and poignant is the image. I can smell incense just as I write it. Always with the censer we chant it at every funeral and requiem. And what comfort it brings. It announces the end of life’s journey, or to continue the sea image, life’s voyage. The key term “haven” has a double…

He was biking and stopped to peer into an empty church. It’s England, and it often happens that churches become obsolete. Yet he does stop and wonders about what it was used for, why it is empty and who may have gained any benefit from it. Americans in general are not yet so empty of spiritual searching, heading off in all sorts of directions to…

So many now say, “That was then, and this is now.” No, we respond, this is the Holy Bible, the teaching of the apostle St. Paul, and the standards remain the same. He is addressing the Corinthians. He is reminding them of what they had been before committing themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is a sad, even disgusting commentary on what a…

He or she believes in God from infancy. He was baptized and raised being taught to love, honor and obey the teachings of “One holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.” And he had done so, even as an altar server, learning the doctrines of the Church and observing them throughout school days and college years. He nurtures himself spiritually on the…

Something within our human psyche creates a yearning to live forever. We have been like this for centuries, according to the author of the above book. Early scientists thought that alchemy would do it. Later on it was thought that monkey glands were the key to longevity. The Russian intellectual, Nicolai Federov, predicted a time when humans would…

In so few words so much is revealed between mother and Son. We find her sharing an immediate problem—is it truly a miracle she seeks? It’s not what she asks. Indeed, she doesn’t really ask for anything, but yet He grasps the import of her statement. Just on the human level we marvel at the connection between parent and Child. So many ordinary…

Years ago when I had ended a taping for a television program, I was standing outside the elevator bank with the show’s producer, waiting to descend to the floor exit. I was approached by a waiter from the nearby restaurant. “Pardon me, sir, but there are several women who asked to speak with you.” Curious, yet a bit annoyed, I bid farewell to the…

Life came from God’s Spirit breathed into the man’s nostrils. Can it be also that the fragrance of divinity has remained with us as a subtle reminder that a human being is more than mere dust—that we are destined to be wherever God is?

Consider the salmon in NW Canada and Alaska. They are spawned there in the rivers and streams, then they are…

9/11. Nine eleven. Everybody knows what those numbers signify. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the invasion of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese air force “A date that will live in infamy” (December 7, 1941). It seems that we’ve now added to that date—seven years ago already, or just seven years ago, depending on one’s point of view. Most of us…

The rejection of the rich young man is to me as mysterious as the election of Judas Iscariot to the twelve apostles. Why not recruit him, take him along, start where he was spiritually and intellectually, and then progressively lead him towards “perfection”? He was willing, he had much to offer, and one would think that he had a much higher…

That event threw Saul from his horse onto the ground, the flash of light blinded him for three days, and it turned his whole life around. That conversion experience the holy apostle Paul related three times in the New Testament. Many Evangelical Orthodox Christians have had experiences not as dramatic but nevertheless life-transforming, and they too…

St. Paul is writing to the Colossian Church. It’s comprised mostly of Gentiles. He reveals his insight concerning a mystery that he is imparting to them. Most mysteries are about secret knowledge kept hidden. This mystery found in the Bible concerns truth that God intends to expose to the world. The apostle understands his life’s purpose is to carry…