Reflections in Christ

What do you expect will happen at Liturgy on a Sunday morning?  Why do you rouse yourself from your comfy bed, pile into the car (possibly with sleepy and unruly kids), drive to church, and stand there for an hour or so?  What do you hope to experience?

For some, the gain comes in terms of ethnic identity and a sense of belonging to one’s…

Everyone you meet and have ever met wears a mask.  You do too.  From the time we were children, we have been taught that certain things were acceptable and certain other things were definitely unacceptable.  For example, when confronted with infuriating people or situations in which our will was thwarted, sarcasm was acceptable.  Falling to the…

We’ve all had moments like that—the moment when you wake up and realize you’ve been a complete moron.  The Prodigal Son had one such moment when he realized he was being idiotic and stupid, (or in the more elegant language of the parable, “ when he came to himself”).  He had left home for a far country in a fever of determination to break…

I would like to share with you an easy technique for avoiding moral accountability.  Whenever you are caught and called to account for doing something wrong (that is, when you are “busted”), you simply invoke the figure of the pharisee.  Tell your accuser that he is being judgmental and pharisaical, and that he has no right to judge you.  After…

With the possible literary exception of Tarzan, real men do not climb trees.  At least they didn’t in the Middle East in the time of Jesus.  Neither did they run.  Running was for children, professional messengers, and soldiers.  Adults who were neither professional runners nor soldiers did not run.  They strolled at a leisurely pace, as befit men…

A Protestant friend of mine who is sympathetic to Orthodoxy and likes icons recently felt he had to draw the line.  On a weekday service in church he saw an Orthodox friend bowing down in prostration before an icon of a saint, and he thought this was a bit over the top.  Kissing icons of Christ, sure; and of His saints—um, okay.  And prostrating…

Since St. John the Forerunner and Baptist adorns every icon-screen in the Orthodox world it is hard to imagine that he was ever scandalously controversial.  But he was.  And what was it that made the child of desert so controversial?  What did John the Baptist do that was considered so scandalous?  Odd to say, it was his baptizing.  Specifically,…

If you are at all like me, it is not Christmas until you have seen the holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has been shown seasonally every year since it first appeared in 1965.  I have watched it faithfully every year since I can remember, and have the whole wonderful thing more or less memorized by heart.  Who can forget Charlie Brown…

If the Christmas story has a villain, it would be King Herod.  In the passion story, the main villain would be Judas Iscariot, with possibly the High Priest Caiaphas and his Sanhedrin running a close second.  But there is no close second in the Christmas story when it comes to villains.  Herod has the field all to himself.

Even children seem to…

In a piece published in the Telegraph at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10458380/Christianity-at-risk-of-dying-out-in-a-generation-warns-Lord-Carey.html, we learn that a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, warned a Christian conference in Shrewsbury that the Church of England was “one generation away from extinction” and that all of…

The Christian Faith is all about thanksgiving.  Our secular North American society thinks that thanksgiving is moderately important, and so it has a wonderful Thanksgiving Day feast once a year.  I love this feast.  Every October in Canada—my calendar tells me it is held in November in the US—when the leaves start to turn colour and the days become…

Fans of the British satirical series “Monty Python” and its movie The Meaning of Life perhaps will remember their portrayal of Christian liturgy.  A man in cassock, surplice, and academic hood, looking every inch a stuffy Church of England cleric, comes forward in chapel and begins a prayer to God with these words:  “O Lord, ooh You are so…

I can, I think, count on the fingers of my one hand the number of times I have described myself as an Eastern Orthodox.  Usually the preferred self-designation is simply “Orthodox,” but sometimes this provokes confusion, as when I am further asked, “Oh, are you Jewish?”  The respondent has clearly heard of Orthodox Jews, and supposes that I…

What do bread and peanut butter have to do with the forgiveness of sins?  More than one might think at first glance.

Recently, a friend told me of how he met a pan-handler asking for spare change in the parking lot of a grocery store.  He knew the man well, for he had often met him and given him the requested spare change.  They hailed each other…

Recently I was taking a walk in a park nearby our home when two young girls met me, offering a tract and (ostensibly) wanting to talk about the Kingdom.  Actually they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and what they really wanted was to convert me to their sect.  Usually I politely decline and the preacher man keeps walking, but today I took the time to…

I have heard that our Muslim friends are not impressed by our New Testament.  That is, as far as Scripture goes, they think it is pretty thin stuff.  That is because for them Scripture represents the very voice of God and comes to mankind as God’s direct message.  By the term “Scripture” they understand God speaking to us in the first person. …

I recently saw a brief on-line debate from the show “Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell,” featuring a debate about the existence of God.  The segment featured two comedians, Jamie Kilstein (arguing for atheism) and John Fugelsang (arguing for Christian theism).  Although lacking in intellectual substance, the debate was good-tempered and funny in…

Living near the US-Canadian border and having friends in a northern border town in Washington State, I often cross the border.  This usually involves waiting in long line-ups, which gives even people like me who have nothing to hide plenty of time to get nervous at the prospect of stern interrogation.  I don’t know why I get nervous.  Perhaps it…

This past Sunday, September 8, we celebrated the Great Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos.  We sang the troparion, in which we rejoiced that her birth “proclaimed joy to the whole universe.”  It is easy enough to sing, but somewhat harder now for us to understand.  Why, we may ask, did the birth of a baby girl in around 15 B.C. or so…

The title of this piece is taken from a song of the same name, written and sung by “The Second Chapter of Acts,” a trio of siblings, in 1974.  In this song they ask the pointed question, “You don’t know which way the wind blows, so how can you plan tomorrow?”  I was thinking of this song as I recently boarded a plane to travel back east to…