Rating: 9|Votes: 8
‘Genuine repentance is a change,’ His Beatitude said, ‘but not a change made with trumpets, with advertising.’
Fr. Lawrence Farley
Rating: 7,7|Votes: 15
Every Sunday we confess in the Creed that we believe in “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church”. But what do we mean when we confess the Church as catholic?
Fr. Barnabas Powell
Rating: 9,1|Votes: 17
Before becoming Orthodox, I’d never heard of Theophany or Epiphany. But this commemoration of Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan is big. Here are some reasons why.
Archpriest Oleg Stenyayev
Rating: 10|Votes: 2
What event reminds us of the Baptism of Christ? Why does the Nicea-Constantinople Creed mention only one sacrament—that of Baptism? Why is the feast of Baptism also called the Theophany? And how should fulfil our baptismal promises?
Fr. Stephen Freeman
Rating: 9,1|Votes: 14
This “truth of all things” is the revelation of the world as sacrament. The waters and all that is in the world is a means of communion with God because of His Divine condescension.
Monk Nicodemus (Jones)
Rating: 10|Votes: 7
His saints and the other world are closer than we realize, and His direct and personal action towards us is both continual and filled with His loving care.
Hieromonk Irenei (Pikovsky)
Rating: 10|Votes: 31
Dainty foods and naked bodies have become idols of our days, and gluttony and viewing erotic images can be compared to idol-worship. How can we deprive ourselves of temptations?
Fr. Ted Bobosh
Rating: 7,5|Votes: 6
And we realize one of the most profound mysteries of the birth of Jesus – God enters the world as a child and puts Himself at the mercy of the world. God entrusts himself to the care of a young girl and an old carpenter, penniless and powerless.
Priest Valery Dukhanin
Rating: 9,4|Votes: 11
Genuine love cannot not be incarnated, but is incarnate.
Fr. James Guirguis
Rating: 8,8|Votes: 15
So how might we be like this mad tyrant Herod?
Rating: 7|Votes: 5
God intruding in all our lives through the birth of His Son, interrupting all the other things we might want to do this evening and this week with our families and friends, in our homes or at work.
Rating: 7,7|Votes: 27
This is part of the Nativity story we don’t have in our Christmas cards or carols and prefer to ignore because we like a sentimental winter story rather than one which exposes the reality of the world.
Rating: 9,6|Votes: 10
The nostalgia, I think, was for the commonality, an experience that banished loneliness and gave meaning to even the smallest actions. The prosperity that followed was hollow. For what purpose do we now shop?
Sergei Geruk, Metropolitan Onuphry (Berezovsky)
Rating: 10|Votes: 10
If we love God, we love everyone—our father and mother, our neighbor and fatherland, as well as other peoples. If we do not love God, we will never be able to love anyone; we will always be prone to committing a sin.
Fr. Philip LeMasters
Rating: 10|Votes: 16
In order to celebrate Christmas properly, we must refuse to make God in our own image.
Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov)
Rating: 9,6|Votes: 11
Jesus’s flight into Egypt at the instructions of an angel of the Lord to preserve Him from the death that Herod had devised for Him gives us also an example to follow on the paths of our own lives. We can also encounter in various forms something similar to what happened with our Savior—that is, danger and persecution.
Metropolitan Onuphry (Berezovsky)
Rating: 10|Votes: 44
In these festive days we remember with love and reverent wonder the blessed Bethlehem night, under the mysterious cover of which was carried out the great mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16). The Son of God was born at night to dispel the spiritual night by which sin had encompassed mankind and to remind us that He, our Savior and Lord, is the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world (Jn. 1:9) and that He is the Light of Truth with which the night becomes day and without which the day becomes night.
Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol
Rating: 9,9|Votes: 19
The meaning of this feast day for us, who are constrained by the passions and sin, lies in the obtainment of freedom, which the Lord has given us through His birth; to be freed from slavery to sin and the darkness of our falling away from God, and also to again be able to experience rejoicing in life as true children of God.
Rating: 9,3|Votes: 21
Brothers and sisters, observing world events, let us not fall into despair, alarm and fear, but hasten in a spiritual sense “up the mountain,” so that, girding ourselves with humble gratitude for everything that God sends us, with staff in hand, begin our ascent “to the mountain of the Lord.”
Really for us to prepare for Christmas we should be reading the scriptures year round to know what God promised, what people suffered for these promises and as a result of them.
