The Morning Offering
The Eucharist
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The place where we meet the Eternal God As a priest, I am a Servant of the Altar, and when I stand before the holy table I am bound together with every priest who has ever served, and with everyone who has laid down his life for Christ, as a martyr. I am bound to every Christian who has ever…
The Morning Offering
Withholding Love
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Not everyone has the ability to love another person Love is the best gift a parent can bestow upon their child, for a child brought up in the loving embrace of a caring and generous parent, will become an adult who can bestow love upon others. Too many people are living as though they are unworthy of love, primarily because…
Eastern Christian Insights
Don't Be a Pharisee This Lent: Sunday of the Pharisee and the Publican in the Orthodox Church
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2 Timothy 3:10-15; Luke 18:10-14 There is no doubt that we live today in a celebrity culture in which we idolize people whose images are available to us through the various forms of mass media. Whether through social media or simply in the imagination of our own minds, it is tempting today to see ourselves as people who should be celebrated and praised by others. Of course, the more we think…
The Morning Offering
Love and Mercy
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Where the temporal and the eternal are connected We can be rich in liturgical correctness and wealthy in traditions, but if we do not have love and mercy, we are in reality bankrupt. Our Lord Himself made love and mercy the chief criterion whereby we will be judged on the Last Day. The fulfillment of the law is love, not…
Father Bill's Blog
166. The Divine Liturgy 6 - The True Pro-Anaphora
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The intro to last week’s Post tells how to find earlier Posts in this series. Last week we covered the “Pro-Pro-Anaphora”, which leads us to what anciently began the Pro-Anaphora. Namely: The Little Entrance… …so called because it takes a short path, out the North Doors and directly to the Royal Doors. Later the Anaphora will begin with the Great Entrance, which usually takes a longer path out through the midst of…
A Lamp for Today
Continue in the Things That You Have Learned! The Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee
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After having considered the cycles of troparia, kontakia, and theotokia, we resume our reading of the Scriptural passages for Divine Liturgy in the light of the Old Testament. This year we will be focusing on the epistle readings, which are so often neglected in favor of the gospels, and seeking to understand them in the light of the Old Testament and the Church fathers. Today’s passage will be read in the light…
Faith Encouraged
Put Off Your Old Nature!
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It was an old suit, but I loved it! It had both sentimental value and the added benefit of actually fitting me! But my dear bride said it had to go! Sure, it had a few stains but I thought they were hard to see. Yes, there was a tear inside the jacket, but I was the only one who was going to see that. And, OK, so the pants were a…
The Morning Offering
Spiritual Parents
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The importance of seeking the guidance of the friends of God My dear friend, Father Photios Dumont, pastor of Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Seattle, asked me to accompany him to Life Giving Spring Greek Orthodox Women’s Monastery in Dunlap, CA. Father needed me to help keep him awake for the long trip, since he needed to return two…
A Light So Lovely
Accepting the World: Leaving Room for Providence
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Welcome to my last post in my not-quite-successfully-accomplished series on “accepting the world.” You can catch up on the rest of the series at its dedicated page here. When I started this series, I wanted to try to write something short but useful for thirty days straight. My initial idea was that I ‘d be able to write a post in around 20 minutes and share it by 30. But that was…
Faith Encouraged
Hank Hanegraaff Is With Fr. Barnabas TONIGHT!
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Faith Encouraged
A NEW Faith Encouraged LIVE Show!
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Faith Encouraged
The Hands and Feet of Jesus
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In World War 1 the two opposing armies would dig in and conduct what was then called “trench warfare.” The land between the two armies entrenched for the fight was called “no man’s land” because anybody who tried to attack would be shot by the other side! Not a pleasant place to be. But recently I was teaching after our regular Wednesday night service about the unique place the priest occupies during…
The Morning Offering
Anger
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In every way we must strive to restrain anger Abba Evagrius the Monk said that, “Anger is by nature designed for waging war with the demons and for struggling with every kind of sinful pleasure. Therefore angels, arousing spiritual pleasure in us and giving us to taste its blessedness, incline us to direct our anger against the demons. But the…
Behind the Scenes
Journey to Pascha 2020 Chart
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Faith Encouraged
Unbelievable Riches!
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I really like to write and I enjoy public speaking, but I had a hint of my tendency to wordiness when my first time in seminary produced a comment from one of my favorite professors. I had just finished a fairly intensive philosophy paper for his class and was really sweating the grade he would give me. Most everybody got their papers back quickly, but mine wasn’t in the first batch handed…
The Morning Offering
Harmony
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Love turns chaos into harmony The inevitability of death is particularly difficult to face for most Americans. We’ve become a people that eschew traditional funerals, preferring to “celebrate” the life of our loved one, while disposing of the body, and banning any sign of death from the memorial service. Yet the awareness of our own eventual death is the very…
Glory to God for All Things
The Liturgies of America
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I will be far from the first to observe that football in America has a sort of religious cast. If “liturgy” means a “work of the people,” then football is its clearest manifestation in our culture. When a team wins, there is a deep, abiding sense within its fans that “we won.” The constant use of “we” through public discussions indicates that we experience this sport as something in which we “participate”…
Faith Encouraged
Do You Know How To Make God Powerless?
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Listen to this from St. John Chrysostom: “Upon leaving the house one should without fail say, ‘I renounce you, Satan, your pomp and service, and I enter into Your service, O Christ.’” It’s so radical in its insistence that we actually take seriously the reality of the spiritual warfare and the power in a focused devotion and dependence on Christ with every step of my day. But say something like this in…
The Morning Offering
Attitude
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Keeping a positive attitude Our attitude has an impact that can keep us from growing spiritually. A bad attitude impacts the way we live, and hurts those around us, negatively influencing our family, our friends, and our church community. We must commit ourselves to keeping a positive attitude, for negative thinking will not make anything better. Complaining is a sure…
No Other Foundation
Also Starring Anna the Prophetess
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February 3 is the post-feast of the Feast of the Meeting, which latter is celebrated on February 2, this being forty days after Christmas. The Feast of the Meeting commemorates the time when Simeon and Anna met Christ in the Temple after His Mother came there to present Him to the Lord and to offer the sacrifices for her ritual purification after childbirth. This post-feast, like all post-feasts, focuses upon the secondary…
Faith Encouraged
The Child
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One of the most meaningful Pro-Life demonstrations I ever saw was a graduating High School class deciding to put out the number of empty seats with them in the graduates’ area of all the children who would have been graduating High School with them had they not been aborted. It was a powerful, silent, but effective witness of what had been sacrificed by the rampant abortions in this society. We truly are…
The Morning Offering
Intercession of the Saints
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Jesus is the sole mediator between God and man Most Protestant churches strongly reject all saintly intercession, citing passages such as 1 Timothy 2:1-5, which says that Jesus is the sole mediator between God and man, as well as Deuteronomy 18:10-11 which seems to forbid invoking departed souls. They also point to the fact that there are no examples in…
Remembering Sion
Seeking to See Jesus
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Today, as we stand at the threshold of Great Lent, the Holy Church gives to us in the Gospel story of Zaccheus an icon of the Lenten journey which lies ahead. It is precisely an icon, because everything happens as it were in a flash, in one single image passing before our eyes. We hear nothing of Zaccheus’ past, and after these few short verses he never again appears on the pages…
Eastern Christian Insights
Preparing to Present Ourselves to Christ: Homily for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple in the Orthodox Church
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Hebrews 7:7-17; Luke 2:22-40 Today we celebrate a great feast of the Church that speaks directly to the spiritual challenges that we all face on a daily basis. For today we celebrate the Presentation of Christ, forty days after His birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Theotokos and St. Joseph bring the young Savior there in compliance with the Old Testament law, making the offering of…
The Morning Offering
Righting a Wrong
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The Church’s definition of repentance The act of repentance is the moment when we recognize the wrong we’ve done, either to another person, or to God. At the moment we accept we’ve failed to live as God intended, we must seek out to rectify our transgression by reaching out to the person we’ve wronged, and ask their forgiveness. This act…
Growing the Church
2. Management/Admin.: 2.6.1 Publicity (Part I)
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When I think of publicizing the presence and work of a parish, what I have in mind is that its members and clergy are going to be so excited by what they experience in the Church that they will go out and spontaneously talk to some of their neighbors, colleagues, and friends about what they have seen and heard. They won’t be able to help themselves. Some have called this “The Spontaneous…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Christianity and Paganism
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An area fraught with disagreement is the relationship of Christianity to what has been called paganism. The latter term itself presents some difficulty as it is a later coinage used to describe earlier religious forms. It is not a term used by the people whose practice it describes and it gathers together under one head a vast swathe of beliefs, practices, and ways of seeing and interacting with the world. The very concept of ‘religions’ is a later, Western European Protestant one. Ancient people did not think of themselves as members or practitioners of ‘a religion’ among others. Nor did they distinguish between ‘religion’ and other areas of life like politics, philosophy, or some secular sphere. Nevertheless, paganism is used…
