Faith Encouraged
A Special Message from Fr. Barnabas
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Christ is Born! I’m sitting in my home office on an early morning thinking about the new year right around the corner, and what God has in store for us for this precious gift of time. And my heart can’t escape the one example I see in Christ and all the saints – serve others! But how? Oh, you know me well by now. You know I love to preach. You know…
The Morning Offering
Sharing Orthodoxy
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Sharing Orthodoxy in a Post-Christian Age If we wish to share the truth of the Orthodox Faith, and Christ Who is her head, we must give witness to the love of Christ by loving everyone. Without Christ, Orthodoxy is just another religion, devoid of the power to transform and deify the human heart. Without Christ the Church is nothing but…
Faith Encouraged
He Shall Be Called A Nazarene
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Christ is born! What a busy time of year! As I was preparing for liturgy this morning, I was contemplating my schedule and caught myself becoming distracted from the time of prayer that the liturgy calls me to embrace. I had to exercise my will to banish this distraction so that I could singularly focus on the prayer at hand. And, to varying degrees of success, I was able to refocus my…
The Morning Offering
Putting off the Old Self
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In Christ we become new creatures and the old self is put aside As we struggle to make spiritual progress we do battle with the old self. We work against old habits that have kept us stuck and prevented the change we so desire in our quest for communion with God. Our sins and passions have become familiar to us,…
Faith Encouraged
Christ Is Born!
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Christ is Born! Glorify Him. With this traditional greeting we Orthodox Christians mark the beginning of the Feast of the Nativity of the Theanthropos (The God-Man) Jesus Christ. God takes His flesh from one of us in the person of the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary, and comes among us as the One promised by the Prophets in the First Testament. And He comes fulfilling the scriptures that He would be “Emmanuel,” God…
Eastern Christian Insights
Born to Share His Divine Life with Us by Grace: Homily for Christmas in the Orthodox Church
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Christ is Born! Glorify Him! Galatians 4:4-7; Matthew 2:1-12 We gather today to celebrate the birth of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. No matter how often we have heard them, the details of His Nativity remain shocking. The Child Who was born in a cave that served as a barn and had an animal’s feeding trough for His crib is fully divine…
The Morning Offering
The Feast of Saint Herman of Alaska
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A blessed Nativity to all my friends who are celebrating the Birth of Christ according to the Gregorian Calendar. For those of us who serve under the Julian Calendar, we are celebrating the Feast of Saint Herman of Alaska. With love in Christ, Abbot Tryphon ”By enduring the trials of nature, the storms’ cold and wind together with hunger, thou…
Orthodox Reformed Bridge
Christmas 2019
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Glory to God for All Things
Have a Dickens of a Christmas
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In the late 1600’s in colonial Boston, the celebration of Christmas was against the law. Indeed, anyone evidencing the “spirit of Christmas” could be fined five shillings. In the early 1800’s, Christmas was better known as a season for rioting in the streets and civil unrest. However, in the mid-1800’s some interesting things changed the cultural response to the feast and, in 1870, Christmas was declared a federal holiday (which is to…
The Whole Counsel Blog
St. Ignatius, the Nativity, and the Heavenly Host
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“And hidden from the ruler of this age was the virginity of Mary and the one born from her, and likewise the death of the Lord. Three famed mysteries which God worked in silence. How then was he made manifest to the ages? A star in heaven shining beyond all of the stars and its light was ineffable. And its great newness brought about wonderment. The remaining stars with the sun and moon became a chorus for that star. And it exceeded, with its light, them all. And there was confusion: from whence did this great newness and strangeness come to them? By this, all magistry was destroyed and every evil chain disappeared. Ignorance was taken away. The ancient kingdom…
Faith Encouraged
You Are My Son! Today, I Have Begotten You
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As we approach Bethlehem to celebrate, it’s time to insist on some heavy theology today. So, let’s buckle our proverbial seat beats and do some soul stretching theological work out! Jesus Christ is 100% God and, at the very same time 100% Man. As St. Basil declares “What is not assumed is not healed.” This powerful identity of Jesus Christ is at the very foundation of the Christian Faith. In fact, every…
The Morning Offering
Our Journey to God
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We must be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives The spiritual struggle that is required of us cannot depend on having a spiritual father. Most Orthodox Christians do not have one, and the average parish priest is not equipped, either with the time, nor the inclination, to take on the role of spiritual father to…
Glory to God for All Things
And God said: יְהִי אוֹר
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I apologize for the Hebrew, but you’ll understand in a minute. And God said, “Let there be light” (“yehi’or”). There is an old mystical Jewish notion that when God created things, He did so by speaking them into existence, such that there was an exact correspondence between the word spoken and the thing created. On that basis, it was believed that a person speaking the same word (in Hebrew, of course) could…
No Other Foundation
The Lord’s Prayer: “Give Us This Day our Daily Bread”
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We continue with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer, and come now to the petition, “Give us today our daily bread”. One might be tempted to wonder what one could say about this petition by way of elaboration or explanation, since it seems pretty straightforward. I suggest, however, three things. First of all, that little word, “daily”. The Greek is επιουσιος/ epiousios. It is a rare enough word that Origen thought that…
Faith Encouraged
Marines Don't Do That!
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Recently, I read an article by Michael Wheeler of Harvard Business School on how to make necessary split second decisions. Interestingly enough, Mr. Wheeler concluded that these kinds of decisions we all face always flow from our life-long and deeply developed character. Dr. Wheeler’s article “Marines Don’t Do That: Mastering the Split-Second Decision” concludes that making these kinds of decisions in our lives require us to constantly summon the better parts of…
The Morning Offering
Preparing for Our Death
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We must always think upon our own death Saint Sisoes, the great ascetic, standing before the tomb of Alexander the Great, beheld the skeletal remains of one who was once covered in magnificent garments. Astonished, the saint mourned for the vicissitudes of time and the transience of glory, and tearfully proclaimed, “The mere sight of you, tomb, dismays me and…
The Morning Offering
Chaplains
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Chaplains represent the presence of God in the midst of tragedy I am grateful to God for all the friendships I’ve formed with other chaplains during these past seventeen years of service as a police and fire chaplain, and am privileged to count among my friends some of the finest people I have ever known. These are individuals who have…
Eastern Christian Insights
Joy for the Imperfect People of the World: Homily for the Sunday Before the Nativity of Christ (The Genealogy) in the Orthodox Church
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Hebrews 11:9-10, 32-40; Matthew 1:1-25 I listened to a podcast recently which stressed that comparing ourselves to other people tends to make us unhappy. That is apparently one of the great problems with social media, since people normally post pictures and news about themselves that make them look as though their lives were perfect. Since we know that our lives are not perfect, such images of others easily fuel a…
The Morning Offering
World as Sacrament
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The whole world is a sacrament if only we have the eyes of faith to see it Some of my earliest memories are of the camping trips we would take, as a family, and pitching our tent by the idyllic lakes in Northern Idaho. We would cook over a fire, catch rainbow trout for breakfast (nothing like a freshly grilled…
Father Bill's Blog
158 How the Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-bearer brought 2000 Evangelicals into the Orthodox Church
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Campus Crusade Leaders Searching Before we look at Saint Ignatius himself, let’s tell this story. About fifty years ago some Campus Crusade leaders were filling Big Ten university stadiums with great crowds of young people, converting them to Jesus Christ. I heard some of these dynamic men speak after they became Orthodox. It must have been exciting. They hoped they were changing the lives of these students for the better. But then……
Raising Saints
Quick Poll for Orthodox Mothers
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I’m working on a presentation about the specific pressures put on Orthodox Moms, and I’d love some help understanding what those are exactly. Discussions about gender roles and the distribution of parenting labor abound in our society — but I’m curious about how these things work in Orthodox homes. Is it any different from anywhere else? What is our Orthodox parenting culture looking like as we finish up this decade? Fathers are…
Faith Encouraged
Don't Throw Your Confidence Away!
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It seems we Southerners have an “old saying” for everything. When I was in Boston for seminary, a young man from another part of the country asked me “Barnabas, is there a book I can buy with all these Southern sayings in them?” I laughed and told him “No, son, we Southerners guard these sayings very closely!” Of course, there are tons of books out there that recount all our “old sayings.”…
The Morning Offering
Sacred Things
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What should be our attitude toward icons and other sacred things? One of the attributes of God is holiness, and is reflected in His people, and in physical objects that have been blessed by the Church for the use of His people in their journey towards Him. Therefore, reverence for these sacred objects and images is the manifestation of the…
Faith Encouraged
There is None Good But God
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I love what Mark Twain once said: “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.” Yep, I know what he means. I squirm under the light of someone who’s life radiates a goodness I so often wish I had and all too often do not! My best friend use to say that “No life is a total waste; it can always serve as a bad…
The Morning Offering
Family
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Staying connected to family It is always sad to lose a family member in death, but it is also sad that it often takes a funeral to bring together relatives who haven’t seen each other in years. It is from this perspective that I realize I, as the oldest of the cousins, am perhaps the one family member who remembers…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Offering of Incense
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The offering of incense in Orthodox Christian worship is likely the most misunderstood element of that worship. Worship, in general, outside of the Orthodox Church in other Christian traditions is widely considered to be a matter of preference. If not merely taste, worship ‘styles’ are seen to resonate differently with different people and this resonance is taken to be spiritual experience rather than nostalgic or aesthetic experience. Many communities profess to offer the same worship in a variety of styles on a given day, implying that the connection between the details of worship and its content or experience is loose and variable. In this way, ritual is reduced to language. It is a vehicle for communicating certain content to an…
Time Eternal
The “End” of Christmas: What St. Gregory Wanted for Christmas in AD 380
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Back in November, I read a wonderful homily by St. Gregory the Theologian that I have returned to often throughout Nativity this year. Oration 38 (read the full text here) was written in 380-81 and is often subtitled “On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ,” leaving Orthodox Christians everywhere to wonder: which is it, St. Gregory? Christmas or…
