The title of this blog piece is the title of a book written by Bishop Maxim Vasiljevic, bishop of Los Angeles and Western America of the Serbian Orthodox Church.  (I trust he will forgive not being capitalized.). The book is an extraordinary one, containing a series of disconnected essays on various themes, each preceded by a painting done by His Grace.  That a bishop should be an artist as well as a…

In my Protestant days, I had no problem with anyone talking about Mary—so long as it was Christmas.  On Boxing Day, that was it.  Over.  No more talking about Mary.  What are we anyway, Catholics?  It was understood that when we packed away the Nativity set, all talk of Mary got packed up along with it.  And my proof that Bible-believing Christians should not talk about Mary?  The New Testament never did. …

This is an extraordinary personal appeal, one which I do not make lightly. St. Herman of Alaska Church in Langley, B.C., Canada (of which I have been pastor since 1987) is in the process of building a new church temple on our property, and are about half completed.  Our church community has already raised thousands of dollars from within our membership to complete this project.  We were under the impression from our…

In 1956 an American game show debuted called “To Tell the Truth”.  Each round of the game introduced three people all claiming to be the same person, and a team of panelists would ask them questions.  Those pretending to be the real (usually famous) person would make up answers, while the real person would answer truthfully.  The inquiring panelists would then guess which was the real person.  The host of the show…

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 all, the Lord says, “Judge not”.  It works almost every time, functioning…

Some heresies never seem to die, but have a disconcerting tendency to pop up in every generation, rather like the emerging heads of the whack-a-mole in the children’s game one sees in Chuck E. Cheese:  whack them down as hard and often as you like, but they will pop up again someplace else. The Gnostic view of matter is like that.  Drawing upon Platonic dichotomies of the difference between spirit and matter,…