Orthodox Christianity

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Belgrade, Jan 4 (Dec 22, Julian Calendar): His Holiness Patriarch Pavle has read the Nativity Epistle to the representatives of the media in the Patriarchal Palace in Belgrade. The text of the Epistle follows:

Serbian Orthodox Church to her spiritual children at Christmas, 2004

+PAVLE
By the Grace of God

For today the Only begotten Son of God is born,
the radiance of His glory,
the Image of His very being and everlastingness.
St. John Damascene, Homily on the Holy Nativity of Christ

This is the day which the Old Testament prophets awaited (Is. 2:2-3; 9,6; Jer. 23:5-6; Ez. 34:23; Micah 5:2); this is the day for which the righteous of the Old Testament yearned (Gen. 12:3; Deut. 18:5); this is the day which has been promised to all who seek the Lord (Ps. 118:24), “for being by nature perfect God, He becomes by nature perfect Man – He is the same, not changing natures, nor undergoing an illusory incarnation” says St. John of Damascus.

Dear Christ-loving brothers and sisters, our dear spiritual children, today the Son of God who becomes the Son of Man is born unto us, remaining miraculously both God and man. Today, through the power and operation of the Holy Spirit, the Savior of the world, the King of Israel, the Son of David, is born of the Virgin, the Holy Theotokos (Mt. 15:22). For this reason we sing, together with St. Gregory the Theologian: “O new combination! O miraculous unity! He who Is becomes and the Uncreated is created.”
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January 2, 2005

In the Christian East it is the Baptism of our Lord that receives the dominant emphasis in the Church’s annual celebration of Theophany (commonly called Epiphany in the West) on January 6. This feast is celebrated, moreover, as the manifestation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This emphasis is clear in the troparion of the day: “When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest; for the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee, calling Thee His beloved Son; and the Spirit, in the form of a dove, confirmed the truth of His word. Wherefore, O Christ, who didst appear and enlighten the world, glory to Thee.”
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The Orlando Sentinal (free registration required)
Debbie Barr, December 9, 2004

MAITLAND — Some might consider becoming a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church somewhat unorthodox if you are neither Greek nor born into Orthodoxy.

For the Rev. James Berends [Fr. Jim, as most call him], who was ordained in July as a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church, it was a natural, if not typical, progression.

Berends, 47, serves at the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Maitland, where he assists Senior Rev. Dean Gigicos in overseeing a congregation of about 500 families, predominantly from Orange and Seminole counties.

Berends said his journey to Orthodoxy and the priesthood was not a lightning bolt of revelation, but more of a gravitation.

“It always felt like just a nudge for me; it never felt like a huge jump,” he said.

Berends, who lives in Lake Mary, was born the son of a Baptist minister in Grand Rapids, Mich. He knew early on that he didn’t consider himself a Baptist, but he still felt drawn to Christianity.

“I knew it [my religion] was going to be Christian, I just didn’t know where it was all going to lead,” he said.

Read the entire article on the Orlando Sentinel website.

December 5, 2004
Third Sunday of Advent

Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

In the summer of the year 49, Paul departed from Philippi, the first city in Europe where he founded a church. He left Luke there to pastor this new congregation, but Silas and (it would seem) Timothy came with him as he proceeded southwest along the Egnatian Road, one of the great arteries that held the Roman Empire together.

A day or two and some thirty miles later, Paul’s party came to Amphipolis (Acts 17:1), about 3 miles inland from the sea, at the point where, Herodotus tells us (History 7.114), the Persian emperor Xerxes had crossed the River Strymon in 480 BC on his way down to the Battle of Thermopylae. As Paul and Silas came near Amphipolis, they could not help but notice beside the road the large statue of a lion that had already stood in that place for nearly 500 years. It was a monument erected there to commemorate the victory of the Athenians over the Edoni in 437 BC, and today’s visitors to northern Greece still stop to admire and photograph it, almost two and a half millennia after that battle.
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November 28, 2004 Second Sunday of Advent, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

When the Apostle Paul lists faith, hope, and love as the triad of things that “abide,” he takes care to assert, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). This superiority of love within the standard Pauline triad seems noteworthy in two ways.

First, there is the stark fact that Paul accords the supremacy to love, not faith. Let me suggest that if Paul had not made this point explicitly, there is reason to suspect that certain later readers of his epistles might have concluded, “and the greatest of these is faith.” My speculation here is justified by the plain fact that some of Paul’s later readers really did attempt to condense his teaching on justification by coining the expression “faith alone.” Pressed on the point, of course, those same students of Paul explained that real faith, living Christian faith, necessarily includes love. Love, thus, is subsumed into their full definition of faith.
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November 21, 2004, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings, by Fr Patrick Henry Reardon

The ancients understood the strength of things arranged in threes, and the thesis that “a threefold cord is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12) expressed a truth that no one in olden times was prone to doubt.

A simple deference to geometry sufficed to settle the question. The triangle, after all, is plain geometry’s only stable figure with straight lines. Geometry–literally, the measuring of the earth–is solidly founded on trigonometric functions, and the surest way to calculate the earth (or the heavens!) is by trigonometrical survey.

When we make such a survey, moreover, we are well advised to steady our instruments on a tripod, for nothing is more stable. Indeed, anyone ever seated on a wobbly chair can testify that chairs themselves seem to prefer three legs to four. Their wobbling is an agitated protest against that extra limb.
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Upstream James asked about the scriptural passage concerning the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham:

I’ve always wondered this about Abraham: if he would obey the command to slit the throat of his innocent son, how exactly are we to suppose he was able to discern the voice of God from the voice of Satan?

This also raises the question as to whether he obeyed God not because He was good but because He was powerful and if he would have obeyed the dictates of an equally omnipotent Fiend.

If the story is simply a parable and a myth, could not the moral have been better served through a less literal take on “sacrifice”?
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Genesis 22, which narrates Abraham’s obedience to God in sacrificing his son Isaac, provides a singular example of a trial of faith. In the preceding chapter God had promised Abraham that his true posterity would come through Isaac (Genesis 21:12), but now He commands him to offer up his “only son,” this same Isaac, as a holocaust (22:2).

It is important to the dramatic structure of this story that Abraham does not know he is being tried. Nor does Isaac. Indeed, only God and the reader know it (22:1). In this respect, the story of Abraham resembles the Book of Job, where the reader, but not Job, is instructed that a trial is taking place. In the case of the Abraham story, this notice to the reader is absolutely essential, because both the Jew and the Christian know that the God of the Bible hates human sacrifice. A trial of faith, on the other hand, is exactly what we should expect from the God of the Bible (cf. 1 Peter 1:6-7).
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It may be the case that we have heard the plainest words of Holy Scripture so often that we no longer really hear them. A long but shallow acquaintance with the Bible’s most obvious teachings may serve sometimes to deflect, if not actually to dull, even the keen double-edged sword of God’s Word. We assume that the point of the divine will has already pierced its way into our hearts, whereas in truth we may have spent much of our lives dodging and deftly parrying the thrust of the blade.

Take, for example, the simple mandate to love our enemies. The thing could hardly be plainer: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you . . . But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? . . . And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:27,32,33).
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