St Peters Orthodox Church

In this sermon, Fr. James Rooney reflects on the story of the golden calf and God's call - we must abandon the false gods we create in our own image, and instead, learn to follow the living God on His terms. Rather than allowing culture, personal preferences, or worldly values to shape our understanding of God, we are called to encounter Him through worship, Scripture, and faithful obedience. As w...

When we hear the term repentance, what comes to mind? A lifestyle of true Christian repentance is filled with joy and wonder. It causes hope to spring up within us and keeps hope before us. Too often, we are deceived by an enemy wanting us to believe that repentance is self-loathing; that repentance is some form of unhealthy groveling before God. When we live from that lie, repentance over our sin...

In Luke 14, Jesus tells the Parable of the Great Banquet. In this parable we have the Nature of God behind the gift of this important banquet revealed to us. The Nature of God is to gather the broken to Himself that they might be made whole again. The Nature of God is to provide precisely what every soul needs to be raised up from the condition the fall of man left us in. As Jesus said when He ins...

We are now in the liturgical season of Trinitytide, also known as Ordinary Time. But this Ordinary Time is far from mundane or common as our culture understands ordinary. It speaks to the "ordinary" life of those living in the realized and manifest Kingdom of God on earth as it is in Heaven. It is in Trinitytide that our Lord disciples us as to how we should live in His Kingdom for our salvation a...

Eternal life, mercy, forgiveness of sins, covenant meal that keeps us in Christ and He in us. These are but a few of the very real benefits Christ our God bestows upon us through bread and wine that He has made His Body and Blood for us. Jesus teaches us this directly in the Gospel of John and chapter 6. The very generation following the Apostles testify to the experience of all of these benefits...

On Trinity Sunday, the Church enters the long season of Trinitytide, often called Ordinary Time—not because it is plain or unimportant, but because it is the ordered season in which Christians learn to live out the faith revealed in the great mysteries of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit. As living temples of the Holy Trinity, believers are called t...

Christ our God, having Ascended, has opened the gates of Paradise to mankind for the first time since the Fall of man. He forged the path for us to ascend in Him to be with Him forever. Today, on the Day of Pentecost, we are given everything we need to be with Him forever. Today God sends Himself in the Person of the Holy Spirit and He is poured into us. Today, the age of the healing of the souls...

In this sermon for Ascensiontide, the faithful are reminded that Christ’s Ascension is not His departure from humanity but the exaltation of human nature itself, as Jesus ascends bodily to the right hand of the Father and prepares His Church for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Drawing from Scripture and the teachings of St. John Chrysostom and St. Seraphim of Sarov, the sermon presents Pentecost as...

The Angels were in wonder as Christ our God ascended into Heaven. They were in wonder because, in Him, humanity reentered Paradise for the first time since mankind was banished from Paradise at the fall. Can you imagine it? The Angels behold Christ in human form, enter Paradise, ascend beyond even them, and be seated on the "throne of glory," as St. Leo the Great taught. How far the Word of God we...

The summary of the Collect prayer for the Fifth Sunday After Easter Mass is this: "All good things come from you, O Lord. Grant that we may think as You think, desire what You desire, and do what You do." The good works of Christ being manifest through us are, by far, not depended upon our perfection. They are completely dependent on His perfection being the strength in our weaknesses and frailtie...

Today we celebrate Mass for the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross; a Feast Day that celebrates how the Holy Cross of our Lord was discovered by St. Helen, mother of St. Constantine, after the Roman persecution of Christ and His Church. What a blessing we have so soon after Holy Week of remembering the might and loving work of Jesus Christ for us upon the Cross once again. Today we remember tw...

Jesus said in John 10, "I am the good Shepherd." The good is defined by the actions rooted in the virtue of the Shepherd on behalf of the sheep. Who He is and what He does for our salvation is what makes Him good. Today, we use the Icon of the Good Shepherd to see how it reveals the nature of our good Shepherd to us. Christ our God reveals Himself to us so that we might know Him, be drawn to Him,...

All of the disciples wanted to believe Christ had risen, but they doubted and struggled to believe it was possible. They doubted, that is, until they experienced Him after the Resurrection. Christ knew precisely what the disciples needed to strengthen and mature their weaker faith, and gift them with a greater faith. It is the same for all of us. Today we talk about the disciples experience moving...

As is tradition each year in the Orthodox Church, on this day we hear the blessed Paschal homily once preached by St. John Chrysostom.

This sermon reflects on the Resurrection account in St. Matthew, drawing attention to the plural “Sabbaths” in the Greek to reveal the profound transition from the old covenant of rest under the Law to the new and eternal rest inaugurated by Christ. While Christ’s body lay in the tomb, His soul descended into Hades, as described by St. Epiphanius of Cyprus, to liberate Adam, Eve, and all the right...

Tonight we have arrived where Christ has been leading us during the entirety of Lent. We have come to the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here, love is manifest for us all to see and experience. Not that we feel love only, but that we become the love that we see. How far Christ our God went that we might regain all that we had lost. When we see His great sufferings, we encounter His great lov...

On Maundy Thursday, we see two Divine and extraordinary actions of Christ our God on behalf of us all. The Lord of all disrobes and puts on the garb of a common household servant and washes the feet of His disciples. And, our Lord instituted the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, on the night He was betrayed. At the washing of the feet, blessed St. Peter had trouble coping with what Christ needed to do...

As we gaze upon the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, we see the most wondrous revelation of the love of God for mankind. We see the immense suffering. We see how far God lowered Himself so that our nakedness from the fall could be clothed with His glory. But we most certainly do not stop there. As we look upon the suffering, we rejoice in the victory. Our deliverer has delivered us. His blood...

This sermon calls Christians to recognize Christ’s suffering not as a substitute that removes their own trials, but as the perfect model by which they are to measure and endure their own crosses. Emphasizing that Christ descended, suffered, and endured mockery to lead humanity into glory with Him, the message insists that the path to resurrection always passes through suffering. Drawing on the wit...

In Mark 14, we are given the testimony of the woman with the alabaster jar of oil coming to Jesus. She falls at His feet, breaking the jar open and pouring the oil upon His head and feet. Jesus says that this woman's actions will be proclaimed in every Gospel throughout the whole world. How important is this to us, then? The Church has handed down to us that the infinitely valuable jar of oil is i...

This sermon reflects on Christ’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem as both the fulfillment of Old Covenant prophecy and a foreshadowing of His final return in glory, emphasizing the contrast between those who laid down garments and those who offered only palm branches as a symbol of varying degrees of self-surrender to Christ. As Holy Week begins, the faithful are called to move beyond partial devoti...

Today is Passion Sunday. All of the Icons of our Lord Jesus Christ have been covered. What prompts this? In John 8, our Lord Jesus Christ reveals His true Identity, proclaiming Himself publicly in the Temple to be the "I AM." The masses took up stones to stone Him for His blasphemy, and we are told that He was hidden from them as He passed through them, for it was not yet His time. From whom was H...

Here, just beyond the midway point of Lent, we are given a Mass that bears the name "rejoice!" We remember today that "rejoice!" is not a suggestion, but rather a command. Our God is worthy of our praise, and we are in great need of making that offering. Rejoicing, thanksgiving, praising God; that spiritual discipline is oxygen to the Christian soul. We rejoice because, if we have failed in the li...

After Jesus' Baptism, the Holy Spirit leads Him to fast and pray in the wilderness for 40 days. After the 40 days, Satan comes to tempt Jesus when Satan perceives Him to be weak. The deceiver was deceived and his temptations were easily thrown down. Jesus fasted and prayed for those 40 days to make a path for us to do the same. By fasting and praying for 40 days by grace, Jesus empowers us to shar...

We begin Lent with blessed ashes being placed upon our foreheads. The ashes remind us to keep our mortality daily before us, so that we press into Christ everyday as if that one day is all we have to experience Him and His wondrous healing in our lives. And, in the Old Covenant, God's people would put on sackcloth and pour ashes over their heads. This was always an external sign of internal suffer...