St Peters Orthodox Church

December 24, 2021 - Our God is transcendent. This means that there will never be a time that we will not grow to know Him more. And yet, at the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ the transcendent God manifests Himself as one of us that we may experience Him with all of our human senses. The wonder of the manifestation of the Incarnation is before us at the Nativity of our Savior.

December 19, 2021 - We hear in the Collect prayer for this Mass, "Come with great might and power and succor us." Our longing for Christ to come with His healing and deliverance grows to a crescendo in the last week of Advent. Today we look at what it means and shows us about Christ when we pray for Him to come and succor us. Come, Lord, and let us experience your Incarnation in the eternal now of...

December 12, 2021 - The name of the Mass for the Third Sunday of Advent is Rejoice! It is a day we are given in the middle of our Advent spiritual disciplines to be sure we see Christ clearly for Who He is and why He has come to us. Today we are encouraged that if we have fallen short in our Advent disciplines, our Lord knows right where we are and we are to have our faith and countenance restored...

December 5, 2021 - The Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ was to make all things right again; to bring order to our chaos and to restore that which was lost in fall of mankind from Paradise. Our Lord will come again to do the same once and for all. When Christ healed, raised the dead, and forgave sins it was to make right what was damaged by the fall. Today we look at righteousness as just that, to m...

November 28, 2021 - We are tight to think of Advent as an entering into the longing of creation for the Incarnation and as a time of preparation for our Lord's Second Coming. This message focuses on the reality that the Advent of Christ, His coming to us, is something we can experience throughout the days of our lives.

Having examined the realities of the Fall of Man and seeing more clearly the extent of what was lost, we now turn our attention to the redemption and deliverance of God through the Incarnate Jesus Christ.

November 21, 2021 - Today is the Mass of Sunday Next Before Advent. It is the Mass where we begin to prepare to walk with Christ through that blessed and holy season. In Advent, by the grace of God, we enter into the longing that all of creation had to be redeemed; that time from the fall of man to the coming of Christ. We also look ahead preparing our souls for His Second Coming. We are reminded...

November 14, 2021 - St. Paul teaches us in Ephesians 5 that we are to "walk circumspectly redeeming the time, for the days are evil." The truth is we are either redeeming the time by making the moments of our lives sacred, or we are sowing the ill effects of the fall of mankind through the way in which we live. Today we look at what it means to live a life redeeming the time.

Are we, in some ways, Christian Atheists? A Christian atheists believes in ideas and teachings about God, but lives life as though God is nowhere to be found in the moments of our lives. It is believing in the ideology of Christianity, but not knowing the Christ of Christianity. Using Jacob's Ladder, we see an event that shows us how Jacob's eyes were open to the God Who was present with Him and h...

November 7, 2021 - In Ephesians 4, St. Paul starts by talking about the wonder in the unity of the Body of Christ; how all of us are joined together with equally important roles to be the continuing ministry of Christ reconciling the world to Himself. He then spends the rest of the chapter talking about how to protect that unity by the way we live amongst one another. Today we look at how to withh...

November 2, 2021 - Today we celebrate the Feast of All Souls; a Feast Day on which we lift up the souls of those we love dearly before the Giver of Divine mercy. As we lift up name after name, we are offering them back to God and, at the same time, we see before us our own end. In the twinkling of an eye, at any moment, we may draw our last breath on earth and our soul ascends to be before Christ...

November 1, 2021 - When we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, we are celebrating the witness of the entirety of the Saints communicates to us. Each Saint grew greatly in certain attributes or virtues of our Lord Jesus Christ, so much so that when people encountered them they truly experience something of Christ. But the true wonder is when you put them all together and see how their collective liv...

Last week we looked at how man existed in Paradise with the God Who had created him. Today we examine the Fall. What caused the Fall? What was lost? And, what things entered into the world that causes stumbling blocks for the souls of all mankind to be renewed to the Paradise experience by the healing work of God.

October 31, 2021 - When Pontius Pilate questioned Jesus at His trial asking if He indeed was a king, Pilate asked this question having a completely wrong framework regarding the King that Jesus is and the Kingdom He came to bring. Too often we approach our relationship to our Lord with the same problem. We approach Jesus trying to have Him live within our framework when, in reality, we are the one...

Today we look into the life of mankind before the Fall. What was their existence like in relation to God and all that He had created? To see this reality is to begin to comprehend the life we have now been offered once again in and through our Lord Jesus Christ. Paradise is not simply related to a place. Paradise is an existence in and with God.

October 24, 2021 - In the Gospel of St. Luke 4, our Lord gives a parable telling us that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and the humble will be exalted. St. Paul, in Ephesians 4, gives us the three virtues that will keep the unity of the Body of Christ and the experience of His great peace: humility, meekness, and longsuffering. Today we examine each of these and find that they are our...

The Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ is such an incredible indication of how close our God came to us. If we are to gain the experience of how closely God and His Kingdom are to us, we must begin with seeing the wonder of the Incarnation itself. The Blessed Virgin Mary kept the wonders God did in, through, and all around her right in front of her pondering them in her heart. This must be the d...

October 17, 2021 - The battlefield of the Christian is the battlefield of the mind; our thought life. And in this battle, someone is going to be taken captive. Too often we get caught off-guard with our temptations and thoughts. Our thoughts then grow within us and eventually we come to agree with them and commit actions of sin. St. Paul tells us to take every thought captive. Today we talk about...

In order to understand the Kingdom of God made manifest through our Lord Jesus Christ and established on the earth as it is in heaven, we must begin by look at our Lord's Creation and ordering of all things. He did so in order that He might share Himself with us and that we might experience Him both in fellowship and through all that He had created. In this session, we focus on the first words of...

October 10, 2021 - The definition of sin in the Orthodox Faith is falling short of that Nature of God. There are many ways we sin by this falling short and there are distinct stages that pave the way for sin in our lives. Today we have a look at these stages so that we can better recognize them. If we can do this, we can live a life of repentance in the earlier stages that bring about sin. And, if...

The creation and re-creation of all things by God makes manifest to us Who God is and all that He has done. In the beginning all of creation was permeated and filled with the Divine life of God. God created the material and the immaterial in His marvelous act of creation. This same God is the God Who reveals Himself to all and through all. This revelation of God is the starting point to our experi...

October 3, 2021 - Today we hear of Christ healing the ten lepers from the Gospel of St. Luke 17. After the ten are healed only one, the Samaritan, returns to Christ to offer Him praise and glorify Him for healing his disease and releasing him from shame. Jesus looks at Him and says, "Your faith has saved you." Why did He return? The answer to this shows us the faith that saves us all. That faith i...

If you want to know what the Christian existence is to be like, indeed what the experience of God and His Kingdom in our lives is there to be had, then look no further than Jesus' prayer for us in the Gospel of St. John 17 just before His Passion. He prays, "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, jus...

September 26, 2021 - When the Hebrew Lawyer asked Jesus "Who is my neighbor?", Jesus responds by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, according to the Church Fathers, the Good Samaritan is none other than Christ our God. The Inn that He brings the broken and wounded man into is His Church. We see in this timeless parable the wonder that Christ our God has indeed shared His m...

St. Paul says in Romans 12 that we are not to be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The patterns of this world lead us to experience a two-story reality regarding the Kingdom of God. We live on the first floor while God and His Kingdom exist on the second floor as if God is not everywhere present and filling all things. For us to experience th...