Translating the Tradition

In today’s Gospel reading, we have a principle, a command that we all know, and we all know it super well: “Do as you would be done by.” The Golden Rule, right? And so I want to use the classic fantasy technique of defamiliarization today, and tell you a story. More specifically, a Minecraft story. You may not know this, but in addition to being a priest and a teacher, I am also a Minecraft server...

In honour of my son Simon’s beautiful post “ The Mistake of True Love ”, which references another one of my recent wedding homilies, I’m re-issuing this, perhaps my all-time favourite wedding homily, releasing it for the first time here on Substack. Mawidge. Mawidge is what bwings us togever today. So begins the homily of the impressive clergyman in that classic movie, The Princess Bride . The Pri...

We are given, in the modern world, a great many different definitions of success. We might define success as getting straight A’s in high school and university. Or we might define success as getting a really good job by the age of 25. Or we might define success as having so many YouTube followers by this point in your YouTube career. Or whatever — we have a lot of different ones. They all tend to...

I want to do things a little differently today. Instead of a three-point sermon, I have three mini-sermons. They’re not exactly connected to each other, except by the day. But I want to preface my remarks by saying that I hope they are all genuinely practical — because one of the things that has struck me after almost 30 years of being Orthodox is that it’s really not about the theology. Now don’t...

So we’re all gathered here for the great feast of the Dormition, which of course commemorates the falling asleep of the Mother of God. And I want to begin by looking today at the epistle reading that we just heard. The epistle reading is, of course, about Jesus. Let this mind be in you, which is also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,...

When I think of the great feast of the Transfiguration, I always think about encouragement. This feast above all — well, I guess Pascha is the most encouraging; Pascha is off the charts — but this feast really seems to be focused on encouragement. You hear it even in the hymnography: one of the reasons Christ went up on Mount Tabor at this point was to encourage his disciples, so that as they knew...

More than 20 years ago now, in the summer of 2005, a young priest who was kind of wet behind the ears, fresh out of seminary, worked with his mentor to determine that they should probably have a new mission in the major city in the area. And so the beginning of that new mission was to establish who would be actually willing to go out on a limb, leave the comfort of the large mother church, and go...

Today, as we got to induct a new catechumen, I got to say one of my favorite lines — addressed to Satan — saying: “Call to mind him who commanded you to enter into the herd of swine,” and “your power, which has not power even over swine.” And we got to hear the Gospel reading that talks about exactly that. This passage comes up fairly frequently in the Sunday readings, and I wonder if it’s because...

Today we are celebrating the great feast of St. Peter and Paul in anticipation, since it’s actually tomorrow. Given that, and given the content of the daily Gospel we just heard, I want to speak to you about authority. Authority is not a particularly popular topic in our society. In fact, we’re almost trained to have a rebellious attitude toward it. This goes all the way back to my childhood — the...

We were blessed to have Reader James Mullin, our local expert in the Celtic saints, give the homily on the feast-day of All Saints of Britain and Ireland: The Scriptures say, “Be still and know that I am God.” The Scriptures also say, “In repentance and rest is your salvation; in quietness and trust is your strength.” Today I find it ironic that I want to talk about a wonderful, holy Christian vir...

“Little children, love one another.” These were the words of the Apostle John when he was too feeble and old to say anything else to his flock. All he would say to them was, simply: “Little children, love one another.” Last night, as we were listening to the readings at Vespers, we read the epistle readings for the Holy Apostle Simon the Zealot, whose feast day is celebrated today. It was a mistak...

We were blessed, today, to have Fr. Nathanael, one of the founding members of St. John’s, with us. Here is his homily on the Gospel for today. Our Gospel reading today was a composite one. The first part is the commemoration of the paralytic, where Christ heals a paralyzed man at the pools of Bethesda. Now, like all the Gospel readings, this is a treasure chest full of jewels. All I’m going to do...

It was finished. Or rather, Jesus’ work was finished — but his body was still hanging on the cross. His spirit had gone from it, but his body was still there. The body is something fundamentally important in our tradition. We often think of the Greeks as the ones who celebrated the human body — you see all those beautiful sculptures — and assume the Jews dismissed it. But not at all. The Jews trea...

So tonight, as we approach the end of Great Lent and move toward Lazarus Saturday, the story given to us from Genesis to meditate upon is the end of the story of Joseph. It’s an amazing story — it takes up a big chunk of Genesis, actually. And nothing in it is more amazing than this concluding statement which Joseph makes to his brothers as he reveals himself to them and realizes just how scared t...

So we’re getting to the end of Great Lent, and the Church gives us, on this Sunday, St. Mary of Egypt to think about. I won’t go through the whole of the story of St. Mary of Egypt , but just very briefly, St. Mary was very much not a saint at the beginning of her life. But the story actually doesn’t begin with her. It begins with Elder Zosima, who was a very righteous young man. He lived in the m...

So on this Wednesday of Great Lent, we’re given the story of Noah just after the flood to meditate on. The story is about the first recorded sin after the flood. Noah and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth come out of the ark, and God blesses them. It then notes that Ham was the father of Canaan, and these three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated. You have a brand new...

There’s supposedly an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Well, apparently we’ve all been cursed. People are concerned. Some are worried that Islam is encroaching on our civilization. Some are concerned that with the continual elevation of the culture wars, civil war may not be far off. We’ve been through a pretty weird time with sickness. These are interesting times. If yo...

Those of you who have been coming to St. John’s for a while will know that the Sunday of the Last Judgment and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus are my two least favourite passages on which to preach. Because this is a warning. We are coming to the edge of Lent, and we are deliberately given this passage to contemplate, the passage where Jesus talks about the Last Judgment. And we have to ap...

We spend a lot of our lives waiting. And it can be really tough. We’re waiting for justice. We’re waiting for, I don’t know, an appointment at ICBC or something like that. We’re waiting for the fruition of some sort of hope. And what we see in the Gospel reading today is, well, a lot of waiting. It begins, of course, with Mary and Joseph. Mary has been waiting 40 days. She’s had a firstborn son un...

As an experiment, I thought I’d try getting Google’s NotebookLM AI to summarize my sermon, and I was rather impressed with the following (lightly edited) results: In his sermon for Zacchaeus Sunday, Fr. Justin explains that as Lent approaches, we must reflect on the “gifts galore” and spiritual talents we have received from God. He observes that like the tax collector Zacchaeus, humans often squan...

So in today’s Gospel reading, our Lord is approaching Jericho, and there’s a blind man sitting by the side of the road. He’s begging, because if you’re blind in those days, they didn’t have a lot of alternative support for you. And so the basic way that you got by was you sat and you asked people for help. And so that’s what this man was doing. He hears this large crowd going by. And he asks, “Wha...

As we’ve been going through Father Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World , one of the things that Father Schmemann is very careful to point out is this dichotomy that we human beings naturally fall into: we have the spiritual, which is up there, and then the physical, the ordinary, the mundane, which is down here, and we kind of have an almost “never the twain shall meet” attitude. The t...

So today, as we get ready for the great Feast of Theophany, we begin with the beginning of the gospel of Mark. And the gospel of Mark begins with prophecy. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophets, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you. The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of t...

Somewhat similar to the pattern that we see at Pascha (and, indeed, Christmas is for us in many respects a mini Pascha—you’ll notice I’m wearing white), the Sunday after the great feast, we have a bit of a downer in terms of the Gospel reading. After Pascha, of course, we have the great and glorious joy of Pascha, and then we have Thomas Sunday, Doubting Thomas. This one is even more of a downer,...

Today’s homily was (for me) relatively short, so, rather than posting the transcript here (the automated version of which is already readily available), I want instead to add an addendum: “the sermon after the sermon,” as I like to call it. In both this parable and in our Lord’s rejoinder immediately preceding it, those to be invited to the feast are “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” a...