Translating the Tradition

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...

[The how of all that follows here is outlined in the preceding parts of the homily, in the audio recording. What follows is the conclusion of the matter:] All things are exposed or made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light. That’s what the light does. It shows things for what they truly are. It makes manifest the reality. Sometimes it’s an ugly reality, and people dislike th...

So on this joyous day of Raissa’s baptism, we have a fairly solemn Gospel reading, in which our Lord tells a parable of a certain rich man, who had lots of stuff—like too much stuff, so he didn’t have enough space for all his stuff. And he thought, “Okay, well, I need more space for all my stuff. And so I’m going to tear down my current barns and build bigger ones so I have all my stuff laid up fo...

Sources cited: from II Samuel 6:14-22: Then David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was wearing a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet. Now as the ark of the Lord came into the City of David, Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and whirling before t...

So in today’s gospel reading, we get two stories for the price of one. And these intertwined stories actually are the culmination of this particular section of the Gospel of Luke, which begins with the centurion asking Jesus to heal his servant. One of the things that runs throughout this section of the Gospel of Luke is the question, who is this man Jesus? Who is he? And as we look at this sectio...

So we come again to the story of the rich man and Lazarus, and, since I don’t really want to talk about this story, I feel like that probably means that I should talk about this story. One of the reasons I am reluctant to talk about this story is probably my upbringing. I grew up in a very conservative evangelical Christian community with lots of really nice people there. They loved Jesus. But I d...

If our starting point for love as Christians is “love your enemies”, and if our ending point is “love one another as I have loved you”, and if this is supposed to be what characterizes us as Jesus followers, this love should be the defining feature of our church. Note: The inside joke at the beginning of this homily is comes from something I have long said to my parishioners. Based what St. Jerome...

So today I want to draw our attention to one phrase from the Gospel reading, or at least focus in on that, and talk a little bit about repentance. Repentance is one of those words, of course, that we hear all the time within the church and almost never hear outside the church. And so its definition is often a little bit narrowed in our minds. Repentance in the Greek means change of mind: metanoia...