with Fr. Alban Waggener
The 12th Ch of Romans from which our epistle readings have come over the Sundays after Epiphany is the chapter of the consecrated life of the Christian disciple and the law of love.
In our portion this morning, St. Paul says we are to enter into one another’s desires and aims – not to aim at a high place or honor for ourselves, but to be content with the humble duties that come our way.
Continue reading “Reflections on the Third Sunday after Epiphany”“We are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”
We, who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, owe nothing any longer to the flesh.
The flesh, from the Greek, sarx, is synonymous in the Biblical and Patristic literature with the “world”, not the created cosmos, but the life of the passions – the world opposed to God. Continue reading “Reflections on the Eighth Sunday after Trinity”
“The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Our Orthodox Faith commits us to an Apostolic and Patristic form of Christianity. We are committed to Holy Scripture as the ultimate source of our authority for faith and life, and to the catholic consensus of the interpretation of the Scriptures of the Apostles the Fathers and the Bishops of the Church. Part of the Patristic mind has to do with the understanding of sin. For most modern Christians, sin is a matter of doing bad things, which creates a debt to God, and which somebody has to pay off. They believe that Jesus paid the debt for our sins on the Cross – paid the Father, that is, so we would no longer bear the penalty.
The Fathers of the church have a rather different understanding of Christ’s saving work. Continue reading “Reflections on the Seventh Sunday after Trinity”
BRETHREN: So many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death. Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection… Continue reading “Reflections on the Sixth Sunday after Trinity”