They gladly went down and began digging. Excited to know that not only were they improving each other’s lot, but also the lives of so many others who might have been struggling like they had.

Who will roll the stone away from our hearts?

They found the kind of courage where they had so much love for God, that they resolved to stick by Him and to offer of themselves to Him, no matter what the circumstances.

On Thomas Sunday, it’s an odd scene in the Gospel reading (John 20:19-31). After Christ’s joyous resurrection…after His conquering of death by death…the disciples spend the end of Easter Sunday hiding behind locked doors.  What gives?

“Today is the summary of our salvation!” Those are the very first words in the Apolytikion hymn for today’s Great Feast of the Annunciation. “Today is the summary of our salvation…and the revelation of the age-old mystery.” Well…what is this mystery that’s being revealed to us- today... …this age-old mystery? 

The world has done its best to convince us that fleshly pleasures bring us happiness and that sin has no consequence.  The world (who thinks that sin is a made-up legal problem instead of something that steals life from us) says, it’s not really sin if it gives you pleasure…if it makes you happy!  However, this Saint, who had a salacious beginning, challenges us to take a more realistic look at these things and at ourselves. 

Both, our Gospel reading this morning (Mark 9:17-31) and the icon of St John’s Ladder of Divine Ascent draws our attention to something that we should really come to grips with at this point in Lent. Our belief in God is much more fragile for us broken human beings than we often realize…and yet, in spite of this, there’s enormous hope in the promise that we can still find salvation through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

A few years ago, when Presvytera and I lived in Arizona, we moved into a house whose backyard had a conspicuously bare patch of ground. Nothing ever grew there. The Arizona desert is famous for illustrating every imaginable shade of brown. So, as I began to make good use of our back yard for grilling and entertaining guests, it wasn’t long before I was longing to see some color on that bare patch of desert soil.

This Sunday marks the crux of Lent…the midpoint of these 40 days. Here, our mother, the Church, offers to us The Cross to meditate upon, “to strengthen and refresh us.” But, a cross is a strange symbol from which to gain such reinforcement.  Why would we believe that this implement of death could so strengthen us? Is there more to this symbol of the cross than we may realize?

This Sunday’s Gospel Reading is an excerpt from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”, where He also said some crazy sounding things to make a similar kind of point about the upside-down world we live in, like “Love your enemies.”

At the Blessing of the Waters, in one of the beginning prayers by the priest, the tone is set with these words, “Lord Jesus Christ, only-begotten Son…Light from Light, who came into the world to enlighten it, flood our mind with light by your Holy Spirit…”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … Through Him all things were made, and nothing was made without Him.   In Him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind. … The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.”

This Sunday, as we continue to make our way closer to the birth of Christ, the Church commemorates the Three Holy Youths, Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego (Ananias, Azarias, & Misail)…and also the Prophet Daniel (Baltazar), who went from testing to testimony.  

Lots of people think that St. Nicholas is just another name for Santa Claus, but it’s not. If you want to know the truth, it’s a lot more fun learning the story of the real St. Nicholas, whose feast day is December 6th.

It’s funny, what we’ve come to think of as “the first Thanksgiving.” Although it’s historically fabricated, many of us were brought up to envision an idyllic scene from the autumn of 1621. As the story goes, friendly local Native Americans had swooped in to teach the starving English Pilgrim Colonists how to survive.

The Gospel of Luke presents the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of God's prophesies and promises…giving a nod to the Jewish Temple—showing Christ as the fulfillment of its practices.