Eastern Christian Insights

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent

If we have embraced the spiritual practices of Lent with any level of integrity for the last few weeks, the weakness of our faith has surely become apparent to us.

Homily for the Second Sunday of Great Lent

We will misunderstand these blessed weeks of Lent if we assume that they are about helping us to have clearer ideas or deeper feelings about our Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection. We will be even more confused if we think that our intensified prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and repentance somehow earn God’s forgiveness or make us better than other people. Quite the contrary, Lenten disciples are simply opportunities to open our souls to the gracious healing of our Lord so that we may share m...

The Adoration of the Holy Cross

We do not have to look very closely at dominant trends in our culture today for signs that many people are offering their lives for the service of false gods, regardless of how they identify themselves religiously. The evidence of their idolatry is not primarily in where they congregate to worship, but in how they seek first the things of this world, such as possessions, power, and pleasure, and in how they hate and condemn those whom they perceive to stand in the way of their acquiring them.

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent (The Sunday of Orthodoxy)

On this first Sunday of Great Lent, we commemorate the restoration of icons centuries ago in the Byzantine Empire. They were banned due to a misguided fear of idolatry, but restored as a proclamation of how Christ calls us to participate in His salvation in every dimension of our existence.

Homily for the Sunday of the Prodigal Son

The themes of exile and return are prominent throughout the entire narrative of the Bible. Adam and Eve were cast out of Paradise. The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt until Moses led them back to the Promised Land. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah went into exile in Assyria and Babylon, respectively, with only Judah returning home. The Jews endured a kind of exile when the Romans occupied their land and longed for restoration through a new King David. Our Lord provided the true restoratio...

Homily for the Sunday of Forgiveness in the Orthodox Church

On the last several Sundays, our gospel readings have challenged us to return home from our self-imposed exile. Zacchaeus gave more than justice required to the poor and those whom he had exploited from his ill-gotten gains, and was restored as a son of Abraham. By her persistence and humility, the Canaanite woman received the deliverance of her daughter as a sign that Christ calls all people to return home to Him in faith. The publican returned to his spiritual home by humbly calling for ...

God Resists the Proud, But Gives Grace to the Humble

Today we begin the Lenten Triodion, the three-week period of preparation for the spiritual journey that prepares us to follow Christ to His Cross and victory over death at Pascha. The first step in our preparation is to remember that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” (Jas. 4:6) Today the Church reminds us of how easy it is to distort the spiritual disciplines of Lent in a fashion that makes them nothing but hindrances to the healing of our souls. Today we are warned tha...

Holiness Requires Humility and Persistence

Unless we are very careful, it is easy to fall prey to the temptation of defining holiness in ways that serve our preconceived notions, which may have very little to do with finding the healing of our souls by sharing more fully in the life of the Savior by grace. We often see righteousness through the lens of our own sensibilities about worldly divisions and disputes in ways that have more to do with serving our own passions than with serving the Lord. Today’s Scripture readings challenge ...

If We Do Not Invest Ourselves In the Life of the Kingdom, We Risk Losing Our Souls

It is easy to overlook how often the Lord used money and possessions to convey a spiritual message. Perhaps that is because almost everyone struggles with being overly attached to material things, for they can meet our basic physical needs and provide comfort and a sense of security. Due to our self-centered desires, however, they so easily become false gods as we make them the measure of our lives. As Christ taught, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also….You cannot serve ...

It Is Only Because of the Light that We Can See the Darkness

We remain in a period of preparation to behold Christ at His appearing. The One born at Christmas and baptized at Theophany is brought by the Theotokos and St. Joseph the Betrothed to the Temple in Jerusalem as a 40-day old Infant in fulfillment of the Old Testament law, which we will celebrate later this week at the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlig...

Offering Ourselves to God and Neighbor like Zacchaeus

Today we continue to celebrate the Presentation of Christ, forty days after His birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Theotokos and St. Joseph bring the young Savior there in compliance with the Old Testament law, making the offering of a poor family, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.” The...

Offering Ourselves to God and Neighbor like Zacchaeus

Today we continue to celebrate the Presentation of Christ, forty days after His birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Theotokos and St. Joseph bring the young Savior there in compliance with the Old Testament law, making the offering of a poor family, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.” The...

Obedience and Gratitude

During the season of Christmas, we celebrated the Nativity in the flesh of the Savior. Born as truly one of us, He is the New Adam Who restores and fulfills us as living icons of God. During the season of Theophany, we celebrated the revelation of His divinity as a Person of the Holy Trinity at His baptism, where the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove. Christ has appeared in the waters of the Jordan, blessing the entir...

Homily for the Sunday Before the Theophany (Epiphany) of Christ in the Orthodox Church

Today is the Sunday before the Feast of Theophany (or Epiphany), when we celebrate Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan and the revelation that He is truly the Son of God. His divinity is made manifest and openly displayed at His baptism when the voice of the Father declares, “You are my beloved Son” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove. Theophany shows us that Jesus Christ, who was born in the flesh for our salvation at Christmas, is not merely a great religious teac...

Are We Looking for a Kingdom Not Like the Other Nations?

As we conclude our preparation for celebrating the Lord’s Nativity, we must resist the temptation to corrupt this blessed season into an excuse for glorifying ourselves in any way. Instead, we must allow our hopes for whatever we want in this life to be called into question by the God-Man, Who was born in such strange circumstances to fulfill a kingdom not of this world that stands in prophetic judgment over all our agendas, preferences, and desires. We must learn at Christmas to hope only i...

Christ Comes to Free Us All from Our Infirmities

When Jesus Christ was teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath, he saw a woman who was bent over and could not straighten up. She had been that way for eighteen years. The Lord said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity.” When He laid hands on her, she was healed. When the woman stood up straight again, she glorified God. As was often the case when the Savior healed on the Sabbath day, there were religious leaders eager to criticize Him for working on the legally mandated day of...

Homily for the Sunday of Forefathers (Ancestors) of Christ in the Orthodox Church

As we welcome Christ into our lives and world at His Nativity, we must remain focused. There is no shortage of distractions this time of year that appeal to our passions and threaten to convince us that there are matters more important than accepting His gracious invitation to enter fully into the joy of the banquet of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Savior calls us to embrace our true vocation not only during divine services or in the eschatological future, but in every moment of our lives.

We Must Open Our Eyes to the Light of Christ in Order to Prepare for Christmas

On the last couple of Sundays, our gospel readings have reminded us what not to do if we want to prepare to welcome Christ into our lives and world at His Nativity. The rich fool was so focused on money and possessions that he completely neglected the state of his soul. The rich young ruler walked away in sadness when it became clear that he loved his wealth more than God and neighbor. The weeks before Christmas are the most commercialized time of the year when we are all bombarded with me...

Preparing to Welcome Christ with Joy Through Humility

As we continue to prepare to welcome Christ at His Nativity, we must keep our focus on becoming like those who first received Him with joy. That includes the Theotokos, whose Entrance into the Temple, where she prepared to become His Living Temple, we celebrated last week. That includes unlikely characters like the Persian astrologers or wise men, certainly Gentiles, who traveled such a long distance to worship Him. What better news could there have been than that the Prince of Peace was c...

Entrusting Ourselves to Christ with Truly Humble Faith

It is worth asking what we want to achieve by practicing our faith. Why do we come to church, pray, fast, give to the needy, forgive our enemies, confess our sins, and otherwise struggle to reorient our lives toward God? Perhaps we do these things because we want to put God in our debt so that He will do our will. Maybe we want to become socially respectable, making ourselves look virtuous in our own eyes and in those of our neighbors. It could also be the case that we want to distinguish...

Those Who Have Received Christ's Merciful Generosity Must "Go and Do Likewise"

It is terribly tragic when people fall into the delusion of thinking that they love God and neighbor, when in reality they are using religion to serve only themselves and the false gods of this world. One symptom of doing so is to narrow down the list of people who count as our neighbors to the point that we excuse ourselves from serving Christ in all who bear His image and likeness. When we do so, we disregard not only them, but our Lord Himself, the God-Man born for the salvation of all. ...

Loving Our Neighbors More than Our Money is Part of Being "A New Creation"

There is perhaps no more powerful example of our need for Christ’s healing of our souls than that contained in today’s gospel reading. A rich man with the benefit of the great spiritual heritage of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets had become such a slave to gratifying his desires for indulgence in pleasure that he had become completely blind to his responsibility to show mercy to Lazarus, a miserable beggar who wanted only crumbs and whose only comfort was when dogs licked his open sores. T...

Becoming a Human Person Fully Alive to the Glory of God

St. Irenaeus wrote that “The glory of God is a man fully alive, and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Adv. haer. 4.20.7).” To be a human person is to bear the image of God with the calling to become more like Him in holiness. The more we do so, the more we become our true selves. The God-Man Jesus Christ came to restore and fulfill us as living icons of God. He enables us to become truly human as we participate personally in Him as the Second Adam. As St. Paul wrote, “For all t...

Bearing the Good Fruits of Peace for the Living Icons of God

In the midst of the ongoing tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land, we must attend to the wisdom of our father in Christ, His Beatitude Patriarch John X of Antioch, who stated this week that “Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace…” He w...

We Must Learn to Mourn and Rejoice with the Widow of Nain

I am sure that many people today reject or have no interest in the Christian faith because they have not seen in others the healing of the human person brought by Jesus Christ. Perhaps they have heard Christians speaking primarily about morality, politics, emotion, or a view of salvation that has nothing to do with the realities of life in the world as we know it. Or they may have seen many examples of hypocrisy on the part of those who identify themselves with the Lord, but who live their ...

The Patient Obedience of Letting Down our Nets

Looking to the example of the great saints we commemorate today, as well as to the model of those holy fishermen, let us repudiate the superficial, self-centered tendencies celebrated by our culture and undertake the daily struggle of obedience to Christ. That means letting down our nets in obedience at every opportunity as we cry out for His merciful healing of our souls. That is the holy habit that we must all cultivate if we want to become worthy disciples of the Savior.

Taking Up the Cross is Very Different from Trying to Use the Cross to Get What We Want

In order to take up our crosses, we must choose to embrace the struggle of dying to our vain illusions about ourselves and our world. Our hope is not in spiritual or moral perfection acquired merely by our own willpower, but in the gracious mercy of the One Who offered up Himself for our salvation purely out of love.

Good Tenants of the Lord’s Vineyard Do Not Hoard the Fruit for Themselves

By faith in Christ, we have become the new tenants of the vineyard with an obligation to “give him the fruits in their seasons.” That, of course, is precisely what the original tenants refused to do. Instead of tending the vineyard and offering its fruit to their rightful owner, they wanted everything for themselves and even killed the son of the owner in order to take his inheritance. We must read this passage as a reminder that, in order to be good tenants of the Lord’s vineyard, we must...

“With God All Things Are Possible” for Those Who Take Up the Struggle

St. Basil the Great, who gave away his great wealth to found philanthropic ministries for the sick and needy, taught that the Lord’s strict words to this man revealed his lack of love for his neighbors. Basil wrote that “Those who love their neighbors as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbor; yet surely, you seem to have great possessions! How else can this be, but that you have preferred your own enjoyment to the consolation of the many…For the more you abound in wealth, the ...

It Takes Humility to Forgive as We Have Been Forgiven

If we dare to call upon God’s forgiveness for our sins, we will condemn only ourselves as hypocrites when we refuse to forgive others.

Transfiguration in Holiness Through Faith, Prayer, and Fasting

Today we conclude our commemoration of the Lord’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, when the spiritual eyes of Peter, James, and John were opened to behold His divine glory and they heard the voice of the Father say, “This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!” (Mk. 9:7)

To Behold the Glory of the Lord, We Must Be Transfigured in Holiness

We have all had the experience of suddenly perceiving a truth that we had previously not grasped. There are times when the fog lifts, the lights come on, and what was opaque or out of focus becomes clear. That is precisely what the apostles Peter, James, and John experienced on Mount Tabor when they were enabled to behold the divine glory of Jesus Christ, Who shone brightly with light as the voice of the Father identified Him as His beloved Son.

We Must Live Eucharistically in Order to “Give Them Something to Eat”

By miraculously satisfying so many with so little, Christ revealed what it means for us to live eucharistically as we offer ourselves and our resources for the fulfillment of His gracious purposes for the world and all its inhabitants.

How We See and Speak Reveals the True State of our Souls

Like the men in today’s gospel reading, we all need the healing of the Lord for our eyes, our mouths, and every aspect of who we are.

Becoming “All Flame” Through the God-Man

There is a temptation in pursuing the Christian life to think that we are more faithful than we actually are because we have confused lesser goals for our true calling. Then we can pat ourselves on the back for achieving far less than what the God-Man has made possible for us as “partakers of the divine nature.”

The Shocking Response of Christ to the Humble Faith of the Centurion

Though it was commonly overlooked at the time, God’s promises to Abraham were for the blessing of all the nations. They have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ such that all with faith in Him are now rightful heirs. (Gen. 22:18; Gal. 3:8-9)

Fishers of Men

Becoming Receptive to the Light of Christ Through Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving

The spiritual disciplines of the Apostles Fast provide us all with opportunities to clarify our spiritual vision and gain the strength to see all the blessings of this life as gifts to be offered to God.

To Become Holy Is to be Healed

Everyone who shares in the blessed life of the Savior does so through their participation in His grace, not merely as a reward for good behavior.

Becoming Persons in Communion with God and One Another by the Holy Spirit

Today we celebrate the restoration of our true unity in God through the unifying power of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter sent by the risen and ascended Savior Who is seated at the right hand of the Father in heavenly glory.

The Joy of the Resurrection Overcomes All Human Divisions

Christ said, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” No one else would have looked at Photini and seen a future saint who would shine with the light of holiness.

Obedience to the Risen Lord Overcomes the Paralysis of our Souls

The plight of the paralyzed man shows us the common condition of fallen humanity. None of us took the initiative in bringing salvation to the world and this fellow did not ask Christ to help him or even know His name. The Lord graciously reached out to him, nonetheless, asking the seemingly obvious question, “Do you want to be healed?” The Savior’s words should challenge each of us because we often become so comfortable with our weaknesses, desires, and habits that we do not think that we ...

Entering into the Joy of the Resurrection Through Selfless Service, not Self-Centered Calculation

The devotion of the Myrrh-Bearers, Joseph, and Nicodemus shows us what true faith looks like, and it has nothing to do with figuring out how to use God to help us get what we want on our own terms in a pathetic attempt to distract ourselves from the fear of death.

Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen!

In order to follow our Risen Lord into the joy of the resurrection, we must open our deepest personal struggles and wounds to Him for healing.

The Mystery of Self-Emptying Divine Love Beyond our Comprehension

Holy Week is not a time for rational theological speculation and argument. It is, instead, a time for entering into the deep mystery of the love of our Lord, of the great “I AM” Who remains infinitely beyond our full comprehension.

Taking Up Our Crosses Takes Time

Like St. Mary of Egypt, let us refuse to let anything keep us from confronting our personal brokenness with brutal honesty as we take up our own crosses in faithfulness to the Savior Who offered up Himself on the Cross for the salvation of the world. He alone is our hope and the Victor over death.

Growing in Prayer, Fasting, and Brutally Honest Faith This Lent

Through the many struggles of this season of Lent, we all have the opportunity to grow in the faith necessary to entrust ourselves more fully to Christ.

We Will Either Take Up Our Crosses or Commit Idolatry

If we refuse to deny ourselves even in small ways this Lent, then we will become even more accustomed to serving ourselves instead of God and neighbor.

Lent is About Nothing Less Than Knowing God from the Depths of our Hearts

Lent does not call us merely to think or have feelings about our Lord’s Cross and resurrection. This season invites us to grow in our personal knowledge and experience of the Savior Who offered Himself on the Cross and rose in glory on the third day for our salvation.

Seeing Heaven Opened as Living Icons of Christ

The disciplines of this season give us all countless opportunities to do precisely that as we prepare for nothing less than to “see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”