Sermons

Everything is turned upside down on Christmas day. Everything the world loves is rejected. Everything heaven loves is cherished. Yesterday, we celebrated the birth of our Savior. Today, we celebrate the martyrdom of his soldier. The Church honors the death of St. Stephen on the second day of Christmas. It is an effort to shake us up. Christ is born. Our heart must be fixed on paradise. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it

“Advent creates people, new people.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer December of 1943, this young pastor experienced Advent in a unique way. He wrote these words in a letter, written in the weeks preceding Christmas, in his Nazi prison cell. He discovered there what Advent truly is, a time of waiting in the dark, waiting for freedom, for new life, for the birth of hope. These words struck me when I read them. How does Advent create new people? In what manner should I be a new man on Ch

First buy your Calvins, then pay the rent. It was the 1980s — new fashions, new hairstyles, and new rock. In her Calvin Klein commercial, Brooke Shield’s best summed up the spirit of the times: “Whenever I get some money, I buy Calvins. And if there’s any left, I pay the rent.” Luxuries come first, obligation comes second. For decades now, the priorities in our culture have become scrambled up and backwards. Today, the healing so needed in our souls will only happen if we rea

"When the man of pure heart looks at the World of Nature…at the sky, the earth, and the sea…[the] multitudes of birds...every kind of animal...the variety of plants on it, the abundance of fish in the sea...he is immediately amazed and exclaims with the Prophet David: 'How great are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom Thou made them all’” (St. Nektarios of Aegina). My grandmother had the gift of seeing. I do not mean she was prophetic or that she got by without glasses. She could sp