And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. (Acts 6:5) These were the first deacons of the church. Stephen was a deacon in the original sense of the word. He served, he ministered …
The Divine Child
A sermon by my beloved professor of liturgical theology, Father Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory: The Divine Child. Fr. Schmemann was a remarkable teacher, a true visionary, an advocate of genuine Orthodoxy rather than the false, pretentious versions that are on the increase, especially in North America. He worked tirelessly for ecclesiastical unity, but his …
The Difference a Sigma Makes
I got a bit of a shock tonight during the Liturgy of December 24th. The Gospel reading was the nativity narrative from Luke 2:1-20. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese has been using the Revised Standard Version of the Bible for several decades now, and so do several other Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States. Usually that's not a problem, and …
Our Genealogy
Every year on the Sunday Before Christmas we read the genealogy of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew. It's our annual exercise in getting through a long list of tongue-twisting names, but I look forward to it. I love reading these names. And, as the great Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown asserted, this genealogy contains …
The Rules of the Game
As almost always when reading the Gospels, context is everything! It is easy to take today's Gospel reading, the Parable of the Great Banquet, as a moralistic lesson about getting into heaven; or as a rejection of the Jewish people, in that racist and anti-Semitic interpretation that has been popular through most of Christian history and continues to endure in …
