Fr. John Parker
The season of Great Lent is, to a significant degree, a return to conformity to the likeness of God, a transformation back into a human being. Having lived in the world almost a year since the last Pascha, we fall into the routines and device of what St Paul calls “the old man”. Precisely into those ways enumerated in the Prayer of St Ephraim—the facets from which we ask God to deliver us.
Father John Parker
"We all have so much to give—but we forget that it is not actually ours. Everything we have is given to us by God to be used by us to show the love of God to those who truly need it."
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Royalty, divinity, and death. These were the gifts offered as signs of the essence of Jesus Christ. As we celebrate the feast, adoring him, let us also enflesh the call of this ancient hymn and prayer:
"The Christian knows this salvation through Jesus Christ in Holy Baptism. We do not wait for the Lord to destroy us in our sins. He doesn’t desire the death of anyone—but that we would turn and live! We immerse one another in the water to drown the old man voluntarily. We arise out of the baptismal waters—waters which grant earthly death, but heavenly life—to build an altar to God called “my life”, which is given as a daily offering of thanks for salvation in the Ark of the Church."
The larger question, which seems to be the proverbial elephant in the living room, is “From where do our definitions of good and evil come?” Is the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, from above? From outside ourselves? From God? If so, how could we presume to tinker with it?
Similarly, church and state have long been linked in Russia. Perhaps it is the persistence of the double-headed eagle that Americans find so puzzling about Russia.
