There are times when the pairings of the readings for any given Sunday seem peculiar and a reasonable person looking at them from the outside may wonder “Why are this Epistle and Gospel together?” “What’s the point?” And those questions themselves speak to something important about our Orthodox Faith. In Orthodox Christianity questions are not a sign of a lack of faith but rather an invitation to look deeper, into ourselves, our world, and that which we believe.

Our Faith has existed for over 2000 years and during that time its been scrutinized, analyzed, probed, challenged, and examined by its adherents and opponents, the curious and controversialists. We’ve done okay. We’re still here. And in all that time its probable the questions you may be struggling with have already been addressed.

Its important to know, as well, that the existence of questions shows you’re engaged with your Faith, that what you believe is valuable enough to you to ponder. Questions indicate a lively faith. You should be reading the texts, learning about your religion, examining the evidence, and seeking to work through questions to new insights. Every Orthodox should have a healthy curiosity about their Faith, their Church, and how what they believe impacts their lives. Someone once said “If you don’t ask you’ll never know” and this is especially true when it comes to your Faith.

Even the hard questions, those birthed within us in a time of tragedy and suffering, demonstrate faith. If one reads the stories of the Saints we see people who are often engaged in profound struggle with themselves, with God, and the world around them. In fact these struggles were often the arena where their holiness was formed, the precursor to the glory they experienced. Questions are part of theosis.

In that light what do these texts have in common? What theme may unite them and why did the Church link these over the centuries?

If you notice you’ll see a theme of exile in both. St. Paul receives the revelation of God and then finds himself in exile in Arabia safely awaiting the moment when the main act of his ministry is to begin. In the Gospel St. Joseph receives a call from God to take the child Jesus to exile in Egypt, a time of waiting and safety in anticipation of what this child would bring in the future.

This is a common theme of the Scriptures, the idea that before we engage in the work we are called to do God takes us to a place of exile, rest, and safety where we can learn, grow, and prepare. Moses, before he stood in the presence of Pharaoh, had his time in the wilderness as a shepherd. Elizabeth waited in years of barrenness before the birth of her son, John the Forerunner. The disciples of Christ walked with Him for three years before they were released to the world.

God has a call on each of our lives, a call on our church, things we must do, a purpose to fulfill. But often before the full flowering of that time there is a time of exile, a time when the purpose becomes clear, vision becomes focused, and everything extraneous is sloughed away. The time of exile, far from being a time of passivity and weakness, is actually a time when God is transforming us in preparation for what will be.

Now ponder this in the context of your own life and the life of this parish and you’ll begin to understand.

Looks like another 3-5 inches of snow for LaCrosse tonight and Sunday.

Oh well!

While the pro-life cause welcomes, and has been greatly bolstered by, the support of many distinguished intellectuals, the same is not true of the pro-choice movement. On the contrary, intellectuals who share their policy preferences are always raising inconvenient questions about the intellectual coherence of arguments advanced in favor of the unlimited abortion license…

Read it all here.

It has been said that information is power and in that light I would like to recommend the www site of Dr. Robert Gagnon, a Professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. The site itself is not particularly well designed, (lots of ads and kind of hard to look at), but the information presented on the Bible and sexuality is worth the visit and the site should be bookmarked by Christians seeking to understand these issues.

In recent years there have been many attempts, sadly, by Christian clerics and even hierarchs to distort the teachings of Scripture regarding sexuality and argue for an ethic of permissiveness by dramatically misinterpreting the texts to support their arguments. Unfortunately people of traditional and historic faith are often overwhelmed by these arguments because the person conveys the authority of their office and appears to be intelligent. Dr. Gagnon is a scholar, familiar with the original languages and cultures, whose special area of focus has been the Scriptures and sexuality. His material is generally easy to read and thoroughly supports the historic understandings of Christian texts in the area of sexuality.

A special feature is the availability of many of his works in PDF format which you may save and copy for your own use and to help you not be overwhelmed when the nice man in the collar and a business card full of initials wants to convince you that it doesn’t say what it really says. Although Dr. Gagnon is not Orthodox he is certainly “orthodox” in his understanding of Scripture and sexuality and I recommend his work as a valuable aid not only to help Orthodox Christians get into the Scriptures, which they should always be doing, but also to provide valuable information on these hot topic issues from a historic/traditional perspective.

I wish all of you a very blessed Nativity!

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!

In this most recent storm the good folks in Seattle’s government have decided not to use salt and other chemicals on the road because they don’t want to have some of it end up in Puget Sound. The result has been impassible streets and police vehicles unable to navigate in certain areas.

My only suggestion is that sometimes the people on the coasts might want to check in with us folks in “fly over country” about how we deal with snow because unlike Seattle, we get a lot of it and know how to handle it. In our neck of the woods, a blue as can be state with a long history of environmentalism and lots of fresh water lakes, we use salt and sand and plow down to the pavement whenever we can. We figured out a long time ago that this was safer and more effective then waiting for the stuff to melt, which in our case means waiting for April, or using snow tires and chains which can, by constant use, beat up the roads. Quality of life is irrelevant if you’re stuck in your house for a week or the ambulance crew can’t get to you because the city is afraid some salt might get into the salt water.

We may be rubes out here in the middle of the country but at least I could, despite about a foot of snow in the last week or so, drive over to Caribou and get a coffee.

Winter has just barely begun and I’m already feeling washed out and snowed under. My clothes smell like snowblower and the cold has settled into my bones. When I was a child this all was part of the fun, the snow, the season, the anticipation, and the ambience of it all. All I can say is that I’m not a child anymore.

The world and I have aged and grown cynical together, buried in the details, counting the cost, worried about the future. It’s the great sorrow of growing older; you can stay up as late as you want and buy a car with your signature but you learn too much as well: Too much about life, too much about the reality of the human condition, too much about how things really are, too much about yourself.

Early on we learn to pretend, talking about life, where we are, who we are, and everything else with the practiced happiness that comes when we get a really bad sweater for Christmas. We do our part to keep up appearances and take one for the team all the while hoping that somewhere along the line we get a taste of the real thing, a moment or two when we are who were supposed to be, when the joy is real, and our hearts are alive.

Such is life in the frosty white broken world of these times. The sad truth is that its been that way since the first swallow of Eden’s fruit. We who were born to shine like the sun have few moments when we live as we were intended; the joyful creation of the maker of the universe. More often we pass through life as a mixture of thoughts, actions, hopes, dreams, struggle, and the nagging sense there is more just beyond our grasp.

And I want it back, that kind of primal innocence, the sense of meaning in the world, the joy of life. I want to possess what has always seemed to elude me. I desire to be somewhere in time before trees and snakes and walk with my Maker in the cool of a summer night. I’m weary of my brokenness. I tire of my frailty. I am exhausted by the restlessness of my spirit.

I must travel, not in the wanderings of life carried by the winds of fate, but directly, with intention, with perseverance, undistracted. No matter how the world as it is shouts at me, discourages me, or attempts to turn me to this side or that I must follow that star and travel straight on until morning. I must see Bethlehem in my heart and when I get there I will stand with the shepherds and see this great thing, this birth, this Christ that has come into a cold dark world so that nothing, and no one, will ever be the same again.

Then I will rest for as long as it takes, forever even, and my soul will be quiet, my innocence returned, and my heart released to live where no winter, of body or soul, can ever settle and the child I was meant to be fills even the oldest frame.

Our culture is, at the present, comprised of a very large majority of spectator consumers watching, judging, appraising, and observing a handful of people who actually do something. But no positive change will come until people, especially Christians, reverse this.

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Read the rest of the article here…