Deanery 2008 Archive
July
(1) A Sermon of Metropolitan John on the occasion of the Consecration of the Holy Archangel Michael's Church, Audley, UK on Sunday, 11th August 2002.
"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
Beloved,
I greatly rejoice in seeing you again in this beautiful parish and in
the holy church. First, I would like to relay to you the blessing and
love of His Eminence, beloved brother, Metropolitan Gabriel who wishes
you all prosperity and well-being.
We meet today to consecrate this church. We offer this space to God. We
consecrate it to Him, asking for His sanctification so that we may
accomplish our "reasonable service".
As you have noticed, the service of Consecration is twofold: first,
placing the altar-table, washing it, blessing it with holy water,
anointing it with Holy Chrism, and covering it with new altar-clothes;
second, processing with the holy relics of martyred saints and placing
them in the altar-table.
We desire to offer only the best of what we have to God, a pure, chaste
and holy offering. Therefore, after we put the alter-board on the
columns, we wash it as a sign of purification. Also, we sprinkle it with
holy water to sanctify it and bless it by Divine Grace. Then we anoint
it with Holy Chrism. The holy table is the altar in front of which the
priest stands to offer the gifts in his name and in the name of the
people, so that the Holy Spirit descends upon them, sanctifying them and
sanctifying us.
Today, then, we consecrate this holy altar to the Almighty, so that we
may assemble and offer glory and thanksgiving to the Lord, humbly asking
for sanctification and grace. We declare today that the Lord is the
Master of our life, and we humble ourselves, proclaiming Him to be the
Fountain of all good, asking for His mercy and care. We also ask Him to
sanctify our life and give the world peace.
We declare today that we, as human beings, are weak. We lift up our eyes
towards heaven, realizing that our real home is above and not here.
The real cornerstone is Christ. That's why we read the Gospel passage in
which Christ asked his disciples, "Who do people say I am?" Peter
answered, "You are Christ the Son of the living God." Christ is the
alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. He is the true priest,
the One "who offers and is offered, who accepts and is distributed". And
"we commit all our life unto Christ our God."
We offer today this house and we consecrate it as God's house. In it, we
lift up our prayers and present our gifts. We also place in the
altar-table the relics of saints after the procession. We do this to
remember that the real altar of the Lord is not stone, wood, metal, or
any other material. The real altar is Man.
Every one of us desires to offer things to God. One gives money. Another
gives incense, oil, or other things to the Church. The truest and
greatest offering, however, is the offering of man himself. It is good
and beautiful to offer from our belongings to God, but what is most
beautiful is to offer all of oneself to God. It is to make one's heart a
throne of the Lord, and make one's being His abode. In this way one is
transfigured and transformed into a living altar to the Lord. For this
reason, we place holy relics in the altar to express this truth by
remembering that we ought to give all our life unto Christ. For this, we
offer the gifts on the altar of our Lord. The true altar is man who
sacrifices himself out of his love to God. We place the relics of
Hieromartyr Phocas, Bishop of Sinope, whose memory we celebrate on the
22nd of September.
I ask the holy Master to bless you, give you abundant blessings, and
make you prosper in all your doings, so that you may grow in grace and
stature for the glory of His name. May this newly consecrated church be
a house in which you gather as children of God to receive His heavenly
gifts; Him Who is blessed and glorified forever. Amen."
(2) "The Waves Keep Coming In - the Evangelical, Charismatic, Orthodox Axis" - An address given by Very Revd. Michael Harper on 27th November in Wesley House, Cambridge on the occasion of the Centenary of the coming of the Pentecostal Movement to the United Kingdom. PDF DOWNLOAD / VIEW
(3) A poem from Fr. Jonathan ...
One Thing
Luke 10:10:41 And Jesus answered and said to her ”Martha, Martha,
you are worried and troubled about many things.”
Possess your soul with patience,
Let the seasons bear their own time.
Lighten your heart with love,
Passion beats to a heavy, uncertain pulse.
Provide your mind with peace
Since idle imagination is a deadly weapon.
Still your tongue with silence
Allow the Word to speak to you.
Open your hands to offerings
Give generously and receive gracefully.
Guard your eyes with goodness
To become a pupil of Light.
Place your feet in poverty.
That you may walk in the way of the saints.
Feed your stomach with friendship
So nourishing and sustaining the lonely.
Breathe into your nostrils the air of beauty
For the Holy Spirit gives life to the canvass of creation.
Humble your ears to holiness
That you may become deaf to the whispers of pride.
Wash your skin with wisdom
Cleanse yourself from the accretions of personal opinion.
Commend your life to Christ
Be transfigured into His likeness.
Discard the superficial distractions of the world
Find the one thing that is necessary for heaven.
Fr. Jonathan
To the Glory of God
“The evil one cannot comprehend
the joy we receive from the
spiritual life; for this reason he is jealous of us, he envies us
and sets traps for us, and we become grieved and fall. We must
struggle, because without struggles we do not obtain virtues. “
Elder Ieronymos of
(4) a meditation upon the Prosphora (Eucharistic bread) [anonymous]
His Bread
“It was wheat, sown on mountains and ravines.
It was harvested, milled, kneaded, turned into bread.
We blessed it and it was sanctified and became the body of Christ.
We, too, are scattered, Lord. On “mountains” and “ravines”.
Gather us round you, Lord. Pound us. Turn us into bread.
Make us all one in Your Church and sanctify us.
Take us to Your Kingdom.”
(From Didache of 12 Apostles,
chapter 9,4,)
“Ώσπερ ην τούτο το κλάσμα
διεσκορπισμένον επάνω των ορέων και συναχθέν έν, ούτω συναχθήτω Σου η
Εκκλησία από των περάτων της γης εις την Βασιλείαν σου.
- Ήταν σιτάρι, σπαρμένο σε βουνό και σε φαράγγια.
- Θερίστηκε, αλέστηκε, ζυμώθηκε, έγινε ψωμί.
Το ευλογήσαμε και αγιάσθηκε και έγινε σώμα Χριστού.
Και εμείς Κύριε, σκορπισμένοι είμαστε. Σε (βουνά) και σε (φαράγγια)!
Μάζεψέ μας κοντά Σου, Κύριε. 'Αλεσέ μας. Κάνε μας Ψωμί. Κάνε μας όλους
μας ένα μέσα στην Εκκλησία σου και αγίασέ μας. Πάρε μας στη Βασιλεία
Σου!
(Διδαχή των Δώδεκα Αποστόλων κεφάλαιο. 9,4.
Change
I love bread. Bread is rarely the protagonist of a meal. It will be
there, next to your plate, as a nourishing accompaniment, as a tool to
help you eat your food with. Bread is humble, yet essential, at the
heart of the Holy Communion, the essential moment of
“changing…by Thy Holy Spirit”.
We don’t always welcome change in our life, we often resent it or resist
it, even though it is unavoidable. I read somewhere that sin is
surprisingly conservative; it means refusing to grow; to change.
Bread possesses a changing nature: from seed to plant, from wheat to
flour, from flour to dough, from dough to bread, from bread to
nourishment, from nourishment to life, from every day common commodity
to prosforo, from prosforo to the Body of Christ. Humble bread turns to
Holy Bread; it turns into a bridge between heaven and earth. Christ
offers us His Holy Body. Man takes a part of creation and changes it,
through his labour, then offers it back to the Creator, “Thy own of
Thine own we offer Thee”
(I also read recently (The Apples of the Cook, p.18) that in the
old times people called the prosforo “Panagia”, Mother of God,
humanity’s “offer” to God, which, among other things, made me think that
the word prosforo comes from the word prosfero= to offer).
As a child, I was blessed to have the chance to play out, in the fields
that, in the early summer, turned into a green sea of wheat. We’d roll
and hide and chew the milky, unripe seeds. Unbaked bread dough was one
of my first toys, a primitive form of Playdough, that nourished my soul
with the joy of playing and my mind with the joy of imagining and
creating, before another piece of the same dough would turn into the
fragrant loaf that would nourish my body.
As an adult, I was blessed to have the chance to bake loaves that would
later be transformed by the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ.
Maybe this is one of the reasons why I was so touched by the above
quotation. It made me feel good to think that, as my father on earth is
a baker, as my spiritual father is a baker for our church needs (the
first prosforo I got from his hands filled the entire house with
fragrance for days), my Father in Heaven is a Baker, too. It made me
wonder, will I be as humble as an ear of wheat, that bows its head when
full and ripe, and let Him take me, break me, knead me, turn me into a
fragrant, useful, nourishing loaf? It made me think that we are all
indeed, like the scattered grains of wheat, that can drift off with the
wind, unless we let His hands harvest us, from our mountains of problems
and trouble, from our urban ravines, and bring us together, transform
us, make us sprout and flourish and yield fruit.
Not scattered but One
A seed is full of potential, but it can die without fulfilling it, as
some seeds did, in the parable of the sower; but the seeds that will
give fruit, will then be transformed into something good, something that
will also benefit others. The single ingredients will have to come
together so that the flour, the yeast, the salt, the honey, the water,
the oil, will transform into one, new, complete entity.
Break my will Lord, make me want what You want.
The grinding and the pounding and the kneading of the transformation
process will only make us better, in the same way that the finer you
grind your flour, the more you work your dough, the more patient
you are with it, allowing it to prove and improve and bake properly, the
better your bread turns out. Baking bread is a slow process that
requires patience: for the yeast to activate, for the gluten to develop,
for the dough to rise and then bake all the way through. The fragrant
result is worth it. Growing and changing from a drifting, fruitless
existence to a centred (with Christ in the middle), rounded (as a loaf),
fruitful one, takes patience too. The result can be the fragrance of
Heaven. How can we say no?
