Featured Homily

strangling on opinions

I've been enthralled over the last few days with a book sent to me by an associate of mine, an out-of-state Protestant minister who has been investigating Holy Orthodoxy and whose travels have taken him into the Denver area a couple of times. More about the book later in this essay, but the pastor himself has already paid a price for his interest in the Orthodox Church. Seems that once his denominational leadership discovered that he was seriously investigating the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church they summarily dismissed him from his congregation as an apostate. Stop to consider this for a moment; this pastor hasn't yet received formal catechesis (though his knowledge of the Faith grows by leaps and bounds, fed by an insatiable hunger for the Truth), he hasn't been chrismated or yet received into the Faith, and yet he has already paid a very stiff price for his curiosity.

And in speaking with this pastor it is inspiring and humbling to witness the extent to which he "counts it all joy" and is happy to undergo these trials if the outcome is to have entered "this holy house with the fear of God, with faith, and with love." How many rank-and-file Orthodox church-goers today would be sitting in the pews on Sunday if the price of admission had been their livelihoods? And while I am inspired on the one hand by such devotion and intensity I am disheartened and nearly scandalized by the cavalier disregard with which many lifelong Orthodox Christians simply set aside the teachings of the Church, painstakingly acquired over two millennia of diligent practice, whenever the Church's teachings fail to comport with their privately-held opinions.

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