Jesus is no appeaser. He hates sin, self-righteousness, violence and injustice. But he has made his hates general. I am not aware of Jesus berating any individual, even when that individual was a known sinner, even when that individual was known to betray him. But Jesus was absolutely relentless in revealing the evil and hypocrisy…
So the other day when I was bringing the bulletins to church and setting up for Sunday, this teenager rides up on his skateboard and comes into church. [Loud] ‘Yeah I want an espresso double shot on ice with two raw sugars.’ Are you kidding’ I say, ‘bro, this isn’t Starbucks, this is St. Hagop…
‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any group that will have me as a member.’ This is Groucho Marx’s joke, and as with all good jokes, much truth lies within. The truth is that in all important communal efforts, family, work and church, we tend to see everyone else as the…
As we were setting up for a wedding last week, the videographer asked me for the password to use our internet. I gave him our password which ends in 333. Why 333 he asked? Wait till you see the sacrament, I said, then you’ll know. In the Armenian Church, echoing the Holy Trinity, we say…
The last time we were all together, we were having a great time. There were two big weddings and a baptism to celebrate, it was Poon Parekendan, the day of good living. We ate, drank and were merry, because God blessed creation into existence and called everything good. When we woke up this morning, however,…
Lent is that season in the life of the church where we’re invited to pay attention to our hunger, to those yearnings that we might use to move us toward what is better for us, our deepest hunger, which is for God. During Lent, we join Jesus in his forty days of disconcerting hunger in…
In 2021 I gave fifty-two sermons, using exactly 58,418 words, an average of about one thousand words per Sunday. Using a word frequency calculator, I found the top words in the St. Hagop year in search were God, Church, Jesus; People, Life, Time; One, Word, First…Love (2x). I laid this out in a beautiful graphic…