Like Abraham with Isaac, we Christians have benefited from receiving the gift of the Son of God twice, the first his marvelous life on earth and the second his life eternal—by which he guides—protects and counsels those who follow him. We Armenian Christians, whose weekly service is called “the sacrifice,” must always remember the essence…
O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. -Is 64:8 As our annual Parish Assembly is before us, we will be looking at ourselves a lot in the mirror as a church community. Our wonderful treasurer, David Kazarian, will have…
Very truly, I tell you…the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Jn 6:33 Our family is considering another attempt to travel to Armenia this Summer, and the one thing we are dreading is the 24 hours of planes and layovers. Daddy my shoe fell off. Momma,…
‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ –Jn 6:20 There is a parable from the ancient East about a deadly disease that meets up with a large family travelling by caravan to Baghdad. ‘Why are you travelling to Baghdad?’ asked the family elder. ‘To take five thousand lives,’ said the disease. On the way back, they…
Timing is important. What’s the most important part of telling a good joke……timing. Timing is important in jokes, and it’s important in sermons. Until I figured out the 2.45 second delay between the live stream video and audio, my sermons looked like old Bruce Lee movies. Timing is important in conversations. Zoom meetings have unexpectedly…
“This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” (Mt 3:17) Gabriel Garcia Marques, in his classic 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, writes about a village in Central America. A virus strikes this community and the virus causes amnesia. It becomes necessary to hire people from the outside world to…
Often our lives take us in a different direction than we wanted, a worse direction it seems, until we grow to see our situation with the eyes of God. This is not the work of one sermon, this is the work of a lifetime. To guide us in this spiritual re-orientation, I want to use…