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…
Begin this holy season of Great Lent with our Primate.
Lament Brings Us Closer to God in Worship So I had a hard time bringing this sermon series to an end, I could have gone in a lot of directions. I didn’t even get a chance to Gregory of Narek and his lamentations, and I thought we might get into talking about Lament and the…
Introduction Last week we got into the book of Psalms and got very practically into what composes a Lament, that it is has an address to God, a complaint, a request, a push for God to act and then ends in confidence that God will provide. Last session, by the way, was a very Modern,…
Resources: People should have a Badarak book and a Handout of Psalm 13 (see below) Introduction We talked about how society and people get sick when Lament is absent in our first session, that our society encourages us to stuff down, deny, avoid pain instead of dealing with it, but that if we don’t transform…
Introduction “Learning Lament” Has a PR Problem Our sermon series is called Learning Lament, and I will admit to you right off the bat that I realize the title has a PR problem. People either don’t know what Lament is, or they have negative associations with it. When I told the altar servers that the…
We often hear about the importance of Prayer and Fasting. But there is also a third dimension of Lent. In English this quality is known as Almsgiving; in Armenian it’s called Voghormoutiun: “mercifulness.” It’s the Lenten virtue that takes us into the world, to bring the light Christ to other people.