We are a mystery to ourselves. Neither science nor Google can deal with mysteries, but praise God, the Armenian Church does. The Armenian Church says that you are a mystery to yourself, so stop trying to grasp yourself from other things, people, even God. Instead, start trying to give yourself away to other things, people…
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…
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…
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…
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…