Hymn Texts

For the Resurrection, Tone 2 - When You descended unto death, O Lord who yourself are immortal Life, then did You mortify Hades by the lightning flash of Your Divinity. Also when You raised the dead from the netherworld, all the Powers of the heavens were crying out: O Giver of life, Christ our God, glory to You.

For St. Euphemia, Tone 3 - To the Orthodox you brought elation, * to the heretics, humiliation, * lovely virgin of Christ, St. Euphemia. * For you confirmed what the Fathers decreed as true * during the Fourth holy Council in Chalcedon. * We entreat you now, O glorious Martyr, pray for us * to Christ our God to grant us the great mercy.

For St. Olga, Tone 1 - Giving your mind the wings of divine understanding, / you soared above visible creation seeking God the Creator of all. / When you had found Him, you received rebirth through baptism. / As one who enjoys the Tree of Life, / you remain eternally incorrupt, ever-glorious Olga.


Homily

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christ is in our midst! He is and ever shall be.

Today, the 3rd Sunday of Matthew, our Lord warns us against the dangers of valuing wealth above all else. This stern rebuke, "you cannot serve both God and mammon," is clear and unequivocal. However, as with all the commandments of Christ, it contains layers of deeper meaning for us as Christians to ponder and apply to our lives in a more radical way. Here, I'm not referring to some "secret knowledge" or meaning, but rather to the practice of taking the Lord's words to their logical conclusion.

All of us have different relationships to money, and different relationships to resources. We are wealthy, or poor, or somewhere in between. The gospel is meant to, in the words of the Mother of God, "put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalt the humble; to fill the hungry with good things, and to send the rich away empty." We can and should examine our relationship to our actual, physical wealth. If we are wealthy, whether in money or resources, how can we give radically for the benefit of those in need? Perhaps more importantly, how can we redistribute our resources so that we are no longer the wealthy exploiting the poor, but dwell on an equal footing? If we are poor, whether in money or resources, how can we receive from our wealthy siblings in Christ, how can we pray for them and continue to speak prophetically against the power of Mammon which corrupts our society, both inside and outside the Church?

And yet, Christ's words also speak a deeper message to both rich and poor: Do not be anxious about your life, about your food or drink or clothing. But seek first the Kingdom of God and God's righteousness, and these other things will be given to you as well. Beloved, how often does a scarcity mentality prevail among us? How often does our striving for "enough" cut us off from true connection with one another, and with God? I'm not condemning our need to care for our bodies' basic needs. After all, Christ did not say "do not eat," but "do not worry about what you will eat or drink." We can work, pray, and provide for our needs while trusting God in peace, and not allowing our worries about our needs to cause us to close off our hearts from others. It is not survival itself, but the scarcity mentality that causes strife, hatred, greed and fear in our human communities. Christ calls us to a radical trust, and a prayerful pursuit of our day to day lives that is open-hearted to the needs of one another. Even if we cannot provide for each other's bodily needs in every circumstance, we can share generously what we have, whether little or much. And we can share the gift of community. St. Paul also understood this. He reminds us that we are not hoarding up resources or security in hopes of some far off time. "Now is the day of salvation. Now is the acceptable time." We wait with eagerness for Christ's redemption of all things, for the Kingdom of God to fully break into our present reality. And this is meet and right. But the inbreaking has already begun. And our attitude towards our neighbor here and now will shape and determine how we experience the Kingdom when God is truly all in all. To "seek first the Kingdom" is to live a life of radical generosity and compassion for one another, to live as if we were already in the Kingdom, even as we continue to provide as best we can for the needs of the body, needs which will be fully met for all when Christ returns.

St Olga, Apostle to the Rus, whose memory we celebrate today, understood this. She lived in a time of turmoil. Many of her subjects, both Christian and pagan, feared the loss of power, security or resources should "the other side" triumph. St. Olga was both patient and bold, trusting in God for everything. When she went to Constantinople to be baptized, the Emperor's officials gave her a beautiful golden plate inlaid with jewels. This was a tribute befitting her status as a Grand Princess. Olga accepted it gratefully, but then donated it to the Church. Like the woman who anointed Jesus' feet, Olga gave freely to God, trusting that she would receive back whatever she needed. Back in Rus, she continued to evangelize and live a holy life, establishing the faith more deeply in her homeland. She knew that Rus would not fully embrace the gospel in her lifetime, but she was not discouraged. She built churches, spoke boldly of the beauty of the faith, and convinced her son Sviatoslav to loosen the persecutions against the Christians enough that the church could grow and remain stable. She met people where they were, and kept the faith with a deep love for her people. Paradoxically, in letting go of the need to preserve the security and power of the Church, she ensured that it would blossom and grow in Russia for centuries to come. Two generations later, her grandson St. Vladimir brought her work to completion, and the Russian church has flourished in its lands ever since. 

Love, generosity, tranquility, courage, trust. These are all virtues of the Kingdom of God, and they can be ours in every moment, when we seek first that Kingdom, the righteousness of God, and the love of God which pours out through us and around us blessings for all people. May we prayerfully discern the use of our resources. May we give without expecting return. May we receive with gratitude all that God gives us. And may we stand boldly in faith and love, building up the Body of Christ and bringing acts of mercy, justice and care to all people. For now is the acceptable time, beloved. Now is the day of salvation. May we turn towards the Kingdom again and again and again, and in so doing witness to its glory in day to day lives. Amen.

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+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christ is in our midst! He is and ever shall be.

Today, St. Matthew the Evangelist tells us of Jesus calling the first apostls. He calls humble fishermen. Later, he will also call women, such as our patron saint, the Holy Apostle Photini. The response of Peter, Andrew, James and John is instructive for us. Immediately, they left their nets, their boats, their livelihood and followed their Lord. We heard last week from Christ the warning that to live the gospel may cost us friends and family, whether we consciously leave them behind or not. God calls each of us to leave behind different things, different situations, different relationships. There is no "one size fits all" call to discipleship, except this: To follow Christ, whatever it takes.

Jesus and the apostles began to preach in the synagogues. Why? They were practicing Jews. They and their compatriots were already the people chosen by God. St Theophylact suggests that they preached in the synagogues to show that the gospel was not opposed to God's Law, the Torah given to the people of Israel. Indeed, the fact that they preached to both Jews and Gentiles is a testimony to the reality that everyone is capable of following God, or falling away from God. We cannot claim to be God's favorites because we are Christians, or think that our relationship to Christ excuses us from the work of repentance, discipleship and faithfulness in love of God and neighbor.

In the Epistle, St. Paul reflects on this truth. He points out that there are members of God's chosen who do not adequately follow the Law, and members of the Gentiles who do, and vice versa. We follow God's commandments when they are written on our hearts, as God promises to do, regardless of whether we are in the church, the synagogue, both or neither. Because of this, we must remember that no one person or community is totally separated from God. Not even the people we may personally find the hardest to see God in. Our enemies, whoever they might be. Likewise, no one person or community is totally identified with God. We are to examine our own journeys, prayerfully consider our relationship to God, our faithfulness, and to let go of anything that holds us back from truly loving God in one another, and God as Lord. We are to imitate the apostles in their running towards Christ.

Today is July 4th, the day the secular calendar sets aside to celebrate the United States' independence from England. America is not a "Christian nation" in the prescriptive sense, but the dominant cultural force in America has been rooted in a particular kind of white triumphalist American Christianity. Orthodoxy, by and large, has not shaped this culture, but as Orthodox Christians in America (particularly those of us who are white), we are not exempt from taking responsibility to mitigate its impact. Here, the gospel can help us. Christ's call to sacrificial discipleship is a rebuke of American exceptionalism. There is no "us and them" of ethnicity, race, religious tradition or nationality in God's Kingdom. There is only the faithfulness of each beloved child of God on their journey towards theosis and the life in Christ. All of us seeking Christ together are Christ's Body, a Body which is one and united without requiring homogeneity. A wise priest once said to me, "We are not called to be Greek. We are not even really called to be Orthodox. We are called to be the hands and feet of Christ." Do we follow God as best we can each step of our journey? Do we love one another, and seek to heal the harm we have caused, with God's help? Do we walk with Christ to heal the broken, uplift the downtrodden, to put down the mighty from their thrones and exalt the humble? Do we pray and continue to grow in courage, faith, compassion, love, joy and other fruits of the Holy Spirit? To the extent we fail to do these things, we go astray. To the extent we live into them, we become more and more divine by grace. Christ calls every nation. Every person of every background. "Come, and follow me." And as we follow Christ, we invite all people into the communion of love that is the very force which holds us together in God. We become channels of God's grace, mercy and love. To rephrase that priest's saying. "We are not called to be American. We are not ultimately called even to be Orthodox. We are called to be the hands and feet of Christ, the love of Christ to and alongside the entire world." Amen.

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+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today, as we enter into the season of Pentecost, the time of our living in Christ and in the Spirit, the Church encourages us on our journey through the example of the saints. We look to the saints on every day of the year, but on this day, we commemorate all the saints, known and unknown, from every corner of the world.

In today's Gospel reading, our Lord has a sobering word for the Apostles. To truly receive the Kingdom of God, they are called to leave behind anything that might keep them from fully following God. "Whoever loves father, mother, son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." These words have often inspired great feats of asceticism, as in the life of St. Antony the Great. But there may yet be other wisdom Christ can teach us about the way of the saints through these words.

Perhaps Christ's words here are not only prescriptive, but descriptive of the kind of life discipleship tends to create. To follow Christ boldly is to stand with Christ in the poor, Christ in the marginalized. It is to be on the side of the Kingdom of God when it is often more profitable, more easy, more smooth to pass by and stand with empire, or with the status quo. "Whoever denies me before human beings, I will also deny before my Father." To deny the love of God and the concern of God for our neighbor is to deny Christ. When we boldly witness to that love, we often earn enemies, sometimes even enemies out of former friends. We know that God does not call us to hate anyone. We also know that the love of God is not self-seeking. Therefore, to love God more than our own family and friends need not mean that we devalue those whom we have an authentic affection for, but we see that to act on the love of God sometimes brings us to a place of resistance against evil and injustice where others, even others with the best intentions, fear to follow.

Many of us have already lost fathers, mothers, siblings, whether biological or spiritual. We have been kicked out of churches, we have strained relationships with relatives because we live as our authentic selves in our myriad identities and relationships, and do so all under the life in Christ. Though we may not have been "stoned, sawn in two or killed by the sword" (in the words of today's epistle), we have nonetheless experienced losses in our social and relational circles in the process of witnessing authentically to our lived experiences under God.

Like St. Peter, we may often relate to the cry, "Lord, we have left everything to follow You." I have heard from other Orthodox Christians in our jurisdiction, "If this church did not exist, I could not be a Christian." We have left much, and we see many others in other churches deconstructing, leaving behind or being forced out of community because they love God and the ones whom God loves so deeply that they refuse to let our human institutions block out his voice. We have left everything to follow Christ, whether by choice or by circumstance. It is not an easy journey.

And in the midst of this hard road of carrying the cross, Christ invites us into the family of saints. We are called to inherit the twelve thrones of the Apostles. By faith in Christ we conquer kingdoms, enforce justice, shut the mouths of lions, quench raging fires, escape the sword and put evil to flight. We stand amidst the saints, the great cloud of witnesses. When the visible church rejects us, the saints become for us the Church. When our temporal family may become estranged from us, we can place them in the capable and loving hands of our eternal family. In truth, we are all the communion of saints, some realized and some not yet realized. The saints pray for us. The saints pray for those who have become estranged from us, when words between us and our families fall short. And we can join their prayers and take up the work of sainthood by our continued faithful living, by our continued faithful following of Christ, until the day when we will all be saints together. Every day will be All Saints Day, and God will truly be all in all. Amen.​

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Christ is risen! Christos anesti! So much has been written and said about the relative faithfulness or faithlessness of the apostle Thomas that it seems there is not much new ground to cover. Nonetheless, trusting in the power of the Spirit to present Christ to us through the Scriptures, let us briefly reflect on this rich narrative.

As the disciples are meeting in secret, Jesus comes to be with them. He comes to offer them peace in the midst of bewilderment, joy in the midst of grief, and courage in the midst of fear. He breathes on them, and invites them to receive the Holy Spirit, and the authority from him to forgive sins, an authority which we as the Church continue to hold in trust from our Lord, practicing radical repentance and forgiveness before one another for the betterment of our world.

Thomas desires proof. It is worth noting that he is not the only one who did not believe before seeing. None of the Apostles, save perhaps St. John, were faithful through the cross. Christ himself knew that they would be overwhelmed by their sorrow, and he did not hold this against them. Instead, he showed himself tangibly and truly, he made a gift of his presence in their midst, a gift which showed them the resurrection in its fulness. Thomas, too, desires this gift.

It is also worth noting that, when Jesus appears a second time, we don't know whether Thomas actually did choose to touch Jesus. Jesus invites him to do so, but Thomas physical response is not recorded by the evangelist. What is recorded is Thomas making a profound confession of faith. "My Lord and my God." Only in a few other places in the gospels do any of the Apostles proclaim Christ as both Lord and God. One can almost see the parallels to St. Peter's proclamation, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God."

Thomas' faith was restored and deepened by an encounter with Christ. In our own lives, we encounter Christ in one another, and especially in the poor and downtrodden. Those who bear in the body the wounds of our society's evil are those whom we can recognize Christ's wounds most powerfully in. We are invited, like Thomas, to recognize our Lord in one another, to touch where touching is warranted and welcome, and most importantly to proclaim with joy, faith, hope and love the truth that Christ is risen and dwells in each beloved child of God. Christ is risen!

Beloved Friends and Parishioners,

Christ is risen!

Continuing in the vein of spiritual reflections on material from my seminary studies, I wanted to take some time to reflect on certain legacies of the ecumenical movement of the mid 20th century, and how its impact may resonate with our community today. Ecumenism is often a “hot button” topic among Orthodox, particularly the canonical churches but also among us extra-canonical Orthodox churches. Despite this contentious reality, Orthodox participation in the World Council of Churches and other related gatherings has been nothing short of a work of the Holy Spirit. Orthodox Christianity offered an infusion of new life into the liturgical and theological life of many other churches at these gatherings, and our beloved Orthodox forebears (some of whom are still active in the ecumenical movement) received much insight on how to apply the timeless truths of our faith to the needs of the children of God in modernity and postmodernity.

In particular, I want to focus on the brilliant document entitled “Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry” which was produced by the Faith and Order conference. This document wisely forges an ecumenical consensus, centered especially around the faith of the first four centuries of the undivided Church. It sums up very neatly and precisely the particulars of our common catholic faith, while also not avoiding the extensive commentary necessary to name our remaining differences and potential obstacles to unity. Reading this document as an Orthodox Christian convert from evangelicalism, I was encouraged to see that I could read with both my past faith and my present faith in mind and the language was still true and expressive of a robust Christian faith. This is true ecumenical consensus. Though the WCC has never claimed the ancient authority of the ecumenical councils, it has nonetheless affirmed at the very least a common faith and practice among many Christians of diverse traditions. It affirms the necessity of baptism for entry into faith, in the name of the Holy Trinity. It elucidates an order for celebrating Eucharist which contains all the key elements of the Divine Liturgy (Thanksgiving to the Father, words of institution from our Lord Jesus Christ, invocation of the Holy Spirit to be poured out on the gifts presented, etc.). Finally, in the chapters on Ministry, it offers a brief but potent meditation on apostolic succession, apostolic tradition, and what it means to hold fast to the faith we have received in the present. It is this meditation in particular that I want to unpack.

“Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry” notes that 
“ The  primary  manifestation  of  apostolic  succession  is  to  be  found  in  the  apostolic  tradition  of  the  Church  as  a  whole.  The  succession  is  an  expression  of  the  permanence  and, therefore, of the continuity of Christ’s own mission in which the Church participates. [...] Where  churches  see  little  importance  in  orderly  transmission,  they  should  ask  themselves  whether  they  have  not  to  change their conception of continuity in the apostolic tradition. On the other hand, where the  ordained  ministry  does  not  adequately  serve  the  proclamation  of  the  apostolic  faith,  churches  must  ask  themselves  whether  their  ministerial  structures  are  not  in  need  of  reform.”
Orthodox Christianity in the present rightly places emphasis on the faithful reception of the apostolic succession by our bishops. However, there is, I feel, an instrumentalism of the apostolic succession lines which has regrettably at times prevailed among many of the canonical Orthodox churches, as well as many of the independent Catholic and sacramental churches whose origins are similar to ours. While it is important to maintain the apostolic authority passed down from bishop to bishop, that authority means little unless it is used to live out the apostolic faith, the core kerygma of the Gospel that Christ entrusted his Apostles with keeping and cultivating abroad.

Canonical Orthodox churches will say that a community like the Universalist Orthodox Church is unorthodox because our lines of succession contain bishops who fell out of communion with much of the global Orthodox world. It is regrettable that certain bad faith actors misused their ordination for their own ends. But this does not taint the transmission itself, and our community is deeply invested in holding to the apostolic tradition just as much as we are in preserving the apostolic succession. We are an Orthodox church for all of God’s children, but we are unabashedly Orthodox. Even within the larger Orthodox communions, there are gaps and breaks in unity. Russia and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Old Calendarists, etc. We take no joy or schaudenfreude in these ruptures, but I point them out to name that it is the job of all of us to hold to the apostolic faith as best we can and to pray for unity with one another, however we come by our successions.

On the other end of the ecclesial spectrum, many independent Catholic churches are deeply invested in maintaining the integrity of their lines, to the point when the list of who succeeded from whom becomes almost more important than a robust witness to the apostolic faith itself. In some ways, our Orthodox ecclesiology which allows for a multitude of jurisdictions expressing one faith in many places may safeguard us from this mistake. At the same time, we must be careful to remember that the apostolic succession is not a pedigree. The Holy Spirit confirms, re-invigorates and revitalizes our faith when we come together as the Eucharistic assembly, the Body of Christ. We will continue to pray faithfully in the traditions of our forebears the Apostles, to reach out in a spirit of fellowship to those canonical Orthodox who will be in conversation with us, and to echo our Lord’s blessed prayer “that they all might be one.”

-Sdn. Micah Lazarus.

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Christ is in our midst! We are pleased to offer the following services via Zoom for Holy Week:
4/23/21 -- Lazarus Saturday Compline (7 PM PT)
4/24/21 -- Lazarus Saturday Typika (Orthros 8 AM, Typika 9 AM PT)
4/24/21 -- Palm Sunday Vespers (5 PM PT)
4/25/21 -- Palm Sunday Typika (Orthros 9 AM, Typika 10 AM PT)
4/25/21 -- Holy Monday Bridegroom Matins (7 PM PT)
4/28/21 -- Holy Thursday Bridegroom Matins (8:30 PM PT)
4/29/21 -- Passion Gospels Service (6 PM PT)
4/30/21 -- Apokathelosis (Removal from the Cross)(3 PM PT)
4/30/21 -- Lamentations Service (8:30 PM PT)
5/1/21 -- Anastasis and Typika (Pascha Vigil) (11 PM PT)
​5/2 -- Agape Vespers (3 PM PT)