“But he kept calling out all the more, ‘Son of David, have pity on me.’” We hear today the prayer of a man desperately in need of the Lord, who calls out over and over, “have pity on me!” Bartimaeus is not afraid to be repetitive in prayer, to ask over and over again […]
Read more "“Enacting a Drama of Love” — Sermon for the XXX Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"On February 5th, 2006, Fr. Andrea Santoro, an Italian missionary priest in eastern Turkey, was kneeling and praying in his church when a young man entered, shouted, “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”), and shot him dead. His murderer, though convicted, he was released after serving only ten years of his sentence after a […]
Read more "“Lending Your Flesh to Christ” — Sermon for the XXIX Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"“There is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age.” We encounter today another teaching that defies the logic of […]
Read more "“Taking the Right Risk” — Sermon for the XXVIII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"This past summer, we read deeply from the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the Bread of Life discourse. We did so using the parallel series of readings from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians as a key that showed us how the Lord’s teaching on the mystery of His Body present in the […]
Read more "“The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce” — Sermon for the XXVII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"“Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!” The prophets were misunderstood people. By our Lord’s time, they were held in great reverence, but in their own day they were persecuted, reviled, and even killed – like the just man we […]
Read more "“To Be a Prophet” — Sermon for the XXVI Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"“The wicked say: Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us … let us find out what will happen to him.” There is a deep crisis of faith in our world, a crisis of faith precisely in whether or not there exists a God who made it so that, “three […]
Read more "“Not a solution, but a victory” — Sermon for the XXIV Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"You’ve probably felt that sharp pain from time to time, the one that happens when you’re trying to chew really quickly so you can tell your son to stop hitting his sister at the dinner table (just a hypothetical example), and all of a sudden your teeth close on the side of your cheek, and […]
Read more "“The Judgement of God is Nigh” — Sermon for the XXIII Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"“Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said, ‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’” After hearing St. Paul’s teaching on marriage – perhaps the most difficult reading of the entire three-year lectionary cycle, at least to our post-modern ears – we jump back to the Bread of Life Discourse and our Lord’s […]
Read more "“He has the words of eternal life” — Sermon for the XXI Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"Dominica XX per annum, B 18 August, A.D. MMXXIV Last Sunday, we saw how there are two “this is my Body”s – the “this is my body” of Holy Thursday, when Christ gave His body in the Eucharist to His Apostles for the first time, and the “this is my body” of Good Friday, […]
Read more "“A Person, not a Thing” — Sermon for the XX Sunday through the Year, 18 August, A.D. MMXXIV"“So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.” We’ve been reading the Lord’s Bread of Life discourse through the lens of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. Last Sunday, we […]
Read more "“This is My flesh for the life of the world” — Sermon for the XIX Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV"
Father Gregerson 