Dear Respectable
and blessed children in Christ, Greetings,
Greetings,
Greetings,
And be blessed
you all.
I would like to
take the opportunity of the great twelve-day feasts and wish you all to have
nice, blessed, bright, regenerated,inaugural,fruitful, creative and
well-pleasing to God years.
And as the Magi,
that is, the clergymen of the Persian religion offered distinguished gifts to
the Born in Bethlehem, so may each of us offer the Lord faith, love, hope and
may each one's hope be like the star of Bethlehem which led the Magi from the
darkness of sin,irreverence and ignorance to the salvation, which they sighted
as an infant.
In the same way,
may your faith lead you, like another star.....and follow the way the star
shows, which is the salvation.
And as Joseph
and Virgin Mary, forty days later at......Candlemas,offered two pigeons or
turtle doves as gifts in the temple , so may we offer the purity of our
soul,body, faith and life and of our glorification and course in our lifetime
so that each one's
soul can be an animate, living and high as heaven manger where the king of all
will be reborn,and so that we can be united with Him who descended and was
incarnated, till the end of the world, with Him who humbled Himself by
concealing not only the Divinity into the humanity but also His omnipotence into the seeming
weakness of the believed as infant,
who became a young child and who is the
wholly perfect and eternal God .
He is the magnet
and Bridegroom of our souls ,the Bridegroom of Church and He invites us all but
we try to justify the unjustifiable usually making excuses for our sins, but
we should all remember that Adam was not
led out of Paradise because of the sin but rather because of the excuse for the
sin.
Below follows an
extract from one of St . John Chrysostom's sermons along with a comment by the
writer in order to have it as a piece of equipment in the course of our
lifetime .
.........
.........
I your father,
I your spouse ,
I your home,
I your nurse,
I your root,
I your
foundation,
Whatever you
want, I will be.
You will lack
nothing,
I will labour
for you .
For I came to
serve and not to be served. I will be your friend and your host,
your head and
your brother, your sister and your mother.
I will be
everything.
Only be intimate
with me.
I will be poor
for you, errant for you,
on the Cross for
you,in the Tomb for you.
For you I was
slapped,
For you I was
spitted,
For you I was
whipped,
For you I
humbled myself ,
I left my
heavenly Father and came down from Heaven for you, as a brother.
I loved you and
you hated me.
I ran towards
you to make you mine,
I united you
with me.
Above I plead
the Father for your sake on earth,
I became
intercessor to the Father for your sake.
You are
everything for Me,
brother,
co-heir, friend and member.
What more do you
want??!!!
.........
.........
.........
With this
anguish and donation of Christ, we should become soil and ash,
zeroes
:00000000000000 so that number one, The one, the ace,the first
will be placed
in front of them and become 10000000000000000000000000
become more than
value, for the beyond, for the eternity from temporality,
for the likeness
of God from the image of God,
for life, from
deadness, for the eternal.
BUT what do we
reply?
Evangelically
indeed, but :
....I have just
bought a field....
....please
justify me.....
( Luke:chapter
14,line 18)
....
And we project
our...virtuously-disguised
passions, and
from unrepentant we turn accusers.
But,Lord, You
that endured everything in order to salvage humanity, raise our consciousness
and bring us back to ourselves because we are beside ourselves.
Like the
Prodigal son of the Parable we have many falls, so Lord, make it possible that
the last fall will be onto Your Holy Feet.
God bless and
make us see reason
because every
one of us have always committed sins, nevertheless, we have never been far from
You,and despite being immoral servants ,we all appeal to Your name and works .
And although we are
all repeated sinners, we spread out our hands to You,
our God, and not
to another.
One Parable of
our Gospel, whose messages have always been everlasting,
unalterable and
pertinent says :.....
......A farmer
went out to sow his seed....
The farmer of
our spiritual land came from Heaven to plant the seed, that is, His word, the
salvation.
BUT!!!
.....Then came
his enemy to sow weeds...
The evil came
out in order to tease those who annoy and disturb him, namely, those who strive
and struggle to proceed from the image to likeness of God and also in order to
plant the weeds, that is, the dark thoughts, the doubts, the scandals, the
unlawfulness,the illegitimacy, the atheism , the indisrespect and so on.
Beware, please!
In the Parable
of the good sower, one part falls in the street, another part onto prickly
bushes, another onto barren rough ground and another onto good and fertile soil
which produces a crop but still, not equally
because some land yields thirty, some sixty and some a hundredfold what
was sown.
This signifies
the cultivation and fertility
of our souls,
our disposition. He came to sow,not to plough. The cultivation is up to us, and
depending on each of us, the talent multiplies.
So, in this
Parable, when our soul is good and fruitful land,this soul is automatically
fruitless for the evil.
Understand that
having been spoken :
On the contrary,
when the seed falls into the soul with the prickly bushes, which is not
effective, this soul is not only immediately fruitful and fertile for the evil
but also it is inspected by the evil.
Now, in the case
that the evil comes out to sow weeds......
when his seed
falls onto fertile land, this fruitful for the evil land is automatically
fruitless for the Incarnated Redeemer, and if then again his seed falls
onto infertile for the evil land, this
soul belongs to Christ and is fertile for Him.
There was once
someone who had found a global map in the litter and was trying to put it
together as it was in pieces.
Since he was not
good at Geography, he could not do it right and he put one state of America
into Europe,and the opposite.
So, there was an
irregularity and shapelessness .
At that moment,
someone of his acquaintance was passing by and after asking him what he was
doing, he found out about his unsuccessful attempt to arrange the map in the
right order, and says to him :
"....I
happen to have the same map ,so watch what you can do .
At the back of
the map there is a picture of a man having the entire body.
Reverse the
pieces of the map, try to put the parts of the human body together and since we
know what it looks like and we don't put a hand in place of a leg, when you
complete it, the map will have been correctly assembled on the other
side!!!!!!!!
How wise ,
simple and meaningful!
What a move!
What a
simplicity!
Indeed, the
solution to his drama and to his difficulty lay in that simple thing.
What I mean by
this is:
We have been
living in an era when everything has been dissipated . The harmony ,which the
Maker laid on our course of life , has been lost and as St . Chrysostom says
,everything has been mixed.
We have lost the
ideals, or rather, we sold them like
Esau.....for.....a mess of pottage . We lost the birthright and now the
compound interests come.
We lost number
one and only zero is left. From 10 to 0.
Our native
country is experiencing the greatest treason and impunity in its history.
We have been
jealous of the fury of Sodoma but let us see now that......Fire Will Fall From
Heaven.
Do not fear,
though.
Let's take the
example of the map.
We cannot
assemble it and do it right,
but if we
reverse the map, we can try each of us separately and all together to
mend......the man......mend ourselves.
Then,
automatically, the back part will be mended, that is, our homeland.
How encouraging!
How real !
How pertinent !
How hopeful!
Don't you think
it is worth the effort?
Won't we make
the start?
Come, my
children, ahead with the cross,
with faith, love
and determination to give the battle.
Either [with]
this [your shield] or on it :
Victory or Death
.
A Bloodless
sacrifice, a sure victory, a certain outcome.
So come on,
let's begin the...arrangement of our members from today all together and we
will have the divine blessing and grace in everything we do for the
glorification of our Trinitarian God, with the intercessions and leading of
Mother of God , Most Blessed among women, who is the hope of our souls, Amen.
God be with you,
with the blessings and love in Christ,
your father,
father Apostolos
God be with you
.
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