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Bulletin February 14, 2010
WELCOME! If you are a first time visitor to Saint George’s today. We are glad to have you! Please stay for the coffee social in the parish hall after liturgy so we can get acquainted.
SCRIPTURE READINGS THIS WEEK
Feb 15th Apostle of the 70 Onesimus, Venerable Euphrosyne of Alexandria
Genesis 1:1-13 Proverbs 1:1-20
Feb 16th Martyr Pamphilius & Company; St. Nicholas, Archbishop of Japan
Genesis 1:14-23 Proverbs 1:20-33
Feb 17th Greatmartyr Theodore the Recruit; St. Mariamne, sister of the Apostle Philip
Genesis 1:24-2:3 Proverbs 2:1-22
Feb 18th St. Leo the Great, Pope of Rome; St. Flavian the Confessor of Constantinople
Genesis 2:4-19 Proverbs 3:1-18
Feb 19th Apostles of the 70 Archippus and Philemon & Martyr Apphias
Genesis 2:20-3:20 Proverbs 3:19-34
Feb 20th Commemoration of St. Theodore the Recruit; St. Leo Bishop of Catania
Hebrews 1:1-12 Mark 2:23-3:5
Activities/Services this Week:
Forgiveness Sunday Vespers: Sunday, February 14th, 12:30 PM, after social hour
Canon of St. Andrew: Monday, February 15th, 6:30 PM, at the church (council meeting follows)
Canon of St. Andrew: Tuesday, February 16th, 6:30 PM, at the church
Presanctified Liturgy: Wednesday, February 17th, 6:30 PM, at the church
Canon of St. Andrew: Thursday, February 18th, 6:30 PM, at the church
Canon of St. Andrew: Friday, February 19th, 6:30 PM, at the church
Great Vespers: Saturday, January February 20th, 5 PM, at the church
The Sanctuary Lamp is burning this week for the health of Julie Olmstead celebrating her birthday next week.
Last Sunday, February 7th, 38 Adults and 9 Youth attended Divine Liturgy.
For the month of February, please bring cans of chili in whatever amount you can afford to donate for the All Saints Food Pantry. Thanks you for your help.
The next meeting of the Rossford/Toledo Book Club will be on Monday, February 22nd, 10 AM at the home of Mary Dedes in Toledo. We will discuss Chapters 12 and 13 of “Bread, Water, Wine, & Oil; an Orthodox Experience of God”. The Bowling Green Book Club will meet next on Thursday February 25th, at 6:30 PM at Grounds for Thought on Main St. in Bowling Green. We will study Chapter Eight and Nine of the same book. Please read the material so we can properly discuss it.
Our church will be hosting the Pan Orthodox Vesper service on Sunday, February 28th, at 6 PM. The presentation that day will be, “College life and Orthodox presence on Campus.” A panel of Orthodox Christian College Students will share their thoughts on the above theme. The panel will consist of: Jessica Precop, Sarah Kersey, Michael Moussa, and Anastasia Widmer. Lenten potlucks will follow all of the Lenten Vespers services. For those times, go to our web page or see the newsletter.
The first Lenten Vesper service will be next Sunday, February 21st, 6 PM, at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Nicholas will speak that evening.
Starting on Friday, the second week of Lent, there will be an Akathist service to St. Herman of Alaska offered each Friday at 6:30 PM, during Lent to ask for St. Herman’s prayers and intercessions for the qualitative, and quantitative spiritual growth of our community. This will eventually replace the Wednesday evening Compline service after Easter.
The St. Anna’s Women’s Guild will hold its monthly meeting on Sunday, February 21st, after the Divine Liturgy.
To the Very Reverend and Reverend Clergy, Monastics, and Faithful of
the Orthodox Church in America
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
The gateway to divine repentance has been opened: let us enter eagerly, purified in our bodies and observing abstinence from food and passions, as obedient servants of Christ who has called the world into the heavenly Kingdom. Let us offer to the King of all a tenth part of the whole year, that we may look with love upon His Resurrection. [Cheesefare Monday, Matins sessional hymn]
We approach the Great Fast as our preparation to celebrate the life-giving Passion and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Great Lent is a time of great beauty and profundity, a time which the Church calls the "tithe of the year" which we give to Christ in a spirit of fasting and self-denial. We fast, we pray, we go to services, and we give alms. But what is different in us the very day after Pascha? Have we attained inner peace? Have we come to self-control over our passions? Has my soul been healed, even a little?
Lent is the time for repentance. But that repentance does not simply mean feeling sorry for our sins, much less trying to do some kind of penitential acts to atone for them. Rather, the goal of repentance is the transformation of our minds and hearts, our very consciousness. It means a transformation of our whole life. To engage it means that we have to embrace change. This change not only affects our diet for a few weeks, or abstaining from some bad habits. It means a different way of behaving, of perceiving God, ourselves, our neighbors. It means a rejection and renunciation of the ways we have been living and treating others, and the adoption of a new way of life. We have to come to the recognition that how we have been living and behaving does not lead us deeper into communion with God and our neighbors, but rather alienates us from both, and from our very self.
So often we become trapped by our own self-righteousness and pride, thinking that we do not have to change. This is delusion. If we are so sure of ourselves, how have we left room for God to even show us our shortcomings? We fall into the trap of the Pharisee. This is especially the case when we let ourselves criticize and judge our neighbors. If we allow ourselves to judge and criticize, then we can be sure that we have cast God out of our lives. Who needs Him, if I can judge everyone and everything? We pick and pick at our neighbors, from external appearances to deep judgments about their integrity. And in so doing, we
destroy our own souls. We project all our own insecurities on those around us, not caring whose feelings we hurt or whose lives we destroy. And in reality, it has nothing to do with that other person; our judgment is only an image of myself and my insecurities, and the sins we don't want to admit to ourselves.
If we judge and criticize our neighbor, our fasting is in vain. Our repentance is hypocrisy. And we make a mockery of Jesus Christ. We receive the Eucharist unto damnation. And we are oblivious to it, in our own self-righteousness.
Repentance, being "transformed in the renewal of our minds," means that, like the Prodigal, we have "come to ourselves," and recognized that our minds and hearts have taken the wrong road. We can perhaps see some of the damage we are causing to ourselves and others. We recognize that our minds are filled with angry, suspicious, judgmental, and self-righteous thoughts, and that we have no inner peace.
How do we repent? The first thing we must do is withdraw from the stimulus: to stop exposing ourselves -- temporarily -- to the issues and people that bring up these angry thoughts and judgments. We have to stop ourselves from rehearsing the wrongs done to us (and hence our judgment and condemnation of the person who wronged us), and realize this is just our own self-justification rooted in pride and vainglory. Then we need to pray that God will forgive us for our anger and pride, and forgive the other for what he or she has done. Then we can let it go. So long as we are provoked by thoughts of the remembrance of wrongs (resentments), and react with anger, we have not worked it through. But when the remembrance of something no longer disturbs our peace, we know that God has worked in our hearts.
Great Lent can be a clinic, a hospital, for our souls that are sick with the passions. Have we been healed? We can have our minds and hearts lifted up to heaven itself, if we want. We can use Great Lent to lay the foundational stones of discipline, and build habits that will stay with us the rest of the year. We can emerge from Lent with our hearts illumined and our minds cleansed, with a new way of being. Will we allow ourselves to change and be transformed in repentance?
It is only this transformation that will open our spiritual eyes, that in our hearts and with all our being we will be able to shout with joy, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!"
With love in our Merciful Savior,
+JONAH, Archbishop of Washington, Metropolitan of All America and Canada
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