Newsletter September 13, 2025

A Cry from a Wound

No one can deny the enormous changes globalization has brought to human life, to our inner and outer worlds, and how deeply it affects the modern person.

For example, people are much weaker in the face of hardship than in the past because of the lifestyle of modern city life and the ease created by new technologies. Among Christians, the choice to prefer quality of life over quantity of life has led to smaller families, a decline in numbers, a higher level of secular education, and a greater absorption by urban culture.

All of this has pushed them toward a search for comfort, which often goes hand in hand with a softer way of life typical of developed societies.

Add to this the decline in spiritual life and ascetical living, plus the tendency to settle for outward, social forms of religiosity, and it becomes easier to understand why people quickly grow weary when faced with tragedies around the world, why they lack the strength to endure, and why their spiritual resilience has weakened. We must also recognize that being constantly exposed to images of suffering has desensitized people.

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So we ask: What is required of the People of God today? What is our deepest need at this very moment? How do we remove the pile of dirt of our sins and indifference upon the face of the Church, so that the face of her Lord may shine again – saving, embracing, and full of compassion? What must we, the faithful, do in these decisive times? What is the role of God’s people – the Church of Jesus Christ, clergy and laity, men and women, together and individually?

Read the entire article: https://www.antiochian.org/regulararticle/2565

Please remember that our full calendar continues to be available at our parish web site. Here is a link:
https://stjfc.org/Pages/Calendar/calendar.php

Full schedule:
https://stjfc.org/Pages/Ministries/Prosphora/Docs/prosphora sched 2025 web.pdf

Full schedule:
https://stjfc.org/Pages/Ministries/Altar/Docs/epistle readers for 2025.pdf

Epistle: ST. PAUL’S FIRST LETTER TO THE CORINTHIANS 1:18-24

Brethren, the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Gospel: JOHN 19:6-11, 13-20, 25-28, 30

At that time, when the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no crime in him.” The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God. When Pilate heard these words, he was the more afraid; he entered the praetorium again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave no answer. Pilate therefore said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore he who delivered me to you has the greater sin.” When Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called the Pavement, and in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. Pilate also wrote a title and put it on the cross; it read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Many of the Jews read this title, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. Then when Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, “It is finished”; and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

THE TRUE WORTH OF MAN

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

When we try to understand the value which God himself attaches to man we see that we are bought at a high price, that the value which God attaches to man is all the life and all the death, the tragic death, of the only begotten Son upon the Cross. This is what God thinks of man, of his friend, created by him in order to be his companion of eternity. Again, when we turn to the gospel, to the parable of the Prodigal son, we see this man who had fallen away from the greatness of his sonship, of his vocation, coming back to his father. On his way he prepares his confession. He is ready to admit that he has sinned against heaven and against his father. He is prepared to recognise that he is no longer worthy of being called a son. And yet, when he meets his father, his father allows him to make half of his confession, to recognise that he is unworthy, that he is a sinner, that he has sinned against heaven and against him; but as to allowing him to ask a place in the kingdom on terms lower than those of sonship, ‘let me be like one of thy hired servants’, this he does not allow. He stops him at a moment when the young man has recognised his unworthiness, but he is not prepared to allow his son to establish new terms of worthiness, unworthy of the primeval, original and eternal relationship to which he is called. He can be an unworthy son; he can be a repentant son; he can come back to the father’s house, but only as his son. Unworthy though he be as a son he can never become a worthy hireling.

And this is the way in which God looks at man – in terms of the sonship offered us in the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, implied in the act of creation and in our calling to become partakers of the divine nature, to become sons by adoption in the only begotten Son and in the only Son; to become, in the very words of Irenaeus of Lyons, the only begotten son in the total Christ.

Read the entire article: http://www.mitras.ru/eng/eng_03.htm