Sixth Sunday after the Festival of Holy Cross

Welcome, Friends in Christ~
For those who are visiting us a first time, please click on the July archives at right. There you will find a brief introduction to our Church.

This Sunday we celebrate the Holy Mysteries at 11am in the chapel of St. John's in Olympia, WA.

Meditation from this Sunday's Scripture:
Acts 28: 23-24, 1 Cor 15: 6-13, Luke 18: 18-27

Lk 18.18: And a ruler asked him, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
. . . (18.26:) Those who heard it said, "Then who can be saved?"
But he said, "What is impossible with men is possible with God."

Only in God is my soul at rest.
God has created us, God alone can re-create us. Only God can save us!

All goodness, truth, and beauty originate in God's own being and identity and activity. All existence, eternity, and infinity originate in God; all knowledge, love, life originate in God.

Given a mind that seeks to know reality, philosophers name these origins as the divine attributes, and thus as "the Divine Names of God." These names are the real subject matter of philosophical metaphysics: the subject of ultimate reality as it relates to our present realities.

But the God of human history's natural philosophers has done far more for us. God has acted inside our history: God revealed His Name to Moses. From that revelation Moses, and all history, must ponder what this Name means.

What is the meaning of I Am Who Am?
What does it mean for a creature to name an absolutely transcendent Creator?
What does it mean to share this Divine Name as a way of sharing a covenant?

In God alone originates all transcendence and immanence, all freedom and finality. And the only necessity: God is God, only God is necessarily real, only God cannot not be what He is, cannot not be who He is, cannot not be why He is.

And this God of origins and ultimates is our God: the Living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is ours! And so God is "the one thing necessary":
Hear, O Israel! The Lord, thy God, the Lord is One! And you shall love the Lord, thy God, with all your mind and heart and strength and soul!

Christ's Peace, Fr. Michael +