COME TOGETHER IN HIS NAME

Happy New Year and many happy, healthy years. Presvytera Ellen and I want to wish you all a very blessed and Happy New Year, filled with all God’s richest blessings. May you all have a healthy, happy, and prosperous New Year and may we all continue to grow in love and faith of our Lord.

It is a blessing for us to serve and get to know all of you in this great community. You have all been so very kind and hospitable and we can’t thank you enough. Our prayer is that this year we can have the opportunity to see and meet as many new parishioners as we can.

I am reminded of a passage in Ephesians that instructs us in love and fellowship and it says: And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, as a sweet-smelling offering and sacrifice to God. Speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. With the beginning of a New Year the pages of a new book are blank and we put the words on them. Let our entries include words of continued and new relationships with all members of our family of this Holy Parish in Pocatello . Our greatest growth and development occurs and is produced by association. We are challenged more to change through our interaction with our fellow Christians than through any other means. Our faith is a real, beautiful, transfiguring experience, whereby all our senses (our mind, body, and soul) are involved and offered to God in worship, and we are mysteriously given the foretaste of the everlasting joy of the Kingdom of Heaven . In short, in worship together, we encounter God. Through our approach to life, to one another, to God’s creation, we, working together, and with God’s permeating grace, can make the Kingdom of God real and present right here and now.

As a Church, an assembly, we are a people called out (summoned) by God to come together in one place, in His Name, to worship the One God, at the One Altar, partake of the One Loaf, drink from the One Cup, and be united mysteriously, by His Divine Grace, in Communion with Him, and therefore, united to one another in His Love. As a Church, we are living, breathing members of the Body of Christ; Christ is our Head. Let us come together in His name and let our entries on the blank pages of the new book for this year emphasize the living of our Orthodox faith in and outside our Church.