Come to Me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Mt 11.28

His Eminence Metropolitan SABA Archbishop of New York and Metropolitan of All North America         His Grace Bishop Alexander

Pastor: Fr John Vazquez| fatherjohnvazquez@gmail.com | stgeorgealbany.org | 1 St George's Pl Albany

Office Hours: Mon/Fri 10am-5pm/Confessions: After weekly services or by appointment

Parish Council Leadership: Chair—Michella Rizk, Treasurer—Marie Barbera, Secretary—Daniel Palmer, Vice Chair—Justin Rezek

Beloved,

One of the great works of the Holy Fathers of the Church is called—On the Incarnation—by St Athanasius the Great. St Athanasius lived during the 4th century and was a very important figure in helping the Church to stand up against incorrect teaching about who Jesus Christ is. It is a very short book, logical, simple and yet very profound and I encourage each of you to read it (you can find it HERE and HERE).

In his book St Athanasius discusses what salvation is and why it has been ordered the way that it is. For us as Orthodox Christians salvation means union with God. When we sinned we broke that union and communion that we had with God and we were unable to fix it—something had to be done so that sin and death did not have the last word (God wouldn't be God if evil, sin and death had the last word) and so that union with God could be available to us again.

One of the points that St Athanasius makes in his monumental work is that Jesus became a man so that he could die. Why? Because death was the path that every single person walked down irregardless of riches, power, strength or holiness. Our sweetest Lord wanted to reunite all people to himself and so He chose the thing that all people experience—death—to be the way that we could be reunited to Him.

There was a problem though, as God and Divine and Life itself—the Son of the Father was not able to die so that he could fill death with Himself and thus transform death into a path to Life. So the Son of God took on the ability to die by becoming a human being...How amazing is this? Our Lord stopped at no lengths to reunite us to Himself. Do we play a role in this Divine intervention in our lives?

We do.  It is our work to accept Him and this acceptance means choosing to unite ourselves to Him as He chose to unite Himself to us. This process of uniting ourselves to Him happens in the Church and it is why the Church—which is our Lord's body (Col 1.18)—must have true teaching, dogma and practice so that this union with God can happen (if I unite myself to a lie—even a very good one—it will not save me). Ultimately, our union with God happens through our own death to sin which is accomplished in and through the Church which grants us the Grace of God to defeat sin and ultimately death.

As we draw nearer to the birth of our Lord—meditate on this amazing truth—it is so that we could be reunited to our Lord, that He came as a young child and was born, suffered, died and rose again.

May we choose to unite ourselves to Him in return for His love.

With love in Christ,

Fr John