Having read through many threads here and debatted in some I've come to the sad conclusion that most spend their time trying to prove that they are the better christrian and everyone else will be sent to a warm and not so cozy place. Most do this by quoting scripture and from the looks of most scripture quoted we are all going to be roasting like marshmellows, so lets take a pause and stoop with the doom and gloom for a bit.
To this end I start this thread. Look into the scripture, look into the sermons of your pastors and look into your hearts to find something that speaks of warmth, love, compassion and the true spirit of Christianity and share it with your brothers and sisters no matter which Church they come from what their personal beliefs are..
"He who stands with me shall be my Brother."
Great subject, one of the greatest of all.
Here's a homily on Love by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. Homily = Sermon.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The meaning of love is the meaning of life, because love, in spite of what we very often think or imagine, is not a simple feeling. When we speak of God, and we say that God is love, we do not mean that He is infinite feeling. We mean something deeper than this: that God is a plenitude of life and of being. And this applies also to our human love. Someone who is possessed by love is a man who has a plenitude of life in himself, in whom the sense of life, the power of life is so full, so great, that life is sure of itself. And this generates joy, courage, enthusiasm, and it goes so deep that it is beyond death itself.
The Holy Scripture says that love is stronger than death. Indeed it is stronger than death because it has placed itself by its fullness, its power, its intensity in the realm of the resurrection, in the realm of eternal life. And this is why love is capable of final sacrifice, not only of giving and of receiving but of laying down one’s life, because this life, if it is given, is also possessed in its fullness. It is plenitude of life which finds expression in final sacrifice. You may remember the words of Christ: ‘No one is taking My life from Me, I give it freely Myself.’ In that respect love, the fullness of life which it expresses, is invulnerable. People may take our lives, people may put us to any test, and yet one remains invulnerable because no one in reality is taking; the person who loves is giving.
I would like to give an example of this. During the Russian Revolution a mother with two children was hiding in a small town. One evening a woman came, as young as she was, in her late twenties, and told her that she had been discovered, betrayed, and that she was to be arrested in the night in order to be shot. The mother looked at the children, and her new friend said, ‘Don’t worry, you go, and you hide.’ And the mother said, ‘How could I go with these two children. I would be found within a few hours.’- ‘No’, said her unknown friend, ‘I will stay behind, call myself with your name and be shot perhaps, but you will escape.’ And so she did.
This was an act of love, which proceeded from such fullness of life, from such certainty that life was not ending, and that it was only in the fulfilment that she would find in her death that she could do this.
No one has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friends. Who does it himself, freely, and who in doing so, attains to the fulfillment of life because life is worth only what one lives for, and life attains this fulfillment when all is done that can humanely be done beyond fear, in joy, in certainty.
This is the meaning of love to me. Such fullness of life, that will allow me to accept, to become totally vulnerable, never recoil, never resist, give myself to the last, without discrimination to anyone and for anyone with a certainty that love shall never be defeated, that love is stronger than death; because to love means that we already have renounced a limited self and grown into communion, that is community of life with God, who is love itself. Amen.
For those of you that don't know or aren't aware:
Stalin's role in the fortunes of the
Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938.
[69] During
World War II, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the
NKVD had recruited the new
metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated until a further round of suppression in
Khrushchev's time. The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
In total, Stalin's government was responsible for the death of 21 million Russian Orthodox Christians, in addition to torture and the killing of other religious ethnicities
God bless!
