March 2025 Newsletter – Lenten Leadership

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Leadership requires action and example. A good leader (and remember, we are all leaders) sets a vision and then engages with others to meet the vision. Consider what bad leaders do. They say: ‘Do this and do that’ but merely sit back and watch. They are not alongside in working to accomplish the vision. They take a lais·sez-faire approach. Even worse, they sit back and criticize when they think you’re not doing it right. We can rightly say: How can we do it right without leadership?

Jesus is the good and perfect leader. He placed His entire self on the line for the vision His Father had set, the establishment of the Kingdom. He led and taught others the how and why. He set out clear goals and worked to get there – He alongside His disciples. He corrected His disciples when they went astray, but did so in a fair and evenhanded manner.

On the First Sunday in Lent our Epistle is taken from St. Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome. Paul is doing two things. He is contrasting the Law of Moses with its legalistic claim against the free gift of salvific grace offered through Jesus. St. Paul tells the Church that they have the Word of God and that if they confess Jesus as Lord and believe fully in Him they have salvation. They need not offer animal and grain sacrifices or carry out other precepts of the Law to obtain forgiveness or salvation. It is already theirs in Jesus’ sacrifice.

So too for us.

From there, Paul calls on us to lead by our proclamation. This was a call to bold leadership because to confess Jesus as Lord was quite hazardous then. For a Jew it could mean being cast out of family and community including great economic sacrifice. For a Gentile the penalties could include not only separation from family and community, but also arrest and prosecution, later even martyrdom. That’s not too far from reality today. Yet, lead we must without fear. Let us engage and through our Lenten action and example draw many to Christ trusting the assurance that no one who believes in Jesus will be put to shame.

Welcome to our March 2025 Newsletter. We enter Lent on March 5th with Ash Wednesday. Lent provides us with apply opportunity to practice the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and sacrifice. Join in our Directed Giving program to provide food resources in our local community. Looking forward, we are preparing for our Seniorate Lenten Retreat on April 5th and our Basket Social on April 27th. Looking back we announce the winners of our Valentines Raffle. Congratulations to all who participated. You support the faith development of our youth. Read up about CarePortal’s Love Day 2025. What we do really matters. We announce upcoming Ordinations for three of our brothers, Tonsure, and Minor Orders for another five. God bless them! All that and a reflection on the Orthodox Hymn “Open To Me The Doors Of Repentance.”

Read up on all this and more in our March 2025 Newsletter.

October 2023 Newsletter – Earnest Love

Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart,

Welcome to October! We see a wonderful theme for this month carried on from our celebration of Brotherly Love in September. It is this, a theme of deep focus on sacrificial love. Peter reminds us of our Christian duty to sacrificial love in 1 Peter 1:22 as quoted above: love one another earnestly. How do we grow in love?

October is the month of the Holy Rosary. We must ensure, of course, that we keep the rosary in perspective as a methodology for concentrated prayer and not as some sort of magical mystery thing. The rosary takes us on a tour of the glorious, joyful, and sorrowful moments (called mysteries in the rosary) in the life of Jesus. What we see in each moment of His life and that of Mary is their living out the sacrificial love that marks the gospel way of life. They give of themselves totally to do as God the Father asks. By their example and our focusing on that example, we discover new ways to share our love. We pause to recollect how we might imitate Jesus and follow His call to love as the Father asks.

Also in October we celebrate the Christian Family in a special way. The family, as designed by God, is the seed bed for developing a life that conforms to St. Peter’s guidance – foremost by obedience to the truth. The family relationship, the smaller model for the wider Church, is the place we learn true self-sacrifice, whether it is giving up our time or treasure to serve another member or in giving up our dreams to bring the aspirations of the other to fruition. Further, the truth of God and our obedience to it is also self-sacrifice founded in love. No, we must not meander through life just doing whatever we please if we call ourselves Christian. We set aside our urges to do as we please in order to follow Jesus’ way of life and the Father’s call to us.

To love one another earnestly means we place our whole selves in the service of love. We privy ourselves by obedience to God’s truth and with sincerity follow Jesus, imitate Mary, love on our families, and take a back seat to the other.

Fall is here and we are busy. The blessing of pets will occur at Holy Masses on Sunday, October 1st. We celebrate the month of the Holy Rosary with regular prayer on Fridays at 3pm and we honor the Christian Family with a special Solemnity on October 8th. We cover the unfortunate occurrences (debacle) in the Polish Catholic Church in the Republic of Poland. Read up on the PNUA transition to the PNA.

We look forward to the months ahead replete with activities including our Seniorate Thanksgiving celebration. Fr. Jim will offer online catechism classes starting October 11th. That and so much more to read up on.

Check it out in our October 2023 Newsletter.

July/August 2023 Newsletter – On the Faithfulness Track

And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me

Balaam’s ass is one of two animals in the Bible that can speak. She is also one of two who are a blessing to their human companions. I encourage you to read the whole story found in Numbers, Chapters 22 through 24. This story has much to tell us about our walk of faith.

Baalam was a soothsayer or magician. The King of the Moabites had called on Balaam to curse Israel who were coming out of Egypt into his land. At first Balaam would not go, listening to God, but later relented under much pressure. All along God tells Balaam not to go, but he later chooses to go, agreeing to say only what God tells him. Along the journey Balaam’s ass bows humbly and will go no further. Balaam beats the animal three times. Finally the ass speaks and asks Balaam why he has hit her. He gets angrier and tells her he would kill her. Then God opens Balaam’s eyes and he sees the Angel of the Lord with sword drawn standing in the road. The angel tells Balaam: Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me: And the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.

This is a story of faithfulness and of weakened faith. The Angel (of course) and the ass are absolutely faithful to God, and in terms of the ass, to Balaam. This loyalty failed in Balaam. He chose to neglect God’s command, preferring to try making a deal with God so he could please the King of the Moabites. He also chose to hit his animal. Balaam’s disloyalty causes God to show that He is the One in charge. He can send angels and cause animals to speak. Balaam (and we) are reminded that we must follow God’s instruction. We cannot double-deal. We cannot bargain out of doing as God asks without consequences.

Our walk of faith is to be a life of loyalty to God’s command, His Word Who is Jesus, the Holy Spirit’s work in the Church. Let us not veer!

Welcome to our July/August 2023 Newsletter. We are enjoying the hot summer days and are engaging in many wonderful activities that grow our faith, serve our community, and foster our fellowship as the family of God in Schenectady.

Read a report from the Men’s Spiritual Retreat. Join in the great activities offered for our youth, musicians, and parish. We have replaced our organ – take a look. Our Food Bank partnership is underway and CarePortal is serving those most in need (23 requests met, 67 children served, and an economic impact of over $32,800).

Please join us for our parish/community picnic on the church grounds on Sunday, August 20th after the 10am Holy Mass.

BTW – we still need help in getting our funeral candlesticks refinished. Let Fr. Jim know if you have the skillset to help. 

Check out all that and more in our July/August 2023 Newsletter.

January 2023 Newsletter – Treasure and Gift

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Imagine if you will, an asteroid falls to earth. Upon investigation scientists discover a new element, one unknown throughout history. There is just so much of the element and it is removed and and taken to a lab. The element is found to have a beautiful appearance, an infinite number of valuable uses, and in-and-of-itself is rare. Everyone has heard of the element via the news and social networks and that news causes it to further increase in value. Everyone would love to have it in their possession. With all this going on, people are talking about the new element all-the-time, they are doing all they can to pursue it, and there is no work or sacrifice people would not expend to have it in their possession.

Jesus tells us as recorded in Matthew 6:21 that where a person’s treasure is, so is their heart there.

Eight days ago we recalled the precious gift that came down from heaven, like our imaginary asteroid element one-of-a-kind, filled with light/luminous, rare, and infinitely present and perfect in all situations. That gift is Jesus, God with us, ever present.

Now one thing about our journey through the liturgical year, following in the footsteps of Jesus and the key moments and teachings given to us is how we live because of them. We could consider our experience of Jesus disconnected and one-off, of no more value than perhaps a few hours on a Sunday and a few occasional holidays, but if we see the truth of the treasure we have, its preciousness, we do all we can and even more to fully possess Him. If we do indeed see the value of Jesus and we make His value central in our lives, we will talk about Him all-the-time. We will pursue Him in our reading of Scripture and in times of dedicated prayer. We will count no work or sacrifice too much if we dedicate them to carrying out Jesus’ commands. If Jesus is our treasure then our hearts will be focused on Him alone. Let our continuing celebration of the forty days of Christmas cause us to reflect on the gift we have received and how we treasure it.

Welcome to our January 2023 Newsletter and the ongoing celebration of the Christmas season (all forty days of Christmas which started Christmas Day). As you can imagine, there is tons going on. 

We start by taking a look at all the good we are doing within our community, whether direct assistance to families, empowering the women among us, gathering clothing and food which continues in the SouperBowl of Caring – Let’s Tackle Hunger. There are several events going on including Christmas season gatherings and our hosting of prayer for Christian Unity on Saturday, January 21st at 5pm. It is time to recognize those who have been awarded music scholarships in the past and encourage all to apply for a scholarship. There are plenty of thanks to go around and a schedule of most of this year’s big events.

All that and more in our January 2023 Newsletter.