How to Be an Orthodox Christian

In the second of two episodes on the Eucharist, Dcn Seraphim turns from what the Mystery is to how an Orthodox Christian prepares to receive it. He begins with St. Paul's sober warning that whoever eats and drinks unworthily is "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord" and "eats and drinks judgment to himself" (1 Corinthians 11), and draws the Church's careful distinction: no one is ever worthy of the Eucharist, but we are asked to come in a worthy manner. He walks through the converging disciplines of preparation — a life of continual repentance, confession, the Eucharistic fast, the pre-Communion prayers, and reconciliation with the brethren (Matthew 5) — and then closes with the practical mechanics of approaching the chalice, the prayers of thanksgiving, and the Christian live as lived from chalice to chalice.

Handouts and resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kqqYoHZK-q8yWVDqT9gbqdt6PkkWE7CI?usp=sharing

Music Used:

Cherubic Hymn, Romanian Chant, Tone 8

Choir of St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Santa Rosa, CA

In the first of two episodes on the Eucharist, Dcn Seraphim explores what the Holy Eucharist is according to Holy Tradition: the fruit of the Tree of Life given again to the children of the new Adam, the sacrifice of Melchizedek brought to its perfection, the anamnesis of the Lord's passion, the very Body and Blood of the incarnate Christ made present by the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. Drawing on Nicholas Cabasilas's Life in Christ — "the clay is no longer clay when it has received the royal likeness, but is already the Body of the King" — he ends with the central claim of the whole Orthodox sacramental life: that the purpose of the Christian faith is to eat God so that we may become, by grace, what God is by nature.

Handouts and resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FOxCuUeiWEKWzdt_6w2i121c6R82hjVK?usp=sharing

Music Used:

Cherubic Hymn, Romanian Chant, Tone 8

Choir of St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Santa Rosa, CA

Dcn Seraphim takes up the first two mysteries of Christian initiation: Baptism, by which we are reborn out of the waters into the humanity of the new Adam, and Chrismation, by which the Holy Spirit Himself is sealed upon us. Drawing on his own background as a former Baptist minister, he traces the two great modern misconceptions about baptism — that it is only a symbol, and that it can only be administered to those old enough to consent — back to the Radical Reformation, and refutes both from a long line of New Testament passages. He then walks through the Orthodox baptismal rite moment by moment.

Handouts and resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GSl_XdilbI9lDmaZYKufyh6pITpxmMni?usp=sharing

Music Used:

11 Cherubic Hymn, Romanian Chant, Tone 8

Choir of St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Santa Rosa, CA

Every visitor to an Orthodox church eventually asks the same question — why so much stuff? The icons, the candles, the incense, the relics, the bread and wine and water and oil. In this episode Dcn Seraphim argues that the question itself is the wrong one, and that the Orthodox question is never "what is the bare minimum?" He diagnoses the quiet, unstated gnosticism that has shaped modern American religion and then lays out the central thesis that will frame the rest of the series: that the Holy Mysteries of the Church are the recapitulation, in Christ, of what God did with Adam in Genesis 1–3.

Handouts and resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xZEu9Y48xE8Z4A_XC7bKLjxbK39ZTreB?usp=sharing

Music Used:

11 Cherubic Hymn, Romanian Chant, Tone 8

Choir of St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Santa Rosa, CA

Picking up the framework from Part 1, Dcn Seraphim applies it to the specific moral questions where the Church's teaching most visibly cuts against the assumptions of our age. He begins by rejecting the quiet gnosticism of the modern world and affirming the goodness of the body, then takes up sexual ethics at length, working from Genesis 1 and Ephesians 5 to chastity, marriage as the icon of Christ and the Church, fornication, pornography, and the image of God in the human person. Finally, he talks about the discipline of the tongue: lying, gossip, judgment, and the new domain of online conduct.

Handouts and resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16IQ-i3cukC75VMFRqGP1q9oLoED_uXa-?usp=sharing

In the first of two episodes on the moral life, Dcn Seraphim works through the two great moral texts of Scripture — the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Sinai, and the Sermon on the Mount given by Christ to His disciples on a mountain in Galilee — and shows how Christ does not abolish the law given to Moses but fulfills it, taking it inward into the dispositions of the heart. The Decalogue marked off Israel by clear external standards of conduct; the Sermon on the Mount addresses a new community, the Church, in which God is concerned not only with our outward actions but with our inner thoughts, our affections, and the very movement of our wills.

Handouts and resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1z-OVpbdZqhEDT0v3M9tipcdb-_frY4zP?usp=sharing

Where does all of it come from — the eastward-facing altar, the icons, the hymns, the precise theological claims woven into every prayer? In this episode Dcn Seraphim takes up the question of Holy Tradition: not a rulebook or a second Bible, but the whole living transmission of the Christian faith from the Apostles to today, the river in which Scripture itself flows. Drawing on St. Paul, St. Irenaeus, the ecumenical councils, and the witness of saints from St. Athanasius to St. Sophrony of Essex, he shows how the Church discerned the canon, defined the faith at councils like Nicaea and Ephesus, and continues to confess that faith in her worship under the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi — the law of prayer is the law of faith.

Handouts and resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CD0DyDFbR8DEr1yNyb_N2tdrrX8PCmUL?usp=sharing

Intro: 0:00

Two Modes of Transmitting Tradition: 4:04

Scripture in Tradition: 6:45

St. Irenaeus on Tradition: 12:06

Conciliary Principle/Councils : 13:56

Fathers of the Church: 21:45

What the Church pray is what we believe: 26:14

tradition vs. “T”radition: 30:36

Closing statements: 32:16

In this episode, Dcn Seraphim explores the Orthodox understanding of the Holy Scriptures as a verbal icon of Christ — a living encounter with the One who speaks through every page, from Genesis to Revelation. He looks at how the Church gave us the Bible, why Orthodox Christians use the Septuagint, what is meant by reading Scripture with the Fathers, and why typological reading is not an invention of the Fathers but an extension of the way the New Testament teaches us to read the Old. Along the way he draws on St. Irenaeus, St. Theodore the Studite, St. Isaac the Syrian, and St. John Chrysostom, and shows how the hymns and readings of the Divine Liturgy are themselves the Church's living school of biblical interpretation. The episode ends with practical guidance for daily Scripture reading at home.

In this episode, Dcn. Seraphim takes up the third great discipline of the Sermon on the Mount and shows why the Orthodox Church understands almsgiving not as an optional extra but as the practice by which we become like the God who gives Himself away. Drawing on Christ's teaching in Matthew 6 and 25, the Book of Tobit, the parable of the Widow's Mite, and the writings of Sts. Basil, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, and Clement of Alexandria, he traces almsgiving back to its roots in the very nature of the Trinity. He then turns to the practical questions: tithing, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, parish stewardship, and how the whole Divine Liturgy forms us as a school of giving.

Show notes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WENS_5xjgyLnr5kJQPTiK3qqYTgi5Hd6/view?usp=sharing

Dcn Seraphim traces fasting back to the first commandment given in Eden — a commandment about food — and shows how the Fall itself was a failure of fasting, answered in the wilderness by the New Adam who refuses to turn stones into bread. Drawing on Basil, Chrysostom, John Climacus, and John Cassian, he distinguishes Orthodox fasting from dieting or self-punishment and presents it instead as the rider's training of the horse: a medicine for the soul whose dose must be fitted to each person through the Church's principle of oikonomia. Then, he walks through the Orthodox fasting calendar — the four great fasts, Wednesdays and Fridays, the approximately forty percent of the year spent in fasting — while pairing Christ's "when you fast" in Matthew 6 with Isaiah 58's warning that a fast without mercy is no fast at all. Practical guidance follows on how to live a fasting day, how cravings become occasions for prayer, and how every act of bodily restraint is oriented toward the Eucharistic table, where food is at last received on God's terms rather than seized on our own.