Our Christmas Gift to YOU!

Merry Christ-Mass to you

Many of us have spent a lot of time in the past few days wrapping up Christmas gifts.   It is rather fun and a bit challenging to make something beautiful as a clever way to hide a surprise.

The idea is to disguise a surprise so that no amount of rattling, sniffing, or even holding it up to the light will give away the surprise.  Other times the idea is to get a person to accept something they’d never accept any other way.  Like those Christmases when I gave my brother a rock.  Or the year I gave my mother a puppy in a bottomless box that wiggled across the floor.

Most of us can tell stories about oddly or creatively wrapped surprise gifts.  Packages wrapped so that we could never guess what’s inside.  But we all know that Christmas isn’t really about the gifts we give or how we wrap them; it’s not about rocks, bicycles or even puppies.  Christmas is about the gift that God gave us. 

The first gift God gave us was our FREE WILL.

But the most startling and eventful gift is God’s surprise package.  What an incredible idea this really is:  “For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son…”

How do you wrap such a gift?

How can anyone wrap an invisible, unspeakable gift?  How do you wrap up UNCONDITIONAL LOVE and FORGIVENESS?

This evening I want to talk about the gift of forgiveness and the gift it offers.  Tonight begins Christmas, the most significant holiday in the Christian calendar that celebrates our capacity to acknowledge where we have turned away from wholeness, to let go of the spiritual fetters that have resulted from our transgressions against each other and to begin anew.

The Christian Holy Days are a time for prayerful reflection on all the transgressions one has committed, all the little instance, as well as the big ones, where one has fallen out of right relationship with not only one’s own self, but with others.  For me, this is the most spiritually significant holiday of all world traditions.

The very Gift of Forgiveness is often misunderstood, especially among Christians who don’t often talk about it because they don’t really understand its full implication and meaning.  Forgiveness is not denying or forgetting.  When someone is wronged, reaching forgiveness isn’t simply saying that everything is now okay.  Forgiving isn’t excusing an action, or condoning it.  And most assuredly, forgiveness certainly isn’t about cheap grace that lets people off the hook from being accountable for their wrongdoing.

So why is this gift called FORGIVENESS?  It is a response to being wronged that acknowledges the wrongfulness of the action and acknowledges the other as a human being, similarly flawed to oneself.  Forgiveness is not instinctual  for most of us are.  For if you are like me when wronged, you get angry.

Forgiveness is a very long and slow process.  It can’t be rushed.  But the human heart is an open book.  In time, emotional healing can move people toward an open future rather than the dead-end of nursing a pent up anger.

Saying the words, I am sorry and meaning it when you’ve done wrong, invites another to turn towards you, but the other might not accept the invitation to mend the relationship.  It might hurt.  It will hurt.  We might have to swallow our pride.  But aren’t we better for it even if the other doesn’t respond to us as we wish?

When it comes to the gift of forgiveness, some of us don’t recognize it.  Some of us don’t trust it.  Some of us think we can live without it.  Some of us think it isn’t real.

If we are truly committed to spiritual growth within, it behooves us to do what Christian people are doing all over the world this week; giving a gift to our Savior, Jesus Christ, in honor of His birthday.  Taking the self-initiative and engage in self-examination so that we can turn toward a right relationship with not just ourselves, but with others, with the world, and then, most of all… with God Himself by the actions we take.

God’s gifts are always given.  The one holy and living God continues to be born into our world today.  The Messiah, the Christ, lives and becomes visible and name-able in each person that gives the gift of unconditional Love and forgiveness.  There is no need to unwrap the gift.  The wrapping and the gift are one…

This gift is not just between individuals although this message includes them too.  It is also between groups of people too… as we are hearing and seeing amongst many Christian groups, people, organizations both civil and religious that have been divided for centuries and some in these past years.

For my unworthy self and those with me, we have unanimously decided that this message to you and all who view it, is the most powerful and important gift that we could ever give beyond anything material that the world has to offer.  For every manner, method or form of spiritual or material harm we have felt or believed has taken place against us which may have caused division among individuals and/or groups, organizations and our unworthy selves, We extend forgiveness and seek your forgiveness as true Christians in spirit and truth if we have been the cause of the same toward you!

As many of you already also know... We have never been and are not now against people of the various denominations in themelves as we are against those false, misleading and errant doctrines and dogmas that were never, ever sanctioned by the Church established by Jesus Christ, the Holy Apostles and Patristic Fathers who have held true to the pillars of the Church upon which the ancient Seven Ecumenical Councils are based.

We have included special visitor tracking software in this message so that we can know who has visited this special page in hopes that certain ones whom we wish this message be viewed by, have (hopefully) viewed it.  For by viewing it, it will truly tell us a truth concerning the kind of Christianity we should all hold near and dear regardless of where one may come from. 

May all of us accept the gift and let it grow in our very lives….

God bless you and thank you!

+Thaddeus the Repentant Unworthy One in the Vineyard

  +Joseph Thaddeus, OSB, SSJt., Ph.D.

Metropolitan Archbishop, Archabbot, Primate

American Orthodox Church  / North American Orthodox Church

P. O. Box 1652, Deming, NM 88029

International Communications Headquarters:

(575) 531-0021

URL: http://www.apostle1.com

E-Mail: thaddeus@apostle1.com

•Ancient Canons/Seven Ecumenical Councils  

•An Understanding of the Ancient Canons

• Ancient Canons/Seven Ecumenical Councils

• A bit of understanding about the Fundamentalist Cults....

• Modern Day Ecumenism and its horrors

Copyright Notice
 

This website is the property of the American Orthodox Church (AOC), North American Orthodox Church (NAOC) and the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC). This website and all it's contents are under Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 by the American Orthodox Church (AOC), North American Orthodox Church (NAOC) and the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC).

All Rights Reserved under International Copyright Conventions. No part or whole of this website may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information, storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from either the American Orthodox Church (AOC), North American Orthodox Church (NAOC) or the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC). Information provided in any directory(ies) may not be recompiled into other directories or used as the basis for a derived work without explicit written permission.

U.S. Copyright Office

Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave. S.E. Washington, D.C. 20559-6000
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/
For permission to copy or use any of this material please contact us by using the E-Mail or the Postal Address located at the left of this page.

Regarding Copyrighted (c) Copyrighted Logos at this website:

All logos of this Website are copyrighted by their owners and Apostle1.com in California and/or New Mexico 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006  by the
American Orthodox Church, Inc. (California), North American Orthodox Church (New Mexico) and the American Orthodox Catholic Church Designed by Webfriar Ministries, and His Eminence Metropolitan Archbishop  +Joseph Thaddeus (Stanford), OSB, SSJt., Ph.D.

Notice the New Mailing Address for all Holy Orders, Institutions and organizations under the

AMERICAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

and the

NORTH AMERICAN ORTHODOX CHURCH:

P.O. Box 1652, Columbus, NM 88029

(575) 531-0021

Institutions include, but are not limited to the following:

Catholic Christian Church, Orthodox Benedictine,

Holy Order of St. Jude Thaddeus

Free Hit Counter

Physical Mailing Address Change as of April 15, 2007:

P.O. Box 1652, Columbus, NM 88029

Church International Communications Headquarters

NEW PHONE NUMBER:

(575) 531-0021