St John Orthodox Christian Church - Rogers, Arkansas

03/19/2026

03/14/2026

There was no death in the ancient world as shameful as crucifixion. Stripped naked in front of the whole world and literally hung up for everyone to mock and spit on and insult while slowly dying in agony, that is crucifixion. And so the cross was a symbol, not only of Roman power and authority, but of the most shameful form of death known to man.

And crucifixion is the most powerful image of death because this is precisely what death is: a cruel mockery of life. We try to make peace with it but to no avail. People now have “celebrations of life” when they die, but the Church knows what the saints have always told us, that death is not just the final chapter of life, not a friend to be greeted as some poets want to tell us, but our nemesis, our mortal enemy.

So why, if this is the case, does Christ in this gospel tell us to take up our cross and, in a sense, embrace death? Because there is a third way. Living in the world we think the opposite of death is life, biological life, this life that we know. And so we cling to it, we hang on to it tightly, with white knuckles, desperately fighting off death by seeking pleasure wherever we can find it. And let us not kid ourselves, this is precisely what we’re doing by seeking pleasure and satisfaction in this world, we’re trying to fight off death. Why, after all, has our culture made a cult of youth, of attempting to be forever young, of plastic surgery, of little blue pills, trying to look and feel like we’re forever 18 years old? Why if not because we’re trying desperately to stave off death by feeling alive.

I think we should be honest about what our culture is selling us and what it’s doing to us with its incessant advertisements for the cult of youth. It’s turning us into vampires. We fear death and so we feed off of the only life we know, the life of the flesh, life of pleasure, like parasites. Is that too gruesome for you? But just what are we doing if not sucking the life out of this world, desperately trying to get life forever we can find it? What is it, in the end, but a sort of grotesque and unholy Eucharist? Isn’t all of our consumption merely a participation in the flesh and blood of this world, hoping it will give us life?

But Christ is not offering us simply more of this life that we know, biological life, more food and drink and s*x. He’s offering us eternal life, which is not just more biological life or even unending biological life, but divine life. And, paradoxically, the way to divine life is a third way between mere biological life and death. It is the way of the cross.

Christ is telling his followers and disciples to embrace the cross, to take it upon themselves, to not wait to be crucified but to crucify themselves. But what about the shame of the cross? The real shame lies in our attempts and our desire to find our life in this world, a world that has become for us a place of shadows, false promises and deception. Don’t misunderstand, it’s not that this world is evil, it is not. But when we make it our end, our life, it decays and turns to dust in our hands and becomes for us death. By letting go of our grip on this life, our clinging to this world, and instead taking hold of the cross and raising it onto our shoulders in faith, embracing the path of Christ, life and death as we know it lose their hold on us and we mysteriously enter into the third way, the way of Christ, the way of the cross.

And this, after all, is the point of this whole season of Great Lent which is a microcosm of our life: we seek to look beyond this world of mere food and drink and s*x and the pleasure of this life to find our life elsewhere, as Saint Paul says, hidden with Christ. Lent teaches us what we should never forget as Christians, that our whole life only ever makes sense as a participation in the Paschal mystery of Christ crucified and risen, triumphing over death by death. Here, in the middle of Lent, in the middle of our lives, let us simply be Christians, denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Christ, to whom is do all glory, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

-Fr John Wehling

02/23/2026

I was honored to appear on the Orthodox Health podcast last week with one of my parishioners, Michael Kuhn.

The Church does not begin Great Lent with a diet plan or a productivity hack. She begins Lent with a doorway: forgiveness.In this Forgiveness Sunday (Cheesef...

02/22/2026

The temptation to which Adam and Eve succumb in the garden is the temptation to attain salvation by asserting their own will. The serpent promises them that if they disobey the commandment and eat the fruit then they will be like God. But it is a lie, and they become the slaves of sin and the evil one. This is what the whole of history teaches us down to our own day with its promises of happiness, bliss, and fulfillment if only we can find the secret, the fruit of the forbidden tree, the wisdom which we suspect has been hidden from us.

What we most need to give up in Great Lent is our self-will, the illusions and delusions that we can figure out the recipe to save ourselves. That is what the whole American program is about, but is it working? Not so much. We endlessly chase everything from diets to ancient secrets, always looking for the one missing ingredient that eludes us and that is the key to our happiness. We are like Naaman the l***r (2 Kings 5), unwilling to just do the little thing right in front of us even though all the scriptures and the saints have said it is very simple: fast, pray, give alms, confess your sins, and go to church. All that we give up in Great Lent is only the means, the method, by which we give up the one thing we need most to abandon: our self-will.

-Fr John Wehling

02/21/2026

We are at the door of the Great Fast, the fast leading to the Holy Week of our Lord and the great Pascha. Fasting remains for most of us a sort of mystery, a spiritual discipline that we might or might not undertake but which we struggle to understand. The fact is that we tend to function in much of our life with a sort of basic, childlike morality. Things are either good or bad, and if they’re good we can do them if they’re bad we should not.

But spiritual life goes deeper than this simplistic morality. We live in a world, a cosmos, in which all things were created good but in which we turned from the good, God, toward the world as an end in itself. We might say that we made a good into The Good and in doing so relegated The Good into a good. And when we did this the cosmos, this good world, became somehow corrupted. It’s not that it is now evil or that what is good became bad, but when we turn from God, our ultimate good, and seek the good in created things apart him then they no longer serve their purpose as steps to heaven. The food that should nurture us and become part of our very bodies and thus along with everything should be offered up to God in sacrifice and in spiritual ascent becomes merely tasty calories and empty pleasure. To use the biblical language, our bodies become fleshly.

It is significant that the very first commandment given to man in the garden was to fast. “From all of the trees in the garden you may eat except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.“ “Do not eat” is, therefore, the first commandment. “Not from this tree.” And then listening to the serpent and seeking God-likeness apart from God through food the good world became for us a temptation.

Our culture tells us that we can have everything, that we can eat and drink what we like, engage in relations with whomever we like, say yes to everything that we like, and through this find satisfaction and fulfillment. But if we are honest we know that this is not true. We cannot say yes to everything. You cannot, for example say yes to an addiction and say yes to physical, mental, and spiritual health. You cannot say yes to two brides or grooms at the same time and remain faithful to both. You cannot say yes to the road upward and the road downward at one and the same time. And so we must learn to say no to some things in order to say yes to better things.

This is the secret to fasting. We learn to say no to some foods for a period of time. And all of the fathers of the church tell us that there is great power in learning to say no. Learning to say no to a hamburger or a chicken sandwich, as mundane as that might seem, strengthens us and enables us to say no in higher and more important areas of our life where we must truly say no if we are to belong to Christ.

Our Lord himself tells us, you cannot serve two masters. He doesn’t say you should not, he says you cannot. And Great Lent is a season for us to practice this by serving God and God alone. And we practice this by doing it in the most basic fundamental area of our life, what we eat.

-Fr John Wehling