sermon [Theme]

“All people are like that,” said Tarrou. “We just need to give them the right opportunity.”

There are not many people, and since it is desirable from the very beginning to eliminate possible misunderstandings between the narrator and the reader, I ask you to note that I apply my statement not only to young people or small children, but to absolutely all people, children and adults, old and young , those that are still stretching upward, and those that are already growing downwards - there are few, I repeat, there are people who would agree to sleep in a church. I don't say - on a hot summer day, during a sermon, no, I mean at night and all alone.

- In fact, everything is much simpler. They just live for today.

The priests tried to present Jesus to the Roman procurator as a politically unreliable person and sought to prove that politically dangerous moments were the popularity that Jesus enjoyed among the people, the attention with which the people listened to Jesus' preaching.

Once, during a sermon, the priest turned to the audience with the question: is there

During the sermon, parishioners catch every word coming from the confessional.

In the arsenal of theology, I was looking for a weapon for holy war; I was looking for means by which the Gospel idea of ​​salvation could triumph in the souls of those who had lost their strength and succumbed to temptation - and would return the lost, broken, sick to the right path ... Neither historical, nor systematic, nor practical theology, taken separately, did not correspond this much needed requirement. In all ages, the Church was to be illuminated with the spirit of Christian love; she was called to give people this love and make them instruments of divine love - but in fact, in her history, the trace of such efforts is almost negligible, despite the examples of many whom love has transformed, and many who dedicated their lives to deeds in her name. Endless disputes about dogmas - cruel, fanatical, filled with hatred, and the more powerful, the more petty, insignificant and further from the understanding of love was their subject; disputes about the forms of worship, which were given magical power; fear, striking to the shiver of any believer, when he understood that his own conscience tells him to depart from the church charter - and thereby deprive his soul of salvation; a fierce hatred of heretics, who, knowing the Bible and faith, willy-nilly rejected old beliefs and adherence to church dogma, even if they attributed such deviations to satanic tricks; questions of power, money and law, resolved in spite of the gospel - all of this, as I found out, was much more concerned than the task of translating divine and human love into life. In an effort to prove that they better understood and embodied the religion of love, some Christians smashed the heads of other Christians who also served Jesus and wanted to be His disciples; often entire nations were involved. People killed, robbed, raged more mercilessly than beasts of prey - in the name of the One who died on the cross out of love and by death bore witness to the message of love brought by Him. Of course, there are many testimonies of sincere love and true piety in church history. And yet, if the criterion announced by Jesus in the Gospel of John becomes the yardstick, it will be that according to which disciples are recognized by mutual love, and not by subtle differences in dogmas; if it becomes His main commandment about man's love for God, his neighbor and himself; if they are the words of the Apostle Paul, who put love above faith and hope (1 Cor. 13:13), then the history of the Christian religion is more like a monstrous misunderstanding or an abnormal deviation from true Christianity. Dogmatic theology and its history, with their ruthless adherence to irrational dogmas that have nothing to do with love, seemed to me to be a roundabout maneuver undertaken with one goal: to bypass the main point of Jesus' preaching and demands. I saw how the Gospel and the doctrines of the Church horrified people, for any doubt about them threatened to be burned at the stake and in hellish flames; I compared it to the careless contempt with which the love of Christ was trampled upon; and I considered it as straining a mosquito and swallowing a camel.

The best sermon of a priest is his life in plain sight.

Faith can't preach and not preach love. Their message sounds nice, but in reality is an empty sound.

To preach, you need to honor the commandment.

Another time, other songs. But morality, something from the sermon on the mount, must remain the man that he was not a pig, not a criminal.

When in a moment someone else's suffering, we begin preaching, we are waiting for absolute failure. A suffering person does not need preaching, does not need lots of advice and consolation - so you can only aggravate the situation. In a moment of suffering, I want only one thing: that someone sat down and wept together.

Innumerable of those individuals who wish semitransparency and would like to find her in the Church. But alas, "the hungry flock looks up and unfed". They take part in rites, they listen to sermons, they repeat prayers; but their thirst remains unquenched. Frustrated, they turn to the bottle. At least for a while it somehow works. The Church can still be visited; but it is nothing more than the Musical Bank of Butler's "Egdon". God can still admit; but He is God only on the verbal level, only in strictly pikviksky sense. A valid object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state unchecked and belligerent euphoria which follows the consumption of the third cocktail.

Came this preacher, Billy Bundy, was trying to sell mom's religious sewing machine. Dad asked what in this sewing machine such religious, and Billy said:
- If you buy such a machine, the Lord bless you.