Confession

The Church of God expects to experience injustice and hostility historically. It is precisely that it is persecuted and does not fight back or take revenge, but prays for the forgiveness and salvation of its persecutors, that qualifies it as possessing the true faith and being the true Church. It is precisely at that moment when the Church takes revenge or remembers the offenses it has endured and passes on hostility and resentment to its next generation that it is betraying Christ and proving to everyone that it follows not the God whose throne is the Cross and who trampled death by death, but the old Adam, whom death tramples.

How can I be a member of a church institutionally some of whose members and even some of whose leaders are betrayers of Christ? Well, because I too am a betrayer of Christ, but by His call refuse to give in to defeat, since He has won the victory for me, and for these others, whose blasphemies they call loyalty to Orthodoxy, while trampling down not death by death as Christ does, but their brothers, whom they hate, as death does. Like it or lump it, I too am a sinner following Christ, and if He picks me up every day, He will pick up these others too. Meanwhile, we all suffer the strain of forgetting Him while we glory in our own ideas, fleshly and blind though they be, and mistake our loves and hates for truth.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.