Archpastoral Message for Christmas 2020

It seems appropriate that, maybe more than ever before, we are longing for celebrations – Christmas and New Year’s among them. We are longing for the feast as we know it (or have romanticized it in our minds) and not the version that we seem to have received in 2020. We are longing for family and friends, coworkers and customers, safety and health and goodness.

The world was longing for its Savior, suffering under the consequences of humanity's sin, when the Lord chose to become human. His response to our longing was to enter the world, taking on our nature, loving us intimately, suffering for us, and liberating us. For He, too, longs for us - to throw off the shackles of our corruption and slavery to sin, and to find the promised life with Him in eternity.

At Christmas we celebrated the initiation of the plan to fulfill our longing with His presence, His grace, and His transformative love. While following His Nativity there were still years of difficulty, work, and suffering, it was all bearable because of the ultimate purpose - our Salvation, which was assured by His Incarnation. His acts of self-sacrificial love gave true satisfaction to our longing and showed us a path beyond the suffering of this life to the place for which we truly yearned.

We are called, in imitation, to see the longing in our fellow human beings - longing for joy in place of fear or sorrow or distress, longing for love in place of indifference or hatred - and to meet that longing with His love and our faith. While the days of difficulty are not over, and we still have a period of physical separation and work and sacrifice ahead, we must take the strongest lesson of the pandemic - that we desperately long for Christ and for one another - and find a way to meet that longing with His compassionate grace. Like He did, we must show mercy, reach out, excel in charity, and put others before ourselves. And when we're met with their fear, distress, sorrow, or anger, to respond with the love that is longed for at the deepest level - a love that counts not the wrongs, but sees the inherent dignity in each person. The dignity that Christ came to redeem and restore through His Nativity. Christ is Born!

With Archpastoral blessings and love in the Lord,

+SAVAS
Metropolitan of Pittsburgh