 Sermon from June 12, 2022
The Feast of Pentecost John 7: 37 -52 By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost was and is to this day a powerful breath of life from our one God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, sends the Holy Spirit from the Father to the people of God, to the Church. On this day, over two thousand years ago, this mighty Breath of Life was felt in the powerful sound of wind, seen as tongues of fire, and heard in the charismatic words of Apostle Peter. It energised the Church then and continues now to bring thousands of people into the Trinitarian life of unity and love. As I was thinking about what I would say today, two examples of this living Breath of Life came to mind. I recently heard a talk between two Englishmen, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and a writer based in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth. Paul used to write on environmental topics and he’s also a poet. Their conversation is titled Conversion, Culture and the Cross. [Find it here on Youtube]. Paul shared the story of his conversion to Orthodoxy. Rowan Williams knows a lot about Orthodoxy on an intellectual level and has been drawn to it since his 20s, although he hasn’t become Orthodox. Paul explains his journey to becoming Orthodox in very straightforward language. He came from atheism and went through Zen Buddhism and even Wicca. He said that basically the Lord grabbed him by the hand and led him to where he needed to come. He was looking for a tangible manifestation of God in life, not just intellectual talk about Him which Christianity can slide into. Intellectual talk alone is not Church life. The second example is a visitor from Indonesia we had twenty years ago, Fr Daniel. Fr Daniel shared his experiences of preaching to Muslims who wanted to hear about Christ. They had great difficulty in understanding the mystery of the Holy Trinity. In speaking to them he used a model that is used in the ancient Church tradition: the Father is like the mind, the Son is the Word and the Word comes out with Breath of the Spirit. We believe in one God. The breath of Life in the Church is what we are talking about today. Those who need to see and touch in order to believe, like doubting Thomas, can go to the Holy Land because there are three public miracles that happen there every year: the Holy Fire of Great Saturday, the blessing of water in the Jordan River, and the cloud on Mt Tabor on Transfiguration. These happen every year. If we need to see the power of God in a tangible way, we can! But He said Himself to Thomas, more blessed are those who haven’t seen and yet believe. The Church of the apostles, martyrs, prophets and hierarchs has kept Pentecost alive for two thousand years. How? It is kept alive in the Eucharist, in the Liturgy. Let us bring the living Breath of God from the Eucharist, from the Church, from our communion of love into our family life, into our community life and let us share it with the people in the world around us, even without saying a word specifically to them. Let the living breath of God live within us. Let Him speak to those people that are ready to come into the Church just like those three thousand who converted after the words of Peter at Pentecost.
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 Christ is risen!
It is with great sadness that we learnt that Metropolitan Hilarion, our diocesan ruling bishop since 1996 and later, first hierarch of the the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, passed away this morning (Australian time). We will serve a panikhida tonight after vespers. Vespers at 6pm, panikhida at 6.45pm. Memory eternal!  Sermon from Sunday March 20, 2022 Second Sunday of Great Lent; St Gregory Palamas By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. On this day, the second Sunday of Great Lent, the Holy Church celebrates the memory of the great Hierarch of the 14th century, St Gregory Palamas, archbishop of Thessalonika. He was a great theologian and he summed up the traditional teaching from many centuries of ascetic strugglers of the Holy Church who taught about the nature of God’s grace. In the 14th century a controversy arose. Western Christianity developed the idea that the grace of God is a gift separate from God Himself, whereas the traditional Eastern understanding has always been the grace of God is God Himself. The energies of God are God Himself. This difference in understanding is important because it changes the nature of spiritual life. In Western thought grace is separate from God, and is a gift, like a ‘battery’ given to you to energise you and your moral life! But the other view emphasises the Church’s faith in the reality of the incarnation – that God is with us – ever since Christ became incarnate and set up His Church, He is with us. God is with us. God lives in the Church. God does these things through us. The Church – we – are His presence in the world. It’s not just a God Club, a club of nice people who try to be ‘good’ to each other! It’s much more than that. I have an illustration. I’d like to share a story told to me by my younger sister, Abbess Anna who spent many years in the Holy Land and got to know many clergy and interesting people from around the world. The story is about a priest’s wife, a matushka, in the town of Vyshgorod, Ukraine. Vyshgorod is a very old town dating back to the nineth century, and was a favourite place of St Olga. A few days ago, the woman was sleeping at home at night when she suddenly woke up because she felt somebody touching her. She woke up in a huge shock. There were two men standing by her bed. They made it known to her that were the first martyrs of Kyiv and Rus, Boris and Gleb. They were the first Kievan saints canonized. Boris and Gleb were the youngest sons of Vladimir, the baptiser of Rus, who were slaughtered by their oldest half-brother Sviatopolk so that they would not rival him for the throne. Boris and Gleb’s mother, Anna, was a Christian, and the sister of the Byzantine emperor. They each foresaw their deaths, but accepted their fates, rather than causing tension and war with their half-brother and his people. Once Matushka had calmed down, the martyrs said to her, Why is no one praying to us? Why have Ukrainians and Orthodox people elsewhere not turned to these saints to ask for help? This is something we really need to think about. It shows the spiritual state of the world, not just in Ukraine. Boris and Gleb are passion bearers. They preferred to sacrifice themselves rather than fight their brother’s warriors. This is an illustration of God’s grace making people into actual Christ-like figures, because like Christ, they preferred to shed their own blood rather than to shed other people’s blood. The lesson here is about the nature of love, that there is so little love in the world today. There is so much animosity, so much hatred, and we hear about it from the Lord Himself, that because of the lawlessness, because of the transgressions, because of the sinfulness of mankind, love will disappear. This is the most awful part of the spiritual state of the world today. And these two saints remind us that we should pray and connect with them and contemplate the nature of Christian life. Forget about God Club! Forget about becoming a ‘better person’! We are the Church of Christ; our job is to be Christ’s presence in the world. I’ve been asking people to take upon themselves a little effort of prayer and to say a kathisma of psalms every day for Ukraine. Please add in your prayers and address these saints, Boris and Gleb, and think about their sacrifice, their act of love. Without the grace of God, without God Himself coming into the life of each one of us, and energising us in a personal way, we will not survive these temptations that have filled the world. No sooner had Covid subsided a little than we became faced with a much bigger temptation, the war in Ukraine. It is a further test of our faith and one that really shows up how little love there is in the world. On this day when the Church celebrates the memory of St Gregory of Palamas, we are reminded what our Christian life is about. Like St Seraphim said, Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, the grace of God, so that we can manifest Christ. Only Christ-like love defeats death which is present in hatred and all other sins. This cold breath of death is everywhere in the world. The only way to resist it, to win, is with Christ because Christ is the winner. As Christ says, In the world you’ll have tribulations and sorrows, but be of good cheer for I have defeated the world, I have overcome the world. Prayers to Saints Boris and Gleb Troparion (Tone 2) Righteous passion-bearers and true fulfillers of the Gospel of Christ, Chaste Boris and guileless Gleb, You did not resist the attacks of your brother, the enemy, When he killed your bodies but could not touch your souls. Therefore, let the evil lover of power mourn While you rejoice with the angels standing before the Holy Trinity. Pray that those who honour your memory may be pleasing to God, And that all Orthodox Christians may be saved. Kontakion (Tone 3) Today your most glorious memory shines forth, Noble participants in the passion of Christ, holy Boris and Gleb, For you call us together to sing praises to Christ our God! Praying to Him before your sacred images, We receive the gift of healing by your prayers, For you are indeed divine healers. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sermon from Sunday March 13, 2022 Third Sunday of Great Lent. The Sunday of Orthodoxy By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Today’s feast, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, in concrete historical terms, celebrates the restoration of the veneration of icons in the year 842AD in Constantinople. The theology of the icon is about the reality of the Word becoming visible and tangible, becoming flesh. It is the love of God incarnate and crucified. Orthodoxy, let us say Christianity as God’s love, has triumphed not only in the year 842 but on countless occasions throughout the two-thousand-year history of the Church. I’ll give you two outstanding examples. Firstly, the victory of the Church over the Roman Empire in the early 300s. Secondly the victory of the Church over the atheistic Soviet regime in the celebration of the Millenium of the Baptism of Eastern Slavs in 1988. We are living in times when people might easily say, all you need is love! But they don’t know what love is. There is too much narcissism in our society, because there has been too much good life for too long. But recently our faith and our love here in Australia has faced many challenges; the terrible bushfires of 2019 /20, Covid which reached our shores in 2020 and is still here, the recent devastating floods in NSW and Queensland which have been almost ignored, and finally the devastation and suffering of the war in Ukraine. I’d like to add a note here that ROCOR, our Church in the diaspora, is connected historically and culturally to Ukraine. The First hierarch that led the Church when it was established in 1920 in the harbour of Constantinople was Anthony, the Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia, and a number of bishops with him were from the south, including Ukraine. In the period after World War II, some bishops from the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church joined ROCOR. The late Metropolitan Laurus who was the predecessor of our current metropolitan, was a Carpathian Ukrainian. And our current leader, Metropolitan Ilarion, is a Canadian Ukrainian. Our Church and liturgical culture is influenced by Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville which is a branch of the Pochaev Lavra in Ukraine. So even the way we do services here in this parish comes from the tradition of Pochaev. I’m saying all this to emphasise our connection. What should our appropriate response be to all these challenges I’ve just mentioned, including this last and terrible challenge of the suffering and devastation of war? We are The Church. We are supposed to understand that there is a spiritual reality beneath every thought, every word, and every action. With God, spirituality is constructive. But spirituality can be destructive as well. Human beings, even in their hate and aggression, project a spirituality because we are spiritual beings, but what’s projected then is a destructive spirit. Christ teaches that these spirits of hate, aggression and destruction can only be expelled through prayer and fasting. We are now in the best time of the Church year for prayer and fasting - Great Lent. As I’ve said many times before, that we should take upon ourselves a podvig, a labour of prayer and fasting for the purpose of overcoming the hate and suffering in the world and especially in Ukraine today. We have successfully done this a year ago when parishioners read a kathsima per day. We had forty parishioners who collectively read the entire Psalter through twice each day, and the parishioners found great help from it. I can guarantee it will help not only us, but further afield, because humanity is interconnected. Yes, hate divides and fragments humanity, but the Church is present in the world to bring the unity and love – the crucified love of God – into the world. That’s what we need to do. We need to inject this love, to give God some space in this world. Where there is hate, there is no room for God. But when we start to fast and pray, the grace of God can come and heal things that are unimaginably difficult to heal. And yet, nothing is impossible for God. The Church – that is us – as Christ’s love is being challenged to triumph again over hate and death in the world. And that means it has to triumph within ourselves, this crucified love of Christ. Listen to what the Lord Jesus Christ tells his disciples and us at his Mystical Supper; in the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. Amen.  Sermon from Sunday March 6, 2022, Forgiveness Sunday
Matthew 6:1-13 The Sermon on the Mount by Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Today is Forgiveness Sunday. Today the church remembers how Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, because they did not seek forgiveness from God. The Gospel reading that we just heard is from the Sermon on the Mount and in this passage we hear about three things. First of all, the need to forgive our neighbour as a condition of forgiveness from God to us, which of course reverberates even in the Lord’s Prayer. Secondly it talks about the true spiritual life, which doesn’t need to parade itself. Thirdly, the Lord talks about our heart and where our treasure is. The spirit of forgiveness shows up who is a real follower of Christ. We have it, or we don’t have it. We’re Christ’s or we’re not Christ’s. The Lord’s last words and deeds from His cross were about forgiveness; his prayer to the Father, Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing, and his forgiveness of the repentant bandit, the Good Thief. Surely these words and deeds are a testament to what is really important for Christ. When a person does not have the spirit of forgiveness, their heart has chosen another treasure, a treasure other than God. And that treasure, of course, can be summed up as their ego and pride. They are deluded and they may even think that they are serving God and praying to God, but in fact they are serving themselves and even in their prayer they address their ego. They parade their virtues, and the result is that they create a hell for themselves. As Dostoevsky wrote, Hell is the inability to love. Let me illustrate this with a passage written in the last few days by a young parishioner of ours. I feel terror and grief every day, as the news gets worse, and levels of hatred and fear escalate. While the immediate loss of life and the destruction of ways of living occupy my thoughts, I worry about the future. The burning lava of aggressive speech is gaining traction through media and public discourse. At a point where the pandemic should have brought us closer together and more appreciative of the preciousness of the time with our loved ones, and the importance of international cooperation and support, ties have been severed. I feel like it is now the time to come together and pray for peace to end all corrosive conflicts globally. I feel it is also time to examine the hatred and aggression in ourselves towards our fellow human brothers and sisters. Are we starting a war in our daily lives with angry thoughts, burning words or actions, that seek to destroy? More than ever, I feel we need to extend compassion, patience, and kindness, each being a candle of peace in our surrounds. That’s a touching and beautiful little passage from a young parishioner. In entering Great Lent, we must commit ourselves to a merciless honesty about our inner life. What is our real treasure? It’s a big question. Are we serving God or ourselves in a multi-faceted way? Do we have the spirit of forgiveness? Are we going to become real followers of Christ? Today’s theme of forgiveness translates into transformation of life. The Gospel calls this repentance, and that’s what the next seven weeks is about as we prepare to greet the Risen Lord. to edit.  Prayer for Ukraine
Lord Jesus Christ our God, look down with Thy merciful eye upon the sorrow and greatly painful cry of Thy children, abiding in the Ukrainian land. Deliver Thy people from strife, make to cease the spilling of blood, and turn back the misfortunes set against them. Lead unto sanctuary those bereft of shelter, feed the hungry, comfort those who weep, and unite the divided. Leave not Thine own flock, who abide in sorrows on account of their kinsmen, to diminish, but rather, as Thou art benevolent, give speedy reconciliation. Soften the hearts of the unmerciful and convert them to the knowledge of Thee. Grant peace to Thy Church and to Her children, that with one heart and one mouth we may glorify Thee, our Lord and Saviour, unto the ages of ages. Amen. Metropolitan Onuphry of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine “Defending the sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine, we appeal to the President of Russia and ask him to immediately stop the fratricidal war. The Ukrainian and Russian peoples came out of the Dnieper baptismal font, and the war between these peoples is a repetition of the sin of Cain, who out of envy killed his own brother. Such a war is not justified either by God or by people.” ‘This is not right’: Melbourne’s Russians decry Putin’s invasion , The Age, 25 February 2022 "Like many people of Russian descent living in Australia, Nicholas Karipoff, Archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church in Melbourne, believes President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is both unexpected and deeply upsetting. “We pray for the suffering land of Ukraine in our church,” he told The Age. “They are people who are very close to us. We have Ukrainian families in our church.” " The Parish Council of Protection Cathedral would like to publicly express the following: 1. Our dismay at the war in Ukraine. 2. Our acknowledgement of the anguish caused to our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, both there and here in Australia. 3. Our wish that our churches locally, nationally and internationally will do all they can to urge the end of hostilities. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9)"  Sermon from February 27, 2022
Sunday of the Last Judgment Matt 25:31 - 46 By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Today’s reading about the Last Judgment that we just heard is all about love. Our life here on earth is given to us to choose the love of Christ, of God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. This is the choice that God wants us to make. Back in 2020 I spoke of coronavirus as a crisis, and I remind you that the word crisis originally meant judgment. That crisis – or judgment - began to show whether we have love for Christ and our neighbour. We have sinned by being impatient with other people, and with their opinions about the virus and everything that went along with it. There is nothing more painful for parents to endure than to see their children feuding. This applies to spiritual relationships even more, and there is no greater sadness and pain for the pastor than to see people in church begin to feud with each other. Right now, we have an even greater test of our love. Another crisis and judgment. I’m talking about Ukraine. Firstly, as I’ve said many times before, our problem is that we have had it too good for too long and we’ve become insensitive. Our hearts have a sort-of layer of fat that makes them insensitive. Right this minute our Orthodox brothers and sisters in Ukraine are hiding in underground shelters and in metro stations because of the street fighting. One of our Ukrainian parishioners sent me a clip about a building that was hit by a rocket. Glory be to God it was evacuated so there were no casualties in that building. Think of the young soldiers, both Russians and Ukrainians, the young conscripts. They don’t want to fight or kill other people. They don’t want to stand in the front line to be shot at. It’s awful. And these are largely Orthodox people, how sad this is for the Church. We Christians can talk about geo-politics and national interests in abstract, alienated terms, but here we have Christians who are really hurting. We have been praying for the suffering land of Ukraine since 2014. Challenges are allowed by God to make us grow in love, to make us become more mature in spirit. I’ll give you a quote from Fr Seraphim Rose: In the time ahead (he died in 1982) the devil will be using every chance to get true Orthodox Christians upset at each other over matters big and small. We must firmly try not to take the bait. It is not our job, and in fact it’s impossible, to figure out really what is happening in the murky waters of big politics, because it’s all so convoluted and contradictory. It is time to remember that traditionally the allegiance of all the Eastern Slavs was to Christ first, and then to the tribe and nation. This is evident from the form of address they used for each other around the 16th and 17th centuries; they used to address each other as “Christians”, not “Russians” or “Ukrainians” or “Byelorussians”. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being patriotic. But some things are more important. When I began my pastoral work in the church at Collingwood in 1981, I started saying things which may have been somewhat jarring to some people; I told the parish, this church is not a Russian club! In the decades since then, our Church life has developed and moved away from that. It might be understandable for migrants in the early decades of their life in a new country to stick together with their compatriots, but now we, one would hope, are more mature, able to build a Church life together with people from many different backgrounds. To return to today’s Gospel about the Last Judgment, it is a reminder that each one of us will have to give an account of what we did with the gift of love we were given. Did we turn that gift, that energy, towards God, to Christ and to our neighbour? Did we love our neighbour as ourselves, did we feel our neighbour’s pain? Or did we turn the gift of love inward and become egocentric, greedy, and selfish. Instead of being God’s obedient flock, did we become the selfish goats, like in the reading? Brothers and Sisters, I call upon all of you to pray for the quickest possible cessation of these hostilities and bloodshed. It is damaging not only on the level of respect and friendship between the nations, but even more so, it is damaging on the spiritual level, to Church life. All Orthodox Christians need to pray for the peaceful resolution of this awful tragedy.  HELP RESTORE THE CHURCH BELL TOWER One of the iconic aspects of our church is the bell tower, which can be seen from afar and complements the traditional golden domes of the cathedral. The bells are rung during important parts of the service and on festive occasions. It is now time to do some maintenance work on the bells in the tower to continue to safely use them in our worship of the Lord. BUY DELICIOUS WINE Most people we know enjoy a nice glass of wine! Ask your family, friends, and work colleagues if they would also like to buy some quality wine and support our parish. Wine also makes an excellent gift for birthdays and other special occasions, and it’s always handy to have a few extra bottles hand in the cellar. HOW TO ORDER The minimum order is 6 bottles, and can be a mix n' match selection of the different styles. If you can’t make up the 6 bottles, then ask a friend or fellow parishioner to combine an order with you. For orders of 12 or more bottles a 10% discount will apply (use promo code ‘POKROV12’ in the online cart just before you checkout, or use the second column on the paper based order form). Orders can be placed directly online at the below link: Pokrov Wine Fundraiser Alternatively complete the order form below and email to: Darren O’Hara at darren@personaliseyourwine.com.au All Melbourne metro orders will be dispatched within 5-10 working days of receipt. Delivery is free for Melbourne metro. For all regional Victoria and interstate orders please email or call for a quote on freight before placing your order. For any enquiries please contact Terence Polorotoff Email: tpolorotoff@me.com or phone: 0438 761554 Your kind contribution by purchasing wine through this fundraiser is greatly appreciated. A hardcopy of the order form is attached below. 
 Sermon from February 15, 2022
Feast of The Meeting of the Lord By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Today is the Meeting of the Lord. What is this meeting, who’s the meeting with? The Lord meets a couple of old people, an old man and an old woman. His parents, Joseph and Mary, a very modest couple from Bethlehem, come ten kilometres by foot and present the child to Simeon in the temple. It’s a very modest scene. And yet it is a cosmic event, just like the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. How was it described, what did the people see? Not much, and yet at the same time there was the entire glory of the angels open to those who were pure in heart. I was thinking about our service last night and even this morning. Despite our earthly modesty and poverty, despite how few of us are here in church, our service resonates with heavenly glory. Heaven and earth come together. Mary and Joseph brought the baby to the temple to honour the Jewish fortieth day dedication of the first-born. This dedication of the first-born was a commandment from God to Moses, for the Israelites to remember at what cost they had been given freedom from the Egyptians. As you know, Pharoah would not let the Israelites go until something awful happened to force him - the first born of the Egyptians perished. Afterwards God commanded to Moses that from then on, all the first born would be dedicated to God, implying that God would have the power of life and death over them. We Christians are all dedicated to God. This is evident from the service of Baptism and dedication on the fortieth day. This dedication to God is even implied for those people who enter the Church as adults. We belong to God. On this feast day the man Jesus is offered to God, but as God, He gives Himself to us. This humility and love touch us and elicit a response from us, a response of faith, love and trust in His protection. Through our response, cosmic glory will increase in the church. We will be no longer be seen by the world as a small group of “no-hopers”! The church will shine to the world, as it has done in different times and places before and will grow in strength and numbers. We will stop hiding. We will see with our eyes of faith the almighty salvation of God, just as Simeon saw this salvation in infantile vulnerability and infinite humility. Sermon from Sunday February 13, 2022 Luke 18: 10 – 14 The Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee by Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Today the Church begins a three-week preparation for Great Lent, and we’re given this parable, the Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee for us to think about life, repentance and transformation. The Publican and the Pharisee are two different examples of piety. The Pharisee is zealous in doing the things that he talks about, so he’s not all bad! But he’s deluded because even his prayer is not addressed to God, it’s addressed to his ego. It’s easy for us to judge the Pharisee and think I’m not like him, but that’s exactly what the Pharisee said about the Publican! Thank you, God, that I’m not like the rest of the scumbags! We probably relate to the pharisee more than we realise. We come to church, we pray, we try to fast, and it’s difficult not to feel pleased about ourselves. We have this smug satisfaction that may not be there all the time, but it creeps in. Like the Pharisee we are blind to our own vainglory and pride. The Publican, on the other hand, finds it easier to repent, because he can easily see his own evil. He’s a traitor to his own people because he collaborates with the Romans. He plunders his own people. So, it’s then easy for him to see his greed, his selfishness and how he hurts people. He understands that life in the big world is merciless in its cruelty. That enables him to understand that mercy can only come from God and from the children of God. He says Lord have mercy, and this prayer of the Publican is the prayer we hear in church more than any other and that has been so for over 2000 years. We read in the New Testament that many of the Pharisees did in fact repent. Just think of the greatest Christian missionary that history has ever known, Saul, who turned into Paul. Many Pharisees turned to Christ and became children of God themselves. If it’s possible for the Pharisees to transform themselves, then it’s possible for us! We have an advantage over the Old Testament Pharisees because we have the teaching of Christ, just like in today’s parable. This parable is a model which has been put into practice by thousands of New Testament lives of saints from which we can learn. This is something that the Old Testament Pharisees did not have. And more importantly, we have easy access to the healing grace of God within the life of the church. Christ is the greatest of all teachers but, even more, He is our Saviour. It is the grace that comes from Him that saves us. The Pharisee possesses the letter of the law and yet, fails to understand its spirit. The Publican has the right spirit and walks away more justified because of this, as we hear at the end of the Parable. The Publican learns that the love of God can save us, and this is repeated by many of the Holy Fathers, that just through humility, just through saying, Lord have mercy, even just once in a lifetime and really meaning it, we can be saved. Imagine that! Such is the love of God that He wants everybody to be saved, both the publicans and the pharisees. Let us ponder on the many facets of this very simple parable given for our edification today at the start of our preparatory journey to Great Lent. Sermon from Saturday, February 12. The Holy Hierarchs, St Basil, St John and St Gregory. By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Three Hierarchs, St Basil the Great, St Gregory the Theologian and St John Chrysostom, give us an image and example of the correct balance of Church life which is a mysterious way how God enters into the fabric of the world. He does the work; we sometimes think we are the ones doing things, but in fact He is the one who does the work. I understood that perfectly in the process of building up our parish and this church building. Now we face huge challenges trying to retain the parish. This is the work of the adversary over the past two years. Our ranks have been decimated. You can think whatever you like about this virus. Yes, it is physical, but there’s another level of understanding, and I had spoken a lot about this back in 2020. The Three Hierarchs lived during a period which also had its own big challenges for the survival of the Church. They each experienced great difficulties. We read about how St Basil was visited by the chief police officer of the local governor who was threatening him to fall into line with the governor’s demands. St Basil replied to the policeman, How can you scare me? If you try to take away my possessions, well, I have a few books but not much else. If you exile me, it’s the Lord’s earth. If you kill me, I’ll be with my Christ, so I’ll be happy! The police officer was so impressed with the power and courage of these words from St Basil, that he went back to the governor and said he couldn’t do anything with him. St Gregory, his friend, was a very meek and modest man, a man who during his entire lifetime never had a falling out with any person. Can you imagine that? He never offended anyone or lost a relationship. Such meekness, such love. He also possessed depth and beauty of understanding of God. Many of the Church services written by people like St John of Damascus, use the poetry of St Gregory. The Paschal service is one example. St John Chrysostom was a wonderful arch pastor. He was loved so much by the people and at the same time persecuted by the powerful of the world, because he wasn’t interested in pleasing secular society. He didn’t attend parties or gatherings, even though he as archbishop was expected to attend. He didn’t like the spirit of these gatherings. And he could barely eat, because of his zealous fasting in his younger days which destroyed his stomach! St John also spoke very directly about the powerful people of this world and created enemies, including the Empress, who eventually succeeded in getting rid of him. He died in a distant land in the eastern part of the Black Sea in what is now Georgia. The Three Hierarchs give us as picture of ideal Church life for us, whatever responsibility we carry. We all have responsibilities. If we carried our responsibilities towards Christ as well as they did, the life of the Church and the life of the world would change. The attacks of the unseen adversaries would roll back, and the church would be given some space to develop.  When Thou was baptised in the Jordan, O Lord,
The worship of the Trinity was made manifest For the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee, When He called You His beloved Son. And the Spirit, in the form of a dove Confirmed the truth of the Word, O Christ, our God! Who has appeared and has enlightened the world, Glory to Thee! (Troparion hymn of the feast) Sermon from Sunday, January 16, 2022. Forefeast of Theophany Mark 1: 1-8 by Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The beginning of the Gospel of Mark, that we just heard, opens to us a picture bigger than life itself. In thinking about these verses in preparation for Theophany, I remembered the painting of a Russian 19th century artist, Alexander Ivanov. He lived from 1806 to 1858. Ivanov spent twenty years doing research for this painting by reading the New and Old Testaments and making about 600 sketches and full-size paintings in preparation. The painting is called The Appearance of Christ to the People and is a colossal oil painting 7.5 m wide and almost 5.5 metres tall. It’s now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It’s a contemplation of Theophany and it shows two central figures; the one closer to the viewer is St John the Baptist while the main figure of Christ Himself is approaching from a distance. There’s a group of people around and every single face on this painting shows all the nuances, all the different ways that people reacted to the Baptist and to his words about the coming Christ, the Lamb of God. One of the greatest dangers of spiritual life is desensitization, as I’ve said many times in the past. This desensitization, as the psychologists call it, leads to a jaded state, a state of insensitivity to spiritual reality. You can have all the ingredients of church and of a spiritual life, but you also need a freshness of perception, a child-like spontaneity. This was the spiritual state of Israel which had not had prophets for literally hundreds of years before the coming of St John the Baptist at the time of Theophany. Yet the ancient Israelites were better than us. They were very receptive to the call of St John the Baptist to repentance. Let me just re-read to you a passage from the Gospel we’ve just heard, Then all the land of Judea and those from Jerusalem went out to him and were all baptised by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins. (Mark 1:5) Now this might be an exaggeration or a generalisation but nevertheless there must have been a majority of people who reacted like that. They came with contrite hearts to the River Jordan. This is not what we see in the spiritual reality of our own Church life. We may not have John the Baptist preaching to us with a booming voice in the power and spirit of Elijah, but we have world events. Just in the last twelve hours the State Emergency Services were getting people off the beach in Bondi because they were afraid that a tsunami from Tonga might hit the beaches. And we’ve been two years under attack from the virus and everything else that goes along with it. But still that’s not enough for us! Shouldn’t that be booming to us as much the sermon of the Baptist two thousand years ago? We have just received the lessons from the Nativity; Christ taught us to put aside all that baggage of our so-called accomplishments and to invigorate the child inside in each one of us. Then we can heed the call for transformation, for repentance, on an adult level. Only then we can come to the Feast of Theophany to contemplate what it means to die and to rise with Christ in our life after baptism. ------ Sermon from January 19, 2022, The Feast of Theophany Matthew 3: 31 – 17 By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Theophany is one of the most ancient of the Church feast days. It appeared in the earliest centuries after Pascha and Pentecost. Originally this feast day celebrated not only the coming of Jesus from Nazareth to the River Jordan to be baptized, but it also celebrated the birth of Christ. Even now these feasts are still connected liturgically. You know the carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas? It shows the connection, how one feast flows into the other. Theophany celebrates the manifestation of God at the Jordan, whereas the Nativity is the celebration of His birth in Bethlehem. As we hear from the prophet, Isaiah, God is with us, God is Emmanuel. For centuries the Church has fought very hard to preserve its faith in Jesus Christ, Who is true God and true man. If any of you ever read the history of the Church you will see how much blood, sweat and tears went into that. Because if there is no incarnation, or if the reality of the incarnation is somehow undermined; if God is not Emmanuel, if He’s not with us, if He’s distant, then Christianity is no different from Judaism or from Islam or from a host of other religions. And you know what? This is the reason why the faith of the Church in the manifestation of God as true God and true man in the flesh has been attacked so much over the centuries. Humanity wants to bring religion down to a comfortable level because deep down inside simple mankind really wants God to be distant. Don’t call me, I’ll call you! That’s our attitude! When I need you, I’ll let you know, but otherwise let me carry on with my earthly life as it is. That’s the comfortable level for human beings. But Christians are supposed to be different. If God is not with us, if we keep Him at a distance, then our religion is based on a personal moralism, of “becoming a better person”. And yet just this morning I quoted to someone the words of St Ephraim the Syrian, that the Church is not a choir of the righteous, it’s a choir of repentant sinners. We Christians have to repent, rather than think “I’m going to become a better person”. That’s rubbish! That’s moralism. This moralism has seen many fake saints over the centuries, people who have taken on ascetic practices but without real repentance. There are plenty of real saints, of course, but there are even more fake saints, people who play at being a saint, because it’s much easier to do. Today’s feast, like Nativity, is about our connection within the life of the Church, an organic connection with the body of Christ, the God-Man. That’s what it’s about. This connection is made in baptism, and today’s feast of course, is an opportunity for us to contemplate each year what our own baptism means. What is this organic connection all about? When people come to baptisms, they hear these words of St Paul to the Romans, that baptism is about participation in the death and resurrection with Christ. But what does this mean? We need to be dying to sin and having a life with God on a daily basis. That is the essence of Christian life and it’s a painful but joyous event at the same time because Christ is with us. If we allow him to be in our lives, if we don’t tell Him, Look, just stay away until I call you!, then I’ll tell you your life is going to change. It’s going to change and be a very different life. When we repent, we truly believe what Christ said when he was baptised and when he began to preach Himself saying Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand. This life in Christ is close to us, God wants to be in our life. We just have to allow Him. Sermon from Sunday, January 23, 2022 Afterfeast of Theophany Matthew 4: 12 – 17 by Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit The life of Christians is about following Christ. At this time each year in the liturgical year our spiritual gaze turns from the baptism of Christ to the desert where He went to fight the devil. We just heard in the Gospel reading His message to us after those forty days in the desert: Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. We have to come into the desert to die to “Egypt”, our comfortable worldly life, and then to rise to the Promised Land. Too often our understanding of repentance is too comfortable and shallow. It’s a bit like going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while flying first class and staying in 5-star hotels! I’ve told some of you already the story of the grandmother of one of our prominent parishioners who died about twenty years ago, Professor Nina Christesen. Her grandmother lived in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. After she was widowed, she gave away all her property to her children and took off on a foot journey from Archangelsk in the very north of Russia all the way to the Holy Land. She went as a beggar. She took no money. This is the classical pilgrimage. She begged all the way to the Holy Land, and then came back and lived the rest of her life piously in prayer and good works. This is what the pilgrimage of repentance is about. St John of the Ladder, one of the greatest of the ascetic fathers, wrote in his book, “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” about repentance. In Step Five he wrote: “Repentance is the renewal of baptism. It is a contract with God for a fresh start in life. Repentance goes shopping for humility and is ever distrustful of bodily comfort”… 5-star hotels on a pilgrimage! … “Repentance is critical awareness and a sure watch over oneself. Repentance is the daughter of hope and the refusal to despair. The penitent stands guilty but undisgraced. Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord by the performance of good deeds which are the opposite of the sins. It is the purification of the conscience and the voluntary endurance of affliction. The penitent deals out his own punishment for repentance with the fierce persecution of the stomach and the flogging of the soul into intense awareness.” Beautiful! On this Sunday after Theophany, Christ begins to ring the bell, 'Ding Dong'. This is the bell of repentance. The bell has just sounded from the Gospel today, and it’s an annual call to repentance. This year we still have about six weeks until the start of Great Lent; Easter is not so early this year. And yet the Holy Fathers teach us that Lent is, or rather should be, an image of our whole life, of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to the Promised Land. That’s what our life is about. The great ascetics lived an incredible lifestyle. They were true sportsmen and sportswomen in a spiritual sense. But for us, like for the ancient Israelites, the message of repentance is quite simple. It is in the words that St John the Baptist said to the Israelites, basically: Don’t be greedy, don’t be selfish and don’t hurt other people. It sounds pretty simple. But it still requires effort and blood, sweat and tears, because we have to fight ourselves. We are selfish and greedy, and we do hurt our neighbour, all the time. So, this is the deal, the mission, should we choose to accept it. No first-class journey, no five-star comforts! Let’s take and accept what God sends us. And especially during the last couple of years, He’s been sending us quite a lot of stuff to help us in our journey of repentance! `Sunday December 19 - St Nicholas of Myra
Luke 17:12 – 19 The Ten Cleansed Lepers Sermon by Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Everybody is happy to receive the gifts of God. But not many people acknowledge Him and reciprocate His giving by giving Him the sacrifice of praise. This is illustrated by today’s story of the ten lepers who were healed, and only one of them came back to thank God. Does God require our thanks and praise? No! He doesn’t need it; he doesn’t need anything at all from us. We need it! A relationship can only be established and work when it’s two-way, not when it’s all one-way… give, give, give. St Paul reports to us the words of Christ, in the Book of Acts (which are not recorded in the Gospels – as John writes there are many words from Christ that aren’t recorded in the Gospels), that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Today’s humanity only wants to receive. It walks away from God like the nine lepers in the story. Are we sometimes with them too? Or are we with the one who came back to thank the Lord? When we walk away, the gifts cannot last. We can walk away with a gift, but the gift won’t last. Then we feel fear, anxiety and we get depressed. St Paul teaches that Christians have to be in the state of joy constantly. How is that possible? There are so many difficult things in life. The answer is given to us when we reverse the order of that saying: rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and thank God for everything. If we reverse it, we see that we must begin with thanksgiving, then learn to be connected to God through constant prayer. Now to be connected to God that way doesn’t mean we necessarily have to be saying many prayers, but our spirit must be connected with Him. We have to remember about Him. That’s the beginning. That ensures a state of happiness, of spiritual joy. This lifestyle is illustrated by one of the most glowing images of sanctity - today’s saint, St Nicholas. And of course, it’s illustrated in the lives of all the saints. Let’s learn to be like the Samaritan leper in today’s Gospel story, who came back to thank God. Let’s establish a proper relationship with God by reciprocating the many gifts that we receive from Him with the gift of thanks and of acknowledgement, the gift of thanks and praise. For instance, how thankful we should be to come to church in an almost-normal situation, something we haven’t seen for such a long time, when everybody who wants to come to church can come. I think some of our people, especially some of our elderly parishioners, don’t know about this and that might be why they’re not here. But the thing is, we have to be careful not to rest on our laurels. We’ve received this gift, now God looks to see what we do with it. We can come to church as many times as we like, and as many of us as we like. Are we going to come? I fear that unfortunately the lockdowns have made us complacent about staying home or thinking we can’t make it to church. Well, now you can! This gift has to be used properly. We also have to keep thanking God and connecting with Him, so that this gift lasts. Otherwise, we’ve walked away with the gift and it will disappear. We must not let this happen. Because when we walk away, we will again experience that fear and anxiety which Christians should never feel. It’s a symptom of disconnectedness from God. When we’re connected, when we live the life of thanksgiving and prayer, the joy of Christ will always be with us. This is the real joy of life. Life is the greatest gift of God. Life is meant to be enjoyed, but in a proper way, not in a hedonistic, materialistic, carnal way. When our whole being, beginning with our spirit, rejoices, then it’s normal and valid to have the other joys and the other consolations which even monastics talk about. We can have them, but first let’s earn the joys of life, the greatest gift of God. Sunday December 12 Luke 13:10 – 17. A Woman Healed on the Sabbath Sermon by Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In today’s story, we hear about a woman who was severely bent over. Her back was bent so much that she couldn’t look up at all. In that sense, she was like an animal. No animal is able to stand upright, to stand vertically. The Holy Fathers say that human beings are different to animals, because human beings do stand straight. With our whole posture we point to heaven, to our spiritual homeland. We are called to work in this direction, towards heaven. After the Lord had healed the woman, the ruler of the synagogue challenged him because He had healed her on the sabbath. The Lord answered that the woman had need of healing on the sabbath, to set her free from this severe infliction caused by the devil. There has been constant warfare since the day when our forefathers stretched their hand to the forbidden fruit, to the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were tempted, and they accepted those sweet temptations. The Lord rejected these same temptations in the desert when He came to restore the damage that had been done by our forefathers, who accepted food as being something primary to their life. By doing this they also accepted all the passions associated with the aesthetic side; as I mentioned recently, in the culture of imperial Rome, this was referred to as bread and circuses. Food and entertainment. The third temptation of Christ in the desert is about the worship of the devil. Adam and Eve did not formally bow down to him, like he had said to Jesus in the desert: Fall down and worship me and I’ll give you power over the kingdoms that belong to me. But they did believe the devil more than they believed God. They believed the liar who said I’m going to give you the secret of how to become like gods. History has seen periods and fluctuations where humanity has become more and more enslaved spiritually through its falling, through sin, as well as periods when people rose from this. There are a number of examples of enslavement in the twentieth century because of ideologies. I’m talking about the communist ideology and to a lesser extent - but it’s also an awful beast - the Nazi fascist ideology. Ideology mimics religion. Ideologies appear when religion and faith are lost. Some sort of an ideology attempts to replace this vacuum in the human soul. I remember my father, a long time ago, referring to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin as the gospels of communism because they were treated and presented as such, as the good news to humanity. These ideologies were built around humanism. Humanism is something that goes back to the world of antiquity and was overcome by Christianity but then resurfaced in the Renaissance, around the fifteenth century and has been growing since then. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a fall of communist ideology, and the fall of communist socialist regimes in Eastern Europe first, and then in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the republics of the former Soviet Union. But for many decades another ideology has been growing which goes further than humanism. In the last ten to fifteen years especially, a number of thinkers, intellectuals and philosophers have been worried about the appearance of this new ideology which can be broadly termed trans-humanism. Trans-humanism is changing the human being into something that is not human anymore, using science and technology to alter the physical and mental state of human beings. Humanity will no longer be able to go through cycles of falls and rises and overcome ideology, just like it did in the past, including during the twentieth century. If human beings become more like animals they will not be able to rise, to look up to Heaven. Human beings will be like this poor woman in the story, whose whole posture spoke of domination and enslavement by the devil. That is a great danger for humanity of the future; and maybe not so distant future, because the technology is already here. Look at what happened during the 1940s with the Manhattan Project, the development of the nuclear weapon. Some of the physicists that were working on this project warned the American government not to go ahead with it, not to test the bomb. They said, look, we don’t know how the chain reaction works. What if the chain reaction transfers from these atoms of uranium and plutonium into the atoms that make up the air, and the chain reaction begins to spread through the whole atmosphere? These were serious physicists. Serious scientists were warning humanity in the same way very serious thinkers today are warning society of trans-humanism because the ideology is already there. There’s such a total loss of desire for God and such a belief in the power of humanity and the power of science that the danger is already here. I’m not just saying this to scare you. There are enough scary things around. At the moment people are terrified of the virus and this fear is not disappearing. There’s something spiritually wrong about that fear. It’s a great challenge to the church to stand up to these fears, and to the spiritual transformation of humanity to make it into an animal-kind of breed. We need to pray, and our prayer must come not from hysterical fear, but from a peaceful state of the soul, a humble and loving state of the soul where we love everybody, and we do not enter into ideological fights with other people, especially in the church. This is happening in the world; families are being divided in the secular world. But it must not happen in the church because the church is the only chance of the world to stop these destructive processes developing further and further until there is no way back. We know that God is not going to allow this and eventually He will intervene, of course, to stop this destructive process. But it’s better that we take the spiritual iniative. We need to do it, because we’re called upon by our Saviour Jesus Christ to be His co-workers. We are like the gardeners on this earth, we have been entrusted with this earth to create a paradise. We’ve lost the original paradise; we’ve lost the Garden of Eden. But Christ has enabled us to return to it, and the return is through the church, the return is through the Life of Christ. This is our calling. |
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