September 1
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Last Sunday we heard about the storm at sea and what we need to learn about coping with storms whether they are private or public. Today the gospel (Matt. 17:14-23) reminds us about the energy of chaos that provokes and escalates the destructive power of these storms. We heard about the story of the Lord walking down Mt Tabor with three of his disciples, Peter, James and John, who were there with Him during the Transfiguration. They witnessed this chaotic situation at the foot of the mountain and saw Christ calm a very different kind of storm than the one at sea. 
 
Nine of the twelve disciples were at the foot of the mountain and were helpless in trying to cope with the storm and so we hear how the Lord cries out, ‘Oh faithless and perverse generation’. These words apply to everyone at the scene – the disciples, the pharisees (who were taunting them), the father of the sick boy who wants to believe and yet is overcome with unbelief and finally the crowd of people who were watching this whole scene and were being tempted as well. 
 
Only the Maker of heaven and earth can overcome chaos. He begins in this case by humbling everyone, when He says, ’O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I going to put up with you’. He humbles everyone, including his disciples, and the poor father and then he expels the chaos from the boy. The storm is calmed.
 
The Bible in the Old Testament and especially in the New Testament is dead serious about the reality of chaotic and destructive power of demons and yet many people probably shrug it off because they do not have any direct knowledge of this, and it seems fantastic. Secular culture, over the last couple of hundred years, has made demons at best comical and at worst, from our point of view, romantic. We observe tensions, provocations and fights between people, and we forget and disregard what the New Testament teaches. As St Pauls’ Letter to the Ephesians, (chap 6:12) states– ‘We do not wrestle (fight) against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” He is talking about the ranks of demons.
 
When the great twentieth century Saint, Archbishop John of St Francisco, was cleared of all charges against him in the civil court he was asked, ‘Vladika, who is responsible for all of this trouble?’, he looked at that person very seriously and said ‘The devil is’. 
While we understand Christianity as a morality, as a religion, we are unable to see and understand the way the chaotic power of the fallen spirits can energise our passions. We do not see it; we think that it is people doing it. We think that it is our neighbour that is causing us grief and we respond in kind because we are provoked. 
Meanwhile the demons are laughing at all of us because they see that we have failed, we have been provoked, we have sinned, we have fallen, and we are dancing to their fiddle. When we get serious about living the life in Christ, we will see and understand that we can survive storms only with the Lord, by understanding who the real enemies are. They are not human beings, they are not our neighbours, they are not flesh and blood whom we are called to love even if they are sinners. If they are our enemies, we are obliged to love our enemies, but it does not mean we have to like them, especially like the things they are doing. But we must wish them well and to wish them salvation rather than be provoked by them, because it is not them; it is these demonic winds of chaos that are blowing and causing them to behave that way. If we do not have that attitude to our enemies, then we are going to be provoked into fighting each other. The great modern saint of the holy mountain, St Silouan said ‘If you don’t love enemies, you are not quite Christian yet’. I don’t mean ideological enemies or enemies of Christ, I mean personal enemies, people who do unpleasant things to us, they might cause havoc in the church. You still must have patience with them and defeat the demon with love and patience and humility. This is the only way we can live. We are not going to win by fighting against flesh and blood, only against the unseen enemies.

​September 15                  
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Patristic writers agree that the rich young man in today’s gospel story (Matt. 19:16-26) was sincere in his desire to please God and to attain eternal life. The story is covered by the first three synoptic gospels. In Mark’s version we read that Jesus looking at him loved him, showing that the rich man had goodness in him. God’s love wants all of us to be saved and the young man sincerely wanted to be saved. Jesus Christ gives him advice to enable him to see what he did not see before - his addiction to money, which later Saint Paul in first Timothy would call “the root of all evil”.
 
Any addiction is an idol which enslaves us. The Lord wanted to show this to the young man and to every one of us. We cannot serve two masters, as the Lord says elsewhere, God and mammon, the idol of wealth. Why is the love of money the root of all evil? Why is it such a dominant idol? Because it feeds and builds up and enables an even greater idol that is within all of us. If we did not have that idol, we would be sinless. The Great Canon of St Andrew that we hear in the first and the fifth week of Lent gives us these words, “I have become my own idol”. If I am my own idol, I want MY will to be done. This is expressed in the desire to supress and coerce the other person to do my will. Let my will be done. 
 
All of God’s commandments beginning from Moses were intended to teach us self-limitation as a path to God. The Lord Jesus Christ comes and shows what moral law is on a deeper level. He gives us the teaching about sacrificial love. Christ’s cross among many other things is an illustration of what he means by sacrificial love. We want to follow Christ not only in word but deed, so we must pick up our cross and follow Him. That means I must allow my neighbour to crucify my ego –wow, that is hard!
 
Recently I quoted to you the words of the holy fathers – “Your salvation is in your neighbour”. We cannot worship God properly if we are secretly serving that idol of self-the ego. In Galatians Chapter 6 St Paul writes “God forbid should I boast except in the cross of our lord of our Jesus Christ by whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world”. By the world means passions, as the holy fathers explain. St Paul talks about crucifying the flesh, which is the old fallen person, the sinful humanity within us. 
 
Last Thursday we had the feast of St Alexander Nevsky.  I spoke about the wonderful words he spoke, “God is not in power but in righteousness”. Power is what the ego seeks because fallen humanity imagines God as power, it projects, it creates God in its own image. God sends His only begotten Son to show that He is humility, He is not power. If we are not ready to learn about ourselves and about God, we are wasting time. 
Brothers and sisters let us get serious about Christian life!

​September 21.  The Nativity of the Mother of God.
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
There are parallels in the Holy Scriptures with today’s story of Joachim and Anna, a childless couple who give birth to a child. We have Abraham and Sarah, prophetess Anna, mother of Samuel, and in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Luke, the story of Priest Zachariah and Elizabeth. The ancient tradition of the church sees several Old Testament prophecies and prototypes indicating this event.  Our service uses Old Testament readings from Genesis about the Jacob’s vision of the ladder, Ezekiel’s prophesy about the shut gate of the temple, used by the Lord to enter, and the reading from Proverbs about Wisdom which is spoken of in the feminine gender. 
 
The first mention in history of the Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos is by Proclus, who was the archbishop of Constantinople, three or four decades after St John Chrysostom. The story of Joachim and Anna comes from church tradition preserved in an apocryphal book, the Gospel of James.  While the apocryphal books were never accepted into the canon of scripture of New Testament books, this story has been lovingly preserved by the church and has found its way into one of the twelve major fests.  The feast speaks of God’s plan of salvation prepared before time. As we learn from the story of Annunciation, God’s plan does not take away a person’ s exercise of free will.  The Theotokos, born today, grows up to express her free will in the acceptance of God’s plan. God’s foreknowledge does not restrict our free will, that is something that needs some thinking about to really understand.  There is a lot of confusion in people’s minds, even historically, about what God’s foreknowledge really means.  
 
The story of Joachim and Anna is in harmony with the ethos of Old Testament scripture, and it makes more sense in the New Testament culture through the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Joachim and Anna’s prayer of many years transforms them into pillars of fire, or into the burning bush that Moses saw which itself is an image of the Theotokos who facilitates the incarnation of the Word.  
 
There is an image of prayer given by the holy ascetic mother Sinklitike which I really like. When we first seek to burn with the spirit there is much smoke and tears.  Why? Because the firewood is wet and green from our passions.  Through our efforts in prayer and self-limitation, podvig, we prepare our nature to accept the fire of God.  When the transformation progresses, the fire burns brightly. This is the moment when people say the Lord has heard my prayer. We hear this in the Bible too. It is not to say that He fails to hear our prayer before this.   It means that we had to be transformed through our prayer before it can be answered.  This takes time. Today’s feast is a joyful inspiration for us.  We too can be like Joachim and Anna.  We too can become fertile in the spirit and then anything is possible with Christ! 

​September 22
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Yesterday we had the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God.  We are now in the after-feast, the second day being the remembrance of her parents, Joachim and Anna.  It is also the Sunday before the great feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, celebrated on the fourteenth day of the church calendar (27th in the new calendar).  Yesterday we contemplated the transformational cross of Joachim and Anna and how it enabled them, a childless couple, to become parents of the one who became higher than the cherubim and the seraphim.  
 
The reading for today’s saints (Matt 12: 46 – 50) is an opportunity to think about the gospel story depicted in one of our frescoes.  Surrounded by a large crowd of people, Jesus Christ is told that His mother and brothers are wanting to see Him. He replies: My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.  Christ’s answer may appear to be harsh and dismissive, especially if we consider that the traditional societies treated their relatives with so much loyalty.  But Christ knows that His mother was at the forefront of those people who hear the word of God and do it, and His brothers, children of Joseph from his first marriage, would soon become His followers too. In His short reply, the Lord is saying that in His kingdom there are very different values to the values of the world, even when worldly values like family loyalty seem good. 
 
Familial loyalty, however, is not abolished but now there is something higher.  Even the Lord’s own mother had to transform her love for her Son.  Imagine that! Her love and relationship with Him had to become sacrificial and non-possessive.  Normally maternal love is very possessive. Only in Christ’s spirit of humility can we really love anyone properly.  Love, in the Christian sense, is only possible when our pride is crucified. But when the ego is dominant, pride with all its passions like jealousy, envy, vainglory and possessiveness cause suffering and tensions among people. The church, the people of God, are called upon to make Christ’s kingdom of love a reality. This is not easy! Anyone who has tried will know that it is not easy! It is only easy if we fantasize and pretend that we already have this love.  But we do not!  We are only on the way there.  The best we can say is:  I want to have faith, I want to have love. As we attempt to keep that dual commandment that Christ talks about, to love God and our neighbour, we are going to fail in thought, word or deed every day.  We will fail every day! But we must not get discouraged or despondent by it.  These are symptoms of hurt pride. We should understand that a peaceful acceptance of our failures is going to shrink our pride, the cause of all human pain and suffering.  Then the grace of God can enable us to relate to God and our neighbour in an unselfish way. 
 

​Friday September 27.  Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today we fall down before the Holy Cross.  We remember how Queen Helen found the precious cross in the early 4th century, and by remembering we enter into the mystery of our salvation.  
 
Many years ago, when I was a young man, I happened to read a sectarian brochure which argued that traditional Christians are deluded in having a loving attitude towards the cross. A rhetorical question was asked in this brochure:  Would you love a weapon that killed your loved one? That naïve question shows a complete lack of understanding who Christ is and what he did for our salvation.  Christ is not a passive victim as you can see from the large icon in the centre of the triptych called “Christ’s Ascent to the Cross”.  Christ desired the cross, even though it is preceded by the agony of prayer in the Garden of Gesthemane.  The cross is humility and love. Christ defeats Lucifer with the cross, with His humility and love. Satan had captured the human race with the promise of prideful glory.  Christ’s glory, on the other hand, is the cross. Its divine wisdom is perceived as foolishness by those who think they know everything. To the moralistic and proud pharisee it is scandalous. How on earth could God do such a thing?  God is power, almighty!  How can He do this?  But Christ tells Paul that His strength is made perfect in weakness. 
 
In every Liturgy we sing the words: Only One is holy, only One is Lord Jesus Christ.  We are all sinners. The root of sin is always pride. It is in all of us. What is our cross?  Our cross is the meeting of our sinfulness, our pride, with the humble love of Christ. Elder Ambrose of Optina explains that God does not create our cross, but rather it grows on the soil of our heart.  
 
We have so much to learn about the cross but very often we do not want to learn.  Instead, we want justice for ourselves, and to enjoy this life. One thought that arises not infrequently in the heart of the Christian is: How come all these people who don’t know about God are enjoying their life and I’m not?  Why do I have to put up with all the difficulties in my life?    We need to remember the example of the holy ones who would prayerfully complain, “Lord, why have you forgotten me” when they experienced a long stretch of time in their lives withoutsorrows or suffering!  They knew from experience that only the cross purifies the heart from pride, and that is it pride that makes us block out God.  I have told you the story about Archbishop Nikolai Velimirovich, the great Serbian hierarch, who experienced hell in a Nazi death camp. That experience, though, opened up to him the power of prayer.  Prayer brings heaven into our hearts. He said, I would give the rest of my life for half an hour at Dachau because I have never prayed like I prayed there!
 
Today’s feast is about sorrow and joy.  It is about being born again. No pain, no birth, no gain!

September 29
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today, this Sunday after the Feast of the Holy Cross, we hear readings concerning the carrying of our own personal cross (Mark 8:34-9:1) and the parable of the wedding feast of the King’s son. (Matt. 22:2-14).  These two readings complement each other. 
In the first passage from Mark’s gospel, we hear: whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. 
 
The central icon in our triptych is Christ’s Ascent to the Cross.  In March 2018 I showed and explained this icon to Jordan Peterson who was touring here and gave him the written explanation of the icon penned by the iconographer. (see A.Rudakov, Pokrov Chronicle 1949-2024, p197) Dr Peterson was deeply moved by the icon and mentioned it in his subsequent talk in Sydney. He gave one of the best short formulations, in my opinion, of the difference between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity on his blog a few weeks later after returning to Canada.  He surmised that being an Orthodox Christian is indeed an existential experience of carrying the cross and not, in Peterson’s words, “subscribing to a cognitive theory of the world”.  By these words, Dr Peterson is explaining a view where Christ has already done all the hard work for us, and all we must do is just accept Him and His salvation. But we hear today that the Lord is talking about denying oneself.  Wow!   Do you know what it means to deny yourself?  It means you say to yourself, “I reject you!  You are my false self! You are a tenacious octopus of passions, feeding on my real self!
 
A declaration of this nature is only the beginning.  It is like the declaration that any Christian makes in accepting Christ as our Saviour. But it is only then that the real work of our transformation – our transfiguration – begins.  We need to destroy the “octopus” of the eight passions, which creates the false façade, the false ego.  By destroying these passions our true self is revealed.  This is our journey with Christ up Mt Tabor to the divine light. 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Following Christ means trying (to the best of my abilities) to keep the commandment of love for God and my neighbour. I will fail miserably. Acceptance of the cross and my failures will teach me about myself. I am nothing without Christ, nothing… 
 
In his God-inspired psalm of repentance, King David says, “A broken, and contrite heart God will not despise”. He describes in those words the pre-requisite for obtaining the wedding garment of which we heard in the second reading. The wedding garment is the robe of righteousness given to us in baptism. It is like a force field of God’s grace that can only be sustained by carrying our cross.  The cross is our salvation. The cross reveals to us the difference between our real self and our false self.  Let us commit to a serious fight together with Christ.  Only with His help can we fight for our liberation from the deadly octopus of our passions. 

 25 August 2024                                          
Father Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The whole Gospel is full of meaning even in the small details, as the holy fathers teach us. Some of the stories will speak to us in a personal and powerful way. Today’s story of the storm at sea is one such story. This is the second storm, a scarier one than the first one. It happens after the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, in the early hours of the morning called the fourth watch, as we hear in the holy gospel.  It is followed by the long talk by Christ about heavenly bread, the eucharist, which takes place in the Capernaum  synagogue. 
 
The story of the storm at night is a lesson about the historical journey of the church, and of each church community, each family and ultimately about each one of us, because we cannot avoid these storms when they happen. They are our challenges in life. In this story, the Lord allowed the disciples to experience the storm so that they are trained and are enabled to face the difficulties in the spreading of the word of the gospel throughout the world. Why is it that the Lord did not organise things in a way that the path of the Gospel would be unopposed? Surely, He could do that? He is almighty! 
 
The answer is that the Christ’s “strength is made perfect in weakness.” (2Cor.12:9) Even the great Paul sorrowed about the difficulties that came his way, that constant presence of the thorn in the flesh. There is a lot to think about what that means. In other words, we individually or collectively in the church can only win through meekness and humility. Any remnant of pride causes us to lose in these storms, to drown, like Peter began to drown, when we face the difficulties and challenges of life. Christ allows Peter to learn about His weak faith when he wanted to demonstrate to the other disciples that he had more love for Christ than they had. That is not a humble attitude, is it? Christ teaches him (and us): if you want to do it come and learn what happens when you approach the storms of life with that attitude. The final dose of humility came to all the disciples at the time after the mystical supper when Christ is bound and taken away to the tribunal of the high priest; the disciples all ran away in fear. What a dose of reality, what a dose of humility!
 
There are many lessons that we can take out of this story of the storm. First, Christ is always near, even if He seems to be invisible, even if He seems to disappear, He is still there. Secondly, it is safer to stay in the boat; that means within the guidelines and traditions of the church within the community of love, of the family of the church. Thirdly, we should not be overconfident about our own strength.  And fourthly, prayerful focus on Christ helps us to build our trust in Him. It helps us to build real faith that He will always help us, both individually and collectively, that He will not abandon us. Peter starts drowning and Christ saves him. 
We live in a time of great storms happening in many different parts of the world and in many different aspects of life. Fierce winds are blowing in the world. Listen to the news. We cannot pretend this does not and will not affect us. We cannot say that is somewhere else – Ukraine, Gaza, America and Russia- or that it has to do with somebody else. It will come to us, we will have to deal with it, so it is up to us to learn how to handle ourselves, how to deal with these storms. Christ is our teacher but even more importantly He is our strength. He is stronger than any storm.
 
 
Sunday August 18
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  
The four Gospels complement each other to give a complete picture of Christ. The interesting thing is that there are very few stories that are covered by all four of them. These few stories are the baptism of Christ (Theophany), Transfiguration which is the second theophany on the mountain, and of course, the events of Christ’s death and resurrection. Today’s story about feeding the five thousand (Matt. 14:14-22) is also covered by all four Gospels. It shows how important this story is. It speaks about the church and the Eucharist.  
 
The Eucharist is the central axis of church life.  The modern Greek theologian Christos Yannaras writes: The church is a meal. Five thousand people were hungry.  Christ lifts up His eyes to the Father to teach us where our meal comes from. As He also teaches in the Lord’s Prayer.  Give us this day our daily bread. Our daily bread, our bodily food comes from God. But the next morning, as we see only in the Gospel of John chapter 6, Christ teaches in the synagogue in Capernaum about another level of food. And that is God Himself, Who is food in Christ.  He is our Heavenly bread. The Lord’s Prayer points to this heavenly bread.  The apostles wrote the prayer in Greek, and “daily bread” (in the English text) is better translated as “essential bread”, something that is above practicality. It points of course to the Eucharist. You are what you eat, as the saying goes. 
 
Christ is born, He lives, He dies and He rises from the dead so that we can be sanctified by the humanity of God. That is how St Gregory the Theologian puts it. In today’s story, the disciples came to the Lord, overwhelmed by the mass of people, and asked what they should do. The Lord answers:  You feed them!  In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan takes the wounded man to the inn, and entrusts him to the innkeeper.  The inn represents the church with God’s helpers there, for the healing of soul and body, sustained through two denarii, the price the Samaritan gives to the innkeeper.  The Holy Fathers say that these two denarii are the body and blood of Christ. We must overcome the tendency to think of the church in moralistic terms. It is not some sort of religious club.  The church is something existential. It is a family, it is healing like in the parable.  It is the meal that sustains life above mere psycho-physiological level.  The church is an existential invitation to rise above being just an intellectual animal. 
 
 
Sunday August 11
By Fr Gennady Baksheev
 
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 
Brothers and sisters, we are temporary pilgrims on earth. We have been placed here to work out the salvation of our souls in fear and trembling with the help of Christ. Today’s Gospel reading (Matt. 9:27-35 Jesus heals the blind and the mute) is a stark reminder for all of us to continue in our spiritual battle against sin, our passions, the world and the evil one. To use the words of St Paul in his letter to Timothy: ‘Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life to which you were also called (1 Tim 6.12).’ This is the disposition of a Christian soul; as we say in the Creed  ‘I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’ 
 
Today’s gospel reading (or pericope, as known in theological terminology), is a short passage from St Matthew. It begins with the words ‘When Jesus departed from there.’ This refers to a preceding section in St Matthew’s Gospel, where Christ raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead. And so, these two blind men followed Christ as He left Jairus’ house. The blind men cried out to Him, acknowledging Him as the Son of David, that is, the Messiah. But Christ keeps walking. He does not stop to heal them on the road amidst a multitude of people. It is as though he is testing their resolve, their faith and desire. 
 
Christ takes them privately into a house and talks with them. He poses a question to them: ‘Do you believe that I am able to do this?’ They answer Him very succinctly with ‘Yes, Lord.’ And so, these two physically blind men were able to discern with their spiritual eyes, that standing before them was the Lord over all creation. 
 
This belief in Jesus as Lord was based on proof. There were no newspapers during those days, no social media. Rather, there was the spoken word, and people would need to go out and see what was taking place. These blind men would have heard of the numerous miracles of Christ: the cleansing of a leper, healing of a paralysed servant, the calming of a storm at sea, the healing of a woman who had bled for 12 years and the raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead. 
 
Let us imitate these two blind men. They had no doubt struggled in their lives as blind men. However, this struggle is so important for each and every one of us if we desire to grow spiritually. Christ says that in this world we will have tribulation, but to be of good cheer, as He has overcome the world (John 16:33). These should be comforting words for us. In the original Greek, the term ‘be of good cheer’ is expressed as ‘thar-seh’-o.’ This means to have courage. When the woman who had haemorrhaged for 12 years touched the hem of Christ’s garment, he turned around and said ‘Daughter, have courage.’ In last week’s Gospel reading we heard about the healing of the paralytic man who was lowered by his friends through the roof of a house. Having seen the faith of the paralytic’s friends, Christ said to the paralytic man ‘Son, take courage.’ 
 
As Christians, we are required to develop courage. The Holy Fathers teach us that courage is a foundational virtue. Let us learn what this means from the lives of the saint, especially the martyrs. Do not be defeated or be crushed by the trials and tribulations of life. Let us take courage and walk in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
 
Во имя Отца, и Сына, и Святого Духа. Аминь.
Братья и сестры, мы - временные паломники на земле. Нам нужно в страхе и трепете трудиться для спасения наших душ с помощью Христа. Сегодняшнее Евангельское чтение является суровым напоминанием для всех нас о необходимости продолжать нашу духовную борьбу с грехом, нашими страстями, и с миром. Апостол Павел пишет: "Подвизайся добрым подвигом веры, держись вечной жизни, к которой ты и призван’ (1 Тim 6.12). 
 
Сегодняшнее евангельское чтение - это короткий отрывок из Евангелия от Матфея. Сегодняшний отрывок из Евангелия начинается словами "Когда Иисус ушел оттуда’. Это относится к предыдущему отрывку из Евангелия от Матфея, где Христос исцелил женщину, страдавшую кровотечением в течение двенадцати лет, и воскресил дочь Иаира из мертвых. Когда Христос уходил от этого место, за Ним последовали двое слепцов. Они взывали к Нему, признавая Его Сыном Давидовым, то есть Мессией. Но Христос продолжает идти. Он не останавливается, чтобы исцелить их по дороге среди множества людей. Он как будто испытывает их решимость, их веру и желание.
 
Христос уединяется с ними в доме и беседует с ними. Он задает им вопрос: "Верите ли вы, что Я способен это сделать?" Они отвечают Ему очень кратко: "Да, Господи ‘. И вот, эти два физически слепых человека смогли увидеть своими духовными глазами, что перед ними стоит Господь всего творения.
 
Мы также должны подражать этим двум слепцам. Они, без сомнения, боролись в своей жизни, будучи слепыми. Эта борьба очень важна для каждого из нас, если мы хотим духовно расти. Христос говорит, что в этом мире нас ждут скорби, но мы должны мужаться, потому что Он победил мир (Иоанна 16:33). Эти слова должны быть для нас утешительными. 
 
Как христиане, мы должны развивать в себе мужество. Мы можем научиться об этом из жития святых, особенно от мучеников. Будем развивать мужество и ходить в вере в Господа нашего Иисуса Христа. Аминь.
 
 
Sunday August 4
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
For several hundred years since the beginning of the Reformation in the early 16th century, Western Christianity debated whether we are saved by works or by our faith.  Today’s Gospel story about Christ forgiving the paralysed man (Matt. 9:1-8 ) gives a clear answer. Similarly, the words of St James, the Brother of the Lord, who writes in his epistle that faith without works is dead. Faith has to be externalised in our life.  To use a modern American expression, it is not enough to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk!
 
Christian faith is just that.  It is an existential event.  The story of the paralytic shows several aspects of faith and life.  We have heard Matthew’s shorter version of this story, but Mark and Luke give longer versions in which they described how the paralysed man’s friends uncover the roof to lower him down as they could not get through the crowds.  What an incredible effort of love ! No wonder we hear Jesus say to the paralytic when He saw their faith: Son, be of good cheer, your sins are forgiven. Jesus Christ as God, of course, saw their faith even before they got there. Their faith, hope and love were made manifest for all the other people.  The image of these four men carrying their paralysed friend is a powerful image of the church.  It is an active connectedness with the Lord in faith, hope and love. 
 
Our sinful nature is a heavy weight that is not easy to move.  Have you noticed how ingrained this culture of ticking the box has become in modern life? To be children of God we cannot get away with just creating appearances.  There is a good expression of that in 18th century Russian history:  Potemkin villages.  It comes from the story about how Grigory Potemkin, the governor-general, wanted to impress Empress Catherine so he prepared fake facades of towns and dressed peasants in nice costumes for the Empress’ tour of the Black Sea region, recently secured by him from Turkish rule.  She probably understood that it was fake but she played along with it. That is not good enough! Let us be honest with ourselves, with God and with our neighbour. What if our faith and Christian life are  feeble to the point that we are not unlike this paralysed man in today’s story. The church here and in heaven is carrying us, each one of us when we need it in different times of our life.  As we get stronger in connection with Christ, we then can also carry others, as we heard in today’s Gospel. 

Sermon July 14
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today the church celebrates All Saints of Rus.  This is another opportunity to look at the saints.  Who are they?  After the Lord Jesus Christ had recapitulated (as St Irenaeus says) the human race with himself as the head, as the new Adam, he then sent from the Father the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit enables the unity of the church around Christ.  But there is something else that the Holy Spirit gives:  the gift of true hypostatic personhood in the likeness of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  The term hypostatic is a spiritual term which can be explained like this: the member of Christ’s kingdom acquires and grows in unique personhood instead of being an individual part, an atom of human nature fragmented by sin. The saints are such persons.  
We only know a few thousand by name, but they are just the visible part of the iceberg. Saints enable us to see in their lives the quality of human nature healed by Christ. These are the qualities of virtue mentioned by St Paul in Galatians which he calls the fruits of the spirit; love, joy, peace, long-suffering (which means patience), kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The saints are those people who are Christ’s, and as the great Paul continues, they have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Each saint is a gem, polished by voluntary and involuntary suffering. How this happens depends on the unique person in question and the collective personhood of each national spiritual culture. A good example is in St Nectarios, who was the subject of a film which our youth watched last Friday night, called “The Man of God”.  It was a well-attended, successful night and the film was powerful.  St Nectarios at the deepest level of course is Christ-like, so in spirit he is neither Jew not Greek, as the apostle writes, but in his culture he is Greek.  He is also a unique person through whom we learn about Christ our image.  In each life of a saint, we see the light of Christ that shines in a unique way through the prism of that gem
Recently I have come across words of the British writer, Robert Louis Stevenson who, after working his way through Dostoevsky’s first Christian novel, “Crime and Punishment”, said, I didn’t finish the book, but it almost finished me! I thought that was quite a cute turn of phrase!  The culture of Rus is resignation to the impermanence of civilisation. The experience of Rus was living in the steppes constantly attacked by waves of nomads, thus the acceptance of suffering. In that sense I think that the Nobel prize physicist Andrei Sacharov’s wife, Elena Bonner, said correctly that there are similarities in the histories of Israel – she was Jewish herself – and the Eastern Slavs, Rus.  Nevertheless saints – the Jew, the Greek, the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Persian, the Celt, the Germanic, Anglo-Germanic, the Southern Slavs and finally the Eastern Slavs of today’s celebration teach us about Christ as the perfect image.  The image is in flesh and blood, it is concrete in the uniqueness of person and culture.  The saints, through us, are the builders of Orthodox Christianity here in the new world. 
 
Sermon July 12, St Peter and Paul
By Fr Peter Sheko
Today the holy church celebrates the memory of the holy great apostles Peter and Paul. On this day I usually speak about one or the other of them; this year my focus is on St Paul.  Before I read an excerpt from his epistles to the Romans, I would like to remind you of something that Christ said in his Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7: 1-2:  Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgement ye judge ye shall be judged.  And with what measure ye mete it will be measured to you again. 
St Paul continues this theme in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans.  You therefore have no excuse.  You who pass judgement on someone else for at whatever point you judge another you are condemning yourself because you who pass judgement do the same things. Now we know about God’s judgement against those who do such things is based on truth.  In judging others, we take upon the sins of the other person that we judge them for.   We are adding to our own sinful burden.  We have enough already that we are carrying without taking on other people’s sins by judging them! Judgement is so detrimental to our salvation because when we judge we are not capable of seeing ourselves.  We want to shift the focus onto someone else without the need to do any work on ourselves.  In Great Lent we hear the beautiful words of St Ephraim the Syrian: Grant me to see my own transgressions and not judge my brother. How powerful are these words!  God is the only judge, but we are trying to take his place.  
Let us not finish on such a difficult aspect. I would like to bring something more positive from St Paul, Ephesians 4: 32:  Be kind and compassionate to one another forgiving each other just as Christ God forgave you.  And Romans 12:18:  If it is possible as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everybody. We can only be at peace with everyone else if we are not judging.  Judging puts up a barrier that separates us from God and from the people around us. Let us take counsel from something that Abba Dorotheos in his chapter on not judging others:  God, through the prayers of the person I’m judging, help me not to judge.  This is a very powerful prayer.  Whenever we feel that judgement is getting the better of us, let us try and remember this, that we are asking for God’s help and considering the prayer of the person we are judging to be more worthy than our own.  It has a double supportive effect for us.  Let us turn to the holy apostles Peter and Paul and ask for their help in our struggles with judgement so that we can be living in peace with one another. 
Sermon July 7
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
It is a well-known saying of the Holy Fathers that obedience is above prayer and fasting. The first Gospel reading today was about the calling of the first apostles, the fishermen Peter, Andrew, James, and John who left everything, simply dropped their nets, and followed Jesus Christ.  Christ told them he would make them fishers of men. And today we celebrate the nativity of St John the Baptist. He was born to accept an extraordinary obedience from God, to prepare all of Israel for the coming of the Christ. He becomes the greatest of the prophets.  Prophets spoke and acted in the name of God, in total obedience to God. St John becomes the forerunner of the One Who took upon Himself the greatest obedience from the Father, before the creation of the world.
What is obedience? The modern world no longer understands that word.  Firstly, it is not like in the army or in bootcamp where a soldier receives a command, and he does it mechanically out of fear of punishment if he disobeys.  In the church however, obedience is an expression of the spiritual culture.  It is an expression of love. There is always someone who is the initiator of an obedience and one who accepts the obedience.  If it is a proper and loving understanding of what obedience is, the one who is given the obedience must have the ability to be able to carry it and to not be destroyed spiritually. I remember back in the early 90s when Metropolitan Vitaly came to Australia, he had a great meeting with the youth. He told them, you are going to grow up and have children yourselves.  Know this, that all obedience comes from above, from God.  If you are obedient now to your parents, your children will be obedient to you.  But if you are not, your children will not be obedient to you!
Obedience in the church family and in the family at home is an expression of what theologians call Trinitarian life. There is total equality but at the same time there is initiative that comes from the Father though the Son to the Holy Spirit. When you read the writings of the holy fathers you become aware that they were intensely conscious that sin was and always is caused by disobedience. The podvig, or ascetic effort, of prayer and fasting is meaningless without obedience. It becomes individualism, self-delusion or prelest’ in Slavonic. In the secular world there is plenty of individualism which is even encouraged.  At the same time there is always authoritarianism in the secular world.  While individualism is encouraged, it is always suppressed by someone powerful.  The world is crazy! You are encouraged to be “free” but at the same time there is huge coercion to do what someone wants you to do.  
We Christians should be aware that in the church there is also Catholicity – sobornost’ – which is a mode of life where there are relationships of love in a horizontal manner, adult to adult, but also vertical -parent to child. And it works! It works in the church, but it cannot work in the world. It works because the motivation is different. In the world there are two motives: fear and profit, or reward. Negative and positive reinforcement are the terms that psychologists use.  We must grow sufficiently to understand that while we do need those two motivations, they are temporary. Ultimately, we are called to live the life of love which is mutual obedience, both horizontal and vertical, and which comes from God. 
 
Sermon 30 June 2024
Father Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Last Sunday at the great feast of Pentecost the church completed the first part of the liturgical year in which we learn about what God did for us. We learn about God’s plan of salvation for us. We went through a whole series of feasts and fasts which begin with the preparation for the feast of Christmas, the Advent and then the whole series of other feasts, after Christmas, including the baptism of Christ, the Theophany, the Meeting of the Lord, Annunciation; then Great Lent begins; Palm Sunday, Easter itself; the paschal period and then the Ascension and finally Pentecost which we had last Sunday. This is a massive picture of God’s plan of salvation. Each of these feasts, and the learning period during Lent, speak to us about this. 
Today the Church celebrates the memory of all saints. All saints are humanity’s response to God’s calling to accept His plan for our salvation. Each one of us when we enter the life of the Kingdom, the life of the Church, receives a heavenly friend and a protector, a Saint. We become temples of the holy spirit as we hear in the New Testament. Our temple is dedicated to a saint. Think of it this way, he or she is not only our helper, protector and intercessor but also should be an inspiration for our Christian life.  
In services for the saints, we often hear the phrase ‘your life was according to your name’. Names have a meaning, they are not just nice sounds, so that’s at the level of the saints. For us these names of the saints are filled with much more meaning because each is filled with the wonderful life of that saint. The content of their prayer and ascetic efforts here on earth. Today is a joyous day when we all, as it were, celebrate our names days together. This is an occasion for the contemplation of the phenomenon of the church. 
The bible begins with the words, ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’. Today heaven and earth come together, in this joy to praise God. To praise God who is wonderful in his Saints as we hear in the psalms. The saints, our heavenly brothers and sisters, have completed their earthly course, their education, their struggle. We are on our journey to join them. One of the causes of our earthly neuroses is people’s constant vacillation between different goals in life. People do not know what they want. They are not sure what to dedicate their energies to. ‘What should I do tomorrow?’ that is the question that makes people very nervous. The saints through their lives on earth and in heaven radiate peace. The peace that is the opposite of that neurosis, and that peace only Christ can give. As He told his disciples at the mystical super, ‘My peace I give unto you’. That peace comes from aligning our life with Christ’s words, when He says, in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness’. When we make that our goal, everything else will fall into place.  Life will become peaceful, harmonious and without that neurosis about tomorrow. 
Let us maintain that connection with the saints, they are our brothers and sisters, and they are the spiritual nobility of the King of kings. Our connection with them is maintained through private prayer and effort, but especially through the mystical supper. There the holy spirit calls us, as we heard last Sunday, into a unity with Christ. Heaven and earth come together in the kingdom of God, the mystical life of the Church.
Sermon June 23 Pentecost
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
John the Baptist, Forerunner of the Lord Jesus Christ, said to the hundreds of people who came to listen to him, I baptize you with water but One Who is mightier than I is coming. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and Fire.  Today at Pentecost Christ sends the Holy Spirit from the Father in tongues of fire. God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. Elijah brough the same fire down from heaven to burn his sacrifice. Now it is given to the church, to the people of God, forever. It is mostly invisible, but if you want to see it, go to Jerusalem on Great Saturday in any year and you will see it. God’s uncreated energies can be seen as fire and light.  They make a huge difference to human life, as we hear in the festal troparion, Blessed are thou, O Christ our God, Who has shown the fisherman as supremely wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit… Who are these fishermen?  Simple, naïve people.  We read in the Book of Acts that the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of the Jews, having brought Peter and John to their tribunal quickly realised that these people were uneducated and yet they spoke with such clarity and force.  This obviously came from the Holy Spirit. The apostles and their words could not be resisted. 
All saints, whom the church celebrates next Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, understood empirically, experientially, the difference between life in the Holy Spirit and life without Him.  The saints put all their efforts into acquiring the Holy Spirit, that fire of God, and then keeping the Holy Spirit.  They were human beings with limitations and had to struggle to keep their focus on acquiring this fire. 
The kontakion of the feast juxtaposes the building of the Tower of Babel with Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit calling all to unity in God. To build a tower of Babel has been a dream of humanistic civilizations or empires since those ancient times in Genesis. Look at the name of the most famous skyscraper in New York City – Empire State Building! We are living in times where many people are confidently working towards the new tower of Babel. There are now tools that earlier generations could not even dream of to help in building this.  At the same time, there are greater and greater problems appearing in the fabric of world politics, economics, physical and mental health, just to name the obvious areas.  More and more people are beginning to understand that humanity cannot solve its problems without God.  Life without the Spirit is a sleepwalk of zombies. There is no meaning, no direction. Those questions are not asked and are not encouraged. But Pentecost to us is a reminder of eternity and purposeful life in the world. Acquire the peaceful spirit and thousands around you shall be saved.  These words of St Seraphim refer to the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost. He lives in the Church; He lives with the people of God. 
 
Sermon June 16 
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
The gospel passage that we just heard begins with the ‘Golden Rule’ except the Lord Jesus Christ turns it around. The Golden Rule says ‘do not do unto others as you would not have do unto you’ but Christ says ‘Do those things’, He puts it in the positive, he says it’s not about not about doing bad things but about doing good things; about being an initiator of goodness and love in the world. And this is the beginning of this passage; the key to today’s reading because it is the key to all real Christianity. We should remind ourselves of these words, as often as possible. 
Now, take for instance the life of St Paul, the great Apostle. He was stoned and left for dead. He received 39 lashes 5 times. Can you even imagine what that would be like? Jim Caviezel who during the filming of the ‘Passion of the Christ’, was accidently hit once and he lost consciousness. 
St Paul was shipwrecked and yet his letters are full of joy because a real Christian gives, a real Christian is a shining star that gives with joy from the heart. A real Christian doesn’t moan and groan and whine and whinge and a real Christian begins prayer with praise to the Lord, praising God, thanking God and then, only then, thinking about and asking forgiveness for our sins and then last of all asking for things from God.
Now we often work the other way. When we think of prayer, we think prayer is about asking for things, but a Christian is not a black hole that sucks everything in. A Christian is not a consumer of everything. A Christian is not an emotional vampire, but we often behave like that. Now we want to suck blood out of our neighbours. Christians are children of God; this is what this passage is saying to us. He is our Father and so shouldn’t children behave like the father does. So, this is what the Lord is trying to teach us to give and not to expect anything in return because God gives - He gives to the good, to the bad and to the ugly. 
 The Eucharist teaches us this attitude to life. Think about what this word means: thanksgiving. We’ve come to thank God. This is what we come for but more than that it’s not just about learning. That’s the first part of the liturgy which is coming to an end now with the sermon. The second part of the liturgy/the Eucharist is about receiving the energy from God to be like him. The grace of God so that we give, and we don’t even notice that we give. This is the response of those, the righteous, the sheep in Christ’s picture of the last judgement. They are terribly surprised when he tells them that you’ve done this and done that, ‘What have we done ‘we’ve done nothing, we’ve just been behaving normally’. So that’s Eucharistic life, this is what we absorb here in this holy temple of God, His grace, to become transformed so that we can go out into the world, into our families and not to behave like the people who don’t know Christ.
Brothers and sisters, as St Paul says to Thessalonians ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing and in everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ for you’.

By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen!
Beginning with His first miracle at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, the Lord taught for three and a half years and performed countless miracles to confirm the certainty of His word. Today we are observers of His conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well.  She cannot see us, but we can see and hear her. The Lord, of course, sees us. He speaks to the woman about living water, the life in grace, and invites her to bring her husband, showing her that He sees everything, He is God. Following their conversation, a great miracle ensues. But while we hear the conversation between them, Only Christ can see the whole picture. Often Christ’s miracles are bodily healings which are followed by a great transformation of the spirit, like we will see next Sunday with the man who was born blind and healed by Christ. In today’s story, Christ resurrects the soul of the Samaritan woman, rather than healing her physically.  In church tradition she is known as Photini; the Slavic translation is “Svetlana”.  Following her conversation with Christ, she immediately becomes an apostle to her own people, the Samaritans. 
 
A week ago, we had the presence of a miracle in our church here, the myrrh-streaming icon of the Mother of God from the church dedicated to her in Hawaii. Christ often speaks to us through His mother, through her miraculous icons.  If you open the church calendar, there is hardly a day without a mention of a miraculous icon of the Mother of God. What are her words to us when she speaks to us through her icons?  They are the same words that she spoke to the servants at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee:  whatever He says to you, do it.  This is the purpose of the grace-filled icons that sometimes visit us, and God willing, we will have another in July, the Kursk icon.  [scheduled to be at our parish on July 21, with the visit of Metropolitan Nikolai]. Christ wants us to believe His words, to accept them and to live by them. Moses told the Old Testament Church, Israel, Man shall not live by bread alone but by the word of God. (I’ve simplified the words with this paraphrase.) Jesus Christ quoted these words to reject the temptation of Satan in the desert. 
Are we fortified by last week’s miracle to follow Christ by rejecting this and other temptations? The enemy wants to enslave us spiritually.  Look at the joyous spirit of Photini.  She walks away liberated by Christ, by His words. May we too not ignore the life-giving words of Christ. May we not treat them as something abstract and general, as though they do not apply to us individually. Let us open a contrite and humble heart to Him, the personal and specific liberation. 
 
Sunday May 26, 2024
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen!
Brothers and Sisters, today we are witnesses to an extraordinary event, a tangible presence of the grace of God and a stronger than usual sense of presence of our Protectress through her holy icon, the Iveron icon of Hawaii.  We are indeed blessed today.  Nevertheless, we are obliged to speak first of Christ God and the Gospel story of the paralytic at Bethesda healed by the Lord.  We are all, in some measure, spiritual paralytics who need the loving kindness of the Saviour to raise us up from the paralysis, visible or invisible, which comes from the root of all sins - human pride.  Christ’s love is masculine in its powerful sacrifice and maximalism about sin.  As we heard just now, he offers a stern warning to the healed paralytic, to not sin any more or worse things could happen. 
 
But the Lord’s love is infinite.  He finds ways to communicate more gentle aspects of his love to us, who are not only paralytics but who are infantile in our lack of spiritual maturity.  The church knows this love through the image of our heavenly Mother.  The image of the mother speaks to all of us. And that explains the great number of historical holy miracle-working icons in all the nations, including the recent ones from Montreal and from Hawaii, which is here today. The best illustration of these two aspects of love is presented in the story of Christ’s first miracle at the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee.   That occasion is also a touching illustration of the almost wordless communication between Mother and Son which really communicates so much beyond words. She whispers that the wedding hosts have no wine, expressing a concern for people’s seemingly mundane needs.  The Lord meekly pretends to resist her request, saying My hour has not yet come. Her request for wine reminds Him of His coming shedding of blood on the cross, in about three years’ time. She reminds Him of the sacrificial love but for now her request fits in with His own desire to bring joy back to the wedding feast. 
 
And here we are today too, Brothers and Sisters, at the Wedding Feast! We are at the feast of the King’s Son, which is the Eucharist. We are weak, easily discouraged by life’s challenges and anxious about the future because of our fragile faith.  Yet, here she is, just like at Cana of Galilee, whispering to Him: Fortify them. Give them joy and strength. Maybe they will understand why You are doing it, maybe they will want to get up, take up their bed and walk.  Maybe they will want to grow up!

Sunday April 21.
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
In today’s reading (Mark 10:32-45), the Lord Jesus Christ announces to His disciples His firm resolve to leave the country beyond the Jordan, where He had raised Lazarus, and journey to Jerusalem. This would be the final days of His ministry, His passion, death and resurrection.  Today, the fifth Sunday of Lent, is also dedicated to St Mary of Egypt. The moving story of her death and resurrection is an image of inspiration and consolation for all of us.
 
Christianity is not like all religions and social ideologies which  accept the state of a human being as more or less “normal”;   that humanity only  needs rules and structure to be enforced in society to make life on earth turn into the “pursuit of happiness”, as we hear in the American constitution.  Today’s conversation of Christ with His disciples, and the life of St Mary, tell us that being a Christian turns that idea upside down.  Without Christ and the Holy Spirit, we remain firmly anchored in something that St Peter calls “aimless conduct”, which means meaningless existence; we are doomed to this superficial and chaotic life. The history of humanity is full of examples of people who have tried to  control it by political force. It is still happening today! In today’s gospel,w e see the same temptation in two of the most zealous of the twelve disciples. They failed to hear Christ’s explanation of the cross and instead asked Him for something that is completely insane – to participate in God’s power. They wanted to sit at the right and the left hand of Christ as the King of Israel and ultimately of the whole world. A  few days after this Gospel story, Christ is teaches us that we should accept Ceasar.  But he is not interested in being the emperor.  Not at all. To rule people without healing them first, without saving them through the cross. What’s the point of that for the Saviour? 
 
The story of Mary, the Egyptian, is a story of healing;  it is about death and resurrection and that is what healing in Christian terms is!  She was a young terrorist of carnal chaos for seventeen years.  On the day of the Holy Cross, in Jerusalem she takes up her own cross.  She cooperates with Christ, the Holy Spirit and the church represented by the Mother of God.  She suffers in the desert from the chaos that was inside of her. Ultimately, she purifies her heart and becomes an earthly angel.  
 
Christ is maximalist in His teaching.  The great saints like St Mary, or another Egyptian, St Anthony the Great,  and countless others in all nations, were able to  mobilize their total commitment to Christ, sometimes in literally minutes.  We cannot.  We need time.  Our journey is often a zigzag that takes a whole lifetime. It is important to understand that it is about direction of our life’s journey.  We fall, we crawl, but we must continue. Only then help is given when we show that we are for real, that we really intend to live the Christian life.  By teaching His disciples about the most essential aspect of the Kingdom, Christ explains to us too that we must give up the idea of ruling over others. Otherwise, we remain unchanged and sick in our self-assertion of pride. Whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant, we hear today.  That means to become Christ-like in humility and thereby defeat the chaos we have inside with His help. 
 
Sunday April 14
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Lent is our yearly course in spiritual life.  Now that we have reached the last two weeks before the Pascha of the Cross begins - Passion week and the Lord’s entry on Palm Sunday - the Church gives us the final lessons.  Today (Mark 9:17-31) we are reminded of the teaching of the ascetics represented by one of the giants, St John the Abbot of Sinai, the author of the “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”. Human nature in our fallen state is a slippery eel. We desperately resist seeing our real self.  This is why the Lord Jesus Christ has so much to say about the danger of being our own saviours.  Just think, people who condemn to death the Saviour of the world, thought of themselves as being religious and righteous people.  They thought they were doing the work of God. It is very easy to say, I am not like those men. Yet that thought alone shows the person is on a slippery slope towards that same pharaisaical spirit. Did not the pharisee in the parable say, “Thank you God that I am not like other people”?  Spiritual life begins first with a serious commitment to keep the commandments, yet again the rich young pharisee said to Christ, I have kept all the commandments from my youth. He was right, and yet he was terribly wrong.  The question is how he kept the commandments.  
 
All the spiritual fathers and mothers teach that keeping the commandments has only one goal – to know our weaknesses and so reach a measure of humility before God.  We really do not understand how important that is.  Without that, we are just not open to God. Keeping the commandments is certainly not to become a better person. That is rubbish!  That is how the world thinks, that to become better people it is necessary to  compare ourselves to other people,  like the pharisee did: to paraphrase him, Thank you God that I am not like those other no-hopers! 
 
 A proper commitment to keeping the law of God will show us how we are constantly attacked by tempting thoughts.  Do you remember the Lenten homework I gave you about judgement?  Add to the list envy, jealousy, vain glory, anger, love of possessions, impurity, love of eating, and the list goes on.  We have these passions like a dirty torrent passing through our thoughts and our souls.  We will understand that we are helpless against these attacks if we try to keep these commandments properly. Then we will remember what Christ said, as we heard today in the Gospel reading just now:  This kind is only expelled through prayer and fasting. 
 
Fasting does not mean just a change of diet.  It means making every effort of our will to be obedient to God, not to the things that we have turned into idols.  Again, the only purpose of prayer and fasting is to cultivate that contrite and humble heart of which King David sings in Psalm 50.  That is what makes the heart open to God’s grace, nothing else does.  Christ will fortify us in our battle inside the heart when He sees that we are serious about it.  Commitment means we will be reminded about God when we try to be faithful and fail constantly.  That will help us to cultivate prayer and the fear of God.  In Greek and Latin, the word for “God” means “one who sees”. Different cultures have different words for God; in the English language “God” means “Good”. If we cultivate the  sense that He sees, that He is present, that will be a mighty help for us not to think wrongly, not say wrong things and not to do bad things. Fear as reverence will make our prayer into a transformative force.  This transformation will be not a change into “better people” but a transformation into the children of God.  
 
Sunday April 7, Annunciation.
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The Liturgical year is a kaleidoscope of surprises.  This year, Alpha and Omega have come together; The Feast of Annunciation is the alpha, the beginning of Christ’s entry into the world, and the third Sunday of Lent is the omega, which reminds us of His and our journey to the cross and to the resurrection. The purpose of both the Annunciation, the incarnation of the Lord, and of His Cross is to bring transformation to the world.  This transformation, transfiguration, is in the life of the church. 
 
In discussing transformation, there are some basic questions to ask. People in today’s society may be able to answer in a limited way the first two questions of who am I and who is Christ? But today’s Christianity has a very vague feel to the third question:  what is the church? This is indicative of the spiritual state of the world today. The world has lost direction because it cannot see the light coming from us Christians.  It is decaying in spirit because there is not enough salt, this ancient preservative, that has to come from us, from the church.  To know what the church is is to know the life with Christ. Moreover, not only to know – it is easy to know, it can be an interesting intellectual game – but to commit ourselves to this life.  
 
The moment of His incarnation on the day of the Archangel’s annunciation, is the beginning of the emptying, the extreme humility, of the Son of God. It reaches its crescendo on the cross when He is crucified. The church connects and participates in that humility and love. The church is not organised religion.  The church is not ideology.  The church is not a club, especially an ethnic club. The church is the mystical supper with Christ.  Jesus Christ washed the feet of His disciples to give them a practical lesson in humility before the supper. To participate in the church as the supper, we must put aside all earthly cares and forget about our egos. Judas was unable to because of his attachment to the world, because of his ego.  He left the supper; he went to betray Christ.  
 
The early church had a clear and simple maxim. The Body of Christ receives the Body of Christ in order to become the Body of Christ.  That may need some explanation!  The body of Christ of course is the Church. We are the church through baptism, but that is only potential. We receive the body of Christ, at the Eucharist, the Mystical Supper, to become the real living body of Christ, not just an organisation. We must understand by experience that membership in the church is not like membership in an organisation. It is a dynamic process that depends on every moment of our life being energised by the grace that comes from the mystical supper, the Eucharist. 
 
This Sunday is seen as a hill from which we can see our journey to easter, to the cross and resurrection.  Today is all the more special as it coincides with the Annunciation. Let it be for us a contemplation of our life with Christ.  Let us be serious about the church. 
 
Sunday March 31
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s Sunday reading  (Mark 2:1-12) is about sin, illness, forgiveness and healing.  In addition, it gives us an image of the church carrying us to Christ for this forgiveness and healing. The memory of St Gregory Palamas on this the second Sunday of Lent adds a dimension about the role of the grace of God in the healing of soul and body.  Orthodox Christianity never forgets Christ’s teaching that we address God as “Our Father” not “My Father”.  
 
The four men in today’s story who make a great effort in their love for their paralysed friend are an image of the church, our brothers and sisters here on earth and also in Heaven.  We need each other.  As we mature in spirit, we begin to understand our connectedness with other people, especially in the family of the church. In the first week of Lent, I read from the book by St Dorotheus of Gaza during the evening services. On the Thursday night, we read chapter six about the refusal to judge our neighbour.  St Dorotheus explains that in connecting with people we connect more with God, and vice versa; when we get closer to God, we also get closer to our neighbours.  Sin is a disconnect from people and from God.  It is the failure to love.  This is why the Lord Jesus Christ says to the paralyzed man, “your sins are forgiven”.  Once this connection, or rather, reconnection, is made, God’s healing grace flows into the soul and body of the sick man. Reconciliation with God is a greater joy than anything else.  But, as we see in the story, it is invisible to observers, and so in this Gospel story, some of them remain sceptical.  Has anything really happened when the Lord said, your sins are forgiven?  This is what they are asking in their hearts.  At that point the Lord shows not only His power to heal but to forgive sins, something only God can do. Three thousand years ago, King David showed in his moving Psalm 50 (51 in the Hebrew Bible) that repentance and forgiveness opens the heart to receive the Holy Spirit:  A contrite and humble heart God will not despise.  
 
Let us learn from today’s story and the culture of Lent which is prayer and fasting.  Let us learn that there are two wings of spiritual life that can raise us up from the mundane level of earthly cares:  that is the church and the body of Christ which lives breathes, connects and energises its members with the energies of the Holy Spirit. The difference between that life and a life focused on earthly cares is as huge as the difference in the life of the paralytic before and after the miracle.  We can practically discover the difference. As King David says:  O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that hopes in the Lord. Amen.

Sunday March 24
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is the Sunday of Orthodoxy. It is also called the Triumph of Orthodoxy because of the historical connection with the event that happened in the year 842 on this first Sunday in Lent, in Constantinople.  At this event a great procession with icons marked the end of the iconoclastic persecutions which had lasted intermittently for over one hundred years.  Orthodoxy, however, does not revel in superficial triumphalism.  The church is intensely aware that every victory, every triumph happens through the Cross.  That means blood, sweat and tears.  
 
What does it mean for the church to retain the icon? It was a final act in the drama of the period of the great councils which lasted from 325 AD to 787, the first of the seven ecumenical councils. These councils defended and upheld the Orthodox faith, as the proper understanding of the New Testament revelation. 
 
Our faith is very simple and at the same time, very practical. It is not airy-fairy! Our faith can be expressed in one gesture: in the sign of the cross. This action speaks volumes.  It speaks of the triune God sending one of the Holy Trinity, the person of the Son, to take on the fullness of humanity; the Son, the Word of God, took on human nature to save us through the cross and resurrection. We use the icon because we believe the apostles who saw Him, the Son of God, with their own eyes as we heard in the Gospel reading today. (John 1:43-51). Phillip says to his friend Nathaniel: Come and see.  The invisible became visible.  God chose to enter the created world in a tangible way.  That means people touched him, He touched people, He Healed them, He suffered, He died, and He rose from the dead for us.  He promised His disciples that He would never leave the church, or them.  He connects to us in prayer, the sacraments and especially the Eucharist.  It is all real, not an abstract ideology.
 
I want to share something with you.  Yesterday I baptized a baby.  The godfather came to me afterwards and said,” I really believe.  When I was a boy (he was a man in his mid 30s) – I served in the altar. And there were other altar boys there and it was the day of Pentecost.  We were serving the Eucharist.  Towards the end of the Eucharistic canon, all of us altar boys saw something amazing happen.  There was a lot of smoke from the incense and suddenly all the smoke came together above the priest.  He didn’t see it because he was looking at the holy gifts.  This smoke then turned into a bright shining crown. The boys cried out, “Father, Father look”! He looked up and this crown started to lift until it disappeared”.  
 
It was the presence of the King, there at the Eucharist.  He is always here!  These tangible things sometimes happen to help people believe. In last night’s gospel reading from John, one of the eleven matins resurrection readings, we heard the Lord telling Thomas: Thomas, you believe because you saw me, but more blessed are those who did not see but believed. The faith of the apostolic church is a heart burning with the fire of the love for Christ. In another resurrection matins reading, we hear the words of Luke and Cleopas, two of the seventy apostles:  Did not our heart burn within us when He spoke to us along the way?    Let us use these precious days of Lent to prepare our hearts to receive the holy fire of the resurrection so that our hearts burn and we can say, as we sing each Sunday and at Easter,  Having seen the resurrection of Christ…
 This is our journey now in Lent.  It is a journey of our whole life too.   
 
Sunday March 17
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is Forgiveness Sunday. We are preparing to embark on the lenten journey to the Resurrection. Tonight, at the end of Vespers, we are going to sing the stichera (verses) of the Resurrection, of Pascha, ahead of this journey; it is a Christian tradition to ask each other’s forgiveness and for prayers before any journey.
 
Today the church also remembers Adam, his fall and his expulsion from Paradise.  He was expelled not because he broke some arbitrary rule but because he destroyed the communion of love with God.  He failed to respond to God’s call to his conscience to ask forgiveness and come back to the loving relationship with God.  Instead of asking for forgiveness, he blamed Eve and even God for giving her to him. He tried to say it was somebody else’s fault, not his! 
 
Variants of the Genesis story can be found in many religious traditions.  It speaks to a deep level, an archetypal level in our souls and consciousness.  The story of the fall is the beginning of human history.  It is humanity’s journey towards Christ, and through Christ, to our own resurrection.  Lent is an image of the whole history of humanity and our personal journey to Christ.  One of the archetypes is the story of Exodus, where Moses and the Israelites journeyed to the promised land over a period of forty years.  An even more powerful image is Christ’s forty day fast. Lent reflects that.  Christ teaches us how to defeat the three temptations of the devil which Adam failed. 
 
How was it possible for Adam to be defeated so badly that he even failed to realise that all he needed to say to God was “Forgive me”.  He had no reason to be filled with fear. His only prior knowledge of God was as a loving father.  Why is he then suddenly filled with fear of God?  It was because he lost that sense of communion of love.  God, his wife Eve, all of nature and everything in the world, became objects to him.  He became the subject of his own universe, seeing everything and everyone else as an object, as the “other”.  
 
The 20th century French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre says that hell is the “other”. That is, of course, the case when there is the loss of loving communion.  Hell is the inability to love. The communion of love is restored through forgiveness and Christ takes the initiative.  He offers forgiveness.  If we forgive the other, we then turn our neighbour from an enemy to becoming our brother or sister.  In beginning our Lenten journey tonight, we will sing these paschal stichera:  Let us say Brethren – also Sisters of course! – even to them that hate us. Let us forgive all things on the Resurrection and let us cry out, Christ is Risen from the dead.  Trampling down death by death and on those in the tombs bestowing life. 
 
 
 
 
Sunday March 10
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
It is normally noted that after two preparatory Sundays where the love of God toward repentant sinners is shown.  This Sunday presents the picture of God’s justice.  The picture of the Last Judgement, while it uses the image of human tribunals is vastly different from them.  Saint Isaac, whom I love and whose words I quoted last week, about not calling God “just” but “loving”, says also this:  God’s justice is like a grain of sand in comparison to the mountain of gold which is His mercy.  But that grain of sand must exist nevertheless otherwise human free will becomes undermined.  We need to think about what that means.
 
God wants everyone to be saved but not against their will.  It is not like the social revolutionaries who also, one way or another, follow the words of the 18th century thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau in his “Social Contract” where he says: “ We have the right to force people to be happy, even against their will”.  That’s not God!  The Last Judgement is really a revelation of choices made by us human beings; either to be with God or without God.  “Judge not lest ye be judged”, or in more modern English, “Judge not that you be not judged. With the measure you use it will be measured back to you”, says the Lord in the sermon on the Mount (Mt 7:2).  If you are forgiving you will be forgiven, that is the underlying message of Christ’s Gospel.  Why then do we constantly fall into judging other people? Because deep down inside we believe that we are better.  That is the symptom of the worst human disease, which is pride.  Those people who understand about not judging, or those people historically who understood, believing the promise of the Lord, that they too will not be judged, they eventually reached a deeper understanding of humility, the foundation of all the virtues.  By refusing to yield to the temptation of judging they were given the grace to see just their own vulnerabilities and failures in relation to God and their neighbour.  They were given the grace to see only the inner beauty of each person, not the ugliness of sin which is also present in all of us.  For this reason, both the sheep and the goats are surprised by Christ’s words to them.  The sheep are surprised because they sincerely and genuinely believed that they had never done anything good before God, and suddenly He praises them! The goats, too, are surprised because they thought that they were God’s gift to humanity. Suddenly they find out that they are not!
On occasions in the past, I have done this for a little while, but this is a bigger experiment. I am not saying let’s promise to God, because we are terrible at keeping promises. The experiment is to try and stop judging during Lent.  That is hard!  We can begin by counting how many times in a day we have judged other people in our minds. That knowledge will help us to come to a measure of humility.  We will realise how often we judge other people!  Where does that mean we will end up? By doing this experiment we will come to a measure of humility and love for our neighbour.