​Sunday August 2, 2026
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
The powerful story that we just heard from the gospel (Matt.14:22-34), the storm at sea, is found between two other very important stories. We heard the first last Sunday which was the story of the loaves and fishes. The second is the story of Christ’s long speech in the synagogue of Capernaum on the morning after the great miracle and after the storm. Within the story of the storm there is an episode of Peter walking on water towards Christ who was walking on water, which is found only in Matthew’s gospel. Peters’ fear, his drowning and the words of Christ to him, O you of little faith, why did you doubt? are usually taken as signs of weakness, but most likely Peter himself thought very differently. He saw this event as a sign of God’s strength, God’s power acting through him. For that reason, Peter, out of humility, did not allow his scribe, Mark, to include this event in his gospel. John also makes no mention of it because he had read the gospel, and he was a witness at the event. For the same reason, out of Peter’s humility, Mark’s gospel also omits the Lord’s praise to Peter when he replied to the Lord’s question: “Who do you think I am?” and Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. Peter had great faith. In the context of the story, the others were terrified of both the storm and seeing what appeared be a ghost walking on water. But Peter took the initiative and said, “Lord, if it is you, allow me to walk towards you” and he does. Christ encourages him.
There is connection here between Peter and the fiery prophet Elijah whom, we, the church, celebrate today. After Elijah had brought down fire from Heaven in competition with the priests of Baal, he was humiliated by a woman, Jezebel, and he fled from her. What kind of humiliation is that? Fear humbles the fiery prophet and drowns the disciple who dares to walk on water. Fear is an interesting thing. Why does fear undermine faith? Fear is a function of our mortality. While we have not fully died to sin, as part of fallen humanity, and its manifestations within us, we will have a measure of fear within us. It is just a fact of life. At the same time, God allowed the great fiery prophet and the future great pillar of the Church, Peter, to experience humiliation at the height of their glory. One brings down fire and then he is humiliated. The other one walks on water together with the Lord and then starts drowning. There is a lesson to be learnt there. 
This was to protect them from overconfidence which robs us of God’s grace. Once we get a bit cocky and overconfident, we are finished. The storm at sea is a great lesson for the church for all times. It is a lesson for us collectively and individually. Storms will happen to all of us, and they will test our faith. They will humble us and we should learn firstly to stick together like the apostles in the boat. They felt better because there were a group of them together supporting each other. Secondly, focus on Christ and  not on the winds or on the waves, and trust that Christ will protect us individually and collectively.

Sunday July 5, 2026
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
The gospel story that we just heard (Matt 10:37 – 11:1) speaks of two demoniacs. It speaks of the terrible and great power of the devil but also about the infinitely greater power of God. It is easy to think that this story has little to do with us. Such demonic possession seems to us to be such a rare phenomenon. If that is the case, what has it got to do with me? Why listen to this story? We hear it on two Sundays during the year. This attitude is shared by the Gergesenes or Gadarenes (the region has two different names) who decided to simply expel these unfortunate sufferers from their midst, leaving them to stay in their own hell. Occasionally these two men would attack anyone who was unfortunate enough to come close to them. 
It is a normal human reaction to want to keep away from others who could cause us pain and grief, and these two demoniacs were very scary.  Let us acknowledge the spiritual reality that is all around us and is within us as well, that we human beings we are not in our normal state. We are tormented by the demonic world through the passions. What are these passions? Let me remind you: gluttony, fornication, love of money, anger, sinful sorrow, despondency (depression), vainglory and pride, and there are many incarnations of these passions, many variations.
We human beings determine who we can put up with when we consider their passions - their demons- are at an acceptable level to us. Once people become too hard to bear we, as a rule, want to stay away from them. But let us remember who we are. We are Christians! We are called upon to fight our passions and to realign them in such as a way that they cannot be used by the demons to provoke us. These passions were originally meant to be helpful drives and energies. Take for instance, anger. Anger is bad, and yet Christ became angry on quite a few occasions. However, in His anger He kept loving. Can we do that? That is the proper way to get angry:  get angry and do not sin, as we hear in the psalms. 
Secondly, we are called to bear each other’s burdens and that means to understand that when people provoke us through their passions, we should thank God for sending these people to us because they show us what is inside of us. Otherwise, we would not know what sort of work we need to do. Because of this we should not turn away from people who are challenging for us. The problem with sinful humanity is that it is always easier to see the problem in the other person, rather than in ourselves, and for that reason we always want to change the other person. Consider modern Western philosophers and revolutionaries who always want to change the other person or change society.  But we can change only ourselves. We cannot change anybody else. When we begin to understand our problems, then start to work on them and connect with Christ, our inner life will start changing and we will approach the other person, whoever they might be, with patience firstly, and then ultimately with love. When we drive out our own demons, with Christ’s help, we will be able to drive out demons in other people the way that the Lord did today. The way to change other people is by changing ourselves first and ridding ourselves of our demons.  
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Sunday July 12, 2026. Feast of the Apostles
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 other. This year my focus is on St Paul and on an aspect of human behaviour where we do the opposite of what we know to be right. In the epistle to the Romans, 7:19, St Paul says: For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. In his homily on these verses, St John Chrysostom explains that Apostle Paul is emphasising the overwhelming power that sin has acquired over a person who has not been fully liberated by Christ. This highlights the inner struggle that everyone experiences. Even the saints were not exempt from this as we see in this passage. We know the basic principles of how we should behave and interact with one another.  And yet something different often happens and we end up saying or doing the opposite of what we know is right. Our previous position to sin causes this.  For example, our pride interferes with our ability to accept constructive criticism, our jealousy prevents us from rejoicing when someone else is rewarded or acknowledged for an achievement instead of us, our anger is stirred when someone says something hurtful and we feel the urge to retaliate. Does this mean we should give up trying to live according to Christian principles? It is understandable that we may feel disheartened because of our constant trouble with sinful habits. However, there is a way to turn this around and transform our sense of helplessness into something more positive. In Romans Chapter 5, St Paul says: and not only so, but we glory in tribulations also. Knowing that tribulation worketh patience and patience experience and experience hope.
St John Chryostomos explains that suffering confirms, rather than weakens, Christian hope. Trials are not evidence that God’s promises have failed. Instead, they test and strengthen our faith as believers. Practising patience builds character and endurance. Those who persevere faithfully through trials learn to face greater confidence in God’s promises and come to realise that the struggle is not in vain. This is easier said than done. Accepting the trials and difficulties that come throughout our lives is extremely challenging. We naturally resist them as much as we can. In times of desperation, we may pray to God to spare us just as St Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12 that we heard today: “for this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me and He that is Christ said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee, my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in mine infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon you”. We need to keep in mind Christ replied to St Paul that My grace is sufficient for you, My strength is made perfect in weakness. God’s love for us together with his respect for our free will does not compel Him to interfere in our lives, it is only when we acknowledge our weakness and recognise our need for His help in working through life’s difficulties that God extends His helping hand to us. 
May St Paul together with St Peter intercede for us in our struggles so that we may not be overwhelmed by them but instead accept that difficulties are a part of life.  And may we remember that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. 

Sunday July 19 2026
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
The gospel reading today (Matt. 9:27-35) contrasts the goodness and love of Christ with the envy and prejudice of the Pharisees. The people rejoiced seeing the two blind men and the dumb demoniac healed but the Pharisees could not overcome their negative bias towards the Lord. They said that He performed the exorcism through demonic power. On many occasions, the Lord was direct in telling them about their inner spiritual problems while at the same time showing great patience with them.  As a result, many of the Pharisees came to Christ and joined the church after Pentecost.
Today’s story shows typical human relations. A preconceived notion and a negative attitude caused by a passion such as envy, as illustrated in this case, makes it difficult for people to see anything good in the other person. It is difficult to accept that anything good is possible from a person whom we dislike intensely. This passionate, biassed attitude covers our whole perception of the other person. And it can also work the other way around. We may wear rose coloured glasses and fail to see the person objectively, fail to see any of their harmful behaviour and so we fail to help them by correcting them in love and meekness. The life in Christ demands that we hear what we heard in the epistle today (Rom. 15:1-7), before the Gospel, because it speaks of the responsibility of the stronger members of the church to carry the weaknesses of the weak. We are called to be like-minded to one another and to glorify God with one mind and one heart. That unity of faith and life is impossible without a lot of work on the inside against our passions with the demons working through them. 
We hear the Lord quoting: Physician heal thyself ! This was a saying in His day in the Middle East, and it tells us to not fantasise about being able to help people spiritually before we have attained a measure of health ourselves from Christ. Christ is the good Samaritan who heals. We must heal ourselves first before we can heal anybody else.  So often we are completely blind to ourselves. How do we begin to heal ourselves? First, by praying along the lines of the prayer we use during Great Lent, the prayer of St Ephraim: “Lord, enable me to see MY failings and not to condemn my brother”. This is the correct spirit, but we must really want this to happen and not just recite the line.  
Prayer must come from a bleeding heart. Then Christ will come and give us vision of our inner world, to help us be free of that demonic manipulation that we are constantly affected by.  Then we will be able to speak the words from Christ. 
 
Sunday July 26, 2026
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
This Sunday  (Matt.14:14-22) is about both the feeding of the five thousand and the memory of the Holy Fathers of the Sixth Council; the focus is on the church as  “a meal”, to use an expression of one of the modern Orthodox theologians. The image of the hungry five thousand families sitting on the green grass is an image of the church being fed by Christ in the mystery of the Eucharist. This multitude of people had chosen to be hungry all day rather than leave Christ, and for that they were rewarded with His great miracle. That is something for us to contemplate. How do we prepare for the miracle that is even greater than the miracle that happened then? 
We have come for this miracle today. Recently I spoke to a catechumen and also an inquirer about the faith and I mentioned the three great miracles that happen in the Holy Land; the Holy Fire at Pascha, the water of the Jordan River that goes backwards during the blessing of the water of Theophany, and also the night of Transfiguration as the shining cloud comes over the mountain. These are all great miracles, and they happen regularly, yet a lot of people do not know about them. My late mother had a Jewish friend who lived in the kibbutz underneath Mount Tabor, who was amazed to hear about it from her.  I have never been present at the Holy Fire because for a priest it is just impossible to get away during Easter, but I know many people who have. Imagine being present at such a miracle!
Every Sunday, every feast day, every time we come to a liturgy and a Eucharist, it is a greater miracle. It is a greater miracle because the Holy Fire is God’s energy, but here is Christ Himself and it is also the Pentecost. The Holy Spirit comes on us and, on these gifts.  The priest or bishop prays: Send down Your Holy Spirit.  Can you imagine how prepared and how focused we need to be to properly participate in this, and to behold it!
People make a big effort to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and for that they are rewarded. Some people see things that others do not see during the coming down of the fire, like lightning flashes all over the church and many other things. I am not focusing on that; I am focusing on our presence here today and every time we come on this. 
The bodily hunger of the five thousand people opened them to the love of Christ. We prepare ourselves for the meeting of Christ with the liturgical fast. No breakfast until after the Eucharist is a small thing to do. We are preparing for Holy Communion. We will say some prayers before communion, but the main thing is to do is what we are told in the Cherubic hymn: let us put aside all earthly cares. This is the sort of focus we need to have. 
The miracle of the Eucharist will not happen for us if we are not properly focused and not prepared. Our presence in Church will just be some sort of profanation and that would be awful. Imagine a person who is in present amongst those thousands of people during the Holy Fire and is not focused but still expects it to happen. Yet we come we for something greater and we do not always focus ourselves well enough. 
This is the contemplation that we need to carry away from today’s reading about this great miracle and about the holy fathers who have done so much for the church.
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​Sunday June 7, 2026. All Saints’ Day
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
Happy Namesday to Everyone, today! The church celebrates All Saints the week after Pentecost. Pentecost completes the panoramic picture of God’s plan of salvation to humanity which begins in November each year with Advent leading to Christmas, the Feast of Christ’s Nativity, then His Baptism, Theophany, followed by the feasts of the Meeting of the Lord, Great Lent, Annunciation, Palm Sunday, Pascha, Ascension, then Pentecost. This Sunday, a week after Pentecost, focusses on mankind’s response to God’s love and His invitation to participate in the life in Christ. 
The saints, thousands of whom we know by name, as well as the millions whose names we do not know, are the crop of God’s salvific planting. Wonderful is God in His saints, says King David. In venerating the saints, we recognise them as God’s co-workers who did everything “not from themselves but from Christ”, as St Seraphim explains, through the Holy Spirit. Each one of them is a gem that shines with the light of God. Christ gives them the glory that the Father gave Him. 
The saints are normal healthy people! Learning about them helps us to achieve a progression towards our spiritual and psychological health; we are much closer to neuroses and psychoses than we are to the normal health of the saints! Saints teach us through their life stories of repentance how to overcome the slavery of sin which is the addiction of the passions.  They have also left us many writings where they teach us about God and our journey to Him in Christ and the Holy Spirit. The saints are not only our teachers but also our friends who can and do help us when we call out to them. Christ wants the saints to help us because they are His friends; as He Said to His apostles: You are my friends. The saints, beginning with the Good Thief, understood the love of God. Their hearts were lit up by that love. 
I would like to read you a few beautiful words from St Isaac the Syrian about this: “Why was Christ nailed, hung on the cross for us sinners? It was for no other reason than to show the world His love so that when we understand this, our love would grow and we would be captivated by His love. He partook of death in the horrific suffering of the cross. Why the need for the offensive mockery, spitting, beatings, scourging? His death without the torture, by itself, would suffice for our redemption…  O Wisdom of God filled with love”! And so, the saints teach us that a Christian is not a sanitised keeper of the law, but a repentant sinner, full of love for Christ and his brothers and sisters. 

Sunday June 14 2026: All Saints of Russia
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
This Sunday, the second Sunday after Pentecost, the church of Russia celebrates its own saints. Many other churches also remember their own saints on this day.  It is a continuation of the celebration of All Saints, which we had last Sunday.  The Saints give us  worked examples,  images of a proper response to the love of God through Christ. 
However, as today is a teaching liturgy, I would like to talk about the most important part of the liturgy, which is the Liturgy of the Faithful. The liturgy has three parts:  The preparation or Proskomide, the Liturgy of the Catechumens which is like the teaching part, and the final part, the sacramental (sacrificial) part. We really should know how the liturgy works and how to participate in it properly because we cannot be passive visitors to the church. We are active members.  We are the royal priesthood.
The Liturgy of the Faithful begins with the choir singing the Cherubic Hymn. Then the Great Entrance takes place, when the clergy take (from the table of preparation) the discos with the prepared Lamb and other particles, and the chalice with wine, and the commemorations are said. Then the vessels are placed on the altar table. The choir then sings the second part of the Cherubic Hymn, which is followed by a litany and the singing of the Creed. That is very important. It is a good custom for the whole church to sing the Creed as we do in the Russian church rather than one person saying it. It actively involves the people in the liturgy. 
After this the Eucharistic Canon begins, with the deacon saying, “Let us stand well, let us stand with fear, let us attend that we may offer the holy oblation in peace”. The choir begins singing, “A mercy of peace, a sacrifice of praise”.  The choir are representatives of the laity, and they respond. There is a conversation between the clergy and the laity here. During the Canonisation of St John Maximovitch Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco in San Francisco in 1994, the church was overflowing with people, and everybody sang the Eucharistic Canon.  The whole liturgy was sung by all the people. That is a proper participation in the liturgy, and it used to happen in the early church. What usually happens now, though, is that the prayers of the Eucharist are only partially said aloud, and the rest is said quietly by the bishop or the priest. This is because, historically, by the eighth century there was a huge influx of people coming to church, which became legalised from the fourth century in the Roman Empire. Many people were coming for the wrong reasons, and this diluted the former intensity of life and worship in the church. 
As the Eucharistic canon continues, the priest says, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Fatherand the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all”. The choir, on behalf of the people, responds, “and with thy spirit”.The conversation continues with the priest saying, “Let us lift up our hearts” and the choir responding, “We lift them up unto the Lord”. The priest invites everyone, “Let us give thanks unto the Lord”, and then the choir sings the beginning of the eucharistic prayer, “It is meet and right to worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and indivisible”.  While the choir is singing this, the bishop or the priest continues reading a long prayer quietly. It is the custom of the Orthodox churches to read this prayer quietly, and we do not dare break the custom, although recently in the Macedonian church they have been told to say these prayers aloud. 
This is the main part of the liturgy, and everyone should be focused completely on it, because it is not just the clergy who are praying and involved in the sacrament, the mystery. It is the entire congregation, as the royal priesthood, who participates in the prayers of the sacrament. It is important for everybody to be focused at this time. From the Cherubic hymn there should be no walking around, placing of candles, talking to each other.  Forget about it, it is not on!  The Cherubic hymn announces the beginning of the Liturgy of the Faithful and builds up after the kiss of peace, which you will see the clergy doing today, to the Eucharistic canon prayer which is partly sung by the choir and largely by the clergy.

Sunday June 21 2026
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
This gospel passage that we just heard (Matt 6:22-33) ends with the words “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness”. What is God’s righteousness?  As Christ explains, it is to love God and our neighbour.  Ideally it means that there should be nothing left in our life except for love. That sounds maximalist. The worldly realist would say that it is impossible. The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, puts it even more starkly by calling Christ cruel. The religion of The Grand Inquisitor is one where humans are allowed to serve both God and mammon, two masters. In that religion, righteousness means to create a good impression. But Christ asks us to have love as the direction of our journey and on this journey our capacity to love will grow. What seems impossible today will be possible tomorrow by God’s grace. To have that direction means to trust God and to stop worrying about things we cannot control. We read in the first chapters of the Book of Acts how much love the church in Jerusalem had and yet despite this, it was recognised in a non-judgemental way that not everyone was ready to sell everything and donate it, or lay it at the feet of the apostles, as we read.
Growing in God’s righteousness, that is love, will heal us from anxiety and our neuroses. It will stop us worrying either about yesterday or tomorrow and will give us clarity of vision today.  That is the meaning of the Lord’s words at the beginning of this passage about the eye; darkness engulfs us if we attempt to serve two masters.
If the love of God and our neighbour is our direction, we will be free from internal torment. Peace and a gentle joy will fill our heart, and the necessities of life will come without agony; as the Lord said, “they will be added to us.” At the same time, let us be realistic. This journey demands courage, a willingness to grow up and become mature, and not to remain infantile in our selfishness. We often resist growing up. There is work ahead, but Christ is in our midst. Not only is He in our midst, but more precisely He is in front of us, leading us, supporting us, and comforting us. 
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Sunday June 28, 2026
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
There is something special about the Roman centurions in the New Testament! We have just heard a story about an amazing centurion in Capernaum (Matt 8:5-13), then we go forward to Calvary where we read about a centurion there who believed in Christ, and then a third one, who was the first Gentile to come into the Church having been converted by Peter and Cornelius in Caesarea. 
The incredible humility and faith of the Centurion of Capernaum elicit an exclamation of surprise from the Lord. He had done this only one other time in the whole gospel. Here He says, I have not found such great faith, no, not even in Israel. We know from the Book of Proverbs and from St James, the brother of the Lord who became the first Bishop of Jerusalem, that it is humility which opens to us the gifts of God. These gifts are the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. A proud person thinks that he is self-sufficient and does not need God, and so he does not recognise any higher authority than himself. 
The Centurion understands that his authority comes from a higher military authority, and so it is necessary for him to obey orders, as his subordinates obey him. He believes that Christ, by his divine authority, has the power through His word over all of nature including illness. It is as if he had read the words in the beginning of Genesis: then God said let there be light and there was light. How can we learn to have such faith built on the solid rock of humility?
Our Christian life is all about attaining a measure of humility because only then can we grow spiritually. The Lord Himself, along with the Apostles and the holy mothers and fathers, teach us how can we attain humility. It is through patience. An “eye for an eye” is alright for a religion but not for Christianity - Christianity is not a religion, as I have told you many times. When we are provoked by people or events, patience is a struggle to first contain and then diffuse our irritability with God’s help. When Christ sees that we are making a serious effort in trying to overcome our sinful nature, He comes to our help as a healer and our Saviour. This may not happen until we have failed enough times to stop believing we can do it by ourselves!  It is when we understand our failure at a deep level that things change. The grace of God touches our heart, no matter how low we have fallen. This is the moment of the awakening shown in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The closer we get to the father’s house, the more our hearts fill with faith and hope. Perhaps the image of this New Testament centurion is a reminder to us that we are all meant to be warriors of Christ; warriors first for humility and then for faith, hope and love. 

Sunday 26 April 2026: Myrrh-bearing Women; Joseph of Arimathea & Nicodemus
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!
Today’s story (Mark 15:43 -16:8) of Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus and the Myrrh-bearers is a shining illustration of the New Testament words that would appear later in the writings of St John the Evangelist: Perfect love casts out fear(1 Jn 4:18). Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were members of the Sanhedrin - the Supreme Council of the Jews, and were secret disciples of Christ, for fear of the Jews, as it is written in the gospel. When Christ is crucified, they overcome their fear and they approach Pilate to release the body for burial which they perform with great respect and in the proper manner. The Myrrh-bearing Women, too, showed more courage than the Disciples.  They came early on Sunday morning to the tomb to anoint the body of Christ. What were they expecting? They knew that there was a guard there at the tomb, and secondly, they knew that there was a huge rock that they could not move themselves. This is the nature of love. It is beyond logic. Love creates miracles. 
 
I want to share with you a story from a 19th century Russian novelist, Turgenev, in his book “Notes of a Hunter”.  He describes coming back from one of his walks in the countryside, after some hunting. Suddenly his hunting dog ran ahead and was looking at something down on the ground. As he approached, he realised that it was a little sparrow which the dog was sniffing at. Suddenly, the mother of the sparrow came down from the tree, fluttering vigorously in front of this huge dog as if saying “don’t touch the little one, take me”.  It was such a powerful message to the dog that the dog just backed off. This picture from the animal kingdom illustrates how powerful love is, because love is life. Love drives out fear because fear is about death and for God’s sake, we are Christians, we believe in the Resurrection! How did I just begin greeting you? Christ Is Risen! 
 
Richard Rohr, an American psychologist and Franciscan friar, has interesting observations about fear. We are all subject to fear. Rohr observes that people with the worst fears sometimes become tyrants and he gives the example of Adolf Schicklgruber, better known as Hitler. He had the worst paranoia, the worst fears and he became a tyrant. You can see how fear disfigures our whole life. Fear makes an evil caricature of what we as human beings, especially as Christians, ought to be. Fear is driven by our bodily mortality, which is a function of our fallen, sinful nature. The apostles, the martyrs, the prophets, and the other saints had no fear, and we should re-acquaint ourselves with stories of their lives and how they faced threats but were not afraid. When an officer was sent to arrest St Basil, the saint said, ‘How can you threaten me? I do not have anything you can take. I do not have any property.  If you exile me, the Lord’s earth is everywhere. If you take my life, I will be with my Lord, my Christ’.
 
Today the church gives us a very inspiring example of these two men and a group of women. We celebrate our Sisterhood today, because they are like the Myrrh-bearers. Women historically have saved the church many times. During the worst times, the women, just like the Myrrh-bearers today, saved the day. May we acquire their love for Christ and then our life will be transformed. 

Sunday May 3: Sunday of the Paralytic
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen!
Gospel stories always speak to us on many levels, and in today’s story (John 5:1-15) about the healing of the paralytic, it speaks to us, firstly, of our salvation through Christ. Humanity was paralysed by sin, having broken its bond with God, until the Lord took pity on us and sent His only begotten Son to come and heal us.  Bethesda was the pool where sacrificial animals were washed before they were taken to the temple. The healing powers of its waters, although it only happened once a year, prefigured the mystery of baptism. The Lamb of God, Himself, came from Nazareth to the River Jordan to be baptised, to be washed according to the law, in preparation for His sacrifice. The paralytic in today’s story did not have a man to help him get into the waters that were disturbed by the angel, so he kept missing out. But Christ heals everyone who enters baptism, or at least, we begin our journey of healing from the font. Christ is the Man. This is why the Lord tells the healed man afterwards, Sin no more, lest a worst thing come upon you. In saying this, Christ means that salvation is not a passive process, but one that involves our constant participation.  We cannot just rest on our laurels!  The best way to participate in our own salvation is to become, through Christ, the person whom the paralysed man needed but did not have… Christ’s messenger.  The paralysed man was there for 38 years, and no one noticed him.  Everyone was concerned only with their own problems.  Sin often incapacitates us. We can be hurt by people, ignored by them and then we are provoked ourselves. We get angry and sulk, and then we are spiritually and psychologically paralysed. We feel alienated in that state.  St Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians, that if someone falls into sin, those in a better spiritual condition should help such a person, in meekness; it will not help if you have a superior “holier than thou” attitude!  
On this Sunday of the Paralytic, the church begins to turn its attention from the events of the Resurrection to the life in grace that begins in baptism. The stories for the next few Sundays relate to water.  We begin a preparation for the next feast, Pentecost, which is a feast enabled by the Resurrection of the Lord.  The life in grace is a life that heals us from self-isolation. Self-isolation is a paralysis, an inability to love. Once we find the Man, we will find connection also to brothers and sisters in Christ. When we are healed from this state, we must help others also to come out of this paralysis. It may just take one kind word.  I can tell you that I know one case when a young person was taken out of this paralysis of self-pity and despondency just because someone bought him a Maccas meal! It really does not take much from us to help! ​

Sunday May 10, 2026                                                    
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ Has Risen! Truly He Has Risen!
Today’s story about the Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well is one of the longest Sunday readings and to comment on all the aspects of this story would easily take one hour or more, but we have a short time this morning so will look at one small aspect.
 
The woman is shocked that Christ speaks to her at all, as she is a Samaritan heretic and a woman at that. When the disciples come back to the well sometime later, they are also shocked. The Jews despised Samaritans as heretics and did not converse with them. Moreover men, even some great thinkers like Socrates and Buddha, let alone Middle Eastern men 2000 years ago, considered women unworthy of any serious conversation. Modern humanity often treats Christianity the same way, as though there is nothing interesting to hear! As well as being a woman and a heretic, we find out she was a sinner having these five husbands, or whatever these relationships were.
Women’s rights and respect for people no matter who they are, are one small aspect of the moral revolution that Christ brought into the world two thousand years ago. Yet without Christ, all His principles become debased, and we Christians must watch ourselves because it is so easy to distort, debase and trivialise even the most serious things. There can be prejudices based on social class, sex, moral superiority and religious triumphalism, but the underlying prejudice in everything is this: ‘if I don’t like you, you are bad’.
 
Now Christ tells the woman that in the future true worshippers will worship God in the spirit and truth. This can mean many things starting with the fact that the spirit and truth refer, firstly, to the Holy Spirit and to Christ himself. Furthermore, it could mean that in Christ the spiritual relationship is above the relationship based on blood or preference and that that truth is above self-interest. Such perception is impossible without a dose of reality - a bit of humble pie - and this is precisely what the Lord does by humbling the woman, asking her to bring her husband, and she says, I have no husband. Without at least a glimmer of humility, the human being can be an awful beast: proud, aggressive, greedy, egocentric, obnoxiously and repulsively self-entitled, and narcissistic. Still, we have no right to judge anyone, but we must have compassion even on the worst members of humanity. Underneath all that ugliness there is the image of God in every person. If we build up this Christ-like patience and compassion towards people, we can transform them in the same way Christ transformed this woman, a heretic and a sinner. 

Sunday May 17, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
​
Christ Has Risen! Truly He Has Risen! 
In today’s gospel reading, Christ spits on the ground and makes clay which He then uses to anoint the eyes of the man who was born blind. This act may have two meanings. Some point out that He, as the Son of God, acts as the Creator by whom all things were made, as we say in the Creed. He creates the eyes that see, using clay. It is easy for God to make a blind man see physical light. It is quite something else to enable a person to see the spiritual light. Even God himself needs the cooperation of the person for that to happen. We see in this story a greater glory of God than His glory as the Creator. His greatest glory is that of the Saviour. For this reason, if you look at an Orthodox crucifix you will see the words The King of Glory.  What is seen as humiliation from a worldly point of view, is His greatest glory. 
 
Let us look at the journey of the blind man. He is born blind and carries this heavy cross until his adulthood. The suffering transforms him into a person who is ready to receive the light of Christ; the light of Christ enlightens all, we hear during the liturgy of the pre sanctified gifts in Great Lent.  His faith is kindled when he sees Christ saying aloud, I am the light of the World. He submits meekly to the anointing of his unseeing eyes with mud, and he obediently does what the Saviour tells him to do, to go and wash in the pool of Siloam.  When he comes back, he is transformed.  He sees physically, but he also sees spiritually. We hear from that dialogue with the Pharisees that he becomes a warrior for the truth, and the truth is Christ Himself. 
 
What can we learn here for ourselves? Firstly, to be patient in carrying our cross, whatever it might be. It is our salvation. We too can come alive to God like this blind man did. Secondly, there is a lesson about the mud that the Lord used to anoint the eyes of these unseeing eyes. He shows us that what blocks our spiritual vision, is the earth and our attachment to it. That is why the Lord spits at it because it is the earth. It is our earthly attachments, constantly blocking our spiritual vision.
 
Through our cross we must develop our obedience like today’s man. We too must contemplate our Siloam, that is our baptism because our baptism has given us the potential to wash off the mud off our eyes. How? By daily dying to sin through the efforts of unseen warfare and rising with Christ, and then we can come back to Christ just as this man came back from Siloam and our spiritual eyes can see. We reach a level of maturity and then we can consciously follow Christ. Nothing else matters. Everything falls into place. 

Thursday, May 21, 2026. Ascension
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff

We spend the best part of the year preparing for Pascha and then rejoicing in the risen Lord. The joy of His resurrection speaks to us because He is one of us according to His human nature. However, as the righteous priest, Fr Alexei Mechev of Moscow (1859–1923) commented, there is a dissonant note amid the symphony of Paschal joy. The ikoshymn that is sung after the kontakion hymn of Pascha tells us that the Myrrh bearing Women cried out:  Let us weep and cry aloud. O Master arise, Thou who dost grant resurrection to the fallen! Fr Alexei would say, yes, Christ is risen but I am still fallen and thus I weep and cry aloud. 
This is where Ascension comes in.  Christ tells His disciples at the Mystical Supper that it is better for them that He should leave because he will send another Comforter, the Spirit of Truth. He, the Holy Spirit, will enable them too to become Christ-like. As we hear in today’s festal troparion hymn, the Lord had made the disciples joyful with the promise of the Holy Spirit and the blessing that He imparted to them as He was rising into heaven.  The Ascension is a powerful indication of God’s intent for mankind. As I have said before, the Holy Fathers comment that we human beings, unlike the animals, stand upright pointing to heaven, because this is our home, where we aspire to.  Lucifer has tried and is still trying to turn us human beings into animals, focussed on the earth.  He almost succeeded before the cataclysm during the time of Noah, when God said: My spirit will not remain with these people forever for they are flesh. How terrible! There was no place left for God in His people before the flood.  Today Christ returns to the Father, bringing His humanity with Him.  We are invited to come to the table as is depicted in the icon of the Holy Trinity. The church is a meal; the food is Christ God Himself Who enables us to rise from our fallen state. We hear in our church services the words that Christ has given us eternal life and great mercy.  This great mercy is spelt out in the event of the Ascension.  Humanity is invited to participate in the eternal supper with God.  What a great honour and mercy!  It begins from Pentecost, when the Apostolic Church starts to break the bread of the Eucharist. The Eucharist, though, is only a foretaste of the wedding feast of the age to come.  We sing in the 9th ode of the Paschal Canon: O great and most sacred Pascha, Christ! O Wisdom and Word and Power of God! Grant that we may partake of you fully in the day that has no evening of your Kingdom.

Sunday May 24, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Today we remember the Fathers of the Nicaean Council in the fourth century. The troparion (central hymn) of today’s feast tells us that the preaching of the Apostles and the dogmas of the fathers speak of the same one faith of the church. St Paul, in the First 
Letter to Timothy, calls this the great mystery of Godliness. We express this faith without any words when we simply make the sign of the cross; we express the faith in the Holy Trinity - the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, – and we believe in One of the Holy Trinity becoming flesh through the love of the Cross.  Looking at the story of Nicaea, we see how, in the 4th century, Christians defined their faith with the same commitment of the apostles and martyrs in earlier generations.   This difficult journey of the church has continued with different challenges in each generation of its 2000-year history. 
 
Today the celebration of the Fathers coincides with the memory of the apostles of the Slavs, Sts Cyril and Methodius. It is hard to overestimate the importance of their work and their legacy. They evangelized the Slavs by giving them everything for faith and public worship including, arguably, the best translation into any language of the Scriptures and the Orthodox services. When Matushka and I with some of our family visited Rome not long ago, we were moved by our visit to the Basilica of St Clemente there.  There is so much in this 4th century temple that speaks of Sts Cyril and Methodius.  They brought the relics of St Clement there from Crimea needing to speak to the Pope of Rome, Adrian. St Cyril died in Rome and was buried in the basilica.    Our diocesan educational institute, the Sts Cyril and Methodius Orthodox Institute (SCMOI) also celebrates its patronal saints today. As I told the students, one of the ways the Eastern church has preserved the preaching of the apostles and the dogmas of the fathers better than in the West, is because the Eastern church used languages that people could understand. Sts Cyril and Methodius successfully argued in Rome against the prevailing idea that only the Hebrew, Greek and Latin could be used, and they received a blessing to use a local language in the Slavic Kingdom of Moravia. For that reason, they are not only the apostles of the Slavs, but they have enabled the church to preserve and spread its faith in every possible language all over the world.  It is still happening today and allowing us to spread the faith. As St Paul writes about this in his First Letter to Timothy: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by the angels, preached among the gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory.

Sunday May 30, 2026. Pentecost
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
We have reached Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Trinity! Christ, the Son of God, sends the Holy Spirit from the Father to the Apostles and the group of people with them – 120 in all – in one large room in Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Spirit is born! The Apostles receive the Fire of Grace. The Fire of Faith spread all over the world to all the tribes and nations. There had never been anything like this before in human history. That first group of 120 people were prepared with diligent prayers through the teaching of the Lord after the Ascension to receive the Holy Spirit. Three thousand people, as we read in the Book of Acts, were converted to the Lord on this day, after they had experienced the Holy Spirit in the sound of the powerful rushing wind and the apostles speaking in different languages, despite being simple Galilean fishermen, and  especially  through the sermon of Peter who explained what all this meant. 
 
We are present at Pentecost every time we come to a Liturgy. Whoever leads the prayer of the Eucharist asks God the Father to send down the Holy Spirit upon us and upon the Gifts, just as happened at Pentecost.  At this moment the priest can feel how much the congregation is participating in the prayer. Maybe it is sometimes better for the priest that he is unable to see what may be happening now, if some in the congregation are walking around in church and even talking to each other, especially at big events like Christmas. This is during the Eucharistic Canon!  Those who are rare visitors to church might not know what is really happening, but those who come regularly must know how important this is.  The Liturgy of the Faithful begins when the choir sings the Cherubic Hymn and continues through the hymn, “A mercy of peace” while the priest is reading the prayers of consecration. Somehow, we in the parish need to co-operate in overcoming this and learning to participate in the prayers.  It is crazy to not be aware of the importance of what is happening! In the early church, each family would bring the energy of the Holy Spirit back home, with burning hearts, after having been in church.    Consequently, pagan Rome and its world became Christian, imagine that! We, too, must come home with burning hearts.
 
In the 1950s and 1960s there was naïve optimism, following the tragedy of World War II. Now we are on the brink of World War III.  Some people even think it has begun. These current events should be making us think, especially when we come to church.  Many people spend hours, following the news, trying to make sense of all these world events. But this helps no one. What can help is for the Church to pray.  We must pray at home and especially at church, where grace abounds.  Today we celebrate the coming down of the grace of the Holy Spirit; Pentecost 2000 years ago transformed the world. Today the Holy Spirit is still with us. Pentecost can- and will continue- but only if we are serious about wanting it to continue. 

​Sunday February 22, 2026. Forgiveness Sunday 
At the Last Judgement, as we heard last week, Christ God will tell us that whatever we have done or have omitted to do for our neighbour, we have done to Him. If we forgive others, our Heavenly Father will also forgive us. The Lord tells us this immediately after having given the Apostles the prayer “Our Father”, in today’s gospel reading, Matt 6:14 – 21.  One of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer is to:  forgive us our debts (trespasses in the older English version) as we forgive our debtors. The Lord does this to show how important it is to forgive. He chooses this part of the prayer to comment on it. The Gospel teaching of Christ is about love; the whole gospel is about love. Forgiveness as an expression of love is central in Christian life. When the Lord Jesus Christ was already nailed to the cross, He prayed: Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do. When someone hurts us, and it is hard to forgive that person, we should recall that image of crucified love, Christ on the cross. Christ wants us to forgive, and He gives such a powerful image within Himself of forgiveness. 
It is easy to think that is someone hurt me, I might be able to forgive them, but if they hurt someone I love, I could never forgive them.  Yet we have many examples of saints who have done just that; the apostles loved their Teacher but they still turned to His enemies afterwards with love.  St Elizabeth, the Grand Duchess, saw her husband murdered by a terrorist in 1905.  How did she react?  She went to prison to express her forgiveness for him. She forgave the murderer of her loved one. 
When there is no forgiveness, life begins to fall apart. I can tell you that in my decades of pastoral life I have seen how this happens. This is seen in marriages, in families, in small communities, in the general society at large. The Old Testament law introduced the law of limitation of vengeance, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth - not both eyes for one eye, and not ten teeth for one tooth. That law speaks of fairness, balance and justice. But the culture of the gospel, as we heard today, teaches us to seek heavenly treasures, not earthly justice. St Isaac the Syrian tells us to not call God “just” because when we were His enemies, He sent His only begotten Son to die for us.  What kind of a justice is that? Forgiveness sees beyond justice. Forget about justice if you are a Christian! Forgiveness enables us to see the Lord in our neighbour. Our salvation is in our neighbour.
 
Sunday March 2, 2026. Sunday of Orthodoxy 
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In 842AD, after two long periods beginning in 726AD when iconoclasts removed icons from churches, it was decided that the Rite of Orthodoxy should be served on the first Sunday of Great Lent every year. This rite was composed by the then Patriarch of Constantinople, Methodius, and in the Synaxarion of the service for today it explains that this ought to be done lest we fall into this blasphemy again.
The Sunday of Orthodoxy is not just a celebration of the icon and restoration of its proper theology in the culture of Eastern Orthodoxy; it sums up a long period of theological work which is known as the period of Great Councils – the Seven ecumenical Councils- from 325AD until 787. The seven councils defended the faith of the church, and they expressed or formulated this faith in a number of statements.
Let us return to the topic of icons.  What is an icon? Why is it so important? And why is it that our brothers, the protestant Christians of the West, are wrong in saying that icons are idols, and images are forbidden in the bible? 
What is an icon? It is an expression of the apostolic faith that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man from the beginning of church life. This was held up as fundamental faith of the church. The invisible became visible and tangible. People saw Him, they touched Him, they heard Him. This is expressed in a powerful way in the gospel of John, chapter 1: and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory as the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, truly God and truly man. The visible God became depictable. He was not visible in the Old Testament, that is why you could not have images of Him earlier.
The Council of 787 in Constantinople said that the veneration addressed to the image is transferred to the origin. There is also an important distinction between the words “worship” and “venerate” because we worship God only and we venerate - we show deep reverence and respect to - an icon of Christ.  That veneration is addressed not to the piece of board, or painting but to the person. He who has seen Me has seen the Father, says Christ to Phillip at the Mystical Supper. In other words, the visible and tangible Christ in His humanity is an image of the invisible transcendental unknowable Father. The icon of Christ is an image of the Image of the Father. It speaks about the tangible reality of the incarnation, that God is with us, as we hear from the prophet.  Emmanuel means, God with us. He is not somewhere far away; He is with us. 
What about icons of saints? Christ says to the Father before He crosses the Kidron stream: The glory You gave Me, I gave them. He is speaking of the apostles. He is speaking of all the saints of the church. The saints are connected; they are the glory of the Church. They show the reality of the body of the church, The Body of Christ. They are connected to Him, so much that we cannot even fathom it. Remember the story about Elder Paisios?  When a man asked him to pray on his behalf, the elder started saying Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me! The man, astonished, replied:  I asked you to pray for me, you are praying for yourself! Elder Paisios told him: You are me. That is the mystery of the church. Christ has come to reconnect humanity, to put back Humpty Dumpty back together again!
The icon is not an idol, because we worship God only. Moses prayed before the Ark of the Covenant in the tabernacle which became a focus of prayer, of his conversation with and connection with God. The icon is often compared to the Ark of the Covenant. 
The Ark itself had images of cherubs on top of the lid, and there were two huge cherubim, inside the sanctuary just in front of the great screen, the curtain which separated the sanctuary and the holy of holies in the temple. There were images even in the time of Moses. 
We are in Lent now and the Bible and Church recognise that human beings are not just spiritual beings. The spirit is the most important part of us, but we are also bodily beings, and the body is called to a transformation to the worship of God together with the soul and the spirit that is why we have so much bodily prayer. If the Word became flesh, if God is physically with us from His birth in Bethlehem, then we cannot separate the two realms the physical of spiritual. That is the error and the problem that people fall into; they separate the two. The idea that I come to church on Sunday and connect with the spiritual realm but otherwise, I live my own life, my bodily life is wrong! The spirit as well as the body and soul  must participate in family life, in working life, in all aspects of our life, and so in Lent we make a conscious effort to let God into every aspect of our life and to transform it. He loves us, warts and all! 
 
Sunday March 8, 2026. Second Sunday of Lent 
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
A week ago, we celebrated the Sunday of Orthodoxy, a triumph of the Orthodox faith. Today the church celebrates Orthodoxy again, this time Orthodoxy in life. The theology of the icon, as I explained last week, says God is with us. Orthodox theology tells us that grace is not a gift separate from God; grace is God himself: God is with us.  St Paul writes, in his first letter to the Thessalonians (chap 5), Do not quench the spirit. Nineteen centuries later, St Seraphim speaks about the goal of Christian life which is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. A candle serves its purpose when it is lit. The Holy Spirit lit up human candles at Pentecost, and they went out into the world and lit many, many thousands of other candles. They went into the world to spread that fire of which Christ said, I came to send fire on the earth, (Luke12:49-53).
Once a decade I retell a powerful story that is appropriate today. There was a very successful pastor, in the Russian far east, in eastern Siberia, who worked among convicts and criminals.  Sometimes he would encounter Yakuts who were interested in Christianity. One time he came across a very unusual man, who was a Buddhist lama. There are Mongolian Buddhists lamas there, but this man had a European education. He was very well versed in Christianity. They had the most amazing conversation that lasted a whole night and at the end of this conversation the Russian priest said, Brother, you know so much about Christianity, why haven’t you become a Christian yet? And then the Buddhist lama looked sad and he said, “Brother, if the whole world became Buddhists everyone would sleep soundly because everyone would know that everybody else is an honest person, so there would be nothing to worry about. But if the whole world became Christian, NOBODY would sleep, because everybody would be up praising the Lord”. He then continued, “Unfortunately, we pagans don’t see much of this among you Christians, and so this is why we are still pagans.” The priest said, “I had never felt so deflated in my whole life!” That is something for us to think about!
The gospel story that we heard this morning (John 10:9-16) about the paralysed man brought in by his four faithful friends, speaks of the two different conditions that we human beings can experience; either we sleep, or we are full of life, the life of God. This is what the lama was referring to. The Pharisees could not comprehend the reality of repentance and forgiveness, as seen by their words: He is blaspheming. Repentance and forgiveness from God open the heart to receive the grace of God and the Holy Spirit, Who lights up our life.  As St Gregory of Nyssa said: When iron is cold, it is dark, but when it absorbs the energy of the fire, it starts to glow and it even shines. This is what happens when our human spirit is heated and energised by the Holy Spirit. 
Lent is the spiritual springtime of the year even though we are in Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. It is our annual course in Christian life, but it is for diligent students. If you are not a diligent student, you will not get anything out of Lent. It is a time when we learn that a Christian is saved not through the letter of the Law and not even through the letter of the Holy Scriptures, but by becoming partakers of divine life. Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, said the Forerunner and Baptist John. The words were repeated by our Lord, when He began His ministry. The Kingdom of God is the Holy Spirit, the Church, the whole world of God. Everything we do in Christian life has one purpose only, and that is to bring us to repentance and humility before God. This enables us to be lit up with the energies of God which are God Himself, not something separate from Him. We are energised by God Himself, and this is the teaching of today’s saint, St Gregory Palamas, the great fourteenth century theologian, to whom the second Sunday of Great lent is dedicated.
 
Sunday March 15, 2026. Veneration of the Holy Cross 
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
Whoever desires to come after Me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. Anyone who sees Christianity through rose coloured glasses should have a good think about the meaning of these words, which we have just heard (Mark 8:34 – 9:1).  These words were spoken in response to Apostle Peter’s plea to Christ to avoid the cross.  These words are very significant. Christ intends for His followers to think about the path of salvation which is the path of the cross. The church has also taken these words very seriously, and this is why we spend six weeks preparing for the Pascha of the Cross and Resurrection at the end of our Lenten journey. Moreover, the Holy Fathers see Lent as an image of our whole life’s journey in the same way that the Israelites journeyed for forty years in the wilderness until they came to the Promised land. 
The accent on self-denial and carrying one’s personal cross has always distinguished the Orthodox church from those people who seek a pleasant and comfortable Christianity; there are plenty of those! This is not because Orthodoxy is gloomy and morose. On the contrary, Orthodoxy is much more about the joy of the Resurrection than it is about the pain of the cross. No pain no gain - this is a very Christian saying!
The path to joy is through the pain of self-denial and the cross. To deny oneself is to deny the selfish life of constantly acquiring and consuming everything, things and people, for we sinful human beings consume people as well. To deny oneself is to turn the focus away from our ego to focus on Christ but in the process, we truly discover ourselves. We do not stop living by denying ourselves. We begin to live a different life, a life according to the image of the Holy Trinity.  This is the life of the church, the Christian life.  To deny oneself is to greet God and our neighbour with open arms, with a loving embrace. Life is not about alienation, not about hiding in the corner and secretly eating, consuming everything. It is about sharing and about communion, joining in, with people. 
In the gospel reading today, the third Sunday of Lent, Christ spoke about those who will see the glory of the kingdom before they die. He was referring to what would happen six days later when he took three of his disciples up onto Mount Tabor This was straight after his words about the cross because from this mountain, we can see Calvary. This third week of Great Lent is like Mt Tabor, because we can see the “mountain” of the Cross from here. Good Friday is our contemplation, not only of the Lord’s cross but of our cross.  What is our cross? What does it consist of? It might be illness, it might be a difficult person to bear in a close relationship of some kind, say a marriage, or a friend or a member of the family. Dealing with a hardship like this is where our humility comes from.  The holy fathers say: you want to learn about humility? God is going to send you a difficult person to bear! Of course there are plenty of other hardships in life. If life were easy, it would be meaningless and superficial. Yes, there is pain, life is painful. The acceptance of the cross makes this pain much more bearable when we accept our cross, we accept whatever comes our way. We come out of hell together with the Good thief. His life was hell, but he accepted the cross. But the other robber on the left-hand side of Christ, stayed in that hell. When we accept that cross, we come out of our hell and we rejoice because we are then with our Saviour.  We recognise Him when we see His loving face turn to us. Then we begin to understand that with Him there is nothing to fear. Life becomes meaningful, we rejoice in His resurrection and in our participation in it. 
That is where we are at the moment, the third Sunday of Lent. 
 
Sunday March 22, 2026. Fourth Sunday of Great Lent Matt 4:25 – 5:12
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
At the top of Mt Tabor is the uncreated light of God in Christ, which we heard about in last week’s gospel reading.  From the top of the mountain we also hear about the cross that leads to the resurrection, the ultimate transfiguration. Today we come down from the mountain with the Lord and his three disciples, Peter, James and John. At the bottom of the mountain we see confusion, the power of the demons and people’s weak faith. The church selects St John of the Ladder for us today as an example of a teacher who explains the Lord’s words about prayer and fasting. The book, “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” shows us how to get to the top of the mountain, how to acquire the faith that can move mountains! I will read you a small excerpt from this book, in Step Eight, about freedom from anger, and meekness:
 “Freedom from anger is an endless wish for dishonour whereas vainglory is limitless thirst for praise. Freedom from anger is a triumph over one’s nature. It is the ability to be impervious to insults” … How about that, not affected by insults!... “And comes by hard work and the sweat of one’s brow. Meekness is a permanent condition of the soul that remains unaffected regardless of whether it is spoken well of, honoured or praised. The first step towards freedom from anger is to keep the lips silent when the heart is stirred.  The next is to keep thoughts silent when the soul is upset.  The last to be totally calm when unclean winds are blowing. Anger is an indication of a concealed hatred of grievance nursed.  Anger is a wish to harm someone who has provoked you. Irritability is an untimely flaring up of the heart. Bitterness is a stirring of the soul’s capacity for displeasure.  Anger is an easily changed movement of one’s disposition, a disfigurement of the soul. Just as darkness retreats before light, so all anger and bitterness disappear before the fragrance of humility”. 
Anger is just one of the eight passions. We can grow out of these passions only through prayer and fasting because the demons control us through these passions, like puppet strings. That means we are freed by a synergy of God’s grace and our efforts. The Ladder of Divine Ascent talks of thirty steps according to the full maturity of Christ, the Son of Man, as He comes at the age of 30 to the river Jordan to be baptised and to begin His ministry. Before that He was in obedience at home to His ostensible father and mother. In our immaturity we try to justify our failings.  Here is one example of how we deal with our failings in anger: We say, yes, I have a short fuse and flare up quickly, but I also calm down quickly, so I don’t have much of a problem.  But in fact, we are not getting anywhere, we have no maturity. To grow to maturity is to take the cross of responsibility for our life, walking up the mountain, not to justify ourselves or to shift blame onto others. We do this all the time, from the time of Adam who said it was not his fault, it was her fault!  That is immaturity. 
Part of prayer and fasting is to hear the word of God as He speaks to us collectively and individually in concrete terms from the Scriptures. Christ God also instructs us in faith and life through the writings of the Fathers, such as St John of the Ladder. We cannot hope to reach any measure of maturity without making those efforts. Nowadays it is so easy to get hold of books to read.  So much is available free on the internet. We have a library here at church. What excuse do we have to remain seventeen-year-olds in our older age? None! But that is what happens all the time. Christ told us to be childlike; he did not say ‘be infantile’! 

Sunday January 4, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
The Sunday before Christmas is dedicated to the Old Testament Holy fathers, some of whom are mentioned by name in the genealogy of Jesus the Christ which we heard today. It is the opening passage in the gospel of Matthew. In the Hebrews passage preceding the gospel today (chap 11), we see a vast panorama of these Old Testament heroes. When Paul remembers each of them it is preceded by a something of a refrain from him: By faith they did their heroic feats, and they were protected by God by faith.  What faith is St Paul talking about?  It was their faith in the coming Saviour of the world, the Messiah. We live two thousand years after His coming and we have a vast tradition, scripture and culture of the New Testament, as well as the saints who knew the Risen Lord through their life in Christ.  We should marvel at their great faith of these Old Testament heroes who looked towards the bright day of the Lord.  Their faith should inspire us who are weak in our faith, even though we have all these witnesses and saints and teachings. 
Now all of us together are coming to Bethlehem with the Lord, His holy Mother and His ostensible father.  As a side note, Matthew gives the genealogy of Joseph because that was the Jewish practice, while Luke gives the genealogy of the Mother of God. 
Each great feast, especially Christmas and Easter, are prepared by prayer and fasting, and is an event that has two dimensions.  Firstly, it is a historic rememberance.  This is easy to understand.  Secondly, it is our entry into participating in the event’s eternal dimension. Our door into this reality is our faith.  
The church is the life in Christ.  Christ is in our midst.  Christmas is not just a celebration of Christ’s birthday is His absence.  Oh no! It is not just an event of ancient history.  We may sometime think it would have been wonderful to have lived in the time of Christ when the Lord was here on earth, to have seen and heard Him, or even to have touched Him. Remember though, among the Old Testament fathers like Moses and the great prophets, very few experienced any clarity of vision of the coming Saviour. Yet they persevered in their faith. They could never have said the words of St Paul: no longer do I live but Christ lives within me. (Gal. 2:20) We can understand what this means.  Everything in the church teaches us that Christ is with us. 
Matthew begins with the genealogy of Christ and ends with Christ’s words to His disciples – and through them to us all: I am with you until the end of the ages, Amen.

Wednesday January 7, 2026 Nativity of Christ
AI study of the Shroud of Turin
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ; God in the flesh. The angel tells Joseph in a dream to call the Holy Virgin’s son, “Jesus”, which in the context means “God the Saviour”. He is also called “Emmanuel”: God is with us.  Not long before the Lord’s passion, the Apostle Peter declares: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. (Mat.16:16) Jesus Christ speaks as God. When officers are sent to arrest Him, they come back empty-handed saying, No man ever spoke like this Man. (Jn.7:46)  Jesus Christ speaks as God even when he is silent. 
Here are two examples. The first is when He looks silently from the cross and His loving gaze shocks and transforms a hardened criminal, hanging on the cross next to Him.  The Good Thief recognises God the Saviour in the dying man.  
Secondly, Christ God has left a silent witness for us of little faith, two thousand years after His resurrection.  The Silent Witness is the title of a documentary from 1978 on the Shroud of Turin.  Now there is a new documentary titled AI found something impossible in the Shroud of Turin. Scientists are terrified to explain.  You can watch this video below.   Jesus Christ speaks as God from the pages of the gospel.  You must read the Gospel; Christ God is speaking to you!  Those who have ears to hear, let them hear, He says.  Christ is born, glorify Him.  Merry Christmas!
About the Shroud of Turin
There was much excitement in the aftermath of the scientific studies of the Shroud in the 1970s. Many Christians at that time saw the 1978 documentary, ‘The Silent Witness’.
The Shroud is one of the countless holy relics plundered by the Crusaders from Constantinople in 1204 and the following decades. Brought to Europe by a secretive monastic order of Crusader knights, it was eventually transferred to Turin, Italy. Modern interest in the Shroud began with the first photos of the relic taken in the late 19th century by a photographer in Turin. When he developed his plates, he realised that the Shroud itself is a negative photograph on a large linen cloth. His negative plates revealed for the first time in history a clear positive image of the face and body of the Man Who had suffered scourging with Roman whips, a crown of thorns on His head, wounds from the nails in His hands and feet, and piercing of His side with a Roman lance.
In 1988 ten years after ‘The Silent Witness’ documentary three independent studies ‘proved’ that the relic was a 14th century ‘fake’, based on radioactive carbon tests. The dating however could not explain how a medieval European artist could have procured a piece of linen produced in Palestine near Jerusalem (shown by pollen in the material) woven according to the style of weave popular there before 70AD, and how he could have known about photography, negatives, as well as many other things only discovered centuries later. Nevertheless, atheistic scientists and their followers were gloating: another nail in the coffin of religion. Eventually it was revealed that all three groups of scientists took a patch from the Shroud sown on after a fire in the 14th century.
Now we come to recent studies using huge computer power – AI. Please watch this 21-minute film. You may want to read and/or see other material like the 1978 documentary.​
https://youtu.be/ADJ6i6mgdwo?si=maj3AeND3dVAobeI
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​Sunday January 18, 2026. Eve of Theophany
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
John the Forerunner, as we hear, came preaching repentance and baptising in the wilderness.  Why did all the land of Judea, and all those from Jerusalem come to him to confess their sins and be baptised in the River Jordan? When we look at the beginning of Mark’s gospel, it says AS it is written on the prophets.  Behold I send my messenger before Your face to prepare your way before you.  The conjunction “as” is the Greek word “os”, but in the best ancient manuscripts of the gospel another word “kathos” which means “according to”. The difference is that the prophets said this WOULD happen. It seems like a tiny nuance, but it explains why people came en masse to the Jordan.  John’s appearance was not unexpected, quite the contrary.  Only an extraordinary intensity of expectations could have produced this effect of huge crowds coming to the Jordan so quickly.  
Nearly thirty years before this there was an event that we have just celebrated, the Nativity of Christ.  Echoes of the rumours spread by the shepherds at that time had spread. People had not forgotten.  Those of us who are older can easily remember what happened thirty years ago! The same can be said of the visit of the Magi to Jerusalem, because it caused such excitement, as well as negative feelings from Herod which led to the Slaying of the Innocents.  These events would have been in the memory of the people, who could have calculated that the Messiah was approaching the age of thirty, an age when He could begin His ministry.  According to the Law you had to be thirty before you could become a teacher, a rabbi.  John the Baptist announced with his booming voice that the Messiah was at the door.  The intensity of a prophet who even looked like the fiery Elijah broke through even the hardened hearts of people.  At that time Israel was in crisis.  There was a lot of tension between the ruling elite and the common people.  The elite had acquiesced to Roman occupation because Rome protected them and gave them considerable internal autonomy.  But the common people preserved the religious expectation that the Messiah would come and deliver them from all oppression.  They looked forward to the Messiah.  
Cynical politicians say Don’t waste a good crisis!  Lenin said, the worse it is, the better it is!  God, too, does not waste a crisis! What does the word crisis mean?  It is the Greek word for judgement.  Judgement wakes people up.  When we wake up, we are ready not just for water but for the Holy spirit, according to the words of John the Baptist.  The question is: are we awake? Are we ready for Christ?

Monday January 19, 2026. Theophany
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
When Jesus came from Galilee to the River Jordan, John the Baptist tried to argue with Him about His baptism. He perceived Jesus as the master and himself as a servant, so how could he baptise the Master? The Lord stops John’s resistance by saying that it was fitting to fulfill all righteousness.  The word used in Matthew’s original is dikaiosini which, in the New Testament, has a dozen different meanings!  Yet John immediately understood what the Lord meant.  He stopped arguing and baptised the Lord. 
The event at Jordan River had the significance of Theophany, the manifestation of God. It was also the declaration by two witnesses, the Father with His booming voice, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, that Jesus is the Beloved Son from eternity and from His incarnation. Jesus begins His ministry of redemption as the Christ.  While John saw Him as the master, the Lord wanted to begin the economy of salvations as a slave. Pride was the thing that had separated Adam from God, and now the extreme humility of the Saviour was the foundation of Adam’s return to the bosom of the Father.  We can understand from this what the Baptist meant when he said, I did not know Him. John the Baptist had not known Him before, on a superficial level, but his comment reveals there was more to it.  John expected, like the rest of the Israelites, that the Messiah would appear as a master.  Suddenly the words of Isiah the prophet, which John quoted, acquired a completely new and deeper meaning:  Behold the Lamb of God.  Isaiah speaks in chapter 53 of the meek and humble Christ who takes our sins in suffering and in His sacrificial death.  
The Feast of Theophany every year is also an important opportunity for us to rethink and contemplate our own baptism.  Christ’s humility and our acceptance of that image is a declaration of war on the sinful and proud ego. In the drowning of sin, there is a foundation made for a constant reconciliation with the Lord.  In our connection to Christ, the True Vine, we receive the potential to become a royal priesthood, members of the holy nation of God, as we hear in the writings of the apostles and the holy fathers. The Holy spirit is received for us in the mystery of Chrismation.  The Father then declares us to be His beloved child. The whole scene of Christ’s baptism is repeated in our life and baptism.  All this is truly magnificent! But let us not fall into the trap of thinking that this is easy.  It is not easy!  It is not just about accepting an idea.  We have to actually live it.  Baptism in the Jordan, for Jesus Christ, is the beginning of His journey of love.  What is love?  Love is the cross. The Lord says:  And he who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. (Mat.10:38)

Sunday December 4, 2025, Presentation of the Mother of God.
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today the young Virgin Mary enters the temple to become the temple of the Word of God. This gives an opportunity to contemplate two things for us; firstly, what the temple can offer and secondly, how to use these gifts to follow the example of the Mother of God in becoming the living temple of the Lord. 
The Lord said to Nicodemus that it is necessary to be born again, to become children of God. In the literal sense, young parents and young people thinking of marriage should have this image before their eyes because there are so many advantages in being taught about Christ when we are little children. Children’s hearts are so receptive to the things of God. Look how the future Mother of God absorbed and learned the things about God. It is precisely because she was such a diligent student of these things that later, as a teenager, she was chosen to be the facilitator of the Incarnation, the Mother of God. Life in and around the church - the temple - offers many opportunities to learn. We learn in the services, we learn outside the services, from our brothers and sisters and we get ample opportunities to train in humility and meekness through being patient with other people. It is not easy, but it works with God’s help.
The temple gives us food and drink for our spiritual life, without these we can only try to supress our bad thoughts, feelings and words but we cannot obtain healing. Instead, we just bottle things up and cannot do anything truly good. Public worship in the temple teaches us to live the trinitarian life, where we are helped by others and help others to reach their unique beauty in the unity of love. Let us love one another that with one mind we may confess the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and indivisible.  Most holy Mother of God, teach us and help us.

Sunday December 14, 2025
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
It is not uncommon for parishioners to expect the church to be an enjoyable and easy-going “God club” and that is certainly the perception of the man in today’s gospel story (Luke 18:18-27).  He is living a comfortable life and feeling content. But Christ shocks him with the suggestion to sell everything and follow Him. The Lord does this, not because he expects him or anybody else to do it, unless they really want to, but to get him out of that smug state of self-satisfaction and to understand that life in the kingdom is warfare. It is a war on our ego, which is fed by the passions. Passions make us vulnerable to attacks from the demons; unseen enemies work through the passions, both our own passions and the passions of the people around us. This is what St Paul writes about in today’s passage from Ephesians in Chapter 6 which we heard before the Gospel. The Christian must apply the strength given by Christ to conduct this warfare. St Paul asks the Ephesians to pray for him to give him help in this battle. The whole armour of God is needed to conduct against the fight against the devil. 
While we do not wrestle with flesh and blood, we wrestle with the unseen enemies. Flesh and blood in Paul’s historical context are the people who are antagonistic towards Christianity, people who act as instruments of the demons without realising it. St Paul’s interest in this letter to the Ephesians was to address the problem of the worldly resistance to the spread of the gospel. This resistance was inspired and activated by the demonic world. The Holy Fathers also speak of this warfare in a broader sense, applying  not only to the people outside of the church but also to all of us inside the church.  The Fathers teach us to hate the sin and the demonic energy that causes it while loving the sinner. The sinner is often ignorant of the spiritual process, not realising how he is manipulated by the evil one. St Paul describes spiritual weaponry as the armour of righteousness.  He was referring to the large shield that Romans used that covered the whole body. St Paul used this image in referring to the shield of faith, to protect against the fiery darts (or arrows) from the evil one, and the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. This armour makes us completely protected and ready for battle. 
We need to reject the flippant attitude of the man in today’s gospel story. The battlefield is not a place for a picnic. Anyone with the picnic attitude will not survive very long at all. We live in a time where there is so much readily accessible literature on the internet, masses of recordings of talks, audio and video; there is so much we can learn about this teaching of the holy fathers about unseen warfare. If we are not so good at reading, a skill our society is losing, we can listen instead. We must be diligent in learning about all these things if we seriously desire to win in this battle with Christ. 

Friday December 19, 2025
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
At last night’s vigil we heard the gospel from St John where Christ speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd, the reading which is in honour of holy hierarchs because today we honour the memory of one of the greatest holy hierarchs, St Nicholas. For us, St Nicholas is an image of Christ translated and filtered through the specific prism of his personhood.  We see so many different facets and qualities of what Christ’s love is about in the image of St Nicholas. The troparion to the saint tells us that the truth of things revealed thee to thy flock as the rule of faith, an icon of meekness, a teacher of temperance, it speaks of humility and riches of poverty. He is the image of the great Good Shepherd himself, a tuning fork for his flock because this is what the pastor does, he must project the tune of heaven. What is Orthodoxy? It is singing in tune with heaven, and the holy ones have always given that correct tune, the correct note for us to be able to sing, with our hearts, our souls, if we, ourselves, want to sing that tune. 
Recently our bishop, Vladyka George, shared with us a talk by the American Antiochian Metropolitan Sabas who speaks of the role of the pastor. Metropolitan Sabas bemoans how difficult it is to move an unresponsive flock, and quotes Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, an 18th century hierarch who also complained of this difficulty. 
On a day like this, and especially when we have St Nicholas as the patron saint of two priests here, it is an opportunity to think of and to pray for us pastors, because we massively need your prayers as we are always attacked. The higher the position of responsibility within the church, in ministry, the more attacked this person is. Also, it is a very important thing for the flock to be aware of who we are supposed to be – Christians. Of course, great pastors like St Nicholas educated their flocks by giving that example of the Christ-like virtues as we hear in the troparion. The Church is the Body of Christ and we all affect each other.  There is a Russian saying that goes something like this, ‘one man in the battlefield is hardly a warrior’.  That means that you need to collaborate with and help others. 
St Nicholas gives us the tone and the teaching, but there is a need for reciprocal support. The Church cannot operate with just the pastor.  There must be a sense of harmony with us all singing that tune of Heaven. We should pray to St Nicholas and ask for his help, and every time we have a celebration it is an opportunity for us to think about our particular church family and the life within. Glory be to God for that!
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Sunday December 21, 2025
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The gospel story today is about the Ten Lepers who were healed (Luke 17:12-19).  It was preceded by a passage from Colossians Chapter 1 which also speaks of thanksgiving. The passage begins: Giving thanks to the Father who has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the Kingdom of the Son of His love in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. 
The story of the Ten Lepers illustrates Christ’s deliverance from the power of darkness.  Our forefathers were warned that the moment they transgressed, they would die. Death would enter them. The Lord, Himself and the New Testament fathers, beginning with the apostles, explain that death entered humanity with sin as an illness.  Sin is a loss of God-given wholeness. Leprosy is a terrible image of a slowly approaching death. It was a dreaded disease in ancient times.  Christ’s deliverance of the lepers is a tangible image of His redemption of the whole human race.  
It would be natural to assume that the ten lepers who received healing would come back to thank the Lord for this wonderful gift, but only one did. This one was a Samaritan, and the other nine were Israelites. The others took this healing for granted, as most of humanity - including us - does during the greater part of life. Why was the one leper able to acknowledge the great gift that he had received, and not the other nine?  It was because he did not see it as his right, as the Israelites did.  The Israelites thought it more important to ‘tick the box’ of seeing the priest and being declared clean, as the law demanded.
We Christians come to the Eucharist not only as a source of the fruits of Christ’s redemption but also that we may learn about a different attitude to life.  We learn to change our thinking.  If we train ourselves in the Eucharistic consciousness, thanking God for everything – the good things  and the hard things, each day, we will establish a relationship with Him.  Our senses and our spirit will not become jaded and insensitive to the things of God. 
I would like to turn one of St Paul’s sayings back to front.  In First Thessalonians 5:16, St Paul writes:  Rejoice always, pray without ceasing and in everything give thanks.  But I would like to put to you that the spiritual logic is the other way around:  In everything give thanks. This is the beginning. Secondly, pray without ceasing, which means to try to have a memory of God.  Without remembering God, you are no different to an atheist. Thirdly, rejoice always.  With this attitude, God will give you joy even in difficulties and sorrows, so that you will feel strong and not crushed.
 
Sunday of the Forefathers, 28 December 2025
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
Today’s readings from Luke (14:16-24) and Colossians (3:4-11)* speak of God’s calling, God’s invitation to enter into a proper relationship with Him.
There are formidable internal problems-challenges- to be overcome. These concern our whole being: the body, the soul, and the spirit. That is shown in the responses of the first three people who are invited. They decline, giving excuses that point to the enslavement of the body, the soul, and the spirit. 
The plot of land symbolises the body which is material- taken from “the earth”. The five pairs of oxen could indicate the five senses which supply information to our consciousness-our soul-about the environment-physical and psychological. The wife indicates a selfish, possessive love that excludes God as much-or more-than the other passions. Here the spirit worships the idol of the selfish ego; worships the octopus of the eight passions. The spirit does not respond to the invitation to participate in a bilateral, loving relationship.
In Colossians the great Paul explains why earthly things should not be the focus of a Christian’s life. Earlier in his life Paul had explained in the letter to the Romans that those who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death (Rom. 6:3). Now he exhorts the Colossians: “…put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanliness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness which is idolatry”. Further he adds: “…anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language, and lies” (Col. 3:5,8). Why does he call these things our “members”? Because these passions have become like parts of our body, like aspects of our soul. The tentacles of the octopus.
“Put off the old man” - rip off the giant octopus with its tentacles- “put on the new man” (Col.3;9,10) according to the image of Christ. In our renewal we should forget about the national and social advantages and distinctions, writes Paul. Christ is the focus of the Christian. Not the earth, not the oxen, and not the possessive eros.
Our life is a struggle uphill to freedom in knowing the Truth (Jn.8:32). There on Mount Tabor we are invited to the never-ending Supper of the Lord. Today we can say together with the person who prompted the Lord to give His parable: “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!” (Lk.14:15)

Sunday November 2, 2025
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The parables of the Lord usually focus on one important issue and for that reason certain things may be intensified to make the point very clearly. This can be said about today’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus. We see a juxtaposition of extreme egotism of the rich man and the complete lack of selfishness in Lazarus. Abandoning egotism is also the topic of today’s Epistle from St Paul to the Galatians.  St Paul writes, ‘I have been crucified in Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the son of God who loves me and gave Himself for me’.  (Gal 2:20) By being crucified with Christ, St Paul refers to such a commitment to Christ that he no longer feels the dominance of the ego which feeds from the passions. 
In the parable, the Lord shows that the rich man is completely ruled by his ego and selfishness, which are fed by the excesses of his life.  According to the teachings of the Fathers, these excesses are the passions, He is so self-centred, that over the years, he does not notice that there is a suffering man just outside the door of his house. He continues to live happily, but his inability to love anyone except for himself, lands him in hell. Lazarus, on the other hand, is an image of death with Christ of which we hear in Galatians today. He is like many of the Christian strugglers, the ascetics, who worked intensely at dying to the ego of the passions and rising to the beauty of our unique personhood in Christ.
Let us not be put off by the extreme images of today’s parable, thinking, Well there is no way that I am as egoistic, selfish and insensitive as that rich man in the parable - no way! and Neither am I ready to live the life of a Lazarus who has no ego but then he is a complete beggar, he has nothing!  Our Christian life is not a solitary pursuit; the life of the church is the life of a spiritual family. Just like in our physical family, we are fed and educated by the spiritual family.  This means that we can grow towards that state that St Paul talks about: “no longer do I live, but Christ who lives in me”. It does not mean Paul has disappeared, but it means that the ego has disappeared. 
Surely none of us would like to share the rich man’s afterlife, yet the fact that there is hell shows that God is love, according to the words of St John Chrysostom. The rich man begins to lose his selfishness in hell, he begins to think and to care about other people. He wants to help his brothers; that is a huge step forward.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord Jesus Christ has enabled us to live in the heaven of love here and in the age to come, that heaven is the life of grace. The life of the church opens more as we cooperate with our Savior who says, ‘For my yoke is easy and my burden is light’.  Amen.

Sunday November 9 2025    
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
In preparation for baptism, the priest turns to the catechumen and asks, ‘Do you renounce Satan and all his angels, and all his service, and all his pride?’ and the catechumen answers, ‘I do renounce him’. Our baptism opens the potential of total liberation from Satan. Satan is always ready and willing to torment every human being, just like the man in the country of the Gadarenes that we heard about in today’s gospel reading. We see the liberated former demoniac sitting at the feet of the Saviour, shining with the beauty of God’s image. 
Today’s gospel story shows these two polarities of the human life in the example of the person who was liberated from the hell of self-destruction. We hear in the Orthodox funeral service ‘I am an image of thy unspeakable glory even though I carry the wounds of transgressions’. Unless we understand the presence together of God’s beauty and the ugliness of sin in every one of us, we understand nothing about humanity and about salvation in Christ. Alas, even Christians often remain in the confines of moralism. This means that every person is viewed as either being good or bad, and our judgement of if a person is good or bad usually depends on whether we like the person! That is moralism.
In today’s Epistle reading from Galatians, we hear how St Paul speaks out strongly against those who want to practise this superficial type of Christianity. He speaks of the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ as the only true transformative force that enables us to die to the world and to come alive to God. Then Satan cannot torment us, or other people through us. We often torment other people but fail to see it.  
Brothers and sisters, let us focus on seeing and working against the destructive forces within us; envy, jealousy, anger, vainglory and other passions which come from our pride, and our worship of the ego. When Christ sees that we have a serious intention to work against a particular passion He comes to our aid. It is easier to see the failures and ugliness in other people than to see and acknowledge it in ourselves. The Holy Fathers teach us to remind ourselves constantly of the beauty of God that is present in every person. It might be hidden beauty, but it is indestructible. As for ourselves, let us accept the cross of Christ. We have a responsibility to participate in our liberation from these demonic destructive forces. When we renounce Satan properly, we too will sit at the feet of Christ as this man did at the end of the gospel story. We will sit in all the beauty of God’s image as His followers clothed in the robe of righteousness (baptism) in our ‘right mind’, not a chaotic and aggressive, passion-filled mind.

​Sunday November 16, 2025
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The parables of the Lord usually focus on one important issue and for that reason certain things may be intensified to make the point very clearly. This can be said about today’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus. We see a juxtaposition of extreme egotism of the rich man and the complete lack of selfishness in Lazarus. Abandoning egotism is also the topic of today’s Epistle from St Paul to the Galatians.  St Paul writes, ‘I have been crucified in Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the son of God who loves me and gave Himself for me’.  (Gal 2:20) By being crucified with Christ, St Paul refers to such a commitment to Christ that he no longer feels the dominance of the ego which feeds from the passions. 
In the parable, the Lord shows that the rich man is completely ruled by his ego and selfishness, which are fed by the excesses of his life.  According to the teachings of the Fathers, these excesses are the passions, He is so self-centred, that over the years, he does not notice that there is a suffering man just outside the door of his house. He continues to live happily, but his inability to love anyone except for himself, lands him in hell. Lazarus, on the other hand, is an image of death with Christ of which we hear in Galatians today. He is like many of the Christian strugglers, the ascetics, who worked intensely at dying to the ego of the passions and rising to the beauty of our unique personhood in Christ.
Let us not be put off by the extreme images of today’s parable, thinking, Well there is no way that I am as egoistic, selfish and insensitive as that rich man in the parable - no way! and Neither am I ready to live the life of a Lazarus who has no ego but then he is a complete beggar, he has nothing!  Our Christian life is not a solitary pursuit; the life of the church is the life of a spiritual family. Just like in our physical family, we are fed and educated by the spiritual family.  This means that we can grow towards that state that St Paul talks about: “no longer do I live, but Christ who lives in me”. It does not mean Paul has disappeared, but it means that the ego has disappeared. 
Surely none of us would like to share the rich man’s afterlife, yet the fact that there is hell shows that God is love, according to the words of St John Chrysostom. The rich man begins to lose his selfishness in hell, he begins to think and to care about other people. He wants to help his brothers; that is a huge step forward.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord Jesus Christ has enabled us to live in the heaven of love here and in the age to come, that heaven is the life of grace. The life of the church opens more as we cooperate with our Savior who says, ‘For my yoke is easy and my burden is light’.  Amen.

Sunday November 23 2025
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
The Lord teaches that the greatest commandment is the one that tells us to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. This is what he tells the lawyer in today’s gospel reading (Luke: 10:25 – 37)). But the lawyer then asks the question, “And who is my neighbour?” To answer that question, the Lord gives the moving parable of the good Samaritan. This parable teaches us that those who think that they are keeping the law of God are, in reality, insensitive to their neighbour. The beaten-up man, lying there, cannot give anything to the first two people that passed. They illustrate those who feel that they are the centre of the universe and are incapable of feeling the pain of anyone else who is not in a close orbit of that centre. That sort of person asks the question:  What’s in it for me?’ Why is it that the Good Samaritan notices his suffering neighbour? He is humble. Compassion is possible only if our pride shrinks to the level where we begin to understand that we are not the centre of the universe.  This is easy to understand with the head, but not with the heart.
The parable speaks in the broadest possible sense about loving our neighbour but today I would like to focus on one aspect only of that love: patience with our neighbour, and the ability to restrain our irritability and anger. To illustrate this, I would like to read an excerpt from Abba Dorotheus of Gaza in his Maxims on the Spiritual Life, Chapter 22 (English Translation): ‘It is impossible for a man to be angry with anyone unless his heart is first lifted up against him, unless he despises him and esteems himself superior to him’. Our immediate reaction to hearing such words might be, I do not feel that I am superior to that person, but I still cannot cope with this rising emotion of irritability and anger, I cannot cope with it. In all truth, such a reaction means, I am still only understanding only intellectually, that I am not the centre of the universe but not existentially with all my heart, not with all my soul. 
The beginning, the first step, in our fight against irritability and anger is to keep our feelings to ourselves, or at least not to let this poison out.  We have an inner brake, which of course, has to be worked on and kept in proper shape with a lot of help from Christ. Then it becomes a power assisted brake! Most of you are too young to know about cars that did not have power assisted brakes – there is a big difference!  The Holy Fathers put it this way: Love is the bridle of irritability. A bridle is what you put in a horse’s mouth when you rein the horse in. Again, St Dorotheus says that if anyone offends you or saddens you, pray for them, as ones who have given you great benefit. Through this your irritability will begin to diminish.
Through the prayers of the Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.  

Sunday  November 30 2025
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
The Lord said this parable of the rich man’s plentiful harvest (Luke 12:16 – 21) in response to a jarring, intrusive and dissonant request.  This came from a man who wanted to get the Lord to influence his brother to share the inheritance of property. In response to this, the Lord offered this short parable and warned, “Take heed and beware of covetousness for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses”. In other words, life is not about material things. The great Saint Paul today explains what true life, the life of Christ’s kingdom, is about.(Eph 4:1-6): “I,  therefore the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling of which you are called, with all lowliness (humility) and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism…”
The unity of the spirit in the bond of peace is possible only if we have the direction that Christ indicates further in His speech (the Sermon on the Mount): ”Seek ye the kingdom of heaven and all of these things will be added to you”. The message is simple; there is a hierarchy of values. Eternal, spiritual riches should come first, then the rest of our life should be accepted as a gift from God, not as our right of possession. We come to church to thank God, but even more than that, we come to learn to change our attitude to life and the world around us.  The rich man is enslaved by his passion for possessions. He thinks that he possesses his riches but of course, they possess him. When human beings worship any idol, but especially mammon, the idol of wealth, they cannot enter into the life of unity of grace and love which Christ gives. The fathers explain that the idol of wealth is especially pernicious because greed firstly disunites us from each other and secondly, it enables the person to to exercise their sinful will through the passions as they seek to pamper the passions much more. What is even more tragic is that you do not have to be a wealthy person to worship the idol of earthly possession, you can be a poor person and still be worshipping that idol. It is all about the focus and hierarchy of values. Even a materialistic person understands that there are things in our life that are more valuable than possessions, such as our physical health, the happiness of our children, harmony in marriage and family. 
Christ teaches us that life with Him enables us to endure the challenges to our peace, whatever they are. And as the holy martyrs, and all the saints, have shown, even death does not cancel life when we live our life with Christ. But if we fail to live this life then, as Christ shows in the parable, death cancels everything. 

Sunday October 12, 2025
By Fr Gennady Baksheev

​In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 
 In the symbol of faith, we say that we believe in one God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. Compared to the invisible world, the visible created universe is easier for our eyes and mind to comprehend. We see the sun going up in the morning and setting in the evening, the planets orbiting the sun and the movement of stars in the night sky. There is a sense of order and predictability in the physical universe. This is because God created everything good, and modern science continues to develop our understanding of the laws of nature that govern the world. These laws of nature can be expressed in mathematical form, which even if we can’t understand the equations, we can appreciate how they operate in our everyday lives.  If there is a place for laws of nature to govern our world, that also must mean that we need spiritual laws to govern our lives. 
 
Today’s gospel reading is taken from St Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. In His first public preaching, Christ appears as the Incarnate Lawgiver. He comes to give us spiritual laws to live by. The last verse calls us to ‘be merciful, just as our Father also is merciful.’ This speaks to us of a beatitude: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. 
We hear these beatitudes at most liturgies; we heard them just moments earlier during the small entrance, when the deacons, priests and altar servers come out of the altar and onto the ambo. At this time, the Gospel is brought out. In the beatitudes, Christ lays out what His disciples and followers should be like. That is, He lays out a character of a Christian. These beatitudes are the hallmark of an authentic follower of Christ. The beatitudes are a Christian definition of a blessed person, and they are a stark contrast to what the world thinks a blessed person should be. There is a double blessing for each beatitude. Christ says that you will be blessed to have the character that pertains to each of the beatitudes, and you will also have a reward for living in the way that is described by each beatitude. 
 
The first three of the beatitudes, that is, the poor in spirit, the blessed mourner and those with meekness, describe the inner character of a Christian before the presence of God. This is the most fundamental description of a Christian. The fourth beatitude speaks about hungering and thirsting after righteousness. What is the mercy beatitude about? The most repeated phrase that we use in our services is Lord have mercy. This is the heart’s cry within our communal life as a parish. We stand in the presence of God and ask for mercy. The heart of our private life is the Jesus prayer, where we say, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Mercy is the summation of our call to God, both privately and publicly.  
 
Christ not only taught these beatitudes but also modelled them for us in His life. The very act of Christ’s descent into our world is an act of mercy. The whole movement of God sending His son, conquering our enemies and joining us to Himself is about granting mercy to mankind. Mercy can be seen in so many acts of Christ during His life. Christ bowed down heaven to be with people and even showed mercy to those who crucified Him. He is the model of mercy and teaches us to do likewise. 
 
Mercy is fundamental with God Himself, and this is how we act like Him. When we imitate Christ and express the character of a Christian, we are being merciful like God Himself  and we show God’s face in our interactions. Showing mercy to people around us triumphs over judgment, and it gives relief to our conscience. This means that we need to look for mercy for ourselves from God and also share in the burdens of those around us.        Mercy is not just a disposition of emotion but needs to be expressed in concrete ways in our lives to provide relief to others. In the gospel from the Sunday of the Last judgement, Christ gives us specific ways to show mercy: visiting the sick, clothing the naked, going to prisons, feeding the hungry, and showing hospitality to homeless people. These actions involve showing mercy with our hands. We can also show mercy spiritually, by admonishing a sinner, counselling a doubtful person, comforting a sorrowful person, bearing wrongs that are done to us patiently, forgiving every injury and praying for the living and the departed. These are all ways to show mercy.
 
And what is the reward? We hear in the beatitude, ‘For they shall obtain mercy’. We shall obtain mercy from God that is far greater and superior to any kind of mercy that we can show to people. While we show mercy towards others as people, we will receive mercy from the God of all. God’s mercy is not the same as man’s mercy.  
 
Earlier I said that we can see the fruit of the laws of nature and comprehend them by the mind through the operation of the created visible world. In like manner, we can also observe the fruit of living according to God’s commandments in the saints. Today, the church celebrates the uncovering of the relics of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, which took place in 1993, only 27 years after his death (1966). He is a much-loved bishop of the Russian church, whose life was governed by the standards of the spiritual life. To this day, his relics remain incorrupt. If we sow sparingly, we will reap sparingly. If we sow bountifully, we will reap bountifully. Amen.  
 
Sunday October 19, 2025
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Today’s short narrative of the great miracle of the Lord raising the young man, the dead boy, the only son of a widow, raises some questions. Firstly, one might ask, how can this story possibly connect with me, or relate to me? Are we going to start raising people from the dead? While it is a story about the great divine power of Christ, we must always remember the gospel stories are not just historical narratives.  They are intended to speak to us today. In today’s story the Lord is confronted with the terrible grief of a widow who has lost her only son. Christ’s response in this instance has a connection with the story of the paralysed man, by telling him, ‘Your sins are forgiven’. In this case, He says to the mother, to the widow ‘Do not weep’. 
 
God has given us a great and powerful gift of the word, but our sinfulness has resulted in this word losing its power. Imagine how offensive and banal it would be for us to say to someone, in that tragic situation, ‘don’t cry’. Yet the Lord’s word is full of divine power. He forgives the paralytic, and the paralytic is healed. He says, ‘Do not cry’ and He raises the dead boy. 
 
What can we learn from this story? Luke writes that when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and then He said, ‘Do not weep’. The Lord’s compassion was an expression of His divine power of love, and by this He raised the boy. If our words are filled with just a tiny fraction of that divine compassionate love we will perform miracles. Maybe we would not raise people from the dead but maybe we could raise a dead soul. (There is a novel by Nikolay Gogol called Dead Souls.) A dead soul is a soul that does not know God, and to raise one up is a great miracle. 
 
The compassion and love of the Lord are absolute. But our problem is that sin separates us from our neighbours, and we cannot feel the same love and compassion for them. We are unable to fulfil the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. Perhaps our ego is scared to let God in when we are touched sometimes with compassion. Why? Our ego knows if that we let God in properly the ego will die and it does not want to die! It is very tenacious.  Yet there are many accounts of sinners being touched by compassionate love and performing miracles. There is an ancient story of a harlot that just walked out from spending time with a client, and she saw a mother with a baby that had just died. She was moved with such compassion that she prayed to God and raised the baby. Can you imagine that? We have no excuse saying, ‘Well, I am not a saint’ because sinners have performed miracles and we can perform miracles, of a different type, a spiritual type.
 
Religions give laws and morality but only Christ reveals the power of God’s love that transforms our life, that raises us from the dead,  from the death of mundane godlessness. It gives us the power to transcend any tragedy, grief and sorrow. Amen.
 
Sunday October 26, 2025                                           
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Today the Lord speaks to us about our heart.  Our heart should be receptive to His word but often it is not. The parable of the Sower, that we just heard, speaks of different states of the heart; totally unreceptive; shallow and unstable; enslaved by the passions; and finally deep fertile, and receptive soil of the heart.
 
In the stories of the lives of saints we often see how they responded and committed themselves to a life in Christ after just one word, or just one hearing of the gospel in church. There is a famous story in the life of St Anthony the Great, the founder of monasticism, how he had heard the word of the gospel addressed to the rich young man and immediately after the service he sold all his possessions and went into contemplative life. To our shame we can probably remember times when we heard the word of God in church, and it may have registered in our consciousness and then immediately disappeared.
 
Who are these ‘birds’, the ‘rocky soil’ and the ‘weeds’ that prevent the word of the Sower to grow in our heart?  The ‘birds’ are the unseen enemies of our salvation, the demons. They do not want us to get any benefit from our attendance in church so they will work at getting our attention to shift from what is going on at the service to anything else.  Our thoughts go from the divine to mundane things, such as wow what a great outfit that person is wearing, or why is that person is always acting in such an annoying fashion, or here is someone I haven’t seen in church for ages, I will go and say hello immediately. Do you recognise these things?! After the service, ask yourself what the gospel reading was about. If you can remember what it was about then you have survived the ‘birds’, to some degree. 
 
“Rocky soil” is when people get all fired up, inspired to fly, but after a very short while they nosedive down. When I first started seminary there was a young man who later became a good priest. When Great Lent came he got fired up and said, “I am not going to eat anything in the first week”, but in several days he got to such an irritated state that drove a car to MacDonald’s and had everything that he wanted! We can recognise that sort of attitude too. It is easy to get inspired.
 
Now an explanation about “the weeds”. God warned Adam about these. He told him that the soil of his heart would bring about these ‘weeds’. Nothing good comes without the sweat of the brow. During liturgy we make efforts for a good hour to lay aside all earthly cares, as we sing in the cherubic hymn.  Afterwards there is a need to be entertained, to gossip, to talk about very worldly things as soon as the service has ended.  But maybe on some occasion we put in a little bit of sweat of the brow. Maybe the soil of our heart has been ploughed up by a bit of pain- physical or mental. Maybe our own pain has enabled us to respond to the pain of another person, as we discussed last week. No pain, no gain. It is a very Christian saying! 
 
The public worship of the Liturgy, the word of God, will bring fruit. It will not be hard to remain focused during the service, and there will be no need to rush out of church immediately and engage in all kinds of things that are more entertaining for us in the pursuit of our worldly happiness. There will be a desire to find people who are on the same wavelength so we can talk about more serious things with them. 

Sunday September 14, 2025
Fr Gennady Baksheev
 
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 
The Church gives us many things for our contemplation today. 
In the Church calendar, today is the 1st of September and marks the beginning of the Church new year. This is also known as the Indiction, which comes from a Latin word meaning, “to impose.’ This originally referred to the imposition of taxes throughout Egypt and then the Roman empire. It is also on this day that Christ entered a synagogue on a Sabbath day and read the following words from the Prophet Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed Me ... to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4, 18:19). And so to commemorate these events, the holy fathers of the First Ecumenical Council decided to begin the New Year on the first of September.

The parable in today’s Gospel reading speaks about the disobedience of the chosen nation of Israel. I will not focus on this today, but will rather focus on its relevance to us.  

There is a common theme that unites today’s epistle reading, Gospel reading and the commemoration of Sts Peter and Fevronia. The epistle reading was from St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, where he writes about God anointing us with ‘the seal’ which ‘gives us the Holy Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee’. This is from Chapter 1 verses 21 and 22. This seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit is given to us in the sacrament - or better known in the Orthodox Church as the mystery of chrismation. This mystery is performed together with baptism. The mystery of baptism joins us to Christ, and gives us a new birth into eternal life. It is also the formal entrance into the Church and the communion of believers. The mystery of Chrismation activates that life within us. We hear the following words during a prayer at this mystery: ‘keep the person in your holiness, confirm him in sanctification, confirm him in the Orthodox faith, keep him from the evil one, preserve his soul that he may please God.’ These words about defeating the devil and preserving holiness within us. This begins our path of spiritual growth.

For growth to occur, we need nourishment. We eat and drink food, but this is to our death. In today’s parable, God calls us to a joyous occasion, to that of a wedding feast where Christ is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride. We are called to a feast that is laden with spiritual nourishment, and we are given fattened calves, which are the loaves that we offer to God on the altar table and are given back to us as the Body and Blood of Christ. This is the mystery of mysteries in which we grow in our personal relationship with Christ. We have not done anything worthy to be called to this feast. The entry into the wedding takes place for all people without distinction, for people both good and bad. Let us tremble however, and understand, that we need to lead a pure life after entering the Church as there will be a careful examination by the King. The mysteries are given to us as a means of divine – human union, but what we do with them matters. They don’t circumvent our will. That is, something is expected of us. We need to co-labour with Christ in producing fruit, such as prayer, repentance and virtue. 

The Church gives us an example today of a married couple that lived a life of virtue. I encourage you to read the full life of Sts Peter and Fevronia at home. St Peter became sick one day with leprosy, and when hope of a cure was diminished, he was told in a dream to seek out Fevronia who could heal him. She was of remarkable beauty and goodness, studied plants and had the gift of healing. Peter fell in love with Fevronia and gave his word to marry her as soon as he recovers, but failed to keep his promise when his health was restored by Fevronia. He became fearful as Fevronia was from a lower class. 
Then the same disease returned to Peter, and Fevronia did not refuse to help him again.   Peter repented of breaking his promise, married his benefactress, and was happy with her to the end of his days. As tradition has it, the couple honored one another throughout their lives, and lived honestly, in peace and harmony. They did not have an easy life however but they  were able to overcome all obstacles through their love for each other. For example, there was a time when Peter ascended the Princely throne of the city of Murom but decided to leave his position in the face of slander against his wife. Even in exile from their own city, the wise princess never lost heart, and always found a way out of a difficult situation, and supported her crestfallen husband. Peter in turn never ceased to treat Fevronia with great tenderness and never once reproached her with the fact that she was the cause of their exile. Tradition also has it that they not only died on the same day, but in the same hour. Their commemoration is on July 8th, but this always falls in the Apostles’ fast and so weddings are unable to be served on this day. So another feast day was established to fall on the Sunday closest to the 16th September, as many young couples want to have their wedding take place on the feast day of these two heavenly patrons of married couples. 
 Let us also take up this call to lead a holy life, as did Sts Peter and Fevronia. Amen.

​Saturday,  September 27, 2025: Exaltation of the Cross
by Fr Gennady Baksheev
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The power of the cross was foretold to us in the Old Testament. We can read about the time when Moses held out his arms  raised in the form of a cross during a battle, and giving victory to the Israelites of the Amalekites. He also divided the Red Sea by a blow of his rod on the ground and a blow along the horizon of the sea, making the sign of a cross, which gave the Israelites safe passage from Pharaoh’s army. 

During the time of the Roman empire, the Cross was used as an instrument of punishment, something that would evoke fear and aversion. After Christ’s death however, the Cross becomes our instrument and sign of salvation. Through the cross, Christ destroyed the kingdom of the devil. After His death, Christ descended with His soul into hell so as to raise up from it the souls who were awaiting Him. By the Cross, Christ opened the doors of paradise which had been closed after our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, had been banished from it. The Cross was sanctified by the Body of Christ which was nailed to it when He gave Himself over to torments and death for the salvation of the world and the cross itself was then filled with life-giving power. The cross is our weapon and  a sign of Christ’s victory. Invisibly and unceasingly Divine grace gushes forth from the cross to save the world.
 
When Emperor Constantine went into battle against Maxentius, who was in control of Rome, he and his soldiers marked their armour with the sign of the cross and put an end to the persecution of Christians. The emperor’s mother, Queen Helen, embarked on a journey to Jerusalem to restore the holy places and to find the cross. She found the cross around Easter time in 326AD. Then the Cross was erected on a high place, so that the people could see it and render honor to it. At first, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross was celebrated on the second day of Easter. After the consecration of the Great Church of the Holy Resurrection on September 13, 335AD, it was decided to celebrate the feast of the Holy Cross on the following day, September 14, and this has continued to this day. Today, of course, is September 14 in the Church (old) calendar.

Now we continue to raise crosses in churches and monasteries. We use the sign of the cross across our whole lifespan, from the time that we put a cross on around our neck at our baptism through to the end of our lives when crosses will be placed upon our graves. But these are external crosses. Let us continually raise our spiritual crosses, mortifying the passions and the sinful desires of our flesh so that we may die to sin with Christ and also become partakers in His glorious Resurrection. Amen.  
 
Sunday September 21, 2025: Nativity of the Mother of God
by Fr Peter Sheko
 
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 
Dear brothers and sisters,
Today we celebrate the first great feast of the Church year, the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God. In the troparion of the feast we sing: 
“Thy nativity, O Virgin Theotokos, * hath proclaimed joy to all the world; * for from Thee hath shone forth Christ our God, the Sun of righteousness, * Who, having annulled the curse, hath given His blessing, ** and having abolished death, hath granted us life everlasting.” 
Just as the dawn announces the coming of the sun, the birth of the Virgin Mary announces the coming of Christ, the Sun of Righteousness. Her nativity is joy for the whole world for it ends humanity’s long and hopeless waiting. Through her, the One who brings salvation will come. 
The Fathers often call Christ the “Sun of righteousness” (cf. Malachi 4:2). Just as the sun scatters darkness and brings life to the earth, Christ scatters sin and death, bringing true life to the world.
The troparion speaks of the curse, which recalls Genesis: the curse of death, hard work, and separation from God. Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, overturns this curse. Where Eve was disobedient, Mary is obedient. Where humanity was cast out of Paradise, through Her we are offered the blessing of union with God. The Nativity of the Mother of God is the first step in undoing Adam’s fall. 
This is the heart of today’s feast: through the birth of the Mother of God, the way is prepared for Christ’s victory over death. Death, once final, is now transformed into a passage. And eternal life is not a mere extension of earthly days, but communion with God in His Kingdom. 
In the Akathist to the Mother of God we hear: “bridge that conveys us from earth to Heaven”. Today that bridge has been created. God’s plan for the salvation of humanity is revealed, through Her, God becomes Man, and through Her, mankind is raised to God.
The kontakion of the feast reminds us: “Joachim and Anna have been freed from the reproach of childlessness”. In St John of Shanghai and San Francisco’s book “The Orthodox Veneration of Mary the Birthgiver of God”, he explains that Joachim was of the royal line of David, and Anna of the priestly line. Yet they were burdened by grief, disdained by their people for being childless. In their sorrow, they prayed: Joachim on the mountain after being rejected in the Temple, and Anna in her garden in tears. To both, an angel appeared, announcing the birth of a daughter whom they promised to consecrate to God. 
This feast shows us two important truths. First, that God hears the prayers of the faithful, even when all hope seems lost. Joachim and Anna were not abandoned. Their patience and trust became the doorway for the greatest blessing in history. Second, salvation begins in humility. Mary was born quietly, in a modest household, without earthly power or glory. Yet from Her came the Saviour of the world.
What can we learn from this feast? Firstly, to trust God with patience, like Joachim and Anna, especially in times of difficulty. It’s important to remember that God’s timing is not our timing, He never forgets us, His children, and gives when it is the most beneficial for our salvation. Secondly, to learn from the humility of the Holy Virgin Mary. God can only help us when we acknowledge that we need it and when our hearts are pure and humble.
So, as we celebrate today, let us give thanks to God for the gift of the birth of His Mother, the beginning of our salvation. And let us pray with confidence, for She who was born today is our intercessor, quick to hear and to help us.
Through the prayers of the Most Holy Mother of God, may Christ our true God have mercy on us and save us. Amen.