August Sermons 2026

Sunday August 9, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
Today the church celebrates the memory of the holy healer St Panteleimon. Let us consider the Sunday gospel reading from St Matthew today (Matt. 17:14-23) which is about Christ healing a boy.  We know from the account in Mark’s gospel (9:14 -29) that Christ required the father to be involved in the healing. The father’s unbelief was a barrier for the grace of God to work. From this story we can see that there are three components to healing; faith, prayer and fasting. Let us look at these three components and how they work together to bring about healing. 
Most of us have a strong incentive to attain and to maintain health of soul and body - look at how many people come to our annual holy unction during Great Lent. While people usually think of bodily health first, imagine how much more difficult it is to cope with ailments of the soul. Take depression, for instance, which is so common in today’s urban culture where there is such alienation. Anxiety and depression are much more difficult to bear and to heal than physical illnesses. You probably heard how the Romans used to say mens sana in corpore sano which means a healthy mind in a healthy body. For them, as for the world today, the body is the foundation of everything. But the gospel shows that it is the other way around. Our spirit creates our world around us. We need faith. Faith is a gift, as we can see from Mark’s account. It is given to those who really want it. I believe O Lord, help my unbelief, says the boy’s father, weeping.
Prayer again is given to those really want to pray. Just saying the words of the prayer is one thing, but it is entirely another thing to PRAY. Prayer is a connection to God through our spirit. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit. St Paul explains that the Holy Spirit prays within us. 
Fasting refers to many things. It is an expression of our efforts to stop worshipping the idols of our body, of the love of money, of vainglory and of pride -which are very close to each another. The three components of faith, prayer and fasting all together will bring us out of anxiety and despondent spirits. Physical illnesses, even pain, become much easier to bear when the upper level of life is energised by the grace of God. 
The healer, St Panteleimon, helps us to understand and accept that health does not come upwards from the body, but rather it cascades down from the spirit. So let us attune our human spirit to the Holy Spirit, the spirit of God. Let us “lift up our hearts”, as we hear in the liturgy. 
 
Sunday August 16, 2026                          
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
I think we have a serious problem. Every year we hear this parable (Matt. 18:23-35) about God’s forgiveness and our lack of forgiveness, and I suspect that very few people really understand it properly. We - and I am the first of us in this - cannot imagine that this parable can be taken literally. We think surely my debt to God cannot be so great and the debt others owe me be so small?  Why do we think that this parable is a huge exaggeration? It is because we do not know ourselves. We consider ourselves the centre of the universe and that everyone else owes us something.  My family and my friends are my debtors because I make such great sacrifices for them. Furthermore, there are pretty difficult people around me!  And finally, we consider that God Himself owes us something. We understand with our minds that He is the source of everything, but we still think: Why doesn’t He help me in ways I want Him to help me? 
We are lazy although we do make incredible efforts to serve that idol of the ego. The problem is that we just do not love God. We cannot move ourselves to prayer, to hold our tongue, not to wound the other person, to truly forgive the other person, not to say: “forgiven, but not forgotten”. Of course, we are not like this all the time. Just most of the time! Our job is to work on extending those short moments when we truly understand our debt before God. Then we will stop imagining that we love God and that we love our neighbour. 
We have such a long way to go before we can say like the great Anthony of Egypt, the founder of monasticism. I no longer fear God, I love Him. 
 
Wednesday August 19, 2026: Transfiguration
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
Holy Transfiguration. It is such a special celebration. It is the quiet sense of “heaven emanating in this gladsome light”, as we sing in the Vespers hymn. Heaven touched the hearts of those three chosen apostles. Apostle Peter, in a state of ecstasy, cried out: Lord, it is so good to be here, let us build three tents, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.  He did not know what he was saying, but he was expressing that he was in heaven. 
We see this heaven beginning at Pentecost with the birth of the church. The Holy Spirit lights up the church, and it continues throughout the ages. There are countless examples and stories from the holy fathers of how this sense of heaven continues in the church. I would like to share a couple of these stories with you. 
The first one is from the life of Elder Porphyrios. When he was still a teenager, he saw an ascetic praying from whom the grace of God was emanating. The boy was lit up by this grace. He received gifts that continued for the rest of his life, including an amazing ability to see through things, x-ray vision!  Such are the gifts of grace at times.
Another story is very close to me, from my three years at the seminary in Jordanville. One of the monastics, Fr Iov, was a very special man. He was like an angel, and at the same time exceptionally strong physically.  When he was a 10-year boy in the Soviet Union during the time of the persecutions, his parents used to receive monastics and priests from the catacomb church. One night two monks stayed with them. For some reason the boy got up in the middle of the night, and he saw a light coming from the room where these two monastics were. He came up and looked in the little gap in the door, and he saw these two monks praying, their figures all lit up. At that moment, the grace of God lit up that 10-year-old boy, and he decided then and there that he would become a monastic. That is how heaven works - it lights up. It lights us up when we are ready and able to sustain that light. 
I recently said that every time we come to the Eucharist it is a Pentecost. Saint Seraphim, like all the holy fathers, taught in words and deeds that the aim of the Christian life is precisely the acquisition of this light and grace of the Holy Spirit.  This is the acquisition of heaven on earth. This occurs at the top of the mountain, just like on Mount Tabor, and means that we can only experience heaven by making the effort to carry our cross up that mountain. It is not a free lunch! It does not just happen; we must work for it and that means effort and acceptance of the cross.
What is the cross? It is the meeting of our sinfulness with God’s love. The cross is for our salvation, whatever we need to carry. We need to accept it and learn not whinge and complain.  We also need to learn to thank God for everything because when we thank Him for everything it establishes this two-way relationship. This Eucharistic attitude to life is all important. This is what the holy feast of Transfiguration is about - heaven on earth. We come to church to partake of this heaven and when we leave and go back home, it should not disappear. We should retain it for as long as possible, at least to leave a little bit of that light to share around.  You do not even have to say anything to those around you, you do not have to “bible bash”. You just need to retain that light. 
 
Sunday August 23, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
Here is a rich young man (Matt. 19:16-26) who thought he was a diligent keeper of the law, but the Lord saw that underneath his outward piety that there was an attachment to an idol – wealth. He was a wealthy young man. Christ’s advice to the young man was meant to show him where he really stood in spiritual terms. He was unable to stop worshiping that idol of wealth, and yet St John Chrysostom said selling his property and giving the proceeds to the poor would have been the easy part, because it involves just one idol. The hard part came next, Come and follow me. What does it mean to follow Christ? The Lord tells us later that anyone who follows Him but does not carry his cross is wasting his time. To follow Christ does not mean to passively accept the difficult things of life. Rather it means to also take an active energetic stance fighting all temptations that come through three groups of idols: idols of the body, idols of the soul and idols of the spirit. 
After the Lord’s baptism in the River Jordan, He goes to the desert and faces the temptations of the devil. He prepares Himself with prayer and fasting. Adam and Eve gave in to the temptation of the devil without a fight.  We also will fall, but we are called to rise again and never to give up, even when we become hurt and wounded.  A Christian needs to have this mental stance. I have always thought that the reason why the Lord Jesus Christ chose as his first disciples a group of fishermen is because fishermen never give up. If any of you have ever done any fishing, you will know what I am talking about. Never give up!
Last Thursday there was a funeral in Brisbane of 26-year-old, Ksenia, who was born with severe heart problems, and then later developed another serious disease. She had major problems all her short life, until the age of 26, but she never gave up. She was not known to complain or whinge about things.  What a fighter, what a Christian! In one day during this funeral, we experienced the grief of good Friday, the peace of Great Saturday, and the joy of the Resurrection. It was quite amazing. Hundreds of people took such a long time to come up pay their last respects both at church and then at the cemetery, and the big choir kept singing paschal hymns. It was such a joyous event. 
We are now in the afterfeast of Transfiguration. St Peter had said to the Lord six days before the Transfiguration to forget the cross and to take pity on Himself. In response, the Lord took Peter and two others up to the top of Mount Tabor to hear about the mystery of the cross in the uncreated light found at the top. Our selfish ego is our biggest idol, but it is nailed to the cross. We are liberated from the crushing coils of the serpent.
The great hierarch St Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica whispered on his deathbed: Higher, higher, towards the light!  With those words, his soul left the body and the large room, full of many people was filled with light . 
 
Friday, August 28, 2026. Dormition
By Fr Gennady Baksheev.
Today, Brothers and Sisters, we joyfully celebrate the Dormition of the Mother of God. This is a joyful feast day because it is the triumph of life over death. Her passing is not a death but a translation or passing from this earthly life into the heavenly life. Christ, who descended into the Virgin’s womb, draws up His most pure mother in the flesh to His own Father. Christ takes her, who was heaven on earth for all of us, into the heavenly country. 
The Mother of God is very dear to us. After the Ascension of Christ, the Mother of God was a consolation for the apostles, and for all believers. She would strengthen and edify them about the events surrounding the Annunciation, the seedless conception of Christ born of her, about His early childhood and His earthly life. The Mother of God continues to be a consolation for us. We hear in the troparion for today’s feast: in thy falling asleep thou hast not forsaken the world. The Orthodox church calendar celebrates a multitude of icons of the Mother of God throughout the year, and we have been blessed to have several of these icons in our parish.  This shows that she has not forsaken us.
Rejoice, redemption of the tears of Eve! We hear these words from the Akathist hymn to the Mother of God. Adam and Eve received a sentence of death for they listened to the devil without putting up a fight. They accepted his suggestion and were caught by the lure of false and deceptive pleasure. How could the Mother of God come under the dominion of death? Death had learnt from its experience in approaching Her Son. Death now also trembles before approaching His mother.
This feast day serves to strengthen us in our earthly pilgrimage and to continue our battle with sin, with our passions and with the evil one. Let us emulate the life of the Mother of God who was humble of heart, wise in mind, a lover of work and of virtue. Let us pray to the Mother of God that she may continue to intercede for the faithful.
O Most Holy Theotokos, save us! Amen. 
 
Sunday August 30, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
There were two theological schools in the history of the early church; the school of Antioch in Syria and the school of Alexandria in Egypt. They had different ways of looking at the word of God. The Antiochians focussed on the literal or historical meaning of the text while the Alexandrians were inspired to look for the allegorical level of meaning. Both are present in the scriptures, of course, and both are important. In the historical sense, today’s parable of the Lord (Matt. 21:33-42) refers to the leaders of the Israelites who rejected Him. In the allegorical sense the parable is addressed to the whole world and to every person individually. The literal meaning is important. It provides a clear logic for the spiritual meaning of the text. Otherwise, people can go off on tangents into the unreal world; the texts have to begin with something tangible. 
The literal meaning of the parable is at the level of the history of the Old Testament and the coming of Christ. Christ is rejected by the “builders” like the cornerstone mentioned in the psalm at the end of the reading today. Yet it was not only the builders of Old Israel who rejected the stone, but also many in the history of New Israel - the Church - but less openly. Read the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in Dostoevsky’s novel, “The Brothers Karamazov” and you will understand how Christianity can be subverted without directly rejecting Christ. The “servants of the vineyard owner” are not only the literal patriarchs, prophets, apostles and saints who spoke about Christ either directly or through their writings. These “servants” are also the good thoughts and messages from God that are sent to our conscience. Any person who begins the life in Christ will understand that what happens within us is truly “the unseen warfare”.  All the saints, beginning with the great Paul, were ready to admit like he did: I am the first among sinners. There is no one among us who has not sinned by rejecting, trampling on, or conspiring to delude ourselves with regards to these messenger thoughts from God. Even worse, we receive Christ in the Eucharist and then proceed to crucify Him through an unloving word or deed against one of His lesser brethren. And you know how He speaks about that! Does our rejection of Christ mean He will reject us? No! There is nothing to fear where there is repentance. If we could only be like that congregation of the early church who were addressed by their pastor with a very short sermon: Brothers, let us weep for our sins. And everybody wept…`

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