December 2025 Sermons

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)

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