June Sermons, 2026

​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. 

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