October 2024 Sermons

​October 6, 2024
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
We human beings are slow in learning God’s language. His language is that of silence, stillness, humility and love. He knows that He is the poet of heaven and earth, the Creator. His power of the word is great, and He knows our language like no human being can know human language. And so, in today’s gospel (Luke 5:1-11) we see how He does it with the miraculous catch of fish, speaking this language to the fishermen. 
Peter, a mature man, an experienced fisherman, understood that it was absolutely impossible for the nets to be filled. When that miracle happens, in awe and astonishment he falls down on his knees and he says, ‘Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord”.
 
We see how quickly the seed of God’s word brings down an abundant harvest in the good soil. Peter’s reaction is one of contrition. He is filled with awe by the realisation of whose presence he was in. How often are people’s reactions and expectations to the things of God so inadequate. We often feel this sense of entitlement, so common in today’s culture, when people have been pampered by the good life. ‘I deserve it, I am entitled’. When we pray, we expect an immediate response to our prayer, immediate results, either some profound spiritual experience when we are praying or fulfillment of our wishes. This is expected from people who pray in a hurried and in a distracted way, usually often forgetting about the existence of God during the day completely, ‘But now God, can’t you see, that I’m seriously addressing you, I am talking to you, surely you should be happy that I’m doing this and I want you to immediately give me what I’m asking for’. This is the attitude. We cannot behave with God like a dissatisfied customer in a department store. There the customer is always right but here in spiritual life, the customer is always wrong!
 
Peter shows the proper attitude, unworthiness. ‘Get away from me Lord, I am a sinful man’. We live in a democratic culture, it is good when this culture focuses on respecting our fellow beings, but even then, liberal democracy is based on the eighteenth-century concept of enlightened selfishness and egotism. Much has been said has about the revolutionary slogans of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. This slogan is inspired by Christian values. Sadly, when the Christian content is leached from these principles expressed in these slogans, they become ghastly newspeak of Orwell’s 1984. Fraternity becomes familiarity which is another word for what the holy fathers called ‘audacity’. The reaction of a modern-day Peter in this situation, in the context of this miracle, would have been something like this “Thanks Jesus, you are a real pal”!
 
The gospel constantly calls us to attune ourselves to the melody of heaven. God himself in Christ is the absolute image of humility. However, His humility never comes as familiarity. His humility is majestic, and Christ sets the example.  He teaches us how to become a true example of God’s beauty, how to become truly noble in the context of heavenly and earthly things.

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October 13, 2024
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount is His spiritual interpretation of the law, and in today’s passage from the sermon (Luke 6:31-36) we see that Christ points to a life that is only possible in grace. It is supernatural, it is beyond the possibilities of law. Nobody can love enemies simply by saying ‘The law says we have to love our enemies’. It is not going to work like that. We can only do it, as St Seraphim says, ‘From Christ, not from ourselves’.
The key to the passage that we just heard is in the last couple of sentences which explain that only if we have an intention and the commitment to attempt what Christ expects from us will we become Children of God. Children of God are born from above, they are born from water and the spirit as we hear from the Lord himself. They desire to enter the life in Christ, which means to follow the Lord and do what He does. It is important to know His crowning words, which explains what His teaching. These words are what He said from the cross: ‘Father forgive them’.  He prayed for forgiveness of His enemies, or rather those who thought He was their enemy, because He loved His enemies. 
 
At the same time, we can see that throughout the gospel Christ speaks out forcefully against evil, hypocrisy and sin. He does not say: ‘It will be alright’! This dichotomy is expressed beautifully by the holy fathers who transmit the essence of Christ’s teaching to us with their maxim to ‘hate the sin but love the sinner’. Now this is a great challenge for us. When someone hits us on the cheek, we typically react with anger, animosity, aggression, if not outright hatred against the culprit. We find it hard to delineate and to make the distinction between the sin and the sinner, (the person who we are told to love) and this is something that real Christians have always done with real such ease and even joy. They rejoiced in this.  But this is us, this is how we speak within ourselves ‘Oh so you don’t like me, huh, well then I don’t like you either!’ and ‘if I don’t like you, you are bad’!
 
Are we going to ever take notice of what the Lord says? Today he plainly calls us to be the Children of God, and we hear that God is kind to the unthankful and evil. We have got to be serious about that. The pagan and the godless word lives in a constant never-ending story of limitless vengeance; even the law of Moses has said ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, although this law calls for a limitation of vengeance, for more balance. Many people think that if they limit their vengeance, they are, at least to some extent, acting in a Christian way. Wrong! That is the Old Testament law. Moreover, is it easy to quantify what is just when obviously I am much more important than the other person! How do I quantify the limit of my vengeance if he has slapped me on the face? I feel offended.
 
It is so sad to see when Christians do not make any attempt to take Christ’s words seriously. It is even more sad when we seem to agree with His words wholeheartedly, but we apply it only to the other people, ‘it doesn’t apply to me, it’s the other person’, failing to see that each one of us holds the key to forgiveness, peace and love. 

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​October 14, 2024          
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Today’s feast of Holy Protection of the Mother of God is based on an inspirational story. St Andrew, a fool for Christ (he is represented in the lower right-hand corner of the icon), had a vision with his disciple Epiphanius, on this day in October 911AD during an all-night vigil in the church of the Mother of God at Laharna in Constantinople. The city was in the middle of being besieged at 4am when they saw the Mother of God coming over the top of the congregation in the tall church with a large retinue of apostles and many other saints following her. She stopped over the sanctuary, she knelt, and she prayed with great intensity and then, facing the congregation, she took the large veil off her head, and she held it over her outstretched hands, covering and protecting all the people.  The congregation, though, did not see this happening.  Only St Andrew and his disciple Epiphanius saw it. 
 
This is such a powerful image between the connection of the church in heaven and the struggling church here on earth. The heavenly church is symbolised by the Queen of Heaven and she and the whole heavenly brotherhood and sisterhood of Christ are always ready to come to our aid. The prayer of the packed church was pleasing to God and for that reason God gave this vision to St Andrew and Epiphanius.  It is an edifying story for us to learn that we also must be diligent in our prayer. We Christians in the new world, in the affluent West, have had it too good for too long, as I have said quite a few times in the past. This environment is not conducive to prayer, and this is how we have been robbed,  Brothers and Sisters. We have the idea: ‘Why should I pray and how can I pray when everything is so good…. life is a constant ball’! We are selling our spiritual birth right for a pottage of lentils just the same way as Esau, the older twin brother of Jacob, sold his birthright for a pottage of lentils. Esau had no care at all for his birthright.
 
There is a Russian saying, ‘Until the thunder claps the peasant won’t cross himself’!  In these last three decades the global thunderstorm has been intensifying with louder and louder thunderclaps and they are getting closer and closer to us. This should be helping us to think about prayer. Sometimes I hear despondent voices, even from church people, saying, ‘Oh what is the use, nothing changes anyway’. It is awful to think like that. It is not true because we have so many historical examples of God’s protection and mercy through the prayers of the Queen of Heaven, together with the angels and the saints. This can be found not only in the bible and in the Christian chronicles of the past, such as the story of today’s feast, but also in the lives of individuals and communities. 
I suggest you read our “Pokrov Chronical” that has just been published a couple of weeks ago and you will see and feel that the hand of God has been leading our parish over the last 75 years.  It has really happened, Brothers and Sisters, and is not a figment of our imagination!  
 
St Andrew the fool for Christ and Epiphanius saw the Mother of God take her large veil off her head and in the story we hear that it was like purple, and flashing and flickering like lightning flashes. Let this picture of intense energy, of the prayer of our Heavenly Mother, be an inspiration to us, at least when the thunder claps let our prayer come up from the earth, like lightening connecting heaven and earth. That is what prayer should be like.

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​October 20
By Archbishop Gabriel of Canada
 
I greet everyone today with the Lord’s day, and the Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, and with the 75th anniversary of this parish in Melbourne, dedicated to the Protection of the Mother of God.  Yesterday I became acquainted with the book of the parish’s history; it is a wonderful, beautiful book and gives a very good and thorough examination of the parish.  We know from the parish’s history that Russians and Slavs came to this country well before the Second World War.  Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians were coming to the Syrian church in Melbourne in the 1930s and 1940s until it became quite evident that the Slavs needed a church of their own.  They began, from 1949, to lease different buildings from the Anglicans.  But they understood that this was only temporary, and a church would need to be purchased or built where they could have their own services and not have to pack up each week.  In those days they would have to erect a make-shift iconostasis for each service and then take it down at the end. The church in Collingwood was bought in 1954 and services were conducted there for many years.  Finally, this beautiful church came into existence around 20 years ago.  It is beautiful inside and out and can safely be called a landmark of this city, and also of the whole Russian diaspora here.
 
All those forefathers who came to Australia understood the importance and need of having one’s own church to provide for future generations. This is indeed the case in many of our cities.  Just a month ago I was in the city of Washington DC, at the parish of St John the Baptist which was also founded in 1949 by our hierarch St John Maximovitch. We have a convent in New York which has the largest Russian Orthodox cemetery in the whole US which also is celebrating its 75th anniversary.  Next week, God willing, I will be back in Toronto where we have the largest parish in Canada and possibly in all the whole of the church abroad. Every Sunday there are 300 to 400 parishioners that come to church.  It should be noted that most of these parishioners are newcomers from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.  Not many of the old-timers are left.  The new emigres are now filling our churches.  That church in Toronto will also be celebrating its 75th anniversary. Throughout all the diaspora we can see the need for providing for new generations. 
 
We are blessed to see that this church has so many children.  We know if there are children then there is a future for the church.  
​May God bless you on this wonderful day. 

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​October 27
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Today’s parable of the Sower has connection with the story of the fall. Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise because they did not repent. God addressed them individually and spoke to them about the life that they would lead outside of paradise.
To Adam who represents the whole of humanity, the Lord God said, ‘In the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread’. God spoke about the weeds that would compete with the good seed and the hard work needed to control them. The ascetics point out that this Genesis story speaks about the need to struggle internally with the passions that are represented by the weeds. 
 
The parable of the Sower is a more detailed look at the necessary work that each one of us must do. We have inherited not just a generalised sinfulness from our forefathers, but also certain specific genetic predispositions, our upbringing and the models that our parents have given us. In other words, we are talking about nature and nurture. The parable seems to imply static conditions describing various people as some sort of predestination that we hear from the Protestant world, where some people are like this, others are like that. But this is not the case. No, the entire Bible and especially the New Testament speak of the great gift of free will which presupposes responsibility to work, just like God told Adam. 
 
Each of the described conditions of the soil – and soil is a reference to our heart - except for the good soil, speak of the need to work. The good soil comes very rarely from the beginning, from our early years. It must be made into good soil, into receptive soil. The compacted ground of the roadway cannot enable the seed to hide and to germinate, it is destroyed by the birds which represent demons. How do they take away the seed? They turn our attention away from God.  How does this happen in modern life? How about the traffic of these foreign ideas and images that we are being bombarded with? All sorts of electronic media, there is too much watching, too much listening, too much responding to all sorts of stimuli and messages, superficial ones, rubbish. It turns our hearts into that compacted roadway, it cannot receive the seed because the seed of God’s word is gentle, and it is annihilated by these birds.
 
The rocky soil is the next stage. That is more treacherous than the roadway because it seems like the seed has begun to grow and then it withers away because there is hardness of rock underneath. The layer of soil is shallow, it stops the seed from growing further. The rocky soil is the person who understands that some effort must be made, to turn that compacted roadway into something more receptive, but alas their effort is not enough. This is the person who easily gets turned off, who stops when it seems to him that it is too hard, and puts it in the ‘too hard’ basket. 
As the holy fathers interpret this story, the weeds are the passions, our desires that compete with the divine messages, by entering our consciousness and into our conscience. Our conscience is overwhelmed by these goliaths; the weeds are strong and big. 
 
So where do we begin? How do we begin to work towards making the soil of the heart receptive to God’s seeding? The beginning is limitation of these external stimuli, visual, verbal, and mental. These are the things that are making our heart unreceptive and turning it into a roadway. Without these external stimuli, we can create a path for God’s word. Then the work continues with the fight against our own sinful thoughts, desires, words and actions. That is the path of liberation, the path of salvation through the Sower,  our Lord Jesus Christ.