October 2025 Sermons

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. 

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