Sermon July 14
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today the church celebrates All Saints of Rus.  This is another opportunity to look at the saints.  Who are they?  After the Lord Jesus Christ had recapitulated (as St Irenaeus says) the human race with himself as the head, as the new Adam, he then sent from the Father the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit enables the unity of the church around Christ.  But there is something else that the Holy Spirit gives:  the gift of true hypostatic personhood in the likeness of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  The term hypostatic is a spiritual term which can be explained like this: the member of Christ’s kingdom acquires and grows in unique personhood instead of being an individual part, an atom of human nature fragmented by sin. The saints are such persons.  
We only know a few thousand by name, but they are just the visible part of the iceberg. Saints enable us to see in their lives the quality of human nature healed by Christ. These are the qualities of virtue mentioned by St Paul in Galatians which he calls the fruits of the spirit; love, joy, peace, long-suffering (which means patience), kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The saints are those people who are Christ’s, and as the great Paul continues, they have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Each saint is a gem, polished by voluntary and involuntary suffering. How this happens depends on the unique person in question and the collective personhood of each national spiritual culture. A good example is in St Nectarios, who was the subject of a film which our youth watched last Friday night, called “The Man of God”.  It was a well-attended, successful night and the film was powerful.  St Nectarios at the deepest level of course is Christ-like, so in spirit he is neither Jew not Greek, as the apostle writes, but in his culture he is Greek.  He is also a unique person through whom we learn about Christ our image.  In each life of a saint, we see the light of Christ that shines in a unique way through the prism of that gem
Recently I have come across words of the British writer, Robert Louis Stevenson who, after working his way through Dostoevsky’s first Christian novel, “Crime and Punishment”, said, I didn’t finish the book, but it almost finished me! I thought that was quite a cute turn of phrase!  The culture of Rus is resignation to the impermanence of civilisation. The experience of Rus was living in the steppes constantly attacked by waves of nomads, thus the acceptance of suffering. In that sense I think that the Nobel prize physicist Andrei Sacharov’s wife, Elena Bonner, said correctly that there are similarities in the histories of Israel – she was Jewish herself – and the Eastern Slavs, Rus.  Nevertheless saints – the Jew, the Greek, the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Persian, the Celt, the Germanic, Anglo-Germanic, the Southern Slavs and finally the Eastern Slavs of today’s celebration teach us about Christ as the perfect image.  The image is in flesh and blood, it is concrete in the uniqueness of person and culture.  The saints, through us, are the builders of Orthodox Christianity here in the new world. 
 
Sermon July 12, St Peter and Paul
By Fr Peter Sheko
Today the holy church celebrates the memory of the holy great apostles Peter and Paul. On this day I usually speak about one or the other of them; this year my focus is on St Paul.  Before I read an excerpt from his epistles to the Romans, I would like to remind you of something that Christ said in his Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7: 1-2:  Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgement ye judge ye shall be judged.  And with what measure ye mete it will be measured to you again. 
St Paul continues this theme in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans.  You therefore have no excuse.  You who pass judgement on someone else for at whatever point you judge another you are condemning yourself because you who pass judgement do the same things. Now we know about God’s judgement against those who do such things is based on truth.  In judging others, we take upon the sins of the other person that we judge them for.   We are adding to our own sinful burden.  We have enough already that we are carrying without taking on other people’s sins by judging them! Judgement is so detrimental to our salvation because when we judge we are not capable of seeing ourselves.  We want to shift the focus onto someone else without the need to do any work on ourselves.  In Great Lent we hear the beautiful words of St Ephraim the Syrian: Grant me to see my own transgressions and not judge my brother. How powerful are these words!  God is the only judge, but we are trying to take his place.  
Let us not finish on such a difficult aspect. I would like to bring something more positive from St Paul, Ephesians 4: 32:  Be kind and compassionate to one another forgiving each other just as Christ God forgave you.  And Romans 12:18:  If it is possible as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everybody. We can only be at peace with everyone else if we are not judging.  Judging puts up a barrier that separates us from God and from the people around us. Let us take counsel from something that Abba Dorotheos in his chapter on not judging others:  God, through the prayers of the person I’m judging, help me not to judge.  This is a very powerful prayer.  Whenever we feel that judgement is getting the better of us, let us try and remember this, that we are asking for God’s help and considering the prayer of the person we are judging to be more worthy than our own.  It has a double supportive effect for us.  Let us turn to the holy apostles Peter and Paul and ask for their help in our struggles with judgement so that we can be living in peace with one another. 
Sermon July 7
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
It is a well-known saying of the Holy Fathers that obedience is above prayer and fasting. The first Gospel reading today was about the calling of the first apostles, the fishermen Peter, Andrew, James, and John who left everything, simply dropped their nets, and followed Jesus Christ.  Christ told them he would make them fishers of men. And today we celebrate the nativity of St John the Baptist. He was born to accept an extraordinary obedience from God, to prepare all of Israel for the coming of the Christ. He becomes the greatest of the prophets.  Prophets spoke and acted in the name of God, in total obedience to God. St John becomes the forerunner of the One Who took upon Himself the greatest obedience from the Father, before the creation of the world.
What is obedience? The modern world no longer understands that word.  Firstly, it is not like in the army or in bootcamp where a soldier receives a command, and he does it mechanically out of fear of punishment if he disobeys.  In the church however, obedience is an expression of the spiritual culture.  It is an expression of love. There is always someone who is the initiator of an obedience and one who accepts the obedience.  If it is a proper and loving understanding of what obedience is, the one who is given the obedience must have the ability to be able to carry it and to not be destroyed spiritually. I remember back in the early 90s when Metropolitan Vitaly came to Australia, he had a great meeting with the youth. He told them, you are going to grow up and have children yourselves.  Know this, that all obedience comes from above, from God.  If you are obedient now to your parents, your children will be obedient to you.  But if you are not, your children will not be obedient to you!
Obedience in the church family and in the family at home is an expression of what theologians call Trinitarian life. There is total equality but at the same time there is initiative that comes from the Father though the Son to the Holy Spirit. When you read the writings of the holy fathers you become aware that they were intensely conscious that sin was and always is caused by disobedience. The podvig, or ascetic effort, of prayer and fasting is meaningless without obedience. It becomes individualism, self-delusion or prelest’ in Slavonic. In the secular world there is plenty of individualism which is even encouraged.  At the same time there is always authoritarianism in the secular world.  While individualism is encouraged, it is always suppressed by someone powerful.  The world is crazy! You are encouraged to be “free” but at the same time there is huge coercion to do what someone wants you to do.  
We Christians should be aware that in the church there is also Catholicity – sobornost’ – which is a mode of life where there are relationships of love in a horizontal manner, adult to adult, but also vertical -parent to child. And it works! It works in the church, but it cannot work in the world. It works because the motivation is different. In the world there are two motives: fear and profit, or reward. Negative and positive reinforcement are the terms that psychologists use.  We must grow sufficiently to understand that while we do need those two motivations, they are temporary. Ultimately, we are called to live the life of love which is mutual obedience, both horizontal and vertical, and which comes from God. 
 
Sermon 30 June 2024
Father Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Last Sunday at the great feast of Pentecost the church completed the first part of the liturgical year in which we learn about what God did for us. We learn about God’s plan of salvation for us. We went through a whole series of feasts and fasts which begin with the preparation for the feast of Christmas, the Advent and then the whole series of other feasts, after Christmas, including the baptism of Christ, the Theophany, the Meeting of the Lord, Annunciation; then Great Lent begins; Palm Sunday, Easter itself; the paschal period and then the Ascension and finally Pentecost which we had last Sunday. This is a massive picture of God’s plan of salvation. Each of these feasts, and the learning period during Lent, speak to us about this. 
Today the Church celebrates the memory of all saints. All saints are humanity’s response to God’s calling to accept His plan for our salvation. Each one of us when we enter the life of the Kingdom, the life of the Church, receives a heavenly friend and a protector, a Saint. We become temples of the holy spirit as we hear in the New Testament. Our temple is dedicated to a saint. Think of it this way, he or she is not only our helper, protector and intercessor but also should be an inspiration for our Christian life.  
In services for the saints, we often hear the phrase ‘your life was according to your name’. Names have a meaning, they are not just nice sounds, so that’s at the level of the saints. For us these names of the saints are filled with much more meaning because each is filled with the wonderful life of that saint. The content of their prayer and ascetic efforts here on earth. Today is a joyous day when we all, as it were, celebrate our names days together. This is an occasion for the contemplation of the phenomenon of the church. 
The bible begins with the words, ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’. Today heaven and earth come together, in this joy to praise God. To praise God who is wonderful in his Saints as we hear in the psalms. The saints, our heavenly brothers and sisters, have completed their earthly course, their education, their struggle. We are on our journey to join them. One of the causes of our earthly neuroses is people’s constant vacillation between different goals in life. People do not know what they want. They are not sure what to dedicate their energies to. ‘What should I do tomorrow?’ that is the question that makes people very nervous. The saints through their lives on earth and in heaven radiate peace. The peace that is the opposite of that neurosis, and that peace only Christ can give. As He told his disciples at the mystical super, ‘My peace I give unto you’. That peace comes from aligning our life with Christ’s words, when He says, in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness’. When we make that our goal, everything else will fall into place.  Life will become peaceful, harmonious and without that neurosis about tomorrow. 
Let us maintain that connection with the saints, they are our brothers and sisters, and they are the spiritual nobility of the King of kings. Our connection with them is maintained through private prayer and effort, but especially through the mystical supper. There the holy spirit calls us, as we heard last Sunday, into a unity with Christ. Heaven and earth come together in the kingdom of God, the mystical life of the Church.
Sermon June 23 Pentecost
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
John the Baptist, Forerunner of the Lord Jesus Christ, said to the hundreds of people who came to listen to him, I baptize you with water but One Who is mightier than I is coming. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and Fire.  Today at Pentecost Christ sends the Holy Spirit from the Father in tongues of fire. God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. Elijah brough the same fire down from heaven to burn his sacrifice. Now it is given to the church, to the people of God, forever. It is mostly invisible, but if you want to see it, go to Jerusalem on Great Saturday in any year and you will see it. God’s uncreated energies can be seen as fire and light.  They make a huge difference to human life, as we hear in the festal troparion, Blessed are thou, O Christ our God, Who has shown the fisherman as supremely wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit… Who are these fishermen?  Simple, naïve people.  We read in the Book of Acts that the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of the Jews, having brought Peter and John to their tribunal quickly realised that these people were uneducated and yet they spoke with such clarity and force.  This obviously came from the Holy Spirit. The apostles and their words could not be resisted. 
All saints, whom the church celebrates next Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, understood empirically, experientially, the difference between life in the Holy Spirit and life without Him.  The saints put all their efforts into acquiring the Holy Spirit, that fire of God, and then keeping the Holy Spirit.  They were human beings with limitations and had to struggle to keep their focus on acquiring this fire. 
The kontakion of the feast juxtaposes the building of the Tower of Babel with Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit calling all to unity in God. To build a tower of Babel has been a dream of humanistic civilizations or empires since those ancient times in Genesis. Look at the name of the most famous skyscraper in New York City – Empire State Building! We are living in times where many people are confidently working towards the new tower of Babel. There are now tools that earlier generations could not even dream of to help in building this.  At the same time, there are greater and greater problems appearing in the fabric of world politics, economics, physical and mental health, just to name the obvious areas.  More and more people are beginning to understand that humanity cannot solve its problems without God.  Life without the Spirit is a sleepwalk of zombies. There is no meaning, no direction. Those questions are not asked and are not encouraged. But Pentecost to us is a reminder of eternity and purposeful life in the world. Acquire the peaceful spirit and thousands around you shall be saved.  These words of St Seraphim refer to the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost. He lives in the Church; He lives with the people of God. 
 
Sermon June 16 
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
The gospel passage that we just heard begins with the ‘Golden Rule’ except the Lord Jesus Christ turns it around. The Golden Rule says ‘do not do unto others as you would not have do unto you’ but Christ says ‘Do those things’, He puts it in the positive, he says it’s not about not about doing bad things but about doing good things; about being an initiator of goodness and love in the world. And this is the beginning of this passage; the key to today’s reading because it is the key to all real Christianity. We should remind ourselves of these words, as often as possible. 
Now, take for instance the life of St Paul, the great Apostle. He was stoned and left for dead. He received 39 lashes 5 times. Can you even imagine what that would be like? Jim Caviezel who during the filming of the ‘Passion of the Christ’, was accidently hit once and he lost consciousness. 
St Paul was shipwrecked and yet his letters are full of joy because a real Christian gives, a real Christian is a shining star that gives with joy from the heart. A real Christian doesn’t moan and groan and whine and whinge and a real Christian begins prayer with praise to the Lord, praising God, thanking God and then, only then, thinking about and asking forgiveness for our sins and then last of all asking for things from God.
Now we often work the other way. When we think of prayer, we think prayer is about asking for things, but a Christian is not a black hole that sucks everything in. A Christian is not a consumer of everything. A Christian is not an emotional vampire, but we often behave like that. Now we want to suck blood out of our neighbours. Christians are children of God; this is what this passage is saying to us. He is our Father and so shouldn’t children behave like the father does. So, this is what the Lord is trying to teach us to give and not to expect anything in return because God gives - He gives to the good, to the bad and to the ugly. 
 The Eucharist teaches us this attitude to life. Think about what this word means: thanksgiving. We’ve come to thank God. This is what we come for but more than that it’s not just about learning. That’s the first part of the liturgy which is coming to an end now with the sermon. The second part of the liturgy/the Eucharist is about receiving the energy from God to be like him. The grace of God so that we give, and we don’t even notice that we give. This is the response of those, the righteous, the sheep in Christ’s picture of the last judgement. They are terribly surprised when he tells them that you’ve done this and done that, ‘What have we done ‘we’ve done nothing, we’ve just been behaving normally’. So that’s Eucharistic life, this is what we absorb here in this holy temple of God, His grace, to become transformed so that we can go out into the world, into our families and not to behave like the people who don’t know Christ.
Brothers and sisters, as St Paul says to Thessalonians ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing and in everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ for you’.

By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen!
Beginning with His first miracle at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, the Lord taught for three and a half years and performed countless miracles to confirm the certainty of His word. Today we are observers of His conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well.  She cannot see us, but we can see and hear her. The Lord, of course, sees us. He speaks to the woman about living water, the life in grace, and invites her to bring her husband, showing her that He sees everything, He is God. Following their conversation, a great miracle ensues. But while we hear the conversation between them, Only Christ can see the whole picture. Often Christ’s miracles are bodily healings which are followed by a great transformation of the spirit, like we will see next Sunday with the man who was born blind and healed by Christ. In today’s story, Christ resurrects the soul of the Samaritan woman, rather than healing her physically.  In church tradition she is known as Photini; the Slavic translation is “Svetlana”.  Following her conversation with Christ, she immediately becomes an apostle to her own people, the Samaritans. 
 
A week ago, we had the presence of a miracle in our church here, the myrrh-streaming icon of the Mother of God from the church dedicated to her in Hawaii. Christ often speaks to us through His mother, through her miraculous icons.  If you open the church calendar, there is hardly a day without a mention of a miraculous icon of the Mother of God. What are her words to us when she speaks to us through her icons?  They are the same words that she spoke to the servants at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee:  whatever He says to you, do it.  This is the purpose of the grace-filled icons that sometimes visit us, and God willing, we will have another in July, the Kursk icon.  [scheduled to be at our parish on July 21, with the visit of Metropolitan Nikolai]. Christ wants us to believe His words, to accept them and to live by them. Moses told the Old Testament Church, Israel, Man shall not live by bread alone but by the word of God. (I’ve simplified the words with this paraphrase.) Jesus Christ quoted these words to reject the temptation of Satan in the desert. 
Are we fortified by last week’s miracle to follow Christ by rejecting this and other temptations? The enemy wants to enslave us spiritually.  Look at the joyous spirit of Photini.  She walks away liberated by Christ, by His words. May we too not ignore the life-giving words of Christ. May we not treat them as something abstract and general, as though they do not apply to us individually. Let us open a contrite and humble heart to Him, the personal and specific liberation. 
 
Sunday May 26, 2024
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen!
Brothers and Sisters, today we are witnesses to an extraordinary event, a tangible presence of the grace of God and a stronger than usual sense of presence of our Protectress through her holy icon, the Iveron icon of Hawaii.  We are indeed blessed today.  Nevertheless, we are obliged to speak first of Christ God and the Gospel story of the paralytic at Bethesda healed by the Lord.  We are all, in some measure, spiritual paralytics who need the loving kindness of the Saviour to raise us up from the paralysis, visible or invisible, which comes from the root of all sins - human pride.  Christ’s love is masculine in its powerful sacrifice and maximalism about sin.  As we heard just now, he offers a stern warning to the healed paralytic, to not sin any more or worse things could happen. 
 
But the Lord’s love is infinite.  He finds ways to communicate more gentle aspects of his love to us, who are not only paralytics but who are infantile in our lack of spiritual maturity.  The church knows this love through the image of our heavenly Mother.  The image of the mother speaks to all of us. And that explains the great number of historical holy miracle-working icons in all the nations, including the recent ones from Montreal and from Hawaii, which is here today. The best illustration of these two aspects of love is presented in the story of Christ’s first miracle at the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee.   That occasion is also a touching illustration of the almost wordless communication between Mother and Son which really communicates so much beyond words. She whispers that the wedding hosts have no wine, expressing a concern for people’s seemingly mundane needs.  The Lord meekly pretends to resist her request, saying My hour has not yet come. Her request for wine reminds Him of His coming shedding of blood on the cross, in about three years’ time. She reminds Him of the sacrificial love but for now her request fits in with His own desire to bring joy back to the wedding feast. 
 
And here we are today too, Brothers and Sisters, at the Wedding Feast! We are at the feast of the King’s Son, which is the Eucharist. We are weak, easily discouraged by life’s challenges and anxious about the future because of our fragile faith.  Yet, here she is, just like at Cana of Galilee, whispering to Him: Fortify them. Give them joy and strength. Maybe they will understand why You are doing it, maybe they will want to get up, take up their bed and walk.  Maybe they will want to grow up!

Sunday April 21.
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
In today’s reading (Mark 10:32-45), the Lord Jesus Christ announces to His disciples His firm resolve to leave the country beyond the Jordan, where He had raised Lazarus, and journey to Jerusalem. This would be the final days of His ministry, His passion, death and resurrection.  Today, the fifth Sunday of Lent, is also dedicated to St Mary of Egypt. The moving story of her death and resurrection is an image of inspiration and consolation for all of us.
 
Christianity is not like all religions and social ideologies which  accept the state of a human being as more or less “normal”;   that humanity only  needs rules and structure to be enforced in society to make life on earth turn into the “pursuit of happiness”, as we hear in the American constitution.  Today’s conversation of Christ with His disciples, and the life of St Mary, tell us that being a Christian turns that idea upside down.  Without Christ and the Holy Spirit, we remain firmly anchored in something that St Peter calls “aimless conduct”, which means meaningless existence; we are doomed to this superficial and chaotic life. The history of humanity is full of examples of people who have tried to  control it by political force. It is still happening today! In today’s gospel,w e see the same temptation in two of the most zealous of the twelve disciples. They failed to hear Christ’s explanation of the cross and instead asked Him for something that is completely insane – to participate in God’s power. They wanted to sit at the right and the left hand of Christ as the King of Israel and ultimately of the whole world. A  few days after this Gospel story, Christ is teaches us that we should accept Ceasar.  But he is not interested in being the emperor.  Not at all. To rule people without healing them first, without saving them through the cross. What’s the point of that for the Saviour? 
 
The story of Mary, the Egyptian, is a story of healing;  it is about death and resurrection and that is what healing in Christian terms is!  She was a young terrorist of carnal chaos for seventeen years.  On the day of the Holy Cross, in Jerusalem she takes up her own cross.  She cooperates with Christ, the Holy Spirit and the church represented by the Mother of God.  She suffers in the desert from the chaos that was inside of her. Ultimately, she purifies her heart and becomes an earthly angel.  
 
Christ is maximalist in His teaching.  The great saints like St Mary, or another Egyptian, St Anthony the Great,  and countless others in all nations, were able to  mobilize their total commitment to Christ, sometimes in literally minutes.  We cannot.  We need time.  Our journey is often a zigzag that takes a whole lifetime. It is important to understand that it is about direction of our life’s journey.  We fall, we crawl, but we must continue. Only then help is given when we show that we are for real, that we really intend to live the Christian life.  By teaching His disciples about the most essential aspect of the Kingdom, Christ explains to us too that we must give up the idea of ruling over others. Otherwise, we remain unchanged and sick in our self-assertion of pride. Whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant, we hear today.  That means to become Christ-like in humility and thereby defeat the chaos we have inside with His help. 
 
Sunday April 14
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Lent is our yearly course in spiritual life.  Now that we have reached the last two weeks before the Pascha of the Cross begins - Passion week and the Lord’s entry on Palm Sunday - the Church gives us the final lessons.  Today (Mark 9:17-31) we are reminded of the teaching of the ascetics represented by one of the giants, St John the Abbot of Sinai, the author of the “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”. Human nature in our fallen state is a slippery eel. We desperately resist seeing our real self.  This is why the Lord Jesus Christ has so much to say about the danger of being our own saviours.  Just think, people who condemn to death the Saviour of the world, thought of themselves as being religious and righteous people.  They thought they were doing the work of God. It is very easy to say, I am not like those men. Yet that thought alone shows the person is on a slippery slope towards that same pharaisaical spirit. Did not the pharisee in the parable say, “Thank you God that I am not like other people”?  Spiritual life begins first with a serious commitment to keep the commandments, yet again the rich young pharisee said to Christ, I have kept all the commandments from my youth. He was right, and yet he was terribly wrong.  The question is how he kept the commandments.  
 
All the spiritual fathers and mothers teach that keeping the commandments has only one goal – to know our weaknesses and so reach a measure of humility before God.  We really do not understand how important that is.  Without that, we are just not open to God. Keeping the commandments is certainly not to become a better person. That is rubbish!  That is how the world thinks, that to become better people it is necessary to  compare ourselves to other people,  like the pharisee did: to paraphrase him, Thank you God that I am not like those other no-hopers! 
 
 A proper commitment to keeping the law of God will show us how we are constantly attacked by tempting thoughts.  Do you remember the Lenten homework I gave you about judgement?  Add to the list envy, jealousy, vain glory, anger, love of possessions, impurity, love of eating, and the list goes on.  We have these passions like a dirty torrent passing through our thoughts and our souls.  We will understand that we are helpless against these attacks if we try to keep these commandments properly. Then we will remember what Christ said, as we heard today in the Gospel reading just now:  This kind is only expelled through prayer and fasting. 
 
Fasting does not mean just a change of diet.  It means making every effort of our will to be obedient to God, not to the things that we have turned into idols.  Again, the only purpose of prayer and fasting is to cultivate that contrite and humble heart of which King David sings in Psalm 50.  That is what makes the heart open to God’s grace, nothing else does.  Christ will fortify us in our battle inside the heart when He sees that we are serious about it.  Commitment means we will be reminded about God when we try to be faithful and fail constantly.  That will help us to cultivate prayer and the fear of God.  In Greek and Latin, the word for “God” means “one who sees”. Different cultures have different words for God; in the English language “God” means “Good”. If we cultivate the  sense that He sees, that He is present, that will be a mighty help for us not to think wrongly, not say wrong things and not to do bad things. Fear as reverence will make our prayer into a transformative force.  This transformation will be not a change into “better people” but a transformation into the children of God.  
 
Sunday April 7, Annunciation.
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The Liturgical year is a kaleidoscope of surprises.  This year, Alpha and Omega have come together; The Feast of Annunciation is the alpha, the beginning of Christ’s entry into the world, and the third Sunday of Lent is the omega, which reminds us of His and our journey to the cross and to the resurrection. The purpose of both the Annunciation, the incarnation of the Lord, and of His Cross is to bring transformation to the world.  This transformation, transfiguration, is in the life of the church. 
 
In discussing transformation, there are some basic questions to ask. People in today’s society may be able to answer in a limited way the first two questions of who am I and who is Christ? But today’s Christianity has a very vague feel to the third question:  what is the church? This is indicative of the spiritual state of the world today. The world has lost direction because it cannot see the light coming from us Christians.  It is decaying in spirit because there is not enough salt, this ancient preservative, that has to come from us, from the church.  To know what the church is is to know the life with Christ. Moreover, not only to know – it is easy to know, it can be an interesting intellectual game – but to commit ourselves to this life.  
 
The moment of His incarnation on the day of the Archangel’s annunciation, is the beginning of the emptying, the extreme humility, of the Son of God. It reaches its crescendo on the cross when He is crucified. The church connects and participates in that humility and love. The church is not organised religion.  The church is not ideology.  The church is not a club, especially an ethnic club. The church is the mystical supper with Christ.  Jesus Christ washed the feet of His disciples to give them a practical lesson in humility before the supper. To participate in the church as the supper, we must put aside all earthly cares and forget about our egos. Judas was unable to because of his attachment to the world, because of his ego.  He left the supper; he went to betray Christ.  
 
The early church had a clear and simple maxim. The Body of Christ receives the Body of Christ in order to become the Body of Christ.  That may need some explanation!  The body of Christ of course is the Church. We are the church through baptism, but that is only potential. We receive the body of Christ, at the Eucharist, the Mystical Supper, to become the real living body of Christ, not just an organisation. We must understand by experience that membership in the church is not like membership in an organisation. It is a dynamic process that depends on every moment of our life being energised by the grace that comes from the mystical supper, the Eucharist. 
 
This Sunday is seen as a hill from which we can see our journey to easter, to the cross and resurrection.  Today is all the more special as it coincides with the Annunciation. Let it be for us a contemplation of our life with Christ.  Let us be serious about the church. 
 
Sunday March 31
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s Sunday reading  (Mark 2:1-12) is about sin, illness, forgiveness and healing.  In addition, it gives us an image of the church carrying us to Christ for this forgiveness and healing. The memory of St Gregory Palamas on this the second Sunday of Lent adds a dimension about the role of the grace of God in the healing of soul and body.  Orthodox Christianity never forgets Christ’s teaching that we address God as “Our Father” not “My Father”.  
 
The four men in today’s story who make a great effort in their love for their paralysed friend are an image of the church, our brothers and sisters here on earth and also in Heaven.  We need each other.  As we mature in spirit, we begin to understand our connectedness with other people, especially in the family of the church. In the first week of Lent, I read from the book by St Dorotheus of Gaza during the evening services. On the Thursday night, we read chapter six about the refusal to judge our neighbour.  St Dorotheus explains that in connecting with people we connect more with God, and vice versa; when we get closer to God, we also get closer to our neighbours.  Sin is a disconnect from people and from God.  It is the failure to love.  This is why the Lord Jesus Christ says to the paralyzed man, “your sins are forgiven”.  Once this connection, or rather, reconnection, is made, God’s healing grace flows into the soul and body of the sick man. Reconciliation with God is a greater joy than anything else.  But, as we see in the story, it is invisible to observers, and so in this Gospel story, some of them remain sceptical.  Has anything really happened when the Lord said, your sins are forgiven?  This is what they are asking in their hearts.  At that point the Lord shows not only His power to heal but to forgive sins, something only God can do. Three thousand years ago, King David showed in his moving Psalm 50 (51 in the Hebrew Bible) that repentance and forgiveness opens the heart to receive the Holy Spirit:  A contrite and humble heart God will not despise.  
 
Let us learn from today’s story and the culture of Lent which is prayer and fasting.  Let us learn that there are two wings of spiritual life that can raise us up from the mundane level of earthly cares:  that is the church and the body of Christ which lives breathes, connects and energises its members with the energies of the Holy Spirit. The difference between that life and a life focused on earthly cares is as huge as the difference in the life of the paralytic before and after the miracle.  We can practically discover the difference. As King David says:  O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that hopes in the Lord. Amen.

Sunday March 24
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is the Sunday of Orthodoxy. It is also called the Triumph of Orthodoxy because of the historical connection with the event that happened in the year 842 on this first Sunday in Lent, in Constantinople.  At this event a great procession with icons marked the end of the iconoclastic persecutions which had lasted intermittently for over one hundred years.  Orthodoxy, however, does not revel in superficial triumphalism.  The church is intensely aware that every victory, every triumph happens through the Cross.  That means blood, sweat and tears.  
 
What does it mean for the church to retain the icon? It was a final act in the drama of the period of the great councils which lasted from 325 AD to 787, the first of the seven ecumenical councils. These councils defended and upheld the Orthodox faith, as the proper understanding of the New Testament revelation. 
 
Our faith is very simple and at the same time, very practical. It is not airy-fairy! Our faith can be expressed in one gesture: in the sign of the cross. This action speaks volumes.  It speaks of the triune God sending one of the Holy Trinity, the person of the Son, to take on the fullness of humanity; the Son, the Word of God, took on human nature to save us through the cross and resurrection. We use the icon because we believe the apostles who saw Him, the Son of God, with their own eyes as we heard in the Gospel reading today. (John 1:43-51). Phillip says to his friend Nathaniel: Come and see.  The invisible became visible.  God chose to enter the created world in a tangible way.  That means people touched him, He touched people, He Healed them, He suffered, He died, and He rose from the dead for us.  He promised His disciples that He would never leave the church, or them.  He connects to us in prayer, the sacraments and especially the Eucharist.  It is all real, not an abstract ideology.
 
I want to share something with you.  Yesterday I baptized a baby.  The godfather came to me afterwards and said,” I really believe.  When I was a boy (he was a man in his mid 30s) – I served in the altar. And there were other altar boys there and it was the day of Pentecost.  We were serving the Eucharist.  Towards the end of the Eucharistic canon, all of us altar boys saw something amazing happen.  There was a lot of smoke from the incense and suddenly all the smoke came together above the priest.  He didn’t see it because he was looking at the holy gifts.  This smoke then turned into a bright shining crown. The boys cried out, “Father, Father look”! He looked up and this crown started to lift until it disappeared”.  
 
It was the presence of the King, there at the Eucharist.  He is always here!  These tangible things sometimes happen to help people believe. In last night’s gospel reading from John, one of the eleven matins resurrection readings, we heard the Lord telling Thomas: Thomas, you believe because you saw me, but more blessed are those who did not see but believed. The faith of the apostolic church is a heart burning with the fire of the love for Christ. In another resurrection matins reading, we hear the words of Luke and Cleopas, two of the seventy apostles:  Did not our heart burn within us when He spoke to us along the way?    Let us use these precious days of Lent to prepare our hearts to receive the holy fire of the resurrection so that our hearts burn and we can say, as we sing each Sunday and at Easter,  Having seen the resurrection of Christ…
 This is our journey now in Lent.  It is a journey of our whole life too.   
 
Sunday March 17
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is Forgiveness Sunday. We are preparing to embark on the lenten journey to the Resurrection. Tonight, at the end of Vespers, we are going to sing the stichera (verses) of the Resurrection, of Pascha, ahead of this journey; it is a Christian tradition to ask each other’s forgiveness and for prayers before any journey.
 
Today the church also remembers Adam, his fall and his expulsion from Paradise.  He was expelled not because he broke some arbitrary rule but because he destroyed the communion of love with God.  He failed to respond to God’s call to his conscience to ask forgiveness and come back to the loving relationship with God.  Instead of asking for forgiveness, he blamed Eve and even God for giving her to him. He tried to say it was somebody else’s fault, not his! 
 
Variants of the Genesis story can be found in many religious traditions.  It speaks to a deep level, an archetypal level in our souls and consciousness.  The story of the fall is the beginning of human history.  It is humanity’s journey towards Christ, and through Christ, to our own resurrection.  Lent is an image of the whole history of humanity and our personal journey to Christ.  One of the archetypes is the story of Exodus, where Moses and the Israelites journeyed to the promised land over a period of forty years.  An even more powerful image is Christ’s forty day fast. Lent reflects that.  Christ teaches us how to defeat the three temptations of the devil which Adam failed. 
 
How was it possible for Adam to be defeated so badly that he even failed to realise that all he needed to say to God was “Forgive me”.  He had no reason to be filled with fear. His only prior knowledge of God was as a loving father.  Why is he then suddenly filled with fear of God?  It was because he lost that sense of communion of love.  God, his wife Eve, all of nature and everything in the world, became objects to him.  He became the subject of his own universe, seeing everything and everyone else as an object, as the “other”.  
 
The 20th century French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre says that hell is the “other”. That is, of course, the case when there is the loss of loving communion.  Hell is the inability to love. The communion of love is restored through forgiveness and Christ takes the initiative.  He offers forgiveness.  If we forgive the other, we then turn our neighbour from an enemy to becoming our brother or sister.  In beginning our Lenten journey tonight, we will sing these paschal stichera:  Let us say Brethren – also Sisters of course! – even to them that hate us. Let us forgive all things on the Resurrection and let us cry out, Christ is Risen from the dead.  Trampling down death by death and on those in the tombs bestowing life. 
 
 
 
 
Sunday March 10
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
It is normally noted that after two preparatory Sundays where the love of God toward repentant sinners is shown.  This Sunday presents the picture of God’s justice.  The picture of the Last Judgement, while it uses the image of human tribunals is vastly different from them.  Saint Isaac, whom I love and whose words I quoted last week, about not calling God “just” but “loving”, says also this:  God’s justice is like a grain of sand in comparison to the mountain of gold which is His mercy.  But that grain of sand must exist nevertheless otherwise human free will becomes undermined.  We need to think about what that means.
 
God wants everyone to be saved but not against their will.  It is not like the social revolutionaries who also, one way or another, follow the words of the 18th century thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau in his “Social Contract” where he says: “ We have the right to force people to be happy, even against their will”.  That’s not God!  The Last Judgement is really a revelation of choices made by us human beings; either to be with God or without God.  “Judge not lest ye be judged”, or in more modern English, “Judge not that you be not judged. With the measure you use it will be measured back to you”, says the Lord in the sermon on the Mount (Mt 7:2).  If you are forgiving you will be forgiven, that is the underlying message of Christ’s Gospel.  Why then do we constantly fall into judging other people? Because deep down inside we believe that we are better.  That is the symptom of the worst human disease, which is pride.  Those people who understand about not judging, or those people historically who understood, believing the promise of the Lord, that they too will not be judged, they eventually reached a deeper understanding of humility, the foundation of all the virtues.  By refusing to yield to the temptation of judging they were given the grace to see just their own vulnerabilities and failures in relation to God and their neighbour.  They were given the grace to see only the inner beauty of each person, not the ugliness of sin which is also present in all of us.  For this reason, both the sheep and the goats are surprised by Christ’s words to them.  The sheep are surprised because they sincerely and genuinely believed that they had never done anything good before God, and suddenly He praises them! The goats, too, are surprised because they thought that they were God’s gift to humanity. Suddenly they find out that they are not!
On occasions in the past, I have done this for a little while, but this is a bigger experiment. I am not saying let’s promise to God, because we are terrible at keeping promises. The experiment is to try and stop judging during Lent.  That is hard!  We can begin by counting how many times in a day we have judged other people in our minds. That knowledge will help us to come to a measure of humility.  We will realise how often we judge other people!  Where does that mean we will end up? By doing this experiment we will come to a measure of humility and love for our neighbour.

​Sunday, March 3
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) gives one of the greatest images of God’s love. The greatest, of course, is the image of Christ on the cross. We are beginning this journey towards that image, the Pascha of the Cross and the Resurrection. The church now gives us this parable to break up the ice of our hearts with this story that speaks on a deep level to all of humanity collectively and to each one of us separately. 
 
Today I would like to view some aspects of the parable from the angle of church life. The Father’s house is clearly the church.  The two brothers represent two approaches to the church and the spirit of its life. Christ wants us to learn not only about the spirit of the repentant young man but to learn from the image of the patient and forgiving father. The life of any parish is built up from the spiritual work of its pastors and the whole family.  I would like to share something from the past of our parish.
 
We had a saintly archpastor here in Melbourne during the 1960s, who projected the loving image of the father, just like in today’s parable. He was Bishop Anthony. Bishop Anthony left Melbourne in 1967 to go to San Francisco to take over from the holy hierarch, St John Maximovitch.  Melbourne’s own bishop in the church of St John!  There he became Archbishop Anthony. There is a short story by the Soviet writer, Konstantin Simonov, who visited San Franscisco in the 1970s, with an official Soviet guide. This guide told him that the ROCOR parish was a bad parish. This description piqued the writer’s interest in visiting Archbishop Anthony. He went to his modest apartment and knocked on the door. When the door flung open Simonov gasped because there in front of him, greeting him, was someone who was just like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son.  He had open arms, flowing white hair and eyes filled with love. Simonov writes: I felt that I had come to him like the Prodigal Son. The result of this meeting was the short story called “Bad Parish”!  Another similar story was shared with me by my late father-in-law, Fr Vladimir Vygovsky whose bishop (Gideon) in Novosibirsk visited San Francisco in the 1980s.   He felt the same effect on meeting Archbishop Anthony. 
 
We all wish to enter the joy of the father’s house.  We are all prodigal sons. We need to understand the loving spirit of the church and to project it in the way that Archbishop Anthony did. But it cannot happen straight away. It can only happen when we are firmly established in the family of the church.  Before we get to that level of love we need to learn from the prodigal son that we cannot dictate our terms of return to the father. It must be an unconditional surrender to his love and to the spirit of the church.  We can never act in the spirit of the older brother who insists on his merit before the father.  Such a person seeks justice. St Isaac the Syrian wrote: Don’t call God just. When we were His enemies, He sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross for us. What kind of justice is that? The church is not about justice. It is about humility and love. 

Thursday February 15.  The Meeting of the Lord
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Today’s Gospel event, the meeting of the Lord, is a feast of both the Lord and of the Mother of God.  The Lord, a forty-day-old baby, is silent but He teaches us even from His birth.  He teaches about God’s humility and trust towards us which are an expression of His love.  The Mother of the Lord and the righteous Joseph teach us today about their obedience to the law of God which enabled them to rise to true spirituality. The person who teaches today with his words is of course, Simeon, a man with a pure heart and mind.  He is a prophet who sees and speaks by the Holy Spirit. He speaks about Christ’s future and the future of His mother whose soul will be pierced by the sword. Simeon speaks about the fall and rising of many in Israel who will be enlightened by the light of revelation or else will choose to stay in the darkness, scandalized and provoked by the Lord’s humility.  To us, Simeon speaks through his inspired song used by the church for private and public worship since the apostolic times: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.
In objective terms, what does Simeon see?  He sees a very modest, if not a poor, couple bringing a baby for the required prayers, and sacrifices.  But he received in his arms God as fire, more than the coal brought by the angel to the great ancient prophet Isaiah, which was a prototype of this meeting of the Lord. 
 
No one is stopping us from preparing for the meeting with the Lord.  This preparation can take a long time, as we hear in Psalm 90: with length of days I will satisfy him and show Him My salvation. The preparation for meeting the Lord can happen progressively, step by step.  This is our life within the church, the struggle against wrong thoughts, which are thoughts without love.  Repentance, reconciliation with love and communion with love.  We have access to much more than Simeon had.  He was only waiting for the consolation of Israel.  He waited a long time until he could say, My eyes have seen Your salvation.  
May this feast always be an inspiration for us to be patient, trusting and loyal to the Lord. This is our part. The fire of love is the gift of God. He meets with us when we are ready. 
 
Blessing of Fruit at the feast of the Meeting of the Lord
The tradition of blessing the fruits of the harvest comes from Old Testament times, when the first fruits were brought to the temple to be blessed by God.  Blessing of the Fruit in the Orthodox calendar traditionally happens at the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, in August.  In the northern hemisphere this is harvest time,  but for us in the southern hemisphere the harvest begins in February, so we bless fruit at the Meeting of the Lord, although it is not connected to the feast. We have been blessing fruit on this day in the Southern Hemisphere for many decades.  In fact, we in the Southern Hemisphere bless fruit twice a year, once on the traditional date of Transfiguration, and also at this feast.