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September 1 Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Last Sunday we heard about the storm at sea and what we need to learn about coping with storms whether they are private or public. Today the gospel (Matt. 17:14-23) reminds us about the energy of chaos that provokes and escalates the destructive power of these storms. We heard about the story of the Lord walking down Mt Tabor with three of his disciples, Peter, James and John, who were there with Him during the Transfiguration. They witnessed this chaotic situation at the foot of the mountain and saw Christ calm a very different kind of storm than the one at sea. Nine of the twelve disciples were at the foot of the mountain and were helpless in trying to cope with the storm and so we hear how the Lord cries out, ‘Oh faithless and perverse generation’. These words apply to everyone at the scene – the disciples, the pharisees (who were taunting them), the father of the sick boy who wants to believe and yet is overcome with unbelief and finally the crowd of people who were watching this whole scene and were being tempted as well. Only the Maker of heaven and earth can overcome chaos. He begins in this case by humbling everyone, when He says, ’O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I going to put up with you’. He humbles everyone, including his disciples, and the poor father and then he expels the chaos from the boy. The storm is calmed. The Bible in the Old Testament and especially in the New Testament is dead serious about the reality of chaotic and destructive power of demons and yet many people probably shrug it off because they do not have any direct knowledge of this, and it seems fantastic. Secular culture, over the last couple of hundred years, has made demons at best comical and at worst, from our point of view, romantic. We observe tensions, provocations and fights between people, and we forget and disregard what the New Testament teaches. As St Pauls’ Letter to the Ephesians, (chap 6:12) states– ‘We do not wrestle (fight) against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” He is talking about the ranks of demons. When the great twentieth century Saint, Archbishop John of St Francisco, was cleared of all charges against him in the civil court he was asked, ‘Vladika, who is responsible for all of this trouble?’, he looked at that person very seriously and said ‘The devil is’. While we understand Christianity as a morality, as a religion, we are unable to see and understand the way the chaotic power of the fallen spirits can energise our passions. We do not see it; we think that it is people doing it. We think that it is our neighbour that is causing us grief and we respond in kind because we are provoked. Meanwhile the demons are laughing at all of us because they see that we have failed, we have been provoked, we have sinned, we have fallen, and we are dancing to their fiddle. When we get serious about living the life in Christ, we will see and understand that we can survive storms only with the Lord, by understanding who the real enemies are. They are not human beings, they are not our neighbours, they are not flesh and blood whom we are called to love even if they are sinners. If they are our enemies, we are obliged to love our enemies, but it does not mean we have to like them, especially like the things they are doing. But we must wish them well and to wish them salvation rather than be provoked by them, because it is not them; it is these demonic winds of chaos that are blowing and causing them to behave that way. If we do not have that attitude to our enemies, then we are going to be provoked into fighting each other. The great modern saint of the holy mountain, St Silouan said ‘If you don’t love enemies, you are not quite Christian yet’. I don’t mean ideological enemies or enemies of Christ, I mean personal enemies, people who do unpleasant things to us, they might cause havoc in the church. You still must have patience with them and defeat the demon with love and patience and humility. This is the only way we can live. We are not going to win by fighting against flesh and blood, only against the unseen enemies. September 8 Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In today’s parable we heard about the man who owed his master 10,000 talents (Matt. 18:23-35). This parable shows how much we owe God because of our sins and how little other people owe us because of their sins against us. 10,000 talents is an insanely huge sum of money. According to today’s silver prices it is close to half a trillion dollars. We are rarely able to comprehend that huge inconsistency between our sins before God and the sins of other people against us. This is something that is very difficult for us to understand. It is much easier for us to think the other way that other people owe us so much. We think ‘I am pretty good, so I do not owe God all that much’. That is typical thinking. It is easier for us to digest but let us suggest another way of looking at it; if we believe in God, we surely accept that He is the author of our whole life, He has given us everything, everything is a gift from God. For example, if I become insanely rich at the age of forty and then I discover that I have a terminal illness would not I be ready to give up all those riches to live another forty years of this life? I think most people would take that. The Bible, right from the beginning but especially in the Gospels, explains that sin is a death sentence. Woe to the man who, like the man in the parable, received forgiveness and the promise of eternal life, but shows such a lack of mercy and forgiveness. That is awful. This parable teaches us about the essential spirit of Christian life. There is a story of Saint Isaac the Syrian, when he was a bishop in one of the cities in Syria. A parishioner who was a creditor lent some money to a man who was unable to pay him back. The creditor came to Bishop Issac holding this man by the scruff of his neck and said, ‘Tell this man to give back my money’. Bishop Issac replied, ‘My son, think of the Gospel!’ The creditor said, ‘Get out of here with your gospel!’. After that Bishop Issac took his advice and left, saying, ‘If no one cares about the Gospel then what am I doing here?’ Far too often we operate like the Pharisees in Christ’s time, who thought of themselves as pious and righteous and yet had no spirit of forgiveness or mercy. What about us? We easily find ways to excuse and justify ourselves, while condemning anyone whom we do not like, and we think we are doing it based on justice. Only God can transform the heart of stone, yet He cannot do it without us, without our permission, without our desire and cooperation. Only then it can be done. The saints teach us: ‘your salvation is in your neighbour’. Do we want to live, or do we want to die? That is what salvation is about - so let us choose life, then we must tell ourselves: I must have patience with everyone. I must thank God for everything I am given from my neighbour because he is my salvation. If I am not doing well in this, I must ask Christ to give me the strength and patience to win with Him. September 15 Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Patristic writers agree that the rich young man in today’s gospel story (Matt. 19:16-26) was sincere in his desire to please God and to attain eternal life. The story is covered by the first three synoptic gospels. In Mark’s version we read that Jesus looking at him loved him, showing that the rich man had goodness in him. God’s love wants all of us to be saved and the young man sincerely wanted to be saved. Jesus Christ gives him advice to enable him to see what he did not see before - his addiction to money, which later Saint Paul in first Timothy would call “the root of all evil”. Any addiction is an idol which enslaves us. The Lord wanted to show this to the young man and to every one of us. We cannot serve two masters, as the Lord says elsewhere, God and mammon, the idol of wealth. Why is the love of money the root of all evil? Why is it such a dominant idol? Because it feeds and builds up and enables an even greater idol that is within all of us. If we did not have that idol, we would be sinless. The Great Canon of St Andrew that we hear in the first and the fifth week of Lent gives us these words, “I have become my own idol”. If I am my own idol, I want MY will to be done. This is expressed in the desire to supress and coerce the other person to do my will. Let my will be done. All of God’s commandments beginning from Moses were intended to teach us self-limitation as a path to God. The Lord Jesus Christ comes and shows what moral law is on a deeper level. He gives us the teaching about sacrificial love. Christ’s cross among many other things is an illustration of what he means by sacrificial love. We want to follow Christ not only in word but deed, so we must pick up our cross and follow Him. That means I must allow my neighbour to crucify my ego –wow, that is hard! Recently I quoted to you the words of the holy fathers – “Your salvation is in your neighbour”. We cannot worship God properly if we are secretly serving that idol of self-the ego. In Galatians Chapter 6 St Paul writes “God forbid should I boast except in the cross of our lord of our Jesus Christ by whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world”. By the world means passions, as the holy fathers explain. St Paul talks about crucifying the flesh, which is the old fallen person, the sinful humanity within us. Last Thursday we had the feast of St Alexander Nevsky. I spoke about the wonderful words he spoke, “God is not in power but in righteousness”. Power is what the ego seeks because fallen humanity imagines God as power, it projects, it creates God in its own image. God sends His only begotten Son to show that He is humility, He is not power. If we are not ready to learn about ourselves and about God, we are wasting time. Brothers and sisters let us get serious about Christian life! September 21. The Nativity of the Mother of God. By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. There are parallels in the Holy Scriptures with today’s story of Joachim and Anna, a childless couple who give birth to a child. We have Abraham and Sarah, prophetess Anna, mother of Samuel, and in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Luke, the story of Priest Zachariah and Elizabeth. The ancient tradition of the church sees several Old Testament prophecies and prototypes indicating this event. Our service uses Old Testament readings from Genesis about the Jacob’s vision of the ladder, Ezekiel’s prophesy about the shut gate of the temple, used by the Lord to enter, and the reading from Proverbs about Wisdom which is spoken of in the feminine gender. The first mention in history of the Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos is by Proclus, who was the archbishop of Constantinople, three or four decades after St John Chrysostom. The story of Joachim and Anna comes from church tradition preserved in an apocryphal book, the Gospel of James. While the apocryphal books were never accepted into the canon of scripture of New Testament books, this story has been lovingly preserved by the church and has found its way into one of the twelve major fests. The feast speaks of God’s plan of salvation prepared before time. As we learn from the story of Annunciation, God’s plan does not take away a person’ s exercise of free will. The Theotokos, born today, grows up to express her free will in the acceptance of God’s plan. God’s foreknowledge does not restrict our free will, that is something that needs some thinking about to really understand. There is a lot of confusion in people’s minds, even historically, about what God’s foreknowledge really means. The story of Joachim and Anna is in harmony with the ethos of Old Testament scripture, and it makes more sense in the New Testament culture through the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ. Joachim and Anna’s prayer of many years transforms them into pillars of fire, or into the burning bush that Moses saw which itself is an image of the Theotokos who facilitates the incarnation of the Word. There is an image of prayer given by the holy ascetic mother Sinklitike which I really like. When we first seek to burn with the spirit there is much smoke and tears. Why? Because the firewood is wet and green from our passions. Through our efforts in prayer and self-limitation, podvig, we prepare our nature to accept the fire of God. When the transformation progresses, the fire burns brightly. This is the moment when people say the Lord has heard my prayer. We hear this in the Bible too. It is not to say that He fails to hear our prayer before this. It means that we had to be transformed through our prayer before it can be answered. This takes time. Today’s feast is a joyful inspiration for us. We too can be like Joachim and Anna. We too can become fertile in the spirit and then anything is possible with Christ! September 22 Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Yesterday we had the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God. We are now in the after-feast, the second day being the remembrance of her parents, Joachim and Anna. It is also the Sunday before the great feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, celebrated on the fourteenth day of the church calendar (27th in the new calendar). Yesterday we contemplated the transformational cross of Joachim and Anna and how it enabled them, a childless couple, to become parents of the one who became higher than the cherubim and the seraphim. The reading for today’s saints (Matt 12: 46 – 50) is an opportunity to think about the gospel story depicted in one of our frescoes. Surrounded by a large crowd of people, Jesus Christ is told that His mother and brothers are wanting to see Him. He replies: My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it. Christ’s answer may appear to be harsh and dismissive, especially if we consider that the traditional societies treated their relatives with so much loyalty. But Christ knows that His mother was at the forefront of those people who hear the word of God and do it, and His brothers, children of Joseph from his first marriage, would soon become His followers too. In His short reply, the Lord is saying that in His kingdom there are very different values to the values of the world, even when worldly values like family loyalty seem good. Familial loyalty, however, is not abolished but now there is something higher. Even the Lord’s own mother had to transform her love for her Son. Imagine that! Her love and relationship with Him had to become sacrificial and non-possessive. Normally maternal love is very possessive. Only in Christ’s spirit of humility can we really love anyone properly. Love, in the Christian sense, is only possible when our pride is crucified. But when the ego is dominant, pride with all its passions like jealousy, envy, vainglory and possessiveness cause suffering and tensions among people. The church, the people of God, are called upon to make Christ’s kingdom of love a reality. This is not easy! Anyone who has tried will know that it is not easy! It is only easy if we fantasize and pretend that we already have this love. But we do not! We are only on the way there. The best we can say is: I want to have faith, I want to have love. As we attempt to keep that dual commandment that Christ talks about, to love God and our neighbour, we are going to fail in thought, word or deed every day. We will fail every day! But we must not get discouraged or despondent by it. These are symptoms of hurt pride. We should understand that a peaceful acceptance of our failures is going to shrink our pride, the cause of all human pain and suffering. Then the grace of God can enable us to relate to God and our neighbour in an unselfish way. Friday September 27. Exaltation of the Holy Cross. By Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Today we fall down before the Holy Cross. We remember how Queen Helen found the precious cross in the early 4th century, and by remembering we enter into the mystery of our salvation. Many years ago, when I was a young man, I happened to read a sectarian brochure which argued that traditional Christians are deluded in having a loving attitude towards the cross. A rhetorical question was asked in this brochure: Would you love a weapon that killed your loved one? That naïve question shows a complete lack of understanding who Christ is and what he did for our salvation. Christ is not a passive victim as you can see from the large icon in the centre of the triptych called “Christ’s Ascent to the Cross”. Christ desired the cross, even though it is preceded by the agony of prayer in the Garden of Gesthemane. The cross is humility and love. Christ defeats Lucifer with the cross, with His humility and love. Satan had captured the human race with the promise of prideful glory. Christ’s glory, on the other hand, is the cross. Its divine wisdom is perceived as foolishness by those who think they know everything. To the moralistic and proud pharisee it is scandalous. How on earth could God do such a thing? God is power, almighty! How can He do this? But Christ tells Paul that His strength is made perfect in weakness. In every Liturgy we sing the words: Only One is holy, only One is Lord Jesus Christ. We are all sinners. The root of sin is always pride. It is in all of us. What is our cross? Our cross is the meeting of our sinfulness, our pride, with the humble love of Christ. Elder Ambrose of Optina explains that God does not create our cross, but rather it grows on the soil of our heart. We have so much to learn about the cross but very often we do not want to learn. Instead, we want justice for ourselves, and to enjoy this life. One thought that arises not infrequently in the heart of the Christian is: How come all these people who don’t know about God are enjoying their life and I’m not? Why do I have to put up with all the difficulties in my life? We need to remember the example of the holy ones who would prayerfully complain, “Lord, why have you forgotten me” when they experienced a long stretch of time in their lives withoutsorrows or suffering! They knew from experience that only the cross purifies the heart from pride, and that is it pride that makes us block out God. I have told you the story about Archbishop Nikolai Velimirovich, the great Serbian hierarch, who experienced hell in a Nazi death camp. That experience, though, opened up to him the power of prayer. Prayer brings heaven into our hearts. He said, I would give the rest of my life for half an hour at Dachau because I have never prayed like I prayed there! Today’s feast is about sorrow and joy. It is about being born again. No pain, no birth, no gain! September 29 Fr Nicholas Karipoff In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Today, this Sunday after the Feast of the Holy Cross, we hear readings concerning the carrying of our own personal cross (Mark 8:34-9:1) and the parable of the wedding feast of the King’s son. (Matt. 22:2-14). These two readings complement each other. In the first passage from Mark’s gospel, we hear: whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. The central icon in our triptych is Christ’s Ascent to the Cross. In March 2018 I showed and explained this icon to Jordan Peterson who was touring here and gave him the written explanation of the icon penned by the iconographer. (see A.Rudakov, Pokrov Chronicle 1949-2024, p197) Dr Peterson was deeply moved by the icon and mentioned it in his subsequent talk in Sydney. He gave one of the best short formulations, in my opinion, of the difference between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity on his blog a few weeks later after returning to Canada. He surmised that being an Orthodox Christian is indeed an existential experience of carrying the cross and not, in Peterson’s words, “subscribing to a cognitive theory of the world”. By these words, Dr Peterson is explaining a view where Christ has already done all the hard work for us, and all we must do is just accept Him and His salvation. But we hear today that the Lord is talking about denying oneself. Wow! Do you know what it means to deny yourself? It means you say to yourself, “I reject you! You are my false self! You are a tenacious octopus of passions, feeding on my real self! A declaration of this nature is only the beginning. It is like the declaration that any Christian makes in accepting Christ as our Saviour. But it is only then that the real work of our transformation – our transfiguration – begins. We need to destroy the “octopus” of the eight passions, which creates the false façade, the false ego. By destroying these passions our true self is revealed. This is our journey with Christ up Mt Tabor to the divine light. Following Christ means trying (to the best of my abilities) to keep the commandment of love for God and my neighbour. I will fail miserably. Acceptance of the cross and my failures will teach me about myself. I am nothing without Christ, nothing… In his God-inspired psalm of repentance, King David says, “A broken, and contrite heart God will not despise”. He describes in those words the pre-requisite for obtaining the wedding garment of which we heard in the second reading. The wedding garment is the robe of righteousness given to us in baptism. It is like a force field of God’s grace that can only be sustained by carrying our cross. The cross is our salvation. The cross reveals to us the difference between our real self and our false self. Let us commit to a serious fight together with Christ. Only with His help can we fight for our liberation from the deadly octopus of our passions. Comments are closed.
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