Sermon from Sunday June 2, 2024

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!