Sermons April / May 2026

Sunday 26 April 2026: Myrrh-bearing Women; Joseph of Arimathea & Nicodemus
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!
Today’s story (Mark 15:43 -16:8) of Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus and the Myrrh-bearers is a shining illustration of the New Testament words that would appear later in the writings of St John the Evangelist: Perfect love casts out fear(1 Jn 4:18). Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were members of the Sanhedrin - the Supreme Council of the Jews, and were secret disciples of Christ, for fear of the Jews, as it is written in the gospel. When Christ is crucified, they overcome their fear and they approach Pilate to release the body for burial which they perform with great respect and in the proper manner. The Myrrh-bearing Women, too, showed more courage than the Disciples.  They came early on Sunday morning to the tomb to anoint the body of Christ. What were they expecting? They knew that there was a guard there at the tomb, and secondly, they knew that there was a huge rock that they could not move themselves. This is the nature of love. It is beyond logic. Love creates miracles. 
 
I want to share with you a story from a 19th century Russian novelist, Turgenev, in his book “Notes of a Hunter”.  He describes coming back from one of his walks in the countryside, after some hunting. Suddenly his hunting dog ran ahead and was looking at something down on the ground. As he approached, he realised that it was a little sparrow which the dog was sniffing at. Suddenly, the mother of the sparrow came down from the tree, fluttering vigorously in front of this huge dog as if saying “don’t touch the little one, take me”.  It was such a powerful message to the dog that the dog just backed off. This picture from the animal kingdom illustrates how powerful love is, because love is life. Love drives out fear because fear is about death and for God’s sake, we are Christians, we believe in the Resurrection! How did I just begin greeting you? Christ Is Risen! 
 
Richard Rohr, an American psychologist and Franciscan friar, has interesting observations about fear. We are all subject to fear. Rohr observes that people with the worst fears sometimes become tyrants and he gives the example of Adolf Schicklgruber, better known as Hitler. He had the worst paranoia, the worst fears and he became a tyrant. You can see how fear disfigures our whole life. Fear makes an evil caricature of what we as human beings, especially as Christians, ought to be. Fear is driven by our bodily mortality, which is a function of our fallen, sinful nature. The apostles, the martyrs, the prophets, and the other saints had no fear, and we should re-acquaint ourselves with stories of their lives and how they faced threats but were not afraid. When an officer was sent to arrest St Basil, the saint said, ‘How can you threaten me? I do not have anything you can take. I do not have any property.  If you exile me, the Lord’s earth is everywhere. If you take my life, I will be with my Lord, my Christ’.
 
Today the church gives us a very inspiring example of these two men and a group of women. We celebrate our Sisterhood today, because they are like the Myrrh-bearers. Women historically have saved the church many times. During the worst times, the women, just like the Myrrh-bearers today, saved the day. May we acquire their love for Christ and then our life will be transformed. 

Sunday May 3: Sunday of the Paralytic
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ is Risen!
Gospel stories always speak to us on many levels, and in today’s story (John 5:1-15) about the healing of the paralytic, it speaks to us, firstly, of our salvation through Christ. Humanity was paralysed by sin, having broken its bond with God, until the Lord took pity on us and sent His only begotten Son to come and heal us.  Bethesda was the pool where sacrificial animals were washed before they were taken to the temple. The healing powers of its waters, although it only happened once a year, prefigured the mystery of baptism. The Lamb of God, Himself, came from Nazareth to the River Jordan to be baptised, to be washed according to the law, in preparation for His sacrifice. The paralytic in today’s story did not have a man to help him get into the waters that were disturbed by the angel, so he kept missing out. But Christ heals everyone who enters baptism, or at least, we begin our journey of healing from the font. Christ is the Man. This is why the Lord tells the healed man afterwards, Sin no more, lest a worst thing come upon you. In saying this, Christ means that salvation is not a passive process, but one that involves our constant participation.  We cannot just rest on our laurels!  The best way to participate in our own salvation is to become, through Christ, the person whom the paralysed man needed but did not have… Christ’s messenger.  The paralysed man was there for 38 years, and no one noticed him.  Everyone was concerned only with their own problems.  Sin often incapacitates us. We can be hurt by people, ignored by them and then we are provoked ourselves. We get angry and sulk, and then we are spiritually and psychologically paralysed. We feel alienated in that state.  St Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians, that if someone falls into sin, those in a better spiritual condition should help such a person, in meekness; it will not help if you have a superior “holier than thou” attitude!  
On this Sunday of the Paralytic, the church begins to turn its attention from the events of the Resurrection to the life in grace that begins in baptism. The stories for the next few Sundays relate to water.  We begin a preparation for the next feast, Pentecost, which is a feast enabled by the Resurrection of the Lord.  The life in grace is a life that heals us from self-isolation. Self-isolation is a paralysis, an inability to love. Once we find the Man, we will find connection also to brothers and sisters in Christ. When we are healed from this state, we must help others also to come out of this paralysis. It may just take one kind word.  I can tell you that I know one case when a young person was taken out of this paralysis of self-pity and despondency just because someone bought him a Maccas meal! It really does not take much from us to help! ​

Sunday May 10, 2026                                                    
Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Christ Has Risen! Truly He Has Risen!
Today’s story about the Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well is one of the longest Sunday readings and to comment on all the aspects of this story would easily take one hour or more, but we have a short time this morning so will look at one small aspect.
 
The woman is shocked that Christ speaks to her at all, as she is a Samaritan heretic and a woman at that. When the disciples come back to the well sometime later, they are also shocked. The Jews despised Samaritans as heretics and did not converse with them. Moreover men, even some great thinkers like Socrates and Buddha, let alone Middle Eastern men 2000 years ago, considered women unworthy of any serious conversation. Modern humanity often treats Christianity the same way, as though there is nothing interesting to hear! As well as being a woman and a heretic, we find out she was a sinner having these five husbands, or whatever these relationships were.
Women’s rights and respect for people no matter who they are, are one small aspect of the moral revolution that Christ brought into the world two thousand years ago. Yet without Christ, all His principles become debased, and we Christians must watch ourselves because it is so easy to distort, debase and trivialise even the most serious things. There can be prejudices based on social class, sex, moral superiority and religious triumphalism, but the underlying prejudice in everything is this: ‘if I don’t like you, you are bad’.
 
Now Christ tells the woman that in the future true worshippers will worship God in the spirit and truth. This can mean many things starting with the fact that the spirit and truth refer, firstly, to the Holy Spirit and to Christ himself. Furthermore, it could mean that in Christ the spiritual relationship is above the relationship based on blood or preference and that that truth is above self-interest. Such perception is impossible without a dose of reality - a bit of humble pie - and this is precisely what the Lord does by humbling the woman, asking her to bring her husband, and she says, I have no husband. Without at least a glimmer of humility, the human being can be an awful beast: proud, aggressive, greedy, egocentric, obnoxiously and repulsively self-entitled, and narcissistic. Still, we have no right to judge anyone, but we must have compassion even on the worst members of humanity. Underneath all that ugliness there is the image of God in every person. If we build up this Christ-like patience and compassion towards people, we can transform them in the same way Christ transformed this woman, a heretic and a sinner. 

Sunday May 17, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
​
Christ Has Risen! Truly He Has Risen! 
In today’s gospel reading, Christ spits on the ground and makes clay which He then uses to anoint the eyes of the man who was born blind. This act may have two meanings. Some point out that He, as the Son of God, acts as the Creator by whom all things were made, as we say in the Creed. He creates the eyes that see, using clay. It is easy for God to make a blind man see physical light. It is quite something else to enable a person to see the spiritual light. Even God himself needs the cooperation of the person for that to happen. We see in this story a greater glory of God than His glory as the Creator. His greatest glory is that of the Saviour. For this reason, if you look at an Orthodox crucifix you will see the words The King of Glory.  What is seen as humiliation from a worldly point of view, is His greatest glory. 
 
Let us look at the journey of the blind man. He is born blind and carries this heavy cross until his adulthood. The suffering transforms him into a person who is ready to receive the light of Christ; the light of Christ enlightens all, we hear during the liturgy of the pre sanctified gifts in Great Lent.  His faith is kindled when he sees Christ saying aloud, I am the light of the World. He submits meekly to the anointing of his unseeing eyes with mud, and he obediently does what the Saviour tells him to do, to go and wash in the pool of Siloam.  When he comes back, he is transformed.  He sees physically, but he also sees spiritually. We hear from that dialogue with the Pharisees that he becomes a warrior for the truth, and the truth is Christ Himself. 
 
What can we learn here for ourselves? Firstly, to be patient in carrying our cross, whatever it might be. It is our salvation. We too can come alive to God like this blind man did. Secondly, there is a lesson about the mud that the Lord used to anoint the eyes of these unseeing eyes. He shows us that what blocks our spiritual vision, is the earth and our attachment to it. That is why the Lord spits at it because it is the earth. It is our earthly attachments, constantly blocking our spiritual vision.
 
Through our cross we must develop our obedience like today’s man. We too must contemplate our Siloam, that is our baptism because our baptism has given us the potential to wash off the mud off our eyes. How? By daily dying to sin through the efforts of unseen warfare and rising with Christ, and then we can come back to Christ just as this man came back from Siloam and our spiritual eyes can see. We reach a level of maturity and then we can consciously follow Christ. Nothing else matters. Everything falls into place. 

Thursday, May 21, 2026. Ascension
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff

We spend the best part of the year preparing for Pascha and then rejoicing in the risen Lord. The joy of His resurrection speaks to us because He is one of us according to His human nature. However, as the righteous priest, Fr Alexei Mechev of Moscow (1859–1923) commented, there is a dissonant note amid the symphony of Paschal joy. The ikoshymn that is sung after the kontakion hymn of Pascha tells us that the Myrrh bearing Women cried out:  Let us weep and cry aloud. O Master arise, Thou who dost grant resurrection to the fallen! Fr Alexei would say, yes, Christ is risen but I am still fallen and thus I weep and cry aloud. 
This is where Ascension comes in.  Christ tells His disciples at the Mystical Supper that it is better for them that He should leave because he will send another Comforter, the Spirit of Truth. He, the Holy Spirit, will enable them too to become Christ-like. As we hear in today’s festal troparion hymn, the Lord had made the disciples joyful with the promise of the Holy Spirit and the blessing that He imparted to them as He was rising into heaven.  The Ascension is a powerful indication of God’s intent for mankind. As I have said before, the Holy Fathers comment that we human beings, unlike the animals, stand upright pointing to heaven, because this is our home, where we aspire to.  Lucifer has tried and is still trying to turn us human beings into animals, focussed on the earth.  He almost succeeded before the cataclysm during the time of Noah, when God said: My spirit will not remain with these people forever for they are flesh. How terrible! There was no place left for God in His people before the flood.  Today Christ returns to the Father, bringing His humanity with Him.  We are invited to come to the table as is depicted in the icon of the Holy Trinity. The church is a meal; the food is Christ God Himself Who enables us to rise from our fallen state. We hear in our church services the words that Christ has given us eternal life and great mercy.  This great mercy is spelt out in the event of the Ascension.  Humanity is invited to participate in the eternal supper with God.  What a great honour and mercy!  It begins from Pentecost, when the Apostolic Church starts to break the bread of the Eucharist. The Eucharist, though, is only a foretaste of the wedding feast of the age to come.  We sing in the 9th ode of the Paschal Canon: O great and most sacred Pascha, Christ! O Wisdom and Word and Power of God! Grant that we may partake of you fully in the day that has no evening of your Kingdom.

Sunday May 24, 2026
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
Today we remember the Fathers of the Nicaean Council in the fourth century. The troparion (central hymn) of today’s feast tells us that the preaching of the Apostles and the dogmas of the fathers speak of the same one faith of the church. St Paul, in the First 
Letter to Timothy, calls this the great mystery of Godliness. We express this faith without any words when we simply make the sign of the cross; we express the faith in the Holy Trinity - the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, – and we believe in One of the Holy Trinity becoming flesh through the love of the Cross.  Looking at the story of Nicaea, we see how, in the 4th century, Christians defined their faith with the same commitment of the apostles and martyrs in earlier generations.   This difficult journey of the church has continued with different challenges in each generation of its 2000-year history. 
 
Today the celebration of the Fathers coincides with the memory of the apostles of the Slavs, Sts Cyril and Methodius. It is hard to overestimate the importance of their work and their legacy. They evangelized the Slavs by giving them everything for faith and public worship including, arguably, the best translation into any language of the Scriptures and the Orthodox services. When Matushka and I with some of our family visited Rome not long ago, we were moved by our visit to the Basilica of St Clemente there.  There is so much in this 4th century temple that speaks of Sts Cyril and Methodius.  They brought the relics of St Clement there from Crimea needing to speak to the Pope of Rome, Adrian. St Cyril died in Rome and was buried in the basilica.    Our diocesan educational institute, the Sts Cyril and Methodius Orthodox Institute (SCMOI) also celebrates its patronal saints today. As I told the students, one of the ways the Eastern church has preserved the preaching of the apostles and the dogmas of the fathers better than in the West, is because the Eastern church used languages that people could understand. Sts Cyril and Methodius successfully argued in Rome against the prevailing idea that only the Hebrew, Greek and Latin could be used, and they received a blessing to use a local language in the Slavic Kingdom of Moravia. For that reason, they are not only the apostles of the Slavs, but they have enabled the church to preserve and spread its faith in every possible language all over the world.  It is still happening today and allowing us to spread the faith. As St Paul writes about this in his First Letter to Timothy: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by the angels, preached among the gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory.

Sunday May 30, 2026. Pentecost
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
We have reached Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Trinity! Christ, the Son of God, sends the Holy Spirit from the Father to the Apostles and the group of people with them – 120 in all – in one large room in Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Spirit is born! The Apostles receive the Fire of Grace. The Fire of Faith spread all over the world to all the tribes and nations. There had never been anything like this before in human history. That first group of 120 people were prepared with diligent prayers through the teaching of the Lord after the Ascension to receive the Holy Spirit. Three thousand people, as we read in the Book of Acts, were converted to the Lord on this day, after they had experienced the Holy Spirit in the sound of the powerful rushing wind and the apostles speaking in different languages, despite being simple Galilean fishermen, and  especially  through the sermon of Peter who explained what all this meant. 
 
We are present at Pentecost every time we come to a Liturgy. Whoever leads the prayer of the Eucharist asks God the Father to send down the Holy Spirit upon us and upon the Gifts, just as happened at Pentecost.  At this moment the priest can feel how much the congregation is participating in the prayer. Maybe it is sometimes better for the priest that he is unable to see what may be happening now, if some in the congregation are walking around in church and even talking to each other, especially at big events like Christmas. This is during the Eucharistic Canon!  Those who are rare visitors to church might not know what is really happening, but those who come regularly must know how important this is.  The Liturgy of the Faithful begins when the choir sings the Cherubic Hymn and continues through the hymn, “A mercy of peace” while the priest is reading the prayers of consecration. Somehow, we in the parish need to co-operate in overcoming this and learning to participate in the prayers.  It is crazy to not be aware of the importance of what is happening! In the early church, each family would bring the energy of the Holy Spirit back home, with burning hearts, after having been in church.    Consequently, pagan Rome and its world became Christian, imagine that! We, too, must come home with burning hearts.
 
In the 1950s and 1960s there was naïve optimism, following the tragedy of World War II. Now we are on the brink of World War III.  Some people even think it has begun. These current events should be making us think, especially when we come to church.  Many people spend hours, following the news, trying to make sense of all these world events. But this helps no one. What can help is for the Church to pray.  We must pray at home and especially at church, where grace abounds.  Today we celebrate the coming down of the grace of the Holy Spirit; Pentecost 2000 years ago transformed the world. Today the Holy Spirit is still with us. Pentecost can- and will continue- but only if we are serious about wanting it to continue. 

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