March Sermons 2025

​Sunday March 2
by Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
Cheese fare Sunday is also known as Forgiveness Sunday. The church is a loving mother and wants us to enter the holy days of Lent in a state of Christ’s peace with everyone. That is why we ask for forgiveness today. Today we heard the passage from Matthew Chapter 6 from the Sermon on the Mount. Here the Lord speaks about three things: forgiving our neighbour as a condition of receiving forgiveness from God, fasting unhypocritically and without showing off, and striving for heavenly spiritual treasures. The excerpt from today’s Epistle, Romans chap13-14, speaks of spiritual effort rather than about eating or not eating certain things. St Paul enjoins us to walk honestly, openly, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in debauchery and wantonness, not in strife and envy. Further, not to conduct disputes over opinions. That is something that happens much today, especially on social media. It is a big temptation to argue about opinions. We should not pass judgement on people whether-and how- they fast. 
Let us now return to the focus of today’s main theme - forgiveness. Just before today’s passage, the Lord gave His prayer, Our Father. In this prayer, He expands on one of the petitions:  And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. It is interesting that some of the early Christian writers shuddered and could not fathom the meaning of this word ‘as’ in this part of the prayer.  Clearly God’s love and forgiveness is infinitely greater than our ability to love and forgive so there cannot be any equal sign between those. The word “as” is not an equal sign! The Lord then adds that if we forgive, we will be forgiven. If we at least have the desire to forgive, we already are open to God’s grace to grow further in terms of connecting with our neighbour, having compassion for our neighbour, and  understanding our neighbour, 
Dear Brother and Sisters, we have precious weeks of Lent, coming up from tomorrow. It is not by accident that the church remembers Adam’s loss of paradise today because we are meant to start thinking seriously during Lent about how we get that paradise back. The Publican and the Good Thief knew what to say.  Their hearts were in the right place, and they pleaded: Lord have mercy, forgive me, remember me. Adam and the Good Thief are the two persons placed at the beginning of this whole period and at the end. 
The more we understand about ourselves, the more we understand our need to be forgiven, the easier it becomes to forgive other people. This is what Lent is for, to understand ourselves. It becomes easier to forgive people who offend us, who hurt us, or who make us feel dishonour when we understand how much forgiveness we ourselves need. 
The next step is to understand and accept is these things are allowed by God. He has allowed this difficult person to come into our lives, to heal our failures, and our sins. These sins are always failures in our ability to love. Every single sin is that, either we fail to love God, or we fail to love our neighbour. 
Lord, forgive me, teach me to love you by learning to forgive, and to accept my neighbour.

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Sunday March 9
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is called the Sunday of Orthodoxy because it commemorates the restoration of icon veneration in the year 842AD following two long periods of iconoclasm that began in the year 726. Today is seen as the completion of a long period when the church had to deal with major heresies beginning with the Arian heresy in 325 AD at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea. 
 Our two readings today were from Hebrews chapters 11 and 12, and John chapter 1, the wonderful story of the calling of Nathaniel.  These two passages speak of faith from seeing. There is faith from hearing, and there is faith from seeing.  The Gospel story today tells us how Nathaniel first believed his friend, Phillip, when Phillip told him that they had found Him of whom Moses and the prophets had written, Jesus of Nazareth.  Nathaniel had some doubts: Can anything good come out of Nazareth? But Phillip insisted: Come and see! What do we hear next?  An extraordinary dialogue ensues between Christ and Nathaniel.  Christ God sees Nathaniel praying under the fig tree before Phillip called him.  According to the holy fathers, Nathaniel had been praying for the Messiah to come. How was this encounter possible?  Notice that as Nathaniel and Phillip are coming up close enough to Christ surrounded by a crowd of people, the Lord says: Behold an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile. It means Nathaniel had a pure heart.  Later, in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord would say: Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.  
We have travelled through the first week of Lent on the journey towards Resurrection.  These weeks are given to us precisely to work on our hearts. Those of you who attended the first four evenings last week would have heard two readings.  The first reading comes from the catacomb writings of the Russian church probably before the beginning of World War II in the late 1930s.  It is called “This is from Me” (from God) and it explains that all the difficulties which come our way are sent or allowed to happen by God for our benefit.  They humble us, which means they purify our hearts.  The other reading from last week was chapter 10 of the book, Dorotheus of Gaza,  “Travelling the Way of God with Vigil and Sobriety”.  We heard the elder say, “For everyone who prays to God, God give me humility, ought to know that he is asking that God sends him someone to mistreat him!  When we ask for humility, we are asking for a difficult person to come our way, either for a short time or for longer!
Here is the lesson for Lent:  accept the words that are said to you- meekly.  When somebody says something unpleasant, restrain from retaliating with hurtful words.  This is a very important challenge. Please, just try it!  You will see what a difference it makes when you restrain yourself and do not retaliate.  It is necessary to practice this and gradually we will come to a measure of humility and purity of heart.