Sermons & Homilies – Holy Cross Monastery

Jan 12, 2025

The Fullness of Time: On Patient Endurance - Sermon for the Sunday after Nativity (2025)

You who are sick from the pleasures of this world, thirsty in this barren desert, hungry from the secular diet; your Physician has been born to bring health to your soul; You who are barren and made sterile by our present world, the Giver of Life has come; You who are bereft of virtue, behold the author of your course and encourager in the race; You who live in darkness, the New Day has dawned with the rising of the day-star in your heart; You who are dead, Life has come into the world; When the crowds declare that God is dead, the angels, the shepherds, the Magi, in unison, declare, “Christ Immanuel is born!”

Jan 07, 2025

Christ Is Born! Receive Him! - Sermon for the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ (2025)

Who knows the inner meaning of this Feast? They alone who have experienced barrenness and deadness of soul and now feel pulsing within their very veins the life-giving energy of God Who dwells within them. To taste life, we must experience death. To be thankful for sweetness, we must endure bitterness.

Dec 31, 2024

Turn Everything into Prayer - Sermon for the Feast of the Conception of the Theotokos (2024)

Today we commemorate the conception of the Most Holy Mother of God. This Feast is a little forefeast of the Great Feast of the Nativity of Our God, set amidst the struggles of the Nativity Fast to impart hope and consolation to those worn down, suffering spiritual barrenness, just as the Feast of the Cross is set amidst the struggles of Great Lent when we journey towards the Salvific Crucifixion and Transforming Resurrection of Christ.

Dec 29, 2024

Will You Come to the Feast? - A Sermon for the 27th Sunday After Pentecost & the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers (2024)

All our lives on this earth have been given to us for this one purpose: to decide whether we want to be with God for all eternity, or whether we would really prefer for Him to simply leave us alone. Perhaps it seems to us impossible that we would ever, like the Gadarenes (cf. Luke 8:26-39), ask God to go away. But, my brothers and sisters, we must all ask ourselves: how many times a day do we, too, “[begin] to make excuse” (Luke 14:18), offering to God (as well as to ourselves) various justifications for the fact that all sorts of other things so often seem more necessary and important to us than being with Him? To put it another way: do we often find ourselves looking for every opportunity to lay earthly things aside and spend more time in prayer? Or do we often find ourselves looking for every excuse to lay prayer aside, and spend more time immersed in the cares and pleasures of this world? Thank God, we have been given all our lives to repent, to learn at long last to make the right decision when we hear His divine call. But, my brothers and sisters, this does not mean we do not have to make the decision until the end of our life finally arrives. No, we make this decision constantly, every minute of every hour of every day: do we want to be with God, or not? In each and every moment, we accept or refuse God’s invitation to His Heavenly Banquet.

Dec 15, 2024

What Shall We Do to Inherit Eternal Life? - Homily on the 25th Sunday after Pentecost

Around the year 271, there was a young man who lived in Lower Egypt, born to wealthy landowner parents, both of whom only then recently died, leaving the young man to care for his little sister and the upkeep of the family home. This young man went to the Divine Services one day, and while there he heard the Gospel which we have just heard. A friend, writing about this experience, says that the young man realized this passage had been read for his sake, and he immediately left the church, gave away all the land that he had inherited, and then sold his possessions, distributing the money to the poor, and saving some for his sister. This young man we know as St. Antony the Great...