Sermons & Homilies – Tagged "2020"– Page 6 – Holy Cross Monastery

4 comments ·Mar 22, 2020

The Coronavirus and the Cross of Christ

We have reached today the midpoint of the Fast. Half of the struggle is behind us, and the second half still lies ahead. And seeing our weakness, seeing our faintness of heart and the ease with which we can tire and grow despondent, on this Sunday our mother the Holy Church mercifully offers us hope and refreshment, comfort and consolation. But the form which this takes is not at all what “common sense” might imagine. Of the events yet to come, of the prizes which we are running to obtain, the Church does not offer a prefigurement of Pascha and the resurrection, but rather of Holy Friday and the Cross.

Mar 08, 2020

Public Orthodoxy - A Sermon for the First Sunday of Great Lent (2020)

Our present feast is not just a feast of the victory of truth over falsehood in the abstract—but of truth’s triumph in public sphere, of its open proclamation, its universal acknowledgment, and its sanction by the earthly authorities. Orthodoxy, we see, is a thoroughly public affair.

Mar 01, 2020

Compassion and the Path to Our Forgiveness - A Homily on Forgiveness Sunday (2020)

There is no one who comes to Christ in repentance, who will not receive forgiveness, therefore how can it be amongst us that if we have been forgiven that we cannot find the ability to forgive others?

Feb 15, 2020

Patient Endurance and the Tribulations of the Christian Life - A Homily on the Meeting of Our Lord (2020)

Today is the fortieth day since we celebrated the Nativity of Christ. On this day, we celebrate the Meeting of the Lord. In the book of Exodus, the Lord gave the command to Moses: “Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal.” (13.1-2, cf. Luke 2.23). Today, we celebrate this event, as Christ is brought into the Temple by his parents and we note their obedience to the Law, and this particular law which acknowledges God’s beneficence.

Jan 07, 2020

A Sermon for the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ (2020)

The carnal and Jewish-minded man, says St. John of the Ladder, prepares for Feasts by arranging what foods he can enjoy on them; but the spiritual Israelite, the true Christian, seeks the spiritual recompenses which are bestowed on the Feast Days. The Jewish-minded man paints within his mind with great expectation all the dishes he can glut himself with and all the dainties he can gulp down; but the spiritual man seeks how he can slake his spiritual thirst and sate his spiritual starvation.