Sermons & Homilies
Now that we finish celebrating the liturgical cycle of the Lord’s birth, the Church, like Symeon, directs our gaze to the Cross and death of the Lord. She tells us, in effect, that if we want to find rest in God and greet death joyfully like Symeon, then we must embrace the Cross of the Lord. If we want to say like Symeon, “I have enough,” a sword must also pierce our hearts.
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God is always providing a means to grant us humility. But humility cannot be acquired without humiliation. Humiliation comes about either through our interior passions and falls into sin, or from painful circumstances of body or soul, or from our brother, or by the feeling of God’s grace having withdrawn from our soul, or from all of these together, or a combination of some of them.
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Our brother is our life. We’ve all heard this saying before. But have we really grasped it yet? Have we actually started to live it ourselves? Does it bear any relation to how we experience each day of our monastic life? Even in the monastery—or we might say, especially in the monastery—the force of this saying can be lost on us. Instead, we see our brethren as obstacles to be overcome, as burdens to be endured, as competitors to be defeated, or nuisances to be ignored.
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When we consider our death, do we approach it with a dreadful fear of God, or do we approach it with a sober and conscientious love toward God?
In today’s epistle reading, the Apostle Paul is writing to his spiritual son Timothy, and this will be the last epistle that the Apostle will ever write, because, as he says, “the time of my departure is at hand,” (2 Tim. 4.6ff) because he is soon to go on to Rome where he will be executed and die a martyr’s death under Nero.
Today is the Feast of the Nativity, whereon we commemorate the Incarnation of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. So great is this feast-day that even centuries of unprecedented godlessness and apostasy have been unable to erase it...
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