Sermons & Homilies
Today we celebrate a great synaxis of Holy Elders, Elders who are, with the Optina Elders, spiritual children of the great St. Paisy Velichkovsky. I want to focus on one word of one of these Elders. Of course, it comes from my patron saint, St. Makary of Glinsk. It is the only direct piece of advice you hear from him in the short life contained within the Glinsk Patericon. There are many more in the longer version of his life.
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My brothers and sisters, today we have already reached the final Sunday of Great Lent. In only a few short days, we will once again see Christ resurrecting Lazarus the Four Days Dead; we will once again follow Him as He makes His Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; we will once again become witnesses to the great and fearsome events of Holy Week; and finally, we will once again share together in the incomparable joy and exultation of Pascha night. But today, on this last Sunday of the Fast, the Holy Church sets before our eyes that which is the spiritual crown of the entire Lenten season: the life of our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt.
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I think most, if not all of us, are familiar with St. John Climacus, and his eloquent, witty, and above all soul-saving teaching found in the Ladder, moderately balanced between stern spiritual sobriety and loving fatherly humor. This is the reason for his significance in the Church for both monks and laity, revealed by a whole Sunday during Great Lent being dedicated to him. Because of the shortness of time allotted to a Sunday sermon, I want to focus on just one aspect of his teaching.
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The feast of St. Gregory Palamas this Sunday is a second Triumph of Orthodoxy. It was first instituted less than 10 years after St. Gregory reposed in the Lord. This is a remarkable fact. This ought to tell us something. It says, our Fathers recognized something so important and essential in the life and teaching of St. Gregory that they did not hesitate to accord it public veneration and to praise it with sacred hymns, even while he was within living memory.
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Lent is the recalling to Paradise of those who have been cast out; it proclaims the truth to those deceived by the devil; and it announces sight to the blind, guidance to the lost, a haven for the storm-tossed; it is the announcement of life in Christ to those dead in sin, a life in a world that kills the soul.
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