Sermons & Homilies
I’m struck every year at how different Theophany is from the feast of Nativity. These two feast used to be one, and the services for both share many structural similarities, yet for all that, the spiritual character, the flavor, the personality of each is completely different.
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My brothers and sisters, we have just heard one of the most important Gospel parables which the Lord ever spoke. At the heart of the Christian religion is forgiveness — and how our hearts yearn for such forgiveness! For who among us does not know — at least somewhere in the depths of our heart — that we too owe just such an immeasurable debt as did the servant in today’s Gospel? Who among us does not feel — at least from time to time — the same sense of complete desperation, the sense that it is utterly beyond our power to set aright all the countless mistakes we have made in our lives, to mend all that we have broken, to heal all the harm that we have done? Who among us does not realize — at least in moments of honest sobriety — that there is nothing left for us to do than to fall down before God and beg for mercy?
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Today is the Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, whereon we commemorate St. Gregory as the defender of the Christian’s experience of God. He affirmed that this is how the Orthodox Church’s theology came to be - by direct revelation from God to holy men and women in the Church whom the grace of God had transformed.
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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into sin, or from painful circumstances of body or soul, or from our brother, or by the feeling of God’s grace having withdrawn from our soul, or from all of these together, or a combination of some of them.
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Let us make this yearly renewal of the vows we took in baptism, for Christ did not shed His Spirit upon us so abundantly to no purpose, but rather that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works (Tit. 2:14).
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