Sermons & Homilies
If any parent could be accused of spoiling their children, God would fall most of all under this reproach. Look how God spoils us, so to say, as is represented by the parable: when we desire to take our reasoning mind, existence, and freedom selfishly into our own hands, and use them independently of God, the Lord allows our departure from Him, though He is grieved.
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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into sin, or from painful circumstances of body or soul, or from our brother, or by the feeling of God’s grace having withdrawn from our soul, or from all of these together, or a combination of some of them.
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How should we live? The question is presented today, on Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week, because despite how we have spent the whole of Lent, despite how we have lived our life up until now; knowing what we do about the world’s situation, and seeing the ease by which our whole country and the entire world can simply come undone - how should we live?
The miraculous event we commemorate today—the mystery hidden before the ages and unknown even to the angels—has its origins even outside of time, and so it had been at work already for millennia. Today is fulfilled God’s promise to faithful Abraham that in his seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.
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What is the gate of repentance which leads to divine and eternal life in God? The awareness of our sinfulness before Him. Such an awareness of sin came to St. Mary whom all Orthodox Christians commemorate today as a lofty standard of true, life-transforming repentance. However, as we see from her life, an awareness of our sins is often brought about by a seeming misfortune, or impasse, or perplexity in our life.
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