By Father Valery Zaharov
Sometimes
I come to a confession and tell about things that I did but this is not
repentance, it’s a report of my actions. Repentance begins when my soul starts
feeling sad because I did something wrong; it begins when I ask God to correct
me. There is no set standard for it. Everyone has his own measure and of course
it keeps shifting all the time. It does not originate from us: we ask God to
give us this opportunity to see and repent. (Sermon Before a Confession in the Boarding Home for Children with
Special Needs on December 30, 2016)
By Father Andrew Lemeshonok
The world
is always trying to keep us on leash, it keeps saying, “Live and be happy but
never look higher than your own nose.” The Church, on the other hand, calls us
to “lift up our hearts.” The Church offers us – the dirty ones, defiled and deformed by sin – to taste the holies of holies. Just come and
partake of the Body and the Blood. This is the Life, the New Life that must
reign supreme in each one of us.
***
We must
become free. We can achieve this freedom only when we start following Christ
till the end, when we begin to trust God. It takes a lot of pain. You can’t
achieve it on your way to something else: you have to sweat and spend years
struggling for real prayer – for these three words “Lord have mercy,” which
must take roots inside your heart and not just be uttered by your mouth. (Sermon
after the All-Night Vigil on August 27, 2016)
By Father Sergius Nezhbort
Andrey
Rublev, a classic film by Tarkovsky, contains a horrorful episode when the
Mongols break into the city. We see a devastated church. It is snowing inside
the church because the dome is destroyed, and icons are burning… Something
similar happens to our soul when we allow sin to dwell in us, when we give in
to a temptation. It takes a lot of effort to restore everything after such
rampage. This is why we should try to keep the enemy, who always besieges our
inner city, at bay; we should try to keep up our defence. We should remember
that God’s presence inside a human’s heart is sacred, so we should treat it
with immense care. We should also treat people around us with great care,
because people are sacred, too. However, we often treat each other with little
respect. Our close and not-so-close friends and acquaintances annoy us, and we
sometimes want to simply be let alone. In fact, if we attempt to see God in the
people around us, if we recall that the Lord dwells in their hearts as well as
in ours, this will help and invigorate us. (Sermon
after the Divine Liturgy on October 16, 2016)
By Father Sergius Phalei
The Lord
wants the soul of every person to be God’s dominion. He wants us to do all it
takes to make sure that our hearts are always open to the Lord. This is why we
undertake this labor - spiritual labor. We learn to live with God. We learn
to preserve and value what we receive (and we mostly receive it in the church)
thanks to our living as Christians, thanks to our trying to do more good in our
lives, trying to support, help, and comfort our neighbour. May God help each
person to have a heart like this - a pure, humble, and loving heart. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy on January
13, 2017)
***
We
believe that sorrows and even death of a believer who tolerates everything with
faith and accepts everything as if from God’s hand will eventually turn out as
joy for him: joy in the Lord, joy from inheritance of eternal life.
***
It will
cost us a lot of sorrows to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. We have a lot of
troubles but in these troubles we have the Lord and the Church, which protects,
cares, cleanses, restores us and gives us life like a loving mother. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy on January
6, 2017)
By Father Dmitrius Basalygo
Humans
have known about asceticism, purity, and freedom from passions long before the
advent of Christ. Think Buddha, yoga masters, Oriental religions and
philosophies that are older than Christianity. People felt that they had to
struggle for their lives, their purity. They felt that passions could kill a
man and break him into pieces. However, it wasn’t until Christ came to this
world that this struggle started to make sense. You see, you can fight your
passions, and more than that - you can even win and become free from them - but
you can still be thinking like flesh. How is this? It means you can still be
unable to grasp what salvation and unity with God means and what the purpose of
Christian life is, but instead trust yourself, your natural qualities, your own
purity. Isn’t this self-hope a characteristic of flesh? True asceticism is
always an endeavour to free oneself from everything that separates us from God
and other people, namely, passions and sins. We receive the fullness of life
through the Divine Liturgy, through the Eucharist, but we still continue to put
our hopes on ourselves even in the midst of it, and we queue for confession
hoping for our inborn qualities and expecting to improve them. In fact, we walk
past the Life itself. Aren’t we driven by the flesh, all the while thinking
that we are led by the spirit? (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy on January
10, 2017)
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