Excerpts from Sermons: Salvation is a Question of Relationships...
By Fr. Andrew Malakhovsky
The Church is our life. It is our opportunity to live
mindfully and to be fully human. A human being as an image of God can only
exist in the Church. When we lose connection to the Church, the Divine
principle in us starts to wear off. The Lord created humans with a potential and
a calling to dwell in the paradise as the image and the likeness of God.
However, a person who leaves God and severs his ties with God, loses that
paradise. Adam and Eve lost the paradise, and we are also riddled with
passions, instability, and incompleteness, but regardless of all that, being as
we are in the Church, in the relationship with God, in prayer, we are in the
blissful paradise. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy in the
Boarding Home on October 20, 2017)
By Fr. Valery Zakharov
If we get
accustomed to talking with God, He will reign inside us, and this will be the
fellowship that will deliver righteous words, righteous thoughts, and righteous
actions. It is impossible to accomplish all that without God. It appears to us
that we do the right things, more or less, but it’s vague and prone to
momentary change. Only the aspects that are tied to God — his blessing, his
actions — are eternal. (Sermon before the Confession in the Boarding
Home for Children with Special Needs on October 20, 2017)
The
Israelites left Egypt to reach the Promised Land. Everything that happened with
them on their way (manna, etc.) was just a means for them to pull through. We
should also direct our efforts towards moving closer to God. The desert of our
hearts is, perhaps, as big and dry as the desert that the Israelites had to
cross. We may hope that there are fresh water fountains somewhere in that
desert but it’s an illusion. A human being does not possess the fountain of
life. God is the only life-giving fountain. When we partake of the Holy
Eucharist, we are filled with grace that allows us to keep thinking and
functioning. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy in the
Boarding Home for Children with Special Needs on March 4, 2017)
If you
evaluate someone, you will always come to judge him or her. Horses sometimes wear blinkers that keep them
from freaking out if they see something unexpected. We don’t have blinkers,
that’s why we jump at shadows. One must make his own blinkers and stop judging
others. It does not mean that we must ignore everything that’s happening around
us. Saints used to see more than we are capable of. They saw farther and deeper
than we do. They were aware of the fact that humans are prone to sinning;
however, they also knew that sins may go away, and the former sinners would
then become holy. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy in the
Boarding Home for Children with Special Needs on October 21, 2017)
By Fr. George
Glinsky
There are
wonderful and profound words in one of the Old Testament books, “Can a woman
forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her
womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee” (Isaiah 49:15). This is
what the Lord says through one of his prophets. We are the New Israel, and we
know that the God of Christians is the God who does not simply accept our love
and adoration. Our love is, in fact, a reflection — a reaction — to his care
about us. The God of Christians is different from the gods worshiped by pagans
in that He sacrifices himself so that every one of us will not perish but will
have everlasting life. (Sermon after the All-Night Vigil on October
10, 2017)
By Fr. Demetrius Basalygo
I was
visiting the boarding home for the mentally challenged, and there was a patient
who basically managed to express the entire experience of the fallen world and
the fallen human being. When they called him to have him anointed with holy oil
and sprinkled with holy water, he declared, “They do them, I do me, God does
him.” These dreadful words are the essence of what happened during the Fall,
when everyone and everything was separated and fell apart. That’s the way of
death. The Lord, however, came to re-unite us. He came to restore the unity
among us and with himself, so that we could have eternal life through this
unity. This is the crux of what the Church offers us. Salvation is a question of relationships, a question pertaining to the unity of life. (Sermon
after the Divine Liturgy on October 13, 2017)
By Fr. Eugene Pavelchuk
The Devil is very crafty: he can lead an individual astray
little by little, so that the person loses the track of salvation without even
noticing it. Sometimes, it seems to us that rules are inviolable. Of course,
rules are rules, but there is the letter of the Law, and there is the Spirit.
So if we go by the letter of the law, we can assume that we should take
everything literally. How do you interpret the letters of the law? Are you sure
that you understand what they really mean? More often than not, people use
their own reasoning, their logical faculty, to discern the truth, as if their
logical thinking is the criterion of truth. That’s a delusion. This is why one
should be humble and obey more experienced and knowledgeable members of the
Church. Don’t be so arrogant as to think that you are able to determine what is
right and what is wrong. The Spirit is recognised by spirit, not reason. The
spirit of love lives in one’s heart. By this, I mean the innermost of one’s
heart, not its emotional aspect. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy on September
19, 2017)
January 11, 2018
St.
Elisabeth Convent
