Sermons & Homilies
Within the church on earth there are Christians and there are non-Christians, or, as Christ teaches, there exist the wheat and there exist the tares, dwelling side by side (cf. Matt. 13.24-30). Such will it be until the end of the ages. Such is also the picture painted by Christ in today’s Gospel reading where there is found within the wedding banquet one who is not wearing a wedding garment.
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The Feast of Pentecost, also called “Trinity Sunday,” is a Feast which affirms the role of the Trinity in the creation of the material world and the role of the Trinity in the recreation of humanity who at one time only looked down towards the earth and towards earthly delights, but now is able to look up to the heavens and the delights that come from the heavenly world.
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The life of an Orthodox Christian is not like the life of any other person. The life of an Orthodox Christian is lived within the cycle of the Divine Services of the Church which revolve around Pascha, the feast of feasts. The forty days which follow Pascha are termed the Paschal season. Traditionally, converts were received into the Church through Baptism on Pascha.
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Perseverance is not just waiting. Waiting and thinking. Waiting anxiously. Waiting and despairing. It is not biding time until the problem (or worse, the person) goes away. Perseverance is a positive action. It is turning away from ourselves and our problems and our failures and looking toward Christ.
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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into sin, or from painful circumstances of body or soul, or from our brother, or by the feeling of God’s grace having withdrawn from our soul, or from all of these together, or a combination of some of them.
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