Sermons & Homilies

The Gates of Death: A Sermon on the Meeting of the Lord (2018)

We all have a choice before us: will we willingly accept suffering and death for the sake of the love of God, and so behold those very things being transformed into joy and blessedness and life eternal? Or will we run and hide from suffering and death — only to find, at the end of all things, that we cannot run and hide any longer, and that having refused to meet Christ in them, we are left with suffering and death alone, forever stripped of Christ and of all meaning? To suffer and to die are inevitable. Our only choice is for what we will suffer, and to what we will die.

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Turn Everything into Prayer - Sermon for the Feast of the Conception of the Theotokos (2024)
Today we commemorate the conception of the Most Holy Mother of God. This Feast is a little forefeast of the Great Feast of the Nativity of Our God, set amidst the struggles of the Nativity Fast to impart hope and consolation to those worn down, suffering spiritual barrenness, just as the Feast of the Cross is set amidst the struggles of Great Lent when we journey towards the Salvific Crucifixion and Transforming Resurrection of Christ.
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Fair as the Moon, Bright as the Sun, Terrible as an Army Set in Array - A Sermon for the Nativity of the Theotokos (2024)

Truly, the “whole mystery of… salvation” today begins to be revealed. Every promise that God ever made — from Adam to Noah, from Abraham to David, from the patriarchs to the prophets — now finally begins to be fulfilled, in the person of the Most Holy Theotokos. St. Andrew of Crete declares that She is the “clear fulfillment of the whole of prophecy, of the truth of Scriptures inspired by God, the living and most pure book of God and the Word in which, without voice or writing, the Writer Himself, God and Word, is everyday read.”

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A Feast of Mystery and Praise - Homily on the Feast of Dormition (2024)
Our life brims and overflows with a constant awareness of the interpenetration of the spiritual and material world but also of the created and uncreated world, and this is most true when we step into the church. We arise in the morning and pray, thanking God for a new day, and we use our hands to feed ourselves. We enter the church, and the created spiritual world is present in the form of angels and saints; and the uncreated grace of God transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, through which, Christ tells us, the life of God comes to abide in us and animate us (John 6.35). 
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