Sermons & Homilies

We have now reached the end of the most eventful week of the Forty Day Fast, as we celebrate the life of our venerable Mother, Mary of Egypt.

The details of this life are well-known to any faithful Orthodox Christian. They are not very complicated: the chief of sinners becomes the greatest of saints. This story has repeated itself many times throughout the life of the Church. But St. Mary’s life is without doubt one of the clearest and most striking examples, rivalling even the wonderful and unlooked for conversion of the Apostle Paul. As with the great Apostle, so with St. Mary, we see our Lord Jesus Christ show[ing] forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting (1 Tim. 1:16).

Lent is a small classroom of Orthodoxy within a larger university of Orthodoxy. It is the recalling to Paradise of those who fell away; it is the pronouncement of the resurrection of those dead in sin to life in Christ; it reveals the truth to those deceived by the devil; and it announces sight to the blind, guidance to the lost, a haven for the storm-tossed, and life in a world which kills.

“Sin itself leads us unto God,” says St. John of Karpathos, the great consoler of monks and all those who despair, but he quickly adds, “if we repent.” This is a bold saying, but everyone who has fed themselves on the swine-food of filthy passions, arrogant sins and wretched thoughts, knows this to be true. But only when they feel suffocated and starved, betrayed and deceived by the false shimmering beauty and quickly-passing pleasure of sin, and from such a wretched state cast their eyes to heaven and call upon God in utter humility, confessing their sinful apostasy from Him, their blatant and ungrateful rejection of His infinite gifts and their demonic delusion which sought to live and enjoy itself apart from Life Himself.