Sermons & Homilies
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.
Today, we enter the period of the Lenten Triodion, which includes the three weeks before Lent begins and continues up to Holy and Great Saturday. The purpose of everything that takes place during this period is to remind us of the entirety of God’s benevolence towards us.
“Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” With these words our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ begins His public ministry. “Repent” is the word the Church gives us at the beginning of the year. This Gospel is placed here not just because it takes place chronologically after Christ’s baptism (which we are still celebrating), but also because it signals the approach of Lent.
You who are sick from the pleasures of this world, thirsty in this barren desert, hungry from the secular diet; your Physician has been born to bring health to your soul; You who are barren and made sterile by our present world, the Giver of Life has come; You who are bereft of virtue, behold the author of your course and encourager in the race; You who live in darkness, the New Day has dawned with the rising of the day-star in your heart; You who are dead, Life has come into the world; When the crowds declare that God is dead, the angels, the shepherds, the Magi, in unison, declare, “Christ Immanuel is born!”
