Sermons & Homilies
Today we have the opportunity to celebrate a feast which is unique in our Church calendar, the feast of the Angels. All of the other saints which we celebrate, like St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, St. Herman of Alaska, St. Seraphim of Sarov, and so many others, were human beings, flesh and blood just like us. But today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Archangel Michael and all the nine ranks of the holy, heavenly, bodiless hosts – including our own Guardian Angels. Because they are spiritual and bodiless, we relate to them in spiritual ways. Because we are earthly and weighed down with worldly cares and passions, this feast presents a great challenge for us.
The parable in today’s Gospel of the Rich Man and Lazarus, on the surface seems very clear to us, the rich man had every thing that this world could give him, he was clothed in the finest purple and linen, he ate the best gourmet food every day, he had great wealth, a good name and status among his fellow-citizens. He had all he wanted because … all he wanted was what this world could give him. He believed that material wealth, respect and admiration from those around him and obedience from those under him was all he really needed. And so he lived his life this way and felt satisfied, oblivious to the needs of those around him.
When the pious Empress Helena discovered the Precious and Life-giving Cross of the Lord, she had it brought to the Temple of the Resurrection, where the Patriarch Macarius exalted it in the sight of all. Seeing the Cross of the Lord, all the faithful rejoiced and bowed down reverently before it, offering worship to Him Who was crucified thereon. And even today, when Orthodox Christians behold the elevation of the Precious Cross, we rejoice and cry out to the Cross as if it were alive, saying, “Rejoice, precious Cross. Help us, O life-giving Cross.”
There is no great event which is not proceeded with great longing and expectation. This Great Feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God is no exception. This first of Feasts, celebrated on the eighth day of the New Church Year, was certainly preceded by great longing and expectation. First, we have the longing of the blessed parents of the Blessed Ever-Virgin, Joachim and Anna. Finding themselves childless even in old age and thus ashamed in front of Jewish society, they pleaded with God to relieve them of the curse of childlessness, a shame which even caused Joachim to be rejected from his service at the Temple and which sent him into the wilderness to plead with the Lord. Joachim and Anna did not lose their faith or cease their prayers even when it seemed that all the law of nature was set against them because of their age. Rather, they lived and prayed with longing and the expectation of deliverance. Secondly, we have the longing and travail of the human race itself, which was until the dawn of Grace laboring under the yoke of the old law, the condemnation of the sin of our first ancestors, and the corruption of death. The people of the world had descended to such a state of moral degradation that it hardly seemed possible to redeem mankind. Indeed, it would take the very entry of God Himself, incarnate, into human history in order to save mankind inasmuch as the law was powerless to save it. Mankind, like Anna, was barren, not bringing forth fruit. The whole world was in longing, and the righteous, such as Joachim and Anna and Symeon the God-Receiver, were filled with expectation.
