Sunday, March 29, 2026: St. Mary of Egypt
HEBREWS 9:11-14
MARK 10:32-45
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Christ is in our midst.
Today we are commemorating on this Sunday of Lent, our Holy Mother, St. Mary of Egypt. And of course, St. Mary is important for all of us. She is our patron. She is the protector and the inspiration to our community here. But she is, without a doubt, one of the most important saints in the modern time. Because St. Mary is afflicted mightily with this disease that so many of us have either been infected with or are currently infected with.
And the Sunday of St. Mary, we sometimes can even think upon her. We can think about her life. We just read her life on Wednesday. We can think about the difficulties, and I mean the uncomfortableness of her life. When we read her life, one can almost blush. The shame. The darkness. These things that she brought upon herself.
Because you see, St. Mary brought it upon herself. She says that when I was a child, I believe she says when I was a young girl, 12 years old, I left the love of my parents. St. Mary left her home intentionally, driven by this lust. And as she says to Zosima, worse than a prostitute, because she did these things not for pay. She did these things purely out of her lust. She was poor. She begged and she wove flax to survive. Her lust blinded her. She didn’t even have the common sense to charge for her sin. She was so driven by it. It’s madness. It’s madness. And so St. Mary is brought to something worse than an animal. And so too many of us now have that experience. Too many of us know what that feels like to be brought to such depths. This is why she’s so important.
But to be clear, what makes her important isn’t so much that she demonstrates that the sin that we have all been enraptured with, it’s ancient. That it’s primal. We don’t need St. Mary to show us that. We feel it in our bones. We feel the lust and the sin in our bodies. We see it everywhere in our world. Everywhere. Everything is tainted with it. We don’t need her to show us that.
Why do we need her? Because St. Mary reminds the world something that the world has forgotten. That those who are caught in lust often forget. And that is that God loves them. This is what they forget. They forget that even though they’re in this state of being worse than an animal, being pulled into the black mirror, communing with demons – because this is what it is, it’s communing with demons, it’s the devil’s iconography. Worse than animals. When we are pulled into this, despair is next. And then after despair comes the most blackest of indifference. And we can forget that God loves us.
So what are we to do? If you remember in the life of St. Mary, what is the thing that woke her up? She came to the door of the church. And she was forbidden to enter. This is what woke her up. This very action of drawing a boundary, giving a boundary to the one who had no boundary. You see, the penance is what healed her. It was the cold water in her face sobering her up. This is what beckoned her.
And make no mistake, that was the love of God. That was the love of God. And that is why so many languish in the filth of their lust. That’s why. Because that waking up, they don’t recognize it as the love of God, and it is. You see, St. Mary says something very interesting.
She says, when she’s talking to Zosima, she says that she’s surprised that the seas didn’t swallow her up when she was on the way to Alexandria fornicating with the sailors. She’s surprised that the earth didn’t open up when she was pulling the village people into her sin. But she says, because Christ desired my salvation. She was guarded by her baptism, she says, and she says that Christ desired her salvation. And so Christ stopped her from coming into the church. That was her penance.
That was her wake-up call. You see, cutting her off like that is what inspired her. Have you ever noticed the more that you’re left to your vices, the less and less things are good? Less pleasure, less enjoyment. Everything becomes gray, and eventually everything becomes black and numb. But when you’re given that wake-up call, then something begins to happen. You’re spurned to action.
You’re inspired. Because the penance isn’t a punishment, it’s medicine to wake up. And St. Mary woke up, and she became inspired. And in that inspiration, that’s what carried her, not just across the Jordan, but to labor for decades in the desert. How does one labor for decades in a desert without inspiration? St. Mary did that for decades off of one vision, one penance, and one Holy Communion. Decades.
And forgive me, us, who are so obese with our spiritual food, frequent communion, chat whenever you want, prayers, services. No. Sometimes we need the penance. Sometimes we need what the Lord sends us to wake us up, to inspire us. It was always within St. Mary to do that. Not the sin, by the way. It was always within her to become a saint. Always. God designed her such. And when He sent his correction, things went into process, and the transformation began. And it’s the same for all of you.
But you have to recognize, and this is the key thing for this generation now, the weakness, the insolence, the pride. The disdaining of correction is why so many are left in lust. Period. When you accept the correction that God sends you, that difficulty, that being denied something, that is the penance.
That is the thing that will wake you up, and that is the thing that will inspire you. What was in St. Mary, and this is what’s tragic, but I hope you all take it as wonderful. What was in St. Mary is in every single one of you. And I’m not speaking of the lust again. I’m speaking of the potential to be inspired and to become something higher than an animal.
You were not created for lust. Your body was not designed for that. It was designed to worship God. You are the poiéma, as St. Paul says, the work. Operate as you were designed, my children. Pray to St. Mary. Do not run away from the cutting off of the penance. Embrace it. Become inspired. The same thing that was in her is in you. Through the prayers of St. Mary of Egypt, may the Lord grant us inspiration. Amen.
Saturday, March 28, 2026: Laudation of the Theotokos
HEBREWS 9:24-28; 9:1-7
LUKE 10:38-42, 11:27-28
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Christ is in our midst. Today we are lauding the Mother of God. This is the feast in which the Akathist hymn is commemorated, the praise of the Mother of God. And this longstanding tradition has its root in the intercession and the great love and protection that the Mother of God has afforded the people of God over the centuries, various barbarian hordes and afflictions, diseases, pestilence, plagues. All these things being thwarted by the Mother of God.
And it’s important to recognize that the mystery of the intercession from heaven in our lives, the fact that heaven and all of heaven’s emissaries, particularly the Mother of God, that they are able to serve us, to help us, to protect us, to guide us, that this is a great mystery. And the key to this mystery is one simple thing: It’s knowing the needful thing.
Knowing the needful thing. The tradition, and I don’t mean just the external tradition, but the tradition in regards to the ethos of the people of God has been to turn first to God. Whenever there’s trouble, whenever we need help, the people of God have to turn to God. The people of God have turned to His Mother, and we have always found help. But when we lose sight of keeping the needful thing, this is where we begin to lose that help. We begin to lose that intercession.
So oftentimes, we rely on our own strength. We rely on our wits. We rely on what we perceive to be our gifts, our talents. We rely on these things that we assume are a given. And because we assume that they are a given, that in some regards we are entitled to these things, we begin to trust in them, and we lose sight that the needful thing is first and foremost to recognize that all of our help comes from God. And that is the needful thing.
In the Gospel today, we have Martha, who is obviously gifted with this spiritual gift of helps and working and caring to the needs of others, and this is a good thing. But the Lord says to her, you have left off the needful thing. You have left off the meditation. You have left off the realization that I am your source of help, that I am all that is needed, and that in serving Me, your ability to serve others is not only complete, but possible. This is so important to us because we oftentimes, we can relegate our intercessions, or excuse me, we can relegate the seeking of intercession as just kind of one more duty or chore. But let us never think of this, because laudation means to praise.
To praise. And so we have to always remember heaven, remember our Holy Lady is there to intercede for us. But I also think just as important, this is something many of us can forget, or many of us do not know. We must always start those intercessions with thanksgiving. You start off when you ask by being thankful. And so many of us, we start off without that thankfulness. We start off without that praise. And instead of asking for help, we end up really grumbling. What should have been asking and begging intercessions becomes a grumbling session with the Mother of God or heaven.
And even though they still hear us, in order to keep that grumbling and that complaining from sullying your prayer, learn to start off with giving thanks by praising. And when you praise God, when you give thanks to the Mother of God first, then the intercessions, they won’t be grumbling, complaining, but they become prayer. And then you’re able to see how quickly heaven will respond to you.
For many of us, we think that heaven doesn’t hear us. But I tell you, it’s because we haven’t had the reset button. We’re complaining. And so because we’re complaining, we don’t see that heaven answers us quicker than lightning. Start praising before you ask. Let your ask be a form of praise and your eyes will be open and you’ll see that heaven has never failed you and never will.
Through the prayers of our Holy Lady Theotokos, have mercy on us. Amen.
Sunday, March 15, 2026: Adoration of the Cross
HEBREWS 4:14-5:6
MARK 8:34-9:1
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Christ is in our midst! In the Epistle today, St. Paul addressing the Hebrews, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, he speaks of Christ being our High Priest. He speaks of what makes a priest, and a priest is concerned with the things to do with God. But to be concerned with the things of God is to also be concerned with the things of man. Because a priest serves to be a mediator between God and man. A priest serves to minister unto God for the sake of mankind, if you will. And this ministry is to understand the sufferings and the weakness of men. Because this is what God is concerned with.
God is concerned with mankind. And God is concerned with our weakness and our infirmities. And in being a good Father, and in being truly a good God, God is good. He provides those things that are needed to address the sickness within mankind. And the sickness of mankind, it manifests, it expresses itself in particular ways, in personal ways. But we all share this same sickness. And so we find comfort and we find peace if we trust our High Priest, if we believe that He is Who He says He is.
And so how are we to know that He is the High Priest? So many of us are often under attack. We are assailed with vicious thoughts and interpretations of our life circumstances, and it causes us to doubt whether God is good. It causes us at times to even doubt if there is a God. And this doubt is what expressly causes us to lose sight of the medicine that’s been given to us. In our nature, but us personally, individually.
In the Gospel today, the Lord Jesus Christ, He says, “If any man desires to follow after Me, let him pick up his cross and follow after Me.” What does it mean to follow after Christ? It means to be a disciple. It means to be a pupil. It means to hear His teaching, to see His life, to know Him. To trust Him. To do as He says.
This is what it means to follow after Him. And the way that we know that He is Who He says He is, is that the medicine that He gives, when we take it, we find that it does heal us. We find that when we actually, in our heart, obey and follow, in spite of whatever our thoughts and our feelings are telling us, that when we trust Him and we take the medicine He gives, that we find life.
And this is a difficult thing because the medicine that He gives for all of us is the cross. Without exception. Without exception. And the wisdom of God is such that at the end of the Gospel when He says, if anyone is ashamed of My words before this sinful and adulterous generation, I will be ashamed of him. Why? Because He deemed that the medicine that all men need is the cross. And He is the one who uttered, Physician, heal thyself.
He took upon Himself, as perfect God and perfect man, the medicine first. And He says, “Look, see.” He’s not like the pharmacists and the physicians of this world, who suggest medicines and they don’t take them themselves. This is not Christ. Christ does the complete opposite. He takes the medicine first and says, “Look and see, I live.” And if we want to live, we have to take the medicine.
It’s not in the Gospel today, but I want to point all of you to a moment in the Gospel. Do you recall when our Lord is in the garden and He’s greatly troubled? The pressure of this world, cosmically, all things, all of time, all of space is weighing upon Him. And the pressure inwardly is so strong that He begins to sweat blood. And He asks the Heavenly Father, “If it’s Your will, may this cup pass from Me.” He asked three times. “But nevertheless, not My will be done, but Yours.”
You see, He knew what He was looking for. And this is why we see and we call it His passion. Because the Lord never wavered. Even when Peter, his closest disciple, said, You know what? You don’t have to go that way. Or when Peter says, You won’t go alone. What does he say? “Get behind me, Satan.”
Why? Because He asked and He knew, without any doubt, the medicine that was needed for man. And He knew that He first must take it. And so He didn’t flinch, He didn’t waver, He didn’t question, He didn’t seek to make excuses, He didn’t justify, He didn’t blame, He didn’t project. He accepted, He obeyed, and He went forward. And in doing so, He made it so clear that from generations, even up until now, those who want to be with Him, those who want to be healed, they look upon Him and they follow Him. These are the saints. These are the ones who they don’t justify, they don’t project, they don’t make excuses. They see the medicine and they go forward. They recognize the pain of it, and yet they recognize that pain, it’s a small price to pay for life. They want to live. And so they move forward with the medicine.
For many of you, the confusion, which is wrought by your fear and your weakness, you don’t know what the cross is. “I don’t know what my cross is.” And the temptation to make it abstract, to philosophize around your cross, that’s the devil, and that’s the flesh, and that’s the world. If you want to be made well, you must take the medicine, but first you must understand the medicine. And this is why that moment I wanted to highlight in the garden, because for so many of us – “I don’t know what the cross is, I don’t know what it is.” Well, in your heart of hearts, you do. And you can lie to me as your priest, you can lie to your friends, you can lie to your parents, you can lie to your spouse, but you can’t lie to God. And God wants you to stop lying to yourself about what that cross is. And that’s why you need to take that moment and go to the garden, and you need to hear very clearly what your cross is.
Why? Because without you knowing what that cross is, you won’t prepare. You won’t prepare, you won’t have that commitment, and that’s what you are always lacking. That is what we are always lacking. We are never lacking the antidote. We are never lacking what needs to be done. We are lacking the commitment. We are lacking the inner resolve. We are lacking the honesty before God and ourselves to say, “I see the cross, and I’m moving towards it.” That’s what we’re lacking.
And so, take the time, because without picking up your cross, without you knowing what your cross is, you won’t find life. And there is no greater word, more painful, more agonizing, more excruciating, than the Lord of life saying, “I never knew you.” There is nothing that anyone in this world, no parent, no spouse, no friend, no boss, no superior, there is nothing that will hurt you more than the One Who has always loved you, and the One who has sent you medicine to say, “You are ashamed of Me, I am ashamed of you.” The cross is the way to eternal life. The cross is the only way to follow Christ. The cross is the healing of your sickness. Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.
Sunday, March 8, 2026: St. Gregory Palamas
HEBREWS 1:10-2:3; 7:26-8:2
MARK 2:1-12
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Glory to Jesus Christ! In the Gospel today, we have the account of the paralytic who was brought to Christ by his friends. And as I have said to many of you – this is a Gospel I quote often in my counseling to many of you – this reality that oftentimes the need to bring our loved ones, to bring ourselves to Christ, it has to be born out of a truth, an honesty, a hard reality.
The men who saw the paralytic, his friends, they were aware of his illness. It was only because of the truth of this awareness that they were able to bring him to Christ. And this is so important because in the age that we’re living in, to speak truth, – always, it must be in love, of course – but to speak truth, but to know truth is something that is really, it’s not wanted in our time. It’s not wanted in our day and age.
And God forgive us, oftentimes with Christians in the church, we do not really want truth. We don’t love truth. We want an abstract truth. We want God to be an abstraction. We want our religion to be that of a simple moral code by which we can participate safely and we can have our vanity assuaged. We can feel like we’re good people. But this is not Orthodoxy, and this is not what Christ brings.
And so here we are, moving in Lent and we will soon see why the world crucified Christ. We will soon see why all turned against Him. We will soon see why His own people rejected Him and delivered Him up to the powers of the world. And it’s because He spoke truth. It’s because His very presence reveals these things that we seek to have hidden.
He is truth. Truth is a Person. And so if these men were not lovers of truth, they would not have accurately diagnosed their friend’s disposition and they’d have left him to languish or they would have said, “No, no, no, he’s okay. He’ll be okay.” And so oftentimes we do this. So oftentimes we say to ourselves or say to loved ones or about loved ones and we pretend that everything is okay.
But the reality is, is things are not okay. We need a Physician. We need a Savior. Our families, our friends, our communities, we’re all in need of the same Savior. None of us are exempt. Even a surgeon himself has to go to a doctor from time to time.
Today we are commemorating St. Gregory Palamas, the teacher of the Church, instructor of grace. And St. Gregory is a true physician. And St. Gregory is a true doctor. St. Gregory lived in a difficult time. He lived in a time, in fact, not too different from ours in some respects because he lived in a time when the church was tempted with a type of worldly thinking, a type of philosophizing, a type of intellectualizing faith and relegating our faith and our tradition into a way of thinking as opposed to a way of being and as opposed to being in relation to God.
And so the enemies, the opponents of St. Gregory, Barlaam, Akindynos, these were philosophers. These were men of a, you know, if you will, a proto-Western Latin mind. And we see that for them, the idea that God could be encountered was foolish. And for many of us, we can think that these discussions that happened around hesychasm and around the uncreated light – which St. Gregory was a hesychast, and he was a bishop, and he was an abbot, and he did lead his monks and his community in the practice of hesychasm – but this is very important: St. Gregory was keen that this wasn’t just for monks, but that the encountering of God in His true sense, right, His energies, that these were not created things that were just kind of given, but when you encounter God in His light, that is God. But for Barlaam and Akindynos, this was foolishness.
And we see this today. We see where people have a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof. They have religion and morality, but they do not actually believe in the true existence of God. Unfortunately, we see this in clergy. We see it often, unfortunately, even in hierarchs. We saw it in 2020. And hear me when I tell you, it’s not that different. It’s not that different from the time of St. Gregory because if you do not have Christ as He is, if Christ is relegated to philosophy, if Christ is relegated to a symbol, simply a symbol by which your moralism is given form, then there is no light.
And if there is no light, then you’ll never see the sickness and you’ll stay paralyzed. Your loved ones will stay paralyzed. You won’t have the help of those to bring you to the physician. Or God forbid, if you’re brought to the Physician, you will reject it because the light is too much.
The light is Christ, period. It isn’t a type. It isn’t a form. It is. And when we encounter that light and the light exposes us and shows us our infirmities, then and only then are we healed. Then and only then will we walk again. Then and only then are our sins dealt with. The Church provides sacramental living. The Church provides for morality, but all these are a means by which you are brought to the Physician.
If you do not stand in the light, you will not live in the light. If you do not stand in the light, you will not be found in the light. If you do not stand in the light, you will not have Christ.
So let us see when those who love us, when those who are over us, and yea, even those who hate us, when they bring us that hard word of truth, let us recognize who it really is that we’re being brought to: Christ, the True Light. Through the prayers of St. Gregory of Palamas, Lord, help us to be healed of our paralysis and let us embrace You as Your light. Amen.
Sunday, March 1, 2026: Triumph of Orthodoxy
HEBREWS 11:24-26, 32-12:2
JOHN 1:43-51
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Glory to Jesus Christ! Today is the day of faith. Today, the Triumph of Orthodoxy, where we honor, we celebrate, we exalt in our faith, the faith that is subdued kingdoms, and the faith that shuts up the mouths of lions, the faith where women receive their dead.
Six years ago, a cloud of darkness came over the world, a cloud that is seemingly forgotten by many. Those of us who will not forget, still remember. And as Orthodoxy grows in the world, around the world, and especially in the United States, I’d like to remind all of you, my brothers and my sisters, my sons and my daughters, what our faith is. Because God gave us a good, wonderful gift, the best gift of our lifetime in 2020. He gave us a gift of our faith being tested. And God forbid we ever forget that test.
Because in that time, there are many who did forget what the faith is and what the Triumph of Orthodoxy is. As the faith spreads now, and people approach the Church and then get brought into the Church, let us pray that God opens their eyes to what the true Church is, the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Because there are people who, they’ll have icons, and they’ll put icons on their walls, and they’ll come, they’ll look at icons, and they’ll love the beauty of icons.
But that is not the Orthodox faith. No. In 2020, there were plenty of quote-unquote icons, but there wasn’t any faith. There wasn’t any stopping of the mouths of lions. There wasn’t any subduing of kingdoms. I remind all of you, if you open your calendar every day, you will find some sort of commemoration of an icon of the Mother of God or an icon of Christ. You’ll hear of our forefathers. You hear how they processed with the icons. You’ll hear of how the icons worked miracles, healed cancer, raised people from the dead, stopped invasions, stopped civil war.
The icon. We speak of this word, “incarnation,” but this is a word that is too abstract for most people. They don’t understand it, but people understand terror, and they understand death. And our forefathers, they understood the incarnation to mean that God was with them, not abstractly, but concretely. No, the triumph of our faith isn’t just about holding the externals or the aesthetics of our faith. Icons are not pictures that decorate our homes and make us feel religious.
Icons are weapons. They’re armor. They’re portals. They reveal to us the true reality. They make the visible invisible, and they make the invisible visible. Those visible things that we think frighten us, the fear, it makes that vanish before our eyes.
And the things that are invisible, the angels, the saints, the icons make them invisible. As we move forward, there will be more churches. There will be more people who are saying they’re Orthodox, but will they have the triumph of the faith? Will the icon simply be a pretty picture, a badge to show they belong to a club, or will it be something that they allow their blood to be spilt for?
Let us never forget the anathemas that we are about to pronounce, there was blood spilt for them. If this word makes you uncomfortable, good, because this is the faith that was established for the universe. This is the faith of the Apostles. This isn’t the faith of the bystander. This isn’t the faith of the passerby. This is the faith of the true Church. This is the faith of those who subdued kingdoms, stopped the mouths of lions, and had their women raised from the dead.
Our triumph is in that God is with us, and all the nations should understand that God is with us. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.