Monday, August 3, 2026: Holy Prophet Ezekiel
1 CORINTHIANS 15:12-19
MATTHEW 21:18-22
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Christ is in our midst! The fig tree is withered by the Lord’s command. And the fig tree withering, and the mountain being cast to the ocean, these are figures in which the Lord is speaking to us. He’s speaking to us of what the fruit of the resurrection is. The fruit of the resurrection is to have resurrectional power.
Resurrectional power is not something by which ambition is driven. Resurrectional power is not something by which the individual is exalted above others. Rather, resurrectional power is to have this unity, this hope. What is this hope? What is this unity? It can be nothing else except for being in Christ. And it is the Father who raised Christ from the dead.
You see, if we don’t have this hope, if we don’t have this resurrectional power, if we don’t have evidence of this, then like the fig tree, we wither, we die. And the evidence of this power is when we’re able to look at the things in our life and we can call on our Heavenly Father in the Spirit through the power, and the love, and the obedience of the Son. We call upon the Father and we ask for these things, the seemingly impossible to be done. We ask for the mountain to be cast aside.
Mountains. In the Scriptures, we see mountains as this place where man must go to meet God. Moses ascends the mountain and sits there for 40 days fasting to meet God. Elijah ascends the mountain, goes to the cave, hides, he meets God. Mountain being this place, being symbolic of the need to make pilgrimage, if you will, to struggle, to ascend an arduous height. But in the power of the resurrection, that is put aside. We don’t need to struggle in the same way in the power of the resurrection.
God is closer than our very breath now. And so now, in the light of His resurrection, we don’t have to climb the heights in the same way. The fig tree, not in this particular Gospel, but in the other Gospels in which the Lord curses the fig tree.
Why? Because it did not bear fruit. It had leaves, but no fruit. Meaning it had all the signs of bearing fruit, but no fruit.
And in the resurrectional life, even this becomes a sign of power. Because when we see that we may have the external life, but no real change, no real ability to cross, to bridge the gap, no real ability to bring forth fruit, how are we to do it? We need resurrectional power. We need to call on the fact that Christ has risen from the dead.
And it’s in that space that faith is given to us, that belief comes to us. And then we realize nothing in this world should come between us and the next world. Nothing in this world should come between us and our God. Nothing in this world should come between us and the call of the Father and the power He bestows upon those who are in His Spirit looking to His Son. There’s no mountain to travel anymore. And there’s no need for having leaves, but no fruit.
And again, to have leaves and no fruit is to have the trappings of quote-unquote religious life. To look as if you have fruit, but not to truly have the fruit. Christ came to that fig tree, and He looked to eat something. It looked as if it was ready, but it wasn’t ready. This is why when St. Paul says in the Epistle today, and the resurrection isn’t the case, then we of all men are the worst off.
St. Symeon the Theologian, he’s so clear: If you do not have evidence of the resurrection of this life, you will not have it in the next. We need to look for the fruit here and now. We need to look for that power here and now. Not all of it, but we need to see that something is blossoming. We need to see that there will be something, if the Lord comes to us, there will be something for Him to eat. That we can do, because He’s promised us.
If we believe in Him, then yea, even the mountain can be cast into the sea. May we all have the help of our angels. May we all have the help of our patrons. May we hear the words of St. Paul. And may we fear, and may we have holy dread. May we hope and pray and remember that Christ is risen from the dead. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Sunday, August 2, 2026: Holy Prophet Elijah, St. Maria of Paris
JAMES 5:10-20
LUKE 4:22-30
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Glory to Jesus Christ! Well, today, we honor a Great Prophet, the Great Prophet Elijah. But we also honor another prophet – not a Great Prophet, but nevertheless, a prophet. She’s a prophet. We honor Saint Maria of Paris.
And this confuses people. Even this thought, like, what do you mean, Saint Maria of Paris, a prophet? The origin of this confusion, it comes from us not knowing what a prophet is, actually, or rather, what a prophet does. See, a prophet is not really about telling the future, being a soothsayer, and predicting when things are gonna happen. There’s an aspect to this, yes, but a prophet is one who speaks the word of God and particularly speaks a corrective word of God.
Let me share with you, remind you, this second part of the Epistle from James today that was read earlier. It says, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. And he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit. Brethren, if any among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.
This is what it means to be a prophet. It means to speak the word of God to the correction of the hearer. Not to tell the future, not to have your own private crystal ball, but to speak truth and oftentimes to power. It’s a very difficult thing. And see, Saint Maria, she was one of them. She spoke truth. And I wanted to bring her up because she’s scandalous to many people. And the reason why she’s scandalous is because she broke all of the conventional politics and niceness that we church folk, we really like. She did these things.
Now, the thing with Saint Maria, is people, they love her, they support her because like, “Yeah, here’s a nun who’s smoking in Paris and drinking with intellectuals.” And that’s actually why they celebrate her. And when people lift that part up about Saint Maria, they actually dishonor her. They dishonor her. When they make it about like, “Yeah, she broke the rules,” that’s actually not the point. The point is that she loved God.
See, Saint Maria was a great sinner. She was a great sinner. She was a divorced woman and a communist and a revolutionary. And in her sin, God came to her and reminded her of the faith of her fathers and she repented. And in her repentance, she sought not to hide herself away for her sake, but she wanted to speak to those who also needed light. And this is why we honor her and this has made her a prophet. That she spoke truth to those who needed it, including at times, members and leaders in the church who had lost their way.
You have to remember something. The reason why a lot of people speak ill of Saint Maria now is because they’ve forgotten actually why God allowed the revolution in Russia. When people lose their way, when the people of God forget the love of neighbor and they forget what God asks of us, then He allows judgment to come as a chastisement. And so, because she’s a woman and because she had this checkered past, people don’t like her.
But guess what? She still spoke the truth, because Russia had fallen into sin and needed repentance. And if you don’t understand that and you don’t like it, then I would just point you to Saint John Maximovitch or Saint John Kronstadt. They said the same things. They warned Russia of the same things before it happened. And Saint Maria is speaking to it during and after the revolution, but nevertheless for the same reasons because the love of God had grown cold. And so she spoke prophetically.
But it speaks to another thing you have to think about. When we think about prophets, we have this idea that, again, everything’s perfect, everything’s neat, and it’s wrong and it’s false. You see, Elijah, one of the true Great Prophets, Elijah was also a man of weakness. See, when we think of Elijah, we think of Elijah being this bull, sticking it to the priests of Baal, putting his finger in the face of Jezebel, telling Ahab to repent. And that’s true. That’s true. Elijah did have this fire.
But Elijah also had fear. Elijah also had fear. Elijah is a man, was a man, with a similar nature like ours, would go hot and would go cold. Elijah, after he stuck his finger in the face of Jezebel, he finds himself cowering and hiding in a cave and essentially wishing that he was dead because he was depressed and he was sad and he was scared, you see. That’s the same Elijah who called down fire only a few days earlier.
Are we not all like this? Do we not all have the zeal for God, we pray to God, we’re gonna do our prayers and this and that, and then the next hour, maybe even, maybe the next day we find ourselves falling into the same sin. Yes, we are men that share a nature with Elijah, a fallen nature. This vocation of speaking truth, this vocation of having the courage to represent God, it’s a difficult one.
Even Moses, the great Lawgiver, he also stumbled. He struck the rock instead of speaking to it. My brothers and my sisters, my sons and my daughters, we are fickle. It’s very difficult for us to stay consistent and God knows it. And here’s the thing – this is why God sends us prophets. And the prophets themselves are the first to know of their own weakness. Do not let your weakness, do not let the fickleness of your nature keep you from saying and doing the right thing.
Because the biggest thing about the prophets, and this is key: from Saint Maria of Paris all the way down to Moses, the Lawgiver, the thing that keeps a prophet a prophet is they never fall into self-righteousness. That’s the key. Saint Maria’s quote unquote worldliness kept her humble. Elijah’s fear and even his audacity to say to God, “I’m the only one who hasn’t bowed my knee to Baal,” and God says to him, “I have 7,000 prophets who have not bowed their knee to Baal.” God humbled Elijah. See, the self-righteousness is what we must avoid. God knows you’re falling. God knows you go hot and go cold. But keep yourself from going lukewarm because in lukewarmness, this is where He spits you out.
How do we become lukewarm? By becoming self-righteous. A self-righteous man, a self-righteous woman is a lukewarm Christian. They rest in what they think is their own piety and morality, and they think they’re safe because they’re checking the boxes. Everyone looks at them, they know they’re good, that they’re doing okay. They’re neither hot nor cold, and so Christ will vomit them from His mouth. Self-righteousness is the thing that we must avoid.
Self-righteousness is what keeps you from speaking the truth. You won’t speak the truth because you say I’m a hypocrite. Yes, you are. You’re all hypocrites. So what do we need to do? We fix ourselves. We acknowledge what’s going on. We stay away from self-righteousness. We stay away from the things that keep us humble before God. Saint Maria of Paris, she ended her life simply holding to the truth and she defended those who were in essence the enemies of God.
You see, this is the thing also for a prophet. God gives them a word and they hold to it no matter what. And so for all of you, yes, avoid self-righteousness. Yes, avoid fear. Yes, avoid those things that keep you lukewarm but understand this: God will also give you a word. He’ll speak a word to your heart for you to hold to and no matter what, if you hold to that word that God gives you, you can withstand all things by His power and not your own. And that’s why the self-righteousness is so important to avoid, because self-righteousness keeps you from believing the prophetic word that God speaks to you first before you ever speak a prophetic word to anyone else.
Through the prayers of Saint Elijah, Saint Maria of Paris and of all the saints, the prophets, the holy ones with courage and the ones with a fallen nature like our own, keep us humble, Lord, and keep us far from self-righteousness. Amen.