Dear Friends
A doctor or a dentist usually has a willing patient. We want to be well, want to be healthy, and listen carefully to the medical professional’s advice. We might find it difficult to enact what they ask of us—easily slipping back into old, unhealthy habits—but we know their advice to be sound, logical and for our benefit.
Yet when we speak of spiritual health we so easily go to the other extreme. I fail to recognise within me the sin I have committed: “I’m basically alright,” I tell myself, while my whole self has become polluted through sin. And in this state, as we begin to prepare ourselves for our entry into the blessed Fast, the Chuch calls on us to pray that we be allowed repentance to flow through us.
Open to me the doors of repentance, O Life-giver; for my soul goeth early to the temple of Thy holiness, coming in the temple of my body, wholly polluted. But because Thou art compassionate, purify me by the compassion of Thy mercies.
Come. Come let us repent, let us change, let us lay aside the cares of this life that we may receive the King of All. For we know the result, we have heard the declaration of the Church: Christ is risen! And knowing this as our certainty, our trust, our anchor, we know that we must purify ourselves through repentance.
Repentance sets us free. No longer do the sins we have committed hold us, bind us, weigh us down. Repentance shows that we will not be defined by the evil in our past but by our hope, our faithfulness, in the Resurrection of Christ. Repentance shows our rejection of death and identification with life.
May the doors of repentance be opened to each one of us, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, that we may stand firm against evil and receive more fully Christ risen from the dead. Let us be willing patients that we recognise our need for change and hear the voice of the Church calling us to repent.
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Sermon
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Amen.
When I pray I ask time and again for the Lord to do things, to act in a certain way, to intervene in some supernatural way in our world. I want him to do something for me, or something for a friend, and I ask in prayer. This is not a bad thing to do, not wrong by itself, but it places me at the centre of my world—I am here as the arbiter of what is right and wrong, what is good or sinful, and I will pray that the right should prevail and that goodness will flow out over humanity. I choose, I decide, I pray: and then I am crestfallen and humiliated when it does not happen.
“Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David;” cries out the Canaanite Woman, “my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.” She does not ask for her daughter to be healed, though that would be a good and worthy thing to ask, nor that her daughter receive mercy. In that moment she is recognising that she herself is not autonomous, not independent, but is dependent upon and needs the mercy—which is to say, the love—of God. The scribes and the Pharisees, earlier in this chapter, could not recognise this: the Lord describes them, using the words of the prophet,
“These people draw near to me with their mouth,
And honour me with their lips,
But their heart is far from me.
And in vain they worship me,
Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” (Matthew 15:8–9, Isaiah 29:13)
They could not recognise what the Canaanite Woman did: what is necessary is that they should ask for mercy, that they should repent.
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Read last Sunday’s Sermon, Have mercy on me.
Archive of Past Sermons.
Services this week
Friday 3rd February
Discussion on the Book of Numbers, 8 pm
Online only
Saturday 4th February
Vespers, 6.30 pm
At St Francis’ Hall, Eastleigh
Sunday 5th February
Divine Liturgy, 9.30 am
At St Francis’ Hall, Eastleigh
Online session is via Google Meet: please get in contact for the details.
Please join us: all are welcome, come and see.
Attending Church
We meet at St Francis’ Hall, Nightingale Avenue, Eastleigh, SO50 9JA. Come and See.
Can I help you?
I am here for you, you need only ask. Is there a way I can support your life of faith? Get in touch.
Can you help the community?
Yes, absolutely. Offer yourselves to the Lord: pray! Make available to him all your talents and ask him how he would like you to use them — listen for his reply.
Your prayers!
With love in Christ
Fr Alexander
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