Fr. Philip LeMasters recounts the Christmas story that is for all humanity.

Fr. Philip LeMasters asks, "Can physical things, including our bodies, become holy?"

Fr. Philip LeMasters preaches on the Gospel reading of the healing of the paralytic.

Fr. Philip LeMasters reflects on faith and doubt and our need for spiritual clarity regarding our own unbelief, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent.

Fr. Philip LeMasters describes the way in which we can be blind to Jesus, the Messiah, because he is not what we are looking for.

Fr. Philip LeMasters invites us to embrace humility, as did St. Mary of Egypt who became a model of sanctity through the healing of her soul.

Christ came to restore sight to the blind beggars of the world. Let us embrace the disciplines and spirit of the Nativity Fast in ways that will help us see that that is precisely who we are. Let us acquire the humility necessary to receive and share the peace that He was born to bring to the world. That is how we must all prepare to welcome Him into our hearts and lives at Christmas.

We are all bent over and crippled in profound ways in relation to the Lord, our neighbors, and even ourselves. The good news of Christmas is that the Savior is born to set us free from captivity to decay, corruption, and weakness.

Let us get over our pride and become living epiphanies of the salvation of the One Who was baptized by St. John the Forerunner in the Jordan.

In preparing for Great Lent this year, we must remain on guard against the temptation of self-exaltation in any form.

Lenten practices are not instruments of punishment or legalism, but blessed tools for becoming more fully our true selves as living icons of God.

On this second Sunday of Great Lent, we commemorate St. Gregory Palamas, who defended the experience of monks who, in the stillness of prayer from their hearts, saw the Uncreated Light of God.

Regardless of the particulars of our life circumstances, let us use the challenges posed by the global pandemic as reminders of the folly of making life in this world our false god.

The man in our gospel reading whose sight the Lord restored had been blind from birth, having known only darkness throughout his life. He symbolizes us all, for until the light of the Savior’s resurrection, humanity had wandered in spiritual blindness and captivity.

As odd as it will sound to many in our culture, Christ does not call us to become successful or powerful by earthly standards, including those of our own society. He calls us to shine with holiness such that His glory radiates through us and illumines a world darkened by sin and death. Doing so requires that we do not rest content with being good citizens or moral people, regardless of how those terms are defined.

None of us has the power to fix today’s problems, but we all have the ability to offer ourselves in seemingly small ways to bless people by listening to them patiently, providing an encouraging word, and sharing our resources as we are able.

Growing in humility is the only way for us to find healing for our passions, for our disordered desires ultimately root in the pride of not accepting the truth about who we are before God.

In response to Christ’s statement about how hard it is for rich people to enter the Kingdom of God, the disciples were amazed and asked, “Who then can be saved?” The Lord responded, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” That is true not only for the wealthy, but for us all.

As much as we do not like to acknowledge it, Christ’s Kingdom is not about giving us religion or anything else on our own terms. He calls us to offer Him “the fruits [of our lives] in their seasons.”

As we celebrate the Exaltation of the Cross, let us examine ourselves to see if our lives appear foolish and scandalous by the standards of the world because of our faithfulness to Jesus Christ.

Instead of obsessing over how we measure up, we should simply focus all our energies on finding healing for our passions as we reorient our disordered desires for fulfillment in God. If we persist in doing so and call out for the Lord’s mercy whenever we stumble and fall, we will come to know the joy of those liberated from the tomb, clothed in the divine glory, and finally in our right minds.

Joachim, Anna, and the Theotokos were the complete opposites of the rich man in today’s gospel reading. His only concern was to eat, drink, and enjoy himself because he had become so wealthy. He was addicted to earthly pleasure, power, and success, and saw the meaning and purpose of his life only in those terms. In stark contrast, the Theotokos followed the righteous example of her parents. She was prepared by a life of holiness to agree freely to become our Lord’s mother.

As we prepare to receive the Lord in faith at Christmas, we must use our freedom to follow St. Paul’s instruction in today’s epistle reading: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”

Matthew’s description of the family tree prepares us for the kind of Savior we encounter in Jesus Christ. It does not hide that His ancestors sinned greatly, for He came to heal those who had corrupted and weakened themselves by their own disobedience. His family line even included Gentiles, foreshadowing that He would make all with faith in Him heirs to the promise to Abraham. That being the case, the fact that we are sinners does not make it impossible or pointless for us to become the Savior’s living temples. He came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Mark 2:17). In the remaining days before Christmas, we must simply turn away from evil as we confess our sins and reorient our lives to the Savior, trusting that His healing will extend even to us.

Across the centuries, the Lord has raised up such unusual saints in order to shock us out of our complacency about the alleged harmony between the narrow way leading to the Kingdom and what passes for a conventionally respectable life in any time or place.

There are many ways to view ourselves as human beings. All too often, we accept false definitions that we find appealing in light of our passions, weaknesses, and other forms of personal brokenness. When we do so, we set our sights too low, for the Savior became one of us in order to make us perfectly beautiful icons of His salvation.

Christ did not offer Himself on the Cross and rise from the dead in order to make us well-adjusted citizens of this world, but to heal every dimension of our brokenness so that we will shine brilliantly with His divine glory.

The Cross is truly the Tree of Life through which we return to the blessedness of Paradise.

Through the Lord’s great Self-Offering, even the most wretched person may enter into the blessedness of the Kingdom through humble faith and repentance. Even the most notorious sinner may become a glorious saint and shine brightly with eternal glory.

The season of Pascha has only just begun. Because of His bodily resurrection, we must become holy in our bodies and treat our suffering neighbors accordingly. Let us continue to celebrate by participating as fully as possible in the joy of the empty tomb. Now nothing other than our own refusal can hold us back from becoming truly human, for “Christ is Risen!”

Christ has ascended. Let us go up together with Him as we find liberation from slavery to our passions and share more fully in the salvation that He has brought to the world.

We must live distinctive lives that draw others to share in the divine healing that our Lord has made available to all.

The darkness roots deeply within us all, both personally and collectively, and nothing but the brilliant glory of the Lord can overcome it. Whether we know it or not, we inevitably sink like stones into the abyss whenever we make anything or anyone else the foundation of our lives.

John the Baptist was unspotted from the world due to the spiritual strength he gained from a life of asceticism and prayer, and he called people to follow him in preparing the way of the Lord as they bore “fruits worthy of repentance” and treated other people with the care appropriate to the children of God.

The Lord used the story of the Good Samaritan to show us who we must become if we are truly uniting ourselves to Him in faith. The more we share in His life, the more we will overcome the spiritual blindness that so easily tempts us to justify ourselves in thinking that any person or group is somehow not worthy of our care and compassion.

We are baptized into Christ’s death in order to rise up with Him into a life of holiness in which we regain the robe of light rejected by our first parents. In every aspect of our lives, we must become radiant with the divine glory shared with us by the New Adam.

Let us follow the example of the Canaanite woman in persistently and boldly offering even our deepest pains and greatest weaknesses to Christ for healing.

We must devote ourselves to prayer, fasting, almsgiving, forgiveness, and other forms of repentance in the weeks ahead if we are to open the depths of our brokenness to the healing of our Lord’s humble, suffering love. That is the only way to become like the tax collector in spiritual clarity, for he was aware only of his sin and need for God’s mercy. We must know the true state of our corruption and weakness as he did, if we are to enter into the joy of the Lord’s resurrection.

Lent calls us to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” We must do so in order to accept the great dignity of beloved sons and daughters called to return to Paradise through His Passion.

As we celebrate the restoration of icons today, let us become more beautiful living icons of our Lord’s salvation and gain the strength to treat every neighbor accordingly as we live and breathe in this world. Remember: They are His living icons also.

Whenever we pray, fast, and serve others with humility, we open ourselves to the healing light of the Lord and become more like Him. These practices are not reserved for those who have abandoned the world, but are necessary for all of us who remain weak before our passions with spiritual vision darkened by sin. The circumstances of our lives never excuse us from answering the call to become radiant with the divine energies of our Lord, but present their own opportunities to rise, take up our beds, and walk.

Like St. Mary of Egypt, we must take up the cross of doing whatever it takes to find healing for our souls in the Lord Who offered up Himself for the salvation of the world. That was the path to holiness for St. Mary of Egypt, and it must be our path in the remaining days of this blessed season of Lent.

Today we celebrate that the Lord is at hand, coming into Jerusalem as the Messiah, hailed by the crowds as their Savior. He enters Jerusalem on a humble beast of burden, carrying no weapons and having no army, political machine, or media campaign to flatter the powerful and play on the fears, resentments, and hopes of the masses.

In order to follow our Risen Lord into the joy of the resurrection, we must also open our deepest personal struggles and wounds to Him for healing. Our bodies are not evil, but we have all distorted our relationship to them. Instead of pursuing a disembodied spirituality that ignores how God creates and saves us as whole persons, we must embrace the joy of His victory over death by living as those who are in a “one flesh” communion with the Risen Lord in every dimension of our existence.

If we want to know Christ’s peace, which conquers even the fear of the grave, we must become radiant with His Light, which means that we must unite ourselves to Him in faith, hope, and love from the depths of our souls.

By the grace of our Lord, we may become the light of the world as we do what the world does not prize: praying in secret; struggling to fast as we best we can; giving generously to the needy without drawing attention to ourselves; forgiving and praying for those who wrong us; mindfully rejecting the temptation to praise ourselves or to condemn anyone else; and confessing and repenting of our sins on a regular basis.

To rise up, take up our beds, and walk home requires obedience to Christ’s commands, but not a legalistic obedience in the sense of following a code for its own sake. Instead, this obedience is like following the guidance of a physician or therapist who makes clear to us what we must do in order to regain health and function for our bodies.

When we truly know that we are the chief of sinners and recognize that our very existence is dependent upon the mercy of the Lord, then we will no longer be driven to condemn anyone else.

We must simply keep letting down our nets in obedience to Christ according to the particulars of our lives and circumstances.

Christ calls us all to become like the Good Samaritan, binding up the wounds of our neighbors and refusing to narrow down the list of those whom we must learn to love as ourselves. Like St. John Chrysostom, let us refuse to think that we can rightly worship the Lord by confining our piety only to what we do in liturgical services. Instead, we must make every dimension of our life a point of entrance to the Kingdom of our great High Priest.