“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” The father of the young man in today’s gospel lesson cried out these words with tears in response to the Lord’s statement that “all things are possible to him who believes.” The father in this passage provides a good example of how we should respond to the spiritual challenges posed by our current public health crisis.

The One Who trampled down death by death purely out of love for His suffering children will never abandon us. If He can make someone like St. Mary of Egypt radiant with the divine glory through the desert, then there is hope for us all.

Whenever we give our time, resources, or attention to help anyone who is in need in any way, we embrace an opportunity to serve our Savior and participate more fully in His life.

The man in today’s gospel reading would never have found healing had he chosen to remain as he had been for thirty-eight years. Lying still for a long time makes us weak and unable to move on our own.

St. Photini’s encounter with the Lord was truly transformative. He did not merely give her ideas about religion. He gave her the “Living Water” of the Holy Spirit which made her a participant in eternal life by grace.

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.

At Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit as a sign of the restoration of human persons, both individually and collectively, in the divine image and likeness.

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.

It is easy to think that we are spiritually strong and healthy when life is good and things are going our way. It is a very different matter, however, when things are falling apart and we find that we have no place to stand.

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.

Our calling, like that of Peter and the first disciples, is simply to obey Christ’s command to follow Him. When we stumble in doing so, we must cultivate the humble recognition of Peter, who said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”

We do not have to burn incense on the altar of a Roman god in order to show that we are ashamed of the Savior. All that we must do is to refuse to take up our crosses as we serve the false gods of this world. It does not take much spiritual insight to see that worshiping idols is quite common and easily done in our time and place.

On this feast day of the Holy, Glorious, All-Laudable Apostle and Evangelist Luke, we have an opportunity to celebrate the great witness to the Lord made by the patron saint of our parish. Our small community is named in his honor and memory. We see his image on our iconostasis and regularly ask him to pray for us in the Divine Liturgy. Author of both a gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, as well as an iconographer and a physician, St. Luke died a martyr’s death at the age of 84.

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.

Both the bleeding woman and Jairus were at the end of their rope. They faced circumstances so dark that they could not imagine how they would be delivered from them. The gravity of their challenges is reflected by how little these characters speak in their encounters with Christ. They did not use many words to show whatever level of faith they had in Him, perhaps because what was at stake was beyond their ability to name.

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.

As we continue to celebrate Theophany in a world that remains in “the region and shadow of death,” let us focus mindfully on living each day as those who have died to sin and risen with our Lord to a life of holiness. That is how we may wear a garment of light and become living epiphanies of the salvation of the world.

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.

“The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” The key difference between the Pharisee and the Publican rooted in their hearts and was not simply a matter of their outward behavior or how they appeared to others. Even the despised traitor and thief remained in the image of God and was able to embrace divine mercy when he humbly confessed the truth about his personal brokenness. The Pharisee also bore God’s image, but was so blinded by his slavery to the primordial sin of pride that his spiritual practices lacked integrity and did his soul more harm than good.

Today we commemorate a distinctive person who bore witness in his own life to the healing power of Christ. St. Nicholas lived in the 4th century in what is now Turkey and had a sizeable inheritance from his family, which he gave away in secret to the poor.

The path to eternal life runs through our neighbors, especially those we are inclined to overlook, disregard, and even despise. How we treat the hungry and thirsty, the stranger and the naked, the sick and the prisoner reveals the true state of our souls. How we serve our suffering and inconvenient neighbors, whoever they are, is how we serve our Lord.

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.

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

Today we celebrate that the Lord is at hand, for He is coming into Jerusalem as the Messiah, hailed by the crowds as their Savior. He does not come to usher in an earthly reign or to serve any nationalistic or political agenda. He enters Jerusalem on a donkey, a humble beast of burden, carrying no weapons and having no army. He had no well-oiled political machine to tell the powerful people what they wanted to hear or to manipulate the masses. His Kingdom was and is not of this world.

The good news of our Lord’s resurrection extends to everyone and the entire world. The Church directs our attention during the Paschal season to how some very different people came to share in the life of our Lord, such as the disciple Thomas, the Myrrh-Bearing Women, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the paralyzed man. Today we focus on someone who was different from all of them by worldly standards, for they were Jews and she was a Samaritan. We know her in the Church as the Great Martyr Photini, but in that time and place she would have seemed a very unlikely candidate to become a great evangelist of Christ’s salvation.

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.

Let us live as those who have tasted the living water of the Holy Spirit and know that nothing can truly satisfy us—in this life or in that which is to come—other than uniting ourselves to Christ in holiness.

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

Let us become transfigured in holiness as we pray, fast, repent, and give generously to our neighbors as we become living icons of the Savior’s fulfillment of the human person in the likeness of God.

The Feast of Christ’s Transfiguration calls each of us to nothing less than to be transfigured in holiness and shine brilliantly by grace with the light of heaven.

The feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos calls us to live faithfully as those who have put on Christ like a garment in baptism, been filled with the Holy Spirit in chrismation, and become guests at the heavenly banquet in the Eucharist.

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.

It is only by dying to the old ways of death that we may live as His “new creation.”

If we want to know Christ as the beloved disciple did, then we must learn that our very life is in our brothers and sisters. Loving them and Christ in them is the only way to find liberation from fear in our world of corruption, for it is fear that separates us from one another and keeps us from becoming together the uniquely beautiful persons our Lord created us to become in His image and likeness.

If we have received the Lord’s mercy, we must extend that mercy to our neighbors, especially those we are inclined to hate, condemn, or otherwise disregard.

Those who weep like the widow of Nain today should take heart. The Savior has conquered death and shares His great victory with those Who respond to Him with humble faith and repentance. He has made every day of our lives “the day of salvation.”

There is no point in pretending that all is well when it obviously is not; that was true for the bleeding woman and for Jairus, and it is also true for us. We must face the reality of our own brokenness with brutal honesty, if we are ever to acquire the humble faith necessary to enter into the joy of those who hear the Lord say, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” and “Do not fear; only believe, and she shall be well.” The question is not whether the Savior wants to fulfill His gracious purposes for us, but whether we will open ourselves to receive His healing mercy.

Unlike the rich man, we must not walk away in sadness when our weakness before our passions becomes apparent, especially when we realize how far short we have fallen of the holiness to which Christ calls us.

As “the poor and maimed and blind and lame,” we must prepare to accept the extraordinary invitation that is ours in Jesus Christ by gaining the strength to make our daily responsibilities points of entrance to the heavenly kingdom. They are not reasons to shut ourselves out of the heavenly banquet, but opportunities to unite ourselves ever more fully to Him in freedom.

In the remaining days before Christmas, let us embrace the radically disorienting calling to hope in nothing and no one other than the God-Man Who is born to heal and fulfill all who bear the divine image and likeness.

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 not despair even when the darkness threatens to overwhelm us, but instead mindfully open our hearts to the light of Christ as we trust that He will minister to us at our point of greatest need and make us participants in His salvation.

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.

The coming Lenten season calls us all to come to ourselves as we gain a clearer recognition of the ways in which we have refused to live as the beloved sons and daughters of our Father. By humbly reorienting our lives toward Him and away from slavery to our passions, we will find restoration, blessing, and joy. Now is the time to leave behind the filth and misery of the pig pen and to enter by grace into the joy of a heavenly banquet that none of us deserves.