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.

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.

By rising into heavenly glory as the God-Man, Christ has shown us what it means to become truly human in the divine image and likeness.

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.

It may seem strange that Orthodox Christianity gives so much attention to martyrs and saints. To speak of those who die for their faith is to recall instances of murder. Why would a religion give so much attention to such an unpleasant subject?

The Lord said, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” The only way to shine like a city on a hill or a lamp on a stand in a world darkened by sin is to live in a way that provides a beacon of hope for the fulfillment of the human person in God.

The only true response to the challenges we face today is to believe in and confess Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world. If we cultivate the humility necessary to entrust ourselves to Him, then we will gain the spiritual strength not to fall into self-centeredness, fear, resentment, hatred, or other sinful states of soul that are such appealing distractions to facing the truth about ourselves.

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.

Fr. Philip LeMasters reminds us that our words reveal the state of our souls.

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.”

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.

There is simply no way around the basic truth that how we relate to our neighbors reveals how we relate to our Lord. What we do for even the most miserable and difficult people we encounter in life, we do for Christ. And what we refuse to do for them, we refuse to do for our Savior. Our salvation is in becoming more like Him as we find the healing of our souls by cooperating with His grace. While we do not save ourselves any more than we can rise up by our own power from the grave, we must obey His commandments in order to open our souls to receive His healing mercy and participate in His eternal life.

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.

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.

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 paralyzed man embodies our common human condition. Even as those enslaved to the fear of death did not somehow take the initiative in bringing salvation to the world, this fellow did not call out to Christ to help him or even know the Savior’s name. Instead, the Lord graciously reached out to him.

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.

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.

Icons certainly beautify the church, but not simply in the conventional sense of being aesthetically pleasing. Instead, they manifest visually that the Son of God has called and enabled us to become His beautiful living icons. They show that the Savior has made us participants by grace in His deified humanity so that we may shine brightly with the divine glory.

We must remember who we are and find our true selves in Him, if we want to avoid the inevitable disintegration of personality and character that comes from slavery to our passions. Then we too will be able to obey with joy the Lord’s command to the formerly demon-possessed man: “Return to your home, and declare all that God has done for you.”

Our fundamental vocation remains the same: to undergo a change of mind such that we offer ourselves without reservation in obedience to God. As with the Theotokos, Joseph the Betrothed, and James, there is no telling what that will mean for the course of our lives, but saying “yes” in free obedience as we take the steps we have the strength to take today remains the only way to participate personally in the healing of the human person made possible by the birth of Jesus Christ. Let us look to those we commemorate today as brilliant examples of how to do precisely that.

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.

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.

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.

The devotion of the Myrrh-Bearers, Joseph and, Nicodemus shows us what true faith looks like, and we will never acquire it by looking for ways to fit God comfortably into our lives in order to help us achieve our goals in and for this world, regardless of how noble we think they are.

We have everything that we need to follow in the path of the apostles and saints in humbly obeying our Lord. That is how we can become radiant with the divine glory and obey the Savior’s calling: “Follow Me.”

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.

The disciples offered to Christ what they had that day: five loaves of bread and two fish. He transfigured that tiny offering into a massive feast with far more leftover than what the hungry crowd could eat. This miracle shows that the key question is not what or how much we offer according to any conventional standard, but whether we offer all that we have for the Lord’s blessing. He will do the rest.

Let us take the Theotokos as our great example of how to receive and follow Christ every day, even as we ask for her prayers for the healing of our souls. That is the only way to celebrate the great feast of her Dormition with spiritual integrity.

Most people today surely do not think of the weeks before Christmas as a time of preparation for being loosed from bondage to the corrupting forces of sin and death. More commonly, we use this time of year to strengthen our addiction to the love of money, possessions, food, drink, and other worldly pleasures.

Now is the time to prepare for a spiritually beneficial Lent that will help us grow in the humility necessary to see ourselves and our neighbors clearly as we reorient our lives toward the great joy of Pascha.

Holy Week is not a time for rational theological speculation and argument. It is, instead, a time for entering into the deep mystery of the love of our Lord, of the great “I AM” Who remains infinitely beyond our full comprehension.

The plight of the paralyzed man shows us the common condition of fallen humanity. None of us took the initiative in bringing salvation to the world and this fellow did not ask Christ to help him or even know His name. The Lord graciously reached out to him, nonetheless, asking the seemingly obvious question, “Do you want to be healed?” The Savior’s words should challenge each of us because we often become so comfortable with our weaknesses, desires, and habits that we do not think that we need healing at all.

Today we celebrate the restoration of our true unity in God through the unifying power of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter sent by the risen and ascended Savior Who is seated at the right hand of the Father in heavenly glory.

Everyone who shares in the blessed life of the Savior does so through their participation in His grace, not merely as a reward for good behavior.

The spiritual disciplines of the Apostles Fast provide us all with opportunities to clarify our spiritual vision and gain the strength to see all the blessings of this life as gifts to be offered to God.

There is a temptation in pursuing the Christian life to think that we are more faithful than we actually are because we have confused lesser goals for our true calling. Then we can pat ourselves on the back for achieving far less than what the God-Man has made possible for us as “partakers of the divine nature.”

We have all had the experience of suddenly perceiving a truth that we had previously not grasped. There are times when the fog lifts, the lights come on, and what was opaque or out of focus becomes clear. That is precisely what the apostles Peter, James, and John experienced on Mount Tabor when they were enabled to behold the divine glory of Jesus Christ, Who shone brightly with light as the voice of the Father identified Him as His beloved Son.

If we dare to call upon God’s forgiveness for our sins, we will condemn only ourselves as hypocrites when we refuse to forgive others.

Looking to the example of the great saints we commemorate today, as well as to the model of those holy fishermen, let us repudiate the superficial, self-centered tendencies celebrated by our culture and undertake the daily struggle of obedience to Christ. That means letting down our nets in obedience at every opportunity as we cry out for His merciful healing of our souls. That is the holy habit that we must all cultivate if we want to become worthy disciples of the Savior.

In the midst of the ongoing tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land, we must attend to the wisdom of our father in Christ, His Beatitude Patriarch John X of Antioch, who stated this week that “Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace…” He writes that we pray “for peace in the entire world, for stability, and for the repose of the souls of those who have passed away. We pray that the wounds of the sick be soothed and they might recover, for the wounds of every hurting person, every bereaved mother, every brother, and every sister, for everyone’s wounds. We ask the Lord to protect us and grant us peace…”

St. Irenaeus wrote that “The glory of God is a man fully alive, and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Adv. haer. 4.20.7).” To be a human person is to bear the image of God with the calling to become more like Him in holiness. The more we do so, the more we become our true selves. The God-Man Jesus Christ came to restore and fulfill us as living icons of God. He enables us to become truly human as we participate personally in Him as the Second Adam. As St. Paul wrote, “For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.” (2 Cor. 1:20)

There is perhaps no more powerful example of our need for Christ’s healing of our souls than that contained in today’s gospel reading. A rich man with the benefit of the great spiritual heritage of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets had become such a slave to gratifying his desires for indulgence in pleasure that he had become completely blind to his responsibility to show mercy to Lazarus, a miserable beggar who wanted only crumbs and whose only comfort was when dogs licked his open sores. The rich man’s life revolved around wearing the most expensive clothes and enjoying the finest food and drink, even as he surely stepped over or around Lazarus at the entrance to his home on a regular basis and never did anything at all to relieve his suffering.

Today is the Sunday before the Feast of Theophany (or Epiphany), when we celebrate Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan and the revelation that He is truly the Son of God. His divinity is made manifest and openly displayed at His baptism when the voice of the Father declares, “You are my beloved Son” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove. Theophany shows us that Jesus Christ, who was born in the flesh for our salvation at Christmas, is not merely a great religious teacher or moral example. He is truly God—a member of the Holy Trinity– and His salvation permeates His entire creation, including the water of the river Jordan. Through Christ’s and our baptism, we become participants in the holy mystery of our salvation, for He restores to us the robe of light which our first parents lost when they chose pride and self-centeredness over obedience and communion. He enters the Jordan to restore Adam and Eve, and all their children, to the dignity of those who bear the image and likeness of God.