10TH SUNDAY OF MATTHEW

Dearly beloved Family in Christ.

In today's Gospel reading, from the 17th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew we see our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, referring to all those present - including His own disciples - as ''a faithless and perverse generation. '' Why does he call them 'faithless and perverse'? Because they failed to exorcise the raging demon who kept tormenting a young child, by throwing him into the water and into the fire. In short, they could not draw upon the one true ascetic and Trinitarian faith revealed to them earlier by Christ at the River Jordan, a faith which would have empowered them to act as naturally as Christ created us all to act - namely, as the rulers of this creation distorted by sin, and in particular, as masters of the Devil, whose very name itself is synonymous with the.word.'perversion'.'' O faithless and perverse generation! '' Perhaps these words of Christ, sound harsh to us. However, every perversity - that is every abnormal or unnatural activity of humankind – is indeed, a direct result of our faithlessness. And when Christ speaks of faithlessness, He does not mean the absence of any faith. No! He refers to the absence of the one True Faith. Because as a tree needs its roots to be whole and intact in order to survive, so too does every person need the one True Faith in the Holy Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity to stand upright and steadfast, before God and before neighbor. And as the same tree craves water for refreshment, together with the life giving rays of the sun to bear good fruit, so too do we need the purification provided by fasting and the illumination granted by prayer, that we may become capable to be able to work miracles just like the miracle performed by the Savior today, with the healing of the young man possessed by a demon - because every miracle is nothing more, than a return to the normal state of things, exactly as is the case with our true home in Paradise, '' where there is no more pain, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life without end '', according to the patristic hymns of our.infallible. Orthodox. Church.

This return to the normal state of things, which we call a miracle, can also be seen in the lives of Joshua and St. Gregory the Wonderworker. Both of these

holy men were armed with good faith, prayer and fasting, in accordance with Our Lord’s commandment in today’s Gospel reading. However, while the first saint stopped the very sun in the sky, thereby overwhelming the enemies of God’s people, and the second saint moved an entire mountain in order to build a church in its place, there is a third case of holiness, an inconceivably higher example of the True Faith, prayer and fasting.

We encounter this inexpressible holiness, in the person of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, whom we honor with our own fasts and prayers during this solemn period of the Dormition. For it is one thing to stop the sun in its tracks, or to move an entire mountain, but quite a different thing for someone to open the Kingdom of Heaven, as did Our Lady, who is more honorable than the Cherubim. For only the Virgin Mary, could move God Himself to descend from heaven to earth. Only she, more glorious beyond compare to the Seraphim, could become the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, where the bodiless Word and Son of God the Father took flesh, blood and bones, and became Son of Man, that man may become God. Indeed, here in the case of Our Lady, we do not only speak about '' faith as a mustard seed’’ but a seed which although smaller than all other seeds, became fully grown, and larger than all the other garden plants to become a tree, so that the birds of the air came and nested in its branches.

Let us also make our own nest in the embrace of our Holy Church, especially during this holy period of the Dormition Fast, and let us implore the Mother of God to help us acquire this same 'faith as a grain of mustard seed', which her Son demands of us . Let us sow this faith in the barren pastures of our lives, that we may move our own personal mountains of pain, sorrow and sighing, and thus exercise - perhaps for the first time - the authority that God has entrusted to us at our Baptism. The authority to trample upon snakes and scorpions and to have dominion over all the power of the Devil, at whatever time or place he attacks us, and in whichever form this most cowardly enemy of mankind may wish to take. Amen.