Archpriest Dimitry Smirnov

Sermon

Book 1

Preface

With the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia

The publication is dedicated to all my numerous relatives who have served the Mother of our Russian Orthodox Church for several centuries in the priesthood and monastic rank, as well as to all the true saints of God whom I have been fortunate enough to meet over the past 30 years.

For some time, when I served in the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in the village of Altufieva, some of the parishioners, mostly young ones, began to write down the sermons delivered there. Some of them took a blessing for this, while others did not even know that this is how it is supposed to be in the church.

I did not interfere with this, but I always warned that the recording should be carried out unnoticed even for me (for at first it was very distracting), and even more so for the "eye of the sovereign". The "eye" itself did not delve into the content very much, and there was nothing against the "general line" except for the Gospel itself, but the very fact of daily sermons in the morning and evening, and even more so the recordings, could arouse suspicion and organizational conclusions. And I did not want to leave this church and the old parishioners, who would hardly follow me to another parish.

The second condition that I set for the "writers" was that the film should be used only for personal purposes - "to no one and never". And in addition to the main reason described above, there were a number of other reasons for this.

Firstly, such "advertising" could attract too many people, and this regular movement of a certain contingent in large numbers to one place would also not be hidden from the "eye".

Secondly, a sermon, unlike a book or a song, for example, is intended for specific people who are standing in church at that very moment, and if it is given to someone else without editing, it can produce the opposite effect to what is desired.

Thirdly, I did not and do not believe now that these sermons contain any new or theologically fresh and important material that needs to be brought to the attention of a large number of Orthodox Christians. And therefore he was afraid of harm to his own soul, which always arises when fame exceeds the scale of the person himself.

Fourthly, I have never been a theologian, and despite the fact that I passed the exams for the theological academy well, I could well admit some inaccurate expression that a small audience would not notice, since a polemical motif or too "figurative" an expression often arises in a sermon, but if listened to repeatedly, it can warp or repel people unfamiliar with the genre. One sick woman, whom I had given communion at home for six years, was given a cassette with a sermon by "dear father," which dealt with the attitude of a Christian to illness. A parishioner, "as an experienced pastor" who gave a sick woman a spiritual "medicine", caused her a state of shock and created a real threat of losing her faith in general, which then another priest tried to heal for almost a whole year. If in medicine the dose of medicine varies depending on the severity of the disease and the condition of the patient, then in the spiritual life it is impossible to present to a bedridden person what is given to a walker.