It was the same in the Old Testament. People constantly lost the covenant with God and constantly restored it. When king Josiah sent to one of the prophetesses in Jerusalem, she said to him the words of the Lord: "Because your heart has softened, and you have wept, I have heard you." Then Josiah gathered the people together and made a covenant for the correction of his life and that of the common one. And Judas was accepted into the covenant with God, and even in the last moments of the Savior's earthly life he was nourished with His Body and Blood, but remained outside the covenant. And I repeat to you once again: the key to all the Sacraments is the covenant with God. No one knows about it, it is our mystery before God. Keeping our covenant with God is our life's work.

Only through it can we receive from the Lord the fulfillment of His covenant. And if someone does not have a secret covenant with God, if someone has not yet made one, then now is a good, suitable time for this. Remember that only when we ourselves take upon ourselves this covenant, only then do we receive the opportunity to live with God. Let us think carefully about all this, and I hope that each of us, if we look carefully into our souls, will see that we wanted to receive everything from God, but we ourselves did not give Him anything. And if we give our covenant to the Lord and fall down and ask for forgiveness, then we will receive it from Him.

Let us, dear ones, not only think about it, but also try to fulfill everything that we have just talked about. After all, the time is very favorable! Amen.

Source: Moscow Eparchial Vedomosti No 1-2/2004

Sermon

1. Church New Year Day (September 1)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!

By the mercy of God, today we are entering a new church year. Every year, going from feast to feast, the Holy Church, together with all of nature, passes from beginning to end the annual cycle of divine services.

For people living in the world, the coming of the new year is usually associated with a painful feeling of regret about what he could have done and what was left undone. Looking back at the time lived, a person inevitably thinks about what was irretrievably lost in the past, what can no longer be returned or changed in the future.

People who live a spiritual life are alien to this sense of the irreversibility of the past, because they live in a world where there are no time limits, where the boundaries of the past, present and future are overcome.

Not long ago we buried the Mother of God and did not "remember" Her burial, but actually buried Her, and in a few days we will celebrate Her Nativity again. This becomes possible due to the fact that, in performing divine services, we enter a world in which the boundaries of time are destroyed, because in divine services we live in eternity. Through this communion with eternity, we can really be present with the events from which we, the people of the twentieth century, are historically separated by a number of centuries that have passed.

Overcoming the boundaries of time in divine services and entering the world of eternity, we enter it not alone, but together with all of nature. In the liturgical hymns, it is constantly spoken of the participation of all creation in the joy that man experiences when he joins eternity, of its participation in the glorification of the Creator: "Let the heavens rejoice worthily, and let the earth rejoice, let the world celebrate, both visible and invisible," says the Paschal canon. And not only heaven and earth, but each of God's creations separately participates in this universal hymn to the Creator.

In the "praise" psalms (Psalms 148-150), which are read daily at Matins, we call upon the sun and the moon, the stars and the light, the mountains and the hills, the trees, the beasts and the birds, together with the heavenly angelic world, to take part in the glorification of the Lord.

But nowhere does it seem that this unity of man with all creation in the glorification of God is expressed with such depth and power as in the "Song of the Three Youths," which is part of the last paremia read on Holy Saturday, each verse of which is accompanied by the refrain "Sing to the Lord and exalt Him forever." Here creation unites and merges into one and eternal /"... exalt Him for ever."