And the example of the life of the holy prophet, Forerunner and Baptist of the Lord teaches us how to live, pleasing God, how to be saved in the world of sin. He teaches us to always thirst for the appearance of the Lord and Savior in our personal lives. He teaches us always and in everything to desire the knowledge of God's will for us.

To this day, John the Baptist preaches to us that the first step on the path of our encounter with the Lord is repentance and cleansing from the defilement of sin. Let us repent and produce worthy fruits of repentance.

In memory of the holy Prophet and Forerunner John, in remembrance of his martyrdom, the Church from the first times of Christianity ranked this day among the great feasts, for the martyrdom of the righteous became the gateway to eternal glory and joy. The Church decreed that this day should be celebrated with a strict fast in order to curb human passions, which were the cause of such grave sins, and also in memory of the great faster, who fasted all his life.

And another feature of the present day is the special commemoration of all the soldiers who laid down their lives for the faith and the Fatherland, all those killed on the battlefields, as if they were followers of the martyrdom of the holy Prophet John, who gave his whole life without reserve for the Word of Truth, for faith, for people.

And the last thing that today's feast reveals to us and what we need to inscribe on the tablets of our hearts. Divine truth leads a person who leaves the earth to "his place," to a place corresponding to his manifest desires and secret aspirations. After death, a person connects with the values that his heart on earth has chosen and loved. Already on earth, both heaven and hell begin in a person. Let us pray to the Forerunner of Christ, John, to become for us the Forerunner on the path to Christ, delivering us from the terrible specter of evil, which so often reminds us of itself by sins that invade our lives.

"Let us beseech the Forerunner to have mercy on the Trinity, to deliver us from the passions of dishonor."

The Exaltation of the Cross of the Lord.

O many-sung Tree of the Cross! O life-giving Tree of the Cross! O Three-Blessed Tree of the Cross! O honorable Cross, the all-joyous sign of our redemption! Show us, sinners, the path of salvation.

Our friends! "The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18). And yesterday we visibly touched this force, with the participants of the Exaltation of the Cross of the Lord. The Life-Giving Tree floated past each of you, brought out of the Holy of Holies, from the earthly sky, from the altar of the Lord. It sailed, and rose to the heights, and descended to the earth, to rise again, overshadowing all the cardinal directions, so that everyone would see, understand, and feel the power and authority of this great sign of victory.

It was not by human invention that this wondrous feast entered the world, which absorbed three events of different times in the history of the Life-Giving Tree, and it has not been preserved in the world for seventeen centuries by human efforts. The Gospel reading of the feast points to the power that constantly and autocratically possesses the changeable and inconstant world. The power and power of the Cross is the great sacrifice – the sufferings of the Savior on the Cross, beginning with His unrighteous condemnation to death to the piercing of the rib of His most pure body, from which flowed blood and water, nourishing the world into Eternal Life. And the Gospel ends with the assurance that the truth of this terrible story is attested to by an eyewitness of that sacrifice on Golgotha and is transmitted so that the listeners will believe.

The Orthodox Church, born on the eve of the appearance of the Life-Giving Cross of the Lord to the world and become, in the person of the Apostles, an eyewitness to the great feat of love, even unto death and death on the cross, has since accepted the sign of the Cross as a salvific symbol for the faithful, and not only as a symbol, but as a saving power by which enemies are defeated.

Testimonies about the veneration of the Cross of the Lord have been preserved in the apostolic writings that have come down to us and in the writings of the teachers of the Church. And the living examples of this power, appearing at all times, brought to life a special rule of veneration of the Cross, established at the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which took place in the year 680 in Constantinople.

Its 73rd canon reads: "Since the Life-Creating Cross has shown us salvation, it behooves us to use all diligence, so that honor may be given to him through which we were saved from the ancient Fall."