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 Lords
commandment in todays Gospel reading. However, while the
first saint stopped the very sun in the sky, thereby
overwhelming the enemies of Gods 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.