On the second Sunday of Easter Lent, which our people call Pacista, His Holiness Patriarch of Serbia Mr. . Porfirje served the saint with a liturgy in the Church of the Protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Belgrade.
This week the Church celebrates the memory of St. Gregory Palamas , the great theologian, saint, Athonite monk and Archbishop of Solunna, as well as the great victory that thanks to him the Church won in defense of Orthodox mystical asceticism, which implies the doctrine of the immediacy of God's presence in the world.
Patriarch Porphyry pointed to the great importance of the work of St. Gregory Palamas, who formed the centuries-old experience of the Church, the divinely revealed truth about the distinction between the essence of God and the energies of the Divine. According to His Holiness, this is a very important spiritual truth, because in this truth we are confirmed that we are created icons of God, that we can communicate with God personally and directly, but also that we can become participants in God's divine service. life, because we are created for deification. - God became man so that we could become gods by grace," Patriarch Porphyry emphasized.
The important Patriarch noted that it is important to know our Orthodox faith because it reveals to us what the right life is, as well as what we should be wary of If we believe in the Revelation of God, if we believe in the word of God, then the word of God is the law and the rule of our life. Then we check all other rules and all other laws for conformity to the law of God and know that the law of God, revealed to us and recorded in the Gospel of Christ, is the right, healthy and normal way of our existence and our life. If we do not believe in the Revelation of God, in the word of Christ, in the word of God, in the Gospel of Christ, but have some other idea and ideology that we follow, then our life will be organized according to this ideology. However, as a rule, those other ideas and ideologies are not the revelation of God, but are the fruit of human imagination, the product of man, and therefore they are not salvific.
- Last week we professed the Orthodox faith and rejected unorthodox teachings about the truths of our faith concerning the One God in the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, our Church and our salvation. Then, by the way, we have rejected those who teach wrongly about the Father and the Son, who teach wrongly about the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father; consequently, who teach wrongly about that fact, that truth, that the Holy Spirit comes from the Father. We said we rejected those who teach this wrong, not those who teach it wrong. We mention this today because there are some who insinuate and suggest that we have rejected as wrong those who believe and teach that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. God forbid, no, on the contrary, we have rejected the faith of those who teach it wrongly. What is meant is about that truth, that fact, which is our belief, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.
Unfortunately, even today there are those who teach this wrongly, and there have been many in the past, and if we were to list them, it would be a long list. And for those who maliciously interpret what is said and taught in order to cause confusion, St. Maximus the Confessor in his famous epistle "The Four Hundred Heads of Love" says that whoever listens to a word or reads a book, not for spiritual benefit, but to catch a word or a comma in order to criticize the speaker or the writer of the book to show himself wise, nothing spiritual will ever and anywhere be revealed to him. Of course, we, as the Church, pray for such, as well as for the salvation of the whole world, and we, on the other hand, unequivocally believe and confess, in accordance with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Holy Spirit, the Lord of life-giving, who proceeds from the Father, who, together with the Father and the Son, honors and glorifies, and We reject every other doctrine about the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Church, and salvation as wrong and unorthodox. After all, at every Liturgy we confess our faith by reciting the Creed. And not only at the Holy Liturgy, but also many times in various daily prayers. And so we could freely say that every Liturgy is a kind of Orthodox Sunday for us, because it is, among other things, a proper Orthodox confession of faith.
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At the celebratory liturgy, the Primate of the Serbian Orthodox Church was served by Archpriests Stavrofors Jovica Vicentijevic, Slobodan Aksentic, Milutin Cheketic and Jovan Milanovic, Priests Gavrilo Raic, Nenad Prodic, Aleksandar Popovic and Mihajlo Rapajic, Protodeacons Dragan Radic and Radomir Vrucinic, and Deacon Pavel Matulic.
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