My beloved,

I think that we have to see this Sunday as one who speaks about our future. For that the future of Orthodoxy isjust as important as it’s past.

And the Holy Icons, that we restored in the Church on 11 March 843, they are and now in danger of beingabolished.

Not from the Church…but from society.

Because the society starts to exclude religious symbols…or minimizes their importance.

For what makes postmodernity when reduces humanity to the body? Or what is an empty body, in the dirty magazines, than a body drained of spiritual beauty, of candor?

But, on the other hand, what bad produces the religious symbols…when our world is full of commercialsymbols?

And the elimination from the public space of religious symbols does not keep only of an ideological aversionbut and the ignorance.

Only an ignorant man can believe that the elimination of a symbol from public space…is automatically deletedand from the hearts of men.

But religious symbols are present in society precisely because it founds in the increase the human person.

For Holy Fathers, Holy Icons were iconic testimonies of the incarnation of Lord. Their fight for Icons was the desire to preserve the humanity deified, transfigured in the eyes of the world.

And their gift is huge for the Church and the world. Because, by Icons, we can see who we are…or, rather, to what we must to aspire.

Therefore it is very important soteriological message of the Church to humanity, because it contains correctanthropological parameters.

And they are: man was created by God for to be in communion with Him and to deify. And Holy Icons and Holy Relics are clear evidences of human deification, that of personal fulfillment.

What happens when the society obstructs their theological valences? Man looks like a disaster in motion. For that he not knows who is, how is worth and where he goes.

Human science, being made by man, is limited as and he. For to exit from the ignorance, from fundamentalignorance, you need by divine Revelation, that is the message of God to His creation.

And God’s will not enter in conflict with the human desire to know. He Himself, God, is He who created us with the capacity to observe and understand the creation and us.

The real science is a science based on evidences and not on presumptions. And if man divinizes…and deification is an evidence…then we should follow the science that personalized us.

Therefore, in the first Sunday of the Great Lent, we celebrate the Orthodoxy into an eschatological mode. For that Orthodoxy is the one that creates the new man of the Kingdom.

And this new man is not a human caricature but a man of holiness.

And if we do not get Saints…then we lost the Sunday of Orthodoxy. Because this Sunday is for those who save themselves.

So that do not enjoy in the empty mode but with beautiful heart, full of grace! To enjoy divine, orthodox by life with God for that we inherit it for all ages. Amen!

Source: http://www.teologiepentruazi.ro/2012/03/01/sermon-on-the-sunday-of-orthodoxy-2012/