St. Paul American Coptic Orthodox Church Podcast - Sermon
Sep 6, 2026 · 25 min · 7 segments
Fr. Kyrillos Ibrahim - Homily for the Sunday of Nasie. On the Sunday of Nasie, the church reflects on the end of the world, encouraging Christians to embrace life's tensions, which aim to produce…
So if we think about what is, if we try to ask, what is spirituality? What does it mean to live a spiritual life? What is the pursuit of holiness? One way that we can think of it is that spirituality is fundamentally what we do with the tensions and the paradoxes and the restlessness in our life.
Because All of us live with a tremendous amount of different varying kinds of tensions in our life and paradoxes and restlessness that's within our soul.
And how we resolve those is really the choice of whether we grow in holiness and virtue or whether we go the way of the world.
If we look, for example, at the early Christians, they lived in this tension of whether to be satisfied and comfortable in this life or to prepare for the coming of the Lord.
And so they produced great virtue and holiness in their lives because they chose through that tension to be ready, to be prepared.
Many of us, we have to live with the tension of what we might call the contemplative life versus the active life.
How do I balance between the time for my solitude and my silence and my prayer and my alone time? And how do I balance that with demands of life and being with other people and busyness and so on? And so, again, this is one of those tensions that we're called to resolve in a way that produces in us virtue and the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
we see that oftentimes there's this tension of whether we should be patient and endure or whether we should take matters into our own hands and be impulsive.
And so when we face some sort of restlessness in our soul, when we face some sort of agonizing tension within us, we can either run to some sort of cheap distraction or some cheap pleasure, or we can sit in that tension and let it produce the fruit of spiritual endurance and hope, the virtue of hope, waiting for God.
And so oftentimes the world, when it's sitting in that tension of restlessness, it prefers the way of the world, which is the way of pleasure and happiness of the world.
Paul, of course, talks about the ultimate tension in Romans 7, which is the tension between the spirit and the flesh.
When he means the flesh here, he means the desires of the flesh, pride and anger and lust and envy and gluttony and greed and all of these passions of the flesh.
So he says there is this war between the desires of the flesh, which are born out of that original sin that we all have, and the new man that we put on in baptism, whose mind and heart is on heaven.
So how do we live in that tension? Do we either give in to the flesh, or we choose the way of the Spirit? Another tension might be the consolation that we get from the Lord in terms of experiencing His presence in our life, in our emotions, in our prayers, in our worship, and then those moments in which we feel abandoned by God.
How do we deal with that tension between the felt feeling of God and the unfelt feeling of God, between the sense that he is with me and abiding in me and the sense that he has abandoned me? And again, the way of virtue and holiness is to not give in to that tension by abandoning our faith in God and going the way of the world, but rather sitting down sitting in that tension, allowing that desolate experience to form a greater fortitude in us, a greater faith, a greater hope, a greater sense of waiting for God to come and visit us again with his salvation.
There's also the tension of fear and trust, right? We're afraid of everything.
but we're also afraid of real things like the apostles when they were in the storm and they thought the boat was going to overturn and they were going to drown.
It's a real fear, right? And the Lord let them sit in that fear, that tension, right? In the Gospel of Mark and Matthew and elsewhere, the Lord specifically and purposefully comes to them late in the early morning, in the fourth watch, St.
Matthew says, in order to let them sit in that tension, right? What will they do with that tension? Will they give in to their fear? Will they curse God? Or will they hope and trust that God is with them in that storm? And Jesus, of course, comes to them walking on the water and relieves them of that tension.
So if we think about what is, if we try to ask, what is spirituality? What does it mean to live a spiritual life? What is the pursuit of holiness? One way that we can think of it is that spirituality is fundamentally what we do with the tensions and the paradoxes and the restlessness in our life.
Because All of us live with a tremendous amount of different varying kinds of tensions in our life and paradoxes and restlessness that's within our soul.
And how we resolve those is really the choice of whether we grow in holiness and virtue or whether we go the way of the world.
If we look, for example, at the early Christians, they lived in this tension of whether to be satisfied and comfortable in this life or to prepare for the coming of the Lord.
And so they produced great virtue and holiness in their lives because they chose through that tension to be ready, to be prepared.
Many of us, we have to live with the tension of what we might call the contemplative life versus the active life.
How do I balance between the time for my solitude and my silence and my prayer and my alone time? And how do I balance that with demands of life and being with other people and busyness and so on? And so, again, this is one of those tensions that we're called to resolve in a way that produces in us virtue and the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
we see that oftentimes there's this tension of whether we should be patient and endure or whether we should take matters into our own hands and be impulsive.
And so when we face some sort of restlessness in our soul, when we face some sort of agonizing tension within us, we can either run to some sort of cheap distraction or some cheap pleasure, or we can sit in that tension and let it produce the fruit of spiritual endurance and hope, the virtue of hope, waiting for God.
And so oftentimes the world, when it's sitting in that tension of restlessness, it prefers the way of the world, which is the way of pleasure and happiness of the world.
Paul, of course, talks about the ultimate tension in Romans 7, which is the tension between the spirit and the flesh.
When he means the flesh here, he means the desires of the flesh, pride and anger and lust and envy and gluttony and greed and all of these passions of the flesh.
So he says there is this war between the desires of the flesh, which are born out of that original sin that we all have, and the new man that we put on in baptism, whose mind and heart is on heaven.
So how do we live in that tension? Do we either give in to the flesh, or we choose the way of the Spirit? Another tension might be the consolation that we get from the Lord in terms of experiencing His presence in our life, in our emotions, in our prayers, in our worship, and then those moments in which we feel abandoned by God.
How do we deal with that tension between the felt feeling of God and the unfelt feeling of God, between the sense that he is with me and abiding in me and the sense that he has abandoned me? And again, the way of virtue and holiness is to not give in to that tension by abandoning our faith in God and going the way of the world, but rather sitting down sitting in that tension, allowing that desolate experience to form a greater fortitude in us, a greater faith, a greater hope, a greater sense of waiting for God to come and visit us again with his salvation.
There's also the tension of fear and trust, right? We're afraid of everything.
but we're also afraid of real things like the apostles when they were in the storm and they thought the boat was going to overturn and they were going to drown.
It's a real fear, right? And the Lord let them sit in that fear, that tension, right? In the Gospel of Mark and Matthew and elsewhere, the Lord specifically and purposefully comes to them late in the early morning, in the fourth watch, St.
Matthew says, in order to let them sit in that tension, right? What will they do with that tension? Will they give in to their fear? Will they curse God? Or will they hope and trust that God is with them in that storm? And Jesus, of course, comes to them walking on the water and relieves them of that tension.
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