Editor’s Introduction

Fifteen sermons, gathered here as in the 1911 collected edition, preached across the fixed feasts of the church year that commemorate events in the life of Christ Himself: the Nativity and the Sunday that follows it, the approach to Theophany and the feast itself, the Meeting of the Lord, the Transfiguration (given twice, in two separate years), Pentecost, and the Exaltation of the Cross. Unlike the Marian collection translated earlier in this project, which returns again and again to Mary’s intercession, these sermons circle a different center: the concrete historical events of Christ’s own life as the pattern and guarantee of the believer’s own.

Two pieces stand out for their vividness. The sermon for the Sunday after the Nativity turns from the massacre of the Holy Innocents to a sustained meditation on regicide, written in the shadow of the assassination of Alexander II, a passage that shows how directly nineteenth-century Russian political violence entered even a feast-day sermon. And the sermon for the Exaltation of the Cross traces, in some historical detail, the three centuries of persecution before Constantine, and the later Justinian-era plague whose end, according to tradition, established the feast of the Meeting of the Lord. It is history mobilized in the service of a call to repentance.