Source: Basilica News Agency
February 28, 2016
On the 34th Sunday after Pentecost, the Divine Liturgy was celebrated at the Patriarchal Cathedral by His Eminence Nicolae, Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of the Americas, assisted by a group of priests and deacons.
After reading the text of the Gospel according to St. Luke 15:11-32, His Eminence delivered a sermon in which he underlined the fact that nowadays children are faced with the same temptations as the Prodigal Son, namely to leave the house and country of their parents.
His Eminence urged all parents to educate their children according to the teaching of the Church: “We must build for our children a parental and spiritual home, which is the Church and the community of the Church. If they go abroad to study or live, if they give up wandering, they can do it when they remember they have a parental home and parents who are waiting for them. This is why the responsibility to build a home for our children belongs both to the biological and to the spiritual parents. When the time comes they will remember this spiritual and parental home and return. If not, they will keep on wandering in the world."
The Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of the Americas emphasized the fact that the mission to build a spiritual home for our children belongs to the parishes and communities both inside the country and abroad: “Our responsibility is to raise them up in the parental home until the age when they go to university, to educate them, teach them what it means to be Christian and Orthodox, to offer them the gift of faith and of understanding the love of God as the loving Parent of all of us. Our hope is that these children well educated in our parishes will come back some time in the future. After going abroad, they will remember who they are, Christians and Orthodox, and that they have a home where they will return to their parents’ love that they received in their parental home.”
