On Meatfare Sunday, 23 February 2025, His Eminence Archbishop Makarios of Australia liturgised at the Cathedral of the Annunciation of Our Lady in Sydney, and was joined by the Chancellor of the Holy Archdiocese and Dean of the Cathedral, Archimandrite of the Ecumenical Throne Christophoros Krikelis, as well as by the Assistant Priest, Archimandrite Stephanos Tinikashvili.
At the end of the Divine Liturgy, His Eminence performed the Sanctification Service (Agiasmos) for the beginning of the new Sunday School year and paternally blessed the Sunday School Teachers who serve with devotion the catechetical work of the local Church.
During his address, the Archbishop expressed his gratitude to the Sunday School teachers who were present, the President Dr. John Psarommatis and all the members of the Greek Orthodox Christian Society, characterising them as “co-workers” of the Holy Archdiocese of Australia in the heavy responsibility it has shouldered, to keep the flame of faith and Greek Orthodox traditions burning in the hearts of the Greek children of the fifth continent. “The work that is carried out in our Sunday Schools is an ecclesiastical and mainly apostolic work,” he emphasised and pointed out: “Because this is what the Apostles did.
They went from place to place, from house to house and from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, to preach the word of God. We too today, in other circumstances of course and with other conditions, are called to offer the word of God to the children who come to church, who as we must not forget are our future. What we do through the Sunday Schools is to sow the seed, so that it will sprout after many years. We would say that we are making an investment; an investment not financial, but spiritual. An investment in our language, in our faith, in our traditions and customs.”
At another point in his address, His Eminence Archbishop Makarios recalled that the Orthodox Church has two lungs, one being the Holy Gospel, and the other, the Holy Canons. “The Church cannot breathe without these two lungs,” he emphasised, and addressed the teachers of the Sunday schools with the exhortation: “Do not forget that everything you teach and everything you say must pass through this filter of the lungs of our Church.”
In conclusion, the Archbishop told the Sunday School Teachers that “when the children grow up, they will not remember exactly what you told them, but they will remember that they had a good and kind teacher, a person who approached them with love, understanding and affection, a person who gave them feelings of spiritual joy and security”. To succeed in this mission, he asked them to teach mainly with their lives and example. “What we want is not knowledge”, he noted, “because if the important thing in the matter of spiritual life were knowledge, then we would tell the children ‘go on the internet and read, there is a lot of knowledge there’”. “What matters”, he emphatically explained, “is your own presence and your own testimony, which must be the presence and testimony of the saints, the presence and testimony of Christ”.
