The sacraments are the normative means of receiving grace, but not the rigidly legalistic category you constantly present them as. For example, the thief on the cross would have been baptized if he had heard the preaching of the Apostles and had the same repentance and faith, but the whole being-nailed-to-a-cross-in-the-process-of-dying thing precluded that.
There are countless examples in the lives of the saints of a Christian being tortured, onlookers observing this and declaring that they too are Christians, and being immediately martyred with no opportunity for baptism. These are commemorated as saints in the services of the Church so it's hard to get much more official than that. If these people weren't killed, they would have been baptized and entered the Church in the normative way. If they had professed faith but rejected baptism when it was possible, then they would not have been Christians. It's as simple as that. For 99.9% of us, who are not facing immediate martyrdom in professing faith in Christ, baptism is the normative manner of entering the Church. Exceptions don't disprove the rule.
This is not hard to understand. And it's not a problem for Orthodoxy, it's only a problem for a logic-obsessive bean-counting mentality that can't conceive of perceiving any of this outside of its myopic arbitrary parameters.
The legalistic nature of Orthodox sacramentology reveals itself in their understanding of what makes a sacrament "valid." For the Orthodox, only their sacraments are valid, meaning only their sacraments confer saving grace. Because the Orthodox already deny justification by faith alone, the sacraments become necessary to receive saving grace. I agree that they will, inconsistently, affirm that many are saved without the sacraments and by faith alone but this only goes to show the deficiency in their sacramentology.
So in other words, if you had the misfortune of living before the printing press made owning your own copy of the Bible viable, and/or the misfortune of being an illiterate person who couldn't sit down and read the Bible and decide for yourself what it means, then you're shit outta luck. This cornerstone of Protestant epistemology could only spring from the minds of scholastic western European nerds with a crippling lack of perspective beyond the ivory towers. That's exactly why there's nothing like it before widespread and affordable printing emerged, resulting in people quickly taking universal access to the printed word as a given.
Before the printing press, only the rich and the local churches had copies of the Bible. The laity would receive the Scriptures as told through the preacher. This former lack of availability in the Scriptures doubtless led to many of the superstitions surrounding the Scriptures. When the average person got a hold of the Scriptures and could not find the doctrines that his bishops had taught him, he quickly abandoned those doctrines.
This document is probably a forgery, found under remarkably dubious circumstances, but even if we grant that it's completely authentic and this Patriarch subscribed to Calvinist notions, so what? He's not the Infallible Supreme Pontiff of Orthodoxy. He can simply be wrong, and that has no effect on the Church.
Have you watched the video? There is more to Cyril Lucaris than just the one document. He makes for an interesting case-study because he shows that Eastern Orthodoxy, as it is now expressed, not necessarily in his day, is a post-hoc reaction against the Protestant Reformation. So when you say he was wrong, who are you to say he was wrong? You are only part of the laity and he was the first among the bishops.
In other words a Calvinist can never actually know he's saved and can merely be a deluded reprobate. This places him in a far worse position than the Orthodox. For instance, upon committing an act of fornication, the Calvinist might start to ask am-I-really-elect-or-reprobate, and conclude upon constantly falling into sin that they aren't really saved and give up, that God obviously hasn't given him grace. The switch, so to speak, is either flipped to On or Off, and if empirical experience suggests it's in the Off position, then you're screwed.
There is nothing in Calvinism that makes giving up necessary. We know we are weak, but God is the one who is causing us to persevere to the end. I think everyone who has sincerely struggled with their sin has asked the question "does God really love me?" He does, and because He does, He will not forsake us.
I don't know about anybody else, but I find the latter notion a lot less bleak, and a lot more hopeful. If you scratch beneath the surface, you find that in Protestantism, especially Calvinism, you can't know that you're actually saved. You can be fervently faithful today and totally Believe In Jesus, but if in the future you fall away, your present seeming faith is total delusion.
The same book that says "you may know that in the Son of God you have eternal life" also says "they [apostates] went out from us so that it would be demonstrated that they were not truly of us." This is how to Biblically account for this seeming paradox.
Of course you're under no intrinsic obligation to study Orthodoxy in depth, and one from the Western world can't be faulted for misunderstanding Orthodoxy, as it has an outlook that is very different from that of the individualistic western mind and isn't something that will immediately be picked up, especially not just from reading about it. But if you're going to opine on what you think we believe, as you've done on a regular basis for the last several years, constantly making these kinds of erroneous statements makes you come across as a bad-faith actor with an axe to grind.
You accuse me of not understanding what you believe, but then you go on to affirm everything that I say you believe, which is where these discussions come from. Then after doing so, you suggest I am bad faith actor. I don't get it.
You are free to think of me however you want. I view these kinds of discussions as both a way to learn, and as a sparring match, or like playing chess. I would not make it out to be anything bigger than it is. I am not under the expectation that I will convince you, so I do not experience anger or disappointment when you remain unconvinced.