The 24th Sunday of Pentecost

We are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens of the household of God.

Glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

___Spoke about how our lord is ___ and calls not only those who are near, but those who are far off. He has, as St. Paul said, broken down the middle wall dividing. We understand that in the Jewish temple there were many walls, many barriers. There was the court that separated the priests from the laity, and a court that separated the women of Israel from the men, and a court that separated the gentiles from the Jewish people. The only death penalty that the Romans allowed the Jews to inflict legally was if any gentile, any non-Jew, dared to enter the portion of the temple restricted for Jews, that person could be stoned to death.

Yet St. Paul says that in Christ, this middle wall dividing was broken down, that we became one. He called men and women from many nations and made them, not only all stand together, but to be one family, one race, one chosen generation, one royal priesthood.

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Andrew who was the first called of the disciples. Every year I remark - although since his feast day doesn’t come on Sunday every year, only a few people hear – I remark at how St. Andrew impresses me. He was the first disciple who Jesus called. He immediately, rather than dwelling on his chosenness or the privilege of being close to the Messiah as he had been the closest disciple of St. John the Baptist, instead he runs immediately to bring his brother to Jesus. And there was with him at that time, also following John the Baptist, John the son of Zebedee. And when Jesus chose the three who would be his inner circle, the three who would go with him up on to Mount Tabor and behold him transfigured, the three who would go with him into the room of Jairus daughter to see her raised from the dead, the three who would go with him into the inner garden when he prayed and shed blood with his sweat – it was Peter, and James, and John. And yet when we hear about the contention that arose among the disciples, it is not a contention of Andrew being jealous of Peter, or of James, or of John. It was, in fact, James and John being jealous of Peter. They believed that since they were Jesus’ cousins, they ought to be able stand on His right hand and on His left hand, and they understood that for reasons known only to God, that our Lord had chosen Peter to be the foremost of the Apostles.

And here’s Andrew, who brought them all. Andrew who was the first called. And he was relegated, it appeared, to a secondary place, but we find nothing of jealousy, nothing of rancor, no record of his jockeying for a better position, no sign of his enthusiasm waning. Rather, he accepted the place that was given him. Andrew’s name, Andreas, means “one who is manly,” who behaves like a man; and he was a man – more than a man. Not just anqropoj, but androj, male. He was a man who had his power under control. He was one of those meek whom the Lord said would inherit the earth. The word meek in English doesn’t mean “little” like it does in Romanian. It means having your strength under control; it means thinking little of yourself even though you may mean a great deal.

Andrew could have boasted, as far as we know, that St. Paul was wrong when he said that he had reaped more abundantly than all of the disciples. In Paul’s time, it was probably true in terms of sheer numbers of souls, for we know he had a great impact upon the jews of Palestine, and he had a great impact upon Asia Minor. And he came over to Macedonia and began the mission in Greece. St. Paul’s mission field, although he traveled ____ times, was circumscribed in the world map of the Roman days. It was not so great. Equally as great was that of Thomas who went east to evangelize Afghanistan and India, and went all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But probably the man who is credited with the greatest missionary work is Andrew. Andrew, the first called. For Andrew set off after visiting cities in Asia minor, he set off to go up the Bosporus. He went up to the Black Sea, and around all of its shores and touched all of the kingdoms that surrounded it and preached in all of those places. And he came around a full circle to the city of Byzantium of the Dardanelles, and he founded a church there. The place later became the royal capital Constantinople. And then, travelling again north, he went up the Dnieper River, and he came to the place where today stands the city of Kiev, and he said to his disciples, “On these hills God will raise great glory to his name,” and he blessed that place. Many other places recount, in the archives of their founding, that St. Andrew visited them. This cannot all be documented, but I have on my desk - or rather on a table in the living room of my house – a PhD paper by a scholarly Greek historian who claims that Andrew – there’s ample evidence – that Andrew went up into Scandinavia. That he preached to the Nordic peoples, then came down to Fridja, and then into Gaul, and across into Britain and even into Scotland. So the fact that the Scots claimed him as the patron saint of their church was not simply some kind of Medieval imagination.

And then, returning and retracing his steps, going back through northern Europe, down the Dnieper and into the Black Sea, there he set up his headquarters and ran into conflict with the governor of that time. He was condemned to death, and he was not nailed but tied to a cross – for the Romans, when they wanted to be really sadistic, tied you to a cross and left you hanging there until you suffocated or died of starvation, and it could take days. The fact that Jesus was scourged and then nailed through his hands and his feet was a way of hastening his death. And as Andrew hung on the cross – and later tradition would ascribe to that cross the form of the letter Chi, the X shape – as he hung tied to that cross, what did he do but for two days he preached to the people who came to see this curiosity – this man who was being executed but who nevertheless was talking about life. It is said that after two days the governor was so moved by the people’s attention and so frightened at what the result might be that he sent soldiers to take Andrew down, to release him. But, exhausted by his long and rigorous life and by his two days suspension, having to pull himself up to breath and then falling back onto his bound wrists, it is said that the soldiers were not allowed to loosen his bonds. But rather, he uttered the words, “To Thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit,” and he went as a martyr to Christ, dying alone on the shores of the Black Sea.

Now, brothers and sisters, many, many people can tell lies, or make up stories, or invent tales, or create allegories or fables because they think their teaching is very valuable. In fact C.S. Lewis says there are two kinds of stories that people tell: there is that which is gospel, that is that comes from the truth – the good spiel, and there’s the other spiel – the devil’s story, the story about perversion, lust and vice, wickedness and selfishness and cunning prevailing over good, selflessness. But, to tell a story like that, a person has to be a fabulous creator of yarns. And it is unlikely that C.S. Lewis would have died on a cross arguing that there really was a lion named Aslan. It is not likely that Dr. Tolkien would have allowed himself to be beheaded in order to support the fact that he believed that there was once a place called Middle Earth. No, these were mere stories. And the philosophers among the Greeks and among the peoples of the world would spin their yarns, and perhaps if they were accompanied by others and they believed it to be of some higher value, they might allow themselves courageously, as did Socrates, to be executed for their teaching. But one man, not a professor, not a rabbi, not a scholar, not an intellectual, a fisherman, and the one who although called first was not preferred among even the first three – one man alone, without the support of a community of witnesses, without anybody to perform for, not a _____ whose picture was going to be put up in some town square, but a man who’s death to all that he knew would be obscure and not even remembered, stretched out his hands and his feet and accepted the ropes, the bonds, and suffered and died a terrible death to declare truth to the people of the Russe, of the Romanians, of the Greeks. The one who binds together the Ukranians and the people of Romania, the Greeks and the people of Russe, the man who holds them all together in one family having been their spiritual father and their teacher – that man died a lonely death because he knew that what he was saying was true and that the greater treason would be to deny it, to lie about it, to declare that he had been speaking fables. It is rare to imagine such a heroic person. And certainly to Andrew, the manly, goes the boast, together with St. Paul, that if he did not harvest more abundantly than all the other apostles in his lifetime, that the historic result of his mission has been a harvest exceeding that of Paul’s enormously. For all of the Slavic kingdoms, the Romanian nation and the Byzantine empire and all of it’s children, all their evangelization, this holy apostle Andrew through Christ broke down the middle wall that divided, and who made us all, not any longer strangers and foreigners to one another, but fellow citizens and members of the family of God.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever.

The 23rd Sunday of Pentecost

A couple days ago one of my sons was asking me a question and I gave him and standard answer, and he said, “Well, I know that. You’ve told us that six times at least.” Now I’m thinking that now that Erin Schwartz is blogging my sermons, people are going to find out just exactly how often I repeat myself. But that’s okay. We can go on a three year cycle kind of like the Roman Catholics.

The thing about the gospel today is that every Jewish person, every Jewish man, who had any piety, any love of God in him at all, had this desire: that he should have a sufficient amount of material wealth that he could spend his time studying the scriptures and praying rather than having to labor. It was not that he prayed to be able to be lazy, but that he prayed to be free to do God’s work and not to have to do temporal work. And that’s why this man in the story today is such a clutz. He’s a fellow who was successful at farming. His fields bring forth enough grain that he can survive for years on it. His vineyards enough grapes that he has wine in abundance. His flocks multiply. And he doesn’t say to himself, “Oh my soul, you can now put away some of this wealth and give some to the poor, offer some to the temple, and then go and study Torah.” Instead, he says, “Party on dude. Enough wealth is laid up for you for many years.” And that night, an angel comes to the man and addresses the man in a way that our Lord said that if we addressed one another, we’d be in danger of hellfire. He said, “Thou fool. Thou fool. This night shall thy soul be required of thee, and whose shall those things be?”

The lesson we have from this man is that our entire life is by God’s proclamation to be a life of labor. When Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden, God laid on Adam this commandment: “By the sweat of thy brow shall eat thy bread all the days of thy life until thou returnest unto the earth from which thou wast taken.” In other words, work is a burden, a podvig, a spiritual exercise laid on every single Christian. There is not one of us who are allowed to retire from the service of God, even if we are allowed to retire from our particular occupation at a particular time. And so it is that our life is meant to be one of transition. Now, for most of our forbearers there was no choice. I know that Andrew’s great grandfather was plowing his fields and gathering in his harvest of up to the very day that he could no longer go out in the fields and do it. And his heart was broken, not because he was getting old, but because he was a farmer and couldn’t do his farming. Well, we’re blessed here. We have enough material abundance that most of us, even the most humble among us, are able at the end of our lives to have some leisure to use in whatever way we’re disposed to do so. And God’s will is that after we have laid down the burden of manual labor, or of intellectual labor, after we have finished our lives of having to travel on business, or having to stand before classes, or study inventories and prepare business plans, that we should lay out for ourselves a way that we can serve God whole heartedly without having our attention divided. A pension, social security, savings, even those ever shrinking 401Ks – they are gifts given to us so that we can dispose our lives in such a way as to labor for the Lord.

I would speak to you today about St. Alexander Nevsky. Alexander Nevski is one of the Russian saints who we always observe because, first, a lot of our people are named Alexander; secondly, he was a hero of the faith. If it had not been for him, as world events developed, all of the land of the Russe would probably be Muslim today. Alexander Nevsky was a prince in the line of Rurik, a descendent of Prince Vladimir, he was a prince of Novgorod, the second city. After Kiev came Novgorod – the princes moved through the line, they didn’t stay in a city all their lives. Alexander Nevsky, just plain old Alexander, was faced with a double edged sword, or rather two swords, coming at him at the same time. From the east was coming the Tartar yolk – already felt, already burdening the land. The Tartars came to tax, to despoil, to pillage. They would often ride into town and they would hang the priest from the chandelier of the church, steal the altar and ride off with it. That’s why, in the Russian tradition, often the relics are not place in the holy table. They’re placed in the atimension so that the priest, if he’s smart, can grab it and run. And the next thing he did was to cut the rope from the chandelier so nobody could get hanged from it. They knew how to kill these people but they were devastating. They were barbarians. They were like wild animals. They descended upon the civilized world of that time like a plague of predators – like wolves howling out in the east. And from the West at the same time, sensing the weakness of the young Christian Kievan state, the Swedes – who were going through their Catholic phase before they became Lutherans – decided in the name of a holy crusade to attack the people of Russe. So they put together an army, realizing that the people of the Russe cities were engaged in defending themselves against the Mongolian Tartars, they launched war. They called it a war of the cross. The pope gave the blessing – if you died in this war you would go to heaven, just as if they were fighting infidels. They attacked the Orthodox East.

And Alexander prayed, and he asked his staretz, “What should I do? Oh Elder, Staretz, what should I do?”
And the elder said to him, “Examine your priorities.”
And Alexander said, “The Tartars want to take our wealth. They want to burn down our churches. They want to capture our villages and place them under their rule. The Swedes want to take away our soul. They want to destroy our Orthodox faith. They want to replace it with another religion.” For, at that time, the Tartars didn’t care much about religion – it’s the one thing they didn’t care about. He said, “I will fight the Swedes.” So he turns his back on his most vicious enemies and he takes on those who wish to destroy the souls of the Russe people, of the young Kievan state. And at the river Neva he was successful, in the 13th century, in defeating the Swedes.

There are stories about that battle. This icon here, of Nicholas the Defender of Orthodoxy, is a monument to that. For when the Swedes attacked the monastery, the monks carried the decorative statue of St. Nicholas they had on the walls of their monastery, around the monastery. And the Swedes withdrew.

My good friend, Fr. Michael Lilianstrom, our Swedish Orthodox priest in the Serbian patriarchate in Sweden, said to me, “Nobody tells you this story, but the Swedish priest who was commanding the Swedish army, for some reason, went to talk to the monks and the next time the soldiers saw him he was in a monastic robe. He abandoned the Latin faith. He abandoned the Swedish nation, and died as a monk in that monastery.”

St. Nicholas’s sword in his hand there is not a sword to cut down enemies, because no Swede died in that conflict. It’s the sword of the spirit that cuts for the dividing of soul and Spirit.

Alexander then, having won this victory, turned his attention to the Tartars. He negotiated with the Great Kahn. These are the people who, our little Russian children, when they did their yolka when the All Saints people where, they talked about the bogadiers. The came and they courted the Khan, but they refused to worship the idols that at that time the Mongolian Tartars worshipped, or to practice any of their religious perversities. But they did pay taxes, and by doing so, Alexander bought peace both from the infidels of the West and from the marauders of the East.

But this is the point of the story: When he became elderly, he didn’t say, “I was a great warrior. I defeated the Swedes. I was a great ruler. I brought peace to my people. Now I’m going to sit on my throne and be appreciated.” He, himself, divested himself. Last night during the dismissal I was perplexed – I was thinking, “where do I commemorate Alexander? Do I commemorate him among the great princes – Constantine and Helen, Vladimir and Olga? No, he should be commemorated among the monastics,” because before his death, he lay aside his royal robes; he lay aside his princely diadem, and he took on the robes of a monk. And he died in repentance for all those men whose lives he had had to take in battle defending his people. Not proud for the blood he had shed. Proud that he had chosen the right side, but repentant that exigencies and circumstances had required him to be a warrior who took the lives of his brother human beings, of his fellows made in the image and likeness of God.

There is a time to war, and a time to make peace. And one last fascinating detail. We know the story of Boris and Gleb, the sons of Prince Vladimir. Boris and Gleb both voluntarily allowed themselves to be murdered by their uncle Sviatopolk rather than bring down his anger upon the Orthodox Church. He was still a pagan. He said, “If you oppose me, I will destroy the church. If you move out of my way, I will not touch it.” And by moving out of his way, he meant “allow his assassins to kill them.” They were men who chose peace, where they probably in battle could have defeated him. But they would not risk the peace of the Orthodox people for their own lives and profit. BUT on the eve of this battle against the Swedes, one of Alexander’s generals comes in and he says, “On the river, in a boat, I saw two men dressed in antique armor, and they cried out to me, ‘Go tell Alexander we are his ancestors Boris and Gleb, and we will be with him on the battlefield tomorrow.’”

There is a time to make war, a time to make peace, a time to do business, and a time to seek after the salvation of one’s soul and the souls of one’s fellows. So to each of us it is given to eat our bread by the sweat of our brow all the days of our life. But we pray to God for peace at the last so that our labor may be a labor of prayer, of witness, of study, of Christian labor; and that we will have time and will not say rather to our souls, “Take thy ease: Eat, drink, and be merry, for much good are laid up for you.”

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

The 22nd Sunday of Pentecost

A little less than fifty years ago in Illinois, a young man was born whose name was James was baptized in the Episcopalian church. This young man’s family, like so many Midwestern American families, moved to California. And his dad went into the real estate business and also into the new car business. When the young man became a teenager, he was very uncomfortable with his Episcopalian origins and he looked for truth that God might have for him. And as he began to grow toward his senior year, he found a Moscow patriarchy church in California. Now, some people have said, “Why does the Moscow patriarchy still have churches in America?” Well, one reason was so that one would be there for him to find. He found this church, and there he developed as deep a spirituality as a young man can at the age of 17 or 18. He went off to college and met two other young men who were Orthodox Christians, and the three of them founded the Orthodox Campus Fellowship. They have a different name for it now – Orthodox Christian Fellowship – I don’t know why. Later on in life, the other two young men became abbots of monasteries. The three of them founded this organization, this Orthodox Campus Fellowship.

At the same time Jim occupied himself with studying business – he expected to go into his dad’s real estate business. In the summer he worked in real estate and learned all about buying, and selling, and contracts. He finished his senior year all ready to work for the Paffhausen family business. Instead, he told his dad he was going to St. Vladimir’s seminary. He went off to the seminary in New York and he acquitted himself very well. He earned his master in divinity degree in three years, and then he had to make a decision. He was an unmarried man, and he wasn’t sure that was how he wanted to be. In fact, he was fairly certain he wanted to be a husband and father. So he delayed his ordination and did what a lot of people do when they finish their first degree and aren’t ready to start their careers – he took a master’s degree in theology and Orthodox doctrine. Now, next to having a PhD which is very rare among our people, it’s about as educated as you can become as an Orthodox theologian, to have that advanced master’s degree. And he still wasn’t ready to decide.

So some of his friends on the west coast who were now clergy said, “Why don’t we bring Jim out here and have an internship for him?” The idea was he could come out, he could help out in some parishes, and meet girls. That’s what he wanted; it’s what they wanted. So our Rocky Mountain Deanery invited him and he came out here and he went around and visited all kinds of churches. He also taught classes in the home. Michelle here was enrolled in a couple of those classes. They were jointly registered between our late vocations program and Regis University. He did a lot of ruminating, a lot of thinking, and he and I did a lot of lunch. And as we would eat and talk he would go over and over how he wanted to have a family that he brought up. He wanted to be a dad, he wanted to have children, he wanted to have a wife, but he wanted more than anything on earth, more than his own life itself, to be a priest. And he wasn’t sure what God wanted for him. So, he went back out to California, to his own church in San Diego for a while, and then he went to Russian. He entered the Milan monastery and he lived there for a year. And for the first time in his life, he didn’t have hot water to bathe in. And for the first time in his life, he had to eat kasha sometimes four times a week. And he did it. He learned what the cycles of prayer are, and how holy men spend their hours and their days. Then, after that, he was sent by his abbot there to St. Sergius Holy Trinity, and he spent six months there and acquired a spiritual father who was famous throughout the Russian church who told him, “You should go back and be ordained as a heiromonk.”

Well, he thought he heard the call of God but he wasn’t sure. There was still that little part of him that longed for hearth and home and the consolation of a family. So when he came back after those 18 months were over, he went to his bishop and they scheduled for him an ordination to the diaconate as a celibate priest. And three days before the ordination he called the bishop and said, “I’m not ready. I’m not sure this is what God wants for me. I’m not ready yet.” So, we all called on Sunday and congratulated him on his ordination to find out it hadn’t happened.

And he prayed more, and he thought more, and he fasted more, and then he understood that God had called him to something that meant accepting what Jesus said to the apostles about giving up wives and children and houses in order to do what he had called them to do. So he was ordained a deacon, then he was ordained a priest, and then he went back to St. Tikhon’s monastery and received his monastic tonsure.

He came out to the west, and the thing he loved most of all was missionary work. He liked to go around and start new missions. He started a bunch of them. And he liked to service missions. Places that had no priest, he would go on a monthly cycle – 1, 2, 3, 4 – to these widely separated points in California and serve the liturgy so that once a month these people would have liturgy. He was always being invited to lecture at the ___institute in Berkley, or at one of the seminaries, or to give a class at the university, or to do a retreat for a deanery or a parish. The bishop kept complaining. He said, “You’re a monk. You’re supposed to be stable. All you do is travel around.” So the bishop assigned him: “Go to Point Reyes.” Now Point Reyes sounds like a comely, romantic place to you. It’s on San Francisco Bay. Let me tell you, it’s a very, very cold place. It’s very cold at night – very, very, very cold at night. And it has black mold. Black mold grows on everything there. It’s in Marin County, where a lot of the people are worse than black mold. They’re the kind of people who live for themselves and their egos and their own wants and their own desires. It’s a place where you could open a mosque and the people would all be delighted; or you could build a Buddhist temple and the people would all be thrilled. But if you put an Orthodox church there, that was an insult to them. The bells hurt their ears and they wanted them stopped. He started a monastery dedicated to St. John Maximovich. At that time he wasn’t even recognized by the OCA. He had been canonized by the synod abroad and not by any of the other churches. But with the blessing of the bishop he started a monastery dedicated to St. John of San Francisco. He started out with three of four monks living in these nasty little buildings with mold growing up the walls. Slimy, dirty buildings. And no matter how they cleaned them, they remained slimy and dirty. And these men stayed there and they prayed in the chapel. They prayed for the whole world like St. John had. Gradually, this community grew until there was no room for them there anymore.

He had been forced by the bishop to give up the work that he loved, which was traveling around, preaching as an itinerant, serving liturgy for different groups and giving lectures. His feet were nailed down to the floor of the monastery – except when he could pull the nails out and run off and do a lecture somewhere. But now he realized that if the monastery was to have real life they had to first get away from the Pacific Coast, and secondly get away from the mold. They drew into the interior of California, to a town called Manton, where they bought a farm with a nice house on it. And he built the monastery in three or four years to twelve or fourteen men, with men on the waiting list to come in. Now, you know in America, we had another name for a monastery: it was Father So-and-So and somebody else. Most of our monasteries were one guy, and one disciple at a time, one seeker who stayed until the abbot drove them crazy and then left and another one took his place. But this community grew. Why was it? Because this man, who had been tonsured under the name of Jonah, loved his monastic brothers. He said to them, “A monastery, you understand, is exactly like a prison except for one thing: the love of the brotherhood.” He took in broken and wounded people. Young adults, older people, and he healed them and he strengthened them, and he put them in a place where they could do no harm to themselves or to anyone else. And he also attracted very strong, and wise, and experienced men who were looking for the opportunity to spend the rest of their days in repentance.

And he was satisfied at that point to be the abbot of that monastery, when suddenly the bishop of Dallas called him up. He said, “I’m 85 years old. I have to retire. I’m going to nominate you for auxiliary bishop.”
He went to his bishop, Bishop Benjamin, and said, “Can I be abbot of the monastery and also bishop of Ft. Worth?”
And Benjamin said, “Yes. And you can also get married and have two wives.”
He said, “Which one are you going to be married to? To the monastery alter or to the Diocese of the South?”

And he prayed and again he did not what he wanted to do. Believe me, I know the man very well, he was our intern here for a while. He wanted to live out his life as the abbot of that community, and also be able to sneak off every once in a while and give a lecture. So he was consecrated 15 days ago as Bishop of Ft. Worth, auxiliary to the Bishop of Dallas, in preparation for his succeeding Archbishop Dmitri as head of that diocese. So he packed up all of his brand new bishop stuff. Everything the man owns, by the way, fits into the trunk and the back seat of his car. Everything he owns. He packed up and he went off to Pittsburgh. There in Pittsburgh he sat up on the stage with the Holy Synod, the ruling hierarchs of the church. And our church has had a very rough time. We had two bishops in a row who were cut from a mold that is not either Russian or American. It’s really kind of just a sort of Old-World Paranoid. It comes from a time and a place where the Carpatho-Russyn people were under the rule of somebody else and they had to handle their affairs secretly and stealthily. And they borrowed a lot from Roman Catholic ways of dealing with things – one of which was to cover up things which should have been exposed to the light.

The church was wounded and everybody was mad on Monday. They were all angry as they could be. They all wanted somebody to punish. They all wanted somebody to blame. Nine hundred people – laymen, clergy, bishops – all angry. All filled with every spirit but the spirit of God. And the grumbles and the groaning you could hear throughout the whole room. And that Tuesday night, someone stood up as we were about to adjourn and said, “You bishops promised us you were going to answer our questions. We have given you written questions. We demand that you answer them.” Believe me, that’s the way that the old timers used to talk to the bishops. And the bishops all sat and looked like a bunch of scared school girls. None of them raised his finger. Now, I’ve got to say this. Bishop Benjamin was sick, or he said he was. I think he may have been up stairs, because he was the number one candidate for metropolitan. I think that he found a way to get what he wanted.

As everyone gazed at the stage, this baby bishop – this twelve day old at the time bishop of Ft. Worth – went to the microphone, took the list of questions, and with a smile, with love, with compassion, he answered all of the questions. One by one he answered them. It sounded like his talk was disorganized – it was because he was reading the questions they were asking off the sheet and they were not in any kind of logical order. And he was answering everyone of them. And he said this, “The stuff that has gone one is metropolian. The Metropolian is dead. We will not have these problems again. The church is based on _____, on conciliarity. And we will all, hierarchs, clergy, laity – we will all work together.” He said, “Why do bishops act up? Well, what do you expect? You dress a guy up like a Byzantine Emperor. You put him on a throne in the middle of the church. You call him “despota, master,” and you tell him to live forever, and he starts to believe. He doesn’t understand he’s an icon of God. He starts to believe he’s a little god himself.” He said, “That will not happen again. It will never happen again.” I looked around the room and I saw calm sweep across the room. The anger all dissipated. A kind of quiet peace descended. And then another wave rolled across the room, and it was joy. That night Fr. Chad Hatfield, the dean of St. Vladimir’s who was with me on the Parliamentarian’s committee – and believe me, we did more mischief than any parliamentarians have ever done in the history of any church council – he called Bishop Basil Essey, the Antiochian bishop of Wichita, and said, “I want to vote for you for Metropolitan.” Bishop Basil said, without missing a beat, “God’s given you your metropolitan, Jonah. Vote for him.” I don’t know, somebody may have called Basil from there, but how would he know from Wichita what had happened in Pittsburgh, I don’t know.

The next day the lay people nominated candidates – one candidate each – and then, when no one had a majority, we nominated two candidates and the Holy Synod chose. They chose from between the old, the tested and tried, if you will, and this new, young man – this man who at every point in his life had had his plan, but who like Matthew the tax collector had heard the Lord say, “Come follow me,” and had gotten up and left what he was doing, what he loved doing. Not a man who ran away from things that bored him, but a man who left the work he loved at each stage of his life: he gave up the family business to become a seminarian; he gave up his own family to become a monk; he gave up teaching and his preaching to become an abbot; and he gave up his monastery to become a vicar bishop – and now the church laid on him the mantle of metropolitan. And the moral of this, folks, the moral of the call of Matthew is: In life, we don’t look around trying to find what God wants us to do – “Does God want me to do this? Does God want me to do that?” – in life we do what God’s given us to do, and we remain conscious and aware that at some point he may very well call us to do something different. And when he does, we don’t stop and think about it, we get up and do it. You don’t change the way you’re living your life – that is if you’re living a rotten, stinking sinful life, you change it – but you don’t change what the course of your life is just because you’re bored. But you don’t resist the call of God when he gives it to you.

This is a young man for whom I have great, great hope. I believe that our children will tell their grandchildren that they remember when the metropolitan who was still metropolitan was elected and the parish priest talked about it. Let us then be ready, each one of us, let us formulate our own desires, our own plans, our own will because God gives us the freedom to do that, but let us always keep our ears and our hearts open to his spirit, so that when the call comes – whether it’s the loud acclamation of an assembly shouting “Axios!” or it’s the still small voice speaking in our hearts – we will, like Matthew, rise up from what is busying us at that moment, take up our cross, and follow him.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

The 21st Sunday of Pentecost

“Little girl, arise.”

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

I was very enthusiastic this morning. I was I excited about the meeting today, and we got up and we had a leak in the toilet and I remembered how fragile this property is here, and I remembered how many other times I’ve gotten up early, always on a Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday and found a leak somewhere. But now I know that I’ve got guys back there who can fix it, right Erik? So I’m not quite as worried.

What I want to talk to you about is our life together. I had a young man, Fred Johnson – and you all know he went to seminary about a year ago this fall, and his wife who is pregnant with their second child – and when he arrived in orientation, two people came up to him. One was a former music teacher, Mr. G., and the other was a _____ who had been an education teacher.
And they said, “We see that you started out at St. Herman’s, and then you came here from Holy Transfiguration. What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?” he said,
“Well, that’s an old dead parish. Why would anybody leave a living, American parish like St. Herman’s and come to an old dead parish, down the ghetto, in the Slavic neighborhood, in the stockyards like Transfiguration?”
And he said, “You know, you guys haven’t kept up over the last 20 years, have you?”

Well, this spring is going to be the 25th anniversary or our being here. We came in 1984, and those of you who are still here to witness can tell people the way that this church was looked on at that time. Now, not by everybody. When I came, and I was looking at the parish, Gary sat down with a pad of paper and he read me about 20 questions, like he was doing an investigation – because, you know, he was a detective – and it made me very happy because it meant the people still had ambitions here and they had an idea what they wanted. Father James said to me, “You know there’s a lot that can happen here. This is a parish with a lot of potential. It just means it’s time for a change in leadership.” And if he hadn’t said that to me I would have figured the place was just a bitter cesspool and I never would have come here.

---Honking outside--- It sounds like the Mary Kay car is protesting.

The wonderful thing has been that as we’ve been here, we’ve seen God bring life to us, and he’s brought life to everyone around us. When I came here, Colorado had six Orthodox churches that were sometimes open that were canonical. Now there’s almost thirty. We had 23 clergy to lunch in our parish hall on Thursday just form this area here. Orthodox clergy. And love has flowed through us far beyond the number of people who fill this temple. God has done wonderful things for us and through us, and it’s not Fr. Joe, and it’s not even the parish council leadership. It’s Christ who did it. And I and Fr. Eugene, and Fr. James are now like Peter, and James, and John who got to go into that room with that little girl who was lying dead on the bed - for everyone thought that her soul had left her body – and watched Jesus bring her back to life. We get to be witnesses and so do you.

When I was thinking about how the crowd laughed at Jesus when he said, “The little girl’s not dead, she’s only asleep,” I was thinking about how another former priest here called me up and said, “Why do you want to go there? It’s a church full of Slavic people, they drink, and it’s down in the stockyards.”
And I said, “Two out of three sounds pretty good to me.”
He wasn’t very happy with that, but later he said to me, “You know, if we’d ever had any idea of what could happen there, we probably would have worked harder.” He said, “It’s not that there was anything wrong with the parish. It was wrong with us.”

Well, God has done marvelous things for us. And I remember the first annual meeting I had, nobody wanted to come because they thought of annual meetings as times – well, the no longer brought guns and bricks in socks, the women no longer put bricks in their purses any longer – but they thought it was a place where you went where there were arguments, and fights, and contention. You know, over the years, out of 25 meetings we’ve probably had five or six provocative questions, and most of the provocateurs have gone away. And so, it’s really a wonderful thing. We come, and we sit, and we let the Holy Spirit show that an extension of our liturgy is when we gather together and we discern God’s will, and we do what’s good. We have now completed the restoration of the building except for the final stages of the iconostasis because Gabriel is a perfectionist and he keeps going over and over it again.

We’ve received many gifts in the last two years. Back in the back is an icon of Our Lady of Puchaia. In Poland, and in Ukraine, almost every large parish has a icon like this that is passed around form home to home, and each family in the parish will take it home for a week and pray in front of the icon and pass it on to their neighbors. And somebody said, “Why do you have it down low like that?” Well, there are two reasons. One, there’s no place else to put it. And the second one is where it’s down there, people now come in and they stand in front of it, and they can kiss, and they can touch it, and we have people who come and say akathists in front of that icon, and they couldn’t do that if it was way up high on the wall. It’s a blessing for us, everyday, God gives us more and more blessings.

Our ambition is not to have a parish with 500 members – that would be more members than we could all know by name. We would have to essentially break into little families instead of being a big family. Our ambition is eventually to build a church that is big enough down here that on Sunday, all the people who want to come here could. You know, the Eritreans told me they come here for baptisms, and they come here for weddings, and they said to me, “We have about 50 people who would be here every week, but we know that if we came like that every week there wouldn’t be any room for the people who keep this church going.” But they said, “When you get a bigger church, we’ll be there every week.” So we know that there are people who would like to be here but just plain don’t fit. But that will happen in God’s time, and I don’t have to see that building go up for me to know it will happen, because God put it in our hearts that someday there will be a large temple near this. But this will always be the cathedral. This will always be the place where that little band of people from the Balkans – of buchavenians, and of Carpatho-Russ, and Serbs from Croatia, and Ukrainians from Muldova came here and built this building by mortgaging their homes and then began to pray here.

We are like that little girl who everyone else thought was dead, and who Christ touched and said, “Talitha koum! Little girl, arise.” But I want you think about this, even though we’re 110 years old, we’re just barely out of our adolescence. We’re just pretty much kids. And now God’s called us to mature, to grow in missionary zeal, in purpose, and intention, in vision, and to do wonderful grown up things for him. I’m sure one of the fathers wrote what happened to Jairus’s daughter after she grew up, but I haven’t read that; I don’t know. But I’m certain that having been brought back from the dead by our Lord, she never forgot the miracle that was working for her. We know what happened to the other person in the crowd. We know what happened to lady who is called, for lack of a better name, Veronica, the lady who had been bleeding for 14 years, who was not able to come into contact with people in public because she was unclean by Jewish law, who did the unthinkable. She reached out and as a woman, as a woman with an issue of blood, as an unclean woman by Jewish understanding, she touched the lower hem of Jesus’ robe and she was healed immediately. We know that after she was healed, she became a martyr of Jesus Christ. She witnessed so that the next time the mystery of blood appeared with her, it was the shedding of her blood in witness to the resurrection.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we worry a lot about things that happen in the world, the country, and with the Muselmen far off, and with ragings among nations, and with the economy, but in good and bad times, in difficult times and in plentiful times, through the depression and through prosperity, God has always offered a liturgy in this holy temple. It is sanctified, not for our pleasure, but for our salvation. It is the embassy of the kingdom of heaven on earth. When we stand here, we do not stand on earth; we stand in heaven. When the royal family of Yugoslavia were exiled in England, the queen was about to have a child and there was a problem because the constitution said the heir to the throne had to be born on Yugoslav soil, and so the queen of England transferred territoriality for that one hotel room where the doctors came from her crown and throne to the crown of Yugoslavia, so that the prince was born in Yugoslavia though it was in down town London. Well, we stand, not in Yugoslavia, not in Moscow, not in Bucharest, but in the heavenly Jerusalem itself right now. God has given us that great gift.

The first time that I came into this building, it was an odd kind of a place. Icons were not hung evenly, plastic had been put over things to keep them from getting dirty and then the plastic had gotten dirty. Sticky, yucky. But do you know what? I didn’t feel, “What a yucky, sticky, crooked place!” The first thing I felt when I stood right here in the middle of this building was coming out, radiating from the walls, the prayers of 85 years of souls who have stood here and offered their lives to God – their needs, their wants, their hurts, their injuries, their joys – and who received his grace here.

So now, as I come on 25 years – Matushka wanted to make sure that we had been here the longest of any other priest, and so we’ll have done that – I want to ask you to join me in saying thank you to God like Jairus and his wife did, like the little girl who was raised from the dead did, like the mocking crowd who stood outside and said, “Who does he think he is? The girl’s dead.” I want you to give thanks with me like that woman who had suffered pain, and hemorrhage, and isolation, and with one touch of the border of Jesus’ robe felt the healing begin in her. Let this be the beginning of our healing, the beginning of our maturity, not the end of the last chapter, but the end of the first.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

The 20th Sunday of Pentecost

In the name of Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory Forever!

I want you to think about this man. We hear about him three times a year. It is because there are so many lessons in this story that we hear it over and over again. He was a man who had been possessed by a demon because he lived in the land of the Gadarenes. These were Syro-Greek, that is Greek Syrian pagans. They worshiped idols and they raised pigs. And when Jesus, at the man’s behest, delivered him from the demons, cast the demons out and they ran down into the sea and drowned themselves, having possessed the pigs, then some things happened almost instantly. First, the people of the town came and they asked Jesus to go away. You see, they were pig farmers and they’d rather have their demons and their pigs, than not have their demons and not have their pigs. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with pigs. We know that for us, that we can eat all manner of meat. But for them, this was their business and they would rather have their pigs, their swine’s flesh with the devils than to have the devil take it away and not have this particular source of food and of income.

The man out of whom Jesus had cast the demons… Think about it. This man was not in hell, he was worse than that: hell had been in him. Not just one demon, a legion of demons, a number of demons, were abiding in him. He was filled with terror all the time. Now this man knew what had happened. Suddenly, for the first time in a long time he had become a human being again and not just a house for the minions of hell. So he asked Jesus if he could go with him. And Jesus says, “No. You stay here and tell the people what has happened.” Now when Jesus went to Samaria and spoke to the Samaritan woman, the Samaritans having been sort of half Israelites, they immediately began to convert. But these pagans… They didn’t begin to convert when they saw this man delivered from the devil. Rather, they just wanted Jesus to go away. But Jesus left the man as a witness because for now, he was preaching to the Jews. But the time would come when his disciples would go to all those cities of the gentiles and proclaim the gospel. And that man’s job was to be there as a witness. He could say, “Yes. What they’re saying is true. The man they say died and rose from the dead – he came here and drove demons out of me.” How do you think he felt, being the only believer in that whole Decapolis, those ten towns? Very lonely? Well, perhaps, but also very grateful.

Now we Orthodox people are blessed in this country. It looks like every time you turn around, there’s a new church built. I told the Greeks and the Syrians I don’t have to start missions. All I have to do is put my finger down on a map and say, “I think I’m going to start a mission there,” and then they start one and it saves us the money. There are Orthodox churches everywhere now, and so we cannot really be too far from a church where we can’t get to one. We always have a chance to be with Jesus, to be with our brothers and sisters in Christ, to attend the Divine Liturgy. But there are people in the world who are not blessed that way. Father Matthew Olson, a dear friend of mine who was an army chaplain – now he’s a marine chaplain – he’s off in Iraq. He sent me an e-mail.
He said, “Father, what should I do?” You see, I’m old and all these young guys ask me questions. He said, “There’s no other Orthodox person here. I can’t serve the Liturgy by myself.”
And I told him, “Read the typicha in the church, read your pre-communion prayers, take part in the body of Christ in the tabernacle, and receive communion. You don’t have to do it every week, but as often as God makes you feel like you are drawn to do that.
Here’s a priest who can’t celebrate the liturgy because you have to have another Orthodox Christian to say, “Lord, have mercy,” because Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” I want you to pray for Father Matthew. I want you to pray that he, like that demoniac, that man who had the demons cast out of him, will be such a great witness to Christ that a bunch of those marines are going to want to become Orthodox. And then to have at least one person when he wants to stand at God’s alter and celebrate the Divine Liturgy, who can say, “Lord, have mercy,” for him.

But I want you to think about this too: In a real way, although in church you’re surrounded by your fellow believers, in your life, you’re not. The most recent statistics say there are about 2 million Orthodox in this country. I think there’s really 4 million. The problem is, in America, unless you belong to a church and give money, they don’t think you belong to that religion. We have lots of people who think they’re Orthodox, who claim to be, who don’t belong to a church and who certainly don’t give money. But, these people are still believers. But still, you’re pretty much alone in this country with all these millions and millions of people in it. What are you supposed to do? The same thing that Gadarene demoniac did. You’re supposed to tell people what God’s done for you. Not go knock on doors. Gloria’s not got to go out and say, “Let me give you an Orthodox pamphlet.” No, Gloria’s supposed to, when she’s at work and somebody says, “I’ve got a big problem,” tell them what God says about their problem and then tell them how she learned this in her church. And then, maybe, they will begin to long to have Christ and His holy Church as well. That’s another lesson for us.

So, brothers and sisters, what I want you to think about today is, whether you’re surrounded by fellow believers or whether you’re alone – the only Orthodox person in a certain place, in a certain business, in a certain town – you’re not alone, because where you are you’re encompassed by a great cloud of witnesses, by all the Saints and the angels. And that you’re here in this world to transfigure, to save it, to witness to Christ. If the churches were all closed down tomorrow – if we were all like Father Matthew, if it was like Albania where they killed all the priests and shut all the churches under _____, if it were like that, most of us believers would be very saddened. Our hearts would be broken. Yet we have this treasure, richly given to us, pressed down, running over in abundance. Grace and services served in our church, a beautiful temple. And we should use it, we should employ it, we should embrace it. We shouldn’t just set it aside and say, “Well, it’s there if I really think I need it.”

We’ve learned today these things then: We’ve learned that we need to be witnesses to God when we are not surrounded by other living, Orthodox Christians to support us in our witness. We are the means for saving others. We are to pray for those who don’t have these means. People who are isolated, ministering to those dying marines but unable himself to serve the liturgy. To hold up our prayers so that he will have us near him by prayer. And that we should prize what we have: God’s grace and mercy, His mysteries, a temple, the priesthood, and the gift of being able to serve, and love, and know Him, and to know Him through one another.

In the name of Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory Forever!

The 19th Sunday after Pentecost

Today we are blessed with three stories that are informative for us. They are instructive and illuminating. And they cast a light upon the anxieties that oppress humanity in the present hour. The Lord said in the last days that there would be diseases, and there would be earthquakes and floods, and wars in various places, and men’s hearts failing them. And some will make of this that we can define this as the last days of the earth. I don’t know whether we can or not. But I found from my youth that the older people get the closer they see the last days as coming. It’s not so much that the last days are coming closer to them, as they are coming closer to their last days. I am not going to prophesy to you that there are calamities now that are going to bring the earth to its end, or that I know the scenario that somehow or other will be bound to follow in bringing a close to creation.

We understand only that one of two things will happen to us: either that Christ will come again and we will be brought with him alive in the air to meet him, or we will sleep in the earth and Christ will come and we will rise from the dead to meet him. And practically for us, it makes no difference: our task is the same. Somebody suggested to me that we ought to call of liturgy – it was a joke by the way – and go down and hear the speech down town. And I said, “I think I’ll plant my beans first.” What I was thinking of was the story of a Rabbi in the time before our Lord’s appearance, that was asked by one of his disciples, “Rabbi, if someone came and told you that the Messiah had come, what would you do?” And the rabbi was engaged in planting beans, and he said, “First I will finish planting my beans, and then I will go see the Messiah.” So, I said, “I think I will plant my beans” – take care of the things that are my duty and let God take care of the rest of it.

Men’s hearts failing from fear and from looking after the things coming on the earth is what happens when people attach too much importance to the events around them. They think, in the first place, that what’s happening in the world is somehow or the other what’s important, and it is not what is important. Secondly, they come to think that they are supposed to do something about it. That their principle theatre of activity is supposed to be the world, and that is absolutely wrong.

Today, Holy Apostle Paul starts out telling us about how, when he was setting off to go to Damascus to arrest Christians and bring them back because there weren’t enough in Jerusalem to persecute – he being a Pharisee of Pharisees, wishing to guard God’s honor, thinking it was his job to put an end to this heresy of the Nazarene, of Jesus – he got letters, licenses saying to the king of Nepotian saying that the Roman government considered it and honor if they would allow Paul to bring back Christian’s in chains. But on the way there, he was stricken by God. Not stricken by God to punish him; not stricken by God who wanted to take his black, filthy heart and wash it clean against his will, but stricken by God who knew that St. Paul was trying to do the right thing and Who took his good efforts, who took his good intentions misguided and turned them into a means of grace. So God struck him, and he fell from his horse, and he heard the Lord’s voice and saw him – he says he doesn’t know whether he was taken up to heaven or Christ appeared to him on earth.
“Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me? It is hard for thee, like a horse to kick against gones” – against the straps.
“Who are thou, lord?” said Saul.
And He said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But go into the city. Go to the man named Ananias. He will baptize you and he will show you what you are to do. For I have sent you as a light to all the gentiles” – to tell the Jews that the Messiah has come. So Saul, having heard those things, got up and went into the city, and he came to Ananias and found him on Straight Street – you can still go visit it in Damascus.
And, before he got there, an angel appeared to Ananias and said, “Saul is coming.”
And he said, “Oh, you mean the one who’s been persecuting our people in Jerusalem, who held the coats for the people who stoned Steven.”
“Yes, he’s coming.”
“Well, lord, what’s he coming here for?”
“Well, he’s blind, and you’re to heal him.”
“Oh. Are you sure you want to do that lord? I think the blinding part was a really good idea. Why don’t we just leave him that way, and he won’t be able to do any more mischief?”
“No!” the Lord said, “Baptize him. For he is for Me a chosen vessel to bear my name before the gentiles.”

So, in Saul’s case, a person who was misguidedly full of all kinds of enthusiasm to do the wrong thing, God took that energy because it was offered in good will even though with erroneous reason, with ignorance. And God turned it around; he made it a means of grace. He made it the cause, not only of the salvation of people at that time, but it’s through St. Paul that Christianity ceased to be simply the other sect of Judaism and became the faith that saves the world.

We hear that, and then we hear about another man, if we read the synaxarion, this man is Demetrius. And Demetrius had stead fast good will AND right reason. Now, it’s said of him, that he was a Slav. I suppose this is because he came from Solonica and he’s believed to be a Macedonian. I will say that because, like so many other things, it allows us to put the Greeks, and the Slavs together in the same boat where they belong, and not allow them to argue about which saints belong to whom. Demetrius lived at the time when Roman religion and imperial government had become totally corrupt. Men who looked at it would say, “It’s absolutely lost. The world is coming to the end.” Last night I had some pain in my feet and I couldn’t sleep so I got up and I review the lives of all the Roman emperors. And I realized what a big batch of bums they were. I mean there was one year when there were four of them. They would make an alliance and then they would get together with another guy and kill off their co-emperor. Many of these guys were elevated to the ranks of the Emperor and then killed by another army. But it was about to come to an end.

It was in 306, the same year in which Constantine ascended to the throne in the West, and directed the edict of tolerance in Milan. Maximian in the East was trying as hard as he could to wipe out Christianity, but he also was looking for good, intelligent administrators, men with a good family and a good education. So, not even realizing that Demetrius was a Christian from his birth, baptized as an infant into a secret Christian family, he elevated him to fill his father’s place as the governor of Salonica. Now let me tell you something that this demonstrates to us. Demetrius was a practicing Christian, a believer. He never offered incense to the Emperor’s genius, he never worshiped the Roman eagle or the standards of the gods, and yet neither did he go around and beat on people’s doors and say, “Can I tell you about Jesus?” What he did is he lived a Christian life as a man in a demonically possessed world. He just did his duty. The difference is, Paul was on the wrong road and God had to slap him upside the head and put him on the right road, and Demetrius was on the right road from the beginning. And so, when it came about that Demetrius was made the procurator of the province of Salonica, in which the city of Thessalonica is, he immediately was sent there to arrest and kill Christians. And what did he do? He began preaching Christianity openly, protecting them, knowing exactly what would happen to him. He was a man who did his duty. When he was the emperors soldier, he fought valiantly in the emperors wars against the enemies of the Empire, without allowing his hands become bloodied with innocent blood and without having bowed a knee before false gods. He was a faithful soldier of Jesus Christ, even as he served the Roman government.

But when the time came, when he could not be both a faithful soldier of Jesus Christ and a servant of the Emperor, he knew who his king was. And so he stood up and he proclaimed his faith. Demetrius was arrested, but in prison, the young soldiers who had been won over for Jesus by his way of life, by his example, by his virtue, they began to come to him and ask for his advice. They asked for him to bless, as their spiritual father, as their adopted father, the decisions they had made. And one of these was a man named Nestor, who was a lean mean fighting machine. He was a wrestler; he was a roman soldier. And he noticed at the games that Leo, or Leus, who was a German, the emperors favorite gladiator, not only massacred Christians with great delight, but that it seemed to be his sole purpose to inflict as much torture as he could before destroying them. And so, Christians would be give to Leus to fight and he would beat them to within an inch of their life and he would throw them over on the standing spears on the side of the ring to a bloody death.
So this is what Nestor asked Demetrius; he said, “I know our Lord said that we are to love one another, but this man is a hateful enemy of Christ. May I take up warfare against him?”
Demetrius said, “My son, you have my blessing.”

And so, he entered the ring, that elevated platform, the next day. And when Leus came after him, grinning, shrieking, howling to frighten him, by the sign of the Cross, by his prayers to God, Nestor was able to defeat Leus, and he threw his body on that same barbed, speared garden upon which Leus had impaled so many believers in Christ.

The emperor was so angry that at the very same moment he ordered both the death of Nestor and the execution of Demetrius. Demetrius was a young man who, in his youth, had acquired all the things that you, and in my youth I, tended to think were really important. He had a high position, a lot of esteem from his neighbors, a great deal of wealth. Before he was arrested he ordered he aide-de-campe to give away all his wealth. He said, “We will not need this anymore, we are laying up now treasures in heaven.” And by his prayers the Orthodox people of that part of the world have felt that they were defended and protected from all kinds of calamities from that day even to this. From his bones, starting in the seventh century, oil has exuded that is not just oil but a sweet smelling myrrh. And from time to time, when I can get somebody to go to Salonica, they come back and they bring us a little bit of this oil from St. Demetrius that we can anoint people with. This was, unlike Paul, who was full of fervor and misdirected, a man who was full of fervor and well directed. He didn’t waste his energy on thinking it was his job to determine what task he ought to undertake. He allowed God to present the task, and when the time came, he was equal to it.

And now we’ve got a third man. And this was a man who, as you know, represents both the Jewish priesthood and royalty. He dressed in the white linen ephod of a high priest or a priest and the purple robes of a king. And what did he do? Was he a bad man? There was nothing in the story that says he was a bad man. He was a rich man – is that a sin? Well, Demetrius was a rich man. What was wrong with this man? He was neither striving to do good and doing it incorrectly, nor was he striving to do good and doing it correctly. He was neither a Paul, nor a Demetrius. He was a self-possessed lout. Every day, as he processed out of his house to go through the streets of the city, perhaps to go to the synagogue, perhaps to go for a stroll, he had to step over the body of the man lying at his door step – this man Lazarus, full of sores, who the dogs would come and lick, but who no one gave a crust of bread to. He would step over the man. He would not spit on him, he would not despise him; we have no reason to believe he would call him names or tell him to get out of his way. He simply ignored him. Because it makes no difference whether his reason was good or bad: he had bad will. His will was to satiate his own passions, his own desires, and that blocked him from caring about, from doing good to anyone else. So the Lord tells us this man was in hell, not because of what he did, but because of what he didn’t do. Not because he performed evil acts, but because he didn’t perform good acts. We are called upon then today to hear God speaking to us. Not to let our hearts fail from looking after things coming upon the earth. Not to feel that it is our job to save the economy, or the nation, or the political system, or this or that thing. Not to think that somehow or the other that if things don’t go our way that this is a disaster, for the only disaster will be if our souls are lost. But to look after, understanding and performing the will of God, doing good unto all men, especially unto those who are in the household of faith, seeking God’s kingdom and allowing God to take care of His world.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ.
Glory Forever!

18th Sunday after Pentecost

Rather he who sows sparingly shall reap sparingly and he who sows abundantly shall reap abundantly

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

St. Paul in that epistle which only almost always on the calendar falls with second reading, the gospel reading today, both of which speak to us about sewing seed and the consequences of the sewing of the seed – St. Paul lets us know that those who are generous with what God has given them will cause a great crop, an abundance of grace, to come forth.

Some of you know that some of our culture, some of the preachers of certain branches of Protestantism, teach what they call a gospel of prosperity, and their message seems to be, “Well, if you give a lot of money to the church, then you’re going to get a lot of money back.” That would be investment planning, and I suspect that it would not be anymore successful than the one in which I am now engaged for my retirement. But that’s not what St. Paul’s saying. He’s saying that when we are generous with what God gives us, we are allowing God’s grace to abound. He says this: that because of the generosity of the Christians in supporting the missionaries, the work of the church, in feeding the poor among them – because of that thanks is given to God by many, and that great grace is released into the world by which many are saved.

Now we’ll move from that point. Because some people are a lot more disposed toward giving money to god because he’s going to pay 25% interest, than they are giving to God so that God’s work can be done on earth. And we’ll move on to the gospel.

Those of you who’ve been here for several decades know a lot about this gospel. You understand that in this Gospel the Lord was talking about a real situation – about the way a Jewish wheat field was planted. The Jewish wheat field was not very large – you might have many fields, but each one was separate and very small, about the size maybe of this quadrangle out here. And as one worked his soil year after year, rocks worked their way to the surface, and these rocks were carried to the edge of the field and used to build a wall around it so that every field was surrounded by a wall that had some soil that had washed up on it, but it was still rock.

And then you may also recognize that God had told the Jews that they were not supposed to harvest their fields all the way to the borders. That’s why Jewish men are supposed to leave the corners of their beards long – here – so that they will remember that they are supposed to be generous. Why didn’t you harvest your field all the way to the borders? Because what grew around the border of the field, that was for the poor or for those who were passing by who might be hungry. Our Lord and his disciples, on the Sabbath day, had picked some wheat from along the edge of the field and rolled it in their hands and ate it to assuage their hunger. But, because this border of the field was not going to be harvested, most Jewish farmers did not waste a lot of effort on culling or cultivating it, so it was full of weeds too. And then, across the field, was usually a path in the shape of an X so that then you could walk back and forth across the field and cultivate the field – either around the border or in the middle. In this way, you could reach every corner of your field with your hoe or your rake, and get the weeds out without stepping on the crop.

Now, the Lord says that a certain farmer went out to plant and then he went and he just threw the seed everywhere. He threw the seed everywhere. Some of the seed, He said, fell on the path and it was stepped on and the birds came and ate it. And He said then some of the seed fell on the little rocky area around the field where there was a little bit of soil, and it sprung up. But then when the heat of the day came, it died. It had no root, no moisture. And then there was the wheat that fell in that border around the field and it was choked by weeds and did not bring forth much of a crop. And then the Lord says, “Let he who has ears to hear, hear.” And what He’s saying is, “If you want to know what God has to say to you, you’re going to understand a great mystery here. If you don’t want to know, then friends, just forget about the rest of this.” Because God doesn’t make anybody believe, and He doesn’t compel anybody to understand.
The disciples come to Him and they say, “We don’t understand this.”

----Oh yes, he said, that which fell on good ground brought forth some 20, some 50, some 100 fold. That mean that for every seed that was planted, the heads of wheat had maybe 50 or 100 seeds in them.----

Now a logical question we might ask before we come to His answer to the disciples is, “If wheat is so valuable, why is this guy such a lousy planter?” You wouldn’t think that if your seed grain was dear that you’d be throwing it just every old place, would you? But the fact is, the Lord tells us that the seed is God’s word - that of which we spoke when we said, “He who sows plentifully will reap plentifully” – and that God is the farmer, and so He is profligate with His word, with His grain. He throws it everywhere – on good ground, on bad ground, on the path, among the weeds, on the stones – so that by some means, many might have the opportunity to have the word not just bounce off their ears but penetrate into their hearts.

And the Lord tells His disciples this: He said the stuff that falls on the path, that is the wheat that is the word of God that comes to a person who doesn’t really want to hear. So although it may lie on their eardrums, it may lie on that ground that’s been trodden down, Satan, like the birds of the air, will come pick it out and take it away from them and it will be as though they never heard it. And then He said that which falls on the rocky soil is like the word of God that comes to some who are hungry for meaning and purpose in their lives – whose lives are desperate, lives are lives of being wounded, of being fearful – and so when they hear the gospel of healing and of peace, of forgiveness – when they hear that, then they immediately accept it. But they grab it and the expect God to do their thing for them, rather than their doing God’s thing for Him. So, when the hot sun beats down, they spring up with a green shoot and it appears to be a luscious crop of wheat, but there’s no water beneath the roots to nourish it, and it is burned up by the problems of the heat of the day.

And then He says, those who fall among the weeds are those who both hear the word of God and they embrace it; but they believe more in their own problems than they do in God because they are more concerned about the stock market, or world peace, or the next election, or who’s going to win the American league pennant, or why CU is 4 and 3. Anyway, because those thing prepossess them, when the devil in the form of those means – the cares and concerns of life surround them – when they find that they are ailing, or that they are suffering loss, or that their life is contingent, or that their security in this world seems to be in doubt, then they become so strangled with worrying about things in this world that they forget to think about the kingdom of heaven, and they don’t bring forth very much wheat. They don’t bring forth very much nourishment for themselves, and they don’t bring forth very much fruit in the form of the Word of God, to spread the Gospel.

Then He says that which falls on the good ground are those who, hearing the Word of God, allow them to be watered by his tender love from heaven, the roots to sink deeply into the soil of the truth of christ’s gospel, and the sun of righteousness to shine down on them. And they bring forth fruit which saves many more than themselves. As St. Seraphim of Sarov said to someone who wanted to go be a missionary, he said, “That’s fine. But save your own soul and you’ll save a thousand people you don’t even know.”

Now, today, we’re going to bless this icon – I was going to bless it last Sunday, but it was impossible because it wasn’t here. This is St. Tikhon and St. Sebastian Dabovich. How blessed this church is. The people who, when I first came here, wanted to tear the building down and build another one somewhere, they didn’t have the slightest idea at that time how precious this place is. But here we have a picture of two saints, and these two saints actually were here and the same time, and this moment that is shown in this icon here is a moment of history shown symbolically. It shows St. Tikhon, who became our bishop when we came out of the land of Uniatism into the promised land of Holy Orthodoxy, and who in the third year of our Orthodoxy and the third visit he made here, handed our church over to this young monk, Sebastian Dabovich. He was here for only one year, but while he was here he started Orthodox churches all the way from Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana to Kansas City, Kansas, down to Texas, into New Mexico and the Western coast of the United States. He probably baptized more people than any Orthodox priest in the lower 48 ever. He was the first American born man to be ordained an Orthodox priest. He was the first American born man to become an Orthodox monk. And he not only worked in this country, but as you’ll read in his biography,* if you read it, he was traveling all over the world to places like Australia. He even went to parts of Serbia where the people had apostatized from the Gospel because of Islam or some other cause and re-evangelized people and brought them back to orthodoxy. He would serve in a parish here in America and when a war broke out in the Balkans, he would go to be a chaplain to the men who were fighting for the holy cross against Turkish aggression or against the aggression of heretics. And then he would come back here and serve some more.

He was born the year that the American Civil War was heating up. He is an American by birth because he was born on the ship that his parents took from Yugoslavia just as it pulled into San Francisco harbor. In his entire life he wanted nothing other than to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Not just to Serbs, but to people of every nationality, of every race, of every identity, people distributed all over the world. This was his ambition. Of him, St. Nikolai Velimirovich said, “He had no evil passions in him at all.” He was a man of unmixed motives, a man of manifest goodwill. As our Lord said of Nathaniel, “An Israelite in whom there was no guile.” This man was responsible for spreading the seed of God. He could have been anything: he could have been an attorney, or a general, or a businessman. He came to American when America was in it’s growth, in its vigor. He could have stashed away fortunes. Even in the church, he could have become the comfortable dean of some large cathedral and made a salary that would keep him secure. But he never raise a penny for his missionary work. He worked in a parish, he got a little money, he got on a train or a stage coach or the back of a horse and went some place where there was no Orthodoxy and he preached the Gospel. And he did it all over this country. All over this part of the country. Everything west of Eastern Texas bears his mark. Not just Serbian churches, but OCA churches and Antiochian churches bear it as well.

And this, brothers and sisters, is the meaning of, “Him who sows abundantly reaps abundantly,” because he treasure was treasure for God. It was treasure he laid up in heaven, and you can read in the biography* that when St. Nikolai Velimirovich, who would end up as dean of our St. Tikhon’s seminary in Pennsylvania, when St. Nikolai went to the ____ monastery where he was in the infirmary as an old man, St. Nikolai was willing to do anything he could for him. And he said, “My dear brother, Father Sebastian, is there anything you want, anything you need?” Sebastian Dobovich smiled at his old friend, this man who had traveled with St. Tikhon and St. John Kochurov, and St. Alexander, had traveled with them to the Episcopal Seminary in Wisconsin, hoping to convert the Anglicans to Orthodoxy at that time, smiled at his old friend and he said, “I want, I need only the kingdom of heaven.”

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, seek ye first God’s righteousness, and all the rest will be given unto you so abundantly. Not just of your money, of your time, of your love for God, of your testimony of the truth of the Gospel, and you will reap a crop abundantly, pressed down, running over in bushels, spilling on the ground, more than you could desire, more than you could ask for.

*Read the Biography of St. Sebastian Dabovich by following this link:
http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/general/archimandrite-sebastian-dabovich-serbian-apostle-to-america.pdf

110th Anniversary - Bishop Benjamin

The 17th Sunday of Pentecost
110th Anniversary Celebration
Homily given by Bishop Benjamin of San Francisco and the West

There is no time when a pastor feels more incapable of comforting than when a child dies. We heard the story in this morning’s gospel from Luke, that while Jesus was passing from one place to another, He passed by the Nain, and a funeral was progress. A funeral procession was in progress, and the people of the city were bringing the body of the only son of a widow to be buried.

Imagine the grief, imagine the sorrow, imagine the emptiness that that mother felt. I don’t if you, and I hope none of you ever had had that occasion to experience the death of a child. But it is incomprehensible. One cries out do God and says, “Are you at the desk? Whose running the universe? It’s not supposed to be like that. Parents are not supposed to live longer than their children. It’s not supposed to be like that.” And yet, it happens. And it’s those time we feel the farthest from God.

But I’m here to tell you as I tell the parents. The child could be 9 months and the parents 22. The child could be 50 years old and the mother 80. It’s still not supposed to be like that. It’s just not supposed to happen. I remember when my own mother died my grandmother could not even go to the funeral. It was incomprehensible to her that my mother should pass away before she did.

What kind of words can a pastor give that make it go away? In fact, brothers and sisters, the Rabbi’s say that when someone dies, God weeps. It was not God’s plan that any of this children, be they nine months old or fifty years old, die. And God feels the sorrow and the pain of His children.

Christ, in the gospel today, looked into the eyes of that mother, and He saw real pain. He saw real questioning. He saw her complete lack of understanding of how this could happen, and her questioning, “How could God have abandoned her?” and He reached out to her, and in a moment touched her son and he was raised from the dead.

It’s the foretaste or Christ’s entire ministry on earth. He came to earth for no other reason than to raise the dead. He came to earth for no other reason than to search for His friend Adam, and Eve. When Adam sinned he took himself away from the source of life, and he died. It wasn’t a punishment. No more than when you turn off the light switch, the light goes out. It’s not a punishment, it’s just what happens. And when Adam took himself away from the source of life, God, he died. And all of his children were condemned to die. But God looks into the heart, into the eyes of everyone who suffers and He sees in it the reflection of His own grief at the loss His beloved – at the loss of you, the loss of me, the loss of Adam, the loss of that young son on the funeral bier going the cemetery. God experiences that same sorrow.

But it’s not enough. It’s not for God to let us all kind of stew in our juices as it were. To reap the benefit of our sin. But He sent His own Son, His own beloved Son, into this world to suffer Adam’s death, to suffer my death, to suffer your death, to suffer the death of that widow’s son, so that He could go down into Hades and destroy death, making death, Adam’s death His own.

And so each one of us in the Christian Church, Orthodox Christians, we’re baptized into Christ’s death and raised with Him. And we’re able to rise with Him because He dies our death, He dies Adam’s death. So at any time when we weep, when we feel the sorrow at the loss of someone, we should remember that we’re not the only ones who are weeping, we’re not the only ones who feel loss, but God feels it with us. God shares our sorrow and He has made it His own so that He can turn our sorrow into joy.

Christ is Risen!
Indeed, He is Risen

The 16th Sunday of Pentecost

The 16th Sunday After Pentecost

We hear this gospel every year. It’s maybe, in an odd way, one of the most irritating and disturbing of all the gospels. Of all the things that Jesus asks us to do, the one that makes us most angry is to forgive people who have injured us and to love our enemies. We can recall the great wave of patriotism, but also the great wave of anger, that swept across the country when the 9-11 attack took place on our nation. And in the hearts and minds of most Americans, I’m certain, was very last of all any thought of forgiving or praying for or desiring good for those who had planned and had perpetrated the attack.

It is very difficult for us to understand because we are weaned on justice. It’s a kind of a civil religion for us. We know what our rights are. We know that we can always sue if we feel personally injured. Or we can file charges if we feel the laws have been broken to cause us harm. And we feel not only that we CAN do these things, but that we ought to do them. So when it comes to our enemies, it’s very difficult for us to imagine having any good thoughts or intentions toward them. Yet the lord has made it very clear to us that being a Christian means imitating him, it means imitating his father. We have to remember that our Lord Jesus Christ, when being nailed to the cross, did not cry out to heaven, “Father, send down thy lightening and smite these sinners.” He didn’t call down God’s wrath upon the emperor, or upon the legions, or upon the centurions, or upon the Sanhedrin that had convicted Him, or upon the high priest who had condemned Him, or Pontius Pilate who had stood aside and let Him be lynched. Instead He said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” We understand that our life is a life in God. Week after week I’ve mentioned that to you: That when it says we who believe in Jesus will not perish but have everlasting life, it means believe IN Jesus; it means to be within his body, to be part of him, have his life in us. Otherwise, what does Holy Communion mean if not that God’s life is in us? And what is God? St. John tells us very simply: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.

Maybe our trouble with idea of loving our enemies is that we have really sloppy, kind of sick, sentimental ideas about what love is. I remember when I was a kid, I’ve mentioned it before, the song “What is love? Five feet of heaven and a pony tail.” Well, folks, that is not love. Love is not even the great rush of hormonal attraction that comes upon young men and women when they find their true love for the first time. It is not the commitment that comes from obligation, nor is it all some kind of nostalgic, romantic recollection of the good old days and the wonderful times. Love is, quite simply, ultimate concern. It is caring about the ultimate and temporal disposition of the object of love.

When we say that God loves us, we mean that God wants the best for everyone. There is no one in whose death or damnation God delights. God does not damn anyone. We understand that. We understand that the pastor in Chicago who screamed out, “God damn America,” was doing something God wouldn’t do, and that is to condemn. What he should have said, if he believed it, was, “America may damn itself.” That’s a matter of judgment.

The point, quite simply, is we know from the scriptures that “God desireth not the death of any sinner but that all should turn from their wickedness and live.” And that our hope has to be that all will turn from their wickedness and live. If our Lord could not only forgive those who were so cruelly crucifying him, but could impart absolution to the thief on the cross, who in the desperation of his last moments, cried out, “I deserve this punishment. Remember me O Lord when thou comest into Thy kingdom.” This man to whom he said, “Today you will be with Me in paradise.” If our Lord could forgive Peter, who three times denied Him, after having promised, “I will go to prison and to death for You,” then we also ought to forgive those who injure us. But this is not again that kind of romantic stupidity that sometimes is interpreted as love in our culture. It’s not, “Hey, hit me again. It feels so good when you stop.” No, that’s not what it is. It’s not being a sucker, it’s not being a fool, it’s not making yourself vulnerable to being injured. It is making yourself vulnerable to being disappointed. It’s making your heart vulnerable to being hurt again and again, because we always have to harbor hope and prayer for our enemies no matter how wicked they may appear to us to be now.

And so our Lord calls to our attention how His heavenly Father causes the sun the rise on the good and on the evil alike, and His rain to fall upon the fields of the just, and of the unjust. And if God, in His distributive justice, pours out His love equally upon all of His creatures, then we are obliged to struggle to forgive; we’re obliged to struggle to love; we’re obliged to struggle to pray for others.

Bishop Benjamin tells a story about two Jewish holocaust survivors who met in New York. One of them told about how wonderful his life in America had been, and how he had found a new meaning, and a new purpose, and a new joy. The other one said, “All I think about everyday is those Nazis: how I hate them, how I despise them. How could they do what they did?” And the first one said, “I see. I am here in America, and you are still in the concentration camp.”

Hatred and anger injure the perpetrator more than the object of the hatred or anger. It is their revenge on us if they can make us think day and night about how ill treated we were, then we are still in the prison of their control. And so, brothers and sisters, to pray for them, to say, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” – this is the cure for all that anger, for all of that rumination about past injuries. Yes, stand up and demand that right be done and that wrong be persecuted and prosecuted. But do not call upon God, or desire of Him, that those are the perpetrators should suffer eternal damnation or loss. But call upon Him to touch their hearts and warm them, to turn them, and to save them.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

The 15th Sunday after Pentecost

The Apostle Paul, in writing to the church in Corinth, speaks to them about the people of the old covenant. He tells them how on Mt. Horeb, on Sinai, Moses saw the glory of God, and beholding the glory of God, Moses shown with that light which he’d beheld, and how when he came down from the mountain he was aglow with the presence, the shekinah, the glory of the Most High. And the people of Israel, rather than marveling and saying, “What a wonder this is!” and sharing in the glory that God had revealed to them, constrained to Moses that he should cover his face so that they should not be frightened.
In that they were much like the Gadarenes who we heard about a couple weeks ago, who when Jesus had exorcised a man of demonic obsession and possession, had caused the pigs to run down the hill headlong and drowned themselves, didn’t say, “What a wonder this is! Tell us what we need to do,” but instead said, “Please get out of town, we don’t like you drowning our pigs.”
St. Paul says, however, that we, the people of the new covenant, we have received not simply the reflected glory of God, but that just as God commanded the light to shine forth in the darkness in the beginning when he said, “Let there be light,” and behold there was light; just as God called the natural light, the physical light, the light that ____ being from nothingness, that God has revealed to us the uncreated light, the eternal light, God’s uncreated energy, his holiness, his grace. This uncreated light, this light that God calls forth from the darkness of our dark and sin laden, and burdened, and worried, and troubled, and wounded hearts, and caused to shine a flame within a lantern. This light is revealed to us in the face of Jesus Christ. Not a reflected light. Not a light that Jesus saw and that then shown forth from his countenance, but his own uncreated energy, his own divine love illumining our hearts.
St. Paul relates the consolation first: that God has shown in our hearts the light of his uncreated energy through the face of Jesus Christ. Then he says, “But, that doesn’t mean, that like some prosperity gospel, I’m telling you everything from now is going to be just hunky-dory. I’m not telling you that there are no problems. Look at your daily existence. You’re abused by others, and yet you don’t allow the abuse to destroy your self confidence. You are beaten up but never beaten down. Sometimes desperate, but never in despair.” He says that because of this that we see death working in the world, and yes even in our own bodies, each one of us knows that the law of nature planted in our chromosomes the law of nature dictates that there is a terminus ___ to this fallen humanity which we have inherited from our parents. As the psalmist says, “The days of many are three-score and ten,” that’s the optimum, that’s what they strive for, and even if by chance man should extend those days to four-score or longer, yet all is essentially destruction, death and ashes. They will eventually, no matter what science does to extend this physical frame, no matter what vitamins or therapies or treatments, no matter what diets, no matter what inoculations are given to us to drag out our physical existence a little longer, still it is death working in us. It is because of this anomaly, that we who are children of the light, in whom the love of Christ should be growing daily, who should be becoming ever more god like, who should be inclining more and more toward grace, toward truth, toward the kingdom of heaven, feel that our human bodies are themselves becoming subject to new pains, new fatigues, new injuries, to new degenerations.
And here is how St. Paul explains it: He says if we had this treasure in some kind of golden flask, if we were robotic creatures, or some kind of precious spheres, then it would be our glory and not God’s glory that we would incline toward. But it is because we have the treasure of God’s grace; because divinity – the spark of the Godhead itself – was poured into jars made out of baked clay (that’s how he describes our bodies) because of that, the glory passes to God and is not assumed by us.
Well the Apostle Paul was living in a world, preaching in a world, where everything ridiculed what he was proclaiming. You know, because I’ve told you, that that gentile world to which Paul went, regarded the human body as, well, in its youth, a thing to be admired, to be cultivated, to be formed through exercise, even to be lusted after. And then as it aged they regarded it as a prison in which the soul was captured. They did not believe that the body was a precious, a sacred, thing. They did not understand that human individuality, that human personality, exists because we are bodies, because we are sentient creatures able to know and be known, to see to hear to touch to taste to smell, because we have vocation. We are not droplets of some kind of atman Brahman that flows back into the celestial sea of soul substance; but we are individuals and we are not created for recycling over and over again. We are not bound, as the Greeks thought, to a cycle of reincarnations that will be repeated until somehow or other, through the acquisition of, according to the Greeks, philosophy, and according to the Romans, law, we would manage to escape our bodies and to float back into the celestial sea of stars. This is the universal assumption of the people of St. Paul’s time.
I mentioned last week that when St. Paul preached in the Areopagus, when he told the Athenians that he was there to speak of Jesus Christ who was risen from the dead, probably at least partly because of his country Greek, they thought he was telling them about two new Gods: Jesus and Anastasius.
They didn’t understand what he was saying, and they finally said, “Well, come back some other time. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” St. Paul was in a world where it seemed as though his message was ridiculous and yet where he was able to touch the hearts of people – no the hearts of the people who thought themselves the wisest, the richest, and the most powerful. In time, over the decades, and through the first two centuries, Christianity would trickle up. Where in the world has a movement ever begun which was embraced first by slaves, by manual laborers, by the dregs of the earth, by the poverty stricken and that then worked itself up through the bureaucracy, the civil service, the military, the ranks of the aristocracy and finally to the imperial throne itself. This is really a trickle up theory, isn’t it?
But you see it was in those lower classes finding a meaning for their life in a set of circumstances that appeared to provide no hope, no purpose, no meaning. It was in their being willing, as St. Paul said, everyday to be in danger of death because of their assertion that they knew in their hearts that the eternal God had become man, and taken flesh, and conquered death, and had physically risen from the dead, and that he would raise them as well. It was because of that that then the middle class, going to the arena, and seeing these poor peasant folk, these poor urban poor, these ridiculous off-scourings of the earth, standing up before lions and gladiators and proclaiming their faith in the risen Lord that it is said that for every Christian who died in the arena that a hundred more left the arena, and again that it is the blood of the martyrs that was the seed of the Church.
So this is what St. Paul is telling us. He is telling us that we are put in the world so that, not just in our good times, not by our prosperity, not by our success, not by our dramatic architectural edifices or by our exercise of great power, but because of how we handle fatigue, pain, lowliness, wounds, sorrow, threat, distress, danger, insecurity. That it is in how we handle these things that the world sees the difference between the God who is in us and the god who is in the world – the god who wants to draw men down, down to the earth from which he was taken, return him to the state of an animal, to deprive him of the glory of the knowledge of God revealed in the face of the Jesus Christ. This is what the Holy Apostle tells us. This is why sometimes during those periods of communist oppression, some of the bishops and priests, some of the monastics in the captive lands under communist domination declared that they were more fortunate than their brothers and sisters in the west because they knew how the deck was cut, they understood what the circumstances were, they were clearly aware of the price of faith, there was no cheap grace for them, that embracing Christ meant abandoning a great deal of security, safety, even their own lives.
It was because of this that St. Nicolai Velimirovich, having been captive and persecuted and virtually destroyed, and having survived Dachau, when he was asked, “What is there in your life that you would go back and relive?” said, “The best time in my life was when I was in Dachau.”
And the man interviewing him looked at him like he was a mad man, and he said, “No, then we knew what was lightness and what was dark; we knew who was on God’s side, and who wasn’t, we knew what we were here for and we didn’t mix up our priorities. We had nothing else to bog us down.”
How many people this morning are depressed? They’re depressed because twenty years ago they didn’t have any money in the stock market, but now they do and they’re afraid their going to lose it. So their hearts are aching and they’re failing and they’re in anxiety and despair because they don’t know what the economy is going to do. This is the first time in my life since I became aware of politics that I have no known just exactly what I thought our government ought to be doing. I don’t have a clue. I think bush was right when he said that all - the old bush – when he said that all economics is voodoo. I don’t think that anyone knows what to do. But you know, if I don’t live with my money, with my stock shares, if I don’t live with that, if I don’t live for it, it’s not going to hurt me, it’ll just be another way I have to live. It’ll be a detour on the road of life, but it is not how long it takes you to get down the road of life or how many detours you take, but as the little blue fish says in Finding Nemo, “Just keep on swimming, keep on swimming.” That’s what God judges you by. Like we said before, in every other race that man ever ran there was one winner who got a crown and a gold medal, but in the race that we are running we all get crowns and gold medals if we finish the race. If we just don’t sit down and say, “I’m so tired of doing this. I’m so bored. I’m so unhappy. I’m so disconsolate. I just think I’ll sit on this rock and I’ll stop fighting the good fight and running the race, and I will then say to myself, ‘You know, there probably isn’t any reward,’ or even worse, ‘Self, you know, you’re pretty good. If all these other people around you, all these other wicked people whose sins I know very well, if they’re going to get there, I’ll probably get there too.’” So, quitting the struggle: that’s the only way you can be lost. He who endures to the end shall be saves. And so St. Paul tells us, he says over and over again in different ways, “We are hard pressed on every side, and yet we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but we are not in despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed. Ever carrying about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus that the life of Jesus might be manifested in our body.” Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us take up our obligation, let us have our feet shod and our loins girded, our staff in our hand. And be like the servants of God waiting for their master to come, and let him, when he comes, find us, not bowed down under the burden of our own self-imposed despair, but waiting to hear from, “Well done thou good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of they master.”

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!