The Fourth Sunday of Pentecost

July 13, 2008

“But the centurion said, “Lord I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this on Go! And he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes.”

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

When we come to this time in the four year cycle of our country, politics tends to dominate everybody’s thoughts. People are absorbed with election campaigns, and with the qualifications or the platforms of various candidates. And because we are bombarded, incessantly, some of us voluntarily – I usually have a news channel on the television all the time – with what’s going on in the world, we also fall into that description of the Lord of men whose hearts are troubled with the things coming upon the earth. People will ask “Who are you for?” and, “Who is the best candidate? What is the best political party?” and, “What is the best platform?” and in the temptation to express one’s own opinion, my opinion has always been that the person who I would look for is the one who fulfills the requirements, not of a political philosophy, but of the Hippocratic oath given to doctors – first to do no harm. When the church prays for the civil authorities, we pray that God will speak quiet words into their ears concerning the people in his church, that we might live in their tranquility, that they will be calmed down. That they will lead calm and quiet lives in all Godliness and sanctity.

We understand that all things that happen in this are, in the final analysis, part of the kingdom of darkness. At one time when I was asked to write regular articles for our diocesan magazine, which now we’re only going to put out once a year because we put it on the internet, I got the question, “Is it a sin for Orthodox Christians to vote for the ______ party?” And I wrote back, “There is no Hezbollah in Orthodoxy; there is no party of God.” All of the political parties are, to a greater or lesser extent, bound up in the kingdom of darkness - the things that have to do with cruelty, and severity, and the affairs of this world . Nevertheless, if there’s a message that’s clear regarding authority in the world from the Scriptures, it is that we are to submit to it. Our Lord said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s;” and again the Apostle Paul said, “The sword that is wielded by the state is not wielded in vain.” The irony is that it was the sword wielded by the state that severed St. Paul’s head. But St. Paul didn’t stand up and say, “You have no right;” rather he bowed his head and took the stroke of the sword, recognizing that it was given to civil authority to punish wickedness and vice, and to maintain piety and virtue, and that they would be judged by the extent to which they did such things. In fact, the reason why the early Christians were thrown out of the Synagogue, the reason why there was a split between the Orthodox Church and it’s Jewish roots was not because we claimed Jesus was the Messiah and they denied it. In Judaism, it is not a punishable offense to believe in a false messiah – many Jews claimed many men were messiahs and had to admit later they were wrong. The Church was separated from Judaism because we refused to take part in their uprising against the Roman state. Both in 67 AD and again in the time of the bar-Kokhba rebellion in the early part of the second century, the Christians said, “It may be a bad empire, but it’s the only empire we’ve got.” They refused to rebel against the established authority.

Now, when I say this to you, you’re going to say, “How un-American! Our country is built on revolution.” I’m not going to go into that because this is not a political science address. But I will mention to you that the war that was fought for American independence was not fought in order to wrench rights away from a ruler, it was fought to maintain rights that had already been given to the people by the ruler that the ruler was in the process of taking back. In other words, it was a conservative or reactionary rebellion against usurpation, which is a word found in the Declaration of Independence: Usurpation of power which had been delegated to the people.

Let us go back to the early Church. The early Christians refused to do battle against the Roman Empire. There were things they wouldn’t do: they wouldn’t sacrifice to Rome’s idols or offer incense to her gods. And there are things they would do: They would serve in the army, as long as they were not compelled to worship false deities in the process or to commit acts of massacre, as opposed to acts of warfare – they would not attack civilian populations. They remained obedient to Roman law insofar as that law did not contradict directly the duty they owed to God. In fact, in the apology of Justin the Martyr, he says to the Emperor, “You think we are traitors because we do not offer sacrifices to YOU,” he says to Marcus Aurelius, “to your genius. But know this: That it is the prayers of the Christians that hold intact, it is the eucharist of the Christians that holds in place, the pillars of the universe. We are the ones who sustain your empire by our prayers. We are the ones who are holding order together; it is by our prayers that civilization endures.”

And the Christians didn’t carry signs outside the Roman Imperial palace saying “Caesar is a dictator,” “The Emperor is a fascist,” “Down with the Empire.” They didn’t even protest in support of the moral virtues that they considered to be righteous and just, and against indignities and perversions that they considered to be abominable and disgusting. When I was first engaged to the ministry, when I was an Episcopalian, walking in the Land of Egypt before the Lord brought us out with His mighty hand, I became involved in protesting against the encroachment of abortion on the laws of our country. We protested at drug companies, and we protested at public buildings, and at a certain point I stopped. The reason I stopped was this: that at that point in my mind and in my heart I believed that this was a nation of Christians governed by Christian principles, and that as a Christian I had an obligation to hold up to the political authorities here their Christian obligation to be righteous and moral. At a certain point, I decided, “No, this is no more a Christian nation as a nation than ancient Rome was or than the Soviet Union was.” It is a nation with a Christian habit. And yes, we can sometimes guilt the nation with a Christian habit, but then it falls back to the question of pragmatism: Does the guilt that politicians, or citizens, feel outweigh the pragmatic advantage they will gain by doing the wrong thing? And so we’re no longer the conscience of the country; we become just another group of naggers. I made up my mind that to the extent that I use the stewardship of my vote that I would not vote for anyone who said that he would facilitate the continuation of the destruction of innocent human life by legal means. No, I will not be a partner to that. As it says in the Psalms, “Thou sawest the thief and consented unto him” - you didn’t yell, “Thief!” when he was going into your neighbor’s house, - “And thou hast been partaker together with the adulterers” – you laughed at somebody else’s immorality, you winked at it, you tolerated it. So we cannot become co-agents of sin. Nevertheless, we have to understand that this is not our abiding city.

If we were to have read the other epistle which was appointed for today – Fr. Schmemann advised me, “People have trouble remembering one epistle. Don’t confuse them with two” – we would have read that we have here no abiding city. In other words, this is not our kingdom, this is not our world. Our world is the kingdom of heaven, and our life is in the world to come. But as long as we’re in this world, we have certain obligations to this world. The children of Israel were carried off as captives to Babylon. They were carried off in chains and then allowed to settle there. The prophet wrote to them and said, “Thus says the Lord to the people of the house of Judah, carried off to Babylon: Live in that city in which you are settled. Build houses. Plant vineyards. Give your sons and daughters in marriage. Pray for the peace of that city, for in its peace shall be your peace.” So for 70 years, the Israelites remained in Babylon, and then some came out. There are still people living in Baghdad today, who are descendants of people who were carried away there who pray for that city, that its peace would be their peace. And so we have an obligation to manifest good will toward the institutions of this world; to pray for the president, for those in civil authority; to lift their names up everyday to God that He will strengthen them that they might act rightly and avoid acting unjustly.

But we talk a bunch about human authority. Human authority has a quality to it, as I said, of worldliness, or materialism, and of darkness. If I were the commander of an army – which no priest should ever be – I might have to order someone executed for mutiny or for desertion. Why? Because his act of rebellion or of forsaking his suffering comrades in the ranks would endanger the lives of everyone. So, in exercising that authority, I might have to exercise that force which is not wielded in vain. This is why our church forbids our clergy to exercise civil authority, even though at times they have, because we are combining the kingdom of Light and the kingdom of darkness. I remember a story when the Byzantines appointed a viceroy to the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Viceroys wore one costume, and of course, archbishops wore another, but this person they appointed was also their Byzantine Patriarch of Alexandria, and so he walked around with one brown shoe and one red shoe. We can’t walk with two shoes, like limping with two opinions. Those who are serving in the government of our nation, our state, our city, are as much in danger – in mortal danger – as those who are defending our rights and liberties on the battlefields. They have put themselves within the devil’s reach, and they need our prayers day and night.

But now let’s talk about what authority means in the church. You see that’s what that Roman officer had learned, that centurion learned. He learned that because he obeyed the orders of his commanders, and his soldiers obeyed his orders, that there was a system that worked in the world that kept the world from devolving into anarchy, from breaking down into rebellion and uprisings of hoi polloi. He understood that, and by analogy he understood that if Jesus were the messiah of Israel, the One able to save his dying servant from death, that He could speak the word that the power of God would go forth and perform that work without his even having to come to the man’s house. He had learned what the authority of God was – it did not require to touch of a hand, the breath of a mouth, but simply the thought, the utterance of a word. “Lord, I am not worthy,” he said, “that thou shouldst come under my roof. But speak the word only, and my servant will be healed.”

Now in the church, authority is a different thing. All authority rises from the nature of the person who exercises it. Worldly authority is kataexousiazo. As the Lord said, “The princes of the gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in power exercise dominion upon them”– pounding them down from above, “but it shall not be so among you, but he who will be first among you shall be as the last, and he who will be greatest among you shall be your minister, your servant.” We are to exercise kataexousiazo – you know the word kata is catastrophe, it means coming down from above, overturning – but exousia, that is the authority that we show from our own heart. So in the church, one of the most ridiculous things is when I see a priest get upset because people don’t call him “Father.” If they think you’re their father, they will call you that. If they don’t, they won’t; and why would you want them to call you that if they didn’t feel that that is what you were? So when we introduce ourselves – I will sometimes answer the phone, “This is Father Joe,” and I will sign my checks “Fr. Joseph Hirsch” so that people who get the checks will know who I am. But I’ll say, “This is Archpriest Joseph Hirsch,” or when I was younger, “Priest Joseph Hirsch.” It’s up to people. The Lord says, “Say that no man on earth is your true father, for your Father is in heaven.” But if you call a person “Dad” and he is your natural father, that’s a sign of respect. And if you call your priest “Father,” it’s a sign that shows, hopefully, that you feel that relationship of spiritual child to him; and if you don’t, he is a fool to think he can beat it out of you. How stupid parents whipping their kids for not respecting them – is that going to make the kids respect them more, or is that going to make them despise them? So the authority that we have in the church is whatever authority we manifest. That is why the Lord had St. Paul tell us, “Show respect to those in authority over you, considering the outcome of their actions.” You see how they are living, how they are behaving, what the consequences of their faith are in the lives, and if it is an example that you honor by respect of them. Now what if you don’t honor it? Then do you show disrespect? No, you still show respect to the office; you still show respect to the vestment. But if the man in the vestment does not have a heart beating with those things that deserve the respect of the people of his authority, then it is an empty vestment – a hollow priesthood.

And so, brothers and sisters, we’re taught today a great deal. You see it’s the feast of the first six of the seven ecumenical councils. At each one of those councils, men gathered from the ends of the earth not to pass new laws or to think up new ideas. The Anglicans are now gathered in Great Britain to try to decide whether they should bless the marriages of sodomites and whether they should ordain women to the episcopate. At this point, they should go ahead because they’re no longer possessed of any claim to be part of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church, and they’ve already ordained women to the episcopate in many countries under the priesthood, so let them make up their own religion and so people will not confuse them with us, which they sometimes have done; which I did for a long time until I learned better.

We don’t have meetings like that. We don’t say, “What cool, new, groovy ideas and programs can we introduce into the church?” And when we try to do that, we look really stupid. As one Russian man says, “When we act like that we are like people jumping on bandwagon after horses have run away and wagon is running downhill.” Alright, we held councils because somebody was saying something was true that the church didn’t feel was true. When we held councils, the bishops gathered, they prayed, they said what the church believed – what was taught all the way from Britain and Scotland to India, and the church said “Yes, this is the faith of the apostles. This is the faith of the fathers. This is the faith that has established the universe.” Within the council, there was no heretic. Why? Because the council was asking, “What is the faith we once received?” But once the faith was defined, once the fathers proclaimed it, once the canons were drawn up, once the edicts were sent out, once the creeds were written, then if you said, “Oh well, I have the right to my opinion,” then you were a heretic. What is a heretic? A person who chooses. They say, “Well the church can say this, but I feel this way.” Well go ahead and feel all you want to, but you’d better say what the church says and believe what the church believes because that is the mind of God, kept within us by the Holy Spirit. And so these six councils were gathering the bishops and priests and deacons from the ends of the world, not to think up new ideas, not to develop new programs, not to exercise some new kind of authority, but to delineate what the faith was that everyone believed everywhere, always, and to tell those who had other opinions, “No, in respect for the authority of God, who is able to heal at a word, lay aside your own personal, selfish, ignorant opinions, motivated by whatever, and accept the faith of the apostles, of the fathers, the faith by which the universe is established.

So today, brothers and sisters, we have a lot to think about. We have to think about our attitude toward civil authority, whether we think ourselves too important because we’re allowed to be involved in the political system of our country, whether we think it too important, whether even we think our nation too important, and remember it’s all the kingdom of darkness. And then the authority that’s exercised in the church, that it should be always exercised with love, with compassion, and with kindness, with caring. The highest punishment the church can inflict on anyone is ultimately to excommunicate them from the body. And when St. Paul has to do this, he says, “I am cutting this man off so that hopefully, by handing him over to the devil, he may have such fear in his heart that he will flee back to the church, and his soul will be saved.” So even the act of punishment that’s inflicted by the church ultimately for that arrogance that says, “My immorality is better than your morality; my belief is better than your faith,” even with that it is always an act of love, always with a prayer even to the end that by being handed over to the devil the heretic, the sinner, may repent and may be saved. So today, we’ll each approach God, we’ll say, “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou should enter under the roof of the house of my soul, which is all waste and ruin, and Thou canst find in me no fitting place to lay Thy head. But since Thou desirest to come to me, bid the doors of mine unworthiness be opened that I may be satisfied with Thee alone.”

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

Glory Forever!

The Third Sunday of Pentecost

July 6, 2007

"For after such things the gentiles seek. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you."

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

Glory Forever!

The Lord spoke in a few places about anxiety, the words that are recorded there have been greatly misunderstood by some. I remember the story about Francis of Assisi, the Roman Catholic friar who, as head of his order never allowed the cooks in his friary to make bean soup, because the Lord had said. “Take no thought for tomorrow,” and you had to soak the beans the day before. Now we can give him a little credit for a kind of whimsical craziness, but that’s certainly not what the Lord is talking about.

What the Lord is talking about is anxiety becoming a prominent and obsessive emotion in the human soul, in the human heart. Now we understand that we have problems, and we also understand that we have future possibilities, both negative and positive, and it would be insanity for us to anticipate with equanimity both disaster and prosperity. What the Lord is talking about is allowing anxiety, which was a gift from God, something put into not only human beings but into almost all of the mammals, to give us the possibility in the face of direct, clear, and present danger to either fight or run away. It is an instinct that changes the nature of the body, that makes us able to have the energy, the burst of power, the extra blood, the extra oxygen, that when a tiger growls at us, or the bear is rushing at us, or the fellow with the club and the torch is chasing us in the woods, we’re able to either escape or to turn and to defend our lives. But this is an instinct, a gift, a metabolic activity of human beings given for the confrontation, as I said, of clear and immediate dangers.

For dealing with life God intended for human beings to use two things: The lesser of these things is reason. To look at the possibility of a problem approaching us, with calmness, without anxiety, without an elevated heart rate, without perspiration, without stomach ulcers, to say “Now what are my possibilities in dealing with this situation? How ought I to approach this? What precautions can I take to avoid the problem? What remedies can I apply if the problem develops? What is the likelihood that it will even happen?”

And the other tool which is much more precious, is prayer, which allows us to remove ourselves from the necessity of finally dealing with a potential cause of our fear and allows us to trust, that as Saint Paul says, “Even in tribulation, for this is character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint.” For us to understand that if we love God, that God is working in everything with us to bring about good. It does not make Him the cause of the anticipated disaster, calamity, pain, suffering, loss; but it means that God: who emptied Himself of the glory of the Father and descended from the vault of highest heaven to stand on earth and be rejected among His own people, to stand in His own place and not be received, to be crucified and to descend from there into Hades itself, in order to trample down death; has shared, as it says in the prayers of Pentecost, has shared on equal terms in our sinless passions. He’s experienced the anxieties, the fears, the hardships, the pains that we can experience and more exquisitely than we. Not only was the pain He suffered literally excruciating, which means the pain from the cross, but it was pain that pierced not only His flesh but into His very soul itself, because it was the pain of God who in love saw His creatures attempting to destroy the best that they possessed, the only hope that they had, the one who cared for them more than it was possible for them to imagine care.

And so what the Lord is telling us is this: Yeah, if the bear is chasing you, Andrew, run. If you can climb a tree, climb a tree. But don’t go into the woods and walk around all day long thinking “Once there was a bear in these woods, maybe there’s another one here.” Because it will ruin your day, won’t it? It’ll make your heart beat fast, it’ll make your blood pressure go up, it’ll make you sweat, and it’ll make every twig that snaps a bear. What the Lord is telling us is that with our human reason, aided by divine grace, inspired by the spirit of God who leads us into all truth, who delivers us from all error and who recalls to our minds all words that God has spoken to us through Christ and through the prophets before Him; that thru these instruments we have power to trample down demons and to overthrow the powers of darkness. That the meaning of our life means precisely this: If we abide in Love, and Love abides in us, then that Love that abides in us is not an emotion, it is God himself and that He is capable of bringing us through everything.

And so, let us not, brothers and sisters, let us not decide that we’re not going to take any precautions; that we’re going to leave our doors unlocked, and leave the keys in our car, and that we’re going to stop taking our medicine, and go out in the winter without our coats even when our mothers tell us to put them on. Let’s not be that type of fools. But let us also not allow ourselves to be slaves to anxieties, the victims of a thousand deaths that we have not, nor shall we ever, experience. There was a saying once, written by Shakespeare and put into the mouth of Caesar, that cowards die many times before their death, the valiant taste death only once. What is simply meant by that is that those who spend their lives contemplating constantly all of the bad that could happen, being anxious, being caught up in fear, that they might as well die everyday, because in their hearts they’re experiencing the same anguish that they would experience from the grievous loss that they’re imagining themselves experiencing.

For us, even death itself has no fear. Oh yes, we’re taught by God to preserve our life, and so we cannot be foolhardy, we cannot throw our lives away pointlessly because Heaven’s better than here. If that weren’t the case, we could all hold hands and walk in front of a bus and be zapped into heaven right away. That’s not what God wants for us. He wants us to hold onto this gift of life in this world to refine our souls as far as they’re capable of being refined in this world, like gold in a fire, but when that is done, not to try to grasp onto the ashes and the dregs but to hand over our lives to Him trusting that He who has brought us this far is capable of bringing us to the end.

Now when I read papers that students write in religion class, philosophy class, one of the questions they are asked is “What do you think of the statement ‘Death gives life no meaning? Life has no meaning because of death?’” And the students will sometimes say, “Oh yes, life has meaning. I’ve got my kids, and I’ve got my car and my dog, and a really good job.” So what you’re saying, friend, is, when your kids grow up and move away, when someone steals your car and it gets wrecked, if your health vanishes and you get fired, life has no meaning? In other words, it was a toss up and you got lucky? No, that’s not the point. The point is that death does not give life robbery of its purpose, but it is simply the consummation of the struggle.

What I found when I was chaplain in the old folks home is that the deeper people’s faith was, the quicker they died. When they were in their final struggle, no matter how big and strong they were, that just as our Lord on the cross when He said “It is finished,” bowed His head and gave over His spirit, that people who trust in God are able to hand their life over to him. The terrible deaths, the ripping away of soul from body, were those of people who had no faith because all they had was what they took to that bed in the infirmary with them – the clothes on their back and the aches and the pains – and they were fearful and they could not give up because they had no confidence that anything better than pain awaited them.

So, do not be as the gentiles who spend their days in anxious torment, wondering “How will we get food? How will we get clothing? What will we drink?” These are the things after which the gentiles seek, but seek first God’s kingdom, seek first God’s righteousness, and all the rest: pressed down, running over, in good measure will be added unto you.

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

Glory forever!

Holy Pentecost

June 15, 2008

"And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were dwelling, and there appeared to them as it were, tongues of fire resting on each of them."

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory Forever!

Today is the fiftieth day, it is the end of the week of weeks, it is the great feast of Pentecost. In the Old Covenant, Israel was delivered from slavery in Egypt and traveled for nine days to Mount Horeb, Sinai. And after the tenth day Moses ascended to God by ascending the mountain, and for forty days he fasted and prayed, and on the fortieth day God wrote with His finger on stone tablets the laws of the Old Covenant.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, having come down, having conquered death and risen from the dead, remained with his disciples for forty days and then ascended in glory; and after nine days on the tenth day, the spirit of God came down and wrote with God’s own finger on the fleshy hearts of his people the law of the new covenant. This is in a real sense the birthday of the New Testament Church. We don’t say the birth day of the Church because the Church began with Adam. It was established with Abraham; it throve through the Old Testament, at times being diminished, and at times prospering; but it was the community called from the nation of Israel from Abraham’s seed.

Now, each of us here, in our own ears in the language our mothers taught us, the gospel of Christ proclaimed, and from every nation and kindred we are gathered together to become one race, one nation. When I hear about the racial politics of liberation theology, which really began with quasi-Marxists in the Roman Catholic Church, what astonishes me, what throws me into an absolute confusion, is how these people who study the same scriptures I study, cannot understand that although in the world there are all kinds of conflicts, all kinds of old scores to settle, all kinds of abuses that have been committed and endured, that Christ came to lay aside, to conquer all that. That in Him there is neither Jew, nor gentile, Scythian, Parthian or Mede, Greek. But that we are all made one, that we are all begotten again as a new race, and that for us to find in our Christianity someway of dividing us from the rest of humanity, rather than uniting us, is itself a perversion. Wives have the right to be angry with their husbands because they are often oppressive and dominating; Husbands have the right to be angry with their wives because they’re often sneaky and deceitful. And still, in Christ, the love that He gives conquers all of that. We do not seek in Christ our rights, to manifest justice as the world sees justice, to get revenge, to extract punishment, to win conflicts, to be victorious. We don’t strive to say, “I’m ok and you’re not ok.” We strive to be one people, we strive to overcome those things that pertain to our fallen nature, not to put them on our banners and wave them in the air.

Now you may say to me then, “Well, how come we celebrate here Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Ukranian, and Greek holidays and special events? Isn’t that divisive?” Well, no it is not. It is rather a celebration of the parts, the pieces, the organs, of the cultures from which God has put together His body in this place from many more places. From Scotland, and Ireland, and India. For God has called us all out. The word ekklesia, the word from which we get the word church, means “those who have been called out.” In Greek society it was the assembly that was called out from among the citizens to govern the city. The people who sat on the trial of Socrates were the ekklesia. The people who had been called to senate. And we have been called out from the peoples of the world to be the servants of Christ: all made of one accord, a beautiful display of every color of eyes and of hair and of skin, of every accent, of every taste in food and art, in dance and music, all called together in the temple of God to be one people.

What we celebrate today is Life. As I was standing out here earlier in the week I was contemplating this tree in the front yard that the city forester says we have to cut down. It makes sick b/c the tree is green, but the city forester wants to give some tree trimmers some money, or he’s afraid it’s gonna fall on somebody, and it’s probably the latter. And as I think about that, about this tree that appears to have life in it, and yet we’re told is dead, is practically dead, I think of two things: Of people who have been given life by Christ through baptism, whose roots have been watered with the water of new life, and who have been fed with the bread of heaven, and cultivated in the Holy Spirit by the myrrh that anointed their bodies and who never the less think that their Christianity is a thing they can put in a drawer and perhaps in time of crisis or the time of their death can take that out and place it over their heads, like the inscription “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us” that we put on the head of corpses. But if we do not have life in us, even though there may be the residual traits of life, that we are cut off from Christ and we will not bear fruit. The Lord has said to us, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” The reason that we wear green on Pentecost, and not red for the fire, is because it is the feast of life. And we understand that you can take a vine and you can cut it off from its plant and for a while it will appear to have the signs of life as this tree out front has the signs of life, but if its roots are not in the ground, if the nourishment of the sap is not running through the veins of that plant, it will eventually shrivel and die and will not bring forth fruit.

On the iconostas, behind the roses are branches of a plum tree and they remain green, and they probably will for a few days. Those are branches that grow downward, and those are the ones that I cut off, the ones that are growing downward. But that plum tree was destined from the time it was planted never to bear fruit. Why? It was not in the plum tree to bear fruit, it was raised, it was bred by someone to have flowers, to appear to be filled with the grace of new life, but it is incapable of transmitting new life. And for that reason, that plum tree will never bear plums. I like the tree, Matushka likes the flowers, and every time I look at it, it makes me angry that it’s not going to grow plums. And there are some people who outwardly appear to be filled with life, with spiritual life. They know how to pose it, they know how to go through the motions, but they are not allowing God’s grace to transmit itself through them to enrich and save and glorify others. And so, they are like that tree that Jesus saw, remember the fig tree on the way to Jerusalem that became an icon of Jerusalem itself? He drew near and He willed to find figs on it and there were none and He said, “Let no figs grow on you, no, not forever.” And when they returned from Jerusalem the fig tree had dried up and died.

No, our life in Christ is not, because, as some of our Pentecostal friends say, “The Spirit fills me and I am a Spirit-filled person;” it is because the Spirit fills the Body of Christ and I am in the Body of Christ. If you cut your finger off, the Holy Spirit cannot make that finger continue to live because it’s cut off from the body in which life resides. And if we are cut off from the body of Christ, even though we may have that residual life in us, the sap may be in the branches, it will dry up, it will desiccate, it will not bring forth fruit. This is the Father’s will, He says, “that ye abide in me and I in you.” So, He said, “It is my Father’s will that you should bear much fruit.”

And as I thought about this tree that we’re going to cut down, I thought about another tree – one right out here. In 1988, that tree was visibly falling apart, it had been stunted by lightning some time in the 20s; it had been struck by lightning and blasted. But it continued to live, and we thought “We’d better cut it down.” And the men went out and they took their saws and they started to cut - like men like to do with chain saws. They started to cut away, and what did we find but that in the bosom of that blasted tree was a tree that had grown up. That it had sheltered and nurtured new life from its own roots within its dying body. You can see that tree out there, and you can see the icon of the mother of God where every morning some of our women in the neighborhood came and said their prayers. And you can see the cavity where its mother filled in and supported it as it grew up. Someday that will have to be cut down, because it’s a fallen world, unless the Lord comes quickly. But I call it the Resurrection Tree because to me it represents our community here which many people thought was blasted, was dying, was destined to someday pretty soon to have some forlorn priest sing, “vetch nay ya pam yat” one more time and then shut up the doors. And yet it has grown up from its roots. Oh you may say, “We don’t have a thousand people here,” and that’s true. But we have sent almost everyone who was here 20, 30 years ago to the kingdom of heaven to await the resurrection, dying with Christ’s body and blood in their bodies, renewed and confessed and anointed and ready to enter into eternal life. And so our community is not to be numbered by how righteous, holy, pious, godly we appear to be now, but by how much life has gone on before us, which is the promise of what we are to become. For like the tree that begins as a twig and then grows up into a sapling and then into a young tree and then into a mature tree, we are just as much alive in Christ when we are those little seedlings, we are just as much trees filled with his life as we are when we’re sapling and when we are young trees and when we are full grown trees. Let us then accept the spirit of God, poured out on us not in perceptible tongues of fire, but in the uncreated light descending upon us and enlightening our hearts, and let us hear the Lord say to us “It is the Father’s good pleasure that you should bear much fruit. Abide in me and I in you as I abide in the Father and the Father in Me”.

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

The 7th Sunday of Pascha

Sunday, June 8, 2008

“Holy Father keep them in your name, which you have given me out of the world, that they be one as thou art one."

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit..

Christ has ascended! In glory!

We were blessed this year that on the feast of the Lord’s ascension there were a lot of people, a large number of people to celebrate the wonderful feast day that often gets ignored because it always comes on a Thursday. It was a special blessing because this is the day that marks for us a turning point in our advance through the church year. Someone said to me on Wednesday morning when we served the leave taking of Pascha, and we did it according to the Greek typichon, that is to say served it the way we do on Holy Saturday night and on Sunday morning when we serve Pascha with the festal tones.. And someone said, “I wonder how the Holy disciples and our Lady felt when Jesus ascended into heaven? How did they feel at that time?”

And I said “Well, you know the day before that, I don’t know if they anticipated what was going to happen or not.” They were basking in the joy of having Him from time to time appear in their midst and talk with them. You can imagine that if you thought that you had lost someone forever - if you believed that they were dead or that they were in a far off land and would never return - and suddenly you found them with you and speaking with you, that you would have such great joy that it would be almost boundless. You could imagine that, and you could imagine the disciples who not only believed the lord most likely to be permanently gone from them at the time at which he gave up his spirit on the cross, now finding him who had suffered so greatly standing in their midst, what a great joy they had. And He said, “You sorrow, and you will sorrow, and the world will rejoice; but I will return to you and your sorrow I will change to joy.”

Their joy was so great that they couldn’t really believe what they saw, they began to doubt their own senses - to believe that somehow they were imagining something or that perhaps this was some kind of illusion or a phantom that the Lord had sent them as consolation. And He had to say to them: “Reach out and touch my hands and my side and see that I have flesh and bones, for a ghost hath not flesh and bones which you see me have.” It’s interesting for us if we think about it, because that morning when Mary Magdalene went to embrace the Lord in the garden He said, “Do not touch me for I have not yet ascended to my Father,” but that night He said, “Reach out and touch,” which means that the Lord ascended immediately after His resurrection. He went immediately to the Father, presented Himself as the sacrifice to unite God and man, and carried human flesh into the hall of highest heaven.

But He remained behind on earth from time to time for 40 days. Why? Well there were two things from before I was Orthodox that were always kind of perplexing to me. One was Holy Saturday, because we would celebrate in the Western church, we would remember the crucifixion of Christ. We would do the three hour service from 12-3 o’clock, and then at night there was nothing to do so we did a made up service called Stations of the Cross. And then it was kind of like “Jesus is gone, He’s in the tomb, and nothing happens liturgically.” It was kind of like a blank time, an empty time, and it wasn’t until it penetrated into my consciousness what I always believed – that Jesus’ resurrection began when He descended into Hell that Friday evening and raised up Adam and Eve and all the dead. That He was very busy, He was very busy, He was liberating the captives from all the ages.

And the second thing that was perplexing to me was this forty days between the Lord’s resurrection and His ascension. Yes, I knew, I knew that the Lord appeared to His disciples at times. I was told that He appeared to prove to them that He was risen from the dead, and I understood as well that He accorded to them some teachings. But you see there’s a kind of prejudice in the Western religion, that if it’s not written down in the Bible, you suspect that maybe it might be just not quite as valuable as the information that’s written on that page. What I now understand is that what’s written down in the Bible is what the Church wants us to read at church. It was the memoirs, as we’re told by Justin the Martyr, memoirs of the apostles written down so that we would have our own Christian Torah to read at the Divine Liturgy in place of the Jewish law. But that there was a whole lot more that the Lord spoke to them during the 40 days, and that what He told them during the forty days was everything they needed to go out and set up the Orthodox church throughout the world. It was everything they needed to be able to worship God the right way, and everything they needed to believe the right things. That is why we say the apostles preaching and the fathers’ doctrine have established one faith for the universe.

When the Lord had taught them, then He went up to heaven and He was parted from them physically and they were in a perhaps semi-quandary, but they knew what they were supposed to do. So immediately they began to replace the twelfth apostle who had hanged himself, Judas. And they began to prepare themselves so when the Spirit came on them as the Lord had said He would they would be fortified to engage immediately in the ministry to which they were called. And on that fiftieth day the HS came down and awoke in them an understanding of all the words Jesus had spoken to them during those forty days and all the words He had spoken to them before that time.

Now, why forty days and then nine days and then the fiftieth day the HS came down? Well because God was showing us a contrast between the old and the new covenant. In the old covenant Israel passed from Egypt to Mount Sinai and on the tenth day, they arrived at the mountain. Moses ascended the mountain, and on the mountain, Moses, who climbed up on top of the mountain to talk to God remained, for forty days and on the fiftieth day the Law of the old covenant was given. But for us, Christ remained on earth speaking gracious words for forty days. Then, having gone up to heaven our true law giver, He sent His spirit down to us to write the law, not on tablets of stone but on our hearts, so that every man needs no one to say to him “Know the Lord your God;” every woman needs no one to say “Let me tell you about God.” For we all know Him, we know Him as our own, we know Him in our hearts. So God prepared for His people a body on earth whose Head is in heaven. Had He not ascended into heaven, then it would have been physically impossible for the Church to extend from east to west, from north to south, and o be the body of Christ. For the head must be above the body, Christ enthroned at the right hand of the Father has made us His hands and His feet, His eyes and His ears, on earth. The organs of His body

Today we celebrate the fathers of the First Council. What did the Church do when the persecutions had at long last ended? Well, the Church sought to make certain that only the truth was being preached. There were some people, some people who thought that Christianity was a business; who thought the Gospel was a product they were selling. Some people who judged the importance of their religion by how many converts they could make. And these people wanted to, as it were, tweak the gospel.

Everybody who thought about anything at all, believed this: That in the beginning there was one monad, one single being, one impersonal blob of divine substance, and that that glob of substance exploded, kind of like the Big Bang, huh? And it became emanations, and then it became first another, and then several, and then from the several, several more, and from the several more, even more. In other words, that there had to have been only one singular being, not even personal, at the beginning. And since everybody believed this, Arius, this priest in Alexandria, thought, “Well, if we could just allow people who want to to believe that, we could make a lot more people Christians and we could have a bigger church, and probably bigger collections too.” So Arius went around saying, “There was a time when God the Son did not exist.” He didn’t tell us what time that was in his opinion, he didn’t care. It wasn’t a doctrine, it was an anti doctrine. It was the idea that there could not have always been eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is what the church believes, but it didn’t make sense to the minds of those who were steeped in this Platonic idea of emanations. And so Arius said “Come on guys, let me just let people believe this if they want to, and then, it won’t hurt anything.”

So the Church gathered, she gathered her children together from England to India, from Rhine River to the deserts of Africa. And they gathered in the city of Nicea across the way from the new city of Constantinople. And they each stood up, each bishop who had been made a bishop by a bishop, who had been made a bishop by other bishops, who had been made a bishop by other bishops, back to the Apostles who had consecrated the first bishops and given them their teachings, the teachings given them. And they stood up and they each recited “What do we believe in our church?” And they found that from India to Ireland, everyone believed that there was eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So they created for us a synthetic creed called the Symbol of Faith from the creeds of the many churches. “We believe” they said, not “I believe in this document,” because it was the witness of the whole church. “We believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages.” In other words, eternally begotten of the Father. “and in the Holy Spirit.” So they set down this formula that you will sing during the liturgy today, and they gave it to us. The formula that Jesus had taught the apostles during those forty days. And they regularized the celebration of the Lord’s resurrection, and they stabilized the practice of the Holy Mysteries, and they went back to their churches. And they did this by the power of God’s spirit, who recalled to their minds 280 some years after the Lord’s ascension all the words He had taught them, the power that is given. So today we celebrate the Holy Fathers, and we prepare next week when the church will be all green for Life. We will celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Thank God today that our Lord remained with us, we thank Him for teaching us, and we thank Him for His body which is in the world, and for His mind which by the Holy Spirit drives directs and enlightens His body. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ forever. Christ has ascended! In Glory!