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.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
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 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!
Monday, December 1, 2008
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!
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!
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