Sunday of Zaccheus
Zaccheus, the outcast, the publican, the Jew who had become a contract tax collector for the Roman occupying army, who not only served the foreign enemy but who also collected taxes and handled gentile pagan money, Zaccheus was a man who learned to take satisfaction in what it was that he had, but he mourned all that he didn’t have. His life was centered around the assignment of assessment, of levies and taxes, to various citizens so that the Roman government would be placated, so he could hand over what he had collected to the governor and then take out his share. And he lived in comfort, probably clothed in soft clothing and eating very well, but he found himself both out of communion with God and with his own people, both a traitor to his faith and to his nation, we would say a pretty deplorable person. But that’s not the way that he appears in the gospel.
He hears that Our Lord is coming to Jericho, and he has this little dream, this thought: Perhaps in some way, the fact that Jesus, who many said was the messiah, who some proclaimed to even be a divine oracle, perhaps this Jesus could say a word that he would hear that would show him the way out of his predicament. You see, when things are bad, when you feel threatened, when your strength fails, when the markets go down, when the person next to you is fired and you don’t know how long it will be till you’re fired, you do one of two things: You can eat, drink, and be merry – start celebrating the fore-feast of the Super Bowl on Sunday morning; or you can turn to God and allow him to comfort you, to relieve you of your burden, to give you joy and hope, and to provide peace for you so that you can say, “The Lord is with me, therefore I will not fear, I will not be afraid.” Well, Zaccheus had a hope that that was something he could receive, and so he came out to the street as Jesus was passing by.
Now we know that a lot of things happened on that entrance into Jericho. We know about the blind man who proclaimed our Lord to be the messiah, who saw with eyes of his soul what these people could not see with the eyes of their body. We know about the woman who later, with the issue of blood, touched the hem of His garment and was healed, and Jairus whose daughter was raised to life, but Zaccheus couldn’t get close enough to even see Jesus. He was small. The Romanian word for small is meek, and I remember that two years ago Andrew received an award at school. It said he received the Humility Award, and he said to me, “What is humility?” and I said, “It’s like being humble,” and he said, “But what does humble mean?” And I said, “You know, like ‘blessed are the meek,’” and he said, “Didn’t I tell you I was tiny?” Well, Zaccheus was tiny. He couldn’t see Jesus, and the big tall people wouldn’t move out of the way. They said, “Oh you tax collector, you jerk! Who do you think you are? We’re not going to give you fronts. You just get away from us.” So he got an idea: he figured out what road Jesus was going to come down and he ran ahead – down a side-street, up another one – and there, overhanging the road, was a sycamore tree. And he climbed up in the sycamore tree and he sat there on the branch and he said, “Now I can get a good look at him.” As Jesus comes by, Jesus looks up and he sees him there, and he addresses him by name. He had known his name since he was conceived in his mother’s womb; he had known about him since before creation, and he said, “Zaccheus, hurry up! Come down! I’m going to have supper at your house today!”
What does it mean that Jesus was going to have supper at his house? No good Jew would eat with a sinner, would they? They wouldn’t go into their house, they might become unclean. Especially not a tax collector – somebody who handled the coins and collected the taxes for the gentile dogs. No, you wouldn’t go near him. You were too good. But Jesus said, “I’m going to have supper with you today!” And the people, all around, instead of saying, “Hey! Zaccheus is being changed. The Rabbi is going to go to his house. Maybe he’ll stop sinning” – and by the way, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Gospel for today that Zaccheus was a sinner. He broke the rules of the Jewish nation, but it doesn’t say that he stole anything or cheated anyone. It’s the people standing around who decided, “He’s rich, so he must be a robber, right? We need to raise his taxes cuz he’s rich. He must have done something wrong to get that money.” So, they all start murmuring. They say, “Look! Jesus is going to be the guest of a man who’s a sinner.”
I remember one time we had a man in this church. He had not been born Orthodox. He was born a Uniate, and in college he had converted and he had become so Orthodox that he judged everyone else. He stood up at parish council once and said, “I move we outlaw all liquor at this church,” and one of the parish council members looked at him and said, “Are you a Protestant?” Anyway, this man told me I was a bad priest. Why? Because I’d go to the houses of people who were sinners. And I pointed out to him that was true, I had even come to his house.” And then I said, “Do you realize that two times in the bible when people reject Jesus, two times, the words they use are, ‘He’s gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner’? Do you understand what kind of judgment that brings down on your head, to use the same words the people who condemned Christ used to judge the people who were coming to him for mercy and forgiveness?”
Zaccheus stands up and he says, “Lord, I’m going to give half of everything I have to the poor.” Now this was not admission of any kind of guilt at all. It was an admission of a life that had been changed. All he had had before now was his money. It had been his idol; it had been his God; it had been is prepossession; it’s the only thing he had given any thought to. So how does he free himself from it? By giving it away. “I give half of all my possessions to the poor.” And then he says, “If I have defrauded any many, I will restore it four fold.” He didn’t say, “And the people I’ve defrauded, I will restore it four fold.” There’s no evidence at all that he cheated anyone, except to the extent that the Roman tax system itself was a fraud, like most tax systems are. He said, “If I have a cheated anyone, I will restore it fourfold.” Now this was the Jewish requirement, the law. If you took something by fraud, you had to pay it back four times. And so, this man puts himself, right now at this moment, in the context of being a good Jew, and Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this man’s house. For this man who is a son of Abraham has received me, and the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was being lost.”
This is the lesson that we always have the Sunday before we begin the Triodion. Next week will be the Pharisee and the Publican. It’s the last lesson. Next week when I come to your house and I sprinkle, I always say, “Lord who was baptized by John in the Jordan and who entered into the house of Zaccheus, has brought salvation” because these are two points that we identify at this time that have to do with blessing. So today, climb down from your sycamore tree. Quit looking at Jesus from a distance. Run up to him. Let him embrace you. Let him into the house of your soul. Give up the things that enslave you. Turn way from the things that hold you back from God. Welcome the Lord into your house, and receive salvation from him who came to seek and to save that which was being lost.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
St. Sava and the Sunday of the Syro-Phonecian Woman
Today is the Sunday of the Syro-Phonecian woman, this Sunday precedes the Sunday of Zaccheus that leads us to the preparatory Sundays before the Great Fast. Jesus, last week, had restored sight to a blind man who had recognized him in the eye of his heart, in his true mind, in his nous, to be what his own disciples did not know him to be – that is the son of David, the Messiah. And now, he goes into the coast of Tyre and Sidon. Why did he go out of Israel? Was it so he could insult the Syro-Phonecian woman? No, indeed. It was to show that the power that he exercised in Israel upon the Jewish people was also the power that he would exercise throughout the entire world.
So he comes, and this woman comes up to him, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” And he doesn’t answer her. He wants to hear from her more, what does she have to say? She says, “Lord help me.” The conversation that he has with her has been interpreted by some rabbis as a terribly insulting conversation. He said, “It is not proper to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But is that what he really said? You know, in Greek there’s no question mark. As you read the conversation, it sounds not like a conversation between Jesus and the crowd, but an intimate conversation between Jesus and the woman. He is saying to her, “Is it proper to take the bread that belongs to the children – the house of Israel – and to give it to the dogs?” He’s not calling her a dog. In Jewish idiom, all gentiles were dogs. “Gentile dog” was a compound sort of like “Damned Yankee.” And so, when he says to her, “Is it proper – is it possible – to take the bread of the children of Israel, these people who don’t even understand what I’m doing and to give it to the gentile dogs?” She comes back with a very astute comment, “If the children are throwing their bread on the floor, then can’t the dogs take it?” That’s what she’s saying. “If the children of Israel aren’t accepting you, and I am, then shouldn’t I be able to benefit from what they’re not choosing?” The Lord says, “Great is your faith,” and He heals her daughter immediately, and He shows that His grace flows over, that even though he was sent first to the lost sheep of Israel, that His power, and His mercy, and His healing will extend to all the nations.
And so today, we are here, a gathering, a multitude of gentile dogs, of people who are not the descendents of Abraham after the flesh, but who have attained more than that, who have been grafted into the tree of Abraham, who have been made the true Israelites. But we come from a motley crowd. We are not a people who are monolithic in our culture, in our nationality, in our origin. God has taken us from many nations, from many cultures, from all of the colors of human flesh which was formed from the dust of the earth, and he has gathered us together in one assembly, in one ecclesia, one gather called out from among the nations to be a chosen generation, a royal priesthood.
So, today we celebrate St. Gregory the Theologian, who was an Archbishop of Constantinople, but at the same time we celebrate St. Sava of Serbia, the first archbishop, a holy man, a man who could have been the king of his own country, who was cultivated by his father to succeed to the throne but who exchanged that earthly glory of the robes of a monastic, and then brought back to the Serbian people and through them to the Russian and Ukranian people, the treasures of the Law of God translated into the Slavonic language, and also brought back to us our beautiful Typicon of St. Sava’s of Palestine – which is why our service is a little different from the Greeks, because ours comes from Jerusalem, not second hand from some Greek town. So, we celebrate all the saints, the new martyrs who have died in Russia, at the very same time. And Romanian and Serbian ladies work together to make a wonderful feast in honor of St. Sava. And we remember when St. Sava died – when he caught pneumonia blessing the waters of the lake – and then died a week later on the leave-taking, it was to resolve a conflict in Bulgaria – to bring peace to the Bulgarian people. And we understand that what we really in is not a diminution of our culture by bringing together and mixing all of these wonderful gifts that God has given, distributed to the many nations, gathered together here in one community; but we have is that Greeks can have St. Sava for their own now, and Serbs can have St. Gregory, and the Romanians can have both of them, and we can all have St. Philothea, and St. Dmitru Bazarabov because they have all become our relatives, our kin, our family. They have all become our protectors, our intercessors.
So, today we glory in God’s mercy but I wanted you to think for a moment today, as you stand and pray, utter a prayer for the thousands of Serbian men, and some women, who came to this country, who took the jobs laboring in the mines; those who were shot down in cold blood by the state militia during the coal field wars, and those who died of black lung disease, those who were never able to return to their home land as they’d promise, but were never able to marry and leave children – remember that those people were the people who built this church here. But they have left very few children behind because their lives were difficult, because their struggle was hard. Very hard. Many many of them died very young. Pray for them. We always bless their graves at the cemetery, buried among the railroad tracks there. There all also some in Eerie, some in Lafayette, and up in Leadville, and down in Trinidad. So, pray for those people and remember that every year, no matter how cold it was, how snowy it was, no matter how dangerous the roads, these men and their wives if they had them, and their children would load into wagons with animals or Model T Fords and they would go down those mountain roads – sometimes at night a little boy would have to sit on the hood of the car with his flashlight to show where the road ahead was, snow blowing in his face – to come to Globeville, to gather here in this place, this place where the great Tesla, the great scientist, prayed together with them at one time. They came here to celebrate a saint who had touched their lives, and melted their hearts, and made them feel the love of God.
So today we honor St. Sava and we ask that by his prayers, we also, of many nations, of people who were gentile dogs, of people walking in darkness but have been brought to see the light and have been made children of Israel by water and the spirit, have been made more than that, have been made divine, have been made to have union with God himself, how we are made into one family; and lets ask our dear patron, Sava, to make us all feel a new burst of love and to be able to embrace each other in Christian fellowship as a family, to lay aside all of the foolish and trifling arguments and disagreements which throughout decades my have arisen among some of us, and to again stand before God and have the group photo taken in heaven of this household, this family, this Eucharistic assembly today, in peace and harmony and joy, with our father Sava standing behind us, embracing us like a great grandfather, holding us all warmly in his arms.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ.
Glory forever
So he comes, and this woman comes up to him, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” And he doesn’t answer her. He wants to hear from her more, what does she have to say? She says, “Lord help me.” The conversation that he has with her has been interpreted by some rabbis as a terribly insulting conversation. He said, “It is not proper to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But is that what he really said? You know, in Greek there’s no question mark. As you read the conversation, it sounds not like a conversation between Jesus and the crowd, but an intimate conversation between Jesus and the woman. He is saying to her, “Is it proper to take the bread that belongs to the children – the house of Israel – and to give it to the dogs?” He’s not calling her a dog. In Jewish idiom, all gentiles were dogs. “Gentile dog” was a compound sort of like “Damned Yankee.” And so, when he says to her, “Is it proper – is it possible – to take the bread of the children of Israel, these people who don’t even understand what I’m doing and to give it to the gentile dogs?” She comes back with a very astute comment, “If the children are throwing their bread on the floor, then can’t the dogs take it?” That’s what she’s saying. “If the children of Israel aren’t accepting you, and I am, then shouldn’t I be able to benefit from what they’re not choosing?” The Lord says, “Great is your faith,” and He heals her daughter immediately, and He shows that His grace flows over, that even though he was sent first to the lost sheep of Israel, that His power, and His mercy, and His healing will extend to all the nations.
And so today, we are here, a gathering, a multitude of gentile dogs, of people who are not the descendents of Abraham after the flesh, but who have attained more than that, who have been grafted into the tree of Abraham, who have been made the true Israelites. But we come from a motley crowd. We are not a people who are monolithic in our culture, in our nationality, in our origin. God has taken us from many nations, from many cultures, from all of the colors of human flesh which was formed from the dust of the earth, and he has gathered us together in one assembly, in one ecclesia, one gather called out from among the nations to be a chosen generation, a royal priesthood.
So, today we celebrate St. Gregory the Theologian, who was an Archbishop of Constantinople, but at the same time we celebrate St. Sava of Serbia, the first archbishop, a holy man, a man who could have been the king of his own country, who was cultivated by his father to succeed to the throne but who exchanged that earthly glory of the robes of a monastic, and then brought back to the Serbian people and through them to the Russian and Ukranian people, the treasures of the Law of God translated into the Slavonic language, and also brought back to us our beautiful Typicon of St. Sava’s of Palestine – which is why our service is a little different from the Greeks, because ours comes from Jerusalem, not second hand from some Greek town. So, we celebrate all the saints, the new martyrs who have died in Russia, at the very same time. And Romanian and Serbian ladies work together to make a wonderful feast in honor of St. Sava. And we remember when St. Sava died – when he caught pneumonia blessing the waters of the lake – and then died a week later on the leave-taking, it was to resolve a conflict in Bulgaria – to bring peace to the Bulgarian people. And we understand that what we really in is not a diminution of our culture by bringing together and mixing all of these wonderful gifts that God has given, distributed to the many nations, gathered together here in one community; but we have is that Greeks can have St. Sava for their own now, and Serbs can have St. Gregory, and the Romanians can have both of them, and we can all have St. Philothea, and St. Dmitru Bazarabov because they have all become our relatives, our kin, our family. They have all become our protectors, our intercessors.
So, today we glory in God’s mercy but I wanted you to think for a moment today, as you stand and pray, utter a prayer for the thousands of Serbian men, and some women, who came to this country, who took the jobs laboring in the mines; those who were shot down in cold blood by the state militia during the coal field wars, and those who died of black lung disease, those who were never able to return to their home land as they’d promise, but were never able to marry and leave children – remember that those people were the people who built this church here. But they have left very few children behind because their lives were difficult, because their struggle was hard. Very hard. Many many of them died very young. Pray for them. We always bless their graves at the cemetery, buried among the railroad tracks there. There all also some in Eerie, some in Lafayette, and up in Leadville, and down in Trinidad. So, pray for those people and remember that every year, no matter how cold it was, how snowy it was, no matter how dangerous the roads, these men and their wives if they had them, and their children would load into wagons with animals or Model T Fords and they would go down those mountain roads – sometimes at night a little boy would have to sit on the hood of the car with his flashlight to show where the road ahead was, snow blowing in his face – to come to Globeville, to gather here in this place, this place where the great Tesla, the great scientist, prayed together with them at one time. They came here to celebrate a saint who had touched their lives, and melted their hearts, and made them feel the love of God.
So today we honor St. Sava and we ask that by his prayers, we also, of many nations, of people who were gentile dogs, of people walking in darkness but have been brought to see the light and have been made children of Israel by water and the spirit, have been made more than that, have been made divine, have been made to have union with God himself, how we are made into one family; and lets ask our dear patron, Sava, to make us all feel a new burst of love and to be able to embrace each other in Christian fellowship as a family, to lay aside all of the foolish and trifling arguments and disagreements which throughout decades my have arisen among some of us, and to again stand before God and have the group photo taken in heaven of this household, this family, this Eucharistic assembly today, in peace and harmony and joy, with our father Sava standing behind us, embracing us like a great grandfather, holding us all warmly in his arms.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ.
Glory forever
January 18, 2009
You know, even in the church calendar there are mistakes after all these centuries. One of the problems is when we scrunch the readings of Luke into the pre-Lenten, there’s a question of what you read. Our calendar was right, what was sent to me over the internet was wrong. It had the gospel reading of the Syro-Phonecian woman. You will hear that next week. But oddly enough you’ll hear the same reading from the apostle Paul next week that you heard this week, but we’ll talk about that then.
What I’m going to talk about today is the Gospel and the real significance of this particular gospel at this time. We’re now back to the beginning of the cycle of Pascha. The three Sundays before we begin are the Lenten Triodion, the Pre-Lenten Sundays start, are dedicated to the blind man, the Syro-Phonecian woman, and then to Zaccheus – the little man who climbed up into the sycamore tree to see Jesus. The thing that unites the blind man and the Syro-Phonecian woman is the knowledge they had through faith that the people surrounding them did not have because they were living in their minds, in their brains, not in their hearts. One was a Jew, one was a Gentile, but both of them recognized Jesus as divine, and as the Savior. Both of them came to Him and both of them were rebuked. When the blind man heard that Jesus was coming, he cried out, “Son of David, have mercy on me” – that is, “Messiah, have mercy on me” – and the crowd told him, “Shut up. Be quiet. This is an important Rabbi, but don’t make a fool of yourself.” And when the Syro-Phonecian woman came up and threw herself at Jesus feet and said, “Lord, have mercy on me,” the disciples wanted to push her away. She was a gentile dog. But both of them insisted, both of them persisted, and both of them received what they wanted. When we gave up Pascha, when we had the last Sunday of Pascha, we celebrated it with the Feast of the Man Born Blind. You remember that every year. The man whose eyes Jesus created out of clay and told him to go wash in the pool of Salom. And then we begin the cycle that brings us to the Triodion, the Pre-Lenten times, we begin with the blind man again. This blind man, this man who cried out, “Son of David, have mercy on me,” was actually the only one there who had sight.
You see that now many of our teachers are reminding us, as Father Alithios Webber pointed out, we’re deceived into believing that we are our brains, that our brains are us. But our brains are simply a database, and that database is corrupt. It’s full of all kinds of garbage, it’s been attacked by all kinds of viruses, all kinds of program deviations. And so it makes us think things, and about things, that we have no business thinking about. I was thinking today, “Is anybody going to notice that the hem on this vestment is too long? I wonder how coffee hour will go. Are the kids going to do a good job for St. Sava’s day?” All these little thoughts intruded on my prayer life, and probably two dozen more, some of which, if I told you, you would be ashamed of me, so I won’t. but these are called by the Fathers “logosmoi.” They are little words uttered in our ear by the demon, by the deceiver, to make us think we are thinking. They are little words that distract us and occupy our minds. Words about self-importance, or about self-deprecation; words that exalt us in our own hearts, or depress us and drive us down, so that we feel we are “lower than a toad’s belly.” These logosmoi are just the distractions that flow into our ears. They make us think things are important that are not. They make us fear. They make us occupy ourselves with thoughts of acquiring entertainment or stimulations that when we acquire them we wonder why we did and we don’t really want them anyway. They make us want things we don’t want. And they’re assisted now, because we are bombarded by the availability of all sorts of information. Why do you suppose God confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel? It is because, he said, “if people could all communicate about every idea that they have, they’ll be able to devise all manner of evil. It will be harmful for themselves. I have to divide them up, spread them out.” But now with the computer, all kinds of knowledge and ignorance, all kinds of wisdom and foolishness, all kinds of beauty and ugliness come into our house from every corner in the world. Sometimes we seek it out, sometimes it just throws itself in your face, but we have available to us logosmoi in the billions. Little evil thoughts, little self deceptions.
But the blind man was not looking at Jesus with the eyes of body, because they were blinded. He’s different from the man born blind because he had seen once. He had been born with vision and had lost, and so he knew what it was to see. But he cried out, seeing in his heart that this man coming to him was the messiah, he proclaimed him as the children did on palm Sunday when nobody else was willing to conjure up the gumption to identify our Lord as what he really was – the savior. “Son of God, have pity on me,” he cries out, and Jesus comes to him and He heals him.
You know today we celebrate two saints: Athanasius, who was a deacon at the council of Nicaea but became patriarch of Alexandria, and Cyril who later followed him as patriarch of Alexandria. And we have in these two men, these men who looked at the world through the eye of their soul, two heroes who stood up against everything that just made sense because it wasn’t true. Athanasius was dealing with Arius. Arius was a brilliant orator. He was also a pretty good song writer – would have probably had three songs in the top ten today – that’s why the church stopped letting people make up hymns like the Protestants have in their hymnals because heresy has a funny way of sneaking its way in between the truth. Arius said, “Look. Everybody knows that there had to have originally been a monad – that is, on little ball of stuff, God stuff. And that then that monad emanated the Son and the Holy Spirit, that’s why we call it Father. And so, there has to have been a time when Jesus didn’t even exist. He came into existence at the first instance of time, He wasn’t eternal. There is no trinity, because,” he said, “all these Greeks, all these people who were trained in Platonism, the whole world knows that everything started out with a little ball of oneness and the emanations came from it. Let’s not be foolish. Even if we want to believe that Jesus is eternal,” he said, “doesn’t it make more sense to get people into the Church by catering to their delusions.” So his only doctrine was an antidoctrine – there was a time, he said, when God the Son did no exist. And Arius spread this heresy, and all the Platonists who couldn’t accept the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the undivided, consubstantial, eternal trinity, said, “Oh! We’ll go to church now. We’ll be baptized. This is a lot like what we believe. Thank you for changing your teaching so that we could accept it.” And Athanasius said, “No! This is heresy. It’s not true. God the Holy Trinity created the world, but there was not a time when the Trinity did not exist. The world is not the product of some mad monad who needed people to obey and worship him. The world is the product of a loving community of persons whose love overflowed so much that they made others to share that love with.”
And then, having defeated Arius, the Arians came back with what was called semi-Arianism: “Well, lets say just that it’s possible there was a time when God the Son did not exist.”
And lots of people in the Church said, “Athanasius, you’re causing lots of trouble. Our pews are full. Our offering plates are running over. Why don’t you just shut up? If people want to believe that there was a time when the Son of God did not exist, let them believe that. We can believe what we want to. NO! It’s not true. We’re not going to say that the Son is homoousios – that is of one substance with the Father, we’re going to say that He is homoiousios – the same or similar substance with the Father, and that’ll make these people happy.”
And Athanasius said, “I refuse. I refuse to compromise with heresy. I refuse to look through the eye of my logosmoi. I want to look through the eyes of my heart at my God, who is the eternal Trinity.” So he was thrown out of communion. The church did that to him! The bishops were more interested in the money; they were more interested in the people in the pews or standing up in church in those days. They were so interested in power and importance that they buried the truth. So, he spent most of life in exile until finally, in his old age, he was called back, vindicated by the monks who lived in the dessert – not very well educated, but not distracted – the monks who knew that there was never a time when God the Son did not exist, that God the Son was of one essence with the Father. And so he was restored, and vindicated.
And then along came a patriarch of Constantinople. This guy was a, well, we’ll say he was a woman hater. And the empress, who was the ruler of the empire at that time, came to him and said, “Patriarch Nestorius, on the day of my coronation, I intend to enter the Holy Altar and receive communion at the Holy Table.” Do you know women can do that? When we had deaconesses – who were not woman deacons, they were women who ministered to women – the deaconesses received communion at the Holy Table. They didn’t serve in church, but they came into the altar for communion. When an empress is crowned, she receives communion at the altar. Why? Because she’s sharing in the ruling on the earth of the priesthood of Christ.
And he said to her, “You can’t do that.”
“Well, why not?”
“Well you’re a filthy woman.”
And she said, “What?!? I am a virgin.”
And he said, “You’re still a filthy woman.”
She said, “Was the Theotokos a filthy woman?”
And he said, “She’s not Theotokos; she’s not ‘God-bearer.’ She’s just Christotokos- Christ-bearer.”
See, he looked through the eyes of his prejudices and he distorted and twisted the faith to fit his bad attitude. So, he tried to teach that Our Lady only carried the human nature of Christ. Now, what does that mean? It means that Jesus couldn’t be truly and completely God and truly and completely man, right? If she only carried his human nature, where was his divine nature? Hovering above her? Hiding out in her skirts? I don’t know. But it was a stupid, and asinine idea. But because he saw with the eyes of his body, because of that, he created a whole heresy. And it was Cyril, the successor of Athanasius, who stood up and said, “Enough with the blasphemy.” They summoned a council, the Council of Ephesus. And they declared that our Holy Lady, the Mother of God, is Theotokos God-bearer. That she not only gave birth to Him that was God, but she carried in her womb ___ who is God, that she became the temple, the arc of the covenant, the habitation of the divine on earth. And so, what we need to do, brothers and sisters, as we face the questions that come to us – spiritual questions: How often should I pray? How much money should I give? Should I be kind to this beggar? Should read my morning and evening prayers – and practical questions like: How should I act toward others? What should I think of myself? How am I going to deal with my sickness? How am I going to deal with my children? We need to look at these things from the eyes of the heart, and not listen to the logosmoi, the little words the devil whispers to us: “you don’t need church. You can pray anywhere. That’s not really the body of Christ, we just say it is. Those icons are just holy pictures, they’re not windows into heaven.” The happens to us then when we do what’s wrong to the eyes of our heart is that the logosmoi, when they die, when these dead ideas fall out of our head when we’ve entertained them for a while, the form like bat manure in a cave, a collection of garbage inside of us, and they cover up the eye of our soul. So then let us come to Jesus and fall down before Him say, “The eye of our heart is blind Lord, at least it’s distorted, warped by the bat guano surrounding it. Son of David, Messiah, have mercy on us,” and hear Him say, “Thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace.”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ.
Glory forever
What I’m going to talk about today is the Gospel and the real significance of this particular gospel at this time. We’re now back to the beginning of the cycle of Pascha. The three Sundays before we begin are the Lenten Triodion, the Pre-Lenten Sundays start, are dedicated to the blind man, the Syro-Phonecian woman, and then to Zaccheus – the little man who climbed up into the sycamore tree to see Jesus. The thing that unites the blind man and the Syro-Phonecian woman is the knowledge they had through faith that the people surrounding them did not have because they were living in their minds, in their brains, not in their hearts. One was a Jew, one was a Gentile, but both of them recognized Jesus as divine, and as the Savior. Both of them came to Him and both of them were rebuked. When the blind man heard that Jesus was coming, he cried out, “Son of David, have mercy on me” – that is, “Messiah, have mercy on me” – and the crowd told him, “Shut up. Be quiet. This is an important Rabbi, but don’t make a fool of yourself.” And when the Syro-Phonecian woman came up and threw herself at Jesus feet and said, “Lord, have mercy on me,” the disciples wanted to push her away. She was a gentile dog. But both of them insisted, both of them persisted, and both of them received what they wanted. When we gave up Pascha, when we had the last Sunday of Pascha, we celebrated it with the Feast of the Man Born Blind. You remember that every year. The man whose eyes Jesus created out of clay and told him to go wash in the pool of Salom. And then we begin the cycle that brings us to the Triodion, the Pre-Lenten times, we begin with the blind man again. This blind man, this man who cried out, “Son of David, have mercy on me,” was actually the only one there who had sight.
You see that now many of our teachers are reminding us, as Father Alithios Webber pointed out, we’re deceived into believing that we are our brains, that our brains are us. But our brains are simply a database, and that database is corrupt. It’s full of all kinds of garbage, it’s been attacked by all kinds of viruses, all kinds of program deviations. And so it makes us think things, and about things, that we have no business thinking about. I was thinking today, “Is anybody going to notice that the hem on this vestment is too long? I wonder how coffee hour will go. Are the kids going to do a good job for St. Sava’s day?” All these little thoughts intruded on my prayer life, and probably two dozen more, some of which, if I told you, you would be ashamed of me, so I won’t. but these are called by the Fathers “logosmoi.” They are little words uttered in our ear by the demon, by the deceiver, to make us think we are thinking. They are little words that distract us and occupy our minds. Words about self-importance, or about self-deprecation; words that exalt us in our own hearts, or depress us and drive us down, so that we feel we are “lower than a toad’s belly.” These logosmoi are just the distractions that flow into our ears. They make us think things are important that are not. They make us fear. They make us occupy ourselves with thoughts of acquiring entertainment or stimulations that when we acquire them we wonder why we did and we don’t really want them anyway. They make us want things we don’t want. And they’re assisted now, because we are bombarded by the availability of all sorts of information. Why do you suppose God confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel? It is because, he said, “if people could all communicate about every idea that they have, they’ll be able to devise all manner of evil. It will be harmful for themselves. I have to divide them up, spread them out.” But now with the computer, all kinds of knowledge and ignorance, all kinds of wisdom and foolishness, all kinds of beauty and ugliness come into our house from every corner in the world. Sometimes we seek it out, sometimes it just throws itself in your face, but we have available to us logosmoi in the billions. Little evil thoughts, little self deceptions.
But the blind man was not looking at Jesus with the eyes of body, because they were blinded. He’s different from the man born blind because he had seen once. He had been born with vision and had lost, and so he knew what it was to see. But he cried out, seeing in his heart that this man coming to him was the messiah, he proclaimed him as the children did on palm Sunday when nobody else was willing to conjure up the gumption to identify our Lord as what he really was – the savior. “Son of God, have pity on me,” he cries out, and Jesus comes to him and He heals him.
You know today we celebrate two saints: Athanasius, who was a deacon at the council of Nicaea but became patriarch of Alexandria, and Cyril who later followed him as patriarch of Alexandria. And we have in these two men, these men who looked at the world through the eye of their soul, two heroes who stood up against everything that just made sense because it wasn’t true. Athanasius was dealing with Arius. Arius was a brilliant orator. He was also a pretty good song writer – would have probably had three songs in the top ten today – that’s why the church stopped letting people make up hymns like the Protestants have in their hymnals because heresy has a funny way of sneaking its way in between the truth. Arius said, “Look. Everybody knows that there had to have originally been a monad – that is, on little ball of stuff, God stuff. And that then that monad emanated the Son and the Holy Spirit, that’s why we call it Father. And so, there has to have been a time when Jesus didn’t even exist. He came into existence at the first instance of time, He wasn’t eternal. There is no trinity, because,” he said, “all these Greeks, all these people who were trained in Platonism, the whole world knows that everything started out with a little ball of oneness and the emanations came from it. Let’s not be foolish. Even if we want to believe that Jesus is eternal,” he said, “doesn’t it make more sense to get people into the Church by catering to their delusions.” So his only doctrine was an antidoctrine – there was a time, he said, when God the Son did no exist. And Arius spread this heresy, and all the Platonists who couldn’t accept the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the undivided, consubstantial, eternal trinity, said, “Oh! We’ll go to church now. We’ll be baptized. This is a lot like what we believe. Thank you for changing your teaching so that we could accept it.” And Athanasius said, “No! This is heresy. It’s not true. God the Holy Trinity created the world, but there was not a time when the Trinity did not exist. The world is not the product of some mad monad who needed people to obey and worship him. The world is the product of a loving community of persons whose love overflowed so much that they made others to share that love with.”
And then, having defeated Arius, the Arians came back with what was called semi-Arianism: “Well, lets say just that it’s possible there was a time when God the Son did not exist.”
And lots of people in the Church said, “Athanasius, you’re causing lots of trouble. Our pews are full. Our offering plates are running over. Why don’t you just shut up? If people want to believe that there was a time when the Son of God did not exist, let them believe that. We can believe what we want to. NO! It’s not true. We’re not going to say that the Son is homoousios – that is of one substance with the Father, we’re going to say that He is homoiousios – the same or similar substance with the Father, and that’ll make these people happy.”
And Athanasius said, “I refuse. I refuse to compromise with heresy. I refuse to look through the eye of my logosmoi. I want to look through the eyes of my heart at my God, who is the eternal Trinity.” So he was thrown out of communion. The church did that to him! The bishops were more interested in the money; they were more interested in the people in the pews or standing up in church in those days. They were so interested in power and importance that they buried the truth. So, he spent most of life in exile until finally, in his old age, he was called back, vindicated by the monks who lived in the dessert – not very well educated, but not distracted – the monks who knew that there was never a time when God the Son did not exist, that God the Son was of one essence with the Father. And so he was restored, and vindicated.
And then along came a patriarch of Constantinople. This guy was a, well, we’ll say he was a woman hater. And the empress, who was the ruler of the empire at that time, came to him and said, “Patriarch Nestorius, on the day of my coronation, I intend to enter the Holy Altar and receive communion at the Holy Table.” Do you know women can do that? When we had deaconesses – who were not woman deacons, they were women who ministered to women – the deaconesses received communion at the Holy Table. They didn’t serve in church, but they came into the altar for communion. When an empress is crowned, she receives communion at the altar. Why? Because she’s sharing in the ruling on the earth of the priesthood of Christ.
And he said to her, “You can’t do that.”
“Well, why not?”
“Well you’re a filthy woman.”
And she said, “What?!? I am a virgin.”
And he said, “You’re still a filthy woman.”
She said, “Was the Theotokos a filthy woman?”
And he said, “She’s not Theotokos; she’s not ‘God-bearer.’ She’s just Christotokos- Christ-bearer.”
See, he looked through the eyes of his prejudices and he distorted and twisted the faith to fit his bad attitude. So, he tried to teach that Our Lady only carried the human nature of Christ. Now, what does that mean? It means that Jesus couldn’t be truly and completely God and truly and completely man, right? If she only carried his human nature, where was his divine nature? Hovering above her? Hiding out in her skirts? I don’t know. But it was a stupid, and asinine idea. But because he saw with the eyes of his body, because of that, he created a whole heresy. And it was Cyril, the successor of Athanasius, who stood up and said, “Enough with the blasphemy.” They summoned a council, the Council of Ephesus. And they declared that our Holy Lady, the Mother of God, is Theotokos God-bearer. That she not only gave birth to Him that was God, but she carried in her womb ___ who is God, that she became the temple, the arc of the covenant, the habitation of the divine on earth. And so, what we need to do, brothers and sisters, as we face the questions that come to us – spiritual questions: How often should I pray? How much money should I give? Should I be kind to this beggar? Should read my morning and evening prayers – and practical questions like: How should I act toward others? What should I think of myself? How am I going to deal with my sickness? How am I going to deal with my children? We need to look at these things from the eyes of the heart, and not listen to the logosmoi, the little words the devil whispers to us: “you don’t need church. You can pray anywhere. That’s not really the body of Christ, we just say it is. Those icons are just holy pictures, they’re not windows into heaven.” The happens to us then when we do what’s wrong to the eyes of our heart is that the logosmoi, when they die, when these dead ideas fall out of our head when we’ve entertained them for a while, the form like bat manure in a cave, a collection of garbage inside of us, and they cover up the eye of our soul. So then let us come to Jesus and fall down before Him say, “The eye of our heart is blind Lord, at least it’s distorted, warped by the bat guano surrounding it. Son of David, Messiah, have mercy on us,” and hear Him say, “Thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace.”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ.
Glory forever
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
January 11, 2009
We’re told by holy Apostle Paul, that having descended into the earth – that is into the depths of Hell itself – that our Lord Jesus Christ ascending on high bore in captivity slavery itself captive, and that he gave gifts unto men. The gifts that he gave are the gifts of the holy spirit. They are the presence of God in our lives and they are given to us for two reasons: They’re given to us as signs of God’s presence with us individually, and they’re given to us for the building up of the body of Christ. Now, there are profound misunderstandings about the nature of the Christian vocation, of the Church, and of salvation. People understood from almost the beginning that the church is a community, that salvation comes in communities and that everything that is given to us by God is communal. That doesn’t mean that we are communists. But in the early church, when in Jerusalem there were five thousand Greek speaking Jews converted at Pentecost who then decided to stay, and then sent letters home asking for their house and their property to be sold so that they could maintain themselves, the Christians in Jerusalem sold what they had and then gave it to those people. That’s why we have the deacons now: because the apostles one day realized that the Greek-speaking widows, the Greek-speaking virgins – young women – were not getting their proper share of food and of care from the church. So they appointed these men, these economists of the household, caretakers of the house, or in plain roman parlance, these butlers, these household servants. They were responsible for making sure that everyone was cared for rightly. In our time and in our age, the church is just the same. There are enormous churches – there are churches with five hundred or a thousand people – these are all in the United States. In Europe, there may be a thousand, or two thousand, or five thousand people at a service in church, but the parishes are not that enormous. The church there is a place you go to, and you may go to this church this week, and that church the next week. But here our communities are modular – it has good points. It allows us to be more like the early Christians in that we know the people who are our brothers and sisters in Christ. It allows us to set up an operating mechanism the permits us to run the church in a way that is appropriate to God’s desire for economy. On the other hand, it allows us to know each other to well, to offend each other, to make one another angry, and to become political. None of these are good.
It says that God gave this diversity of gifts to us; it means that you, and I, have received from the Holy Spirit at least one charismatic gift, at least one special blessing from God given to build up the body of Christ, to make the church stronger, healthier, more effective in the teaching and preaching and the charitable work of Christ. And since St. Paul says to pray for the higher gifts, it means that we who have received some gifts are capable of receiving more. And although the gifts are diverse, yet they are not qualitatively different. Therefore the priest in his location in the altar is not a better person than lady wipes down the tables and scrapes the floor in the hall, or even the one who cleans out the toilets, or those who cook in the kitchen, or those who vacuum. The diversity of gifts are given for the health of the whole, entire body, and as St. Paul says those members of the body which are not the most attractive, those not given the most attention, we clothe our ugly parts.
And so it is that ascending into heaven, Christ has poured out on us the Holy Spirit, which in Jordan the father poured down on Him. We have become recipients of that grace, but we can’t talk about it as my gift of the Holy Spirit, or my salvation, or my personal savior because Jesus establishes his relationship with the church, his body. It’s not that you and I each have our own little salvation that we can go out to Aurora and take with us. It is that salvation is through Christ in His body, the Church.
Today we’re going to install Parish Council members and officers, and there are different attitudes toward this. At one time, with the assistance of Bolshevik mentality, parish councils got the idea that somehow or the other they were supposed to be the opponent of the priest; that the priests were going to get uppity; that the priests were called servants of the cult – they were paid a salary, they were supposed to do a job. But the parish council ran the church and they were sure as heck going to tell you who was boss. In other places priests resented the councils and they argued with the people and they said, “I’m the priest here. I have all the power. Who do you think you are anyway?” And both of these are directly from the devil, both of these are directly from Satan. We’ve had splits in the Syrian, and the Russian and, the Ukranian church that, thank God are in the process or have already been healed, that primarily sprung from the question of “Who’s boss?” But I’ll tell you what. Jesus Christ is boss and none of us are put here to boss each other around; we’re put here to work together for the building up of the Body.
Whenever I let somebody goad me into pushing somebody around I always end up sorry, and somebody ends up angry. I remember, about 10 years ago, one of our parishoners said to me, “Father you’re a bad priest because you let people cross their legs in church and my grandmother always said that was a great blasphemy.” So I was out here talking one day and I saw one of the older young people with his legs crossed, and I said, “Uncross your legs.” I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t my job to do that then. I did it because that other person had gotten me riled up. And you know, it took people a long time to forget that – that I had singled out that person and criticized them. Parents should never correct their children in public. I tell people that if your kids are being bad, take them out, put them in a corner, have them face the wall and say, “Are you bored yet?”
When the people take their vow today they’re going to pray and they’re going to promise to promote the peace, unity, and tranquility of the church. And when you say that it sounds like you’re saying the same thing over and over again. Let me remind people who are going to take the oath today that this is a promise and that when they don’t keep that promise that they’re lying to God. Now, not if they’re not able to keep it. It’s kind of like if I decide I’m going to give 10% of what I have and it’s going to be this much, and then I lose my job. I can’t do that. It’s the intention that matters to God. But if I go in there lightly and I make big promises to God and I don’t intend to make the effort to fulfill them I am lying to him. I am foreswearing myself. The peace of the Church is not, as I have told you many times, simply that people aren’t fighting. The word peace in our vocabulary means the full integrity of everything. It means that the Kingdom of God which is here, which Jesus preached in the Gospel this morning, is at hand, and which is coming in its fullness should be present in the church. It means that everything is here needed to make this church work. It means that everything is here necessary to do the job that we have to do as this part of the body of Christ. And that we have to make sure that all that is here, that peace, that completeness, that fullness is used, is called upon, that all the gifts of all the people… Now sometimes people come to me and say, “There are so many people that don’t do anything.” Well, to me that’s like having people criticize my kids. My kids didn’t always do everything they were supposed to do either. It’s kind of like, “What am I supposed to do about it?” What they’re really saying is, “I want you to notice me, I’m doing a whole lot. You know, there’s other people not doing as much as I am.” That’s too bad. Find a way to get them to do it. It’s good for you – you’re getting to do great things for God, you’re getting to do extra things for God. That’s a special blessing, that’s a joy. If you resent doing anything you do for God or his body, don’t do it, because you’re not getting any blessing out of it and no good will ever come out of it, okay? Anything you do with resentment, with anger, withholding in your heart your full willingness to do it, anything you’re doing like that no good will come from it, it will be a waste of time, and it will be a burden on your soul. When people first join the church, they say, “What do you want me to do?” I say, “Stand and pray, then something will come along. Either God will tell you to do something or somebody will ask you and you’ll know it’s the right thing, and you’ll do it.” One thing I especially appreciate about Xenia: I give her a lot of odious tasks - I ask her to clean this, or to vacuum that, or to remove was from that – and you know she says, when she’s done, “Thank you, Father, for letting me help you with that.” As long as she keeps that attitude, as along as it’s sincere, she’ll receive two blessings for everything she does. So the peace is the completeness of the church.
It’s unity has to do with us not breaking up into parties and fighting about issues. Every institution that gets over 100 people – whether it’s a tribe, a clan, a church, or a club – every community that gets over a hundred has the temptation to form parties and fight with each other. And that is a blasphemous sin. It’s like tearing the arm of the body of Christ, or cutting the body down the middle. What we should do for those with whom we disagree is to pray more fervently, to set an example. I had a young priest who was beating the people up, and the bishop said, “If you want a transfer, I can get you one in about a year.” So he got up and he said, “The bishop is POed with you, he’s mad at you, and he’s going to move me somewhere else, and you’re not going to have a priest” – he told them that – “because you don’t come to confession enough, you come to communion when you shouldn’t, you don’t fast right, you don’t attend weekday services, you don’t come to my classes.” You know, I used to plan classes, and I’d plan them out myself and there would be three people, and the next week there would be three people but two of them would be different. So I decided, if you’re going to plan classes, make every lesson independent and don’t worry about who comes – the people who need it will be there. Anyway, he told them this stuff, and the bishop wrote back and said, “Father, your job is not to change your people. Your job is to change yourself so they will want to be like you are.” That’s a lifelong task. I haven’t even begun to start to accomplish it. But the unity of Christ comes from our all following one good shepherd who is Jesus, and the priest is the visible image of the one good shepherd on earth.
Peace, unity, purity: that means that the faith can’t be diluted. We can’t water it down. We can’t say on respect for life Sunday, “We’re not going to talk about abortion because it’s a controversial issue.” It’s not a controversial issue for the Orthodox church: it is destruction of human life.
And tranquility: You know, peace and harmony are one thing; tranquility is another. You can have things not in a riot, people working together, but people agitated, upset, nervous. So the church has to be a place of tranquility, and that means that you guys – guys? – you have to not rile the big people when they’re praying. Be quiet, pray. What you don’t know people is, some of these kids are prayer warriors – they’re in church five or six times a week some weeks, and they can pray five or ten minutes and the rest of the time they’re zoned out because God lets you enter into the kingdom and forget where you are. Some of them pray everyday, they’re at liturgy, they’re at vespers. I won’t tell you which ones, but it’s not just my own grandchildren. But it’s your guys’ job not to upset the big people – don’t run, don’t jump, don’t dance in church, and especially don’t tip candle stands over on your heads because even though it’s red, we’ll have to cut it up and burn it. God has given you, by your chrismation, the gift of the Holy Spirit and he’s continuing to send you new gifts. But what you need to do is keep opening up the gifts that God gives you, ask what can I do that I couldn’t do before, and then open it up, look at it, enjoy the precious stone that he gives you, and then ask, “how can I use this for the building up of the body of Christ, for the edification of the saints, my brothers and sisters?”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!
It says that God gave this diversity of gifts to us; it means that you, and I, have received from the Holy Spirit at least one charismatic gift, at least one special blessing from God given to build up the body of Christ, to make the church stronger, healthier, more effective in the teaching and preaching and the charitable work of Christ. And since St. Paul says to pray for the higher gifts, it means that we who have received some gifts are capable of receiving more. And although the gifts are diverse, yet they are not qualitatively different. Therefore the priest in his location in the altar is not a better person than lady wipes down the tables and scrapes the floor in the hall, or even the one who cleans out the toilets, or those who cook in the kitchen, or those who vacuum. The diversity of gifts are given for the health of the whole, entire body, and as St. Paul says those members of the body which are not the most attractive, those not given the most attention, we clothe our ugly parts.
And so it is that ascending into heaven, Christ has poured out on us the Holy Spirit, which in Jordan the father poured down on Him. We have become recipients of that grace, but we can’t talk about it as my gift of the Holy Spirit, or my salvation, or my personal savior because Jesus establishes his relationship with the church, his body. It’s not that you and I each have our own little salvation that we can go out to Aurora and take with us. It is that salvation is through Christ in His body, the Church.
Today we’re going to install Parish Council members and officers, and there are different attitudes toward this. At one time, with the assistance of Bolshevik mentality, parish councils got the idea that somehow or the other they were supposed to be the opponent of the priest; that the priests were going to get uppity; that the priests were called servants of the cult – they were paid a salary, they were supposed to do a job. But the parish council ran the church and they were sure as heck going to tell you who was boss. In other places priests resented the councils and they argued with the people and they said, “I’m the priest here. I have all the power. Who do you think you are anyway?” And both of these are directly from the devil, both of these are directly from Satan. We’ve had splits in the Syrian, and the Russian and, the Ukranian church that, thank God are in the process or have already been healed, that primarily sprung from the question of “Who’s boss?” But I’ll tell you what. Jesus Christ is boss and none of us are put here to boss each other around; we’re put here to work together for the building up of the Body.
Whenever I let somebody goad me into pushing somebody around I always end up sorry, and somebody ends up angry. I remember, about 10 years ago, one of our parishoners said to me, “Father you’re a bad priest because you let people cross their legs in church and my grandmother always said that was a great blasphemy.” So I was out here talking one day and I saw one of the older young people with his legs crossed, and I said, “Uncross your legs.” I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t my job to do that then. I did it because that other person had gotten me riled up. And you know, it took people a long time to forget that – that I had singled out that person and criticized them. Parents should never correct their children in public. I tell people that if your kids are being bad, take them out, put them in a corner, have them face the wall and say, “Are you bored yet?”
When the people take their vow today they’re going to pray and they’re going to promise to promote the peace, unity, and tranquility of the church. And when you say that it sounds like you’re saying the same thing over and over again. Let me remind people who are going to take the oath today that this is a promise and that when they don’t keep that promise that they’re lying to God. Now, not if they’re not able to keep it. It’s kind of like if I decide I’m going to give 10% of what I have and it’s going to be this much, and then I lose my job. I can’t do that. It’s the intention that matters to God. But if I go in there lightly and I make big promises to God and I don’t intend to make the effort to fulfill them I am lying to him. I am foreswearing myself. The peace of the Church is not, as I have told you many times, simply that people aren’t fighting. The word peace in our vocabulary means the full integrity of everything. It means that the Kingdom of God which is here, which Jesus preached in the Gospel this morning, is at hand, and which is coming in its fullness should be present in the church. It means that everything is here needed to make this church work. It means that everything is here necessary to do the job that we have to do as this part of the body of Christ. And that we have to make sure that all that is here, that peace, that completeness, that fullness is used, is called upon, that all the gifts of all the people… Now sometimes people come to me and say, “There are so many people that don’t do anything.” Well, to me that’s like having people criticize my kids. My kids didn’t always do everything they were supposed to do either. It’s kind of like, “What am I supposed to do about it?” What they’re really saying is, “I want you to notice me, I’m doing a whole lot. You know, there’s other people not doing as much as I am.” That’s too bad. Find a way to get them to do it. It’s good for you – you’re getting to do great things for God, you’re getting to do extra things for God. That’s a special blessing, that’s a joy. If you resent doing anything you do for God or his body, don’t do it, because you’re not getting any blessing out of it and no good will ever come out of it, okay? Anything you do with resentment, with anger, withholding in your heart your full willingness to do it, anything you’re doing like that no good will come from it, it will be a waste of time, and it will be a burden on your soul. When people first join the church, they say, “What do you want me to do?” I say, “Stand and pray, then something will come along. Either God will tell you to do something or somebody will ask you and you’ll know it’s the right thing, and you’ll do it.” One thing I especially appreciate about Xenia: I give her a lot of odious tasks - I ask her to clean this, or to vacuum that, or to remove was from that – and you know she says, when she’s done, “Thank you, Father, for letting me help you with that.” As long as she keeps that attitude, as along as it’s sincere, she’ll receive two blessings for everything she does. So the peace is the completeness of the church.
It’s unity has to do with us not breaking up into parties and fighting about issues. Every institution that gets over 100 people – whether it’s a tribe, a clan, a church, or a club – every community that gets over a hundred has the temptation to form parties and fight with each other. And that is a blasphemous sin. It’s like tearing the arm of the body of Christ, or cutting the body down the middle. What we should do for those with whom we disagree is to pray more fervently, to set an example. I had a young priest who was beating the people up, and the bishop said, “If you want a transfer, I can get you one in about a year.” So he got up and he said, “The bishop is POed with you, he’s mad at you, and he’s going to move me somewhere else, and you’re not going to have a priest” – he told them that – “because you don’t come to confession enough, you come to communion when you shouldn’t, you don’t fast right, you don’t attend weekday services, you don’t come to my classes.” You know, I used to plan classes, and I’d plan them out myself and there would be three people, and the next week there would be three people but two of them would be different. So I decided, if you’re going to plan classes, make every lesson independent and don’t worry about who comes – the people who need it will be there. Anyway, he told them this stuff, and the bishop wrote back and said, “Father, your job is not to change your people. Your job is to change yourself so they will want to be like you are.” That’s a lifelong task. I haven’t even begun to start to accomplish it. But the unity of Christ comes from our all following one good shepherd who is Jesus, and the priest is the visible image of the one good shepherd on earth.
Peace, unity, purity: that means that the faith can’t be diluted. We can’t water it down. We can’t say on respect for life Sunday, “We’re not going to talk about abortion because it’s a controversial issue.” It’s not a controversial issue for the Orthodox church: it is destruction of human life.
And tranquility: You know, peace and harmony are one thing; tranquility is another. You can have things not in a riot, people working together, but people agitated, upset, nervous. So the church has to be a place of tranquility, and that means that you guys – guys? – you have to not rile the big people when they’re praying. Be quiet, pray. What you don’t know people is, some of these kids are prayer warriors – they’re in church five or six times a week some weeks, and they can pray five or ten minutes and the rest of the time they’re zoned out because God lets you enter into the kingdom and forget where you are. Some of them pray everyday, they’re at liturgy, they’re at vespers. I won’t tell you which ones, but it’s not just my own grandchildren. But it’s your guys’ job not to upset the big people – don’t run, don’t jump, don’t dance in church, and especially don’t tip candle stands over on your heads because even though it’s red, we’ll have to cut it up and burn it. God has given you, by your chrismation, the gift of the Holy Spirit and he’s continuing to send you new gifts. But what you need to do is keep opening up the gifts that God gives you, ask what can I do that I couldn’t do before, and then open it up, look at it, enjoy the precious stone that he gives you, and then ask, “how can I use this for the building up of the body of Christ, for the edification of the saints, my brothers and sisters?”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!
January 4th, 2009
…….Began to think about the beginning of the new creation, which is figured in the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ which we will celebrate tomorrow, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and actually through next Sunday. We come to an Epistle reading where the Holy Apostle describes to us the end of his work. St. Paul is writing to Timothy, who he calls his beloved son. He had baptized him. Timothy as well had been ordained by him as a deacon and priest of the church. He writes to Timothy telling him to do the work of an evangelist, that is to say to continue to spread the Gospel as Paul had spread the Gospel. And the St. Paul speaks to him intimately. This was a letter sent by St. Paul to one man, but the Church circulated the letter because it felt that the teaching was universal. When St. Paul says, “I am now ready to be offered up” the word his is using is “to be sacrificed.” St. Paul knew that his martyrdom was very near. He doesn’t say this with regret. He doesn’t say, “My time’s been cut short. I can’t continue my evangelical work because the Romans have me imprisoned and are going to kill me. It isn’t fair. Somebody should come up with some remedy.” He simply says, “I am about to be offered up. I am about to be sacrificed. And the time of my departing this life is at hand.” And then St. Paul describes what it is in which he has confidence. He says, “I have fought the good fight. I have completed the course. I have kept the faith.” It’s fascinating. Paul, who was raised in Tarsus, who was a Roman citizen, who was very familiar with Greco-Roman culture, but who was a Pharisee of Pharisees, this Paul was able to draw images from Hellenistic life and apply them to Christian life. He was also able to draw images from agriculture and from military science. He was a man who knew many things.
“I have fought the good fight” refers to one of the events in the pentathlon, which was wrestling. If one were a really good pentathlon participant he could win three events out of the five, and he could avoid what was called “the event that involved sand,” that is to say, graveling, wrestling. But if the score were two to two, then he would have to contend with his opponent in a wrestling match, in a fight. And you know that this wrestling match is figured in our Orthodox baptismal rite. Nowadays, when we baptize a child – at least in the Slavic tradition – we make crosses with the oil of gladness on the forehead and on the chest and back and on the hands and feet, and then we put them in the water. But Greek godparents will say, “I baptized that child.” And people will say, “Well, you’re not a priest.” What they mean is, they immersed the child in oil. We pray for the person who has been anointed and for those who have participated in the oil. Why? In the early church, that anointing before baptism was a complete anointing of the entire body before going into the water. The entire body. That’s one reason we had deaconesses – because if women were being baptized, the deaconess would anoint the women. And if there were no deaconesses, the women wore a modest white robe and they were anointed the way we do with children now. But the oil was put all over the body, and the analogy was that a wrestler, when he contends in the arena, greases himself so that his opponent cannot get a grip on him. And so now, in this contention with Satan, our bodies our oiled so that we can say, “I have fought the good fight.” We’re ready, through the water, to contend with the devil, to put him down, to win the prize.
And then he goes on to say, “I have finished the course.” You probably remember the first Olympic event was just one race. If a person that race, from all the cities in Greece, then he was given a laurel crown. Not a $10,000 prize or a shoe sales contract. But when we returned home he was literally the toast of the town. Some cities would knock a hole in their city wall to let him come through, saying, “With such heroes as this, we have no need of walls to protect us,” and for the rest of his life his fellow citizens provided him with everything he needed – with food, and clothing and shelter, and honor, and dignity - because he had brought the crown of glory to that city. Well St. Paul says, “I have fought the good fight, I have won the pentathlon. I have fought with Satan and been victorious. I have finished the race.” He doesn’t say, “I finished number one” because this is the mystery of the new kingdom, of the new dispensation, that it is not that you are the only one who wins the race but that you are one who completes the race that makes you worthy of the crown incorruptible, of the crown of righteousness. Now a lot of Christians, they come to church on Sunday and it makes them feel better, and then they’ve got this kind of latent expectation, “Well, if I come more often than my next door neighbor, if I give more money than those stingy people at work, that when I die, I’ll go to heaven.” But St. Paul doesn’t say, “I went to church once. I filled my offering envelope.” He says, “I have finished the race.” All of life, brothers and sisters, is the race. It is not that we have to run the fastest, or that we have to run the hardest. It is that we finish the race that counts. I remember watching that race in China where that young Romanian lady – who by the way is from Boulder, CO who won first place – she couldn’t talk to anyone on the sidelines, so she didn’t know if anyone was in front of her, or how close behind her anyone was, and so she ran like the devil was behind her. And I was so proud of her. She ran and ran, and I kept thinking, “She’s going to wear out. She’s running too fast.” But God had given her the ability to run hard, and she did. But what made me equally proud, was all those other ladies including the ones from China, who finished eighth or 20th or 33rd, but who also completed the course, who finished the race, who ran the marathon. They didn’t have to. They could have said, “Oh the race is over, I’m going to get a drink.” I told you, many years ago (maybe twice), about the cubana – the man from Havana who was the fastest man in town, who when they had the Olympics in St. Louis went to Miami and ran, all the way to St. Louis. And he entered the Olympics, and he was accepted as the representative if his country, the only one there from Cuba. And he started the race, and he took off, and he was leading the pack. But along the way, one of the runners injured his leg and fell to the side, and a guy coming along in a Model T Ford picked him up and said, “Do you want me to drive you to the arena?” And he said, “Yeah, I want to see how this finishes.” So he drove up to the arena, and the man got out of the car and feeling a little better, he decided to sprint into the arena. And the whole arena burst into applause, and the gentleman from Cuba, the man who was leading the pack, said, “I’ve lost the race.” And he sat down, and he quit, and then somebody came to him and said, “Look, the race isn’t over. Someone else has now won first place, but you can be second.” And he said, “If I can’t be first, I’m not going to run.” You see, this is the precise example of what we are NOT called by God to do. We’re not supposed to worry about what our place is in the pack, how important we are, how esteemed we are, even how fruitful they are. Priests are not supposed to judge themselves on whether they end up pastors of enormous churches, or whether they’re in small communities; and lay people are not supposed to judge themselves on whether they end up wealthy, and esteemed, and powerful. But we’re supposed to judge ourselves on whether we keep running the race. EVERYDAY. So St. Paul says, “There is laid up for me a crown of glory” – not a crown of leaves, a crown of glory – “which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, will give unto me at that day.” And then he says, “but not unto me only, but unto all who persevere in loving His appearing,” who continue day by day to love the Lord their God, with their heart and soul and mind, their neighbor as themselves, to be evangelists, servants of the kingdom. So, we honor Holy Apostle Paul, who has said of his sufferings in his life as an apostle, that he bears in his body the very same marks as those that afflicted the Lord Jesus – the stripes with which he was beaten with canes with whips, the bruises and tears from being stoned twice – and we should glory in our suffering and rejoice in our difficulties, for to those who persevere through difficulties is given even a greater crown. The only way of making your crown brighter is to face greater hardships, greater suffering, greater difficulties and not to relent. To persevere in spite of them.
“I have fought the good fight” refers to one of the events in the pentathlon, which was wrestling. If one were a really good pentathlon participant he could win three events out of the five, and he could avoid what was called “the event that involved sand,” that is to say, graveling, wrestling. But if the score were two to two, then he would have to contend with his opponent in a wrestling match, in a fight. And you know that this wrestling match is figured in our Orthodox baptismal rite. Nowadays, when we baptize a child – at least in the Slavic tradition – we make crosses with the oil of gladness on the forehead and on the chest and back and on the hands and feet, and then we put them in the water. But Greek godparents will say, “I baptized that child.” And people will say, “Well, you’re not a priest.” What they mean is, they immersed the child in oil. We pray for the person who has been anointed and for those who have participated in the oil. Why? In the early church, that anointing before baptism was a complete anointing of the entire body before going into the water. The entire body. That’s one reason we had deaconesses – because if women were being baptized, the deaconess would anoint the women. And if there were no deaconesses, the women wore a modest white robe and they were anointed the way we do with children now. But the oil was put all over the body, and the analogy was that a wrestler, when he contends in the arena, greases himself so that his opponent cannot get a grip on him. And so now, in this contention with Satan, our bodies our oiled so that we can say, “I have fought the good fight.” We’re ready, through the water, to contend with the devil, to put him down, to win the prize.
And then he goes on to say, “I have finished the course.” You probably remember the first Olympic event was just one race. If a person that race, from all the cities in Greece, then he was given a laurel crown. Not a $10,000 prize or a shoe sales contract. But when we returned home he was literally the toast of the town. Some cities would knock a hole in their city wall to let him come through, saying, “With such heroes as this, we have no need of walls to protect us,” and for the rest of his life his fellow citizens provided him with everything he needed – with food, and clothing and shelter, and honor, and dignity - because he had brought the crown of glory to that city. Well St. Paul says, “I have fought the good fight, I have won the pentathlon. I have fought with Satan and been victorious. I have finished the race.” He doesn’t say, “I finished number one” because this is the mystery of the new kingdom, of the new dispensation, that it is not that you are the only one who wins the race but that you are one who completes the race that makes you worthy of the crown incorruptible, of the crown of righteousness. Now a lot of Christians, they come to church on Sunday and it makes them feel better, and then they’ve got this kind of latent expectation, “Well, if I come more often than my next door neighbor, if I give more money than those stingy people at work, that when I die, I’ll go to heaven.” But St. Paul doesn’t say, “I went to church once. I filled my offering envelope.” He says, “I have finished the race.” All of life, brothers and sisters, is the race. It is not that we have to run the fastest, or that we have to run the hardest. It is that we finish the race that counts. I remember watching that race in China where that young Romanian lady – who by the way is from Boulder, CO who won first place – she couldn’t talk to anyone on the sidelines, so she didn’t know if anyone was in front of her, or how close behind her anyone was, and so she ran like the devil was behind her. And I was so proud of her. She ran and ran, and I kept thinking, “She’s going to wear out. She’s running too fast.” But God had given her the ability to run hard, and she did. But what made me equally proud, was all those other ladies including the ones from China, who finished eighth or 20th or 33rd, but who also completed the course, who finished the race, who ran the marathon. They didn’t have to. They could have said, “Oh the race is over, I’m going to get a drink.” I told you, many years ago (maybe twice), about the cubana – the man from Havana who was the fastest man in town, who when they had the Olympics in St. Louis went to Miami and ran, all the way to St. Louis. And he entered the Olympics, and he was accepted as the representative if his country, the only one there from Cuba. And he started the race, and he took off, and he was leading the pack. But along the way, one of the runners injured his leg and fell to the side, and a guy coming along in a Model T Ford picked him up and said, “Do you want me to drive you to the arena?” And he said, “Yeah, I want to see how this finishes.” So he drove up to the arena, and the man got out of the car and feeling a little better, he decided to sprint into the arena. And the whole arena burst into applause, and the gentleman from Cuba, the man who was leading the pack, said, “I’ve lost the race.” And he sat down, and he quit, and then somebody came to him and said, “Look, the race isn’t over. Someone else has now won first place, but you can be second.” And he said, “If I can’t be first, I’m not going to run.” You see, this is the precise example of what we are NOT called by God to do. We’re not supposed to worry about what our place is in the pack, how important we are, how esteemed we are, even how fruitful they are. Priests are not supposed to judge themselves on whether they end up pastors of enormous churches, or whether they’re in small communities; and lay people are not supposed to judge themselves on whether they end up wealthy, and esteemed, and powerful. But we’re supposed to judge ourselves on whether we keep running the race. EVERYDAY. So St. Paul says, “There is laid up for me a crown of glory” – not a crown of leaves, a crown of glory – “which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, will give unto me at that day.” And then he says, “but not unto me only, but unto all who persevere in loving His appearing,” who continue day by day to love the Lord their God, with their heart and soul and mind, their neighbor as themselves, to be evangelists, servants of the kingdom. So, we honor Holy Apostle Paul, who has said of his sufferings in his life as an apostle, that he bears in his body the very same marks as those that afflicted the Lord Jesus – the stripes with which he was beaten with canes with whips, the bruises and tears from being stoned twice – and we should glory in our suffering and rejoice in our difficulties, for to those who persevere through difficulties is given even a greater crown. The only way of making your crown brighter is to face greater hardships, greater suffering, greater difficulties and not to relent. To persevere in spite of them.
The Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ
From very early in the history of the Christian Church – from the time when the calendar of the church was just rudimentary, this day of the first of January, which, according to one of the Roman reckonings, was the new year and also corresponded with the Satur>>> or the time when Chaos reigned and people lived as though it were the end of the world and behaved in wild and reckless ways – not anything we know about today, right? The church decided that this day would be a day when the people would gather for a Synaxis. The Roman Catholic church later made a list of days of obligation, and there are not many of these days, these are days which according to their reckoning, you go to hell if you miss. And they put this day on there. Oddly enough, they seemed to lack cognizance of what the day meant, because it was called originally the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord and they got kind of embarrassed about that because it sounded sort of Jewish so then they called it The Holy Family, and then they called it The Holy Name, and then they called it the Solemnity of Somebody or the other. All they knew was that you should be in church on New Year’s day. But let’s talk about the significance of the circumcision for a moment. You understand that in the old testament God made several covenants with the human race. He made a covenant with Abraham, and then prior to that with Noah. And he made a covenant with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai; he also made a covenant with David the King: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.” And he also said, “I have sworn and shall not repent. Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedeck.” But each covenant had a distinctive characteristic that marked it as a special rite, for just as our people in Eastern Europe don’t talk about butchering or killing an animal for food because that shows such deep disrespect for the life of the animal – they talk about cutting the animal, or sacrificing the animal - so a covenant was always sealed by a cutting. In fact, the Hebrew word for the making of a covenant – barif – was to cut a covenant. There was usually the offering of the blood of a sacrificial animal. In some cases the in sacrifice, the animal became a holocaust – a whole burnt offering, its whole body was burnt. In most cases, the animal was cut, the blood was poured on the ground, parts were offered to God and the rest was shared between the priests and the family. But every covenant was sealed by blood. And when God spoke to Abraham, He spoke to him of the cutting of the covenant of circumcision in his flesh. And He said to Moses, “Everyone who is cut around in the flesh of the foreskin on the eighth day will be cut off from the people.” And so it was the marks of the circumcision, cut in the flesh of each male, that made him a Jew. It was not the clinical act of circumcision, it was not the medical procedure. It was the spiritual act – cutting into the flesh the marks that then reminded that person from that day on that he was in a solemn covenant with God. And in the cutting of the flesh, blood was shed. When we think about it, our Lord Jesus Christ came and was born, and on the eighth day his parents could have said, “This is God himself. This is the one to whom sacrifices are offered. We don’t believe it meet or correct to take him to be cut in his flesh, to have his blood shed.” Nevertheless, they did so. On the eighth day they took him and he was circumcised in his flesh. What did he do by being circumcised in the flesh? You see, we sometimes in modern culture, driven by liberal theologians, talk about an old covenant as though it’s still in effect, and a new covenant. But what Christ did was that when he underwent the rite of circumcision, and later when on the 40th day he allowed himself to be offered in the temple and redeemed by his parents, he took into himself the old covenant. Jesus became not only the author of the Old Testament, he became the Old Testament itself. So that when we were baptized into him, we were baptized into the Old Testament and the New alike. There remained one covenant – the new covenant. And this covenant is not without circumcision either. But it is not the circumcision of the flesh. It is the circumcision of the heart, for St. Paul tells us that with the finger of God our stony hearts have been cut around, circumcised, and made into fleshy hearts, into a nous capable of receiving the light and knowledge of God. And he says of himself, speaking of the marks of the circumcision that the Jews boasted in, “Let no man trouble me for I bear in my body, not the marks of circumcision, but the marks of the Lord Jesus, the marks of His Crucifixion. I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Brothers and sisters in Christ, today we honor God’s extreme humility. The same humility that led him to Golgotha. The humility that allowed him to be borne as a child into the temple, to have himself a victim of a sacrifice offered to God, and, in so doing, the one who closed the door on the old covenant and opened to us the Kingdom of God.
Through him who suffered circumcision of the flesh for our salvation, be glory and honor now and ever and unto ages of ages. Glory to Jesus Christ.
Glory forever.
Through him who suffered circumcision of the flesh for our salvation, be glory and honor now and ever and unto ages of ages. Glory to Jesus Christ.
Glory forever.
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