Forgiveness Sunday
Sermon to the children.
Children, we’re about to enter into the holy season of lent. This afternoon, we’ll have vespers, and at vespers, we’ll all ask each other for forgiveness, and we’ll all give each other forgiveness, and then we’ll begin the Great Fast. When we use the word fast, then it sounds like all we’re going to do for forty-six days is suffer. But it’s not like suffering. See, the word that’s used in most Orthodox languages, at least around the Slavs and the Romanians, is the word “post.” It comes from the word “postinia” which means “the desert.” We’re going into a desert. When Jesus was baptized, when the voice of the Father spoke from Heaven, the Spirit descended upon Him in the Jordan, and the voice cried out, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” then Jesus went out into the desert, and for forty days he prayed and fasted. The devil tried to test him there, didn’t he? He tested him with three things, and I’m going to talk to you first about those three things, then I’m going to talk to you about the prayer that we always say during Lent. It’s a prayer that many people here don’t know. Why? Because we never do it on Saturday or Sunday, and they’re only here on Sunday. Maybe sometimes on Saturday night.
But the devil tested Jesus first by saying, “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.” In other words he tempted Jesus to satisfy His own hunger. And Jesus said, “Man does not live on bread alone.” Okay? Also, later on by the way, after Jesus had fed the Jewish people with bread and fish by the seaside, he multiplied five loaves and two fish and he fed five-thousand, they came to him and they said, “We’ll make you king if you give us free bread.” And what did Jesus do? He said, “I am the true bread that came down from Heaven. My flesh is truly food, my blood is truly drink. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” Do you know what the Jews did? They got grossed out, and left right away. All that was left was the twelve. The whole five thousand said, “How could this man give us his flesh to eat?” We know how He does it, don’t we? He gives us bread and wine in which His living body is – not dead flesh, not Jesus-meat – but Jesus’ life. And so, He was tempted by the devil to turn stone into bread.
The second thing, according to Matthew, that He was tempted with, was He was tempted to jump off the top of the temple. What does the mean? It means the devil wanted Him to do some stupid stuporific act, some kind of show off thing, some kind of big miracle, and everybody would say, “Oh, He must be the Messiah. He jumped off the top of the temple and angels caught Him in their hands.” And Jesus said, “You shall not test the Lord your God.”
And the third test he gave Him was this: He took Jesus to a mountain and he showed Him all the kingdoms of the earth. And the devil didn’t lie to Him when he said, “These all belong to me.” Because the devil got the world. How did he get it? Who did God give it to in the beginning? Who did God give His world to? … The two people whose icon’s up there? … To Adam and to Eve. And what did Adam and Eve do? They sold the world to the devil. They sold it for an apple, and they were ashamed to go and tell God they were sorry, so they just said, “Okay, we’ll take care of ourselves now, God.” And when God found them, the man blame God; he said, “The woman you gave me made me eat!” The woman blamed the serpent, “The serpent who you made, by the way God – silly fool – made me eat.” So what happened is the man made war against the woman; the woman made war against nature; and they both made war against God. So the whole world became a mixed up stupid mess. Because of Adam and Eve’s sin. But the devil got possession of it. He said, “I will give you all these kingdoms. No cross, no nails, no whip, no crown of thorns, no humiliation. Everybody will worship you. You just be my messiah. You be the devil’s messiah.” Jesus said, “Thou shall worship the Lord thy God, and serve Him only.”
And so for forty days, and then for the six days of Holy Week, we go into post, into the desert. But we don’t go into the desert sad. Adam and Eve are saints, they are saints of the Church. Why? Because after they finally saw what they had done, after their robes of light had been turned into fleshly bodies, and they saw the ugliness of them; after they had seen that they’d lost paradise, and that the man had to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow and that the woman had pain in childbirth, and that they would return to the dust from which they were taken, they wept outside of Eden. They wept at the gate as the seraphim with the flaming sword that you can see on the icon was turning all ways to guard the door. And God said to them, he said, “The seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.” Now that’s a funny thing to say. The adults will understand when I say the word seed is semen, it means literally the sperm of the woman. We know that women don’t have seed. The seed comes from the father, doesn’t it? But He says, “The seed of the woman” because Mary was to give birth without a human father, right? “… will crush the head of the serpent,” and He also said that He would trample the gates of hell, and break down the bars of iron, and that the flaming sword would withdraw from paradise, and the people would return to Eden. So Adam and Eve went down to their graves hoping, rejoicing. That skull that you see down at the bottom of that cross over there – did you ever notice the skull? That skull represents Seth, who was Adam’s son, who took three seeds from the tree of life and put them on the tongue of his father when he buried him. And from those seeds grew the pine, and the cedar, and the Cyprus from which the cross of Jesus was made.
So, we’re going into the desert, but we want to be back in Eden, and so what are we doing right now? We’re eating like Adam and Eve in the garden. Now they didn’t have to eat bad stuff, they got to eat every plant that came up from the earth, they got to eat every fruit that grew on the trees, right? And those are the things we’re given for food during the post – good food, sweet food. In the old days when your grandparents were around, all they had around was some cabbage and potatoes, and some dried fruit because they couldn’t fly stuff in from all over the world. But you can have all kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables, healthy things, okay? We had a cardiologist here once named Darya, she was the choir director, and you know what she told me they found? If a person follows the Orthodox fast for forty days during lent, all of the plaque goes out of their veins.
So now I’m going to talk to you about a feast of fasting; being happy during lent. It’s a time to be quiet, not to think about food, not to always be nagging at your mother, not always thinking about candy and ice cream and what’s for dessert. It’s a time to think about God. About Adam and Eve who lived in the garden, and who were thrown out of the garden by their own selfishness.
And here’s the prayer that we say everyday during Lent except on Saturday and Sunday. It has three parts, like everything in Orthodoxy, it’s three. Why is everything three? Because of what? (Child answers, “because of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”). The Father, Son and Holy Spirit! Three persons! One undivided Trinity. The holy, consubstantial, life creating trinity, one essence and undivided. And so this prayer has three parts:
“On Lord and Master of life.” The word Lord is the word “kurios,” it’s the word that took the place in the Old Testament of the name of God. So “Oh God, Master of my life, take from me three things.”
“Sloth.” Now you can remember what sloth is because you know those animals that move really slowly in the trees? Sloth is laziness: not doing my work at school, not doing my homework, not doing my chores, lying around, being a couch potato. Sloth.
“Despair.” Despair is feeling down in the dumps. Now let me tell you, you can feel despair when you’re a kid. Father Joe was not a very good speller in school. I used to teach spelling – I could spell the words when I gave the kids a spelling test, but when I wrote them out, I’m the kind of guy who would spell “pharmacy” with an “F.” And every Wednesday I’d have a trial test and I’d miss the words, and I would go home and I’d be in despair. I’d say every Thursday night, “Oh God, maybe the world will end tomorrow and I won’t have to take that spelling test.” That’s what happens when we give up trying. But let me tell you: God doesn’t judge the outcome of your actions. He only judges what you’re trying to do and how hard you’re trying. And God wants you to have good intentions. Despair is giving up. There are demons that attack you at night. They say, “Tomorrow you’ve got a test you didn’t study for. Tomorrow that girl who’s mean to you is going to be at school. Tomorrow something bad is going to happen.” But then there’s the noonday demon. And that’s when in the middle of the day, for no reason at all, the devil whispers in your ear, “Life is just a bunch of trouble.” That’s because he knows that you now belong to God and he wants to make you not trust God.
Sloth, despair – there’s actually four parts –
“Lust of Power.” Lust of power means wanting to control other people. Now, at school, some of us want to be bossy. But there’s other ways of controlling people. For example, you know that your mother doesn’t have a lot of patience about some things. So she says, “Get ready. It’s time to go to soccer practice.” And you continue watching TV. “Come on get your soccer clothes on.” … “We’re gonna be late!” Now that’s power, isn’t it? You get to torture your mother; you get to get her upset. But it says in the bible, “He who troubles his own house will have the wind for his inheritance.” So what you want to do is to bring peace at home. If your sister gives you trouble, forgive her, love her, and be nice to her. If your brother picks on you, be good to him. Lust of power is want of control. We want who to be in control? Us or… who should be in control?... You’re right… Yes! God! So you want the power, but the power belongs to God.
And “Idle talk.” Now idle talk is not talk about idols. I remember once, my son right there, when he was little, he and I used to read the Psalms every night. And I read, “The idols of the pagans are vain things. Eyes they have that see not. Tongues they have that speak not. Ears they have that talk not, and no breath comes from their nostrils.” And I took him too a Chinese restaurant, and he stood up and said, “There are a lot of idols here!” And he preached a sermon to the Chinese. He said, “Idols have eyes, but they do not see! Idols have ears, but do not hear. Idols have mouths, but they don’t talk.” I don’t know what the Chinese thought, but I was very proud of him. But in this case, “idle talk” is not talk about idols. “Idle” in this case means stupid gossip. It’s just talking about people. Did you ever have a friend, and another friend, and you and the other friend talk about the friend and say bad things about her? … No!? But has it happened to you? Did they get together and say bad things about you? [An anecdotal joke here that was overwhelmed by baby chatter]. Anyway, idle words are things you say that have no meaning. They’re just chitter-chatter to be chittering and chattering.
So we want God to take away laziness, giving up hope, wanting to be in control, and speaking stupid words. And then we say, “But grant unto me the spirit of chastity” – that means purity, not thinking about dirty things – “humility.” The humility comes from the word humus. Does anyone know humus is? It’s a kind of soil. It says remember that we’re taken from the earth, right? Meekness, that’s humility is.
“… chastity, humility, patience.” That means waiting for things to happen when they’re supposed to and not trying to make them happen. Patience is waiting on God. Patience is not nagging your parents. Patience is not wanting to open your birthday presents on Wednesday when your birthday’s on Saturday. I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Lord, give me patience and give it to me right now.” Yeah! Patience.
“… chastity, humility, patience, and love.” Love is the most important part of that. Love is a divine attribute. Love is what God is. Love is wanting the best for everyone, even your enemies. You may not want your enemy to win the millionaire, neither do a lot of people. But you want him not to go to hell too, don’t you? So love means praying for your enemies.
“… chastity, humility, patience, and love give unto me.” Then we have the third paragraph: “Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions…” In other words, to know what’s wrong with you so you can learn to tell God your transgressions in confession. “… to see my own transgressions.” Do you talk to your priest at confession? Not really. There’s a Jesus icon right there so you can talk to Him, right? The priest just listens to help you out in case you think something’s wrong that’s not, or you think something’s right that’s not, or to ask you some questions.
“Help me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother” - or sister – “For blessed art thou unto ages of ages.” Now, I don’t know if they’ve got that prayer for you in Sunday school, but if they don’t, I’ve got it on my desk and they can copy it for you, and I’d like you when you’re not here at a weekday service, to say that prayer at least once a day. Alright? And hope you all have a great Lent, and at Pascha it will be wonderful, and grandpa will shoot rockets over the church and we’ll have roast lamb, and we’ll sing “Christ is risen,” and we will be very happy because we will have gone through the desert and we will have come to the Promised Land.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!
Monday, May 18, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
The Sunday of the Last Judgment
Sunday of the Last Judgment
It is unusual, at least it has been, in Orthodox tradition to emphasize the sufferings of hell and eternal damnation. This thought, this image provides the sum and substance of much evangelical preaching, where accepting Jesus as one’s savior is sold as fire insurance. We don’t mention it much. The reason is because the emphasis of the ancient faith was not on how you could crawl up out of the pit and escape from the fires of hell. It was how you could be united to God and be joined to his resurrection through grace and participation in the life of his body. Our liturgy is not simply an immolation of a victim as the Roman Mass had been for many, many, many years. It’s not so much anymore. It is rather, a celebration of the resurrection of Him who was the Paschal victim.
And yet today, the church directs us – on a Sunday, on a day of the Resurrection – to place our thoughts on the awful and dreadful possibility of eternal damnation, of everlasting death, of pain without remission, without amelioration, unending. And that is because the Church wants us on this day, this week before we enter into the Great Fast, to contemplate that our faith, our religion, is not a hobby, not a prejudice, not a particular choice we’ve made of several possible choices, but that our faith is real, actual, and has consequences.
We are not here today to rejoice in the thought that some might enter into eternal damnation, but to contemplate the worst pain we’ve ever experienced in our lives and then to multiply that pain to every organ, every limb, every inch of our bodies, and then to anticipate that pain growing worse and worse, but never ceasing, never remitting, without hope. Even for the person who is suffering unto mortal death, there is the hope that death will come and put the physical pain to an end. But the pain of everlasting damnation is physical as well, for it is in our resurrected bodies that we are threatened with the awful possibilities of eternal suffering.
And who are they who will be the recipients of this suffering? Will it be the Hindu, or Buddhist, who have never had Christ preached to them in a way that makes it possible for them to accept Him? One certainly doubts that. Of course we’re told that if you accept the Lord Jesus Christ, and believe that God raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved, right? But that doesn’t meant that everybody who says that “Jesus is Christ, and God raised Him from the dead” is saved. Certainly, the devil now knows who Jesus is. He believes that God raised Him from the dead, to his eternal consternation for he thought when he had captured Him in hell, that it could hold Him captive. He thought he could possess, he could digest God in the belly of hell, but God gave him a bellyache. To paraphrase what John Chrysostom says, Hell swallowed up a body, and it gave it a terrible case of indigestion. He broke the bonds of death.
And so it’s not just simply believing something, it’s believing in Jesus Christ and that means living according to Jesus Christ’s commandments, His law and His teachings. You know there are many people for whom Orthodoxy is not a faith at all, it’s simply their chosen superstition. They turn to their icons when life is rough. In the breach they observe the fasts, and they go to confession once a year because it’s expected of them. They drag out their Orthodox clothing – their wedding garment – and put it on on Sunday morning and go to church for awhile, and maybe they can even stay in church for half the liturgy. Then they go home and take it off and go back and live the way they’ve lived all the other days of the week. It’s simply a magical charm, simply a token to them. These people experience what it was that Marx spoke of when he said, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” He didn’t mean that religion is a drug that puts you in a hallucinatory state. He meant, Marx believed, religion is what killed the pain of the people so that they didn’t know that life was rough. And Marx is absolutely right. He’s right about that because if anyone really thought about the nonsense of human existence without God having planned it, without God intervening into it, without God easing our suffering, giving meaning to our meaninglessness, if they ever thought of themselves as what they would be without God as their creator and redeemer, that is to say, very intelligent animals who unlike the other animals are able to be aware of their present predicament and of their future sufferings, as condemned men and women sentenced to death by a slow and painful death or a quick and sudden death, but ultimately grinding their way to death.
T.S. Eliot said, ‘I was a communist in the 1920s and then one day I woke up and said, ‘Why would anyone believe in a doctrine that offers the promise that a thousand years from now, one’s ancestors would look back on him as some lemur in the line of his evolution?” that’s the only meaning that can be offered by life without God intervening into it. And so these people who allow themselves to be doped up, they’ll accept the opiate part of Christianity. They say, “Oh well, if I die” – not “when I die” by they – but “if I die, I believe I’ll go to heaven.” But if you ask them, “What about going to hell?” “Oh, you know, you don’t really believe that do you,” or, “That’s for really bad people. Hitler and Stalin and those guys.” But let me tell you that it’s the same Lord who told us about Heaven – about the many orders of angels, about the many mansions in His Father’s house, and who promised us that we could be with Him where He is at the right hand of the Father – who also described the lake of fire, the place of destruction where the worm does cease and the fire is not quenched.
Brothers and sisters, if there’s a sin that makes a person worthy of losing the grace God has given him, it’s handling lightly the gift of the blood of God. It’s taking Christ’s cross on our shoulder and then putting it in the closet for the rest of our lives because it really is not an attractive ornament and a pretty heavy burden for us. It is pretending to be a believer. It is making believe that we are Orthodox, holding in the back of our minds some silly thought like, “Well, maybe I will win the lottery and there really is a heaven.” That is the really dangerous position. It is not being an adulterer, a murderer, a fornicator, or a homosexual pervert that is the most terrible thing. It is the sin against the Spirit of God. It is calling good “evil,” and evil “good.” It is embracing Jesus, not with tears like Mary Madgalene, not wiping His feet with our hair, but it is approaching Jesus like Judas – giving Him a kiss and then saying, “Now go away. I’ll put you aside for a while God because I can’t really enjoy life with you in the middle of it. I can’t do the things I wanna do if I see your face looking at me while I do them.”
Remember the Grand Inquisitor, I believe in Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor in Spain. Christ comes and He appears, and He’s brought to the Grand Inquisitor. And he says, “I know you can’t say anything because you can’t add any words to what you’ve already said. So let me tell you, I know who you are, but you have to die again. You’re inconvenient. You get in our way. Remain a plastic Jesus on our dashboards, or an icon in the corner, but don’t get in the middle of our lives.”
What was it, today, that the Lord spoke to those people who are called the goats, who are placed on His left hand and who are told to depart to the place that was never prepared for human beings – it was prepared for the Devil and his angels? He didn’t say, “Depart from me because you hated, or because you stole, or because lied, or because you committed adultery, or you didn’t honor your father and mother , or didn’t keep the Sabbath holy.” He says, “Depart from me because you didn’t do the good things you were supposed to do. Because, when I was hungry, you didn’t care if I starved to death. When was thirsty, you didn’t care if I dehydrated and died by the road. When I was naked, you didn’t care if exposure caused me to experience frostbite or if I succumbed to the elements. When I was sick, or I was in prison, you ignored me.” And they said, “Lord, we wouldn’t have done that. How can you say such a thing? If we’d gotten a personal note from you, ‘Jesus S. Christ says, “I’m hungry, bring me some food,”’ we would have brought it to you. We certainly would have brought you water. We would have given you clothing. We would have visited you.” And the Lord says, “In as much as you did not think to do it to the least of my brethren, then you failed to do it to me.” It is in our complacency that is found the possibility, the awful possibility, of our damnation. It is in handling lightly the sacred things of God. We have been ordained, everyone of us as priests, anointed with Holy Chrism, made kings and high priests in Jesus’ kingship and high priesthood, and when we throw that aside like a bunch of old rags, we place our souls in danger.
And so, brothers and sisters, let’s understand that every human being who leaves this life – except for God’s mother – every human being, even the saints whom we commemorate, has to pass through the grave into Hades and behold the terrors of hell, and see the fire and the pre-damnation suffering of those disposed to hate God and who deny his love, before they enter into paradise. That’s why we pray on the third and ninth day, and on the fortieth day, because, although they are outside of time, in our temporal way of thinking of things, we know there are ordeals that they endure beholding the terrors of hell, beholding the delights of paradise, making choices, not of their own but by the grace of our prayers.
And so today, on this Sunday of the Last Judgment, I want you to be scared for just a minute, I want you to contemplate for a moment that your time has come. The Son of Man has come on the clouds of heaven, the trumpets sound, we’ve all been caught up and we’re standing before Him. The six psalms that are read at the beginning of Matins are being read by the archangel, and in the brief time, the twinkling of an eye, each of us is passing in front of Him, and you look into His eyes, and what you see there is corruption reflected in His eyes, and hypocrisy on your part – that you pretended to be a disciple; that you claimed to be a believer, that you even wore the token of His passion on your body, but that really you were a worshiper of possessions, of power, of prestige, of comfort, and of human pleasure. You were really, one of those donkeys, one of those animals who having an angel’s soul in a physical body despised the joys of heaven. And you hear from Him, “Depart from me evildoers,” and you find yourselves now anticipating, not surgery in which the doctor’s going to pierce your body and cause you pain, not a disease that’s going to cause your flesh to weaken but from which you can gain relief through medication, surgery, and prosthesis, but you’re going to receive pain that’s going to start bad and never end. Contemplate that. Turn with fear away from hypocrisy. Quit pretending to be an Orthodox believer. Quit lying about what you are and what you do. Turn your face steadfastly toward God, like the children in the desert following the pillar of fire; not like later when they turned their back toward the rising sun and walked away from paradise because they were afraid of the difficulties of entering into it. As the psalms say, “Their bones were dried up in the desert, their bodies were left in the sand.” Hear the words, then, of David. Hear the words God speaks, “If today you hear My voice, harden not your heart in the time of tribulation, in the time of testing. In the desert for forty years Israel tested Me, they tried Me, and saw My ways.” If today you hear His voice, soften your heart, let Him enter into it, embrace Him in spirit and truth, turn your life around, cast from it all doubt, all fear, all anxiety, embrace His saving love and turn your back on the fires of hell.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!
It is unusual, at least it has been, in Orthodox tradition to emphasize the sufferings of hell and eternal damnation. This thought, this image provides the sum and substance of much evangelical preaching, where accepting Jesus as one’s savior is sold as fire insurance. We don’t mention it much. The reason is because the emphasis of the ancient faith was not on how you could crawl up out of the pit and escape from the fires of hell. It was how you could be united to God and be joined to his resurrection through grace and participation in the life of his body. Our liturgy is not simply an immolation of a victim as the Roman Mass had been for many, many, many years. It’s not so much anymore. It is rather, a celebration of the resurrection of Him who was the Paschal victim.
And yet today, the church directs us – on a Sunday, on a day of the Resurrection – to place our thoughts on the awful and dreadful possibility of eternal damnation, of everlasting death, of pain without remission, without amelioration, unending. And that is because the Church wants us on this day, this week before we enter into the Great Fast, to contemplate that our faith, our religion, is not a hobby, not a prejudice, not a particular choice we’ve made of several possible choices, but that our faith is real, actual, and has consequences.
We are not here today to rejoice in the thought that some might enter into eternal damnation, but to contemplate the worst pain we’ve ever experienced in our lives and then to multiply that pain to every organ, every limb, every inch of our bodies, and then to anticipate that pain growing worse and worse, but never ceasing, never remitting, without hope. Even for the person who is suffering unto mortal death, there is the hope that death will come and put the physical pain to an end. But the pain of everlasting damnation is physical as well, for it is in our resurrected bodies that we are threatened with the awful possibilities of eternal suffering.
And who are they who will be the recipients of this suffering? Will it be the Hindu, or Buddhist, who have never had Christ preached to them in a way that makes it possible for them to accept Him? One certainly doubts that. Of course we’re told that if you accept the Lord Jesus Christ, and believe that God raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved, right? But that doesn’t meant that everybody who says that “Jesus is Christ, and God raised Him from the dead” is saved. Certainly, the devil now knows who Jesus is. He believes that God raised Him from the dead, to his eternal consternation for he thought when he had captured Him in hell, that it could hold Him captive. He thought he could possess, he could digest God in the belly of hell, but God gave him a bellyache. To paraphrase what John Chrysostom says, Hell swallowed up a body, and it gave it a terrible case of indigestion. He broke the bonds of death.
And so it’s not just simply believing something, it’s believing in Jesus Christ and that means living according to Jesus Christ’s commandments, His law and His teachings. You know there are many people for whom Orthodoxy is not a faith at all, it’s simply their chosen superstition. They turn to their icons when life is rough. In the breach they observe the fasts, and they go to confession once a year because it’s expected of them. They drag out their Orthodox clothing – their wedding garment – and put it on on Sunday morning and go to church for awhile, and maybe they can even stay in church for half the liturgy. Then they go home and take it off and go back and live the way they’ve lived all the other days of the week. It’s simply a magical charm, simply a token to them. These people experience what it was that Marx spoke of when he said, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” He didn’t mean that religion is a drug that puts you in a hallucinatory state. He meant, Marx believed, religion is what killed the pain of the people so that they didn’t know that life was rough. And Marx is absolutely right. He’s right about that because if anyone really thought about the nonsense of human existence without God having planned it, without God intervening into it, without God easing our suffering, giving meaning to our meaninglessness, if they ever thought of themselves as what they would be without God as their creator and redeemer, that is to say, very intelligent animals who unlike the other animals are able to be aware of their present predicament and of their future sufferings, as condemned men and women sentenced to death by a slow and painful death or a quick and sudden death, but ultimately grinding their way to death.
T.S. Eliot said, ‘I was a communist in the 1920s and then one day I woke up and said, ‘Why would anyone believe in a doctrine that offers the promise that a thousand years from now, one’s ancestors would look back on him as some lemur in the line of his evolution?” that’s the only meaning that can be offered by life without God intervening into it. And so these people who allow themselves to be doped up, they’ll accept the opiate part of Christianity. They say, “Oh well, if I die” – not “when I die” by they – but “if I die, I believe I’ll go to heaven.” But if you ask them, “What about going to hell?” “Oh, you know, you don’t really believe that do you,” or, “That’s for really bad people. Hitler and Stalin and those guys.” But let me tell you that it’s the same Lord who told us about Heaven – about the many orders of angels, about the many mansions in His Father’s house, and who promised us that we could be with Him where He is at the right hand of the Father – who also described the lake of fire, the place of destruction where the worm does cease and the fire is not quenched.
Brothers and sisters, if there’s a sin that makes a person worthy of losing the grace God has given him, it’s handling lightly the gift of the blood of God. It’s taking Christ’s cross on our shoulder and then putting it in the closet for the rest of our lives because it really is not an attractive ornament and a pretty heavy burden for us. It is pretending to be a believer. It is making believe that we are Orthodox, holding in the back of our minds some silly thought like, “Well, maybe I will win the lottery and there really is a heaven.” That is the really dangerous position. It is not being an adulterer, a murderer, a fornicator, or a homosexual pervert that is the most terrible thing. It is the sin against the Spirit of God. It is calling good “evil,” and evil “good.” It is embracing Jesus, not with tears like Mary Madgalene, not wiping His feet with our hair, but it is approaching Jesus like Judas – giving Him a kiss and then saying, “Now go away. I’ll put you aside for a while God because I can’t really enjoy life with you in the middle of it. I can’t do the things I wanna do if I see your face looking at me while I do them.”
Remember the Grand Inquisitor, I believe in Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor in Spain. Christ comes and He appears, and He’s brought to the Grand Inquisitor. And he says, “I know you can’t say anything because you can’t add any words to what you’ve already said. So let me tell you, I know who you are, but you have to die again. You’re inconvenient. You get in our way. Remain a plastic Jesus on our dashboards, or an icon in the corner, but don’t get in the middle of our lives.”
What was it, today, that the Lord spoke to those people who are called the goats, who are placed on His left hand and who are told to depart to the place that was never prepared for human beings – it was prepared for the Devil and his angels? He didn’t say, “Depart from me because you hated, or because you stole, or because lied, or because you committed adultery, or you didn’t honor your father and mother , or didn’t keep the Sabbath holy.” He says, “Depart from me because you didn’t do the good things you were supposed to do. Because, when I was hungry, you didn’t care if I starved to death. When was thirsty, you didn’t care if I dehydrated and died by the road. When I was naked, you didn’t care if exposure caused me to experience frostbite or if I succumbed to the elements. When I was sick, or I was in prison, you ignored me.” And they said, “Lord, we wouldn’t have done that. How can you say such a thing? If we’d gotten a personal note from you, ‘Jesus S. Christ says, “I’m hungry, bring me some food,”’ we would have brought it to you. We certainly would have brought you water. We would have given you clothing. We would have visited you.” And the Lord says, “In as much as you did not think to do it to the least of my brethren, then you failed to do it to me.” It is in our complacency that is found the possibility, the awful possibility, of our damnation. It is in handling lightly the sacred things of God. We have been ordained, everyone of us as priests, anointed with Holy Chrism, made kings and high priests in Jesus’ kingship and high priesthood, and when we throw that aside like a bunch of old rags, we place our souls in danger.
And so, brothers and sisters, let’s understand that every human being who leaves this life – except for God’s mother – every human being, even the saints whom we commemorate, has to pass through the grave into Hades and behold the terrors of hell, and see the fire and the pre-damnation suffering of those disposed to hate God and who deny his love, before they enter into paradise. That’s why we pray on the third and ninth day, and on the fortieth day, because, although they are outside of time, in our temporal way of thinking of things, we know there are ordeals that they endure beholding the terrors of hell, beholding the delights of paradise, making choices, not of their own but by the grace of our prayers.
And so today, on this Sunday of the Last Judgment, I want you to be scared for just a minute, I want you to contemplate for a moment that your time has come. The Son of Man has come on the clouds of heaven, the trumpets sound, we’ve all been caught up and we’re standing before Him. The six psalms that are read at the beginning of Matins are being read by the archangel, and in the brief time, the twinkling of an eye, each of us is passing in front of Him, and you look into His eyes, and what you see there is corruption reflected in His eyes, and hypocrisy on your part – that you pretended to be a disciple; that you claimed to be a believer, that you even wore the token of His passion on your body, but that really you were a worshiper of possessions, of power, of prestige, of comfort, and of human pleasure. You were really, one of those donkeys, one of those animals who having an angel’s soul in a physical body despised the joys of heaven. And you hear from Him, “Depart from me evildoers,” and you find yourselves now anticipating, not surgery in which the doctor’s going to pierce your body and cause you pain, not a disease that’s going to cause your flesh to weaken but from which you can gain relief through medication, surgery, and prosthesis, but you’re going to receive pain that’s going to start bad and never end. Contemplate that. Turn with fear away from hypocrisy. Quit pretending to be an Orthodox believer. Quit lying about what you are and what you do. Turn your face steadfastly toward God, like the children in the desert following the pillar of fire; not like later when they turned their back toward the rising sun and walked away from paradise because they were afraid of the difficulties of entering into it. As the psalms say, “Their bones were dried up in the desert, their bodies were left in the sand.” Hear the words, then, of David. Hear the words God speaks, “If today you hear My voice, harden not your heart in the time of tribulation, in the time of testing. In the desert for forty years Israel tested Me, they tried Me, and saw My ways.” If today you hear His voice, soften your heart, let Him enter into it, embrace Him in spirit and truth, turn your life around, cast from it all doubt, all fear, all anxiety, embrace His saving love and turn your back on the fires of hell.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!
Sunday of the Prodigal Son
Sunday of the Prodigal Son
Children’s sermon
Okay, I’m going to tell you the story again that you heard in the Gospel, and while I’m telling the story what I’d like for you to do is for you to be thinking also about some story you know where someone ran away – and hopefully where they came back.
Jesus tells about two brothers, and we are assuming from the way that he tells it that they are about 18, 19, 20 years old. You became an adult in the Jewish world, when you were 12 or 13, you could get married then. But you didn’t become on your own till you were thirty. It’s a pretty good system actually – you’ve got some of the privileges but your dad can still swat you upside the head if he needed to. Now one of these boys went to his dad and said, “I want you to divide up everything I’m going to get when you die. Everything I’m going to get when you die, I want that part now. Half of everything you’ve got.” It was the same thing as saying to his dad, “You’re not dying fast enough.” And so, the dad – he had no obligation, by the way; this boy had no right to anything until his father had passed away, but he claimed it. He just couldn’t wait to be king, right? And so when the dad divided up the money – he had to probably sell half the farm, and half of the farm equipment, and half of the livestock, half of the barns, and when he had done that, then he gave his son his half of it. And then, when he gave him half of it, the boy waited three or four days. He’d probably been planning this a long time. He wanted to party on, dude. He wanted to have a good time. He wanted to let his hair down. He wanted to rock and roll. He wanted to bar hop. He wanted no rules – no one telling him what time to get up, or what time to go to bed. He couldn’t do this near home. You see, his buddies, the guys he grew up with, they liked to have a good time too, and they worked on farms too. But they were Jewish kids. They knew the rules. They knew you didn’t mess around with girls. They knew you didn’t get drunk; you didn’t eat pork, right? Those were the rules. So, he had to go to a place where he didn’t know anybody and no one knew him. A far off country where they worshipped idols. Now I don’t know whether he went to where they worshipped Marduk, or where they worshipped Baal, or whether he went to where they worshipped Molek. All those gods, by the way, were worshipped by having babies killed and their blood poured on the statues. Isn’t that awful? And you know, in most places in the world, there’s nothing you do at all that’s not religious. Even a party is religious, so if you had a party, there was always a statue of a pagan god there – a great big idol with a golden head. Every party he went to was offered to a demon. It said that matins this morning: “He paid his money to the demons.” Also, when you bought meat in another country, that meat didn’t come from the butcher shop, it came from the temple of the Gods. The priests of Marduk, and of Isis, and Osiris, and of Baal, they cut up the meat, and sold it in the temple so it was a religious act to eat that meat – it was a sacrifice to an idol. And this is what this kid did for a long time, and he could do it for a long time because he had a lot of money, right?
Meanwhile, his dad and his brother are back their trying to make a living off half the farm. And the dad somehow knows where the boy is, but he doesn’t go and bring him back. He can’t, because the dad in this story represents God and the boy represents you. And God can invite us, and he can long for us, but he can’t force us because the greatest gift God gave you is his image, and that is the ability to make choices. The longer you stay away from him, the harder your heart gets. I worry when anybody misses church for three weeks because I have found, and I later found that the fathers found, that after three weeks of not going to church, most people don’t miss it as much anymore. The devil lets them think, “See, you missed three weeks and nothing bad happened to you. What would happen if you missed four?” And it takes something really big to get you back, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the kid spent all his money and he thought, “I’ll get a job. I can still live here in pagan land.” His money went pretty fast because all his friends let him throw the parties for him. But he couldn’t get a job because there was a recession, an economic crisis. And nobody was hiring, and there was a famine and food prices went up, and he had to go out and be a pig feeder. Even the pigs weren’t getting slop. They were just getting these buds that grew on trees – coriander seeds, okay? Pods. Because they were trying to keep the pigs alive, they couldn’t make them fat because there was no extra food. And you know what? He would have liked to have eaten those pods that grew on the tree, but they were for the pigs. They weren’t for him. He was starving. And he said, “I will get up. I will go back to my father and I will say to my father, ‘I’ve sinned against heaven and against you and I am not worthy anymore to be called your son. Let me be a hired servant.’” His father saw him coming a long way off. Once he saw him turned around – that word we use “metanoia,” or some us say “repent,” means stop going the wrong way, turn around, and start going the right way, backward. Turn around and go home. And so, once his dad saw him coming back he was able to run to him a long way off, threw his arms around his neck. He didn’t say, “You see, you nasty kid! You took this money, you wasted it, you wasted our lives!” He simply said, “Go get my most beautiful clothing for him. Get some nice soft slippers and put them on his feet. Put a ring with the family initial with it on his hand because we’re bringing him back into the family, and kill the fatted calf. We’re going to have a big celebration, a party. Because my son was dead and he is alive again. He was lost and now he’s found.”
Now who was sad in the story, by the way? His brother! He said, “Dad, you never had a party for me. And now this son of yours is back, and you’ve killed the fatted calf.” And his father said, “You don’t understand, it’s not just because I’m having a good day. It’s because your brother was dead. He wasn’t completely dead, but he was dying. His soul was dying, his heart was dying. And now he’s alive again! I had lost him, and I’ve found him again.” That’s how Jesus feels when a person who’s done something bad turns around and comes back to him.
I know a story about down here in Globeville. Almost a hundred years ago – maybe about 80 years ago – there was a girl named Mary, and there was a boy named Bill. And Mary and Bill were talking and they were about 9 years old. And Mary said, “Every Wednesday night my mother makes piroshki. I hate piroshki.” And Bill said, “Every Wednesday my mother makes fried potatoes and onions, and I hate fried potatoes and onions.” See, people really fasted then. Don’t tell me they didn’t keep the fast, but they did. This is the way I heard the story. So they said, “Let’s go tell our parents, ‘You’re going to have to stop this, or we’re going to leave.” So Mary went to her mom and she put her hands on her hips, and she said, “Dorothy” – that’s her mom; she called her by her first name! – “Dorothy, this business of piroshki every Wednesday, it’s gotta stop.” And Bill went and told his mom something like that. And Mary’s mom took some bread and put some butter on it, and she took two dimes and a little bandana, and she wrapped it up and put it on a broken broomstick. And she said to her, “Okay, when you get where you’re going, you call me and let me know that you’re safe.” And so the two kids went across the railroad tracks. They went all the way from Globeville to Pollock Valley and they laid down there in the weeds, and the looked, and they said, “They’re gonna come after us. They’re gonna come get us. We know they are. They’re gonna get scared. They’re gonna be sorry.” But it got cold, and the day went on, and the grass was wet, and nobody came from the houses. And finally it got to be dark, and the kids said, “What are we going to do?” So they went back, and they didn’t say, “Mom, Dad, we’ve sinned against heaven, and against you.” They said, “We hope you’ve learned your lesson,” but that was because they were nine, right?
Any of you know a story about somebody who ran off from responsibility, or ran away but got in trouble, or ran away to get in trouble? Anyone know a story like that? (Silence). How about a little lion, who said, “I just can’t wait to be king”? And then his dad got killed – right. Did he go back for his dad’s funeral? Did he cry with his mom and his family? Did he help take over and run the pride? (Kids – “No”) What did he do? He ran off and met a big fat hog and a little kind of rat, and the lived together, and they said – what did they say? How do you say that phrase? – Hakuna Matata. He had no worries, no worries man. We have everything here in the forest. And he forgot about everything he loved, and everybody he cared for. And his father couldn’t come and get him, and his father wouldn’t have because that’s impossible. But somebody did come looking for him. It was Nala, and also his priest – that baboon, right? Conked him on the head with a stick. Now if I did that to you, what would you do? I have a stick too. Better than his… Anyway, he went back and did what he was supposed to do.
You see, all kinds of stories are like the Bible stories. As one writer tells us, there’s only two spiels, only two stories, people tell: The Devil’s story, and God’s story. The Devil’s story is about everybody doing their own thing, ripping off each other, being irresponsible, mean, bad, evil, going to the dark side, and getting away with it. And God’s story is that someday, sooner or later, you’ve gotta answer for what you do.
When did – Luke Skywalker’s father, his first name is… Anakin. Anakin means “again.” It means “family again” – ana – again in Greek, kin – family. When did Anakin become Anakin, when did he come back to his family? At the last minute of his life, right? It’s too bad he didn’t enjoy it earlier. He started out as a good man. But he got tempted didn’t he? He left his church, he killed some of the children of that church, didn’t he? And he became Darth Vader – which means Dark Invader – the dark man, the dark intention that invades our hearts. But he came back, right?
And how about… Let’s see, do any of you know the story of Pinnochio? Okay, tell me that. (Child speaks). Yes, his father made him didn’t he? Like God made you – not to boss around, but to love. But Pinnochio wanted to play, didn’t he? He wanted to party instead of going to school. He ended up at a big fair, a carnival, where all the kids ate candy all day and they went on rides, but it was actually the devil’s trap, wasn’t it? They were turning them into what? Yes. Donkeys. It shows that when you follow the devil, you are a donkey, an ass, a fool, because the Devil pays only one kind of salary: pain, suffering, and eternal damnation. The wages of sin is death.
I was thinking these people. I thought about Anakin, and about Simba and Pinnochio, even Adam and Eve in the garden, who, when they had sinned, if they’d gone to God and said, “God, we ate the apple! We ate the fruit! We’re sorry!” They still would have had to be punished, but it wouldn’t have been the same punishment, would it? But instead, they ran off into the trees, the forest, and said, “We can hide from God here right?”
Well, we’re about to start Lent, that’s why we have these stories. Jesus tells us three little short stories together:
He says a man who was a shepherd lost a lamb, and what did he do when he lost his lamb? Who can tell me? Did he say, “Oh well, the lamb can find it’s way back home or wolves can eat it? What did he do when he lost his lamb? (Child answering). He went and got it, didn’t he? (Yes). He put it on his shoulders and brought it back. That stole the Bishop wears represents the lost sheep that the good shepherd brings back. It’s always made out of wool to show that.
And then he tells about a woman who lost one of her dowry coins that her husband had given her – or that she’d given to him and he’d given back to her when they got married. Well, she got down in the dirt on the floor of her house till she found her coin.
But both those people went out and looked, didn’t they? Cuz the good shepherd is Jesus, and he’s always calling us back. And the woman with the coin is the Holy Spirit who’s always trying to beat on your heart and open it up to him again. But in the third story, it’s God the Father. He’s not going to come after you, you after to come back to him
Here’s the point: That each one of us, when we sin, has two choices: We can either right at that point tell God that we’re sorry and then come and stand in His house, the church, and say before the priest to God in the icon, “This is what I’ve done,” and have God forgive us and welcome us back, put our clean shoes back on our feet, our clean robe back on us, the ring back on our hand, and feed us with his life. We can either do that, or we can run off and hide. We can go hide in the woods like Adam and Eve. We can go into another country and say, “Who needs God anyway?” You know, the people who turn away from religion then say bad things about their faith because they’re trying to convince themselves and they’re trying to convince other people as well. They become not only the prey of the Devil, they become the tools of the Devil. So, come to lent, remember, whenever anything’s on your heart, a bad thing you’ve done, don’t let it sit there because then you’ll get used to it. You won’t be sorry about it. You’ll even decide it’s not really so bad. But confess it immediately to God, and when you come to church you confess it.
Now, I’ll tell you one more story to help you probably remember part of this. There was a Sunday school class once and the teacher told the story of the Prodigal Son that I just told you: How the boy went off and lived in the country, how he lived a riotous life, how he lost his money, how he had to feed pigs, how he came back and his father welcomed him and had a party for him. At the end, the teacher asked the same question I asked you, “Who was sad at the end of the story?” And you said, “The older brother.” When this teacher asked the question, “Who was sad at the end of the story?” one girl raise her hand and said, “The fatted calf.”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ!
****Before Communion, Father interrupted the liturgy with an addendum to the sermon. I didn’t get to record it, but I did talk to him later and I’ll try to get the gist of it here***
One of the children asked why the boys in Pinnochio were turned into donkeys, and I gave him a stupid answer. It’s important not to brush off kids questions like that, it was a good question and it deserves a better answer that I gave. The boys were being transformed into the image of the carnal desires they were chasing after. When we chase after those desires, we become more and more like our animal part. You see, we have an angel part, and an animal part. Samboli turns the boys into donkeys so that he can sell them as beasts of burden which is a like how Satan turns us into slaves by tempting us with things we desire.
Children’s sermon
Okay, I’m going to tell you the story again that you heard in the Gospel, and while I’m telling the story what I’d like for you to do is for you to be thinking also about some story you know where someone ran away – and hopefully where they came back.
Jesus tells about two brothers, and we are assuming from the way that he tells it that they are about 18, 19, 20 years old. You became an adult in the Jewish world, when you were 12 or 13, you could get married then. But you didn’t become on your own till you were thirty. It’s a pretty good system actually – you’ve got some of the privileges but your dad can still swat you upside the head if he needed to. Now one of these boys went to his dad and said, “I want you to divide up everything I’m going to get when you die. Everything I’m going to get when you die, I want that part now. Half of everything you’ve got.” It was the same thing as saying to his dad, “You’re not dying fast enough.” And so, the dad – he had no obligation, by the way; this boy had no right to anything until his father had passed away, but he claimed it. He just couldn’t wait to be king, right? And so when the dad divided up the money – he had to probably sell half the farm, and half of the farm equipment, and half of the livestock, half of the barns, and when he had done that, then he gave his son his half of it. And then, when he gave him half of it, the boy waited three or four days. He’d probably been planning this a long time. He wanted to party on, dude. He wanted to have a good time. He wanted to let his hair down. He wanted to rock and roll. He wanted to bar hop. He wanted no rules – no one telling him what time to get up, or what time to go to bed. He couldn’t do this near home. You see, his buddies, the guys he grew up with, they liked to have a good time too, and they worked on farms too. But they were Jewish kids. They knew the rules. They knew you didn’t mess around with girls. They knew you didn’t get drunk; you didn’t eat pork, right? Those were the rules. So, he had to go to a place where he didn’t know anybody and no one knew him. A far off country where they worshipped idols. Now I don’t know whether he went to where they worshipped Marduk, or where they worshipped Baal, or whether he went to where they worshipped Molek. All those gods, by the way, were worshipped by having babies killed and their blood poured on the statues. Isn’t that awful? And you know, in most places in the world, there’s nothing you do at all that’s not religious. Even a party is religious, so if you had a party, there was always a statue of a pagan god there – a great big idol with a golden head. Every party he went to was offered to a demon. It said that matins this morning: “He paid his money to the demons.” Also, when you bought meat in another country, that meat didn’t come from the butcher shop, it came from the temple of the Gods. The priests of Marduk, and of Isis, and Osiris, and of Baal, they cut up the meat, and sold it in the temple so it was a religious act to eat that meat – it was a sacrifice to an idol. And this is what this kid did for a long time, and he could do it for a long time because he had a lot of money, right?
Meanwhile, his dad and his brother are back their trying to make a living off half the farm. And the dad somehow knows where the boy is, but he doesn’t go and bring him back. He can’t, because the dad in this story represents God and the boy represents you. And God can invite us, and he can long for us, but he can’t force us because the greatest gift God gave you is his image, and that is the ability to make choices. The longer you stay away from him, the harder your heart gets. I worry when anybody misses church for three weeks because I have found, and I later found that the fathers found, that after three weeks of not going to church, most people don’t miss it as much anymore. The devil lets them think, “See, you missed three weeks and nothing bad happened to you. What would happen if you missed four?” And it takes something really big to get you back, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the kid spent all his money and he thought, “I’ll get a job. I can still live here in pagan land.” His money went pretty fast because all his friends let him throw the parties for him. But he couldn’t get a job because there was a recession, an economic crisis. And nobody was hiring, and there was a famine and food prices went up, and he had to go out and be a pig feeder. Even the pigs weren’t getting slop. They were just getting these buds that grew on trees – coriander seeds, okay? Pods. Because they were trying to keep the pigs alive, they couldn’t make them fat because there was no extra food. And you know what? He would have liked to have eaten those pods that grew on the tree, but they were for the pigs. They weren’t for him. He was starving. And he said, “I will get up. I will go back to my father and I will say to my father, ‘I’ve sinned against heaven and against you and I am not worthy anymore to be called your son. Let me be a hired servant.’” His father saw him coming a long way off. Once he saw him turned around – that word we use “metanoia,” or some us say “repent,” means stop going the wrong way, turn around, and start going the right way, backward. Turn around and go home. And so, once his dad saw him coming back he was able to run to him a long way off, threw his arms around his neck. He didn’t say, “You see, you nasty kid! You took this money, you wasted it, you wasted our lives!” He simply said, “Go get my most beautiful clothing for him. Get some nice soft slippers and put them on his feet. Put a ring with the family initial with it on his hand because we’re bringing him back into the family, and kill the fatted calf. We’re going to have a big celebration, a party. Because my son was dead and he is alive again. He was lost and now he’s found.”
Now who was sad in the story, by the way? His brother! He said, “Dad, you never had a party for me. And now this son of yours is back, and you’ve killed the fatted calf.” And his father said, “You don’t understand, it’s not just because I’m having a good day. It’s because your brother was dead. He wasn’t completely dead, but he was dying. His soul was dying, his heart was dying. And now he’s alive again! I had lost him, and I’ve found him again.” That’s how Jesus feels when a person who’s done something bad turns around and comes back to him.
I know a story about down here in Globeville. Almost a hundred years ago – maybe about 80 years ago – there was a girl named Mary, and there was a boy named Bill. And Mary and Bill were talking and they were about 9 years old. And Mary said, “Every Wednesday night my mother makes piroshki. I hate piroshki.” And Bill said, “Every Wednesday my mother makes fried potatoes and onions, and I hate fried potatoes and onions.” See, people really fasted then. Don’t tell me they didn’t keep the fast, but they did. This is the way I heard the story. So they said, “Let’s go tell our parents, ‘You’re going to have to stop this, or we’re going to leave.” So Mary went to her mom and she put her hands on her hips, and she said, “Dorothy” – that’s her mom; she called her by her first name! – “Dorothy, this business of piroshki every Wednesday, it’s gotta stop.” And Bill went and told his mom something like that. And Mary’s mom took some bread and put some butter on it, and she took two dimes and a little bandana, and she wrapped it up and put it on a broken broomstick. And she said to her, “Okay, when you get where you’re going, you call me and let me know that you’re safe.” And so the two kids went across the railroad tracks. They went all the way from Globeville to Pollock Valley and they laid down there in the weeds, and the looked, and they said, “They’re gonna come after us. They’re gonna come get us. We know they are. They’re gonna get scared. They’re gonna be sorry.” But it got cold, and the day went on, and the grass was wet, and nobody came from the houses. And finally it got to be dark, and the kids said, “What are we going to do?” So they went back, and they didn’t say, “Mom, Dad, we’ve sinned against heaven, and against you.” They said, “We hope you’ve learned your lesson,” but that was because they were nine, right?
Any of you know a story about somebody who ran off from responsibility, or ran away but got in trouble, or ran away to get in trouble? Anyone know a story like that? (Silence). How about a little lion, who said, “I just can’t wait to be king”? And then his dad got killed – right. Did he go back for his dad’s funeral? Did he cry with his mom and his family? Did he help take over and run the pride? (Kids – “No”) What did he do? He ran off and met a big fat hog and a little kind of rat, and the lived together, and they said – what did they say? How do you say that phrase? – Hakuna Matata. He had no worries, no worries man. We have everything here in the forest. And he forgot about everything he loved, and everybody he cared for. And his father couldn’t come and get him, and his father wouldn’t have because that’s impossible. But somebody did come looking for him. It was Nala, and also his priest – that baboon, right? Conked him on the head with a stick. Now if I did that to you, what would you do? I have a stick too. Better than his… Anyway, he went back and did what he was supposed to do.
You see, all kinds of stories are like the Bible stories. As one writer tells us, there’s only two spiels, only two stories, people tell: The Devil’s story, and God’s story. The Devil’s story is about everybody doing their own thing, ripping off each other, being irresponsible, mean, bad, evil, going to the dark side, and getting away with it. And God’s story is that someday, sooner or later, you’ve gotta answer for what you do.
When did – Luke Skywalker’s father, his first name is… Anakin. Anakin means “again.” It means “family again” – ana – again in Greek, kin – family. When did Anakin become Anakin, when did he come back to his family? At the last minute of his life, right? It’s too bad he didn’t enjoy it earlier. He started out as a good man. But he got tempted didn’t he? He left his church, he killed some of the children of that church, didn’t he? And he became Darth Vader – which means Dark Invader – the dark man, the dark intention that invades our hearts. But he came back, right?
And how about… Let’s see, do any of you know the story of Pinnochio? Okay, tell me that. (Child speaks). Yes, his father made him didn’t he? Like God made you – not to boss around, but to love. But Pinnochio wanted to play, didn’t he? He wanted to party instead of going to school. He ended up at a big fair, a carnival, where all the kids ate candy all day and they went on rides, but it was actually the devil’s trap, wasn’t it? They were turning them into what? Yes. Donkeys. It shows that when you follow the devil, you are a donkey, an ass, a fool, because the Devil pays only one kind of salary: pain, suffering, and eternal damnation. The wages of sin is death.
I was thinking these people. I thought about Anakin, and about Simba and Pinnochio, even Adam and Eve in the garden, who, when they had sinned, if they’d gone to God and said, “God, we ate the apple! We ate the fruit! We’re sorry!” They still would have had to be punished, but it wouldn’t have been the same punishment, would it? But instead, they ran off into the trees, the forest, and said, “We can hide from God here right?”
Well, we’re about to start Lent, that’s why we have these stories. Jesus tells us three little short stories together:
He says a man who was a shepherd lost a lamb, and what did he do when he lost his lamb? Who can tell me? Did he say, “Oh well, the lamb can find it’s way back home or wolves can eat it? What did he do when he lost his lamb? (Child answering). He went and got it, didn’t he? (Yes). He put it on his shoulders and brought it back. That stole the Bishop wears represents the lost sheep that the good shepherd brings back. It’s always made out of wool to show that.
And then he tells about a woman who lost one of her dowry coins that her husband had given her – or that she’d given to him and he’d given back to her when they got married. Well, she got down in the dirt on the floor of her house till she found her coin.
But both those people went out and looked, didn’t they? Cuz the good shepherd is Jesus, and he’s always calling us back. And the woman with the coin is the Holy Spirit who’s always trying to beat on your heart and open it up to him again. But in the third story, it’s God the Father. He’s not going to come after you, you after to come back to him
Here’s the point: That each one of us, when we sin, has two choices: We can either right at that point tell God that we’re sorry and then come and stand in His house, the church, and say before the priest to God in the icon, “This is what I’ve done,” and have God forgive us and welcome us back, put our clean shoes back on our feet, our clean robe back on us, the ring back on our hand, and feed us with his life. We can either do that, or we can run off and hide. We can go hide in the woods like Adam and Eve. We can go into another country and say, “Who needs God anyway?” You know, the people who turn away from religion then say bad things about their faith because they’re trying to convince themselves and they’re trying to convince other people as well. They become not only the prey of the Devil, they become the tools of the Devil. So, come to lent, remember, whenever anything’s on your heart, a bad thing you’ve done, don’t let it sit there because then you’ll get used to it. You won’t be sorry about it. You’ll even decide it’s not really so bad. But confess it immediately to God, and when you come to church you confess it.
Now, I’ll tell you one more story to help you probably remember part of this. There was a Sunday school class once and the teacher told the story of the Prodigal Son that I just told you: How the boy went off and lived in the country, how he lived a riotous life, how he lost his money, how he had to feed pigs, how he came back and his father welcomed him and had a party for him. At the end, the teacher asked the same question I asked you, “Who was sad at the end of the story?” And you said, “The older brother.” When this teacher asked the question, “Who was sad at the end of the story?” one girl raise her hand and said, “The fatted calf.”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Glory to Jesus Christ!
****Before Communion, Father interrupted the liturgy with an addendum to the sermon. I didn’t get to record it, but I did talk to him later and I’ll try to get the gist of it here***
One of the children asked why the boys in Pinnochio were turned into donkeys, and I gave him a stupid answer. It’s important not to brush off kids questions like that, it was a good question and it deserves a better answer that I gave. The boys were being transformed into the image of the carnal desires they were chasing after. When we chase after those desires, we become more and more like our animal part. You see, we have an angel part, and an animal part. Samboli turns the boys into donkeys so that he can sell them as beasts of burden which is a like how Satan turns us into slaves by tempting us with things we desire.
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