Friday, July 24, 2009

Samaritan woman

Fr. James Worth preaching on the 35th anniversary of his ordination


I just wanted to talk to you about a couple of points, a couple of simple points of Christian worship. We read the book of Acts we see that the earliest Christians gathered in community. They gathered to hear the apostles’ doctrine, for fellowship, for prayer, and for breaking of bread – the Eucharist. Those were the four essential elements of the earliest church. And I remember, in my young days in seminary when I would go to New York. We would travel from St. Vladimir’s seminary to NYU because Fr. ____ was lecturing there. Every week he would give lectures on the Orthodox church, and he always wished to emphasize to the people – basically not Orthodox people – the essential teaching, he usedd in Latin – unus Christianus, nullius Christianus – “One Christian is no Christian.” That to be a Christian means to be a member of a community, and we see that community manifested makes present the life of Christ, the teachings of Christ, and the presence of Christ both now and till the end of the ages. Remember, again in seminary, I had to do an oral exam before Fr. Alexander Schmemann on the meaning of the Eucharist. And that was probably one of the scariest times of my life, because this man wrote all of the books. He was the constant scholar of the liturgy. What he wanted me to talk about was the cosmical and eschatological content of the Eucharist. How, when we gather as the Church, when we assemble as the Church, remembering that the essential act of the people of God is to gather as the Church, that we gather for a specific purpose and ultimately we are recognizing that the Church is the new creation. That’s the cosmical dimension of the liturgy. Christ is the new Adam. He is the resurrected Lord who lives in the Church. He is the one who is nurturing us, who is offering and we are offering back to the Father. The second part of that is that the Eucharist is eschatological – it makes present the end even in the world. The Church, the Liturgy, manifest the kingdom of God. I always tell people, “Where do you find the kingdom of God these days? Do you find it in Hollywood? No… Do you find it on the 16th Street Mall? Probably not. It’s in the church.” That’s where the kingdom of God is manifest.

So, what I want to emphasize is that the work that we do – and Liturgy is work, it’s the proper work of the people gathering together and to offer a gift, to be present to remember the life, the death, the resurrection of Christ, and then to eat at His heavenly table. That’s what we do. In America, our Church makes a tremendous task because, first of all, there are a lot of different religions and a lot of different types and expressions of Christianity. In America there is always this tendency to want to create something better. You always want something better, so somebody will create a little better kind of Christianity, a little better kind, a little more simple. You know, let’s forget about all these icons, and chalices, and vestments, and let’s just sit down and read the Bible and we’ll talk. And in addition, there are people who probably criticize the Church as being irrelevant, full of hypocrisy, of being broken, full of sinners. I always remind myself that Fr. _____ used to always say, “Church is full of the saints, you see them all around us. But it’s full of us miserable sinners too.” The holiness and the righteousness of Christianity is through Christ and the Holy Spirit, so we need not fear about our own sinfulness because we have Christ who is sanctifying us, who is sealing us. That’s the mystery of the Church: people who are broken, who are flawed characteralogically, who have all kinds of diseases and sin, when we enter into the life of Christ, we are sanctified, we are purified by the Spirit of God.

So it’s important for us to remember just those fundamental underpinnings. When we gather, we gather in the name of Christ for a purpose. That purpose is to hear the apostolic teaching, hear the gospel, and then to offer up the liturgy and to make present the kingdom of God, to enter in procession to the holy table and there participate in the body and blood of Christ and be united one to another in the mystery of the Eucharist. So, as we think about the meaning of worship, I want you to remember is that we’re here for a very specific purpose, and that we’re called to be here in order to make that purpose manifest. So, God has said, Christ has told us, “You have not chosen me, I have chosen you.” So we come together, we offer, we celebrate, we break the bread in the name of Christ. And then we eat and taste of the kingdom, and the life eternal, the kingdom which is to come is made present here. Those are the essential dimensions of the Eucharist. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we believe that when we celebrate the Liturgy, we celebrate with God in Spirit and in Truth, as the Spirit is amongst us and Christ is amongst us, and all of our prayers are carried to the Father so that we ultimately are lifted up to the heavenly kingdom.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Christ is risen!

Indeed, He is risen!

Sunday of the Paralytics

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Christ is risen!
Indeed, He is risen!

The whole issue, brothers and sisters, of miracles is one that is perplexing to us. It’s perplexing to us because a pure and simple miracle is an in-breaking of the divine into the natural order, defined in the prayers of vespers in this way: “When God wills, the order of nature is overturned for He does whatsoever He pleases.”

In the nineteenth century, and even back to the time of Thomas Jefferson at the end of the eighteenth century, there were intellectuals who wanted to take the Bible and remove from it everything that was miraculous. Their opinion was that there must be a scientific or intellectual explanation for everything, and so they even tried to say, “Well, Jesus really did feed the crowd with the loaves and fish, because you know, those greedy Jews – stereotype, stereotype – really had food and He just got them to share it.” Or, on the other hand, some who were a little less direct said, “Well, he sped up the operation by which bread grows out of the earth and fish multiply. It was just a speeding up of time.” These are explanations which I have actually read in books written at that time. These people had their big problem with the idea of God’s in-breaking into nature, and the reason why it was so problematic to them was that God does not do it very often.

And so, we’re faced with two issues: 1) Why doesn’t God do it all the time? Why isn’t every paralytic immediately braced? Why isn’t every blind man immediately given sight? That’s one question we have. The other question is, “Well, since God created us and He doesn’t choose to instantaneously heal every infirmity we have, isn’t God really pretty mean?” Or, to put it into the terms of the agnostics I have every term in my religion class, “How can a good God allow such a thing to happen?” What we don’t understand about miracles is that miracles are not essentially magic tricks, they’re not even essentially medical cures. But miracles are signs. They are signs in the present age of the age to come. When they are performed, either by our Lord in the scriptures, or by the disciples of whom He said, “And these things which I do, ye shall do, and greater deeds than these ye shall do because I go to my Father;” when they are performed in response to the prayers of the church, they are performed in order to increase faith. They are performed in order to deepen understanding. They are performed in order to grant a deeper degree of piety. In other words, they are performed for people whose salvation is dependent upon them.

In both of the cases today, the men who were lame were told by the agent of their healing to stand up, take up their beds, and walk. In either case, the man Anneas who had been lame for eight years, or the man at the pool who had been laying their every day for thirty years, would most logically have been expected to say, “No, I can’t walk.” But that didn’t happen. Something overcame them, something about the power of our Lord working at Bethesda and also working through the holy apostle Peter, empowered them to immediately believe they could and their faith that caused them to stand upright, it was the product of their having accepted the healing. And so, in the case of these people, both our Lord and St. Peter, performed an image of resurrection. What does resurrection mean? It means to stand up again. Both of these men were unable to stand. Both of them had decided that their life was going to be one of begging for shekels, lying in the corner of the street. They had both abdicated hope. The one simply becoming a beggar, and the other lying by the water in some kind of vain expectation that perhaps the next time that the water moved, somebody would kick him into the water by accident. But neither one of them really believed, but hearing the Word they responded in their hearts and they were raised not just for their sake, they were raised for the sake of those who would see and hear it.

Nevertheless signs are two edged swords. Signs, miracles, are given on the one hand to increase the faith of those who hunger and thirst for faith, and also to try those who do not hunger and thirst for faith. So as the crowd rejoiced at the lame man taking up his bed and walking, the Pharisees immediately began to formulate a formal charge against Jesus. He was a bad rabbi. He was a false teacher. For did not the Law say, “Thou shall do no work upon the Sabbath”? And had not the rabbis said that one could not so much as carry in one’s hand a peppercorn to sweeten one’s bread – you could put it in your mouth and carry it to synagogue in your mouth, but you couldn’t carry it in your hand because that was doing labor on the Sabbath, it was carrying something. So a man carrying furniture on the Sabbath, wasn’t that a great breech of that law? And these people could not see because they had blinded their eyes and hardened their own hearts, they could not see that if a man thirty years lame rose up, took up his bed, and walked, that there was a new in-breaking of the power of God, that a new thing was at work in the world, that this was the premonition, the foretaste of the new creation, that if God had raised up this thirty-year paralyzed man, so on the last day, He would raise up all who slept in the dust of the earth.

So, you see, miracles are not unmixed blessings for all who see them. They make some people resentful; they make some people jealous. The very fact we claim that they exist makes some people more doubting than they would have been otherwise because they are not prepared in their hearts to receive good gifts. There are people who want to have a god, but they want him to be a very small god. How do you say it in Russian, “moly”? Is “moly” little? I heard once about a girl who came over and visited as an exchange student, and she had in a bag around her neck a little statue, probably something from Siberia that she called, “the little god.” She wanted a little god hanging around her neck, not a big God who saw all time and all ages, and whose purpose extended beyond our individual feelings, concerns, anxieties at this moment but who transcended them, who turned all of the dirt of our suffering and our sorrow into jewels, precious stones, by the way that we reacted to those things. They want a little god, a god who is there when they say, “Gimme, gimme gimme.” A god who never says, “Say thank you,” and a god who won’t mess with you during this life, but when you die he’ll let you go to heaven. That’s the kind of god they want, and so in-breakings grace, weeping icons, myrrh bearing icons, wonder working relics, great miraculous phenomena, to these people are a pain.

Now let me answer the question, “Why doesn’t God just heal everyone?” The answer is, “He has. He will, but not now.” This is only preschool. We’re awaiting our eternal university education in the kingdom of heaven, where we won’t have to worry about grade cards, and we won’t have bad dreams that we never finished high school – how many have had that dream? You had to go back and take the last test. And we won’t hear any bells. We will go from strength to strength and from knowledge to knowledge and rejoice in the deep understanding of the mind of God that He gives us in each eternal instant. God has raised us up.

And now, why does God allow suffering and sorrow in the world? God didn’t create the world with suffering and sorrow. He said on the seventh day, “It is very good.” It is human sin, human sin sometimes directed toward individuals, individuals who murder, and molest, and rob, and injure, by actions, by words. It is sometimes the phenomenon of nature gone crazy because of human rebellion against it, and we now realize how many of the natural phenomena are the consequence of our misuse of what God’s given us. But there are also things that lawyers used to call “acts of God” because they had to blame someone, that are just nature gone crazy. Things like a cancer. Cancer cell is the antichrist – antichrist means that which stands in the place of Christ, it doesn’t mean against Christ. A cancer cell has everlasting life. It’s a cell that instead of replicating itself six or seven times and then dying like it’s supposed to, keeps going and going and going like that little bunny on the battery ads, and so it just keeps multiplying. It doesn’t stop when it’s supposed to. It doesn’t want to die, and it doesn’t unless we kill it. But if God were to intervene now, instantly – as He will intervene when He makes everything right, and everything straight, and everything holy, and everything sweet, as He will do in that day – if He intervened now, then there would be no faith on earth. Then there would only be the divine insurance policy: everyone would be willing whatever it took to get what they wanted as long as they got it right now with no price and no penalty. God does not break into the order of nature often, and only for our good and out of necessity, because it is necessary that we believe because we know God and love Him, and wish to be with Him, and not because He is the big sugar daddy in the sky who gives us all the prizes as soon as we ask for them, who gave us a cosmic credit card. It’s not, as some of our Pentecostal friends say, “Name it and claim it,” gang. That’s not the way it is. We Orthodox know that. Most of our people have suffered for most of our history. We’ve never had much time being on time. Not much time being on top. We were always under somebody’s heal. But it was for the perfection of souls, for the grinding out of salvation, for the production of martyrs and saints whose prayers drag the rest of us into heaven.

So today we see the two miracles of these men being healed. And we see that in both cases, there was an example given. It doesn’t say, “And the next day St. Peter set up a corner stand and said, ‘Come see me if you’re lame, and I’ll heal you.’” No he didn’t. God told Peter, “Heal this man.” Peter had said, “In the name of Christ, stand up,” and the man did. If Peter had tired to turn it into, “In the name of Peter, stand up,” he would have been a big flop, a big failure, and even it did work it would have been magic. It would not have been faith. And now we come to poor Tabatha. This is an example of a miracle that benefited others and not the recipient of it. Tabatha was already clearly a saint. She was heaven-bound. She was a deaconess – one of those women who took communion of shut in women because men weren’t allowed to go into the houses of women in those days unless their husband was there. She was one of those women who assisted the apostles in the baptism of women. That was her ministry, but she went beyond that. She also was, like I said about deacons last week, someone who took care of the poor. She made shirts, she made tunics, for the naked and those whose clothing was worn thin. She dressed a multitude of people with her own hands, out of her own pocket. And people loved her so much that when she died, and her soul was about to go into the hands of God, they begged Peter to bring her back. Now she was still right there, remember it is three days before the soul departs, so it was a near death experience. So when Peter called Tabatha and said, “Tabatha, arise,” it wasn’t for Tabatha’s sake. Everyone I have known who was a good person who has experienced a near death experience has said, “You know, I guess I’m glad to be back, but it was really great being there, being drawn by the light.” And we don’t know what that light is, but it’s an icon of the uncreated light that’s drawing them towards it. Now this woman’s miracle was not because people needed her, not because she needed to be alive or even wanted to be, it was because the church there, in Lydia, needed to be built up by having her take care of people who couldn’t take care of themselves.

So when old people say to me, and sometimes young people with great pain and great sickness, say to me, “Why am I alive? Why doesn’t God just take me?” my answer is, ‘He’s got something for you to do and you don’t get to go till you do it. And it may be that it will be in your old age when all you can do is sit like Archbishop John in his rocking chair and open your prayer book and pray for the whole world. And maybe those prayers are the prayers that tip the balance of souls, the balance of nations, the balance of eternity. Maybe through your prayers, the question that our Lord asks, ‘The Son of Man,’ He said, ‘will come, but will He find faith on His coming? Faith among the living on earth?’ Maybe that will be answered in the positive and not in the negative because you, in your pain, transcended your pain; in your sorrow, overcame your sorrow; in your suffering, allowed Christ’s suffering to trample it down, and through persistence in prayer, you did as St. Seraphim said: you saved your own soul and you brought salvation to ten thousand who you never knew.

To the God who works miracles at all times and in all things, and whose will is done; to the God who asks of us only to surrender our own will to His and all will be well, be glory unto ages of ages. Christ is risen!

Indeed, He is risen!

Sunday of the Myrrh Bearing Women

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Christ is risen!
Indeed, He is risen!

If we were like those thematic made up American kind of churches, then today would be Service Sunday. Because today is the day on which both the readings from the epistle and the gospel speak to us of service in Christ. Fr. Alexander Schmemann declared at a lecture when he was being berated by some social activists in the 1960s in Chicago – he was speaking there and they were saying, “How can you come and tell us all this stuff about the kingdom of heaven, and liturgy, and about worship of God when we’re busy integrating schools, and registering voters, and fighting the was in Vietnam?” And I won’t tell you what his answer was, but I will tell you how he began it. He said, “Christian social action is the work of the body of Christ, for the body of Christ, by the body of Christ, on behalf of the body of Christ.” In other words, whatever we do in the world that has any meaning is because we’re Christians, not just because we decide that we’re going to do a good deed every day.

We find that the Sunday named after Joseph and by inclusion Nicodemus, they were members of the Sanhedrin, they were Jewish elders, rabbis, probably priests as well, they sat on the counsel of the seventy that ruled Israel as far as they were given power to do so, and they both believed in Jesus. Joseph may have been Jesus uncle. But both of them were scared to say anything. The term for fear of the Jews is the term that’s used by St. John – in fact, he tells us that many of the priests of the Jewish faith believed in Jesus during His lifetime, but that they didn’t say anything because, the Evangelist tells us, they loved the praise of man more than the praise of God. But when Jesus was crucified, Joseph and Nicodemus became courageous. They came, they besought Pilate to give them the body of the Lord; Joseph took is own new tomb and he buried our Lord there. It was he with Nicodemus who directed the rushed preparations that had to take place. No time to wind the body in the winding sheet, but place simply some blocks of myrrh around it, and later at the tomb drape the cloth over, and wait till the Sabbath had passed to come back and finish.

And with them were the same women who had gone to the cross. At the end of every passion narrative it says, “And the women saw from afar off.” These were women who – what is it I had heard yesterday the king of Persia said during his battle with the Greeks when he had one female sea captain who alone escaped the wrath of the navy, he said, “My men have become women, and my women have become men.” These women had become courageous. They went and they dared the Roman authorities to do anything about it, or the Jewish priests or elders. And they also followed when the body was taken down and watched where it was laid. We call these women “the Myrrh Bearing Women” and we see them in to icons – one is at the deposition of our Lord, the other is the one here where our Lord’s winding sheet is laid in the tomb and the angel is saying to them, “Why do you seek among the dead what is living?”

Today I’m going to talk to you about another kind of service. The courageous service of these women speaks for itself. There was only one order of ministry in the church as it began, and that was that of Apostle. Those who the Lord had sent out. He had appointed twelve and had said, “Ye who have followed me will sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” They were the reconstitution of the patriarchs of Israel. The reestablishment of the new Israel. And one of these, Judas, was the one who betrayed Him. So the apostles immediately discerned that there had to first be twelve for the twelve tribes of Israel. So what did they do? They picked out two men, and they had special requirements for those guys. They had to have traveled with the other Apostles from the beginning, and been with Jesus from the start, and seen all the things He did, because they were to be witnesses to what Jesus had done and said. And they chose two: Joseph Barsalamus, who later became an apostle, and Matthias. And they cast lots and God showed them Matthias was the one He had chosen. So Matthias was added to the twelve, and we have a list then of the twelve apostles to Israel. Later these twelve would send out other men, and these would become the seventy apostles – apostles to the whole world. Among them are the evangelist Mark and the Evangelist Luke. But as they began to preach and to teach in Jerusalem, the community became very large. It grew by five thousand by Pentecost, and by three thousand a few weeks later. Now you had eight thousand people, and these people had come to Jerusalem for a pilgrim feast – the Feast of Weeks, the feast that celebrated forty-nine days after Passover, a week of weeks. If you hadn’t been able to come to Jerusalem for Passover you could kill a Passover lamb and roast it on that day of Pentecost and have you Passover Sadr. It was allowed in the Jewish tradition for pilgrims who couldn’t, because of the tempestuous seas, get there for the beginning of the celebration. This feast celebrated the giving of the Law at Mt. Sinai by God to Moses. So everybody was gathered there, like the people at the foot of Mt. Sinai. And when the apostles began to preach, the Spirit moved the people and five thousand converted and a little while later, three thousand more. And some of these people were Jews from Jerusalem and Palestine, and their language was Aramaic, a language not unlike Amharic – the language spoken in Ethiopia, and also in Eritrea and in parts in Syria too, a dialect of it. In fact some people believe that Mohammad originally wrote the Koran in Aramaic, and that it was just simply a heretical Christian book, and that then when the Omyads – the big bad Baghdadis – got a hold of it that they turned it into something else – the turned ripe clumps of large grapes into seventy virgins, among other things. It was a made up religion from the beginning.

Anyway, some of them spoke Aramaic, they were what we call Hebrew-speaking Jews. It wasn’t Hebrew they spoke, it was Aramaic. Others were the pilgrims who had come from all over the Diaspora, and their language was Greek. They heard the Scriptures read in the synagogue in Hebrew, but then the rabbi had to interpret the Scriptures into Greek so they could understand them. And he would use the Septuagint, which is the Orthodox bible, to do that.

And so what happened was that as the widows and the orphans and the women who had dedicated themselves to being virgins and serving the church, and those who had chosen to follow the myrrh bearing women were to receive food from the donations made by those who had money with them. And it was kind of rough at first because you didn’t go on a trip and bring all your money with you. People had to, as we know from the Acts of the Apostles, send back home and sell their houses and their land and when the money came in they would distribute it. The women who spoke Aramaic got the attention of the apostles. The women who spoke Greek found it harder to get their attention. So it turned out that these Greek speaking women were being ignored in the distribution of the handouts every day, of the food and of the money for the needs of their families. And the word came to the Apostles, “Can’t you guys do something about this?” The apostles said, “Do you want us to stop spreading the gospel and become waiters? Choose seven men: godly men, righteous men, men who you approve of, and we will give them a service.” And so the chose seven, and it’s interesting that all seven of these have Greek names. And they became the first order of priesthood in the Church established by the apostles: the order of deacon, diakonos – dia, “around;” oikos “the house” Household servants of the house of God. They became Levites of the new covenant. Now we’re going to have on the 12th of July, on that Sunday, another deacon ordained here. Fr. John’s trying to find out about cuz he wants to snatch him for over at St. Herman’s, so I’m telling you very little about it. But we’re going to have Michael Tarris ordained, and he is only going to be a deacon for a short time because Michael has made the commitment, the decision to become a heiromonk, to become a monastic in the church, and so he’ll be ordained to the priesthood as soon as he’s ripe enough. We’ll knock on his head and if it sounds like the seeds are rattling around in here, then the bishop will come back and make him a priest. But you see, he’s going to be ordained to this diaconate, and it is not an inferior order. It is the first order of priesthood in the church. It is the first order established by the apostles, because service to the body of Christ, by the body of Christ, for the body of Christ, is the first commandment of the new covenant: “In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me.” So the deacon’s job is to look after the welfare of the community and its physical needs, and the maintenance of the temple and the altar in their physical needs.

They have to help them another order, probably one the deacons suggested, called subdeacons. These are guys who are kind of deacons, or almost deacons, or to put it a little more frankly, the work under the deacons. And their job is to help the deacons to polish the holy chalice, they can take things of the proskomedia table – they can do things that are reserved for ordained clergy even though they are not themselves totally ordained.

And the deacons were set apart in the church and their job was to support the bishop. An early commentator likens the bishop to God the Father who rules the diocese, and the deacons to Jesus Christ, because like our Lord they go about doing good. So we’re going to have three deacons here. And someday, when Anthony finishes his work, we may have four – but we won’t because by that time Michael will be a priest. Butyou can’t have too many deacons as long as they’re doing their job, because their job is to serve, their job is to remind us that Jesus Christ, the night that He was betrayed, took off His clean outer garments, wrapped a towel around Himself, and washed the filthy feet of His disciples and He said, “If I do this, so ought you to.” And He said, “He who would be greatest among you should be the servant of all.”

Now, later, as the Church spread, it started to exist in other cities. And the apostles appointed in those cities men who were to oversea the work in those cities, and they became bishops. Bishop is episcopos – that is overseer. So at that point, you had apostles who traveled around, you had deacons who did the service of the apostles, and you had bishops who took the place of the apostles in that city but their job was not to travel around, it was to stay put. And that’s why they’re not called apostles. Some of the apostles became bishops, some of the bishops were sent to become apostles, but you weren’t just necessarily both an apostle and a bishop. Peter was apostle to Rome. Peter was bishop of Antioch. He was never bishop of Rome, in spite of what the Pope says. He’s not even on their list of bishops of Rome.

And by this time the Church was developing, and the bishops needed men to advise them – they needed teachers and co-rulers of the household of God. So they chose men and these men were called presbyteros, that is to say, “elders,” and they would sit on the right side, and the left side of the bishops as he ruled in the local church, and before him would stand the deacons, ready to do his work. And in time, when there got to be more than one church in a town, the Church decided that for the sake of unity, there should be only one bishop in every big city, but that the bishops could lay hands on the presbyteros, the elders, and make them priests also. Up to that point, the office of priest had been given to the bishop only: only he presided at the liturgy, only he presided at baptism. So we priests have two orders, fused together: we are presbyteroi – elders of the church – which is why the cannons say you shouldn’t be ordained a priest till you’re thirty, and we are also erei – that is we share by delegation in all of the bishop’s power sacramentally except that of ordination. We have been given that by the bishop as a gift to us, as a designation to us, but it is not something we possess in our own right. We can’t go and set up our own church somewhere and become our own boss, we can only serve because we’re under the bishop.

And so you see that every rank of service in the church is a rank based on service: that it is from the people that all the orders arise, it is by the declaration “Axios! He is worthy” by the people that orders can be conferred, and that the whole body of Christ is not some kind of terrorist monarchy in which some guy at the top sends down commandments and orders which then his cronies, his capos enforce, and that his soldiers impose, like the mafia. But the church is a pyramid in which power rises upward, and anyone in the church who pretends that they have absolute authority over anyone else is abusing the body of Christ. For the Lord said, “It is the princes of the gentiles who exercise authority over them, who boss them around.” Everything must be by request, by example, by plea, by suggestion, and it must be given out of love, freely, never taxed, never assessed, never commanded.

So today we celebrate service: Service of the myrrh bearing women with Josehp and Nicodemus, service of witness at the cross, and of burial and, of coming at the rising of the sun to find the tomb empty. We celebrate the service of the apostles and their servants the deacons whom the established to be ministers to the body of Christ, or especially to the house of God, to the temple of the Lord – to preserve it’s decorum, to cleanse it, and to minister at it’s altar – and by extension, to the bishops and priests whose labors became necessary as the spread of the body of Christ occurred. And each one of us has to commit of ourselves – himself and herself – to continue this witness. And as an example of this, we’re given finally Stephen, the first chosen of the deacons, who, as soon as he finished his work distributing the wealth of the church to the widows and orphans, turned around and went out and started preaching and got himself martyred. And so to this first deacon, is given three titles. When I take the particle, I say, “For the holy apostle, the holy protodeacon, the holy protomartyr, Stephen.” For he was first among the deacons, first among the martyrs, and by going forth and preaching, he became worthy of being called an apostle. So through the risen Lord may we feel ourselves also called to be apostles, to be deacons, to be ministers to the body of Christ.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Christ is risen!
Indeed, He is risen!

Friday, July 17, 2009

Palm Sunday

Finally brethren, what sort of things are true, what sort of things are good, what sort of things are just, what sort of things are pure, what sort of things are lovely, what sort of things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

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

Come on up kids. Everybody gets to come up, little and big together, young and old, rich and poor.

This is the feast of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. This is the feast when we carry branches of palms of trees in our hands and holy Apostle Paul tells us today that we should thing about things that are pure, things that are lovely, things that are true. Kids, there are two groups of people in Jerusalem who you heard about today. And as Jesus came down the hillside riding on His little donkey – and do you know why He rode on a donkey? Because that’s how, when King David and his descendents ruled in Jerusalem, they didn’t ride into the city on a war horse because they were not men of blood, they were not supposed to be. They in humbly, meek and lowly, and mounted upon an ass’s colt. So Jesus was showing that He was the Son of David, as well as the Son of God.

When He rode into the city He rode down from Bethphage and camped on the hillside with thousands and thousands of people who had come for the Passover – maybe three million people were going to be in Jerusalem that next weekend. The city normally had half a million people living in it. Three million people would be there though. And of those three million people two and a half would be pilgrims. I don’t mean people in black dresses and black hats eating turkey, I mean people who had come for the feast. And as He came down that hillside the people who were camped there were people from Galilee where Jesus had spent most of His time. And in Galilee Jesus had worked many miracles, hadn’t He? He had given sight to the blind, He had raised up the dead children, and He had made paralytics to walk, He had given hearing and speech to the deaf and dumb. So the people knew about Him, and they started saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” and they took down palms, which are a sign of victory. Palms stand for victory, okay? And they waved them and they said, “Hosanna! Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord, the God of Israel.” And a lot of the people in the city who didn’t know who Jesus was heard everybody else saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” and they started saying it. “Hosanna in the highest! The Messiah’s come.” In other words, because the people who knew Jesus were enthusiastic, because they were calling out that Jesus was the Son of David, other people believed, ok? And some people said to them, “Here’s Lazarus! Did you know that yesterday Lazarus was in the tomb? He’d been dead four days. His body had started to stink and Jesus called his soul back to his body, He called him up out of Hades and He made him to live again.”

Now, the lesson from this is that if you’re a witness to Jesus, if you tell other people that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the Son of David, because you know it, then they will believe too, won’t they? So if you be a believer in Jesus, if you behave as a believer, if you think upon good things, pure things, holy things, beautiful things, and you keep out of your mind ugly, dirty, nasty thoughts, if you close your mind to the icons the devil wants to put in there – icons of ugliness, and of sin, of hatred and of violence – and only meditate, only think about, good thoughts – the things Jesus has done for you – then you will be able to bring other people to Jesus.

Now in the city there was another group of people. These people also didn’t know about Jesus. They were Jews just like the Jews on the hillside. The difference was in the city the priests and the Pharisees said to the people, “This man is a big sinner. He’s a liar. He’s a fake. We need to kill him.” And so, one, two, three, four, five days later these other people who didn’t know Jesus either, instead of saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” would be crying out, “Away with Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him!” And also saying, “We don’t have God as our King. We have no king but Caesar,” and then even cursing their own children by saying, “His blood be on us and on our children!” because evil men told them evil things, and evil lies and evil images – injustice, ugliness, anger – those things filled their hearts, the hearts of the men who talked to them, and they spread their lies and their hatred to that crowd. And you know, there may even have been some people there on Holy Friday saying, “Away with Him! Crucify Him!” who on Palm Sunday were saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” because you know there’s lots of people – not just kids – who are subject to – do you know what peer pressure is? Can anyone tell me what peer pressure is? You don’t want to do something bad, but your friends say to you what? Yes. Say it louder… (child answers) “Do it! We’re all doing it! Everybody’s doing that bad thing, so you can do it too.” And so those people were listening to whatever group they were with, and they changed from being people proclaiming Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, to calling for His blood, because they didn’t have minds of their own, because their hearts and minds were not filled with beauty, with justice, righteousness, holiness, and purity. They were filled with ugliness, injustice, hate, bitterness, and anger, right?

Now today, I hope that all of you – every one of you, those who are listening closely and those who are playing with animals – that all of you will be telling the world that Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of David, and bringing people to believe in Him, because there’s a big war going on, boys and girls. A big war. A war between God and His angels and truth, and justice, and holiness, and beauty; and the Devil and his demons and lies, and in justice, and bitterness, and anger. Who will win the war? God will win. The devil is just a punk. He’s just a creature of God who turned on his loving Creator. But that doesn’t mean the Devil won’t do a lot of damage before he’s through. This is what Jesus says about when he comes back again. He says, “The Son of Man shall surely return, but will He find faith upon earth when He cometh?” In other words, Jesus said there’s a chance that when He comes back again that no one living at that time will be a believer. That the Church will be trampled into the dust. That the only saints will be the ones buried in the ground. That there’ll be no liturgy, to priest, no bishop, no icons, no prayer, no temples. It is possible that on earth the devil can bring faith to an end. But there are soldiers on earth fighting to keep truth, and justice, and holiness, and beauty alive, to keep faith in Jesus Christ growing. And who are those soldiers? Any of them here? Raise your hand if you’re one of them? Yes, you raise your hand too. Because you were enlisted when you were signed with the sign of the corss in Holy Baptism as a soldier of Jesus Christ. You are part of His army, and your job is to fight against the demons, not with swords, or machine guns, or blasters or even lasers, but to fight against evil with prayer, with love, with thoughts of – lets say it one more time – beauty, and justice, and truth, and goodness, and love, right? Right Vladimir? Do you know what Vladimir means? Ruler of the world. That means that your name means Jesus.

Now carry your palms proudly. When you hold them up you proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God.