August 2, 2009 - Feeding of the five thousand

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

You know, it’s easy for clergy, and even lay people to complain about how often the same events seem to come up in the readings of the Church. Bishop Benjamin mentioned how the herd of swine that ran downhill and drowned in the sea appears three times, and suggested that we have a bacon Sunday, a ham Sunday, and a sausage Sunday. And what he was reflecting was that it seems, on a superficial basis, hard to say something original over and over again. But this particular gospel today outdoes the herd of swine in how often it appears. It’s the story of the feeding of the five thousand, and the reason why it appears so frequently is because it is included in all four of the gospels. It is considered one of the most important events in Jesus’ ministry, and in fact there are two feedings that occur in St. Luke’s gospel: one of the five thousand, and one of the four thousand. So five times, we have accounts of Jesus seeing the multitude, having compassion on the, having his disciples seek out what food is there for the crowd didn’t come planning to stay for supper, they didn’t know that they were going to be enthralled, that they were going to be staying there that long; discovering a small number of loaves of bread of cheap grain – barley – and a few fish – and these fish were not trout, or salmon, or bass, they were… What does it say at the beginning of Partly Cloudy With a Chance for Meatballs? It says, “All the people could afford was sardines, because sardines are nasty.” They were sardines. They weren’t really, they were small fish though. Little fish that are what’s called “savories.” They were little fish that you took your knife and you spread them on your hard barley loaf so that you could choke it down. Little fish that were soaked in olive oil. And then Jesus took these and blessed them, and everyone was fed, and an amount of food was gathered back together that surpassed by far that with which He had begun.

This is one of the richest events in our Lord’s ministry. There are so many details to give ear toward. There are so many consequences, theologically and mystically, that follow it. And so many types that lead up to it, that it does lend itself to dozens of sermons. I’m not going to preach dozens of sermons today, but I am going to talk about this feeding of the five thousand and its purpose for us. What it was meant to show, besides an act of compassion for starving people.

Long, long before our Lord appeared in Palestine, His ancestor David, the one who had been chosen by God and who had been anointed by the prophet of God Samuel to replace Saul as king, anointed as a little child, who had been brought up in Saul’s court and toward whom Saul had developed a great jealousy. David fled. He fled form Saul’s camp after having had Saul attempt, on several occasions, to kill him of have him assassinated. He fled into the hill country with a few of his loyal soldiers, and he came to Shiloh, where the arch of the covenant was kept in its tabernacle. And he came to the priest Abiathar, there, who was the high priest of Israel at that time, and David and his starving little band of loyalists, those who for several years would protect and support him as he waited for God’s hand to place him on the throne for which he had been destined. They approached Abiathar and asked for food, but there was nothing there at the tabernacle except the twelve loaves of Show Bread which were placed on a table inside the tent and were placed there as signs of the twelve tribes of Israel. Every Sunday, new loaves of bread would be baked, and the twelve heavy crusted loaves would be placed in three rows of four on the top of the table to represent Israel’s life. And then, on the Sabbath, the day on which it was not lawful to make anything by lighting a fire or preparing food, on the Sabbath the priests would take the twelve loaves and that would suffice for their supper for that day. It would be their nourishment. They would eat the loaves, and on the next day, Sunday, they would be renewed; they would be replaced. And David was far from being a priest after the order of Aaron or of the ancient covenate. He was not a Jewish priest. He was from the tribe of Judah. And David approached Abiathar and said, “Give us to eat,” and Abiathar, knowing that this was a command from God and not from man, indicated that he had no food he could give away. And David said, “Of whatever loaves you have, give me five to eat.” And so Abiathar broke the commandments as they were generally interpreted, as Moses had given them, and he entered into the Holy Place, into the tent, and took David with him, and he gave into the hands of David five of the twelve loaves of Show Bread. And David ate and he gave to his disciples to eat as well, to his followers, and thus his life was sustained, and he was delivered out of the hand of Saul and became king of Israel, and the ancestor in the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And so, it was shown, by anticipation, that God with five loaves would nourish the world. Our Lord took these five barley loaves and two small fishes, which, we’re told, were all proffered by one little boy whose mother had the foresight to pack his lunch, and that this little boy eagerly and joyfully shared what little he had with those there. The disciples, meanwhile, asked, “What are these among so many?” Now, the five loaves represent the food that had already been given to Israel – not only the five loaves with which David and his men were nourished, but the five scrolls that constitute the Jewish Torah, the law of the Old Covenant. They were nourishment through the fall of man as these loaves were to be nourishment to there bodies. To this day, in the divine liturgy, when the priest prepares the gifts, he takes five loaves – there are others there – but five loaves set apart for the removal of particles to be placed on the discus and offered as the divine gifts. The five loaves represented the Jewish torah, and the five fish represented life that comes from water. If we descend into the catacombs of Rome today and look at the ancient sketches drawn on the walls of the burial cave where Christians gathered for their liturgies, or where they buried there dead, we will see this motif in at least three different forms: a basket, or a stack of five loaves of bread, and a fish on either side. Or in another case, a large fish swimming, on his head is a basket and on the basket are five loaves of bread, and the fish is looking back, and he is making certain that the smaller fish are all following him – he’s leading them into the kingdom of heaven. Of this Tertullian says, “fish acquire their life from water, and we Christians, born again of holy baptism acquire our life through water. And so,” he says, “we spiritually are fish. And Christ is our great fish, the fish who leads us into the kingdom.” And our Lord, having blessed and broken these loaves, prefigured the Divine Liturgy, for the loaves were distributed and He had the people sit down on the grass in groups of hundreds, so that they represented Israel in the desert, camped around the tabernacle. When the Israelites would come at night to the place where they were going to stay, they would set up their tents, and they would camp in groups around the tent which was in the middle. The tent would then be set up, in the morning it would be taken down, the Ark would be taken up, and they would sing, “Let God arise! Let His enemies be scattered.” And the people would go forth again. So this camp, this gathering of people to hear our Lord speak, was a reiteration, it was a type, of Israel gathered in the desert. And the people gathered around Him who was, Himself, who is, the Ark and the Tabernacle of God among men. And food was distributed. And when the five thousand were fed, what remained was twelve baskets of bread fragments – thus revealing to us that by the twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of the new Israel would be nourished forever with the bread of heaven, with the flesh of Christ, with His holy Body. The twelve baskets represent the twelve apostles, who distributed the mystery of the liturgy from the rising to the setting of the sun. And it is said, in the divine liturgy, when the sacrifice is broken, when I take in my hand the lamb and I break it into pieces after it’s consecrated, “Broken and divided is the lamb of God, who is divided but not disunited, ever eaten, but never consumed, and giving life to them that partake thereof. And so, this mystical feeding in the wilderness was a type of the Divine Liturgy, by which the whole world would be fed.

Then again, our Lord performed this mystery. He performed it this time for four thousand people. And the four thousand represent the four corners of the world. They represent the gentiles, the people not of Israel who would as well be fed of the bread of heaven. And as he gathered together the seven loaves, these represented the seventy apostles who would carry the gospel of Christ to the farthest corners of the world. And the seven loaves, and a few small fishes, were distributed and from these they gathered together seven baskets of fragments representing the entire human race.

Now following this mysterious feeding of the people… And by the way, if you want to interpret this allegorically or symbolically, you make nonsense of the gospel. All four of the evangelists make it very clear that either they, or the people from whom they heard the story, were astonished, startled at a little bit of food feeding a great multitude and there being much, much left over. It was God simply multiplying food. But after Jesus has finished feeding the five thousand, and He and His disciples, as you’ll hear in the gospel during the time after Pascha, He and His apostles got up and went somewhere else. The crowd followed Him. They didn’t follow Him because they wanted their souls filled with the world of God, or their hearts fed with the divine grace, or because they wanted the spirit of God to dwell in them and Christ to nourish them. They didn’t even follow Him because they believed the words He had spoken. They followed Him because He had given them free food. They followed Him like a mob that will follow a demagogue. They followed Him like the masses that will go after any leader that tells them he is going to give them something for nothing. So when they came to our Lord, our Lord made it explicit to them in John’s gospel precisely what this all represented. He said, “In the wilderness when your fathers camped in tents around the tabernacle, every night the manna came down, and you gathered it together. And every day you ate the manna that you got the night before. Day by day, God fed you.” The Syriac version of the Lord’s prayer doesn’t say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It says, “Give us day by day the bread of tomorrow,” referring to the bread gathered at sunset with the expectation that it will nourish us through the following day. And if any of the Israelites had doubted, if they said, “Hey, I’d better put a little extra bread under my bed because who knows what God’s going to do the next day,” when they took it out it had worms in it, because they had not trusted, and because it was the bread of tomorrow, the bread of each day. And when we pray, we pray not, “Give us next week 30 points increase in the Dow,” or, “Put back what we lost in our IRA.” We pray, “Give us day by day our daily bread. Give us this day the bread of tomorrow.”

“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they are dead,” He said. “But whoever eats this bread will live forever and the bread that I will give is my own flesh, which I will give for the life of the whole world.” And what did they say? You know what they said, I’ve told you before. “Yuck!” Either, “This man is very bad at making metaphors – we really don’t want to even think about eating human flesh or drinking blood,” or “What kind of a nut is He? Moses told us we can’t even eat meat with the blood in it, and now He’s saying we must drink His blood to have life in us.” And so they all asked Him again, “Hey, you know, we’ll listen to some more of this craziness if you’ll just give us the food now. Feed us now, then we’ll listen.” Jesus didn’t do it. He knew the crowd had come to make Him king. Anybody, any trickster, any phony philosopher, any purveyor of theories of human salvation by human hands, can promise people that they’ll feed their stomachs, and the mob will follow them. How often in history have ten thousands of people who one day were faithful Christians, thrown away their prayer books and their crosses to go follow after someone who promises land, bread, meat? What did they get? No land, less bread, and ceaseless warfare. Right? The crowd then said, “How can this men give us His flesh to eat?” And Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, lego humin.” That amen is how we end our prayers, you know that. “In truth, in truth, in very truth, I say unto you, my flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink, and unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you do not have life in you.” Brothers and sisters in Christ, the Lord was not speaking of gnawing on human cellular matter, or drinking plasma. He was speaking of our having His life inside of us, becoming one with His body by partaking of His body, of having His life inside of us by partaking of His blood. What did Moses teach when he told the Jews that they had to salt their meat so that all the blood was out of it? He said, “The life is in the blood.” And does that mean that blood somehow is cursed? No! It meant that God through Moses was teaching a lesson: That the life of God is in God’s blood, and that we are not nourished by the blood of animals – of bulls and of goats – but we are nourished by the life of God Himself, poured out through is precious wounds on the cross, by which He makes us to be branches of the vine which is Himself, His body, and to bear fruit through the nectar of His precious blood running through the branches of the vine.

As you leave today, maybe look up to the right, there’s a primitive Romanian icon done by a peasant at a time when the Turks didn’t allow people in that part of the world to write icons. You’ll see that it shows Jesus, and Jesus is sitting, and He is taking from His side a grip on a grape vine that is coming from the wound the spear made on the cross. And with the other hand, He is squeezing into a cup the juice of a bunch of grapes, and the cup is the Holy Chalice. He is showing us thereby mystically, that it is from the life that flows from His side that we are made one with Him. He said, “I am the vine, you are the branches, and it is My Father’s will that you bear fruit. Every branch that beareth not fruit is cut off from the vine and burned. And every branch that bears fruit, it is pruned that it may bear more fruit.”

So you see, brothers and sisters in Christ, this event, this feeding of the five thousand, is not just a story that we tell over and over again, on four Sundays during the year. It is a central theme of our salvation, our participation continually in the life of God. It is a sign of the mystery we are about to partake in, whereby God, not with His dead flesh and lifeless blood, but with His living flesh, and with the life that is contained in His blood, will make us to have life in our cells.

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

August 1, 2009

This body of Christ has become for us our reentry, our restoration, into the joyous paradise that Adam and Eve lost because of their compound rebellion against God. First, possessing the light, being able to know the truth, having it implanted in their hearts by nature, being themselves vessels of the uncreated light, they chose to disobey God. They chose to place their own passions above God’s desire for them. They chose to have what they discerned to be knowledge, that is to say to have laid upon them the burden of discerning good and evil, rather than allowing God to simply pour into their hearts the knowledge of what was good. And then, having thus rebelled, they tasted of the fruit. Their second rebellion was in this: that rather than coming to God and saying, “Oh Father, creator. We know that we have sinned against you. We know that before this apostasy we had your very voice proclaiming in our hearts what we ought to do, and to think, and to say, but now we have become both death and dumb concerning righteousness, and blind concerning your glory. For we see ourselves as ugly, and as broken clumps of clay rather than as beautiful lamps emitting the uncreated light of your divinity. Please forgive us. Please accept us back. In so far as it is possible, restore us. But no, they didn’t do this. Seeing that they had apostatized and abandoned their own good, the rather justified themselves. Was it not true that the serpent said to them, “Ye would be as God, knowing good and evil?” Well, now they knew good and evil, and they did evil. Was it not true that the serpent who had tempted them was created by God? Was it not then God’s fault that they had been tempted? Was not the woman taken from the side of the man by God’s command, and therefore was not the man justified in that it was the woman whom God created who tempted him? So each of them, Adam and Eve, in their own heart devised a scheme by which they could blame it on someone else. It is God’s fault that I have sinned. It is God’s fault that I am blind spiritually. It is God’s fault that I am deaf and cannot hear the gracious words. It is God’s fault that I am dumb and cannot speak the gospel of righteousness and salvation.

And they went and sought to hide themselves from Him, as a teenage girl hides herself from the face her former friend whom she has slandered, or as a boy hides himself from the face of his comrade of whom he has told lies. They went and sought to remove themselves from before the face of God so they would not be ashamed and embarrassed. And they looked on each other as disgusting things, as things of reproach. They looked on their own flesh as though it were dung. And then when God approached them, they spouted out those stories, those justifications that they had contrived. “The serpent whom thou didst make gave to me and I did eat.” “The woman who thou gavest me did give to me and I did eat.” It’s your fault God. It’s the fault of the creation you made. It’s the fault of your having made human beings man and woman. It’s somebody else’s fault. It’s not my fault. And because of this triple apostasy – having eaten, and then having hidden, and then having lied to themselves and repeated the lie to God – they were cast out of the Garden. And only then, when they stood before the closed gates of Eden with the seraph with the fiery sword turning all ways guarding its entrance, only then did Adam fall down and repent and Eve lament, bewailing their own apostasy and misfortune that had befallen them.

And with that repentance came to them the consolation that even though by the sweat of his brow man would eat his bread all the days of his life and feed his family with it, and his wife would have pain in child birth, and that the earth would not easily yield its produce but it would have to be forced from the earth with the blade of a plow, by the strain of the back, and that the serpents offspring would continue to strike the heel of man, was the promise that the woman’s seed would crush the head of the serpent. That someday the flaming sword would be withdrawn, the doors of paradise would again be opened, and that human beings would again be allowed to enter in.

Our Lord Jesus Christ came and he manifested in the world during His ministry the presence of the kingdom of God. When we pray in the liturgy, we say “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” We announce its presence. When Jesus preached He said, “The kingdom of heaven is here,” but He taught us when we pray to say, “May Thy kingdom come,” because the kingdom is come in its potential, but not in its fulfillment, not in its fullness. But we experience the kingdom now. And so, our Lord performed miracles that began to undo on the physical plane the curse that had fallen on humanity as a result of the triple apostasy of Adam and Eve.

Today He opens the eyes of two blind men because they believed He could do it. And by opening their physical eyes, giving back to them sight, by touching their eyes and allowing them to see the natural light, He prefigures for them that through the waters of baptism will be available to them the uncreated light that illumines the eye of the heart. Today He unstops the ears and loosens the tongue of a man held deaf and dumb by demonic power, so that now he can hear the gracious words of the gospel, and having heard them, he may proclaim them. And He lays out for us the pattern of the vocation to which we are called – that first, through water our spiritual eyes are opened and the words of the message of salvation enter through the ear into the heart, and that then from the lips should come out a proclamation, not only of our faith, but of God’s good will toward the human race, making each one of us an evangelist, a preacher of salvation, of liberation, of righteousness, of restoration, and of truth.

But the lesson of the gospel today is solidified in the last line, because, you see, having stood and beheld, having seen these two blind men given their sight, having seen this possessed man unable to hear or to speak now able to hear and to speak, the Pharisees were confronted by a choice. God now meets you. God now stands before you. God now manifests his power. It has never been so; no, not ever before in Israel. And what do the Pharisees say? “In the name of demons, he casts out demons.” In other words, they uttered an absurdity. They repeated the lie of Adam and Eve who blamed their sin on God, and the serpent, and each other, by saying, “It is not by the power of God that he has released people from obsession to Satan, but by the power of Satan.” Now they, in their wisdom, in their learning, in their study of scripture, had to know in the depths of the heart that this itself was an absurdity – that Satan is not divided against himself. That hell does not cast out hell. That evil does not admit of opening the doors to good. And yet, why did they tell this lie? Because like Adam and Eve they were confronted with the wickedness of their own choices to have rejected Him as what the two blind men proclaimed Him to be: the Messiah, the Son of David. And having hardened their hearts and stopped their ears so that they should not hear, they had to have a lie to replace the truth. They could not say, “This is the Son of God. This is the King of Israel,” so they said, “He is a magician who casts out devils by the power of the devil.”

And you know, this is not a story, brothers and sisters, that is just contained in the gospel. If you look into the commentaries, to the Talmud of the Jews, when it discusses Jesus it does not deny that He, who is called there “such and such a one,” it does not deny that He gave sight to the blind, or braced the paralytics, or made the bent over to stand up, or drove out demons, or caused the deaf and dumb to speak. No, it does not deny any of those miracles. Rather it says, repeating the lie of the Pharisees, that He did it by magic, by the power of Satan. So not even His enemies could deny the magnitude of His great, miraculous, manifestations of God’s unconquerable power, but from generation to generation they repeated to their children the lie that He had stole the name of God and by the power of the devil had performed these signs.

Now, we can understand the judgment of the Jews for this, and one doesn’t hear these stories much anymore although they’re still in the commentaries of the Talmud and so, observant Jews still know them. But we have to not cast the light on someone else and scapegoat them and blame them, but cast it back on ourselves and ask ourselves, “How often has God opened our blinded eyes, has He shown us the corruption, the twistedness of our way of life, of our thinking, or our objectives, of the direction in which we’re traveling, of the things for which we hope and desire; how often having had our eyes opened have we sought to shut them again, nay, even to have them blinded because we did not desire the illumination that compels action? How of often, having heard the words of the gospel proclaimed, having had our hearts tickled, as it were, by the power of the words of salvation, have then said, “Yes, but we can’t really live like that”? How often, having had our tongues loosed, having had the cord bound by demons of our tongues no longer bound, have we passed over the opportunity to bring another human being, either before the throne of God in prayer, because we didn’t like them or they deserved what was happening to them, or to say the gracious words of salvation and to bring them to the fullness of the Orthodox catholic faith and to salvation? And we wished that our tongues could again be tight, and our ears stopped, and the eyes of our hearts temporarily blinded, because, you see, it’s very, very difficult to live that kind of life.

I give you, in conclusion today, Jacob Nestiva, a Russian-American boy, half Aleut, half Russian, educated in the seminary of Russia, meant to be a priest in the Church in Eastern Siberia, who answered the call of God and returned to Alaska. And he preached to his own native people in Alaska, and he brought thousands to salvation. And then it occurred to him, that not very far from his village, were tens of thousands of Eskimos, and tens of thousands of Indians, people with whom his tribe had been at war for centuries, perhaps for millennia; people whom his people had regarded as not people at all, calling themselves Inuit – “real people” – and the other as something other than real people. It occurred to him that he had been sent, not just to preach to people he liked, people with a pretty face like him in is opinion, like his mother’s face, but people who looked different, who spoke with different accents or languages, who ate different foods, who had killed his grandfather, who had warred with his ancestors for generations. And he allowed the light of God to shine in his heart, hears ears to be unstopped, his tongue to be loosed, and he went and he sat with his interpreter in the midst of the camp of the Native American Indians, of his tribes mortal enemies, and he proclaimed the gracious words of salvation, and that day, that day alone, did he write something positive about himself in his journal. You know, every Russian priest kept a journal, and he wrote in it every day. He said, “I spoke to the people for eight hours. I made several thousand converts. I believe, by God’s grace, I did a good day’s work.”

That’s all that God asks of us is that at sundown, we can say, “Whether I liked what I was doing today or not, whether it was what I wanted to do or not, whether it was pleasant for me or not, whether it was difficult or easy for me, I believe by God’s grace, today I did a good day’s work.” This comes from an illumined heart, from an opened ear, from loosened tongue, from the grace of not only knowing Christ, but living in Him.

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

July 19, 2009

You know Bishop Tikhon of San Francisco, our last bishop, used to refrain from ever praising anyone because he’d say, “If I praise them, I take away their reward.” I was always annoyed by this because I always thought that people need to be encouraged, and they need to be strengthened in their good works by having it pointed out to them that they were doing things that were pleasing to God. But I understand what he meant, and that is that if the praise becomes the thing that one is working for, if the recognition becomes what one labors for, then that is the reward one receives and there is no other reward. If it is serving God that motivates, then if men praise us we will be a little bit embarrassed, but we will not turn our praise into the pay for the good works we’re doing.

What we’re being told today in the epistle reading is that everyone of us has been given by God special tools for the ministry of the body of Christ for building it up, and these tools vary as we get older. I stand sometimes, or sit around, feeling pity for myself because I used to be able to do all kinds of things: climb up ladders and carry squares of roofing on my back, and get down on my hands and knees and dig in the ground, and now my knees don’t bend and my back won’t carry those shingles anymore, and I feel as though somehow or the other I’m failing. But what it is is God is telling me, “That was your job then. There’s another job now.”

What I want to point out to you without turning you into self-worshipping pagans, is how you ought to really glorify God for the work he has done here recently. There’s a myth of Holy Transfiguration Cathedral. The myth may have come because I always pointed out our good points, and the myth is that somehow or the other, like a deus ex machine, like a divinity out of a machine, Fr. Joe appeared here and things God better. Well that wasn’t the whole story. The first picnic that we had here I enjoyed. I got to meet a whole lot of people. By the third picnic I was praying that it would start to rain about four o’clock so that I could get out of there. It was just a big coffee hour, done outside, and just before it was time to clean up, everybody would get in their cars and go home. And so, it ended up with the Cahenzli kids, and my kids, and a couple other of the children, carrying tables and carrying chairs for an hour and a half after we got through, and I would say to myself, “Why couldn’t we have just done this in the hall and saved all this work?”

As time went on, it was not always clear that everyone here who worked for the church was doing it for God. People would do something wonderful, and meritorious, something that really built up the church or that helped strengthen the community, and then they’d turn around and say to me, “Why doesn’t anyone else do anything?” As soon as they said that, they took away from themselves their reward because they were judging themselves to somehow be righteous because of what they should have been doing out of love. But just recently, and I don’t want to put the idea in your hear or open it up to the devil for you to then boast about it because then you’ll become arrogant and it will become your sin. Just recently our people have become joyful in their service. They have stopped complaining for the most part, and when they do complain, they get over it very fast. Last night I had people come to me. They said, “We sold everything in our booth. Can we go out tonight and buy more food and cook some more?” Can you imagine that? What would have happened ten years ago? People would have said, “Hup. Sold all my stuff. Won’t see me tomorrow.” But people received joy from what they were doing. They received joy because they could see that that the labors they were undertaking were redounding to good. We can now understand how our transformation, which has taken decades, has transformed the community around us. How this is now a low crime area. How the people surrounding us have gone from being poverty to being middle class people – not that we kicked out the poor people and brought in better earners, but that the whole community life has been regenerated in a real way. We understand those things.

Of course, all it takes is for someone to come over from ** and tag something and then we’re all back to where we started right. We’re all pessimistic again. But now we’ve got people down in Globeville who have learned from our church. There’s a guy that drives around, marks on a sheet of paper whenever he sees graffiti, goes home an gets the paint and covers it up. It’s not worth it for these gang bangers to come into our neighborhood any longer and to mark our walls because it’s not going to last until sundown, and if it does it will be gone by the next day.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we have given joy to the people around us. We have given them encouragement. We have taught them that laws can be enforced, that codes can be carried out, that the requirements of statutes do not just apply to lighter skinned people living in Cherry Creek. We’ve also taught them that they can approach power, political power, and request with dignity and intelligence what it should be their right to have, and get it. That the answer to everything is not to form a group of guerilla soldiers and go out and fight a revolution. That the answer is to use their human dignity to access the wheels of power, and to gain for themselves what they should always have had.

And our community here, it’s such a wonderful thing to have people come to me from a half dozen parishes, people who were here yesterday, clergy and laity, saying, “When we have an event, we work and work and work. We forget about church. We just work on the festival, and then we all go in there and we get as much money out of people as we can, and we’re all tired and we’re all angry when we’re through. But your people, they said, they have a good time while they’re doing it. They enjoy it. And you don’t gouge people when you offer them something for sale. You give them value. Why can’t we do this?” Well, they can. But we’re not going to lecture them and tell them that. We’re going to let them see how we do it and let them copy that.

What I’m saying to you today, on this Sunday of the Fathers of the First Six Councils, is that if the Holy Spirit dwells in us… but not just as individuals. We’re not a bunch of protestants who take our Lord Jesus, our personal savior, and our little deposit of Holy Spirit and go off in our little corner and boast about our salvation. We are a body, a community. And the Spirit dwells in us, as a people, the same way He dwells in us as individuals. If we allow our preaching to be a cause of our being caught up in ecstasy about our rhetorical skills, if we allow our good works to be a cause for us to be arrogant and proud, if we allow our charity be something where we go around and judge ourselves better than others, we make a lie of all this. But as long as we are laboring for the building up of the body, whether it’s our family which is a microcosm of the church, our parish which is our home away from home, the whole Church in America, or the universal Orthodox church as we contribute to it through IOCC and OCMC, and other charities, when we build up the church on any basis where two or three or two million or three million are gathered and laboring in the name of Christ, then we become a spirit filled community. And when the Holy Spirit is in us, and working in us, unless we turn our eyes back to that ____ that once had enthroned itself in our hearts, as long as we keep our eyes on the author and finisher of our faith, we can accomplish miracles beyond the imagination of those who even have seen the marvelous things that the Lord has done in our sight.

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

July 5, 2009 - Ss. Athanasius and Sergius

St. Paul tells the Romans that he is speaking to them in an allegorical sense because they are weak people, but he’s speaking to them of freedom and of slavery. He tells them that before they found Christ, they were slaves to their passions. They were slaves to the elemental spirits of the world. They were slaves to the earth from which they were taken. He tells them that before they found Christ, they were wholly owned by their own unbridled lusts. And he says to them, “These things that dragged you to and fro, that tormented you, what profit, what fruit did you have? In what way did you benefit by them? You experienced temporary satisfactions of earthly passions, which by the law of diminishing return then demanded greater and greater needs for physical satisfaction. You received honor which only led to the desire for more honor. You understood the meaning that power corrupts, and that greater power corrupts greatly, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Whatever it was you possessed in your own name, it was not your servant, it was your master. It was something that controlled, that owned, that manipulated, that possessed, and that corrupted you.” But he said, “Now, in a human sense of speaking, you have become slaves to Jesus Christ.”

We in our culture of freedoms and rights, and especially in the post-slavery era of Western civilization – which was never a thing that Western civilization practiced until it was taught to them by the Muselman – we now bridle at the word slavery. We’re shocked by that word. “What about my freedom?” Well, indeed, brothers and sisters, the slavery that are under to God is a voluntary slavery. It is a slavery from which any day we can choose to be released. We can return to the corruption of the flesh, to the freedom of immorality, which is no freedom at all but is itself slavery to matter and passions.

But what does it mean, then, to be a slave to righteousness? To be a slave to anything means to be owned by it, so to be a slave of righteousness means to be owned by righteousness. To be a slave to God means to belong to God. And what does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to be a person bound for eternal life in the kingdom of heaven, but to have subjected ourselves to slavery to righteousness, having voluntarily sold ourselves not to the passions and lusts of the flesh, but having delivered ourselves from that earthly nature which held our flesh and spirit captive, and now consigned our souls to the Spirit of God, to the Spirit of liberty? We now possess the freedom to be truly human beings.

Two saints are celebrated today. Both of these men were men who sought to be slaves to righteousness. They are both men who handed their lives over to God, but who had an idea what God was going to do with their lives. One of them is St. Athanasius of Athos, a young man whose parents died at an early age and who was raised by a pious nun, an aunt. Being brought up in her presence, he did nothing but imitate her life of prayer, and fasting, and self denial. The other was St. Sergius of Radonezh, who from his infancy showed a great proclivity to serve and to love God and to suffer for his sake. Both of these men wanted one then. What they wanted – and it was a righteous desire – was to give up everything that you think you want. To give up possessions, to give up security, to give up power, to give up gregariousness and being surrounded by friends, to give up reputation. They wanted ultimately to disappear into the desert somewhere, whether it was the far side of Mt. Athos, or the woods of Muskovy, and to never be seen again. To live there, to pray, to communicate God through His angels, through His saints, through nature, until only their bones were left there and their souls were reunited to Him.

But since both of these men made themselves slaves to God, to righteousness, and not to their own will, God made of each of them something other than what he wanted to be. St. Athanasius, going to the far side of Athos and making his little hut in a place that was remote and deserted, the most inhospitable place, found himself gathering disciples. People who came to be taught by him, to be instructed by him, to simply be in his presence. And, to each man, he taught the art of living as a hermit. But they’d gather together and offer the liturgies, and finally built a catholicon, and it was in the completion of this catholicon that St. Athanasius gave his soul over to God. We are told that on the day when the dome was raised that he and his six disciples and his architect climbed up on the roof of the building, and as they stood there, there was a shaking and the building fell, and that the six, together with him, all died – the six immediately, and him a few hours later. But he had been called by God to end his life at that point, after having done something he never wanted to do, and that was to build a community and to erect a structure. So today we celebrate his soul fleeing away to God taking with him that little band of disciples. And we celebrate that great monastery which has been erected there on Mt. Athos for a thousand and some years in memory of his prayer there.

And St. Sergei wanted to flee into the woods. He wanted to be a person with God, to pray for the world, and to be in contact with it by his intercessions on behalf of the Christian people. Not to be esteemed by them. In fact, he found himself surrounded, surrounded by disciples, so that a bigger and bigger monastery arose there. And when finally a bishop prevailed up him to allow himself to be ordained – because there’s a saying among the really pious monks in history: “Flee from women and from bishops, because one wants to make you a husband and the other wants to make you a priest.” But giving in to the order, to the command, to the direction of his hierarch, telling him that his monks needed to have the divine services held on the holy days and on Sundays, he allowed himself to be ordained. And you know what happened immediately? His own brother, who had come to join him in the monastery, then became jealous. As soon as he found that his brother was jealous, St. Sergei fled from the monastery, went back in the woods, and tried to regain his solitude. But it wasn’t what God wanted. He had not made himself a slave to Sergei’ pious desires, dreams, and delusions. He had made himself a slave to God and to righteousness, so he returned and forgave those who had envied him, only allowing himself to return on the condition that nothing be held against those who had been jealous of him and who had murmured about his elevation to the priesthood. In time, it was through his holy prayers and intercession, and his good advice, that the Russian land was saved from the Tartars, and ultimately probably from Islam. It was by his prayers that the faith was established in the Far North. You know, when you read the Psalms, it says, “We have heard of it in Mishach, we have found it in the field of Jaar.” Mishach is the far north. The word Muscovy comes from that Hebrew word. It means, “So far north that nobody should ever live there.” But the people had to flee there because they were being tormented by their enemies, their foes. They had to hide and find freedom in the woods. And to that state, grace was given through Sergei.

Two men today then, two men who having freed themselves from slavery to the passions and lusts, desires of the flesh and the delusions of the mind, then allowed themselves also to be freed from their own pious aspirations in this world, and instead accepted God’s will for themselves and became founders of great institutions. One of a monastery on Mt. Athos, and the other of the Holy Trinity of Lavra and in a very real sense, of the whole Muscovite church.

Through the prayers of these men and their examples may we also set ourselves free from slavery to the passions and lusts of the flesh, in which there is no profit, and become slaves of righteousness, for the wages, at the end of the day, that are paid into our hands by sin are a handful of dirt, a boxful of bones. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is everlasting life through Jesus Christ our Lord, to Him be glory forever and unto ages of ages. Amen

July 15, 2009 - St. Vladimir of Kiev

We know the legend of St. Vladimir, how it is recorded in the primitive narratives, the saga of old Russe. We are aware that he was one of a number of princes of the Nordic tribes that had come down the Dnieper River and settled in that valley, and who had performed the service of pacifying the raging Slavic communities along the riverbank and inland by imposing their tyranny over the local tyranny. We know that he, as a man, had two influences acting on him. One was the religion of his people, which was a variant of the Nordic religion, the worship of the god Perm who was the divinity of food, drink, and of human sacrifice. We also know that his grandmother, the wise Olga who had been herself a sovereign and ruler of one of the towns of the Russe confederation, had gone to Contantinople and embraced Orthodox Christianity, and had come back and had been quietly allowed by her husband, and then by her son, to practice her faith.

At a certain point in St. Vladimir’s life, the Spirit came upon him that told him that the way that his people lived, the way they behaved, was not befitting of true human beings. We underestimate the conversion of St. Vladimir if we think of it as simply a change in religious doctrine, or a change of opinion. It was a change entirely, of lifestyle. A change from a life totally dedicated to blood and acquisition of wealth, not even for the sake of enjoyment of the wealth, but its possession, for among the Vikings it was common to hide one’s treasure away in a cave, or to send it out to sea in a flaming ship at the time of one’s death. It was as important to keep it out of the hands of others as it was to have it in ones own hands. It was from a religion based on each man satisfying his own passions, to a faith that taught there were absolute laws of right and wrong, of good and evil, and that men had to convert. They need not only change their opinions, but they needed to change every aspect of their behavior.

Vladimir’s cousin, who was Prince Olaf of Denmark, had already embraced Christianity and was struggling with this metamorphosis from a man of blood, and passion, and violence, of fire and treasure, to a Christian soul. Vladimir was not going to simply follow the example of his grandmother or of his cousin. He was going to find for himself, and so with a spirit of inquiry, he sent out his agents. They encountered at that time the four main religious systems that were offered in that part of the world. They encountered Islam and we’re told, cynically sort of by the author of the primitive narrative, that the Moslem’s hesitation to drink alcohol or to drink pork was an impediment to them. It may have been a discouragement to them, but it was certainly the similarity between the Islamic lifestyle and that of the Nordic people from whom he descended that put him off. For it was not really changing anything, except what he called his deity to whom he sacrificed human beings, the mode by which he sacrificed them, and the orientation of his daily prayer.

And then his men confronted the Kashars who had newly converted to Judaism, and he found among them a people who admitted themselves that they had disappointed their God and were under a curse from Him; that they were exiles from their own land, and their desire was not so much for the kingdom of heaven as for the restoration of a monarch and the acquisition of access again to a city which they had once possessed. He thought of this as a pathetic, as a sad and tragic story. His agents confronted Roman Catholicism in the empire of the Francs. And they found it to be perfunctory, simple, and unedifying. By this time the low mass had become the norm. Worship was simply watching someone go through gestures, and mumble a few words, and occasionally utter out loud, “Sanctus, sanctus” or “ “ And added to this was the annoyance of the newly invented bellows organ. They reported back to Vladimir that there this contraption in the church that wheezed terribly and made a sound that distracted their minds and their hearts from prayer. Now this isn’t as bad as their thoughts about the Muslims or the adherents of Judaism, but it was enough to make them then go on and follow St. Olga’s footsteps to Constantinople, where the church of Agia Sophia, at the divine liturgy, hearing the angelic hymns proclaimed, maybe even some of them in the Slavonic that they understood that had been centuries earlier prepared for their conversion by St. Cyril Methodius, they were carried up into heaven itself, at least in the heart and in the mind and soul. They said, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, We only know God is among these people.” So missionaries came to Kiev and instructed the leading citizens, and mass baptism took place – probably some of it not entirely willingly. The truth of the legend is found in the account that on the day of his baptism Vladimir had all of the statues of the pagan gods thrown into the Dnieper river. This was questioned by historians, especially of the Soviet era, until with the use of sonar they were able to find all of these gods in the mud at the bottom of the river that had been thrown in that day.

God did not desire, however, that Vladimir should intellectually obtain, comprehend, and accept Orthodoxy as simply a preferable religion, as the one that seemed to offer the fewest downsides and the most upsides. So God allowed blindness to best Vladimir. If he were going to question his choice, this is certainly the event that would have led to it. He might even have said, “Perm has blinded me because I am turning away from offering human sacrifice, and pigs, and beer, and wine to him.” Instead, Vladimir quietly, passively, peacefully approached the waters of baptism, there declaring before his baptism, his Orthodox faith. And after emerging from the water, having his eyesight restored as it had been to holy Apostle Paul, giving thanks, he thanked God, not only the God who brought him from the darkness of idolatry to the light of the worship of the one true God and spared him from twisted and warped versions of ethical monotheism to the true gospel of Jesus Christ and the true faith of the Orthodox.

If we need, however, evidence of Vladimir’s sincere and total and perfect conversion which took the rest of his life to be completed, as it will each of us, we don’t simply find it in the fact that a lot of Russians became Orthodox. We find it in the lives of his two sons, born to him after his conversion to Christianity, Boris and Gleb, who not only did not desire the acquisition of wealth and power, prestige and glory in this life, but who, when presented with the possibility of having everything taken from them, knelt down piously and allowed themselves to be slain like lambs, understanding that their brother Sviatopolk, if he could acquire the throne and the crown in his own name and without opposition, while remaining a pagan, would not molest the young Christian church. But if they resisted, even if they were victorious, that great travail would befall the believers in every place controlled by those of the former pagan religion. And that if they failed, that the church and the spark of Christ’s faith would be stamped out to return only long in the future. So they became the first among the saints to achieve the title and honor of “Passion bearers.” Not martyrs – they were not killed for their faith – but sharers in the suffering of Christ who said, “Greater love hath no man than this: That he lay down his life for his friends.” So they are the crowning glory of St. Vladimir, canonized before he was canonized. When he was canonized it was originally under the title of Basil, his baptismal name, only later was his honorific name at birth, Vladimir, “Ruler of the world,” used not any longer as an appellation for him, but as an identification of him with the Pantocrator, the Lord whom he had chosen to serve throughout his life.

Through his prayers may the church be granted peace, unity, and tranquility, and may many from east and west, come and share in the fellowship of Orthodox belief, casting aside twisted faiths, heresies, and errors of old, to enter into the one fellowship with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.

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

Glory forever.

Memory Eternal

Fr. Joseph Hirsch passed away this evening after a two week struggle in the ICU. May his memory be eternal.

I am behind a few sermons, but will post those over the next few days.

June 21, 2009

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Our Lord Jesus Christ's first action after having been baptised in the waters of the Jordan and going into the desert and fasting and praying, was to create the first parish. He was gathering together the first congregation of Orthodox Christians. Rather, the first congregation of Orthodox catechumens, because these men were to spend the next three years being instructed by Him in the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, in the plan of salvation, in what it meant to be a disciple of the Son of God. At this point they are not called apostles yet. They are called disciples, those under the discipline or obedience of a master. Later, He would send them out two by two to the cities of Israel and they would become apostles. Finally, He would send them out to the ends of the earth. But for now, they are gathered together to be instructed, to be formed.

Today, we celebrate also as well, in the secular sense which certainly our Orthodox culture seeks to transfigure, the national day dedicated to fathers, and we also remember grandfathers and spiritual fathers on this day. And we're reminded that the head of a family ought, by right, to be a father. Not because he's the boss of the mother. The two of them stand equally under God. But because he's the one who is supposed to be the face of the family, the one who takes the hits, the one who displays the aggression. And also the one who... In the formation of a well balanced child, there are two things needed: One is conditional love that requires that one conform in order to receive. And there's the other, which is unconditional which doesn't have to be earned. The unconditional love is the mother love. It accepts the children and says, “You are mine. You came from my body. You will always be mine. There is nothing you can do that will make me deny you.” And the conditional love is the father saying, “You tow the line, or I'm not going to pay any attention to you. You do what's right, or you will not have my favor.” If you don't have mother love, you have a complex. You become insecure, and that's not good. But it you don't have father love, you become a psychopath, and you pray on society, and you abuse people, and you think only of yourself. So that's why both of these are needed.

As I was contemplating these things, I listened to a lecture that was given at St. Vladimir's seminary this week, that was broadcast, telecast, live on the computer. The lecture I noted was one that was given by Fr. Alexander Garklavs The chancellor of the OCA, whose grandfather, who adopted his father was archbishop John Garklavs who ordained me. And Fr. Alexander was talking about the great synod of the Russian Church that took place after the revolution had begun – actually, the revolution happened in the middle of it. And he mentioned this: That, eighty six bishops, ten years earlier when the council was supposed to be held because everything in Russia crept along like a cockroach with only two legs, went very slowly. And so ten years earlier when questionnaires had been sent to the bishops to ask them about life in their diocese, and there are thirteen volumes of these answers that had been collected, every bishop of sixty-eight diocese that responded said their biggest problem was the death of parish life in their diocese. That for about two hundred years, the parishes of the church within Russia had become sort of religious curio shops and supermarkets. The priest came into church. He waited for people to come to have molyemins said, or to have panahedas said. He served the sluzhbas, he served the scribes services, he collected trebi and he went home. There were exceptions to this, but by and large, the priesthood had become professionalized. The priests had stopped being in a real sense patushki to their families, they'd stopped being fathers. They had become practitioners of priest craft. They had become liturgizers.

All the bishops said, “We need to change this.” But where was the pattern going to come from? Well obviously from the scriptures. In the early church the Christians lived in one accord, they shared their goods when they needed to. They cared for one another. Widows and women who wished to live a celibate life were supported by the church, and in exchange they worked for the building up of the community. But what pattern could they look to in order to restore parish life in the great Russian Empire? They found two patterns. The first and most primitive form of this was that which was in existence in parts of the Ukraine, and in parts of Valencia and Bukovina, where the people lived under the rule of Catholic kings. In those countries, the Orthodox had to band together to defend themselves. They formed brotherhoods, and the brotherhoods had to build the churches. The churches weren't built by dukes and princes. There was no national government to build churches in those Catholic countries. In fact in most of them they couldn't even be built out of stone or brick. They had to be built out of wood so that if the local ruler got aggravated with you he could burn the church down. So in these places, the communities formed brotherhoods, sisterhoods. And these brotherhoods and sisterhoods cultivated family life within the parish. The parish began to take on, in these places, the nature of a community. It was no longer simply the sacred supermarket where you went to get your grace and then go home. It was the place where you came together to meet, to love, to care, to rejoice with those who rejoice, to weep with those who weep. That's why in a real sense every service that happens in this church, whether it's a funeral, or a wedding, or a baptism, even though it may be called a trebic service, a needs service, it's still a service of the entire church. Everyone should always be welcome to it, because they are things that happen in the family of God.

And then they found another iteration of this parish family idea. And that was that the people who had come to America, most of whom were from Ukrainian or Carpatha-Russyn backgrounds, and who had left Uniatism and had become Orthodox Christians again. These people had formed parishes complete with parish charters, with bylaws, with councils, with brotherhoods, with trustees who built churches and took care of them. And the priest, then, was a member of the community. He was not a dictator. He was not a petty over-groupen fuhrer. He was not a tyrant, nor was he the mystical wizard who had all the secrets, but the leader of worship for the people. And so, it turns out that just about the time of the Octoberist uprising, one of St. Tikhon's priests arrived late from America to participate in the great council. What he carried in his hand was the statutes of the churches in North America, the parish constitutions that directed that their ought to be staretzi, and that there ought to be trustees, and that together with this group of people, the priest was to work – not as their employee, but neither as their dictator – as their father. Not as Pope, but as patushka. To build up the body of Christ. To make it a family. And although it was never implemented as it was supposed to be, and even today has not been implemented in Russia, this American statute was adopted by the great council as the guiding statute of the reorganization of parishes throughout the Russian empire.

This means, brothers and sisters, that even though our American church was small – about eight thousand Russians, about seven thousand Ukranians, about six thousand Galizians, four thousand Romanians, and four thousand Bukovinians, about two thousand Arabs – and I'm not getting these figures right because I'm trying to remember them from the back of my mind – and, Tikhon added, 250 Estonians and Americans. He groups them together. Even though it was small, it had already started to give gifts back to the mother churches of Europe. The idea of how a church should be structured. But brothers and sisters, you must understand this: If a parish is as it's supposed to be – a family – that it has to function as a family. It means everyone in it taking their responsibility. It means that those who take greater responsibility not either boasting about it or feeling abused, but rejoicing in God that they are able to carry a heavier load. It means not shirking. It means knowing that if you don't go to work today there won't be bacon on the family table tonight, that being a parish family is different from having your name on the roles of a religious department store where Orthodox mysteries are dispensed. It means bearing another's burdens and thus fulfilling the whole law of Christ.

So there is an awful involved there. Some of you probably read that Andrew Jones died Friday. Eight years and six months his mother took care of him. His father suffered watching him. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week she cared for him. He had a breathing installed when he was three years old, and so for five years she had to every half hour of his entire life aspirate him, draw the fluid out of his lungs. She bore a dreadful burden, and she bore it like a hero. And what she did was, she perfected a saint. She took a little life that was given to her, a little life that, because of the lottery of genetics, that unfortunate thing that came into the world because of the fall of man, the good and bad genes and all that – which if you have good genes, or you think you do, then you become some kind of fascist and you want to look down on everybody else, and if you have a problem, you say, “Why did it happen to me?” It's the lottery of a fallen world. It's the way the roulette wheel falls out as the process of human procreation goes forward. She took this life from God, she brought it to the waters of baptism. The baby was immersed and given new life. He lay in his bed and never uttered a word. He received holy communion four, five times a year. He watched VeggieTales bible stories, and he had the ones he liked and the ones he didn't like. He had a lively life in his mind because his mother talked to him all the time, but no life at all in his mind. It was a prison, until God completed the work He had begun in a very short time. Having lived a short time, he accomplished a great time and God took him to Himself and now, sinless, he shines among the saints of heaven. And, if it were not out of our place to do so, because it's a canonical matter, we could say, “Holy child, St. Andrew, pray unto God for us.”

This is what a family does. And I've managed, because our church owns some graves that I wangled out of a relative that needed a tax deduction once, and because we've worked with a funeral home for a long time, and because the family was receiving some help from MedicAid, we only owe about $400 for the opening and the closing of the grave. I'm going to ask anybody who wants to to contribute to that, and you can have a part in this. But, the church has taken care of everything. We've done it because we're a family and because it's our job to do that as a family. And we have given to the world an ideal, and if we forget that ideal, we will have betrayed our patst, we will have betrayed St. Tikhon, St. Alexander Holovitsky, St. John Kcharov, the brave men who trod across this land, Sebastian Dabovich, and Bishop Rayfield, and founded the church, from shore to shore. You know, in1890, there were only two churches of the Russian Church in America. Now there is no Russian Church in America, canonically, there is only the Orthodox Church in America. With many parishes and many sister churches here.

What it all means though is that we have to understand that although the parish hall is not as important as the altar and the temple, that it is an extension of that, just as the family table in the house of an Orthodox husband and wife is an altar on which they, as priests of their household, offer sacrifices of sweat, and blood, and labor; to nourish each other, to nourish their children, and from which they give to the poor and for the support of the church, so that, gathering place there is our village. If all things were as our predecessors, the founders of this church, thought they were going to be, we would all be living in houses around here. Thank God we've got three people that have houses here. We'd all be living around here, and when the bells rang everyone would know somebody had died. And when services were going on, if the priest decided to start services a half hour early and rang the bell, you'd say, “Oh, Father got anxious,” like deacon John did this morning when they cut off the third hour. But we're not, we're scattered. And so there's no place for us to meet. It's not appropriate for us to socialize in the temple, is it? This is where we gather to work for God. This is the factory where we grind out grace, where our liturgy, our work for the people of God, is done. And that's the place where then we gather to share our love for one another, our community, our companionship, our fellowship; to mourn with those who mourn, to rejoice with those who rejoice, and to bear one anothers' burdens.

And so today, on this Fathers' Day, I, who am celebrating this for the twenty-fifth time – and it would be the twenty-sixth except I came after Fathers' Day in 1984 – this day here, I want to say to you that the vision we have here, brothers and sisters, is in a very really way the fruition of St. Tikhon's vision, of St. John Alexander's vision, of the vision of the great Sabor – the vision that was never realized in the Russian land but by God's grace may be someday – of a collection of families, of communities, of brotherhoods and sisterhoods gathered under the loving care and intelligent guidance of a patushka who is not on a power trip, to work out their salvation together for the triumph of the kingdom of God. What we have done is more than they imagined, for they imagined a community made up of Romanian, and Serbian, and Arab, and Russian, and Ukranian churches. We have created a community made up of Serbian, and Ukranian, and Russian, and Romanian, Bulgarian, Eritrean, Hispanic, African American, and just plain old Irish, and Scotch, and English Americans in one congregation, under one roof, at one altar, receiving grace from one chalice. We must never let that die. My fear is that when I fade off into the sunset, that someday somebody's going to have an idea that's going to turn this place into some kind of a rigid single nationality, ethnically exclusive, old-time, ghetto church. And that all that we have been able to accomplish will somehow or the other disappear. But you know, it's not my job to preserve it. It's not the dad's job to stay alive for 150 years to make sure his kids are good. It's his job to make sure they know what they're supposed to do so that when he's gone, they'll keep the work going.

So, to our Lord Jesus Christ, who made us one family, who tore down all the walls of dividing, who made of us from many nations one holy people acceptable to Him, a chosen generation, a royal and peculiar people, priestly before Him – to Him be glory and dominion and majesty, and may His blessing descend upon and abide with this congregation unto the consummation of the ages.

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

Glory forever!

June 9, 2009

At that time, the great multitude followed Jesus. He went up into a mountain with His disciples and began to speak to them. You understand that this feast of Pentecost that we celebrated on Sunday was for the Jews the day on which they celebrated the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai. As I said last Sunday, the Jews sojourned nine days after their departure from Egypt and came to Mt. Horeb, and there they waited beneath the mountain. While they waited there, like a mixed multitude of confused people, they partied, they worried, they became excited, and they created a God of Egypt to worship, and they sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play. They offered sacrifices both to Baal and to the Egyptian deities, while Moses on the mountain was praying for the forty days. At the end of the forty days, then God spoke to Moses and He wrote on the tablets of stone the commandment of the Old Law in ten words. And, as God addressed Moses, Moses brought these tablets down to the people, and discovering that they had sinned so grievously, the tablets were broken. It wasn't until later that they were restored.
But now our Lord Jesus Christ, who is God, goes up on the mountain, not like Moses to receive new commandments from heaven, but as the divine manifestation of the Holy Trinity to proclaim the law of the new covenant. And the law of the new covenant includes, but certainly is not confined by, “Thou shalt not... Thou shalt not...” This is prologemena, it's simply the preface of the story. This is a law of love. It says, “Blessed are they who imitate the life of the kingdom of heaven as I have given it to you, for they will receive the kingdom of heaven.” And there are, as we hear the beatitudes read, ten words here as well. But the final is, “Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” And then, an admonition: “Rejoice in that day and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.” The old covenant was sealed by circumcision with a flint knife in the flesh of male offspring. The new covenant is written in our hearts with the finger of God by the descent of His Spirit. So today we honor God, who on a mountain, gave us the law of the new covenant, and manifested it as a law not of fear, but a law of love.

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

June 7, 2009

When God began to create the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, when the Father had called into thought all the splendid orders of the eternal things and bodiless powers, when He had conceived the ranks of archangels and angels and had as well imagined and drafted on the slate of His divine mind all of the stars and the planets and the creatures who would walk upon the face of the earth and who would swim in the waters and fly above the earth, then power was given to the Son to call forth from nothingness into being all those things that the mind of God the Father had conceived and by the word of the Son, “Let there be light,” creation began. And at the same time, the spirit of God hovered, or as the Hebrew implies, brooded like a mother hen over her eggs, upon the face of the deep. It's called the Spirit of God. It's also called rhua elohim, the might wind, the breath of God. So we see from the very first seen, from the beginning of creation, the divine trinity which always existed outside of time and matter, which is timeless, acting in time to bring into being out of nothingness all things which were to be called by God, “very good.” And when God had created the eons of creation, the sixth day God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Thus God spoke in the plural. And He created man to walk upright.

The image of God is not to be understood as that males somehow imitate God by their appearance, but that the image of God is this: that we have a mind capable of holding thought, of self consciousness, of memory, of calculation, of planning. We have the body capable of carrying into being and sustaining the thoughts of the mind. And we have the spirit which resides in the noos, the noetic eye of the body, which we call the spiritual heart, which is illumined by the presence of the life of God dwelling in it. So, we human beings possess within ourselves a tiny icon of the divine trinity. But when human beings sinned, when they fell from grace, then they began to extinguish the flame of the spirit, to not live in the body by the soul, according to the spirit, but to live in the body by the soul, according to the flesh. So human beings were drawn down. Of the earth, earthy. They became owned by the passions which had been meant to give them joy, and they made idols of the senses which God had placed within them. And humans became no longer the perfect image of God, but humans became flesh, body, and soul. And thus it was that God said, having declared to Adam, “On that day in which you eat of that fruit, you will surely die. To the earth shall you return from which you were taken, for dust you are and unto dust shall you return.”

But God had not, as St. Basil eloquently reminds us in his liturgy, abandoned us to the end. But God sought to fan into flames, little by little, that spiritual light which illumined the heart of Adam and Eve when they were created. So God began to speak to human beings. He spoke to Abraham in the form of three angels. He came to Abraham and that text indicates that the one God was three persons, and that Abraham saw the eternal divine as if it were three men, for the text says again and again, “And God said to Abraham... and Abraham said to the men,” and “And the angels said to Abraham... and Abraham said to God.” So these three visitors represent the three persons of the divine trinity, and thus it is that as we look at the icon that represents the trinity, that's in our altar, we see the Father adorned in the gold of the divine monarchy, and the Son adorned in the red of human flesh covered over with the blue of divinity with which he clothed, and the holy spirit clothed in green, the color of life, to show us that the Father offers the Son blessings, and the Spirit imparts grace.

The obvious then, God spoke to Moses and gave Moses a special gift of spiritual power. Not that the Holy Spirit entered into and abode in Moses permanently, or the Moses received the grace which we received at chrismation. But God made in Moses' heart a comfortable dwelling place for his spirit, so that very often God spoke to Moses and Moses possessed the great wisdom that is called the gift of prophecy. And we heard last night that when Moses got to be old and he couldn't handle every job and ever issue himself, that God took part of that spirit from Moses – not that the Holy Spirit is quantifiable, or that it has to be less here to be more there, but that that special gift of the Spirit was diminished in Moses, and it was given to the seventy elders, even the two, the two who neglected their call, who did not go out to the tent but remained in the camp, received that spirit poured out on them so they began as well to prophesy. And from that time on, at sundry times and in diverse manners, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. The Holy Spirit's gift would come upon them; come upon Elijah and Elisha, upon Nathan, upon Samuel. And the Holy Spirit would lead them to say, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel.” And they would iterate the message God had given to His people. And as they uttered it the people would hear it, and sometimes the Spirit would overawe them and the people around would be caught up in the spirit of God. That same Spirit descended upon David, the priest king who was blessed to dance before the Ark of God. But it came and it left, it came and it left. It was a spiritual gift given as a corrective to the path of God's people as they wandered sometimes purposefully and sometimes mindlessly through history till the time that God would appear to them.

We see then that the Spirit sometimes uttered through the prophets messages of hope and joy, and other times threats of doom and punishment. Not that God had anger toward them, but that God's anger was revealed in the laws of nature itself which says that if you break God's law, you are going against the current and people who go against the current are hauled under by the undertow.

When the Israelites had returned from Babylon, having been given the revelation of the valley of dry bones and the knowledge of the resurrection of body, prophecy began gradually to fade away. The Spirit did not come upon men and motivate them to utter with ecstatic utterances the words that God had put in their hearts. But now men began to speak the words of God through apocalyptic writings which proclaimed God's writing through the whole world, and through prophetic writings of wisdom that answered the question, “How ought we to live?” So now it was no longer the Spirit guiding Israel alone, but the Spirit guiding individual Israelites. But there was no one who could say, “Thus says the Lord” for a long time. It got to be that when the Jews had a question they couldn't answer, they would say, “Well, let a prophet come. He'll tell us,” the same way we sometimes say, “When we all get to heaven, we'll know.” They didn't expect another prophet, but they received one.

John the Prophet, and Forerunner, and Baptist of our Lord Jesus Christ, upon whom the Spirit descended with power as he had not descended on anyone, even Moses and Elijah. And John, with mighty words, proclaimed, “Make straight the crooked places. Fill in the valleys. Knock down the mountains. Make a straight way for the Lord and His people. Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” And as people heard John, we're told by the Evangelist that not just a bunch of people, not five hundred or five thousand, but all of Judea, all of Samaria, all of Galilee came out to hear John and to be baptised by him in the Jordan, to make themselves ready for the coming of the messiah. Even Herod, who despised john's preaching because John condemned him for having married his brother's divorced wife, even Herod could not lay a hand on John for a long time. But he would call him into his chamber and have him stand before his throne and prophesy, and Herod would be moved with the desire to do good things, and he would do some good things, and then would fall back into dissolution, until finally in a drunken outrage he cried out to his young step-daughter-niece, that he would give her half of his kingdom or whatever she asked of him, and she demanded the head of John the baptist.

But before John was arrested by Herod, John was privileged to see the beginning of the new creation, for among those who came to him from Judea and Samaria and Galilee, was Christ Jesus Himself. And John, seeing Him come said, “I am not worthy even to bend down and to remove the shoes from your feet.” And Jesus said, “Suffer it to me now, to fulfill all things.” And John baptised our Lord in the waters of the Jordan. And as he baptised Him, the heavens were opened and he heard a voice accompanied with the descent of a visible dove, crying out, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” As God had prefigured with the dove and the olive branch at the time of Noah's flood, now God in the form of a dove descends upon Christ in the Jordan to bring about the new creation. The Father's voice, the dove descending, the Son, the new creation in the water. And John immediately began to diminish. He had said, “I will grow lesser, but He will grow greater.” For John, who, that day of our Lord's baptism and a few days later had pointed eagerly and said, “There is the Lamb of God. There is He who takes away the sins of the world,” now began to question, to doubt. He sent his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you really the one who is to come? Or is there another?” The Spirit becomes weaker in John because it rests entirely in Christ. The Church's gift of the Holy Spirit descends upon Christ, and Christ goes about proclaiming the gracious work of His Father, doing the will of His Father. And the night before He died, as those of you who were here on Thursday of Great and Holy Week hear every year, Jesus spoke of the Spirit: “I will send a Spirit to come to you. He will lead you into all truth. He will deliver you from all error. He will recall to your mind all my words.” So, the evening of the Lord's resurrection, imparted to His disciples again the spark of the spirit of inspiration and power, when he breathed on them and said, “Receive ye the Holy Spirit. Whosoever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven.”

The Spirit, nonetheless, although igniting their hearts did not enlighten their hearts, for Christ remained with them. And for forty days He recalled by His own voice all the words He had told them before, and enlightened them with many new words, instructing them concerning all of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, teaching them how the Church ought to be structured, and how it ought to worship, and how it ought to act. On the fortieth day, our Lord finally went to heaven, taking His body with Him to the right hand of the Father to be seated.

Israel had for ten days after the exodus, traveled to, as I told you last week, Mt. Sinai and then for forty days prayed at the foot of the mountain, and also committed sin while Moses was up on the mountain waiting for the Law. Jesus for forty days comes down from the mountain, and stands with his disciples and teaches them, and then departs and for ten days, the church awaits the Spirit. And lo, today, the Spirit is poured out, not poured out at sundry times and in diverse manners, not poured out measure for measure, bit by bit, token by token, prophecy by prophecy, message by message; but poured out like running water into the hearts of all the souls that embrace the faith of Christ. Poured out like precious oil into the lamp that is the noos, and the flame is struck, and the human heart again bursts back into flames, and God comes to dwell within His people.

And so, this feast of Pentecost is not.... You know there are people who see Easter as the feast when Jesus did the trick of rising from the dead, and Pentecost as the day He did the trick of sending down the tongues of fire. No, that's not it at all. Jesus rose from the dead to raise mankind, and He poured out His Spirit to deify mankind. So today we become one with God. God entered into creation now brings us into Himself. His Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts and enlightens us. We can quench the spirit, we can drown it, we can smother it; we can allow all the logosmoi, the thoughts that pass through our broken minds, to crowd it out like so much ….. or we can scrape away the crud. We can clean the wick of our soul. We can fan back to a flame that fire. And we can allow Christ to dwell in us fervently so that with all hope, and with all faith, and with all joy, we are able to say, “We with Him have overcome the world.” Today, brothers and sisters, is the day in which we obtained our place at the right hand of the Father. On Pascha we received resurrection from the dead. Today we receive enthronement with Christ, in heavenly places, to whom be glory and dominion, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Glory to Jesus Christ!

Glory Forever!

May 31, 2009

Our Lord spoke to the disciples and then He prayed, and He addressed His Father and He assumed for Himself a title that others had been hesitant to give to Him, and that was Christ, the Messiah. And He said that He, the Messiah, was one with the Father, and the Father, one with Him. This He witnessed, standing there, that the words might be established in the ears of the hearers, and that there could be no question in the future as to our Lord's humanity, or to His divinity.

St. Paul was on his way to Jerusalem where the Holy Spirit had revealed to him that he was going to be bound and sent in chains to Rome for trial. This was not a missionary journey any longer in the normal sense, although Paul preached even when he was in prison to the governors and to the jailors. It was quite a different thing. This was the beginning of his own road of sorrows, his own passion. And with eyes enlightened by the prophetic knowledge, and with the work of the Lord which had been spoken, he declared to those Ephesian elders that there would arise within the church those who for their own reasons would lead others astray; and that furthermore, there would enter into the church, those who appeared to be sheep but were in fact wolves in the clothing of sheep. This is not, by the way, simply an ironic statement, “wolve3s in the clothing of sheep,” for we know the hierarchs were vested with the omophorion, which in ancient times was made with the wool of a lamb, depicting innocence and also the way the good shepherds bore the lost sheep on their sheep on their shoulders. And yet, beneath the omophorion, at times, lurked the heart of a ravaging wolf.

So it was that the church began to spread and it confronted errors and it overcame them. The error that said we all had to be Jews first in order to be Christians. And then the error that said there was no moral law anymore because Christ had done away with the law. The Church said, “No, the moral law is still compelling, but the ritual laws of Judaism had been fulfilled.” And then the error that said that secret truth had been revealed to some of the disciples, and that those who had the gnosis, the Gnostics, the inner circle, were the ones who really knew what it was about. And to this the Church answered through Irenaeus: “Show us the list of your bishops, for in every true church there is an unbroken chain of chain of bishops to the apostles. And we know this,” Irenaeus says, “that Christ taught nothing secretly,” that there was no hidden knowledge but openly he taught his apostles. So, if you do not have an apostolic succession, an unbroken link to the apostles, you are not the true church.

Now in the fullness of time, in about the 290th year after our Lord's ascension into heaven, peace had come to the Church, at least within the Roman empire. Constantine had proclaimed an end to persecution. He had liberated the clergy. He had allowed the establishment of church buildings and even turned some of the public buildings, basilicas that is, imperial buildings, over to the worship of the Orthodox believers. Something began to happen. From within the church there arose wolves. Men whose interest was not in preserving and transmitting the unbroken faith for which the martyrs had shed their blood, but men who were interested in marketing their religious faith as a kind of a commercial item which could be sold in the marketplace. Men who decided that Christianity should be a growth industry. So these folks, they began to look for the ragged edges of the faith – the ones that cut to the dividing of the bone from sinew, the ones that made people who might otherwise embrace Christianity turn back from it. One of these was the idea that God is one, and yet eternally three. To all of the science, and all of the philosophy of that day, this was an absurdity. Everybody knew that there had been some kind of divine big bang, some kind of deposit of divine essence that then had blown itself up and given birth to new degrees or emanations of divine essence. And so, to say that there could be one God in three persons, was to this way of thinking absurd. The only reason we believe it is because our Lord taught it to us. The only reason why we accept it is because it was the teaching that was given to the apostles by God himself, not because it meets any kind of human logic. But these folks wanted to spread Christianity fast. They wanted to grow the Church, even if it meant killing it. Chief among these was Arius. Arius was a clever man. He was a kind of poet, sort of a rapper or his day, a rock music composer. He made these little ditties that people would hear and they would repeat: “There was a time when he was not.” Arius' argument was not anything positive. It wasn't that you had to believe this or that about Jesus. It was rather a negative: that there was a time when God the Son did not exist. Now if there was a time when God the Son did not exist, since time only affects creatures, it only affects material things that change, it would mean the Jesus was not true God of true God. But Arius didn't bother with this. He didn't even push the point home. He just wanted to make his Platonistic buddies happy, make it easy for them to join the Church. He probably would have been for gay marriage today too. So Arius was doing what was groovy, what was cool, what was generally accepted, what was normative. Couldn't understand that the church that now spanned the whole empire would not want to be inclusive – just let any idea in that didn't do any harm to what he considered to be the central message. So he went around teaching these things and it caused division, and anger, and apprehension.

And the emperor, at the advice of his spiritual father, decided to gather together the fragments of the church, not only from the empire but as far away as India, North Africa, Ethiopia, and Britain and the far shores of the Rhine river. So he brought together at the city of Nicea, across the Bosporous from Constantinople, from the new imperial city, 318 fathers. Now this number, 318, does not represent the number of invitations. Every church in the world was invited to send its bishops, and money was sent to some of the churches. And money was sent to some of the churches, for example, the church in Britain, to pay for the travel of one bishop, one priest, and one deacon to the council. We actually have the records of the money being sent. We don't have a record of whether anyone attended from there, but we assume they did. And when they gathered, they didn't get down to business by saying, “Somebody want to make a motion about what we believe?” They didn't hold a conference or some kind of discussion session; they didn't brainstorm. What they did was to have each head of each of the local churches, that is to say the larger local churches, the metropolitan of each national church, stand up and recite the creed that was recited by catechumens at his church before they were baptised. And they found that the words differed from place to place slightly, from India to England the words were not identical. From Rome to Asia minor they were not exactly the same syllables. But the doctrines they found that were put forward by each of these creeds were identical. Why? Because they reflected those things that Jesus had told the disciples during those forty glorious days in which, after His resurrection, He had remained with them and instructed them, as it says in the scripture, about all the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.

You know, those who say, “Why do you do this? It's not in the bible,” have to remember John, that John said, “Jesus told us so many things, that if we wrote them all, we don't think there would be enough books to contain them.” He says, “These are written, not to explain the church to you, but that you might believe and that believing, you might be saved.” So the gospels are documents of faith; they are not a constitution of the Church. The constitution of the Church is here, in the heart. It rests in the memory of the bishops, received from the apostles, received from Jesus in unbroken succession. So it's no wonder that from every one of the churches the same creed came forth. It put forth two simple and easy to remember ideas, ideas that you represent when you make your cross every time. You know, in the church for a long time, people made their cross like this – the way that the priest blesses you – with these four letters: ICXC, the first and last letters of Iesous Christos. In other words, blessed themselves in the name of Christ. But when these heretics came along, gradually the Church changed the way that we mark ourselves with the cross so that we use these three fingers – and this tells us that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one undivided godhead. Three eternal persons. How important is this idea, besides the fact that truth is important? It is VERY important. Because if God was first one, then everything else God made because he needed it. But if God is three, a community, then everything else that exists is there because God wanted it. Because He shared His love with all of creation. That's why Muslims who believe in only one person in God, call themselves God. They say it means, “People of peace.” What it means is “people of submission”, “people who surrender,” people who allow themselves to be enslaved, because they see there god as some kind of oriental despot, some kind of tyrant, some kind of pasha, sitting on a throne, disposing this person here or that person there, and it's our choice: we either obey or are destroyed. But Christians see God as our Father. We understand that the Trinity was a community of such overflowing love that there was no need for anything else, only the want to share that love with a whole cosmos of creatures.

And we hold these two fingers down to declare that Jesus Christ is both truly God and truly man. If Arius had been right, Jesus could not be true God. In fact, Arius was willing to call Jesus “homoiousios,” that is, kind of like God, but not, “homoousios,” not one in God. This tells us Jesus is truly and completely God and truly and completely man. He lacks nothing about our humanity except that he never sinned. He lacks nothing of divinity. Even when He emptied Himself of the eternal bosom to descend in the flesh to earth and then to hell, He did not cease being at the right hand of the Father, He simply became present here as well. And when He assumed flesh, He did not cease being divine; He made flesh divine. And so Jesus Christ is true God, and true man. He is one of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And having heard all of the fathers recite their creeds, the fathers chose the creed of the church in Nicomedia. It was compact and yet it was long enough not to leave any details dangling, or so it seemed. And with one voice they renounced.... They first offered to Arius, they said, “Arius, what you've taught you've taught in ignorance. A man can be a heretic and yet not a sinner, if he's just ignorant. But now you know what the Church teaches, do you accept it?” And Arius dissembled. And they excommunicated him. They pushed him out of the Church. Among the fathers who were there were St. Nicholas, Archbishop of Mira who we know lost his temper once and punched Arius in the nose. And among those who were there was St. Athanasius, who was the lawyer who argued the Apostles' point of view. And among those who were there was St. Spyridon, the married bishop of a little island diocese, a shepherd of a flock of sheep as well as the shepherd of his people, who stood up and said, “If a brick can be made of fire, and sand, and water, then why cannot God eternally be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?” Not very good theology, but very good faith.

And these men proclaimed the creed. I would be exaggerating if I said that closed the issue. Arius went back with his cronies. He gathered them together and they said, “Okay, we'll just make an iota's difference. If you add an iota...” Have you ever heard, “It doesn't make an iota's difference?” You add an iota, a little i, the smallest Greek letter, to homoousios and you make it homoiousios – you say Jesus is not of one essence the Father, but of similar essence with the Father. And he also went on to question whether Jesus was true God. He said, “I'll call Him God from God, but not true God from true God.” And he also questioned whether the Holy Spirit was eternal. And so the Church had to gather very soon again. The Church had to gather at Constantinople within a century, and remove Arius' iota from all the places it had been put, and to declare that the Holy Spirit is worshiped and glorified with the Father and the Son and to declare that Jesus Christ is “true God of true God, begotten eternally, not made, of one essence with the Father by whom all things were made.”

Now, brothers and sisters in Christ, if you had been catechumens in the early church, you would have spent the six Sundays after Pascha, and the Saturdays as well, being reminded of everything that your baptism meant to you, and today you would be reminded of the faith that had been delivered to you in the creed a week before your baptism, because on Lazarus Saturday and the Sunday of palms, you would have been given the creed to learn and you would recite it as you went into the water. And on this last Sunday before Pentecost, the creed is gathered back together and you are reminded of the fathers' doctrine, the apostles' teaching that established one faith for the church. So you have finished your special education for soldierhood in Jesus' army. You have been instructed in Lent in the things that pertained to the kingdom of heaven before you received. You have been instructed during Pascha in the meaning of these things now. And you are ready so that next Sunday with power and great glory you will again experience in a special and mysterious way, an abundant outpouring of the Holy Spirit so much that we will gather together at 1:30 in the afternoon and offer prayers for all kinds of things that are our needs, our wants, our desires, even for those who are bound in hell but in whose souls there is some modicum of grace, knowing that in the power of that day of Pentecost, prayers are multiplied and grace abounds.

To Christ who gave us one faith and one baptism be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Christ is in our midst.

He is and ever shall be.

May 24, 2009

These Sundays that follow the Holy Pascha, the lessons are chosen not so much because we need to ramp up the theme of resurrection – we celebrate the resurrection every Sunday – but these Sundays were especially set aside for what is called mystagogia, that is, instruction for the newly baptized into the mysteries which they have received at Pascha. And so, the first gospel that we read at the Paschal service at midnight – outside the doors of the women coming to the tomb. And then on Sunday afternoon we read about how Jesus appeared to His disciples and Thomas was not with them. And then the next Sunday we read about Thomas again and we hear the rest of the story, and then the week after that we read about the women at the tomb again. We're reminded of the remarkable discovery of the resurrection of our Lord which leads to faith. Then for three weeks we have services that speak to us of resurrection. We find the man who was crippled and lying by the pool in Bethesda, the man who was caused to be raised up again, who was resurrected, who was caused to stand up and walk, and we're told that _____ we are raised up from be prostrate, from being flat on the ground, from being dead men, and we're made alive. And then last week we heard about the woman at the well and how Jesus spoke to her about having not only baptism as an outward sign by which water covers our bodies, but having baptism within by the Holy Spirit through which we have streams of living water refresh and enliven us, pouring out from us, which is God's present in us. And today we hear about the man who was born with no eyes, the man for whom Jesus created eyes from clay and placed them in the sockets; the man who had not seen anything natural nor could he comprehend anything supernatural, but by God's grace, both the eyes of his body and the eyes of his heart were opened. And these are three things that happen to us in baptism: we are raised up through repentance, we are sanctified through water and sealed and given illumination of our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

But you see, all of this fails often to make a deep impression on us because we have found ourselves bereft of the awe and astonishment and of the joy that the early Christians and that still those who are evangelized by missionaries discover when meaning and purpose comes to be revealed to them by the words of the Gospel. We have grown up with the Gospel that we have heard read again and again, and we know the stories, and so their meaning has become for us not a very strong meaning, but simply they have become for us repetitious bible verses.

The man, however, in the lesson from the Acts today, is a paradigm for us of what it is to be a Christian. We hear a lot, brothers and sisters, about post traumatic stress syndrome now. I've been hearing about it for years. We've heard about it since the time of the Vietnam war. What it is simply is this: It's that a person becomes suddenly and startlingly aware that his life is on the line, that he is on the point of death, that all things being equal he is likely a couple minutes from that moment to no longer have breath in his body or her body. And having this experience then cause that person to release a whole bunch of endorphins – the biologists here will probably criticise me, I'm not talking correctly, but a whole bunch of hormones of some kind or the other – and these things are intended on one level to make it possible for the wild beast to be fought and cave men to run away, or to stay and fight. And we all have these – the flee or fight instinct. But in this case it's such a powerful thing it actually changes the body chemistry, and so the person is not exactly the same biochemically for the rest of their life. Their levels of anxiety or potential for anxiety have been raised, just as people who use certain drugs, like I'm told methamphetamines, change their brain architecture such that although they can stop using it, they're never going to free of some of the damage that was done by it.

But you see, if this were simply a medical indication of something that happened to you, that makes you no longer in control of your life, then God would not make any sense, for if God has not made us His robots, it certainly seems absurd that something somebody has done to you can make you into a robot. The point about post-traumatic stress syndrome is this: that it's not that it happens to us, it is what we do about it that makes the difference. There are people who experience this; who get up and they walk away from that near death experience, an encounter with a murderer or with a tragic accident or with a frightful circumstance, and they say, “Boy, I'm lucky I got out of that one. I wonder when the next one's going to come along.” And they spend their whole lives waiting for the next wild out-of-control car to come around the corner, or the next sniper to pop up from behind a garbage can and shoot at them, or the next armed robber to waylay them. And so their lives are spent in fear, and this post-traumatic stress then enslaves them. It makes them frightened people. It makes them people who despair, who lack hope.

But there are others who take these experiences and they bestow them in a different part of their soul. They say, “I was dead. I'm alive. There must be some reason for me to be here. From now on I'm going to live my life differently. From now on I'm going to consider it a gift.” You know, it always was a gift. It was a gift when you were conceived. It was a gift to your parents when you were born. The breath in your nostrils is a gift, but when it's given back to you again it is a special gift.

Now this is what happened today with the jailer in Philipi. This man had been called to court, and Paul and Silas were handed over to him. Paul and Silas had been preaching and Paul had healed a girl who had a – what we could consider to be... in fact, if she had it now she would probably have her own televangelist show. She was a person who could predict future events. She had a speical gift where she could synthesize what was around her and what she was told and she could figure out what was going to happen. She was a fortune teller and was able to make a lot of money for her owners because she was a slave. And Paul had healed her. He had delivered her from this fortune telling spirit, and so her owners were angry and they had Paul and Silas taken to the court and they were beaten. Now, for some reason, Paul did not choose to tell the court there in the market place, “I'm a Roman citizen.” If he had told them that at that point, they would not have beaten him. They would have given him a lecture and sent him on his way. But Paul allowed himself to be beaten, and then allowed himself to be locked up in the Philippian jail. And there in that jail at night Paul and Silas arose. They arose at midnight as the early church tradition says to do, the Didache: When you arise in the middle of the night, breathe into your hand and sign yourself on the forehead with the sign of the cross, reminding yourself of your baptism. And then they began to sing hymns.

Now, doubtless, as I have suggested before, the other prisoners in the jail weren't very happy. (To a parishoner) How would they feel down in your jail if a couple guys got up and started singing gospel songs in the middle of the night? (I'd enjoy it, but the prisoners might not like it). And all of a sudden the ground shook. All these guys were attached to chains that were screwed into the mortar between rocks in this stone building, and when the ground shook, the mortar came loose and all the chains fell out of the walls. Not only that, the prison doors shook open. And the jailer got up. Now this was a man who had a pretty good job. He was like the sheriff in Jackson County when I was a kid who got paid fifty cents a day to feed the prisoners and managed to feed them on twelve cents a day and got very rich. He took care of the prisoners. He was paid to watch them. When they left, if they had been kept well when they were released, then he got a stipend from the court and that was his living. But there was a downside to this. You know, they used to say in Texas if you were a prison guard and you let a prisoner escape then you had to serve the rest of his sentence. Well, there's probably no place other than Texas where they could get away with that, but that's what they tell me. Well, that wasn't the way it was there. The way ti was there was if you were a guard and you let a prisoner escape, you were executed. If your prisoner got away from you, you were taken and crucified. So, this man immediately seeing the door of the jail open assumed that the prisoners were all gone, that his life was gone. Now, he could have stayed and tried to defend himself to the authorities. He could have said, “You know, there was an earthquake,” and he might have gotten away with it. But there was another side to this law about prisoners escaping. If you let your prisoner escape and you went to trial and you were convicted of letting your prisoner escape, you were not only crucified, your family was sold into slavery and all your possessions were taken by the state. But if between the time the prisoners escaped and the time you were arrested, you comitted suicide, there was no trial and so kind of like that guy who was the fraudulent guy with Qwest who managad to die while his case was in appeal and so he's technically not guilty – if you died before the trial, your family got to keep their wealth and they didn't get sold. So this meant that this man was not only, in his view, condemned to death, to a speedy death, but he was condemned to death by his own hand. So he pulled out his sword and in proper Roman fashion, prepared to plunge it upward into his heart, when St. Paul cried out, “Do not harm yourself. We are all here.” You see, there was a man who was that far from death, from a violent death, from a painful death, from having to give up everything he loved and everything he prized without even a chance to say goodbye, and now he realized that everyone was still there. The prisoners were still sitting there quietly. They were so astonished at Paul and Silas praying and causing the earthquake, that when Paul and Silas said, “Sit down and be quiet,” they did it. Now the jailor understands what it is to experience post-traumatic stress and to turn it to good. That very moment he says to Paul, “Tell me by what power you did this. How can I be a part of this? What can I do to be saved?” because now that his life was spared, he understood that just being alive wasn't the most important thing – that there must be something beyond life that gave life real reason; something more than just protecting your assets, taking care of your family, and hiding out from danger. So this man that seeks and receives baptism that night, along with his children and his wife and the servants from his house, and he can honestly say, “I was dead and now I am alive again.”

Brothers and sisters, this is the experience the early Christians had. They lived in a world that made neither sense nor reasons. Now it was about two hundred and fifty years before the Christians really started to convert upper class people in any large number, because those people had the illusion that they could buy death off. They had enough money, they had enough possessions, they had enough prestige, that if they were far enough away from the emperor, they could just enjoy luxury and pretend like death was not stalking them. But most of the people in the middle classes, and especially the lower classes of society knew that death was around the corner for them every moment. For the poor, there was the fear of starvation, the fear of enemy invasion, the fear of disease. And for the middle classes, there was the ever present fear that the poor would riot, burn the city, and kill them. Everyone was contingent. Everyone was aware of the contingency. The closest we have come to that in the time near our time is Europe during World War II, when forces of evil stalked every land where people were like ants being crushed between the feet of red devils and black devils, Nazis and Bolsheviks. Where, no matter which way you looked there was no hope, only which enemy you wanted to have stalking you. But those who embraced Christ suddenly acquired hope. Not just the hope that gave meaning to their life in this world, gave it order and rules and purpose, but it gave them really now, having faced death and been delivered from it to face death again in the arena at the hands of gladiators or wild beasts, or the swordsmen, or any other clever devices that the Roman emperors contrived to try and squeeze the faith out of people. And those seeing them face death with great joy and embracing death because they had life beyond it, came to be baptised in great numbers, so that it was said that the blood of the martyrs became the seed from which the church grew. Hopeless and desperate people seeing other formerly hopeless and desperate people not afraid to die lost their fear of death, embraced Christ, ran into baptism, and received life.

Now I pray for all of you, that you not have, some great and terrible frightening experience. Post-traumatic stress is not something good to have. Fear is bad because it's scary, it's not something fun – although sometimes when I used to see my kids on rides at the amusement park I'd think that they really thought fear was fun. I hope that all of you have a smooth path upward toward God without any bombs going off at the side of the road, without any outbreaks of disease, or anxiety, or fear of desertion or harm. But I pray this for you: that if those things lie along the path of your life, you will have sufficient faith in Jesus Christ that you will be able to transcend them, and like that man looking out the window of his house and seeing the jail door open, and hearing the voice of Apostle Paul saying, “We are all here,” you will give thanks to God trusting that He is able to bring you out of all of these problems, and all of these sorrows, and all of these pains, and all of this suffering, and all of this sickness, and that you will not be afraid, knowing that your Lord has conquered death and overcome meaninglessness, and opened life and hope and purpose to all. So that with St. Paul, you can say, “To die is Christ and to live is gain, for whether I live, or whether I die, it is in Christ.”

To our Risen Lord and Christ be glory now and ever and unto ages of ages, Amen. Christ is Risen!
Indeed, He is Risen!