Sunday fo St. John of the Ladder

You know because I have said it year after year that there are three times in Mark’s gospel where our Lord tells His disciples precisely what’s going to happen and He adds details every time. He tells them they’re on the road to Jerusalem and that He is going to be betrayed – that is to say that one of those He trusts will be the one who will turn Him over to His enemies, not that the police will come and arrest Him but He will be betrayed and that He will be handed over to wicked men who will scourge Him and crucify Him, and that then He’ll rise again on the third day from the dead. What’s amazing about the Lord having said this three times in Mark’s gospel is that when we come the resurrection narrative, when the disciples look into the tomb, and they do not see the body of Jesus there, it says, “And they went away wondering in their hearts at the things they had seen for they knew not yet the scriptures that He must rise again on the third day.” In other words, what Mark is telling is that even though Jesus had said to them three times, “This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to be sad. You’re going to feel abandoned. You’re going to feel fearful, but I’m going to conquer death and rise on the third day,” it did not penetrate into their thoughts. It did not go beyond their ears.

Yesterday, we had the gospel for that fourth Saturday in the Great Fast – the Saturday following the time when we began to pray for the elect, those who are going to be baptized on Lazarus Saturday or on Pascha - when we say after that point in the pre-sanctified liturgy, “All catechumens depart, but as many as are preparing for illumination draw near” – and there are special prayers that are said for them. This Saturday we had the gospel about the deaf and dumb man, and I told people yesterday these Saturday and Sunday gospels are not here simply because we’re marching through Mark and this is where the finger of the person who chose the pericope fell. It’s because all the Saturday and all the Sunday gospels during the Great Fast are meant as special instruction – first, for those who are coming to illumination, for those who have not yet been baptized. It’s to encourage them, but also to mark out to them certain rites that they underwent in the process of their preparation. You know if you’ve ever been to a baptism, which I’d be astonished if you’d never been to one other than your own, that we have prayers of exorcism that are said over the child. The devil is rebuked. He is addressed. He is reminded that he has now power over Christ and he is commanded to come out of the person being prepared and to not enter into them again.

So we have today in this gospel the story of a young man who is himself possessed. And Jesus speaks to the demon and He commands him to come out of this child. Yesterday we heard about how Jesus touched the tongue of the deaf and dumb man with spittle from His own mouth, and touched his ears, and said, “Ephathah! Be opened!” And this marks another ritual that preceded baptism, for on this Sunday, each year for years in the Church in transition, the catechumans who were to baptized that year were blessed, their lips and their ears and the word “ephathah” – one of the few Aramaic words that came from our Lord’s mouth that have been preserved in the Greek New Testament was said over them so that they might have their ears opened to be able to understand the gospel. Now they’ve been hearing the Gospel since they became catechumens – we don’t tell the catechumens to depart till after the sermon, right? In fact, this part of the liturgy is called the liturgy of the catechumens. But without special grace, the readings from the Gospel are just Bible stories, just like without special grace Jesus saying to the disciples three times, “We’re going up to Jerusalem where I’m going to be betrayed, handed over to wicked men, scourged, crucified, and rise again,” were just some kind of parabolic utterance. Just as those words did not enter into their hearts through their ears because “ephathah” had not been said over them, because they had not had their ears opened yet, because “hearing they understood not and seeing they did not comprehend.” So the catechumens up to this point had not been able to have the Gospel penetrate through the grey matter of their brains into the lamp of their heart. And now they’re blessed to understand, and not only to understand, for it is not only their ears, but their tongues. If you’re going to understand the gospel, John, why do you need your tongue loosed? So that you can do what? To tell other people what it is you understand; so you can witness to the Gospel that you now comprehend, that’s now not words ringing in your skull but a truth implanted in your heart.

So today on this Sunday, we have to blessings given to us: That we have been exorcised, that Satan’s power over us has been abolished; that not only has he been cast out of us, but we’ve taken out of the fallen world and we’ve been transplanted into the kingdom of heaven, but that our spiritual ears have been opened so that we can understand His world and that our spiritual tongues have been loosened so that we can bring others to Him.

We also, however, today, hear once more about Abraham. When the catechumens began Lent in the very early times, a lesson was read on Sunday afternoon, “God said to Abraham, ‘Leave thy father’s house and thy father’s country, and go to the land I will show you.’ And Abraham immediately packed up and he went out of the city of Err,” which was not any mean city. It wasn’t Dodge, with the wooden fronted buildings, you know, and the Long Ranch Tavern. It was a city with tiled walls; with lions and mythical animals covering the walls in beautiful ceramic tile; with a library, a stock exchange, a public office building, and a huge temple in the middle. And Abraham was told, “Pack up and go out and wander on the plains.” He did it. We’re reminded that we have done the same thing Abraham did. And St. Paul tells us that not without much suffering, much perseverance, did Abraham enter into the promise. And so we’re reminded that especially at this time, we are pilgrims in the land of the bright sadness of repentance for our own sins, and that it is going to be with struggle that we are going to enter into the promise. But for us the promise has already been given – it’s not something that we have to hope for, or imagine, it’s already been poured into our hearts.

And so today, let us with Abraham go forth from our old house and our old country, from the land of sin, from the nation of selfishness, from the kingdom of idolatry, and go into the desert with Abraham and wander to receive the promise. Let us have Satan driven away from us as he was first driven out of us at our baptism. And let us allow our spiritual ears to be opened, our spiritual tongues to be loosened, so that we may hear the word of God, and we may both keep it and proclaim it.

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

Feast of the Annunciation

The annunciation fits into Holy Lent, and we know that now the feast of the Annunciation falls on the twenty-fifth of March, and because of that we know it can move back forth in the time of Lent all the way from, on the new calendar, the first week of Lent until the old calendar Monday or Tuesday after Pascha. But it wasn’t that way in the beginning. The reason why we have the Annunciation on the twenty-fifth now is because in the reign of Justinian we took on a Western feast which is known popularly as Christmas. The nativity of the Lord was broken out from the Theophany and set on a certain date. Once that it was done it was fairly logical that going back nine months before that you would have the Annunciation.

Yet the Annunciation remains connected to the Great Fast, and you will see that if you’re here a week from Friday because we sing the Akathist hymn, we will sing the Kontakion: “O victorious leader of triumphant hosts.” And we will reiterate the Annunciation at that time by speaking of how the angel stood at the house of Mary and cried out. What this is for us is a beginning. The Jews had – I believe it was – four new years, and the twenty-fifth of March is for us a kind of new year. We have our new year on September first. We have our new year on January first – St. Basil’s day. But this is a kind of new year for us – it’s the time when the spring comes and when the tender shoots come forth from the earth and from the trees and the new life appears. And it was at this moment that the Holy Church chose to celebrate, in the midst of the bright sadness of the Lenten fast, the great feast of the word of God coming down from heaven. Because we know, and I know all of the children know, that Jesus would become man on the twenty-fifth of December, or on whatever day His nativity occurred. But God became a man in the hour and the moment when His mother said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to your word.” At that moment she became the new Eve and the new Adam became incarnate of her. That’s what the rest of that first oikos of the Akathis hymn says. The angel said, “Beholding Him who is eternal taking form within thee I sat in awe and cried, ‘Rejoice, O unwedded bride.’” It’s a wonderful time for beginnings. It’s a wonderful rest in the midst of our fast, and today we thank God for we know that not only will it be true that in about twenty-six days from now we’ll all be singing, “Christos anesti! Christos voskrese! Hristos a inviat! Christ is risen!” but we know that nine months from now on the Church’s calendar we’ll be celebrating the revelation to the Earth, to men and to the eyes of angels, that which today we behold with unveiled faces: God becoming man to make man God.

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

Glory Forever

Veneration of the Cross

“What profit is it to a man if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ1
Glory forever!

In this context, the word soul means life, and literally what the Lord is saying is, “There is no price of earthly exchange, no commodity, no position on earth that is worth the losing of one’s everlasting life.” “What profit is it to a man to gain the whole world and to lose his own life, his own soul, for what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Now when we are young, we feel like there are certain exchanges we are willing to make. I remember a young woman once, just past adolescence, and she said, to me, “Well, I come to church two or three times a month.”
And I said, “Dear, you need to be there every week.”
And she said, “You know I have to have a social life.”
As her life went on it was tragically impacted, and still today she is not happy because she exchanged something for that which would enrich and give health, and life, and joy, and peace to her soul. She made a bargain with hell, she made an agreement with death. She thought she was just going out staying out late one Saturday night every two or three weeks, getting drunk, and coming home too tired to get up for church. What she was really doing was worshipping the devil on Sunday morning.

As one gets a little older, one thinks of things that one wants so badly that one will lie, cheat or steal to have them. I remember in the old days, the days when I was very strong and vigorous, and when I was also impetuous, three occasions when men came to me and said, “Father, I need to talk to you about something.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you see, my wife and I, we don’t get along well anymore. She doesn’t understand me. She doesn’t help me. She doesn’t support me.”
And I would say, “What’s her name?”
And the guy would say, “Well, you know my wife’s name_____” Shirley, Emily, whatever.
And I’d say, “No. The one who understands you. Who’s helping you, who’s supporting you – what’s her name?”
“Well, how did you know that?”
“Well, I’m not stupid.”
And then I’d get up, and I’d punch the guy in the stomach, I’d slap the guy in the face, and I’d say, “Go home and take a cold shower. Look around at what you’ve got, and get this out of your head.”
It sounds like I was a mean man. Matushka and I were flying into the airport in Kansas city, back about… I don’t know how long ago, for some event there. And I met a man in the airport who came up and threw his arms around me and said, “You saved my marriage. You saved my life. Remember when you slapped the poop out of me?”

The thing is, we all can think as we’re, let’s say in our late youth, of things for which we would exchange our soul, or take the risk, or bargaining that there’s going to be time to repent, that there’s going to be time to change, time to say we’re sorry. So we make a deal with death, a contract with hell. We exchange something for the glory of God.

As we get older, you know Jung said that “all questions” – and I’m not recommending Jung, he’s just a theorist of psychology – “all questions after forty are spiritual questions.” Well, that’s in another century when sixty was an old age. I would say now that all questions after sixty are spiritual questions. What do we mean by that? We mean that by the time you get to my age and your bones are aching, and your back is aching, and maybe some terrible thing has happened to you, by that time you start to realize that death is at the door. It may not come to visit you at sixty, or sixty-five, or seventy, or seventy-five, of eighty, or eight-five, of ninety, or ninety-five. We’ve buried people from this church who were over ninety-five years old. But death is at the door. He’s just waiting for his invitation from God to come in and claim his pray. The time is drawing near. As it says in the Great Canon, “My soul, my soul, arise. Why are you sleeping? The judgment is at the door and soon you will be confounded. But awake and cry aloud to Christ our God. Awake and cry aloud to Christ our God.” The Lord is telling us that, and he’s giving us the intuition in our bodies as we get older, that death is inevitable. If we are doing those things which are necessary to allow God to save our souls, it has no fear for us. Yes, we have plans. We have ideas. I’d like to see my grandchildren grow up and get married, and have their own children. But I might also see them suffer from something that would break my heart. And God knows what is best, what’s right for me. And God knows that if I don’t see them grow up and get married and have children with my fleshly eyes here in this world, but if I save my soul by taking up my cross and following Him, that I’ll see them every minute, closer than I am right now. I’ll see them from heaven.

You know, my grandchildren have this thing on the computer and they’ve grown less interested in it as they get older, so Grandpa is the keeper of the cyber animals. It’s called Webkins. And there’s these little toy animals you buy, and then you feed them, and you play with them, and you plant gardens, and you grow vegetables and you feed them the vegetables. The kids can’t get to the computer very often during the week, so Grandpa gets on the computer and makes sure they don’t die while the kids are away from home. And I said, “That’s what heaven is like. Your grandparents and your great grandparents and all the saints, they’re looking down on you and when you forget to plant the seeds, when you forget the harvest your vegetables in life, when you’re preoccupied with something else, they’ll be praying for you. And that will help you and it will take care of the needs you have.

And so, brothers and sisters in Christ, what could be more precious, more important to us, than to do those things that are necessary to save our souls? Do you want to be a captain of industry, a general in the military, a commander of the police force, a mayor of your city, a king, an emperor? In Jesus Christ we share in God’s own kingship. Do you want to be a wealthy man, a powerful magnate, a Donald Trump who can speak to people with a nasty voice and insult them, and then smile at them? With Christ, you have the riches of the kingdom of heaven. Do you want to be healthy and strong? Vigorous again without pain and suffering? In heaven there are no tears, no sickness, no sorrow, no sighing. What possible thing that you could gain on earth by serving the devil, by making a contract with death, an agreement with hell, could possible outweigh the riches, the treasure, the greatness, the marvelousness, the eternal joy that is promised to us in the kingdom of heaven?

And so today in the very middle – this is the middle of the forty days, you realize that, this is the twentieth day; and this Wednesday is the middle of the entire fast period, of the forty six days – so we’re in the middle of the middle of things; and in the middle of the middle of things, the Church doesn’t tell us, “Jesus is going to die. Be sad. Weep. Mourn.” The Church holds up, not a cross with a bloody corpus on it, but a cross surrounded by fragrant basil leaves, a cross surrounded by flowers, to tell us that the cross is the source of our victory, of our triumph, of our glory, not the cause of our pain. The Lord says, “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, let him take up his cross, and follow Me,” and He says of that cross, “Come to me all ye who travail and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you.” The yoke of Christ is the cross of Christ that you bear not only around your neck but that’s engraved in your thoughts and in your heart. “For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

So brothers and sisters in Christ, let us look on the flowery cross, let us smell the fragrant herbs, let us see the cross elevated high, and let us not fear that death is at the door, but let us rather give glory to God who has caused us through death to transcend all the broken promises of this world and to enter into life and joy everlasting. Let us like the thief at the eleventh hour who saw our Lord hanging on the cross, cry out to Him, “Remember us, O Lord, when Thou comest into Thy kingdom.”

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

Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas

Today on this day of St. Gregory Palamas, the calendar of the church has given us such a rich burden of teaching about our Lord Jesus Christ, that if we paid attention to it – which it is difficult for us to internalize all that – we would realize we have almost heard the entire gospel today.

St. Paul, in the first reading from Hebrews, the one that was intended for the catechumens, tells us that some believe that Christ is like an angel, that is a creature. Some heretics proclaimed that Jesus was the first creation of the Father, but St. Paul reassures us that Christ was eternally with the Father. In fact, God had said to Him, “Sit down at my right hand,” and He sat at the right hand of the Father until His enemies should be put into submission under his feet. That Jesus Christ is He who was and is and is to be, in whom the fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell bodily, the visible form of the invisible God.

St. Gregory Palamas testified that when God appeared in the Old Testament, when He showed himself to the fathers, when he appeared to Abraham, when He appeared to Moses, when He wrestled with Jacob through an angel, a messenger, when He appeared to Isaiah at the temple, that these were not illusions, not tricks, not visual aids, not special effects, but the very uncreated energies of the eternal God. So it was Christ Himself – the visible form of the invisible God – who appeared in the Old Testament. And we can rightly say that Christ spoke to Abraham in the desert, that Christ spoke to Adam in the Garden, that Christ as the Ancient of Days proclaimed to Isaiah to go and teach, that it was to Christ that the angels proclaimed, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Sabbaoth.”

And in the second reading from the letter to the Hebrews, he tells us that this Christ is the High Priest, that all priesthood that came before Him was simply to teach. The priests who were men like us, high priests with sins, who needed first to ask for their own forgiveness before they could pray for the forgiveness of the people, who needed to offer sacrifices over and over again, and who needed to offer sacrifices of creatures of the fallen world – of lambs from the flock, of cattle from the herd, of birds – who needed to offer sacrifices of blood daily for their sins and for those of the people, but that Christ as the High Priest, having entered into the Holy of Holies, holding the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek had offered himself once, and that that one sacrifice was and remains sufficient for the sins of the whole world; being a high priest who will never die and be succeeded, being a high priest who needs not repeat his offerings, being a high priest in whom there is no sin at all for which he first must offer sacrifice. You might say then that if Christ’s sacrifice is offered once, if he is our high priest, you might say like the Adventists and some of the Protestants do, “Why do we need priests in the church?” We priests in the church are simply visible icons to you of the invisible Christ.

Now, if we offer the liturgy every week, and sometimes every day, and we call it a sacrifice of praise, why are we still offering sacrifices if Christ’s one sacrifice is sufficient. Because, brothers and sisters, although the services of the hours, the matins, the vespers, the compline, the first, the third, the sixth, the ninth hour are attached to the time of the day, they’re attached to moments in the history of the faith. The first hour representing the beginning of Creation, and matins God’s creation and the last judgment, third hour the descent of the Holy Spirit, sixth hour our Lord’s being fixed to the cross, ninth hour His descent from the cross. And these represent times of the day, times in salvation history. The Divine Liturgy is timeless. When we enter into this mystery, when we say, “Let us who mystically represent the cherubim and with them sing the thrice holy hymn to the life creating Trinity, now lay aside all earthly cares,” we pass out of space and time and we become present in eternity. It is not that Christ dies again and again, but that we again and again are privileged to stand at the one offering of Himself on Golgotha and of His resurrection in the Divine Liturgy.

You understand, don’t you? I hope you understand. In the Roman Catholic mass, and in the liturgies of some of the protestant churches such as the Lutherans and Anglicans, the blessing of the bread and the wine are seen as some how or the other representing or being the crucifixion of Christ. But it is not so for us, nor was it for the ancient church. Christ’s body and blood have already been prepared on the table there. The Lamb – one for today and another for Wednesday, the Pre-Sanctified, has already been sacrificed, and pierced. The blood has already been shed. The gifts are prepared and covered, surrounded by the ranks of saints, and by the particles that represent your prayers from the little books and sheets you send into the altar. When we bear them into the altar, it is not Christ going to die, it is we carrying His body and blood to place in the tomb so that in the anaphora we may be present when He arises with glory. For us, the Divine Liturgy is the representation, the presentation again, of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, of His trampling down death and destroying hell.

Now, in the first gospel today our Lord was talking to a crowd. He was preaching to the people; He was standing under the porch of one of the houses that had the roof where thatch was laid across wooden beams. People would go up there to sleep at night, there was a staircase around back. Four men had a friend who was crippled. They wanted very much for Jesus to heal him, but they couldn’t get near because there was a crowd around Him. The King James Version says, “They could not get near on account of the press, so some of the kids probably things those are the paparazzi, but the press meant the people pressing on Him. So they went around behind and they climbed up and they tore up the thatch and they lowered him down by four corners of a cross. And Jesus looks and him and He says, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” This young man and Jesus understood what had happened. The man wanted more than anything to be reconciled to God. It was more important to him to be right with God than to stand aright on his own feet. But the Jews, they were thinking – the Sadducees and the scribes – “How can this man forgive sins? No one can forgive sins except God.” You see, they had their own answer. That this Man, greater than the angels sat down at the right hand of the Father, would offer up His sacrifice for all, One God on earth. But they couldn’t accept that, so they said, “How can this man forgive sins? This man blasphemeth.” And Jesus didn’t have to hear them say it. He knew what was in their hearts. He could read their minds. And He said, “Why do you think such in your hearts?” Then He showed them that He was the One who forgives sins, the very Lamb who God said “takes away the sins of the world” and not just the big sins of the world, but the little sins of you, and you, and me. He takes away our sins. The Lamb of God. And Jesus said, “That you’ll know that the Son of Man” – He claimed for Himself that old title the Son of Man – “has power on earth to forgive sins,” He says to the sick man, “Arise, pick up your bed, and walk.” And the young man was healed at that minute. The healing was to confirm the forgiveness.

And then finally, finally St. Paul tells us something more about Jesus. He is not only Almighty God, the Eternal Only Begotten Son of the Father, He is not only the Ancient of Days, the Son of Man who came down from heave with power and might, He is not only the forgiver of our sins and our High Priest, but He is our Shepherd. The Israelites were taught by God to wander for a long time. They wandered in the wilderness, and He preferred such people as Abel, and Jacob, who were tenders of flocks, and He chose for His king, not any of those big, tall, dark-haired, strong men who were the sons of Jesse, but the little, short, red-headed kid named David. He chose him because he was a shepherd. Because when he said, “The Lord is my shepherd,” he knew what it meant to have God as his shepherd, because he had experienced the danger of the wolf, and of the bear, and of the ravaging creatures who had attempted to destroy the sheep of his flock, and he had had to fight them with his sling and with his rod, and his staff. And now we’re told that Jesus Christ is our Good Shepherd, he is the door to the sheep fold, that He comes to open the door of protection for us, that we may no longer wander in the wilderness of desires, but may enter into the sheep fold and be tended by our good shepherd, who being the Ancient of Days, all-powerful, almighty, nevertheless, loving, kind, compassionate, and caring.

Let us let just a little of this sink into our souls as we progress toward next Sunday when we will lift the cross in the midst of Lent and receive from God belief in the midst of our journey.

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

Glory forever!

Orthodoxy Sunday

(I didn’t press record fast enough….)
… And yet there was an attempt at a reformation, an attempt to reconstruct Orthodoxy, to make it in fact heterodoxy, and it happened a long time ago. It was a movement powerfully supported by those in authority, and wreaked great great destruction upon the church and yet the church survived.

In the 6th century _____ stormed the hordes of Islamic warriors. In the empty space provided because of the warfare between the Persian and the Roman Christian – that is the Byzantine empire – and because both of these empires were in a bit of confusion, these raiders, these brigands, robbers, were able to enter in and to conquer. Their method was simple: You come to the first city and you say, “Surrender or die,” and the people refuse to surrender and so you kill them all. Then you come to the next city and you say, “Surrender or die,” and the city opens up its gates. Not only that, but there was a great hostility in the Syrian Arabic Christian world and also in Egypt against the Byzantine Empire which had attempted to extend the authority of its patriarch over the independent patriarchates of Alexandria and of Antioch. And so many people saw the coming of the Arab bandits, of the Muslims, as a way to free them politically, from tyranny. Whatever the thoughts that people had, it’s always a temptation to try to accomplish a good thing by doing an evil thing.

Now the emperors in Constantinople looked at their shrinking empire and fell into despair, for all these lands to the East had belonged to the Byzantine Empire. Syria, and Palestine, and Assyria, and now they were falling into the hands of an enemy – an enemy dedicated to the conquest of the entire Christian west. Tax money was dried up, and more important, Anatolia, which was an important place for drafting soldiers or for recruiting them, was deprived to the empire. And the Byzantine Orthodox went into a great era of despondency, despair.

Now I want to point out that this did not happen to the Orthodox in the conquered lands. Many took faith to heart. They became stronger in their faith, more devoted to their traditions. But in the Byzantine Empire the thought began to spread that God was punishing them, that he was letting their enemies conquer them because they had done something wrong. And what could that have been? There was an emperor on the throne who was an Assyrian, that is to say he was an Iraqi. He was an Iraqi military officer who had come to the throne when one dynasty had ended. And he said, “I know the answer. It’s because we worship these graven images, these icons, these pictures. Because we bow down to them and we kiss them, that’s why God is punishing us: because we are practicing paganism, we are practicing idolatry.” And so, he set out to destroy all of the icons. He began with the icons of the holy churches and then from house to house, soldiers went and gathered them together and burned them in piles just as the Bolsheviks had done in Kiev and Moscow and in St. Petersburg at the beginning of their revolution. Many, many ancient icons, dating back to the time of the apostles, were burned, were destroyed or hacked to pieces. And in churches, murals were whitewashed over. The icon of our Lord Jesus Christ and His blessed mother was eradicated from public places of worship in the Byzantine Empire. And the people who hid icons in their houses, who hid them in their basements or buried them in their backyards, if found out, were brought to public trial and were executed in the same way that the Roman pagans had executed Christians. Monks and nuns who resisted the destruction of the icons, who were the warriors for the holy tradition, were brought into the hippodrome and publicly ridiculed, stripped naked, scourged, forced to marry, or kill.

Throughout the Byzantine empire war on the icons took place. And it didn’t end in a short time. It lasted off and on for over 120 years. You see, this was a fit of self doubt that caused people to doubt the unbroken tradition of the holy apostles. And yet out of the heart of the Islamic world, from Baghdad, came forth the writings of a man from Damascus, Syria. His name was John. His father, a Christian, was the vizier to the Islamic Caliph. He was a translator in court who had risen in the ranks of the government and who was honored with the position of secretary of state to the Islamic empire. Muslims always preferred Christians in high ranking offices because they could trust them, they didn’t trust each other. John was expected to rise to high office in the government, or in the military, but instead he entered the monastic life. And he wrote, and he is called a doctor of the church because of his writings. He wrote in defense of the holy images. And told the whole world, right in the middle of the Islamic kingdom he told the whole world: Icons are not idols. Idols are images made to be inhabited by the god, in other words, the belief is that they are possessed. And indeed most of them are, by demons. Idols are images in which some divine force is supposed to enter in and take control of it. You can walk around behind an idol, an idol exists in space in time. And people bow down to idols as though they were the manifestation of the deity they were worshiping itself.

He said idols were forbidden to the Jewish people. No image could be made of God because no one had ever seen God. God revealed Himself in types and shadows in the Old Testament. He revealed Himself to Abraham as three angels. He revealed Himself to Moses on the mountain as a burning bush. He revealed Himself to Isaiah in the temple as the ancient of days. It was always Christ preincarnate, because the Father has no form, it was always the Son who revealed the Father, but by shadows and types. As Melchizedek, who received tithes from Abraham. So if you tried to make an image of God in the old covenant it would always be a false image, it would be an idol. In fact, the Israelites tried when they left Egypt to make a visible god for themselves. They made a golden bull-calf to show the strength of God, like the bull Baal. And Moses destroyed it, and he burned it, and he made them drink the ashes of the golden statue. But he said, “Now, God, who in sundry times and in diverse manner spoke unto the prophets, has spoken unto us face to face, through Jesus Christ. And so if we have seen Jesus Christ, if human beings with their eyes have seen God in the flesh, then it is as much a sin now NOT to make images of God as it was then to make them.” Because if you don’t make images of God, if you refuse to, you’re saying God didn’t really come in the flesh. If worshiping the image of Jesus is idolatry, it means Jesus is not God. It is never a sin to worship God.

And He said, “What of our ___ of saints?” He said, what we worship in them – and worship is the correct word. We Orthodox get embarrassed just like the Assyrian emperor did and we say, “Oh, we don’t worship icons, we venerate them.” But the word “worship,” brothers and sisters, comes from a form of “to prescribe worthiness,” that is, it is the acknowledgement of what a thing is worth. In Great Britain, maybe today – they used to – call lords and justices “your worship.” It meant, “Your worth-ship;” it meant, “your worthiness.” And so what we do when we worship the icons is not to give them divine worship, we don’t worship them like God. We give them the worship that is due to them, we ascribe to them what they are worth. And what is that? St. John says that if our Lord Jesus Christ, in the bread and wine, communicates to us His Body and Blood, that the Holy Spirit, through the medium of pigment and wood communicates to us the presence of heaven on earth. In other words, icons are windows into heaven. You can’t walk around behind an icon. You can walk around behind the image. Now I knew a silly goose priest once, in Kansas City a long time ago. He was at the Russian church and he had on his iconostasis the Last Supper. This man was a painter, so if you walked in the altar and looked up over the holy doors, instead of seeing the Icon Not Made With Hands, which should be inside the holy doors facing the altar, you saw the backs of all the apostles painted on the inside of the iconostasis. But you see, you don’t see the backs of people in icons, do you? The people who you only see part of your face – like the devil – they’re not really persons. They’ve given up their personhood because of denying God. So if their face is turned like that and you can’t see both eyes, that’s somebody like Judas who has turned his back on God.

But icons are windows to the divine. They are a medium by which we, looking upon them, enter into the actual presence of the person or the event that is depicted in them. They are as though we are transported into the presence of that person. These icons around us represent for us the presence of all these saints. And somebody said, “Why do you have so many women saints? We’re heavy on women saints.” Well, I want good voices to sing the praises of God and women’s voices are sweeter. Not only that, we honor the female saints because probably, numerically, even though the clergy rank ahead of the pious monks and nuns, there are probably a lot more women saints than men. Still, the holy images are for us communion with the holy persons who are represented in them.

Now, some of us have pictures of our children. Some of us have pictures of our departed parents, our grandparents. And even the pictures, which are photographic images, we will pick up and kiss sometimes. How much more you should kiss the images of those who are saints present with us here on earth. They remind us not that the saints came down to earth again, but that we, when we are in this temple, are raised up to heaven where they surround us. As St. Paul says in Hebrews, “Seeing we are compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sins that so easily beset us and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” So when we venerate, when we worship, an icon, every icon has around its head a round halo, a nimbus. And what that nimbus tells us is that the uncreated light that is Jesus Christ lives in them, that God’s uncreated energy is in them. So when we kiss an icon of the mother of God, or of a holy saint, or angel, or prophet, we are venerating Christ who lives in them. So, all holy icons are images of Jesus Christ, and we want that same light in ourselves – and some times we have it, and sometimes we lose it and we have to get it back again. But that’s what makes us saints. When the priest raises the lamb, he says, “Holy things for the holy.” What we’re saying is, “Holy things for the saints,” so when you come forward you acknowledge that you are struggling and striving for sanctity.

Now, I’ll tell you two stories that will illustrate how icons are with us not only to bring us into heaven, but for heaven to touch us. When I was in San Francisco twenty-three years ago, I went to the Joy of All Who Sorrow Cathedral. That day, it was St. Stevens day on the holy calendar, and the church was full. I was very happy. The third day of Christmas and the church was jammed with people. And I went to the bookstore, and they said to us there’s another liturgy being celebrated across town. There’s a Chinese priest, and he’s celebrating the 75th anniversary of his ordination. Now since he couldn’t have been ordained until he was at least 20, that meant the man was at least 95. Xenia told me he lived to be – how old? (Xenia says “A hundred and ten!”) A hundred and ten years old. And I went in and there’s two subdeacons and they’re holding him up at the altar under his arms. And he served the liturgy. In the middle of the room was an icon. It was an icon of the Hodigitria, the Mother of God and Guide of Pilgrims. And that icon, as the liturgy went on, exuded holy oil from the face. All over the face oil came, and it dribbled down. And at the bottom of the icon were large gobs of cotton wool, and that cotton wool was filling up with oil. And they said to me, “Would you like to venerate the icon?” and I went up and kissed it, and as I kissed it I almost fainted because of the smell of the perfume of the oil. And I bumped the icon, and it slipped, so it wasn’t wired. There were no tubes into it. Nobody was faking anything. It was just a plain wooden tablet with our lady painted on it, and it was exuding myrrh. And they gave me some of the cotton wool in a bottle, and I brought some back. And someday, if you want to, I’ll show you. Right in here, in this oil, in this little locket here, and you can smell the perfume twenty-two years later. Matushka took a piece of this and put it behind a picture of the icon that we framed in our house, and that icon began to have oil on it. For two or three years, oil came down the face of the Mother of God in that picture.

And then about fifteen, twenty years ago, some of you will remember, an icon was brought to us from Georgia. This icon was actually just a laminated wooden board, it was not painted at all. It was also an icon of the Hodigitria, of the Mother of God the Guide of Pilgrims. And that icon was reputed to have exuded myrrh from the eyes, but it had not wept for three years. It was brought to Denver and in the morning we served the liturgy, and we served a moliebin, and my voice was about like it is right now, and at noon all of the priests went over to the house to eat and I was left here to do another moliebin for the pilgrims who came at noon, and I could barely talk. I did the moliebin and afterwards, somebody said to me, “could you touch my picture of the icon” - because they were giving away pictures of it – “to the face of the icon?” And I said, I don’t even think I can open it up, but I went and yes, there was a latch. Matushka was over there. And we took the cover and we laid it back and set her icon on the dry face of the image and when we took it up, the eyes of the picture had streaks of oil on them, and the icon began to weep from the eyes. It wept all afternoon, through the third moliebin, through the liturgy, through taking it over to St. Augustine’s and bringing it back here, through taking it to St. Herman’s the next day, taking it over the mountains to Delta, and down to Calhan, and to Pueblo. All the time the icon was in Colorado, holy myrrh streamed from the eyes of it. And then, when it was time to leave, the icon stopped. Was the weeping a bad sign? No. it was the mother of God showing her love for us, her sorrow for our sufferings, and showing us her joy, by the fragrance and the smell of the myrrh, that we were coming to venerate her in faith.

I know I told you I was going to tell you two stories, but I’m going to tell you a third one. This image here, was written by Daria ____vich. I told her just how I wanted the icon of the joy of all who sorrow. Traditionally that icon has writing on scrolls all over, and it looks cluttered. So I told her to put the writing on top.
And I said to her, “What are those flowers?”
And she said, “Well, heavenly flowers.”
And I said, “They look like weeds to me.” Maybe that’s the Russian idea of heavenly flowers, but they look like weeds.
I said, “To me, heavenly flowers are flags,” so I asked her to put them up there. The kind of flowers I have in my garden – irises. So we put irises on them. So that day a woman named Diane Rogi called me up. She had been praying and trying to have a child for three years, and the doctor had said to her, “You have to face it lady, you are infertile. The only way you can have a baby is we’ll take some eggs out, we’ll fertilize them in a dish. We’ll plant some of them in your womb and the others we’ll throw away, and then later we’ll go back and take out some of the embryos so that you don’t have multiple births.”
And she said, “You want me to kill babies in order to have a baby. I won’t do it.”
And she came here to tell God that she was not going to have any children. And then after she left, the icon came. And I called her that day, and I said, “Come here tonight. We’re going to do a service for you.” At the same time, Nick here had a tumor in his lung. The doctor said, I heard him say it as he went into surgery, “I know it’s going to be cancer. I’m not going to be able to find it, and then it’s going to spread and you’re going to die.” That’s a wonderful thing to tell a patient going into surgery, right? I thought Pauline was going to kill the doctor. But the night before we had done the service for Diane, and for Nick, and also for Daria herself because she had come here as a sad desperate woman. She had spent her life studying cardiology. She ignored dating or having boyfriends, she had thought maybe she would be a nun. But now she longed to be a wife. But there was no one around that was available, and she was very sad. So we did for these three people. The next day we found Nick’s tumor was benign – how many benign lung tumors do you know about? The next month we found that Diane got pregnant that week, and two months later, a guy who had been in the seminary, who had gone off to a monastery for two years, who had decided he wasn’t supposed to be a monk, had gone back to the seminary for an advanced degree, wrote her a letter saying, “Why don’t you come out here and visit me? I would like to have you be my guest at the seminary.” And now she is Matushka Michael Carni. She didn’t eat any meat while she was here, and then when she got married she started eating meat, so I bet that made her Daria con Carni. Anyway, that was three miracles that happened, and this is not the best icon on earth, this is a certainly a sort of frosted window into heaven, but it’s a very nice icon and in the process we now have nineteen babies that were born to infertile women after we have done the moliebin for them before this icon. There is only one person who ever prayed for a child before the icon who did not have a baby, and that woman’s husband refused to come with her, and God probably knew that she would have the support that she needed to raise a baby. Nineteen babies. Now, we don’t tell people that because we don’t want to be the “Church of the Miraculous Baby Factory.” You know, I’d have people standing in line putting money in a box all day long, but that does not honor our Lady.

So brothers and sisters in Christ, thank God that the fathers of the church – the holy monks, the holy bishops – rose up. They threw out the scoundrels, they restored the holy icons, they gave us back our windows into heaven.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, glory to Jesus Christ1
Glory forever!