Fr. Joseph's Homilies

August 2, 2009 - Feeding of the five thousand

2009-08-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-26T16:00:00.002-07:00

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

2009-08-26T16:00:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-24T20:11:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-17T06:44:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-15T09:42:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-15T09:27:00.002-07:00

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

2009-08-15T09:27:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

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!

Samaritan woman

2009-07-24T08:16:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, He is risen!

Sunday of the Paralytics

2009-07-24T07:25:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, He is risen!

Sunday of the Myrrh Bearing Women

2009-07-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palm Sunday

2009-07-17T07:01:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday fo St. John of the Ladder

2009-06-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T06:02:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-25T15:38:00.001-07:00

“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

2009-06-25T14:58:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-23T14:20:00.001-07:00

(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!

Forgiveness Sunday

2009-05-18T09:13:00.001-07:00

Forgiveness Sunday

Sermon to the children.

Children, we’re about to enter into the holy season of lent. This afternoon, we’ll have vespers, and at vespers, we’ll all ask each other for forgiveness, and we’ll all give each other forgiveness, and then we’ll begin the Great Fast. When we use the word fast, then it sounds like all we’re going to do for forty-six days is suffer. But it’s not like suffering. See, the word that’s used in most Orthodox languages, at least around the Slavs and the Romanians, is the word “post.” It comes from the word “postinia” which means “the desert.” We’re going into a desert. When Jesus was baptized, when the voice of the Father spoke from Heaven, the Spirit descended upon Him in the Jordan, and the voice cried out, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” then Jesus went out into the desert, and for forty days he prayed and fasted. The devil tried to test him there, didn’t he? He tested him with three things, and I’m going to talk to you first about those three things, then I’m going to talk to you about the prayer that we always say during Lent. It’s a prayer that many people here don’t know. Why? Because we never do it on Saturday or Sunday, and they’re only here on Sunday. Maybe sometimes on Saturday night.

But the devil tested Jesus first by saying, “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.” In other words he tempted Jesus to satisfy His own hunger. And Jesus said, “Man does not live on bread alone.” Okay? Also, later on by the way, after Jesus had fed the Jewish people with bread and fish by the seaside, he multiplied five loaves and two fish and he fed five-thousand, they came to him and they said, “We’ll make you king if you give us free bread.” And what did Jesus do? He said, “I am the true bread that came down from Heaven. My flesh is truly food, my blood is truly drink. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” Do you know what the Jews did? They got grossed out, and left right away. All that was left was the twelve. The whole five thousand said, “How could this man give us his flesh to eat?” We know how He does it, don’t we? He gives us bread and wine in which His living body is – not dead flesh, not Jesus-meat – but Jesus’ life. And so, He was tempted by the devil to turn stone into bread.

The second thing, according to Matthew, that He was tempted with, was He was tempted to jump off the top of the temple. What does the mean? It means the devil wanted Him to do some stupid stuporific act, some kind of show off thing, some kind of big miracle, and everybody would say, “Oh, He must be the Messiah. He jumped off the top of the temple and angels caught Him in their hands.” And Jesus said, “You shall not test the Lord your God.”

And the third test he gave Him was this: He took Jesus to a mountain and he showed Him all the kingdoms of the earth. And the devil didn’t lie to Him when he said, “These all belong to me.” Because the devil got the world. How did he get it? Who did God give it to in the beginning? Who did God give His world to? … The two people whose icon’s up there? … To Adam and to Eve. And what did Adam and Eve do? They sold the world to the devil. They sold it for an apple, and they were ashamed to go and tell God they were sorry, so they just said, “Okay, we’ll take care of ourselves now, God.” And when God found them, the man blame God; he said, “The woman you gave me made me eat!” The woman blamed the serpent, “The serpent who you made, by the way God – silly fool – made me eat.” So what happened is the man made war against the woman; the woman made war against nature; and they both made war against God. So the whole world became a mixed up stupid mess. Because of Adam and Eve’s sin. But the devil got possession of it. He said, “I will give you all these kingdoms. No cross, no nails, no whip, no crown of thorns, no humiliation. Everybody will worship you. You just be my messiah. You be the devil’s messiah.” Jesus said, “Thou shall worship the Lord thy God, and serve Him only.”

And so for forty days, and then for the six days of Holy Week, we go into post, into the desert. But we don’t go into the desert sad. Adam and Eve are saints, they are saints of the Church. Why? Because after they finally saw what they had done, after their robes of light had been turned into fleshly bodies, and they saw the ugliness of them; after they had seen that they’d lost paradise, and that the man had to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow and that the woman had pain in childbirth, and that they would return to the dust from which they were taken, they wept outside of Eden. They wept at the gate as the seraphim with the flaming sword that you can see on the icon was turning all ways to guard the door. And God said to them, he said, “The seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.” Now that’s a funny thing to say. The adults will understand when I say the word seed is semen, it means literally the sperm of the woman. We know that women don’t have seed. The seed comes from the father, doesn’t it? But He says, “The seed of the woman” because Mary was to give birth without a human father, right? “… will crush the head of the serpent,” and He also said that He would trample the gates of hell, and break down the bars of iron, and that the flaming sword would withdraw from paradise, and the people would return to Eden. So Adam and Eve went down to their graves hoping, rejoicing. That skull that you see down at the bottom of that cross over there – did you ever notice the skull? That skull represents Seth, who was Adam’s son, who took three seeds from the tree of life and put them on the tongue of his father when he buried him. And from those seeds grew the pine, and the cedar, and the Cyprus from which the cross of Jesus was made.

So, we’re going into the desert, but we want to be back in Eden, and so what are we doing right now? We’re eating like Adam and Eve in the garden. Now they didn’t have to eat bad stuff, they got to eat every plant that came up from the earth, they got to eat every fruit that grew on the trees, right? And those are the things we’re given for food during the post – good food, sweet food. In the old days when your grandparents were around, all they had around was some cabbage and potatoes, and some dried fruit because they couldn’t fly stuff in from all over the world. But you can have all kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables, healthy things, okay? We had a cardiologist here once named Darya, she was the choir director, and you know what she told me they found? If a person follows the Orthodox fast for forty days during lent, all of the plaque goes out of their veins.

So now I’m going to talk to you about a feast of fasting; being happy during lent. It’s a time to be quiet, not to think about food, not to always be nagging at your mother, not always thinking about candy and ice cream and what’s for dessert. It’s a time to think about God. About Adam and Eve who lived in the garden, and who were thrown out of the garden by their own selfishness.

And here’s the prayer that we say everyday during Lent except on Saturday and Sunday. It has three parts, like everything in Orthodoxy, it’s three. Why is everything three? Because of what? (Child answers, “because of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”). The Father, Son and Holy Spirit! Three persons! One undivided Trinity. The holy, consubstantial, life creating trinity, one essence and undivided. And so this prayer has three parts:

“On Lord and Master of life.” The word Lord is the word “kurios,” it’s the word that took the place in the Old Testament of the name of God. So “Oh God, Master of my life, take from me three things.”

“Sloth.” Now you can remember what sloth is because you know those animals that move really slowly in the trees? Sloth is laziness: not doing my work at school, not doing my homework, not doing my chores, lying around, being a couch potato. Sloth.

“Despair.” Despair is feeling down in the dumps. Now let me tell you, you can feel despair when you’re a kid. Father Joe was not a very good speller in school. I used to teach spelling – I could spell the words when I gave the kids a spelling test, but when I wrote them out, I’m the kind of guy who would spell “pharmacy” with an “F.” And every Wednesday I’d have a trial test and I’d miss the words, and I would go home and I’d be in despair. I’d say every Thursday night, “Oh God, maybe the world will end tomorrow and I won’t have to take that spelling test.” That’s what happens when we give up trying. But let me tell you: God doesn’t judge the outcome of your actions. He only judges what you’re trying to do and how hard you’re trying. And God wants you to have good intentions. Despair is giving up. There are demons that attack you at night. They say, “Tomorrow you’ve got a test you didn’t study for. Tomorrow that girl who’s mean to you is going to be at school. Tomorrow something bad is going to happen.” But then there’s the noonday demon. And that’s when in the middle of the day, for no reason at all, the devil whispers in your ear, “Life is just a bunch of trouble.” That’s because he knows that you now belong to God and he wants to make you not trust God.

Sloth, despair – there’s actually four parts –

“Lust of Power.” Lust of power means wanting to control other people. Now, at school, some of us want to be bossy. But there’s other ways of controlling people. For example, you know that your mother doesn’t have a lot of patience about some things. So she says, “Get ready. It’s time to go to soccer practice.” And you continue watching TV. “Come on get your soccer clothes on.” … “We’re gonna be late!” Now that’s power, isn’t it? You get to torture your mother; you get to get her upset. But it says in the bible, “He who troubles his own house will have the wind for his inheritance.” So what you want to do is to bring peace at home. If your sister gives you trouble, forgive her, love her, and be nice to her. If your brother picks on you, be good to him. Lust of power is want of control. We want who to be in control? Us or… who should be in control?... You’re right… Yes! God! So you want the power, but the power belongs to God.

And “Idle talk.” Now idle talk is not talk about idols. I remember once, my son right there, when he was little, he and I used to read the Psalms every night. And I read, “The idols of the pagans are vain things. Eyes they have that see not. Tongues they have that speak not. Ears they have that talk not, and no breath comes from their nostrils.” And I took him too a Chinese restaurant, and he stood up and said, “There are a lot of idols here!” And he preached a sermon to the Chinese. He said, “Idols have eyes, but they do not see! Idols have ears, but do not hear. Idols have mouths, but they don’t talk.” I don’t know what the Chinese thought, but I was very proud of him. But in this case, “idle talk” is not talk about idols. “Idle” in this case means stupid gossip. It’s just talking about people. Did you ever have a friend, and another friend, and you and the other friend talk about the friend and say bad things about her? … No!? But has it happened to you? Did they get together and say bad things about you? [An anecdotal joke here that was overwhelmed by baby chatter]. Anyway, idle words are things you say that have no meaning. They’re just chitter-chatter to be chittering and chattering.

So we want God to take away laziness, giving up hope, wanting to be in control, and speaking stupid words. And then we say, “But grant unto me the spirit of chastity” – that means purity, not thinking about dirty things – “humility.” The humility comes from the word humus. Does anyone know humus is? It’s a kind of soil. It says remember that we’re taken from the earth, right? Meekness, that’s humility is.

“… chastity, humility, patience.” That means waiting for things to happen when they’re supposed to and not trying to make them happen. Patience is waiting on God. Patience is not nagging your parents. Patience is not wanting to open your birthday presents on Wednesday when your birthday’s on Saturday. I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Lord, give me patience and give it to me right now.” Yeah! Patience.

“… chastity, humility, patience, and love.” Love is the most important part of that. Love is a divine attribute. Love is what God is. Love is wanting the best for everyone, even your enemies. You may not want your enemy to win the millionaire, neither do a lot of people. But you want him not to go to hell too, don’t you? So love means praying for your enemies.

“… chastity, humility, patience, and love give unto me.” Then we have the third paragraph: “Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions…” In other words, to know what’s wrong with you so you can learn to tell God your transgressions in confession. “… to see my own transgressions.” Do you talk to your priest at confession? Not really. There’s a Jesus icon right there so you can talk to Him, right? The priest just listens to help you out in case you think something’s wrong that’s not, or you think something’s right that’s not, or to ask you some questions.

“Help me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother” - or sister – “For blessed art thou unto ages of ages.” Now, I don’t know if they’ve got that prayer for you in Sunday school, but if they don’t, I’ve got it on my desk and they can copy it for you, and I’d like you when you’re not here at a weekday service, to say that prayer at least once a day. Alright? And hope you all have a great Lent, and at Pascha it will be wonderful, and grandpa will shoot rockets over the church and we’ll have roast lamb, and we’ll sing “Christ is risen,” and we will be very happy because we will have gone through the desert and we will have come to the Promised Land.

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

The Sunday of the Last Judgment

2009-05-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Sunday of the Last Judgment

It is unusual, at least it has been, in Orthodox tradition to emphasize the sufferings of hell and eternal damnation. This thought, this image provides the sum and substance of much evangelical preaching, where accepting Jesus as one’s savior is sold as fire insurance. We don’t mention it much. The reason is because the emphasis of the ancient faith was not on how you could crawl up out of the pit and escape from the fires of hell. It was how you could be united to God and be joined to his resurrection through grace and participation in the life of his body. Our liturgy is not simply an immolation of a victim as the Roman Mass had been for many, many, many years. It’s not so much anymore. It is rather, a celebration of the resurrection of Him who was the Paschal victim.

And yet today, the church directs us – on a Sunday, on a day of the Resurrection – to place our thoughts on the awful and dreadful possibility of eternal damnation, of everlasting death, of pain without remission, without amelioration, unending. And that is because the Church wants us on this day, this week before we enter into the Great Fast, to contemplate that our faith, our religion, is not a hobby, not a prejudice, not a particular choice we’ve made of several possible choices, but that our faith is real, actual, and has consequences.

We are not here today to rejoice in the thought that some might enter into eternal damnation, but to contemplate the worst pain we’ve ever experienced in our lives and then to multiply that pain to every organ, every limb, every inch of our bodies, and then to anticipate that pain growing worse and worse, but never ceasing, never remitting, without hope. Even for the person who is suffering unto mortal death, there is the hope that death will come and put the physical pain to an end. But the pain of everlasting damnation is physical as well, for it is in our resurrected bodies that we are threatened with the awful possibilities of eternal suffering.

And who are they who will be the recipients of this suffering? Will it be the Hindu, or Buddhist, who have never had Christ preached to them in a way that makes it possible for them to accept Him? One certainly doubts that. Of course we’re told that if you accept the Lord Jesus Christ, and believe that God raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved, right? But that doesn’t meant that everybody who says that “Jesus is Christ, and God raised Him from the dead” is saved. Certainly, the devil now knows who Jesus is. He believes that God raised Him from the dead, to his eternal consternation for he thought when he had captured Him in hell, that it could hold Him captive. He thought he could possess, he could digest God in the belly of hell, but God gave him a bellyache. To paraphrase what John Chrysostom says, Hell swallowed up a body, and it gave it a terrible case of indigestion. He broke the bonds of death.

And so it’s not just simply believing something, it’s believing in Jesus Christ and that means living according to Jesus Christ’s commandments, His law and His teachings. You know there are many people for whom Orthodoxy is not a faith at all, it’s simply their chosen superstition. They turn to their icons when life is rough. In the breach they observe the fasts, and they go to confession once a year because it’s expected of them. They drag out their Orthodox clothing – their wedding garment – and put it on on Sunday morning and go to church for awhile, and maybe they can even stay in church for half the liturgy. Then they go home and take it off and go back and live the way they’ve lived all the other days of the week. It’s simply a magical charm, simply a token to them. These people experience what it was that Marx spoke of when he said, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” He didn’t mean that religion is a drug that puts you in a hallucinatory state. He meant, Marx believed, religion is what killed the pain of the people so that they didn’t know that life was rough. And Marx is absolutely right. He’s right about that because if anyone really thought about the nonsense of human existence without God having planned it, without God intervening into it, without God easing our suffering, giving meaning to our meaninglessness, if they ever thought of themselves as what they would be without God as their creator and redeemer, that is to say, very intelligent animals who unlike the other animals are able to be aware of their present predicament and of their future sufferings, as condemned men and women sentenced to death by a slow and painful death or a quick and sudden death, but ultimately grinding their way to death.

T.S. Eliot said, ‘I was a communist in the 1920s and then one day I woke up and said, ‘Why would anyone believe in a doctrine that offers the promise that a thousand years from now, one’s ancestors would look back on him as some lemur in the line of his evolution?” that’s the only meaning that can be offered by life without God intervening into it. And so these people who allow themselves to be doped up, they’ll accept the opiate part of Christianity. They say, “Oh well, if I die” – not “when I die” by they – but “if I die, I believe I’ll go to heaven.” But if you ask them, “What about going to hell?” “Oh, you know, you don’t really believe that do you,” or, “That’s for really bad people. Hitler and Stalin and those guys.” But let me tell you that it’s the same Lord who told us about Heaven – about the many orders of angels, about the many mansions in His Father’s house, and who promised us that we could be with Him where He is at the right hand of the Father – who also described the lake of fire, the place of destruction where the worm does cease and the fire is not quenched.

Brothers and sisters, if there’s a sin that makes a person worthy of losing the grace God has given him, it’s handling lightly the gift of the blood of God. It’s taking Christ’s cross on our shoulder and then putting it in the closet for the rest of our lives because it really is not an attractive ornament and a pretty heavy burden for us. It is pretending to be a believer. It is making believe that we are Orthodox, holding in the back of our minds some silly thought like, “Well, maybe I will win the lottery and there really is a heaven.” That is the really dangerous position. It is not being an adulterer, a murderer, a fornicator, or a homosexual pervert that is the most terrible thing. It is the sin against the Spirit of God. It is calling good “evil,” and evil “good.” It is embracing Jesus, not with tears like Mary Madgalene, not wiping His feet with our hair, but it is approaching Jesus like Judas – giving Him a kiss and then saying, “Now go away. I’ll put you aside for a while God because I can’t really enjoy life with you in the middle of it. I can’t do the things I wanna do if I see your face looking at me while I do them.”

Remember the Grand Inquisitor, I believe in Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor in Spain. Christ comes and He appears, and He’s brought to the Grand Inquisitor. And he says, “I know you can’t say anything because you can’t add any words to what you’ve already said. So let me tell you, I know who you are, but you have to die again. You’re inconvenient. You get in our way. Remain a plastic Jesus on our dashboards, or an icon in the corner, but don’t get in the middle of our lives.”

What was it, today, that the Lord spoke to those people who are called the goats, who are placed on His left hand and who are told to depart to the place that was never prepared for human beings – it was prepared for the Devil and his angels? He didn’t say, “Depart from me because you hated, or because you stole, or because lied, or because you committed adultery, or you didn’t honor your father and mother , or didn’t keep the Sabbath holy.” He says, “Depart from me because you didn’t do the good things you were supposed to do. Because, when I was hungry, you didn’t care if I starved to death. When was thirsty, you didn’t care if I dehydrated and died by the road. When I was naked, you didn’t care if exposure caused me to experience frostbite or if I succumbed to the elements. When I was sick, or I was in prison, you ignored me.” And they said, “Lord, we wouldn’t have done that. How can you say such a thing? If we’d gotten a personal note from you, ‘Jesus S. Christ says, “I’m hungry, bring me some food,”’ we would have brought it to you. We certainly would have brought you water. We would have given you clothing. We would have visited you.” And the Lord says, “In as much as you did not think to do it to the least of my brethren, then you failed to do it to me.” It is in our complacency that is found the possibility, the awful possibility, of our damnation. It is in handling lightly the sacred things of God. We have been ordained, everyone of us as priests, anointed with Holy Chrism, made kings and high priests in Jesus’ kingship and high priesthood, and when we throw that aside like a bunch of old rags, we place our souls in danger.

And so, brothers and sisters, let’s understand that every human being who leaves this life – except for God’s mother – every human being, even the saints whom we commemorate, has to pass through the grave into Hades and behold the terrors of hell, and see the fire and the pre-damnation suffering of those disposed to hate God and who deny his love, before they enter into paradise. That’s why we pray on the third and ninth day, and on the fortieth day, because, although they are outside of time, in our temporal way of thinking of things, we know there are ordeals that they endure beholding the terrors of hell, beholding the delights of paradise, making choices, not of their own but by the grace of our prayers.

And so today, on this Sunday of the Last Judgment, I want you to be scared for just a minute, I want you to contemplate for a moment that your time has come. The Son of Man has come on the clouds of heaven, the trumpets sound, we’ve all been caught up and we’re standing before Him. The six psalms that are read at the beginning of Matins are being read by the archangel, and in the brief time, the twinkling of an eye, each of us is passing in front of Him, and you look into His eyes, and what you see there is corruption reflected in His eyes, and hypocrisy on your part – that you pretended to be a disciple; that you claimed to be a believer, that you even wore the token of His passion on your body, but that really you were a worshiper of possessions, of power, of prestige, of comfort, and of human pleasure. You were really, one of those donkeys, one of those animals who having an angel’s soul in a physical body despised the joys of heaven. And you hear from Him, “Depart from me evildoers,” and you find yourselves now anticipating, not surgery in which the doctor’s going to pierce your body and cause you pain, not a disease that’s going to cause your flesh to weaken but from which you can gain relief through medication, surgery, and prosthesis, but you’re going to receive pain that’s going to start bad and never end. Contemplate that. Turn with fear away from hypocrisy. Quit pretending to be an Orthodox believer. Quit lying about what you are and what you do. Turn your face steadfastly toward God, like the children in the desert following the pillar of fire; not like later when they turned their back toward the rising sun and walked away from paradise because they were afraid of the difficulties of entering into it. As the psalms say, “Their bones were dried up in the desert, their bodies were left in the sand.” Hear the words, then, of David. Hear the words God speaks, “If today you hear My voice, harden not your heart in the time of tribulation, in the time of testing. In the desert for forty years Israel tested Me, they tried Me, and saw My ways.” If today you hear His voice, soften your heart, let Him enter into it, embrace Him in spirit and truth, turn your life around, cast from it all doubt, all fear, all anxiety, embrace His saving love and turn your back on the fires of hell.

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

Sunday of the Prodigal Son

2009-05-15T07:36:00.001-07:00

Sunday of the Prodigal Son

Children’s sermon

Okay, I’m going to tell you the story again that you heard in the Gospel, and while I’m telling the story what I’d like for you to do is for you to be thinking also about some story you know where someone ran away – and hopefully where they came back.

Jesus tells about two brothers, and we are assuming from the way that he tells it that they are about 18, 19, 20 years old. You became an adult in the Jewish world, when you were 12 or 13, you could get married then. But you didn’t become on your own till you were thirty. It’s a pretty good system actually – you’ve got some of the privileges but your dad can still swat you upside the head if he needed to. Now one of these boys went to his dad and said, “I want you to divide up everything I’m going to get when you die. Everything I’m going to get when you die, I want that part now. Half of everything you’ve got.” It was the same thing as saying to his dad, “You’re not dying fast enough.” And so, the dad – he had no obligation, by the way; this boy had no right to anything until his father had passed away, but he claimed it. He just couldn’t wait to be king, right? And so when the dad divided up the money – he had to probably sell half the farm, and half of the farm equipment, and half of the livestock, half of the barns, and when he had done that, then he gave his son his half of it. And then, when he gave him half of it, the boy waited three or four days. He’d probably been planning this a long time. He wanted to party on, dude. He wanted to have a good time. He wanted to let his hair down. He wanted to rock and roll. He wanted to bar hop. He wanted no rules – no one telling him what time to get up, or what time to go to bed. He couldn’t do this near home. You see, his buddies, the guys he grew up with, they liked to have a good time too, and they worked on farms too. But they were Jewish kids. They knew the rules. They knew you didn’t mess around with girls. They knew you didn’t get drunk; you didn’t eat pork, right? Those were the rules. So, he had to go to a place where he didn’t know anybody and no one knew him. A far off country where they worshipped idols. Now I don’t know whether he went to where they worshipped Marduk, or where they worshipped Baal, or whether he went to where they worshipped Molek. All those gods, by the way, were worshipped by having babies killed and their blood poured on the statues. Isn’t that awful? And you know, in most places in the world, there’s nothing you do at all that’s not religious. Even a party is religious, so if you had a party, there was always a statue of a pagan god there – a great big idol with a golden head. Every party he went to was offered to a demon. It said that matins this morning: “He paid his money to the demons.” Also, when you bought meat in another country, that meat didn’t come from the butcher shop, it came from the temple of the Gods. The priests of Marduk, and of Isis, and Osiris, and of Baal, they cut up the meat, and sold it in the temple so it was a religious act to eat that meat – it was a sacrifice to an idol. And this is what this kid did for a long time, and he could do it for a long time because he had a lot of money, right?

Meanwhile, his dad and his brother are back their trying to make a living off half the farm. And the dad somehow knows where the boy is, but he doesn’t go and bring him back. He can’t, because the dad in this story represents God and the boy represents you. And God can invite us, and he can long for us, but he can’t force us because the greatest gift God gave you is his image, and that is the ability to make choices. The longer you stay away from him, the harder your heart gets. I worry when anybody misses church for three weeks because I have found, and I later found that the fathers found, that after three weeks of not going to church, most people don’t miss it as much anymore. The devil lets them think, “See, you missed three weeks and nothing bad happened to you. What would happen if you missed four?” And it takes something really big to get you back, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the kid spent all his money and he thought, “I’ll get a job. I can still live here in pagan land.” His money went pretty fast because all his friends let him throw the parties for him. But he couldn’t get a job because there was a recession, an economic crisis. And nobody was hiring, and there was a famine and food prices went up, and he had to go out and be a pig feeder. Even the pigs weren’t getting slop. They were just getting these buds that grew on trees – coriander seeds, okay? Pods. Because they were trying to keep the pigs alive, they couldn’t make them fat because there was no extra food. And you know what? He would have liked to have eaten those pods that grew on the tree, but they were for the pigs. They weren’t for him. He was starving. And he said, “I will get up. I will go back to my father and I will say to my father, ‘I’ve sinned against heaven and against you and I am not worthy anymore to be called your son. Let me be a hired servant.’” His father saw him coming a long way off. Once he saw him turned around – that word we use “metanoia,” or some us say “repent,” means stop going the wrong way, turn around, and start going the right way, backward. Turn around and go home. And so, once his dad saw him coming back he was able to run to him a long way off, threw his arms around his neck. He didn’t say, “You see, you nasty kid! You took this money, you wasted it, you wasted our lives!” He simply said, “Go get my most beautiful clothing for him. Get some nice soft slippers and put them on his feet. Put a ring with the family initial with it on his hand because we’re bringing him back into the family, and kill the fatted calf. We’re going to have a big celebration, a party. Because my son was dead and he is alive again. He was lost and now he’s found.”

Now who was sad in the story, by the way? His brother! He said, “Dad, you never had a party for me. And now this son of yours is back, and you’ve killed the fatted calf.” And his father said, “You don’t understand, it’s not just because I’m having a good day. It’s because your brother was dead. He wasn’t completely dead, but he was dying. His soul was dying, his heart was dying. And now he’s alive again! I had lost him, and I’ve found him again.” That’s how Jesus feels when a person who’s done something bad turns around and comes back to him.

I know a story about down here in Globeville. Almost a hundred years ago – maybe about 80 years ago – there was a girl named Mary, and there was a boy named Bill. And Mary and Bill were talking and they were about 9 years old. And Mary said, “Every Wednesday night my mother makes piroshki. I hate piroshki.” And Bill said, “Every Wednesday my mother makes fried potatoes and onions, and I hate fried potatoes and onions.” See, people really fasted then. Don’t tell me they didn’t keep the fast, but they did. This is the way I heard the story. So they said, “Let’s go tell our parents, ‘You’re going to have to stop this, or we’re going to leave.” So Mary went to her mom and she put her hands on her hips, and she said, “Dorothy” – that’s her mom; she called her by her first name! – “Dorothy, this business of piroshki every Wednesday, it’s gotta stop.” And Bill went and told his mom something like that. And Mary’s mom took some bread and put some butter on it, and she took two dimes and a little bandana, and she wrapped it up and put it on a broken broomstick. And she said to her, “Okay, when you get where you’re going, you call me and let me know that you’re safe.” And so the two kids went across the railroad tracks. They went all the way from Globeville to Pollock Valley and they laid down there in the weeds, and the looked, and they said, “They’re gonna come after us. They’re gonna come get us. We know they are. They’re gonna get scared. They’re gonna be sorry.” But it got cold, and the day went on, and the grass was wet, and nobody came from the houses. And finally it got to be dark, and the kids said, “What are we going to do?” So they went back, and they didn’t say, “Mom, Dad, we’ve sinned against heaven, and against you.” They said, “We hope you’ve learned your lesson,” but that was because they were nine, right?

Any of you know a story about somebody who ran off from responsibility, or ran away but got in trouble, or ran away to get in trouble? Anyone know a story like that? (Silence). How about a little lion, who said, “I just can’t wait to be king”? And then his dad got killed – right. Did he go back for his dad’s funeral? Did he cry with his mom and his family? Did he help take over and run the pride? (Kids – “No”) What did he do? He ran off and met a big fat hog and a little kind of rat, and the lived together, and they said – what did they say? How do you say that phrase? – Hakuna Matata. He had no worries, no worries man. We have everything here in the forest. And he forgot about everything he loved, and everybody he cared for. And his father couldn’t come and get him, and his father wouldn’t have because that’s impossible. But somebody did come looking for him. It was Nala, and also his priest – that baboon, right? Conked him on the head with a stick. Now if I did that to you, what would you do? I have a stick too. Better than his… Anyway, he went back and did what he was supposed to do.

You see, all kinds of stories are like the Bible stories. As one writer tells us, there’s only two spiels, only two stories, people tell: The Devil’s story, and God’s story. The Devil’s story is about everybody doing their own thing, ripping off each other, being irresponsible, mean, bad, evil, going to the dark side, and getting away with it. And God’s story is that someday, sooner or later, you’ve gotta answer for what you do.

When did – Luke Skywalker’s father, his first name is… Anakin. Anakin means “again.” It means “family again” – ana – again in Greek, kin – family. When did Anakin become Anakin, when did he come back to his family? At the last minute of his life, right? It’s too bad he didn’t enjoy it earlier. He started out as a good man. But he got tempted didn’t he? He left his church, he killed some of the children of that church, didn’t he? And he became Darth Vader – which means Dark Invader – the dark man, the dark intention that invades our hearts. But he came back, right?

And how about… Let’s see, do any of you know the story of Pinnochio? Okay, tell me that. (Child speaks). Yes, his father made him didn’t he? Like God made you – not to boss around, but to love. But Pinnochio wanted to play, didn’t he? He wanted to party instead of going to school. He ended up at a big fair, a carnival, where all the kids ate candy all day and they went on rides, but it was actually the devil’s trap, wasn’t it? They were turning them into what? Yes. Donkeys. It shows that when you follow the devil, you are a donkey, an ass, a fool, because the Devil pays only one kind of salary: pain, suffering, and eternal damnation. The wages of sin is death.

I was thinking these people. I thought about Anakin, and about Simba and Pinnochio, even Adam and Eve in the garden, who, when they had sinned, if they’d gone to God and said, “God, we ate the apple! We ate the fruit! We’re sorry!” They still would have had to be punished, but it wouldn’t have been the same punishment, would it? But instead, they ran off into the trees, the forest, and said, “We can hide from God here right?”

Well, we’re about to start Lent, that’s why we have these stories. Jesus tells us three little short stories together:

He says a man who was a shepherd lost a lamb, and what did he do when he lost his lamb? Who can tell me? Did he say, “Oh well, the lamb can find it’s way back home or wolves can eat it? What did he do when he lost his lamb? (Child answering). He went and got it, didn’t he? (Yes). He put it on his shoulders and brought it back. That stole the Bishop wears represents the lost sheep that the good shepherd brings back. It’s always made out of wool to show that.

And then he tells about a woman who lost one of her dowry coins that her husband had given her – or that she’d given to him and he’d given back to her when they got married. Well, she got down in the dirt on the floor of her house till she found her coin.

But both those people went out and looked, didn’t they? Cuz the good shepherd is Jesus, and he’s always calling us back. And the woman with the coin is the Holy Spirit who’s always trying to beat on your heart and open it up to him again. But in the third story, it’s God the Father. He’s not going to come after you, you after to come back to him

Here’s the point: That each one of us, when we sin, has two choices: We can either right at that point tell God that we’re sorry and then come and stand in His house, the church, and say before the priest to God in the icon, “This is what I’ve done,” and have God forgive us and welcome us back, put our clean shoes back on our feet, our clean robe back on us, the ring back on our hand, and feed us with his life. We can either do that, or we can run off and hide. We can go hide in the woods like Adam and Eve. We can go into another country and say, “Who needs God anyway?” You know, the people who turn away from religion then say bad things about their faith because they’re trying to convince themselves and they’re trying to convince other people as well. They become not only the prey of the Devil, they become the tools of the Devil. So, come to lent, remember, whenever anything’s on your heart, a bad thing you’ve done, don’t let it sit there because then you’ll get used to it. You won’t be sorry about it. You’ll even decide it’s not really so bad. But confess it immediately to God, and when you come to church you confess it.

Now, I’ll tell you one more story to help you probably remember part of this. There was a Sunday school class once and the teacher told the story of the Prodigal Son that I just told you: How the boy went off and lived in the country, how he lived a riotous life, how he lost his money, how he had to feed pigs, how he came back and his father welcomed him and had a party for him. At the end, the teacher asked the same question I asked you, “Who was sad at the end of the story?” And you said, “The older brother.” When this teacher asked the question, “Who was sad at the end of the story?” one girl raise her hand and said, “The fatted calf.”

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

****Before Communion, Father interrupted the liturgy with an addendum to the sermon. I didn’t get to record it, but I did talk to him later and I’ll try to get the gist of it here***

One of the children asked why the boys in Pinnochio were turned into donkeys, and I gave him a stupid answer. It’s important not to brush off kids questions like that, it was a good question and it deserves a better answer that I gave. The boys were being transformed into the image of the carnal desires they were chasing after. When we chase after those desires, we become more and more like our animal part. You see, we have an angel part, and an animal part. Samboli turns the boys into donkeys so that he can sell them as beasts of burden which is a like how Satan turns us into slaves by tempting us with things we desire.

Sunday of Zaccheus

2009-03-19T12:18:00.001-07:00

Sunday of Zaccheus

Zaccheus, the outcast, the publican, the Jew who had become a contract tax collector for the Roman occupying army, who not only served the foreign enemy but who also collected taxes and handled gentile pagan money, Zaccheus was a man who learned to take satisfaction in what it was that he had, but he mourned all that he didn’t have. His life was centered around the assignment of assessment, of levies and taxes, to various citizens so that the Roman government would be placated, so he could hand over what he had collected to the governor and then take out his share. And he lived in comfort, probably clothed in soft clothing and eating very well, but he found himself both out of communion with God and with his own people, both a traitor to his faith and to his nation, we would say a pretty deplorable person. But that’s not the way that he appears in the gospel.

He hears that Our Lord is coming to Jericho, and he has this little dream, this thought: Perhaps in some way, the fact that Jesus, who many said was the messiah, who some proclaimed to even be a divine oracle, perhaps this Jesus could say a word that he would hear that would show him the way out of his predicament. You see, when things are bad, when you feel threatened, when your strength fails, when the markets go down, when the person next to you is fired and you don’t know how long it will be till you’re fired, you do one of two things: You can eat, drink, and be merry – start celebrating the fore-feast of the Super Bowl on Sunday morning; or you can turn to God and allow him to comfort you, to relieve you of your burden, to give you joy and hope, and to provide peace for you so that you can say, “The Lord is with me, therefore I will not fear, I will not be afraid.” Well, Zaccheus had a hope that that was something he could receive, and so he came out to the street as Jesus was passing by.

Now we know that a lot of things happened on that entrance into Jericho. We know about the blind man who proclaimed our Lord to be the messiah, who saw with eyes of his soul what these people could not see with the eyes of their body. We know about the woman who later, with the issue of blood, touched the hem of His garment and was healed, and Jairus whose daughter was raised to life, but Zaccheus couldn’t get close enough to even see Jesus. He was small. The Romanian word for small is meek, and I remember that two years ago Andrew received an award at school. It said he received the Humility Award, and he said to me, “What is humility?” and I said, “It’s like being humble,” and he said, “But what does humble mean?” And I said, “You know, like ‘blessed are the meek,’” and he said, “Didn’t I tell you I was tiny?” Well, Zaccheus was tiny. He couldn’t see Jesus, and the big tall people wouldn’t move out of the way. They said, “Oh you tax collector, you jerk! Who do you think you are? We’re not going to give you fronts. You just get away from us.” So he got an idea: he figured out what road Jesus was going to come down and he ran ahead – down a side-street, up another one – and there, overhanging the road, was a sycamore tree. And he climbed up in the sycamore tree and he sat there on the branch and he said, “Now I can get a good look at him.” As Jesus comes by, Jesus looks up and he sees him there, and he addresses him by name. He had known his name since he was conceived in his mother’s womb; he had known about him since before creation, and he said, “Zaccheus, hurry up! Come down! I’m going to have supper at your house today!”

What does it mean that Jesus was going to have supper at his house? No good Jew would eat with a sinner, would they? They wouldn’t go into their house, they might become unclean. Especially not a tax collector – somebody who handled the coins and collected the taxes for the gentile dogs. No, you wouldn’t go near him. You were too good. But Jesus said, “I’m going to have supper with you today!” And the people, all around, instead of saying, “Hey! Zaccheus is being changed. The Rabbi is going to go to his house. Maybe he’ll stop sinning” – and by the way, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Gospel for today that Zaccheus was a sinner. He broke the rules of the Jewish nation, but it doesn’t say that he stole anything or cheated anyone. It’s the people standing around who decided, “He’s rich, so he must be a robber, right? We need to raise his taxes cuz he’s rich. He must have done something wrong to get that money.” So, they all start murmuring. They say, “Look! Jesus is going to be the guest of a man who’s a sinner.”

I remember one time we had a man in this church. He had not been born Orthodox. He was born a Uniate, and in college he had converted and he had become so Orthodox that he judged everyone else. He stood up at parish council once and said, “I move we outlaw all liquor at this church,” and one of the parish council members looked at him and said, “Are you a Protestant?” Anyway, this man told me I was a bad priest. Why? Because I’d go to the houses of people who were sinners. And I pointed out to him that was true, I had even come to his house.” And then I said, “Do you realize that two times in the bible when people reject Jesus, two times, the words they use are, ‘He’s gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner’? Do you understand what kind of judgment that brings down on your head, to use the same words the people who condemned Christ used to judge the people who were coming to him for mercy and forgiveness?”

Zaccheus stands up and he says, “Lord, I’m going to give half of everything I have to the poor.” Now this was not admission of any kind of guilt at all. It was an admission of a life that had been changed. All he had had before now was his money. It had been his idol; it had been his God; it had been is prepossession; it’s the only thing he had given any thought to. So how does he free himself from it? By giving it away. “I give half of all my possessions to the poor.” And then he says, “If I have defrauded any many, I will restore it four fold.” He didn’t say, “And the people I’ve defrauded, I will restore it four fold.” There’s no evidence at all that he cheated anyone, except to the extent that the Roman tax system itself was a fraud, like most tax systems are. He said, “If I have a cheated anyone, I will restore it fourfold.” Now this was the Jewish requirement, the law. If you took something by fraud, you had to pay it back four times. And so, this man puts himself, right now at this moment, in the context of being a good Jew, and Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this man’s house. For this man who is a son of Abraham has received me, and the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was being lost.”

This is the lesson that we always have the Sunday before we begin the Triodion. Next week will be the Pharisee and the Publican. It’s the last lesson. Next week when I come to your house and I sprinkle, I always say, “Lord who was baptized by John in the Jordan and who entered into the house of Zaccheus, has brought salvation” because these are two points that we identify at this time that have to do with blessing. So today, climb down from your sycamore tree. Quit looking at Jesus from a distance. Run up to him. Let him embrace you. Let him into the house of your soul. Give up the things that enslave you. Turn way from the things that hold you back from God. Welcome the Lord into your house, and receive salvation from him who came to seek and to save that which was being lost.

St. Sava and the Sunday of the Syro-Phonecian Woman

2009-03-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

Today is the Sunday of the Syro-Phonecian woman, this Sunday precedes the Sunday of Zaccheus that leads us to the preparatory Sundays before the Great Fast. Jesus, last week, had restored sight to a blind man who had recognized him in the eye of his heart, in his true mind, in his nous, to be what his own disciples did not know him to be – that is the son of David, the Messiah. And now, he goes into the coast of Tyre and Sidon. Why did he go out of Israel? Was it so he could insult the Syro-Phonecian woman? No, indeed. It was to show that the power that he exercised in Israel upon the Jewish people was also the power that he would exercise throughout the entire world.

So he comes, and this woman comes up to him, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” And he doesn’t answer her. He wants to hear from her more, what does she have to say? She says, “Lord help me.” The conversation that he has with her has been interpreted by some rabbis as a terribly insulting conversation. He said, “It is not proper to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But is that what he really said? You know, in Greek there’s no question mark. As you read the conversation, it sounds not like a conversation between Jesus and the crowd, but an intimate conversation between Jesus and the woman. He is saying to her, “Is it proper to take the bread that belongs to the children – the house of Israel – and to give it to the dogs?” He’s not calling her a dog. In Jewish idiom, all gentiles were dogs. “Gentile dog” was a compound sort of like “Damned Yankee.” And so, when he says to her, “Is it proper – is it possible – to take the bread of the children of Israel, these people who don’t even understand what I’m doing and to give it to the gentile dogs?” She comes back with a very astute comment, “If the children are throwing their bread on the floor, then can’t the dogs take it?” That’s what she’s saying. “If the children of Israel aren’t accepting you, and I am, then shouldn’t I be able to benefit from what they’re not choosing?” The Lord says, “Great is your faith,” and He heals her daughter immediately, and He shows that His grace flows over, that even though he was sent first to the lost sheep of Israel, that His power, and His mercy, and His healing will extend to all the nations.

And so today, we are here, a gathering, a multitude of gentile dogs, of people who are not the descendents of Abraham after the flesh, but who have attained more than that, who have been grafted into the tree of Abraham, who have been made the true Israelites. But we come from a motley crowd. We are not a people who are monolithic in our culture, in our nationality, in our origin. God has taken us from many nations, from many cultures, from all of the colors of human flesh which was formed from the dust of the earth, and he has gathered us together in one assembly, in one ecclesia, one gather called out from among the nations to be a chosen generation, a royal priesthood.

So, today we celebrate St. Gregory the Theologian, who was an Archbishop of Constantinople, but at the same time we celebrate St. Sava of Serbia, the first archbishop, a holy man, a man who could have been the king of his own country, who was cultivated by his father to succeed to the throne but who exchanged that earthly glory of the robes of a monastic, and then brought back to the Serbian people and through them to the Russian and Ukranian people, the treasures of the Law of God translated into the Slavonic language, and also brought back to us our beautiful Typicon of St. Sava’s of Palestine – which is why our service is a little different from the Greeks, because ours comes from Jerusalem, not second hand from some Greek town. So, we celebrate all the saints, the new martyrs who have died in Russia, at the very same time. And Romanian and Serbian ladies work together to make a wonderful feast in honor of St. Sava. And we remember when St. Sava died – when he caught pneumonia blessing the waters of the lake – and then died a week later on the leave-taking, it was to resolve a conflict in Bulgaria – to bring peace to the Bulgarian people. And we understand that what we really in is not a diminution of our culture by bringing together and mixing all of these wonderful gifts that God has given, distributed to the many nations, gathered together here in one community; but we have is that Greeks can have St. Sava for their own now, and Serbs can have St. Gregory, and the Romanians can have both of them, and we can all have St. Philothea, and St. Dmitru Bazarabov because they have all become our relatives, our kin, our family. They have all become our protectors, our intercessors.

So, today we glory in God’s mercy but I wanted you to think for a moment today, as you stand and pray, utter a prayer for the thousands of Serbian men, and some women, who came to this country, who took the jobs laboring in the mines; those who were shot down in cold blood by the state militia during the coal field wars, and those who died of black lung disease, those who were never able to return to their home land as they’d promise, but were never able to marry and leave children – remember that those people were the people who built this church here. But they have left very few children behind because their lives were difficult, because their struggle was hard. Very hard. Many many of them died very young. Pray for them. We always bless their graves at the cemetery, buried among the railroad tracks there. There all also some in Eerie, some in Lafayette, and up in Leadville, and down in Trinidad. So, pray for those people and remember that every year, no matter how cold it was, how snowy it was, no matter how dangerous the roads, these men and their wives if they had them, and their children would load into wagons with animals or Model T Fords and they would go down those mountain roads – sometimes at night a little boy would have to sit on the hood of the car with his flashlight to show where the road ahead was, snow blowing in his face – to come to Globeville, to gather here in this place, this place where the great Tesla, the great scientist, prayed together with them at one time. They came here to celebrate a saint who had touched their lives, and melted their hearts, and made them feel the love of God.

So today we honor St. Sava and we ask that by his prayers, we also, of many nations, of people who were gentile dogs, of people walking in darkness but have been brought to see the light and have been made children of Israel by water and the spirit, have been made more than that, have been made divine, have been made to have union with God himself, how we are made into one family; and lets ask our dear patron, Sava, to make us all feel a new burst of love and to be able to embrace each other in Christian fellowship as a family, to lay aside all of the foolish and trifling arguments and disagreements which throughout decades my have arisen among some of us, and to again stand before God and have the group photo taken in heaven of this household, this family, this Eucharistic assembly today, in peace and harmony and joy, with our father Sava standing behind us, embracing us like a great grandfather, holding us all warmly in his arms.

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

January 18, 2009

2009-03-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

You know, even in the church calendar there are mistakes after all these centuries. One of the problems is when we scrunch the readings of Luke into the pre-Lenten, there’s a question of what you read. Our calendar was right, what was sent to me over the internet was wrong. It had the gospel reading of the Syro-Phonecian woman. You will hear that next week. But oddly enough you’ll hear the same reading from the apostle Paul next week that you heard this week, but we’ll talk about that then.

What I’m going to talk about today is the Gospel and the real significance of this particular gospel at this time. We’re now back to the beginning of the cycle of Pascha. The three Sundays before we begin are the Lenten Triodion, the Pre-Lenten Sundays start, are dedicated to the blind man, the Syro-Phonecian woman, and then to Zaccheus – the little man who climbed up into the sycamore tree to see Jesus. The thing that unites the blind man and the Syro-Phonecian woman is the knowledge they had through faith that the people surrounding them did not have because they were living in their minds, in their brains, not in their hearts. One was a Jew, one was a Gentile, but both of them recognized Jesus as divine, and as the Savior. Both of them came to Him and both of them were rebuked. When the blind man heard that Jesus was coming, he cried out, “Son of David, have mercy on me” – that is, “Messiah, have mercy on me” – and the crowd told him, “Shut up. Be quiet. This is an important Rabbi, but don’t make a fool of yourself.” And when the Syro-Phonecian woman came up and threw herself at Jesus feet and said, “Lord, have mercy on me,” the disciples wanted to push her away. She was a gentile dog. But both of them insisted, both of them persisted, and both of them received what they wanted. When we gave up Pascha, when we had the last Sunday of Pascha, we celebrated it with the Feast of the Man Born Blind. You remember that every year. The man whose eyes Jesus created out of clay and told him to go wash in the pool of Salom. And then we begin the cycle that brings us to the Triodion, the Pre-Lenten times, we begin with the blind man again. This blind man, this man who cried out, “Son of David, have mercy on me,” was actually the only one there who had sight.

You see that now many of our teachers are reminding us, as Father Alithios Webber pointed out, we’re deceived into believing that we are our brains, that our brains are us. But our brains are simply a database, and that database is corrupt. It’s full of all kinds of garbage, it’s been attacked by all kinds of viruses, all kinds of program deviations. And so it makes us think things, and about things, that we have no business thinking about. I was thinking today, “Is anybody going to notice that the hem on this vestment is too long? I wonder how coffee hour will go. Are the kids going to do a good job for St. Sava’s day?” All these little thoughts intruded on my prayer life, and probably two dozen more, some of which, if I told you, you would be ashamed of me, so I won’t. but these are called by the Fathers “logosmoi.” They are little words uttered in our ear by the demon, by the deceiver, to make us think we are thinking. They are little words that distract us and occupy our minds. Words about self-importance, or about self-deprecation; words that exalt us in our own hearts, or depress us and drive us down, so that we feel we are “lower than a toad’s belly.” These logosmoi are just the distractions that flow into our ears. They make us think things are important that are not. They make us fear. They make us occupy ourselves with thoughts of acquiring entertainment or stimulations that when we acquire them we wonder why we did and we don’t really want them anyway. They make us want things we don’t want. And they’re assisted now, because we are bombarded by the availability of all sorts of information. Why do you suppose God confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel? It is because, he said, “if people could all communicate about every idea that they have, they’ll be able to devise all manner of evil. It will be harmful for themselves. I have to divide them up, spread them out.” But now with the computer, all kinds of knowledge and ignorance, all kinds of wisdom and foolishness, all kinds of beauty and ugliness come into our house from every corner in the world. Sometimes we seek it out, sometimes it just throws itself in your face, but we have available to us logosmoi in the billions. Little evil thoughts, little self deceptions.

But the blind man was not looking at Jesus with the eyes of body, because they were blinded. He’s different from the man born blind because he had seen once. He had been born with vision and had lost, and so he knew what it was to see. But he cried out, seeing in his heart that this man coming to him was the messiah, he proclaimed him as the children did on palm Sunday when nobody else was willing to conjure up the gumption to identify our Lord as what he really was – the savior. “Son of God, have pity on me,” he cries out, and Jesus comes to him and He heals him.

You know today we celebrate two saints: Athanasius, who was a deacon at the council of Nicaea but became patriarch of Alexandria, and Cyril who later followed him as patriarch of Alexandria. And we have in these two men, these men who looked at the world through the eye of their soul, two heroes who stood up against everything that just made sense because it wasn’t true. Athanasius was dealing with Arius. Arius was a brilliant orator. He was also a pretty good song writer – would have probably had three songs in the top ten today – that’s why the church stopped letting people make up hymns like the Protestants have in their hymnals because heresy has a funny way of sneaking its way in between the truth. Arius said, “Look. Everybody knows that there had to have originally been a monad – that is, on little ball of stuff, God stuff. And that then that monad emanated the Son and the Holy Spirit, that’s why we call it Father. And so, there has to have been a time when Jesus didn’t even exist. He came into existence at the first instance of time, He wasn’t eternal. There is no trinity, because,” he said, “all these Greeks, all these people who were trained in Platonism, the whole world knows that everything started out with a little ball of oneness and the emanations came from it. Let’s not be foolish. Even if we want to believe that Jesus is eternal,” he said, “doesn’t it make more sense to get people into the Church by catering to their delusions.” So his only doctrine was an antidoctrine – there was a time, he said, when God the Son did no exist. And Arius spread this heresy, and all the Platonists who couldn’t accept the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the undivided, consubstantial, eternal trinity, said, “Oh! We’ll go to church now. We’ll be baptized. This is a lot like what we believe. Thank you for changing your teaching so that we could accept it.” And Athanasius said, “No! This is heresy. It’s not true. God the Holy Trinity created the world, but there was not a time when the Trinity did not exist. The world is not the product of some mad monad who needed people to obey and worship him. The world is the product of a loving community of persons whose love overflowed so much that they made others to share that love with.”

And then, having defeated Arius, the Arians came back with what was called semi-Arianism: “Well, lets say just that it’s possible there was a time when God the Son did not exist.”

And lots of people in the Church said, “Athanasius, you’re causing lots of trouble. Our pews are full. Our offering plates are running over. Why don’t you just shut up? If people want to believe that there was a time when the Son of God did not exist, let them believe that. We can believe what we want to. NO! It’s not true. We’re not going to say that the Son is homoousios – that is of one substance with the Father, we’re going to say that He is homoiousios – the same or similar substance with the Father, and that’ll make these people happy.”
And Athanasius said, “I refuse. I refuse to compromise with heresy. I refuse to look through the eye of my logosmoi. I want to look through the eyes of my heart at my God, who is the eternal Trinity.” So he was thrown out of communion. The church did that to him! The bishops were more interested in the money; they were more interested in the people in the pews or standing up in church in those days. They were so interested in power and importance that they buried the truth. So, he spent most of life in exile until finally, in his old age, he was called back, vindicated by the monks who lived in the dessert – not very well educated, but not distracted – the monks who knew that there was never a time when God the Son did not exist, that God the Son was of one essence with the Father. And so he was restored, and vindicated.

And then along came a patriarch of Constantinople. This guy was a, well, we’ll say he was a woman hater. And the empress, who was the ruler of the empire at that time, came to him and said, “Patriarch Nestorius, on the day of my coronation, I intend to enter the Holy Altar and receive communion at the Holy Table.” Do you know women can do that? When we had deaconesses – who were not woman deacons, they were women who ministered to women – the deaconesses received communion at the Holy Table. They didn’t serve in church, but they came into the altar for communion. When an empress is crowned, she receives communion at the altar. Why? Because she’s sharing in the ruling on the earth of the priesthood of Christ.

And he said to her, “You can’t do that.”
“Well, why not?”
“Well you’re a filthy woman.”
And she said, “What?!? I am a virgin.”
And he said, “You’re still a filthy woman.”
She said, “Was the Theotokos a filthy woman?”
And he said, “She’s not Theotokos; she’s not ‘God-bearer.’ She’s just Christotokos- Christ-bearer.”

See, he looked through the eyes of his prejudices and he distorted and twisted the faith to fit his bad attitude. So, he tried to teach that Our Lady only carried the human nature of Christ. Now, what does that mean? It means that Jesus couldn’t be truly and completely God and truly and completely man, right? If she only carried his human nature, where was his divine nature? Hovering above her? Hiding out in her skirts? I don’t know. But it was a stupid, and asinine idea. But because he saw with the eyes of his body, because of that, he created a whole heresy. And it was Cyril, the successor of Athanasius, who stood up and said, “Enough with the blasphemy.” They summoned a council, the Council of Ephesus. And they declared that our Holy Lady, the Mother of God, is Theotokos God-bearer. That she not only gave birth to Him that was God, but she carried in her womb ___ who is God, that she became the temple, the arc of the covenant, the habitation of the divine on earth. And so, what we need to do, brothers and sisters, as we face the questions that come to us – spiritual questions: How often should I pray? How much money should I give? Should I be kind to this beggar? Should read my morning and evening prayers – and practical questions like: How should I act toward others? What should I think of myself? How am I going to deal with my sickness? How am I going to deal with my children? We need to look at these things from the eyes of the heart, and not listen to the logosmoi, the little words the devil whispers to us: “you don’t need church. You can pray anywhere. That’s not really the body of Christ, we just say it is. Those icons are just holy pictures, they’re not windows into heaven.” The happens to us then when we do what’s wrong to the eyes of our heart is that the logosmoi, when they die, when these dead ideas fall out of our head when we’ve entertained them for a while, the form like bat manure in a cave, a collection of garbage inside of us, and they cover up the eye of our soul. So then let us come to Jesus and fall down before Him say, “The eye of our heart is blind Lord, at least it’s distorted, warped by the bat guano surrounding it. Son of David, Messiah, have mercy on us,” and hear Him say, “Thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace.”

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

January 11, 2009

2009-03-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

We’re told by holy Apostle Paul, that having descended into the earth – that is into the depths of Hell itself – that our Lord Jesus Christ ascending on high bore in captivity slavery itself captive, and that he gave gifts unto men. The gifts that he gave are the gifts of the holy spirit. They are the presence of God in our lives and they are given to us for two reasons: They’re given to us as signs of God’s presence with us individually, and they’re given to us for the building up of the body of Christ. Now, there are profound misunderstandings about the nature of the Christian vocation, of the Church, and of salvation. People understood from almost the beginning that the church is a community, that salvation comes in communities and that everything that is given to us by God is communal. That doesn’t mean that we are communists. But in the early church, when in Jerusalem there were five thousand Greek speaking Jews converted at Pentecost who then decided to stay, and then sent letters home asking for their house and their property to be sold so that they could maintain themselves, the Christians in Jerusalem sold what they had and then gave it to those people. That’s why we have the deacons now: because the apostles one day realized that the Greek-speaking widows, the Greek-speaking virgins – young women – were not getting their proper share of food and of care from the church. So they appointed these men, these economists of the household, caretakers of the house, or in plain roman parlance, these butlers, these household servants. They were responsible for making sure that everyone was cared for rightly. In our time and in our age, the church is just the same. There are enormous churches – there are churches with five hundred or a thousand people – these are all in the United States. In Europe, there may be a thousand, or two thousand, or five thousand people at a service in church, but the parishes are not that enormous. The church there is a place you go to, and you may go to this church this week, and that church the next week. But here our communities are modular – it has good points. It allows us to be more like the early Christians in that we know the people who are our brothers and sisters in Christ. It allows us to set up an operating mechanism the permits us to run the church in a way that is appropriate to God’s desire for economy. On the other hand, it allows us to know each other to well, to offend each other, to make one another angry, and to become political. None of these are good.

It says that God gave this diversity of gifts to us; it means that you, and I, have received from the Holy Spirit at least one charismatic gift, at least one special blessing from God given to build up the body of Christ, to make the church stronger, healthier, more effective in the teaching and preaching and the charitable work of Christ. And since St. Paul says to pray for the higher gifts, it means that we who have received some gifts are capable of receiving more. And although the gifts are diverse, yet they are not qualitatively different. Therefore the priest in his location in the altar is not a better person than lady wipes down the tables and scrapes the floor in the hall, or even the one who cleans out the toilets, or those who cook in the kitchen, or those who vacuum. The diversity of gifts are given for the health of the whole, entire body, and as St. Paul says those members of the body which are not the most attractive, those not given the most attention, we clothe our ugly parts.

And so it is that ascending into heaven, Christ has poured out on us the Holy Spirit, which in Jordan the father poured down on Him. We have become recipients of that grace, but we can’t talk about it as my gift of the Holy Spirit, or my salvation, or my personal savior because Jesus establishes his relationship with the church, his body. It’s not that you and I each have our own little salvation that we can go out to Aurora and take with us. It is that salvation is through Christ in His body, the Church.

Today we’re going to install Parish Council members and officers, and there are different attitudes toward this. At one time, with the assistance of Bolshevik mentality, parish councils got the idea that somehow or the other they were supposed to be the opponent of the priest; that the priests were going to get uppity; that the priests were called servants of the cult – they were paid a salary, they were supposed to do a job. But the parish council ran the church and they were sure as heck going to tell you who was boss. In other places priests resented the councils and they argued with the people and they said, “I’m the priest here. I have all the power. Who do you think you are anyway?” And both of these are directly from the devil, both of these are directly from Satan. We’ve had splits in the Syrian, and the Russian and, the Ukranian church that, thank God are in the process or have already been healed, that primarily sprung from the question of “Who’s boss?” But I’ll tell you what. Jesus Christ is boss and none of us are put here to boss each other around; we’re put here to work together for the building up of the Body.

Whenever I let somebody goad me into pushing somebody around I always end up sorry, and somebody ends up angry. I remember, about 10 years ago, one of our parishoners said to me, “Father you’re a bad priest because you let people cross their legs in church and my grandmother always said that was a great blasphemy.” So I was out here talking one day and I saw one of the older young people with his legs crossed, and I said, “Uncross your legs.” I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t my job to do that then. I did it because that other person had gotten me riled up. And you know, it took people a long time to forget that – that I had singled out that person and criticized them. Parents should never correct their children in public. I tell people that if your kids are being bad, take them out, put them in a corner, have them face the wall and say, “Are you bored yet?”

When the people take their vow today they’re going to pray and they’re going to promise to promote the peace, unity, and tranquility of the church. And when you say that it sounds like you’re saying the same thing over and over again. Let me remind people who are going to take the oath today that this is a promise and that when they don’t keep that promise that they’re lying to God. Now, not if they’re not able to keep it. It’s kind of like if I decide I’m going to give 10% of what I have and it’s going to be this much, and then I lose my job. I can’t do that. It’s the intention that matters to God. But if I go in there lightly and I make big promises to God and I don’t intend to make the effort to fulfill them I am lying to him. I am foreswearing myself. The peace of the Church is not, as I have told you many times, simply that people aren’t fighting. The word peace in our vocabulary means the full integrity of everything. It means that the Kingdom of God which is here, which Jesus preached in the Gospel this morning, is at hand, and which is coming in its fullness should be present in the church. It means that everything is here needed to make this church work. It means that everything is here necessary to do the job that we have to do as this part of the body of Christ. And that we have to make sure that all that is here, that peace, that completeness, that fullness is used, is called upon, that all the gifts of all the people… Now sometimes people come to me and say, “There are so many people that don’t do anything.” Well, to me that’s like having people criticize my kids. My kids didn’t always do everything they were supposed to do either. It’s kind of like, “What am I supposed to do about it?” What they’re really saying is, “I want you to notice me, I’m doing a whole lot. You know, there’s other people not doing as much as I am.” That’s too bad. Find a way to get them to do it. It’s good for you – you’re getting to do great things for God, you’re getting to do extra things for God. That’s a special blessing, that’s a joy. If you resent doing anything you do for God or his body, don’t do it, because you’re not getting any blessing out of it and no good will ever come out of it, okay? Anything you do with resentment, with anger, withholding in your heart your full willingness to do it, anything you’re doing like that no good will come from it, it will be a waste of time, and it will be a burden on your soul. When people first join the church, they say, “What do you want me to do?” I say, “Stand and pray, then something will come along. Either God will tell you to do something or somebody will ask you and you’ll know it’s the right thing, and you’ll do it.” One thing I especially appreciate about Xenia: I give her a lot of odious tasks - I ask her to clean this, or to vacuum that, or to remove was from that – and you know she says, when she’s done, “Thank you, Father, for letting me help you with that.” As long as she keeps that attitude, as along as it’s sincere, she’ll receive two blessings for everything she does. So the peace is the completeness of the church.

It’s unity has to do with us not breaking up into parties and fighting about issues. Every institution that gets over 100 people – whether it’s a tribe, a clan, a church, or a club – every community that gets over a hundred has the temptation to form parties and fight with each other. And that is a blasphemous sin. It’s like tearing the arm of the body of Christ, or cutting the body down the middle. What we should do for those with whom we disagree is to pray more fervently, to set an example. I had a young priest who was beating the people up, and the bishop said, “If you want a transfer, I can get you one in about a year.” So he got up and he said, “The bishop is POed with you, he’s mad at you, and he’s going to move me somewhere else, and you’re not going to have a priest” – he told them that – “because you don’t come to confession enough, you come to communion when you shouldn’t, you don’t fast right, you don’t attend weekday services, you don’t come to my classes.” You know, I used to plan classes, and I’d plan them out myself and there would be three people, and the next week there would be three people but two of them would be different. So I decided, if you’re going to plan classes, make every lesson independent and don’t worry about who comes – the people who need it will be there. Anyway, he told them this stuff, and the bishop wrote back and said, “Father, your job is not to change your people. Your job is to change yourself so they will want to be like you are.” That’s a lifelong task. I haven’t even begun to start to accomplish it. But the unity of Christ comes from our all following one good shepherd who is Jesus, and the priest is the visible image of the one good shepherd on earth.

Peace, unity, purity: that means that the faith can’t be diluted. We can’t water it down. We can’t say on respect for life Sunday, “We’re not going to talk about abortion because it’s a controversial issue.” It’s not a controversial issue for the Orthodox church: it is destruction of human life.
And tranquility: You know, peace and harmony are one thing; tranquility is another. You can have things not in a riot, people working together, but people agitated, upset, nervous. So the church has to be a place of tranquility, and that means that you guys – guys? – you have to not rile the big people when they’re praying. Be quiet, pray. What you don’t know people is, some of these kids are prayer warriors – they’re in church five or six times a week some weeks, and they can pray five or ten minutes and the rest of the time they’re zoned out because God lets you enter into the kingdom and forget where you are. Some of them pray everyday, they’re at liturgy, they’re at vespers. I won’t tell you which ones, but it’s not just my own grandchildren. But it’s your guys’ job not to upset the big people – don’t run, don’t jump, don’t dance in church, and especially don’t tip candle stands over on your heads because even though it’s red, we’ll have to cut it up and burn it. God has given you, by your chrismation, the gift of the Holy Spirit and he’s continuing to send you new gifts. But what you need to do is keep opening up the gifts that God gives you, ask what can I do that I couldn’t do before, and then open it up, look at it, enjoy the precious stone that he gives you, and then ask, “how can I use this for the building up of the body of Christ, for the edification of the saints, my brothers and sisters?”

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

Glory forever!

January 4th, 2009

2009-03-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

…….Began to think about the beginning of the new creation, which is figured in the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ which we will celebrate tomorrow, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and actually through next Sunday. We come to an Epistle reading where the Holy Apostle describes to us the end of his work. St. Paul is writing to Timothy, who he calls his beloved son. He had baptized him. Timothy as well had been ordained by him as a deacon and priest of the church. He writes to Timothy telling him to do the work of an evangelist, that is to say to continue to spread the Gospel as Paul had spread the Gospel. And the St. Paul speaks to him intimately. This was a letter sent by St. Paul to one man, but the Church circulated the letter because it felt that the teaching was universal. When St. Paul says, “I am now ready to be offered up” the word his is using is “to be sacrificed.” St. Paul knew that his martyrdom was very near. He doesn’t say this with regret. He doesn’t say, “My time’s been cut short. I can’t continue my evangelical work because the Romans have me imprisoned and are going to kill me. It isn’t fair. Somebody should come up with some remedy.” He simply says, “I am about to be offered up. I am about to be sacrificed. And the time of my departing this life is at hand.” And then St. Paul describes what it is in which he has confidence. He says, “I have fought the good fight. I have completed the course. I have kept the faith.” It’s fascinating. Paul, who was raised in Tarsus, who was a Roman citizen, who was very familiar with Greco-Roman culture, but who was a Pharisee of Pharisees, this Paul was able to draw images from Hellenistic life and apply them to Christian life. He was also able to draw images from agriculture and from military science. He was a man who knew many things.

“I have fought the good fight” refers to one of the events in the pentathlon, which was wrestling. If one were a really good pentathlon participant he could win three events out of the five, and he could avoid what was called “the event that involved sand,” that is to say, graveling, wrestling. But if the score were two to two, then he would have to contend with his opponent in a wrestling match, in a fight. And you know that this wrestling match is figured in our Orthodox baptismal rite. Nowadays, when we baptize a child – at least in the Slavic tradition – we make crosses with the oil of gladness on the forehead and on the chest and back and on the hands and feet, and then we put them in the water. But Greek godparents will say, “I baptized that child.” And people will say, “Well, you’re not a priest.” What they mean is, they immersed the child in oil. We pray for the person who has been anointed and for those who have participated in the oil. Why? In the early church, that anointing before baptism was a complete anointing of the entire body before going into the water. The entire body. That’s one reason we had deaconesses – because if women were being baptized, the deaconess would anoint the women. And if there were no deaconesses, the women wore a modest white robe and they were anointed the way we do with children now. But the oil was put all over the body, and the analogy was that a wrestler, when he contends in the arena, greases himself so that his opponent cannot get a grip on him. And so now, in this contention with Satan, our bodies our oiled so that we can say, “I have fought the good fight.” We’re ready, through the water, to contend with the devil, to put him down, to win the prize.

And then he goes on to say, “I have finished the course.” You probably remember the first Olympic event was just one race. If a person that race, from all the cities in Greece, then he was given a laurel crown. Not a $10,000 prize or a shoe sales contract. But when we returned home he was literally the toast of the town. Some cities would knock a hole in their city wall to let him come through, saying, “With such heroes as this, we have no need of walls to protect us,” and for the rest of his life his fellow citizens provided him with everything he needed – with food, and clothing and shelter, and honor, and dignity - because he had brought the crown of glory to that city. Well St. Paul says, “I have fought the good fight, I have won the pentathlon. I have fought with Satan and been victorious. I have finished the race.” He doesn’t say, “I finished number one” because this is the mystery of the new kingdom, of the new dispensation, that it is not that you are the only one who wins the race but that you are one who completes the race that makes you worthy of the crown incorruptible, of the crown of righteousness. Now a lot of Christians, they come to church on Sunday and it makes them feel better, and then they’ve got this kind of latent expectation, “Well, if I come more often than my next door neighbor, if I give more money than those stingy people at work, that when I die, I’ll go to heaven.” But St. Paul doesn’t say, “I went to church once. I filled my offering envelope.” He says, “I have finished the race.” All of life, brothers and sisters, is the race. It is not that we have to run the fastest, or that we have to run the hardest. It is that we finish the race that counts. I remember watching that race in China where that young Romanian lady – who by the way is from Boulder, CO who won first place – she couldn’t talk to anyone on the sidelines, so she didn’t know if anyone was in front of her, or how close behind her anyone was, and so she ran like the devil was behind her. And I was so proud of her. She ran and ran, and I kept thinking, “She’s going to wear out. She’s running too fast.” But God had given her the ability to run hard, and she did. But what made me equally proud, was all those other ladies including the ones from China, who finished eighth or 20th or 33rd, but who also completed the course, who finished the race, who ran the marathon. They didn’t have to. They could have said, “Oh the race is over, I’m going to get a drink.” I told you, many years ago (maybe twice), about the cubana – the man from Havana who was the fastest man in town, who when they had the Olympics in St. Louis went to Miami and ran, all the way to St. Louis. And he entered the Olympics, and he was accepted as the representative if his country, the only one there from Cuba. And he started the race, and he took off, and he was leading the pack. But along the way, one of the runners injured his leg and fell to the side, and a guy coming along in a Model T Ford picked him up and said, “Do you want me to drive you to the arena?” And he said, “Yeah, I want to see how this finishes.” So he drove up to the arena, and the man got out of the car and feeling a little better, he decided to sprint into the arena. And the whole arena burst into applause, and the gentleman from Cuba, the man who was leading the pack, said, “I’ve lost the race.” And he sat down, and he quit, and then somebody came to him and said, “Look, the race isn’t over. Someone else has now won first place, but you can be second.” And he said, “If I can’t be first, I’m not going to run.” You see, this is the precise example of what we are NOT called by God to do. We’re not supposed to worry about what our place is in the pack, how important we are, how esteemed we are, even how fruitful they are. Priests are not supposed to judge themselves on whether they end up pastors of enormous churches, or whether they’re in small communities; and lay people are not supposed to judge themselves on whether they end up wealthy, and esteemed, and powerful. But we’re supposed to judge ourselves on whether we keep running the race. EVERYDAY. So St. Paul says, “There is laid up for me a crown of glory” – not a crown of leaves, a crown of glory – “which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, will give unto me at that day.” And then he says, “but not unto me only, but unto all who persevere in loving His appearing,” who continue day by day to love the Lord their God, with their heart and soul and mind, their neighbor as themselves, to be evangelists, servants of the kingdom. So, we honor Holy Apostle Paul, who has said of his sufferings in his life as an apostle, that he bears in his body the very same marks as those that afflicted the Lord Jesus – the stripes with which he was beaten with canes with whips, the bruises and tears from being stoned twice – and we should glory in our suffering and rejoice in our difficulties, for to those who persevere through difficulties is given even a greater crown. The only way of making your crown brighter is to face greater hardships, greater suffering, greater difficulties and not to relent. To persevere in spite of them.

The Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ

2009-03-17T11:45:00.001-07:00

From very early in the history of the Christian Church – from the time when the calendar of the church was just rudimentary, this day of the first of January, which, according to one of the Roman reckonings, was the new year and also corresponded with the Satur>>> or the time when Chaos reigned and people lived as though it were the end of the world and behaved in wild and reckless ways – not anything we know about today, right? The church decided that this day would be a day when the people would gather for a Synaxis. The Roman Catholic church later made a list of days of obligation, and there are not many of these days, these are days which according to their reckoning, you go to hell if you miss. And they put this day on there. Oddly enough, they seemed to lack cognizance of what the day meant, because it was called originally the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord and they got kind of embarrassed about that because it sounded sort of Jewish so then they called it The Holy Family, and then they called it The Holy Name, and then they called it the Solemnity of Somebody or the other. All they knew was that you should be in church on New Year’s day. But let’s talk about the significance of the circumcision for a moment. You understand that in the old testament God made several covenants with the human race. He made a covenant with Abraham, and then prior to that with Noah. And he made a covenant with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai; he also made a covenant with David the King: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.” And he also said, “I have sworn and shall not repent. Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedeck.” But each covenant had a distinctive characteristic that marked it as a special rite, for just as our people in Eastern Europe don’t talk about butchering or killing an animal for food because that shows such deep disrespect for the life of the animal – they talk about cutting the animal, or sacrificing the animal - so a covenant was always sealed by a cutting. In fact, the Hebrew word for the making of a covenant – barif – was to cut a covenant. There was usually the offering of the blood of a sacrificial animal. In some cases the in sacrifice, the animal became a holocaust – a whole burnt offering, its whole body was burnt. In most cases, the animal was cut, the blood was poured on the ground, parts were offered to God and the rest was shared between the priests and the family. But every covenant was sealed by blood. And when God spoke to Abraham, He spoke to him of the cutting of the covenant of circumcision in his flesh. And He said to Moses, “Everyone who is cut around in the flesh of the foreskin on the eighth day will be cut off from the people.” And so it was the marks of the circumcision, cut in the flesh of each male, that made him a Jew. It was not the clinical act of circumcision, it was not the medical procedure. It was the spiritual act – cutting into the flesh the marks that then reminded that person from that day on that he was in a solemn covenant with God. And in the cutting of the flesh, blood was shed. When we think about it, our Lord Jesus Christ came and was born, and on the eighth day his parents could have said, “This is God himself. This is the one to whom sacrifices are offered. We don’t believe it meet or correct to take him to be cut in his flesh, to have his blood shed.” Nevertheless, they did so. On the eighth day they took him and he was circumcised in his flesh. What did he do by being circumcised in the flesh? You see, we sometimes in modern culture, driven by liberal theologians, talk about an old covenant as though it’s still in effect, and a new covenant. But what Christ did was that when he underwent the rite of circumcision, and later when on the 40th day he allowed himself to be offered in the temple and redeemed by his parents, he took into himself the old covenant. Jesus became not only the author of the Old Testament, he became the Old Testament itself. So that when we were baptized into him, we were baptized into the Old Testament and the New alike. There remained one covenant – the new covenant. And this covenant is not without circumcision either. But it is not the circumcision of the flesh. It is the circumcision of the heart, for St. Paul tells us that with the finger of God our stony hearts have been cut around, circumcised, and made into fleshy hearts, into a nous capable of receiving the light and knowledge of God. And he says of himself, speaking of the marks of the circumcision that the Jews boasted in, “Let no man trouble me for I bear in my body, not the marks of circumcision, but the marks of the Lord Jesus, the marks of His Crucifixion. I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Brothers and sisters in Christ, today we honor God’s extreme humility. The same humility that led him to Golgotha. The humility that allowed him to be borne as a child into the temple, to have himself a victim of a sacrifice offered to God, and, in so doing, the one who closed the door on the old covenant and opened to us the Kingdom of God.

Through him who suffered circumcision of the flesh for our salvation, be glory and honor now and ever and unto ages of ages. Glory to Jesus Christ.

Glory forever.

The 26th Sunday After Pentecost

2009-02-16T15:35:00.001-08:00

Excerpts from a sermon to the kids

When I was your age, not only did the Christmas lights go on at Thanksgiving, we had the plaza that had lots of lights, thousands of lights, almost as many as Antonina put up in the hall. It’s very beautiful. But we also in school had Christmas programs and sang Christmas songs. We sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Silent Night” – songs that go to the very heart of the way that the Western Church understood the birth of Jesus – which, by the way, is the most Orthodox part of the Western Church because for a long time they celebrated Christmas with a great deal of respect for the fact that it was God becoming a human being. But now you can’t do that in schools anymore. What are some of the holiday songs you sing at school?
Kids: Jingle Bells, Silent Night
Fr. Joe: You get to sing Silent Night? Oh that’s nice. We’ll have to remember that. I used to have a principal – I taught at a school where there were only two kids in the whole school who were not African American. He said, “Mr. Hirsch, put together a program for us to celebrate the holiday.” And I said, “The Supreme court says you can’t do that in public schools.” And he said, “This ain’t religion. This is culture. We’re Christians, that’s our culture.” And so I did it.
A long time ago in England, in fact two times in England, children weren’t allowed to celebrate Christmas the way that they ought to. One was when the protestants took over and they wouldn’t let the kids who were Catholics – who at that time were, and still are, the closest thing to Orthodoxy – they wouldn’t let them have their mass. Even though they called Christmas “Christmas” – Christ Mass – which we’d call it Christ Liturgy, wouldn’t we? They wouldn’t let them celebrate it. Then the second time was when this terrible terrible dictator took over – Cromwell – and he sent people through the streets ringing bells saying, “No Christmas this year! No Christmas this year!” But people found secret ways to celebrate Christmas. They sang songs that people thought were just silly songs, but they all had a real meaning to them.

How many of you have heard the twelve days of Christmas? Most Americans think the twelve days of Christmas start twelve days before Christmas. The twelve days of Christmas are the twelve days between 25th of December and Holy Theophany on the sixth of January. Those are the twelve days of Christmas. During that time, except on the 5th of January there’s no fasting – you can eat meat all those days even if you fast normally in your home. But, this song sounded like it was silly and people hear it and they think it’s silly. But the people who were singing it knew what it meant.

“The first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree.” A partridge is a bird that if its children, its babies, are attacked, will throw itself in the face of the enemy and allow itself to be killed in order to save its babies. Who do you think was the partridge in the pear tree? (Child Answers: Jesus) What was the pear tree? (Child Answers: the cross) The cross, the tree of life. “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree” – that is the sacrificial who came to die so that we could live, and came to die on a cross and changed the cross into the tree of life.

“On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me two turtle doves.” What are two turtle doves? How many of you have a bible at home? How many of you have four bibles at home probably? Archie Bunker used to say on television that he kept his bible on his TV cause it kept sliding of his refrigerator. Anyway, we keep bibles, we don’t very often read them, but there’re two main parts to the bible? What are they?.... I’ll give you a hint: one of them starts with “old.” Yes! The old testament and the new testament. That is the two turtle doves. Now, you probably don’t know what a turtle dove is its – just a name for a certain kind of dove. So the old and new testaments

“On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me three French hens.” Now those stand for 3 virtues that St. Paul says last forever. What are they? (Child answers: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) That’s the Holy Trinity, and that would be a good answer. In fact, that’s what I told somebody once, but it’s not, it’s what? It’s the three vthings that St. Paul says last forever and they’re the names of three girls who died with their mother St. Sophia. Who were the three girls who died with their mother St. Sophia? Faith, hope and love; and so the three French hens are faith, hope, and love. St. Paul says they last forever.

“On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me four calling birds.” Now in the New Testament there’s one kind of book that there are four of. What are they? Okay Julia. The gospels. What are the four gospels, according to Saints.. (together) Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They tell us the words of Jesus.

“On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me five gold rings.” Those represent the first five books of the Old Testament that told about Jesus – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Now, the Old Testament came first but the song mentions the New Testament first because it’s more important.

“On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me six geese a-laying.” How many days did it take God to make the world? (child answers) Six days! And on the seventh day God rested. And so each of those geese was sitting on an egg and when the egg hatched it was like a day of creation.

“On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me seven swans a-swimming.” It refers to – you probably don’t know about these – the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. I’m going to read them to you: wisdom, understanding, council – that’s good advice, fortitude – that’s courage, knowledge, piety – that’s being holy, and the fear of the Lord. Now the fear of the Lord’s not “I’m so scared God’s going to zap me with lightning.” The fear of the Lord is this kind of fear. Do you have somebody you love a whole lot? Your mommy, your daddy, your grandma or grandpa? (Child answers) Your dog? Would you want to kick your dog? (No) Why wouldn’t you kick your dog? (answer) Because she bites. I wouldn’t kick my dog a) because she might bite b) because I might hurt her. When you don’t do what God wants you to do, what do you do to God? You hurt his heart, don’t you? You hurt his feelings. You break the father’s heart and you put nails in Jesus hands when you’re bad. So, the fear of the Lord is not wanting to do anything to hurt God’s love of you.
“On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me eight maids a-milking.” And that reminds us of the eight beatitudes. You hear that almost every Sunday here: Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. There are ten words that go together, ten sentences in the beatitudes. They’re like the new commandments, but there’s eight blessed and that’s what the number eight stands for.

The nine things are nine ladies dancing, and those stand for the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit. That’s nine things that God causes to grow in us when we love and serve him: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, (child) gentleness – who said that? Good for you! – and self control. That means having a handle on yourself so you can keep from doing bad things.

On the tenth day he gave ten lords a leaping. What are the ten things in the bible? Ten commandments. Right! That we should live by.

On the eleventh day he gave eleven pipers piping. Now this is going to be a little hard for you. There were twelve of these and then one of them turned bad and there were eleven. Yes? (Child: 12 apostles). And who was the one who turned bad? Yes? (Child: Judas)! So then there were eleven. Then the apostles filled in the twelfth again.

Now here’s the last one: twelve drummers drumming stand for the 12 points of belief in the creed. I’m going to give each a copy of the creed. We say it every Sunday but you need to learn it, and when your Sunday school teacher tells me – no matter how young or old you are – that you can recite it without looking at the paper, Fr. Joe’s going to give you a cross. Can anybody do it now? (kids shake heads) Yeah.

Now, these people had to keep their belief and their worship secret because they could have been hanged and drawn and quartered if the people had found out they were believers. They could have been torn into three pieces; had their hearts and vitals taken out of their bodies. They could have been tortured. But, they kept their faith alive. And this is the twelve days of Christmas. Someone told me once that under the communists there was going to be a baptism and somebody said, “We’re going to have a secret baptism at the church at midnight.” When the got to the church at midnight, guess who was there? Everyone in town. It was a secret everybody kept. They were all believers and remained believers but they had to do it at that place, at that time, in darkness. Other people I know in communist countries were baptized in monasteries. They would say, “I’m going to go visit this old building” and then they’d go in and get baptized. Normally monasteries don’t baptize people but when the communists were in control, they did. Other people went to embassy churches – churches run by the Antiochians, or by the Greeks, so that the government in their country wouldn’t know they were baptized. But they kept their faith alive. You don’t have to hide your Christianity, do you? So you be open about it okay? You be open. Don’t be obnoxious. Don’t make your teachers mad at you by telling people what your religion is, but if they ask, “What did you do over the holiday?” I want you to say “I went to liturgy and celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ” Okay?

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

The 25th Sunday after Pentecost

2009-02-10T13:37:00.000-08:00

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

Glory forever.

I’ve been reading papers that my college students have written, and there was a group of women who were writing a report on Roman Catholicism and death – the name of the course is “Death and Dying.” A little bit lugubrious. And they quoted from a Roman Catholic catechism that said that people who died in mortal sin immediately go to hell, where they experience the torments of the last days. And as I read this, “No, well it’s not quite that simple.” For one thing, we don’t believe in venial sins and mortal sins. Sin is a condition, it’s not a collection of acquired guilts. But on the other hand there is truth to the statement and there has to be because I was thinking about this: What if you were one of those ten lepers who was healed and you realized when you were only a few steps away from our Lord that, not only had the sores on your body disappeared – the corruption, the death, that was gradually taking hold of your flesh, vanished – but that your appearance was normal and you could now again move and talk among human beings, and be restored to a state of being clean according to the Jewish understanding. And so you said, “Hey! Aren’t I lucky?” And you went on and did what you needed to do to get the certificate of cleanness, and then went home. If we saw that happen, wouldn’t we think these were dreadfully ungrateful people? They were people who did not have even the normal human sensitivity. What you do if you were in great agony and parts of your body were rotting and falling off because the nerves had gone away, and you couldn’t even tell when you burned yourself or hit yourself with a hammer? If you were all white and crusty, and everyone who saw you kept at a distance because they were afraid they would receive contamination from you, and then you were healed? Would you not return and fall down on your face, and cry with sweet tears, tears of thanksgiving for the one who had been responsible for your restoration to health?

And yet, the Lord in this parable is talking, not only about the leprosy of the body which ends with physical death, he’s talking about the leprosy of the soul. Everyone of us were born corrupt. We were born not only to physical, but to spiritual death. We were born deserving nothing but destruction. We were born enemies of God – hating and despising the good things, loving and embracing the evil. And to each one of us, God has come and through water and oil and his own precious blood which he shed in bitter agony on the cross he has healed the leprosy of our bodies and of our souls. And he has set us on the right path. And how many people accept that, put it away in their promise book, and then fail to respond in any way to it? How many people who are counting on Jesus Christ, on His Church, on His precious blood, on His promises to forgive them their sins are sitting at home today too tired or preoccupied, or lazy, or self-possessed to come and to give thanks?

The very liturgy we celebrate is called eucharistos. I’m afraid of any foreign language because I’m not that good at English, but the Greek people I believe (Nick can tell me if it’s true) when you say “Thank you,” you say “Eucharistou?”
Nick: Eucharisto
Fr. Joe: Eucharisto
Thank you. The Liturgy is our thanksgiving. It is our coming, our bowing down before God, it is our saying how grateful we are that he has given us life, and then it is receiving more from him – more life. It’s not just coming and doing obeisance. It’s not bowing down like people to some Oriental potentate. It’s receiving from God grace upon grace when we hold up to God our broken hearts and our thanksgiving he pours out on us a super abundance of more grace. And yet how many of us spend our Sundays and the Holy Days of the Church, on which we’re not obliged to be at work, entertaining ourselves or just plain sleeping? You know, I believe the Church, being the body of Christ and also the ship of salvation, has the ability through the prayers of the faithful to drag into heaven a whole lot of people who only kind of half way show any kind of gratitude to God. If there’s a spark of the love of God, if there’s a flickering wick lighted by the Holy Spirit, the prayers of the Church can fan that into a flame and ultimately bring that person to salvation. But for those who have received forgiveness, and grace, and healing, and who then so despise the Good Physician that they fail even to return to give thanks – for the nine lepers – there is also the danger that in the hour of their death, in the moment of their trial they will not turn their eyes toward the Risen Lord but will turn their eyes toward the bodily life that is being taken from them. And they will hear from that angel the words that the rich man heard in the gospel two weeks ago: “This night will thy soul be required of thee.” So, even though we don’t believe in purgatory per se, we don’t believe in the accumulated merits of the saints that the bishop of Rome is able to access by unlocking the merit bag and giving out indulgences, even though we don’t believe in that, even though we don’t believe in the categorizing of sin as mortal and venial, still we do believe this: That there is an awful danger that for those who do not return to give thanks, who don’t return love to God for his love of them, there is the dreadful danger that at the moment of the separation of their souls and bodies they will find themselves surrounded by ceaseless flames.

We have today so many saints who I wanted to talk about, but I’m not going to because I was moved to say that, but I will mention simply one. I won’t mention Philotheia this year. Ambrose of Milan. He was a catechuman, and man who had put off his baptism. His mother had been a Christian, his father wasn’t. He was governor of the city of Milan. He had come to the back of the church and he had said he wanted to gather into the Holy Orthodox Church with all his heart, but then he had remained a student into his adult years. He had, like those of our Protestant brethren, despised baptism in his youth thinking he needed to put it off till the right time. I always tell parents who say, “I think my child needs to grow up enough to understand what he’s doing before he’s baptized” – I say – “Yes, I agree. And don’t feed him until he is old enough to understand digestion.” Anyway, this man was called to the cathedral because the Arian heretics – the people who denied that Jesus Christ was true God – were trying to pull a coup. They were the ACORN people – they were trying to steal the ballot box, they were trying to rig the election and they were saying they wanted their Arian candidate to be bishop. They probably even said, “Isn’t it fair? Shouldn’t we Arians get a turn? It’s time for a change!” Ambrose came into the church when it was almost a riot, and he stepped up onto the _____ - the platform in the middle of the church – to tell the people to “Shut up!” And he was wearing his golden armor of a Roman Equestrian. As he stood there, the sun – which, in churches in Italy, tends to shine down from the East toward the altar in the West – showed down the aisle on Ambrose in his golden armor, and a dove descended from the ceiling of the church and rested on his head. And a child there in the church shouted, “Ambrose is bishop!” The whole crowd acclaimed Ambrose as bishop. I will tell you the election of Metropolitan Jonah was almost as remarkable. It was an acclamation that came by a movement of the Holy Spirit. And this man had to be baptized the next day. Then he had to be ordained as a deacon, and a priest, and a bishop, and installed as the Bishop of Milan. But he was one of the greatest bishops the church ever knew.

Three times he opposed the emperor by the grace of the Spirit. A retired Arian bishop wanted one of the little, unused churches in Milan as his headquarters when he came back from working as a missionary, teaching falsehood to the people of the north. And the emperor said, “You know, we can be generous, ecumenical.” And Ambrose said, “The altar of God is not the altar of heretics” and the emperor withdrew. Secondly, the Senate, left at Rome when Constantine went to Constantinople, wanted to keep in the middle of their assembly the altar to the god Nike, the god of victory – not the god of shoes. And, Ambrose said, “How can we put a pagan God in the heart of a Christian kingdom?” Now look around your house sometime and see how many pagan statues you’ve got around there and ask yourself what St. Ambrose would have thought about that. How many icons do you have? And the third thing was this: The emperor Theodosius got upset because a mob in Thessalonica, kind of like that mob of Greek anarchists yesterday who were burning police cars and throwing fire bombs at people, the mob in Thessalonica rioted and they killed the governor. And the emperor called them all to the Hippodrome, and he had soldiers there disguised as plain folk and on a signal they drew their swords and killed a few thousand citizens of Thessalonica. He was emperor. He was going to show them who was boss. And then he showed up the next Sunday, which was Christmas, in Milan. And he came to the church to receive Holy Communion, and Ambrose met him at the door. Ambrose wasn’t even the bishop of Rome, he was just the bishop of Milan, the bishop of the church where the emperor had gone for communion. He said, “You will not enter this church. You will not defile this temple of God, you whose hands are stained with the blood of so many.” And Theodosius stood, with his imperial robes removed, and his crown off of his head, in sackcloth for three days and three nights in the snow barefooted in front of that church, and on the third day Ambrose absolved him and received him into communion. He said, “Even emperors have to do penance for their vicious sins.”

So we honor this man today who teaches us that when God calls us, whatever position we’re in, whatever we think our lives are supposed to be, what ever ends we think we’re pursuing, whatever are our plans for tomorrow, when God calls us to carry out His plans that we say yes, and if we do so, you know he’ll give us the grace to do it well.

The 24th Sunday of Pentecost

2008-12-06T13:31:00.001-08:00

We are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens of the household of God.

Glory to Jesus Christ!
Glory forever!

___Spoke about how our lord is ___ and calls not only those who are near, but those who are far off. He has, as St. Paul said, broken down the middle wall dividing. We understand that in the Jewish temple there were many walls, many barriers. There was the court that separated the priests from the laity, and a court that separated the women of Israel from the men, and a court that separated the gentiles from the Jewish people. The only death penalty that the Romans allowed the Jews to inflict legally was if any gentile, any non-Jew, dared to enter the portion of the temple restricted for Jews, that person could be stoned to death.

Yet St. Paul says that in Christ, this middle wall dividing was broken down, that we became one. He called men and women from many nations and made them, not only all stand together, but to be one family, one race, one chosen generation, one royal priesthood.

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Andrew who was the first called of the disciples. Every year I remark - although since his feast day doesn’t come on Sunday every year, only a few people hear – I remark at how St. Andrew impresses me. He was the first disciple who Jesus called. He immediately, rather than dwelling on his chosenness or the privilege of being close to the Messiah as he had been the closest disciple of St. John the Baptist, instead he runs immediately to bring his brother to Jesus. And there was with him at that time, also following John the Baptist, John the son of Zebedee. And when Jesus chose the three who would be his inner circle, the three who would go with him up on to Mount Tabor and behold him transfigured, the three who would go with him into the room of Jairus daughter to see her raised from the dead, the three who would go with him into the inner garden when he prayed and shed blood with his sweat – it was Peter, and James, and John. And yet when we hear about the contention that arose among the disciples, it is not a contention of Andrew being jealous of Peter, or of James, or of John. It was, in fact, James and John being jealous of Peter. They believed that since they were Jesus’ cousins, they ought to be able stand on His right hand and on His left hand, and they understood that for reasons known only to God, that our Lord had chosen Peter to be the foremost of the Apostles.

And here’s Andrew, who brought them all. Andrew who was the first called. And he was relegated, it appeared, to a secondary place, but we find nothing of jealousy, nothing of rancor, no record of his jockeying for a better position, no sign of his enthusiasm waning. Rather, he accepted the place that was given him. Andrew’s name, Andreas, means “one who is manly,” who behaves like a man; and he was a man – more than a man. Not just anqropoj, but androj, male. He was a man who had his power under control. He was one of those meek whom the Lord said would inherit the earth. The word meek in English doesn’t mean “little” like it does in Romanian. It means having your strength under control; it means thinking little of yourself even though you may mean a great deal.

Andrew could have boasted, as far as we know, that St. Paul was wrong when he said that he had reaped more abundantly than all of the disciples. In Paul’s time, it was probably true in terms of sheer numbers of souls, for we know he had a great impact upon the jews of Palestine, and he had a great impact upon Asia Minor. And he came over to Macedonia and began the mission in Greece. St. Paul’s mission field, although he traveled ____ times, was circumscribed in the world map of the Roman days. It was not so great. Equally as great was that of Thomas who went east to evangelize Afghanistan and India, and went all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But probably the man who is credited with the greatest missionary work is Andrew. Andrew, the first called. For Andrew set off after visiting cities in Asia minor, he set off to go up the Bosporus. He went up to the Black Sea, and around all of its shores and touched all of the kingdoms that surrounded it and preached in all of those places. And he came around a full circle to the city of Byzantium of the Dardanelles, and he founded a church there. The place later became the royal capital Constantinople. And then, travelling again north, he went up the Dnieper River, and he came to the place where today stands the city of Kiev, and he said to his disciples, “On these hills God will raise great glory to his name,” and he blessed that place. Many other places recount, in the archives of their founding, that St. Andrew visited them. This cannot all be documented, but I have on my desk - or rather on a table in the living room of my house – a PhD paper by a scholarly Greek historian who claims that Andrew – there’s ample evidence – that Andrew went up into Scandinavia. That he preached to the Nordic peoples, then came down to Fridja, and then into Gaul, and across into Britain and even into Scotland. So the fact that the Scots claimed him as the patron saint of their church was not simply some kind of Medieval imagination.

And then, returning and retracing his steps, going back through northern Europe, down the Dnieper and into the Black Sea, there he set up his headquarters and ran into conflict with the governor of that time. He was condemned to death, and he was not nailed but tied to a cross – for the Romans, when they wanted to be really sadistic, tied you to a cross and left you hanging there until you suffocated or died of starvation, and it could take days. The fact that Jesus was scourged and then nailed through his hands and his feet was a way of hastening his death. And as Andrew hung on the cross – and later tradition would ascribe to that cross the form of the letter Chi, the X shape – as he hung tied to that cross, what did he do but for two days he preached to the people who came to see this curiosity – this man who was being executed but who nevertheless was talking about life. It is said that after two days the governor was so moved by the people’s attention and so frightened at what the result might be that he sent soldiers to take Andrew down, to release him. But, exhausted by his long and rigorous life and by his two days suspension, having to pull himself up to breath and then falling back onto his bound wrists, it is said that the soldiers were not allowed to loosen his bonds. But rather, he uttered the words, “To Thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit,” and he went as a martyr to Christ, dying alone on the shores of the Black Sea.

Now, brothers and sisters, many, many people can tell lies, or make up stories, or invent tales, or create allegories or fables because they think their teaching is very valuable. In fact C.S. Lewis says there are two kinds of stories that people tell: there is that which is gospel, that is that comes from the truth – the good spiel, and there’s the other spiel – the devil’s story, the story about perversion, lust and vice, wickedness and selfishness and cunning prevailing over good, selflessness. But, to tell a story like that, a person has to be a fabulous creator of yarns. And it is unlikely that C.S. Lewis would have died on a cross arguing that there really was a lion named Aslan. It is not likely that Dr. Tolkien would have allowed himself to be beheaded in order to support the fact that he believed that there was once a place called Middle Earth. No, these were mere stories. And the philosophers among the Greeks and among the peoples of the world would spin their yarns, and perhaps if they were accompanied by others and they believed it to be of some higher value, they might allow themselves courageously, as did Socrates, to be executed for their teaching. But one man, not a professor, not a rabbi, not a scholar, not an intellectual, a fisherman, and the one who although called first was not preferred among even the first three – one man alone, without the support of a community of witnesses, without anybody to perform for, not a _____ whose picture was going to be put up in some town square, but a man who’s death to all that he knew would be obscure and not even remembered, stretched out his hands and his feet and accepted the ropes, the bonds, and suffered and died a terrible death to declare truth to the people of the Russe, of the Romanians, of the Greeks. The one who binds together the Ukranians and the people of Romania, the Greeks and the people of Russe, the man who holds them all together in one family having been their spiritual father and their teacher – that man died a lonely death because he knew that what he was saying was true and that the greater treason would be to deny it, to lie about it, to declare that he had been speaking fables. It is rare to imagine such a heroic person. And certainly to Andrew, the manly, goes the boast, together with St. Paul, that if he did not harvest more abundantly than all the other apostles in his lifetime, that the historic result of his mission has been a harvest exceeding that of Paul’s enormously. For all of the Slavic kingdoms, the Romanian nation and the Byzantine empire and all of it’s children, all their evangelization, this holy apostle Andrew through Christ broke down the middle wall that divided, and who made us all, not any longer strangers and foreigners to one another, but fellow citizens and members of the family of God.

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

The 23rd Sunday of Pentecost

2008-12-04T13:14:00.001-08:00

A couple days ago one of my sons was asking me a question and I gave him and standard answer, and he said, “Well, I know that. You’ve told us that six times at least.” Now I’m thinking that now that Erin Schwartz is blogging my sermons, people are going to find out just exactly how often I repeat myself. But that’s okay. We can go on a three year cycle kind of like the Roman Catholics.

The thing about the gospel today is that every Jewish person, every Jewish man, who had any piety, any love of God in him at all, had this desire: that he should have a sufficient amount of material wealth that he could spend his time studying the scriptures and praying rather than having to labor. It was not that he prayed to be able to be lazy, but that he prayed to be free to do God’s work and not to have to do temporal work. And that’s why this man in the story today is such a clutz. He’s a fellow who was successful at farming. His fields bring forth enough grain that he can survive for years on it. His vineyards enough grapes that he has wine in abundance. His flocks multiply. And he doesn’t say to himself, “Oh my soul, you can now put away some of this wealth and give some to the poor, offer some to the temple, and then go and study Torah.” Instead, he says, “Party on dude. Enough wealth is laid up for you for many years.” And that night, an angel comes to the man and addresses the man in a way that our Lord said that if we addressed one another, we’d be in danger of hellfire. He said, “Thou fool. Thou fool. This night shall thy soul be required of thee, and whose shall those things be?”

The lesson we have from this man is that our entire life is by God’s proclamation to be a life of labor. When Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden, God laid on Adam this commandment: “By the sweat of thy brow shall eat thy bread all the days of thy life until thou returnest unto the earth from which thou wast taken.” In other words, work is a burden, a podvig, a spiritual exercise laid on every single Christian. There is not one of us who are allowed to retire from the service of God, even if we are allowed to retire from our particular occupation at a particular time. And so it is that our life is meant to be one of transition. Now, for most of our forbearers there was no choice. I know that Andrew’s great grandfather was plowing his fields and gathering in his harvest of up to the very day that he could no longer go out in the fields and do it. And his heart was broken, not because he was getting old, but because he was a farmer and couldn’t do his farming. Well, we’re blessed here. We have enough material abundance that most of us, even the most humble among us, are able at the end of our lives to have some leisure to use in whatever way we’re disposed to do so. And God’s will is that after we have laid down the burden of manual labor, or of intellectual labor, after we have finished our lives of having to travel on business, or having to stand before classes, or study inventories and prepare business plans, that we should lay out for ourselves a way that we can serve God whole heartedly without having our attention divided. A pension, social security, savings, even those ever shrinking 401Ks – they are gifts given to us so that we can dispose our lives in such a way as to labor for the Lord.

I would speak to you today about St. Alexander Nevsky. Alexander Nevski is one of the Russian saints who we always observe because, first, a lot of our people are named Alexander; secondly, he was a hero of the faith. If it had not been for him, as world events developed, all of the land of the Russe would probably be Muslim today. Alexander Nevsky was a prince in the line of Rurik, a descendent of Prince Vladimir, he was a prince of Novgorod, the second city. After Kiev came Novgorod – the princes moved through the line, they didn’t stay in a city all their lives. Alexander Nevsky, just plain old Alexander, was faced with a double edged sword, or rather two swords, coming at him at the same time. From the east was coming the Tartar yolk – already felt, already burdening the land. The Tartars came to tax, to despoil, to pillage. They would often ride into town and they would hang the priest from the chandelier of the church, steal the altar and ride off with it. That’s why, in the Russian tradition, often the relics are not place in the holy table. They’re placed in the atimension so that the priest, if he’s smart, can grab it and run. And the next thing he did was to cut the rope from the chandelier so nobody could get hanged from it. They knew how to kill these people but they were devastating. They were barbarians. They were like wild animals. They descended upon the civilized world of that time like a plague of predators – like wolves howling out in the east. And from the West at the same time, sensing the weakness of the young Christian Kievan state, the Swedes – who were going through their Catholic phase before they became Lutherans – decided in the name of a holy crusade to attack the people of Russe. So they put together an army, realizing that the people of the Russe cities were engaged in defending themselves against the Mongolian Tartars, they launched war. They called it a war of the cross. The pope gave the blessing – if you died in this war you would go to heaven, just as if they were fighting infidels. They attacked the Orthodox East.

And Alexander prayed, and he asked his staretz, “What should I do? Oh Elder, Staretz, what should I do?”
And the elder said to him, “Examine your priorities.”
And Alexander said, “The Tartars want to take our wealth. They want to burn down our churches. They want to capture our villages and place them under their rule. The Swedes want to take away our soul. They want to destroy our Orthodox faith. They want to replace it with another religion.” For, at that time, the Tartars didn’t care much about religion – it’s the one thing they didn’t care about. He said, “I will fight the Swedes.” So he turns his back on his most vicious enemies and he takes on those who wish to destroy the souls of the Russe people, of the young Kievan state. And at the river Neva he was successful, in the 13th century, in defeating the Swedes.

There are stories about that battle. This icon here, of Nicholas the Defender of Orthodoxy, is a monument to that. For when the Swedes attacked the monastery, the monks carried the decorative statue of St. Nicholas they had on the walls of their monastery, around the monastery. And the Swedes withdrew.

My good friend, Fr. Michael Lilianstrom, our Swedish Orthodox priest in the Serbian patriarchate in Sweden, said to me, “Nobody tells you this story, but the Swedish priest who was commanding the Swedish army, for some reason, went to talk to the monks and the next time the soldiers saw him he was in a monastic robe. He abandoned the Latin faith. He abandoned the Swedish nation, and died as a monk in that monastery.”

St. Nicholas’s sword in his hand there is not a sword to cut down enemies, because no Swede died in that conflict. It’s the sword of the spirit that cuts for the dividing of soul and Spirit.

Alexander then, having won this victory, turned his attention to the Tartars. He negotiated with the Great Kahn. These are the people who, our little Russian children, when they did their yolka when the All Saints people where, they talked about the bogadiers. The came and they courted the Khan, but they refused to worship the idols that at that time the Mongolian Tartars worshipped, or to practice any of their religious perversities. But they did pay taxes, and by doing so, Alexander bought peace both from the infidels of the West and from the marauders of the East.

But this is the point of the story: When he became elderly, he didn’t say, “I was a great warrior. I defeated the Swedes. I was a great ruler. I brought peace to my people. Now I’m going to sit on my throne and be appreciated.” He, himself, divested himself. Last night during the dismissal I was perplexed – I was thinking, “where do I commemorate Alexander? Do I commemorate him among the great princes – Constantine and Helen, Vladimir and Olga? No, he should be commemorated among the monastics,” because before his death, he lay aside his royal robes; he lay aside his princely diadem, and he took on the robes of a monk. And he died in repentance for all those men whose lives he had had to take in battle defending his people. Not proud for the blood he had shed. Proud that he had chosen the right side, but repentant that exigencies and circumstances had required him to be a warrior who took the lives of his brother human beings, of his fellows made in the image and likeness of God.

There is a time to war, and a time to make peace. And one last fascinating detail. We know the story of Boris and Gleb, the sons of Prince Vladimir. Boris and Gleb both voluntarily allowed themselves to be murdered by their uncle Sviatopolk rather than bring down his anger upon the Orthodox Church. He was still a pagan. He said, “If you oppose me, I will destroy the church. If you move out of my way, I will not touch it.” And by moving out of his way, he meant “allow his assassins to kill them.” They were men who chose peace, where they probably in battle could have defeated him. But they would not risk the peace of the Orthodox people for their own lives and profit. BUT on the eve of this battle against the Swedes, one of Alexander’s generals comes in and he says, “On the river, in a boat, I saw two men dressed in antique armor, and they cried out to me, ‘Go tell Alexander we are his ancestors Boris and Gleb, and we will be with him on the battlefield tomorrow.’”

There is a time to make war, a time to make peace, a time to do business, and a time to seek after the salvation of one’s soul and the souls of one’s fellows. So to each of us it is given to eat our bread by the sweat of our brow all the days of our life. But we pray to God for peace at the last so that our labor may be a labor of prayer, of witness, of study, of Christian labor; and that we will have time and will not say rather to our souls, “Take thy ease: Eat, drink, and be merry, for much good are laid up for you.”

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

The 22nd Sunday of Pentecost

2008-12-01T09:23:00.001-08:00

A little less than fifty years ago in Illinois, a young man was born whose name was James was baptized in the Episcopalian church. This young man’s family, like so many Midwestern American families, moved to California. And his dad went into the real estate business and also into the new car business. When the young man became a teenager, he was very uncomfortable with his Episcopalian origins and he looked for truth that God might have for him. And as he began to grow toward his senior year, he found a Moscow patriarchy church in California. Now, some people have said, “Why does the Moscow patriarchy still have churches in America?” Well, one reason was so that one would be there for him to find. He found this church, and there he developed as deep a spirituality as a young man can at the age of 17 or 18. He went off to college and met two other young men who were Orthodox Christians, and the three of them founded the Orthodox Campus Fellowship. They have a different name for it now – Orthodox Christian Fellowship – I don’t know why. Later on in life, the other two young men became abbots of monasteries. The three of them founded this organization, this Orthodox Campus Fellowship.

At the same time Jim occupied himself with studying business – he expected to go into his dad’s real estate business. In the summer he worked in real estate and learned all about buying, and selling, and contracts. He finished his senior year all ready to work for the Paffhausen family business. Instead, he told his dad he was going to St. Vladimir’s seminary. He went off to the seminary in New York and he acquitted himself very well. He earned his master in divinity degree in three years, and then he had to make a decision. He was an unmarried man, and he wasn’t sure that was how he wanted to be. In fact, he was fairly certain he wanted to be a husband and father. So he delayed his ordination and did what a lot of people do when they finish their first degree and aren’t ready to start their careers – he took a master’s degree in theology and Orthodox doctrine. Now, next to having a PhD which is very rare among our people, it’s about as educated as you can become as an Orthodox theologian, to have that advanced master’s degree. And he still wasn’t ready to decide.

So some of his friends on the west coast who were now clergy said, “Why don’t we bring Jim out here and have an internship for him?” The idea was he could come out, he could help out in some parishes, and meet girls. That’s what he wanted; it’s what they wanted. So our Rocky Mountain Deanery invited him and he came out here and he went around and visited all kinds of churches. He also taught classes in the home. Michelle here was enrolled in a couple of those classes. They were jointly registered between our late vocations program and Regis University. He did a lot of ruminating, a lot of thinking, and he and I did a lot of lunch. And as we would eat and talk he would go over and over how he wanted to have a family that he brought up. He wanted to be a dad, he wanted to have children, he wanted to have a wife, but he wanted more than anything on earth, more than his own life itself, to be a priest. And he wasn’t sure what God wanted for him. So, he went back out to California, to his own church in San Diego for a while, and then he went to Russian. He entered the Milan monastery and he lived there for a year. And for the first time in his life, he didn’t have hot water to bathe in. And for the first time in his life, he had to eat kasha sometimes four times a week. And he did it. He learned what the cycles of prayer are, and how holy men spend their hours and their days. Then, after that, he was sent by his abbot there to St. Sergius Holy Trinity, and he spent six months there and acquired a spiritual father who was famous throughout the Russian church who told him, “You should go back and be ordained as a heiromonk.”

Well, he thought he heard the call of God but he wasn’t sure. There was still that little part of him that longed for hearth and home and the consolation of a family. So when he came back after those 18 months were over, he went to his bishop and they scheduled for him an ordination to the diaconate as a celibate priest. And three days before the ordination he called the bishop and said, “I’m not ready. I’m not sure this is what God wants for me. I’m not ready yet.” So, we all called on Sunday and congratulated him on his ordination to find out it hadn’t happened.

And he prayed more, and he thought more, and he fasted more, and then he understood that God had called him to something that meant accepting what Jesus said to the apostles about giving up wives and children and houses in order to do what he had called them to do. So he was ordained a deacon, then he was ordained a priest, and then he went back to St. Tikhon’s monastery and received his monastic tonsure.

He came out to the west, and the thing he loved most of all was missionary work. He liked to go around and start new missions. He started a bunch of them. And he liked to service missions. Places that had no priest, he would go on a monthly cycle – 1, 2, 3, 4 – to these widely separated points in California and serve the liturgy so that once a month these people would have liturgy. He was always being invited to lecture at the ___institute in Berkley, or at one of the seminaries, or to give a class at the university, or to do a retreat for a deanery or a parish. The bishop kept complaining. He said, “You’re a monk. You’re supposed to be stable. All you do is travel around.” So the bishop assigned him: “Go to Point Reyes.” Now Point Reyes sounds like a comely, romantic place to you. It’s on San Francisco Bay. Let me tell you, it’s a very, very cold place. It’s very cold at night – very, very, very cold at night. And it has black mold. Black mold grows on everything there. It’s in Marin County, where a lot of the people are worse than black mold. They’re the kind of people who live for themselves and their egos and their own wants and their own desires. It’s a place where you could open a mosque and the people would all be delighted; or you could build a Buddhist temple and the people would all be thrilled. But if you put an Orthodox church there, that was an insult to them. The bells hurt their ears and they wanted them stopped. He started a monastery dedicated to St. John Maximovich. At that time he wasn’t even recognized by the OCA. He had been canonized by the synod abroad and not by any of the other churches. But with the blessing of the bishop he started a monastery dedicated to St. John of San Francisco. He started out with three of four monks living in these nasty little buildings with mold growing up the walls. Slimy, dirty buildings. And no matter how they cleaned them, they remained slimy and dirty. And these men stayed there and they prayed in the chapel. They prayed for the whole world like St. John had. Gradually, this community grew until there was no room for them there anymore.

He had been forced by the bishop to give up the work that he loved, which was traveling around, preaching as an itinerant, serving liturgy for different groups and giving lectures. His feet were nailed down to the floor of the monastery – except when he could pull the nails out and run off and do a lecture somewhere. But now he realized that if the monastery was to have real life they had to first get away from the Pacific Coast, and secondly get away from the mold. They drew into the interior of California, to a town called Manton, where they bought a farm with a nice house on it. And he built the monastery in three or four years to twelve or fourteen men, with men on the waiting list to come in. Now, you know in America, we had another name for a monastery: it was Father So-and-So and somebody else. Most of our monasteries were one guy, and one disciple at a time, one seeker who stayed until the abbot drove them crazy and then left and another one took his place. But this community grew. Why was it? Because this man, who had been tonsured under the name of Jonah, loved his monastic brothers. He said to them, “A monastery, you understand, is exactly like a prison except for one thing: the love of the brotherhood.” He took in broken and wounded people. Young adults, older people, and he healed them and he strengthened them, and he put them in a place where they could do no harm to themselves or to anyone else. And he also attracted very strong, and wise, and experienced men who were looking for the opportunity to spend the rest of their days in repentance.

And he was satisfied at that point to be the abbot of that monastery, when suddenly the bishop of Dallas called him up. He said, “I’m 85 years old. I have to retire. I’m going to nominate you for auxiliary bishop.”
He went to his bishop, Bishop Benjamin, and said, “Can I be abbot of the monastery and also bishop of Ft. Worth?”
And Benjamin said, “Yes. And you can also get married and have two wives.”
He said, “Which one are you going to be married to? To the monastery alter or to the Diocese of the South?”

And he prayed and again he did not what he wanted to do. Believe me, I know the man very well, he was our intern here for a while. He wanted to live out his life as the abbot of that community, and also be able to sneak off every once in a while and give a lecture. So he was consecrated 15 days ago as Bishop of Ft. Worth, auxiliary to the Bishop of Dallas, in preparation for his succeeding Archbishop Dmitri as head of that diocese. So he packed up all of his brand new bishop stuff. Everything the man owns, by the way, fits into the trunk and the back seat of his car. Everything he owns. He packed up and he went off to Pittsburgh. There in Pittsburgh he sat up on the stage with the Holy Synod, the ruling hierarchs of the church. And our church has had a very rough time. We had two bishops in a row who were cut from a mold that is not either Russian or American. It’s really kind of just a sort of Old-World Paranoid. It comes from a time and a place where the Carpatho-Russyn people were under the rule of somebody else and they had to handle their affairs secretly and stealthily. And they borrowed a lot from Roman Catholic ways of dealing with things – one of which was to cover up things which should have been exposed to the light.

The church was wounded and everybody was mad on Monday. They were all angry as they could be. They all wanted somebody to punish. They all wanted somebody to blame. Nine hundred people – laymen, clergy, bishops – all angry. All filled with every spirit but the spirit of God. And the grumbles and the groaning you could hear throughout the whole room. And that Tuesday night, someone stood up as we were about to adjourn and said, “You bishops promised us you were going to answer our questions. We have given you written questions. We demand that you answer them.” Believe me, that’s the way that the old timers used to talk to the bishops. And the bishops all sat and looked like a bunch of scared school girls. None of them raised his finger. Now, I’ve got to say this. Bishop Benjamin was sick, or he said he was. I think he may have been up stairs, because he was the number one candidate for metropolitan. I think that he found a way to get what he wanted.

As everyone gazed at the stage, this baby bishop – this twelve day old at the time bishop of Ft. Worth – went to the microphone, took the list of questions, and with a smile, with love, with compassion, he answered all of the questions. One by one he answered them. It sounded like his talk was disorganized – it was because he was reading the questions they were asking off the sheet and they were not in any kind of logical order. And he was answering everyone of them. And he said this, “The stuff that has gone one is metropolian. The Metropolian is dead. We will not have these problems again. The church is based on _____, on conciliarity. And we will all, hierarchs, clergy, laity – we will all work together.” He said, “Why do bishops act up? Well, what do you expect? You dress a guy up like a Byzantine Emperor. You put him on a throne in the middle of the church. You call him “despota, master,” and you tell him to live forever, and he starts to believe. He doesn’t understand he’s an icon of God. He starts to believe he’s a little god himself.” He said, “That will not happen again. It will never happen again.” I looked around the room and I saw calm sweep across the room. The anger all dissipated. A kind of quiet peace descended. And then another wave rolled across the room, and it was joy. That night Fr. Chad Hatfield, the dean of St. Vladimir’s who was with me on the Parliamentarian’s committee – and believe me, we did more mischief than any parliamentarians have ever done in the history of any church council – he called Bishop Basil Essey, the Antiochian bishop of Wichita, and said, “I want to vote for you for Metropolitan.” Bishop Basil said, without missing a beat, “God’s given you your metropolitan, Jonah. Vote for him.” I don’t know, somebody may have called Basil from there, but how would he know from Wichita what had happened in Pittsburgh, I don’t know.

The next day the lay people nominated candidates – one candidate each – and then, when no one had a majority, we nominated two candidates and the Holy Synod chose. They chose from between the old, the tested and tried, if you will, and this new, young man – this man who at every point in his life had had his plan, but who like Matthew the tax collector had heard the Lord say, “Come follow me,” and had gotten up and left what he was doing, what he loved doing. Not a man who ran away from things that bored him, but a man who left the work he loved at each stage of his life: he gave up the family business to become a seminarian; he gave up his own family to become a monk; he gave up teaching and his preaching to become an abbot; and he gave up his monastery to become a vicar bishop – and now the church laid on him the mantle of metropolitan. And the moral of this, folks, the moral of the call of Matthew is: In life, we don’t look around trying to find what God wants us to do – “Does God want me to do this? Does God want me to do that?” – in life we do what God’s given us to do, and we remain conscious and aware that at some point he may very well call us to do something different. And when he does, we don’t stop and think about it, we get up and do it. You don’t change the way you’re living your life – that is if you’re living a rotten, stinking sinful life, you change it – but you don’t change what the course of your life is just because you’re bored. But you don’t resist the call of God when he gives it to you.

This is a young man for whom I have great, great hope. I believe that our children will tell their grandchildren that they remember when the metropolitan who was still metropolitan was elected and the parish priest talked about it. Let us then be ready, each one of us, let us formulate our own desires, our own plans, our own will because God gives us the freedom to do that, but let us always keep our ears and our hearts open to his spirit, so that when the call comes – whether it’s the loud acclamation of an assembly shouting “Axios!” or it’s the still small voice speaking in our hearts – we will, like Matthew, rise up from what is busying us at that moment, take up our cross, and follow him.

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

The 21st Sunday of Pentecost

2008-11-28T06:39:00.000-08:00

“Little girl, arise.”

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

I was very enthusiastic this morning. I was I excited about the meeting today, and we got up and we had a leak in the toilet and I remembered how fragile this property is here, and I remembered how many other times I’ve gotten up early, always on a Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday and found a leak somewhere. But now I know that I’ve got guys back there who can fix it, right Erik? So I’m not quite as worried.

What I want to talk to you about is our life together. I had a young man, Fred Johnson – and you all know he went to seminary about a year ago this fall, and his wife who is pregnant with their second child – and when he arrived in orientation, two people came up to him. One was a former music teacher, Mr. G., and the other was a _____ who had been an education teacher.
And they said, “We see that you started out at St. Herman’s, and then you came here from Holy Transfiguration. What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?” he said,
“Well, that’s an old dead parish. Why would anybody leave a living, American parish like St. Herman’s and come to an old dead parish, down the ghetto, in the Slavic neighborhood, in the stockyards like Transfiguration?”
And he said, “You know, you guys haven’t kept up over the last 20 years, have you?”

Well, this spring is going to be the 25th anniversary or our being here. We came in 1984, and those of you who are still here to witness can tell people the way that this church was looked on at that time. Now, not by everybody. When I came, and I was looking at the parish, Gary sat down with a pad of paper and he read me about 20 questions, like he was doing an investigation – because, you know, he was a detective – and it made me very happy because it meant the people still had ambitions here and they had an idea what they wanted. Father James said to me, “You know there’s a lot that can happen here. This is a parish with a lot of potential. It just means it’s time for a change in leadership.” And if he hadn’t said that to me I would have figured the place was just a bitter cesspool and I never would have come here.

---Honking outside--- It sounds like the Mary Kay car is protesting.

The wonderful thing has been that as we’ve been here, we’ve seen God bring life to us, and he’s brought life to everyone around us. When I came here, Colorado had six Orthodox churches that were sometimes open that were canonical. Now there’s almost thirty. We had 23 clergy to lunch in our parish hall on Thursday just form this area here. Orthodox clergy. And love has flowed through us far beyond the number of people who fill this temple. God has done wonderful things for us and through us, and it’s not Fr. Joe, and it’s not even the parish council leadership. It’s Christ who did it. And I and Fr. Eugene, and Fr. James are now like Peter, and James, and John who got to go into that room with that little girl who was lying dead on the bed - for everyone thought that her soul had left her body – and watched Jesus bring her back to life. We get to be witnesses and so do you.

When I was thinking about how the crowd laughed at Jesus when he said, “The little girl’s not dead, she’s only asleep,” I was thinking about how another former priest here called me up and said, “Why do you want to go there? It’s a church full of Slavic people, they drink, and it’s down in the stockyards.”
And I said, “Two out of three sounds pretty good to me.”
He wasn’t very happy with that, but later he said to me, “You know, if we’d ever had any idea of what could happen there, we probably would have worked harder.” He said, “It’s not that there was anything wrong with the parish. It was wrong with us.”

Well, God has done marvelous things for us. And I remember the first annual meeting I had, nobody wanted to come because they thought of annual meetings as times – well, the no longer brought guns and bricks in socks, the women no longer put bricks in their purses any longer – but they thought it was a place where you went where there were arguments, and fights, and contention. You know, over the years, out of 25 meetings we’ve probably had five or six provocative questions, and most of the provocateurs have gone away. And so, it’s really a wonderful thing. We come, and we sit, and we let the Holy Spirit show that an extension of our liturgy is when we gather together and we discern God’s will, and we do what’s good. We have now completed the restoration of the building except for the final stages of the iconostasis because Gabriel is a perfectionist and he keeps going over and over it again.

We’ve received many gifts in the last two years. Back in the back is an icon of Our Lady of Puchaia. In Poland, and in Ukraine, almost every large parish has a icon like this that is passed around form home to home, and each family in the parish will take it home for a week and pray in front of the icon and pass it on to their neighbors. And somebody said, “Why do you have it down low like that?” Well, there are two reasons. One, there’s no place else to put it. And the second one is where it’s down there, people now come in and they stand in front of it, and they can kiss, and they can touch it, and we have people who come and say akathists in front of that icon, and they couldn’t do that if it was way up high on the wall. It’s a blessing for us, everyday, God gives us more and more blessings.

Our ambition is not to have a parish with 500 members – that would be more members than we could all know by name. We would have to essentially break into little families instead of being a big family. Our ambition is eventually to build a church that is big enough down here that on Sunday, all the people who want to come here could. You know, the Eritreans told me they come here for baptisms, and they come here for weddings, and they said to me, “We have about 50 people who would be here every week, but we know that if we came like that every week there wouldn’t be any room for the people who keep this church going.” But they said, “When you get a bigger church, we’ll be there every week.” So we know that there are people who would like to be here but just plain don’t fit. But that will happen in God’s time, and I don’t have to see that building go up for me to know it will happen, because God put it in our hearts that someday there will be a large temple near this. But this will always be the cathedral. This will always be the place where that little band of people from the Balkans – of buchavenians, and of Carpatho-Russ, and Serbs from Croatia, and Ukrainians from Muldova came here and built this building by mortgaging their homes and then began to pray here.

We are like that little girl who everyone else thought was dead, and who Christ touched and said, “Talitha koum! Little girl, arise.” But I want you think about this, even though we’re 110 years old, we’re just barely out of our adolescence. We’re just pretty much kids. And now God’s called us to mature, to grow in missionary zeal, in purpose, and intention, in vision, and to do wonderful grown up things for him. I’m sure one of the fathers wrote what happened to Jairus’s daughter after she grew up, but I haven’t read that; I don’t know. But I’m certain that having been brought back from the dead by our Lord, she never forgot the miracle that was working for her. We know what happened to the other person in the crowd. We know what happened to lady who is called, for lack of a better name, Veronica, the lady who had been bleeding for 14 years, who was not able to come into contact with people in public because she was unclean by Jewish law, who did the unthinkable. She reached out and as a woman, as a woman with an issue of blood, as an unclean woman by Jewish understanding, she touched the lower hem of Jesus’ robe and she was healed immediately. We know that after she was healed, she became a martyr of Jesus Christ. She witnessed so that the next time the mystery of blood appeared with her, it was the shedding of her blood in witness to the resurrection.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we worry a lot about things that happen in the world, the country, and with the Muselmen far off, and with ragings among nations, and with the economy, but in good and bad times, in difficult times and in plentiful times, through the depression and through prosperity, God has always offered a liturgy in this holy temple. It is sanctified, not for our pleasure, but for our salvation. It is the embassy of the kingdom of heaven on earth. When we stand here, we do not stand on earth; we stand in heaven. When the royal family of Yugoslavia were exiled in England, the queen was about to have a child and there was a problem because the constitution said the heir to the throne had to be born on Yugoslav soil, and so the queen of England transferred territoriality for that one hotel room where the doctors came from her crown and throne to the crown of Yugoslavia, so that the prince was born in Yugoslavia though it was in down town London. Well, we stand, not in Yugoslavia, not in Moscow, not in Bucharest, but in the heavenly Jerusalem itself right now. God has given us that great gift.

The first time that I came into this building, it was an odd kind of a place. Icons were not hung evenly, plastic had been put over things to keep them from getting dirty and then the plastic had gotten dirty. Sticky, yucky. But do you know what? I didn’t feel, “What a yucky, sticky, crooked place!” The first thing I felt when I stood right here in the middle of this building was coming out, radiating from the walls, the prayers of 85 years of souls who have stood here and offered their lives to God – their needs, their wants, their hurts, their injuries, their joys – and who received his grace here.

So now, as I come on 25 years – Matushka wanted to make sure that we had been here the longest of any other priest, and so we’ll have done that – I want to ask you to join me in saying thank you to God like Jairus and his wife did, like the little girl who was raised from the dead did, like the mocking crowd who stood outside and said, “Who does he think he is? The girl’s dead.” I want you to give thanks with me like that woman who had suffered pain, and hemorrhage, and isolation, and with one touch of the border of Jesus’ robe felt the healing begin in her. Let this be the beginning of our healing, the beginning of our maturity, not the end of the last chapter, but the end of the first.

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

The 20th Sunday of Pentecost

2008-11-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

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

I want you to think about this man. We hear about him three times a year. It is because there are so many lessons in this story that we hear it over and over again. He was a man who had been possessed by a demon because he lived in the land of the Gadarenes. These were Syro-Greek, that is Greek Syrian pagans. They worshiped idols and they raised pigs. And when Jesus, at the man’s behest, delivered him from the demons, cast the demons out and they ran down into the sea and drowned themselves, having possessed the pigs, then some things happened almost instantly. First, the people of the town came and they asked Jesus to go away. You see, they were pig farmers and they’d rather have their demons and their pigs, than not have their demons and not have their pigs. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with pigs. We know that for us, that we can eat all manner of meat. But for them, this was their business and they would rather have their pigs, their swine’s flesh with the devils than to have the devil take it away and not have this particular source of food and of income.

The man out of whom Jesus had cast the demons… Think about it. This man was not in hell, he was worse than that: hell had been in him. Not just one demon, a legion of demons, a number of demons, were abiding in him. He was filled with terror all the time. Now this man knew what had happened. Suddenly, for the first time in a long time he had become a human being again and not just a house for the minions of hell. So he asked Jesus if he could go with him. And Jesus says, “No. You stay here and tell the people what has happened.” Now when Jesus went to Samaria and spoke to the Samaritan woman, the Samaritans having been sort of half Israelites, they immediately began to convert. But these pagans… They didn’t begin to convert when they saw this man delivered from the devil. Rather, they just wanted Jesus to go away. But Jesus left the man as a witness because for now, he was preaching to the Jews. But the time would come when his disciples would go to all those cities of the gentiles and proclaim the gospel. And that man’s job was to be there as a witness. He could say, “Yes. What they’re saying is true. The man they say died and rose from the dead – he came here and drove demons out of me.” How do you think he felt, being the only believer in that whole Decapolis, those ten towns? Very lonely? Well, perhaps, but also very grateful.

Now we Orthodox people are blessed in this country. It looks like every time you turn around, there’s a new church built. I told the Greeks and the Syrians I don’t have to start missions. All I have to do is put my finger down on a map and say, “I think I’m going to start a mission there,” and then they start one and it saves us the money. There are Orthodox churches everywhere now, and so we cannot really be too far from a church where we can’t get to one. We always have a chance to be with Jesus, to be with our brothers and sisters in Christ, to attend the Divine Liturgy. But there are people in the world who are not blessed that way. Father Matthew Olson, a dear friend of mine who was an army chaplain – now he’s a marine chaplain – he’s off in Iraq. He sent me an e-mail.
He said, “Father, what should I do?” You see, I’m old and all these young guys ask me questions. He said, “There’s no other Orthodox person here. I can’t serve the Liturgy by myself.”
And I told him, “Read the typicha in the church, read your pre-communion prayers, take part in the body of Christ in the tabernacle, and receive communion. You don’t have to do it every week, but as often as God makes you feel like you are drawn to do that.
Here’s a priest who can’t celebrate the liturgy because you have to have another Orthodox Christian to say, “Lord, have mercy,” because Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” I want you to pray for Father Matthew. I want you to pray that he, like that demoniac, that man who had the demons cast out of him, will be such a great witness to Christ that a bunch of those marines are going to want to become Orthodox. And then to have at least one person when he wants to stand at God’s alter and celebrate the Divine Liturgy, who can say, “Lord, have mercy,” for him.

But I want you to think about this too: In a real way, although in church you’re surrounded by your fellow believers, in your life, you’re not. The most recent statistics say there are about 2 million Orthodox in this country. I think there’s really 4 million. The problem is, in America, unless you belong to a church and give money, they don’t think you belong to that religion. We have lots of people who think they’re Orthodox, who claim to be, who don’t belong to a church and who certainly don’t give money. But, these people are still believers. But still, you’re pretty much alone in this country with all these millions and millions of people in it. What are you supposed to do? The same thing that Gadarene demoniac did. You’re supposed to tell people what God’s done for you. Not go knock on doors. Gloria’s not got to go out and say, “Let me give you an Orthodox pamphlet.” No, Gloria’s supposed to, when she’s at work and somebody says, “I’ve got a big problem,” tell them what God says about their problem and then tell them how she learned this in her church. And then, maybe, they will begin to long to have Christ and His holy Church as well. That’s another lesson for us.

So, brothers and sisters, what I want you to think about today is, whether you’re surrounded by fellow believers or whether you’re alone – the only Orthodox person in a certain place, in a certain business, in a certain town – you’re not alone, because where you are you’re encompassed by a great cloud of witnesses, by all the Saints and the angels. And that you’re here in this world to transfigure, to save it, to witness to Christ. If the churches were all closed down tomorrow – if we were all like Father Matthew, if it was like Albania where they killed all the priests and shut all the churches under _____, if it were like that, most of us believers would be very saddened. Our hearts would be broken. Yet we have this treasure, richly given to us, pressed down, running over in abundance. Grace and services served in our church, a beautiful temple. And we should use it, we should employ it, we should embrace it. We shouldn’t just set it aside and say, “Well, it’s there if I really think I need it.”

We’ve learned today these things then: We’ve learned that we need to be witnesses to God when we are not surrounded by other living, Orthodox Christians to support us in our witness. We are the means for saving others. We are to pray for those who don’t have these means. People who are isolated, ministering to those dying marines but unable himself to serve the liturgy. To hold up our prayers so that he will have us near him by prayer. And that we should prize what we have: God’s grace and mercy, His mysteries, a temple, the priesthood, and the gift of being able to serve, and love, and know Him, and to know Him through one another.

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

The 19th Sunday after Pentecost

2008-11-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

Today we are blessed with three stories that are informative for us. They are instructive and illuminating. And they cast a light upon the anxieties that oppress humanity in the present hour. The Lord said in the last days that there would be diseases, and there would be earthquakes and floods, and wars in various places, and men’s hearts failing them. And some will make of this that we can define this as the last days of the earth. I don’t know whether we can or not. But I found from my youth that the older people get the closer they see the last days as coming. It’s not so much that the last days are coming closer to them, as they are coming closer to their last days. I am not going to prophesy to you that there are calamities now that are going to bring the earth to its end, or that I know the scenario that somehow or other will be bound to follow in bringing a close to creation.

We understand only that one of two things will happen to us: either that Christ will come again and we will be brought with him alive in the air to meet him, or we will sleep in the earth and Christ will come and we will rise from the dead to meet him. And practically for us, it makes no difference: our task is the same. Somebody suggested to me that we ought to call of liturgy – it was a joke by the way – and go down and hear the speech down town. And I said, “I think I’ll plant my beans first.” What I was thinking of was the story of a Rabbi in the time before our Lord’s appearance, that was asked by one of his disciples, “Rabbi, if someone came and told you that the Messiah had come, what would you do?” And the rabbi was engaged in planting beans, and he said, “First I will finish planting my beans, and then I will go see the Messiah.” So, I said, “I think I will plant my beans” – take care of the things that are my duty and let God take care of the rest of it.

Men’s hearts failing from fear and from looking after the things coming on the earth is what happens when people attach too much importance to the events around them. They think, in the first place, that what’s happening in the world is somehow or the other what’s important, and it is not what is important. Secondly, they come to think that they are supposed to do something about it. That their principle theatre of activity is supposed to be the world, and that is absolutely wrong.

Today, Holy Apostle Paul starts out telling us about how, when he was setting off to go to Damascus to arrest Christians and bring them back because there weren’t enough in Jerusalem to persecute – he being a Pharisee of Pharisees, wishing to guard God’s honor, thinking it was his job to put an end to this heresy of the Nazarene, of Jesus – he got letters, licenses saying to the king of Nepotian saying that the Roman government considered it and honor if they would allow Paul to bring back Christian’s in chains. But on the way there, he was stricken by God. Not stricken by God to punish him; not stricken by God who wanted to take his black, filthy heart and wash it clean against his will, but stricken by God who knew that St. Paul was trying to do the right thing and Who took his good efforts, who took his good intentions misguided and turned them into a means of grace. So God struck him, and he fell from his horse, and he heard the Lord’s voice and saw him – he says he doesn’t know whether he was taken up to heaven or Christ appeared to him on earth.
“Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me? It is hard for thee, like a horse to kick against gones” – against the straps.
“Who are thou, lord?” said Saul.
And He said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But go into the city. Go to the man named Ananias. He will baptize you and he will show you what you are to do. For I have sent you as a light to all the gentiles” – to tell the Jews that the Messiah has come. So Saul, having heard those things, got up and went into the city, and he came to Ananias and found him on Straight Street – you can still go visit it in Damascus.
And, before he got there, an angel appeared to Ananias and said, “Saul is coming.”
And he said, “Oh, you mean the one who’s been persecuting our people in Jerusalem, who held the coats for the people who stoned Steven.”
“Yes, he’s coming.”
“Well, lord, what’s he coming here for?”
“Well, he’s blind, and you’re to heal him.”
“Oh. Are you sure you want to do that lord? I think the blinding part was a really good idea. Why don’t we just leave him that way, and he won’t be able to do any more mischief?”
“No!” the Lord said, “Baptize him. For he is for Me a chosen vessel to bear my name before the gentiles.”

So, in Saul’s case, a person who was misguidedly full of all kinds of enthusiasm to do the wrong thing, God took that energy because it was offered in good will even though with erroneous reason, with ignorance. And God turned it around; he made it a means of grace. He made it the cause, not only of the salvation of people at that time, but it’s through St. Paul that Christianity ceased to be simply the other sect of Judaism and became the faith that saves the world.

We hear that, and then we hear about another man, if we read the synaxarion, this man is Demetrius. And Demetrius had stead fast good will AND right reason. Now, it’s said of him, that he was a Slav. I suppose this is because he came from Solonica and he’s believed to be a Macedonian. I will say that because, like so many other things, it allows us to put the Greeks, and the Slavs together in the same boat where they belong, and not allow them to argue about which saints belong to whom. Demetrius lived at the time when Roman religion and imperial government had become totally corrupt. Men who looked at it would say, “It’s absolutely lost. The world is coming to the end.” Last night I had some pain in my feet and I couldn’t sleep so I got up and I review the lives of all the Roman emperors. And I realized what a big batch of bums they were. I mean there was one year when there were four of them. They would make an alliance and then they would get together with another guy and kill off their co-emperor. Many of these guys were elevated to the ranks of the Emperor and then killed by another army. But it was about to come to an end.

It was in 306, the same year in which Constantine ascended to the throne in the West, and directed the edict of tolerance in Milan. Maximian in the East was trying as hard as he could to wipe out Christianity, but he also was looking for good, intelligent administrators, men with a good family and a good education. So, not even realizing that Demetrius was a Christian from his birth, baptized as an infant into a secret Christian family, he elevated him to fill his father’s place as the governor of Salonica. Now let me tell you something that this demonstrates to us. Demetrius was a practicing Christian, a believer. He never offered incense to the Emperor’s genius, he never worshiped the Roman eagle or the standards of the gods, and yet neither did he go around and beat on people’s doors and say, “Can I tell you about Jesus?” What he did is he lived a Christian life as a man in a demonically possessed world. He just did his duty. The difference is, Paul was on the wrong road and God had to slap him upside the head and put him on the right road, and Demetrius was on the right road from the beginning. And so, when it came about that Demetrius was made the procurator of the province of Salonica, in which the city of Thessalonica is, he immediately was sent there to arrest and kill Christians. And what did he do? He began preaching Christianity openly, protecting them, knowing exactly what would happen to him. He was a man who did his duty. When he was the emperors soldier, he fought valiantly in the emperors wars against the enemies of the Empire, without allowing his hands become bloodied with innocent blood and without having bowed a knee before false gods. He was a faithful soldier of Jesus Christ, even as he served the Roman government.

But when the time came, when he could not be both a faithful soldier of Jesus Christ and a servant of the Emperor, he knew who his king was. And so he stood up and he proclaimed his faith. Demetrius was arrested, but in prison, the young soldiers who had been won over for Jesus by his way of life, by his example, by his virtue, they began to come to him and ask for his advice. They asked for him to bless, as their spiritual father, as their adopted father, the decisions they had made. And one of these was a man named Nestor, who was a lean mean fighting machine. He was a wrestler; he was a roman soldier. And he noticed at the games that Leo, or Leus, who was a German, the emperors favorite gladiator, not only massacred Christians with great delight, but that it seemed to be his sole purpose to inflict as much torture as he could before destroying them. And so, Christians would be give to Leus to fight and he would beat them to within an inch of their life and he would throw them over on the standing spears on the side of the ring to a bloody death.
So this is what Nestor asked Demetrius; he said, “I know our Lord said that we are to love one another, but this man is a hateful enemy of Christ. May I take up warfare against him?”
Demetrius said, “My son, you have my blessing.”

And so, he entered the ring, that elevated platform, the next day. And when Leus came after him, grinning, shrieking, howling to frighten him, by the sign of the Cross, by his prayers to God, Nestor was able to defeat Leus, and he threw his body on that same barbed, speared garden upon which Leus had impaled so many believers in Christ.

The emperor was so angry that at the very same moment he ordered both the death of Nestor and the execution of Demetrius. Demetrius was a young man who, in his youth, had acquired all the things that you, and in my youth I, tended to think were really important. He had a high position, a lot of esteem from his neighbors, a great deal of wealth. Before he was arrested he ordered he aide-de-campe to give away all his wealth. He said, “We will not need this anymore, we are laying up now treasures in heaven.” And by his prayers the Orthodox people of that part of the world have felt that they were defended and protected from all kinds of calamities from that day even to this. From his bones, starting in the seventh century, oil has exuded that is not just oil but a sweet smelling myrrh. And from time to time, when I can get somebody to go to Salonica, they come back and they bring us a little bit of this oil from St. Demetrius that we can anoint people with. This was, unlike Paul, who was full of fervor and misdirected, a man who was full of fervor and well directed. He didn’t waste his energy on thinking it was his job to determine what task he ought to undertake. He allowed God to present the task, and when the time came, he was equal to it.

And now we’ve got a third man. And this was a man who, as you know, represents both the Jewish priesthood and royalty. He dressed in the white linen ephod of a high priest or a priest and the purple robes of a king. And what did he do? Was he a bad man? There was nothing in the story that says he was a bad man. He was a rich man – is that a sin? Well, Demetrius was a rich man. What was wrong with this man? He was neither striving to do good and doing it incorrectly, nor was he striving to do good and doing it correctly. He was neither a Paul, nor a Demetrius. He was a self-possessed lout. Every day, as he processed out of his house to go through the streets of the city, perhaps to go to the synagogue, perhaps to go for a stroll, he had to step over the body of the man lying at his door step – this man Lazarus, full of sores, who the dogs would come and lick, but who no one gave a crust of bread to. He would step over the man. He would not spit on him, he would not despise him; we have no reason to believe he would call him names or tell him to get out of his way. He simply ignored him. Because it makes no difference whether his reason was good or bad: he had bad will. His will was to satiate his own passions, his own desires, and that blocked him from caring about, from doing good to anyone else. So the Lord tells us this man was in hell, not because of what he did, but because of what he didn’t do. Not because he performed evil acts, but because he didn’t perform good acts. We are called upon then today to hear God speaking to us. Not to let our hearts fail from looking after things coming upon the earth. Not to feel that it is our job to save the economy, or the nation, or the political system, or this or that thing. Not to think that somehow or the other that if things don’t go our way that this is a disaster, for the only disaster will be if our souls are lost. But to look after, understanding and performing the will of God, doing good unto all men, especially unto those who are in the household of faith, seeking God’s kingdom and allowing God to take care of His world.

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

18th Sunday after Pentecost

2008-11-23T18:47:00.001-08:00

Rather he who sows sparingly shall reap sparingly and he who sows abundantly shall reap abundantly

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

St. Paul in that epistle which only almost always on the calendar falls with second reading, the gospel reading today, both of which speak to us about sewing seed and the consequences of the sewing of the seed – St. Paul lets us know that those who are generous with what God has given them will cause a great crop, an abundance of grace, to come forth.

Some of you know that some of our culture, some of the preachers of certain branches of Protestantism, teach what they call a gospel of prosperity, and their message seems to be, “Well, if you give a lot of money to the church, then you’re going to get a lot of money back.” That would be investment planning, and I suspect that it would not be anymore successful than the one in which I am now engaged for my retirement. But that’s not what St. Paul’s saying. He’s saying that when we are generous with what God gives us, we are allowing God’s grace to abound. He says this: that because of the generosity of the Christians in supporting the missionaries, the work of the church, in feeding the poor among them – because of that thanks is given to God by many, and that great grace is released into the world by which many are saved.

Now we’ll move from that point. Because some people are a lot more disposed toward giving money to god because he’s going to pay 25% interest, than they are giving to God so that God’s work can be done on earth. And we’ll move on to the gospel.

Those of you who’ve been here for several decades know a lot about this gospel. You understand that in this Gospel the Lord was talking about a real situation – about the way a Jewish wheat field was planted. The Jewish wheat field was not very large – you might have many fields, but each one was separate and very small, about the size maybe of this quadrangle out here. And as one worked his soil year after year, rocks worked their way to the surface, and these rocks were carried to the edge of the field and used to build a wall around it so that every field was surrounded by a wall that had some soil that had washed up on it, but it was still rock.

And then you may also recognize that God had told the Jews that they were not supposed to harvest their fields all the way to the borders. That’s why Jewish men are supposed to leave the corners of their beards long – here – so that they will remember that they are supposed to be generous. Why didn’t you harvest your field all the way to the borders? Because what grew around the border of the field, that was for the poor or for those who were passing by who might be hungry. Our Lord and his disciples, on the Sabbath day, had picked some wheat from along the edge of the field and rolled it in their hands and ate it to assuage their hunger. But, because this border of the field was not going to be harvested, most Jewish farmers did not waste a lot of effort on culling or cultivating it, so it was full of weeds too. And then, across the field, was usually a path in the shape of an X so that then you could walk back and forth across the field and cultivate the field – either around the border or in the middle. In this way, you could reach every corner of your field with your hoe or your rake, and get the weeds out without stepping on the crop.

Now, the Lord says that a certain farmer went out to plant and then he went and he just threw the seed everywhere. He threw the seed everywhere. Some of the seed, He said, fell on the path and it was stepped on and the birds came and ate it. And He said then some of the seed fell on the little rocky area around the field where there was a little bit of soil, and it sprung up. But then when the heat of the day came, it died. It had no root, no moisture. And then there was the wheat that fell in that border around the field and it was choked by weeds and did not bring forth much of a crop. And then the Lord says, “Let he who has ears to hear, hear.” And what He’s saying is, “If you want to know what God has to say to you, you’re going to understand a great mystery here. If you don’t want to know, then friends, just forget about the rest of this.” Because God doesn’t make anybody believe, and He doesn’t compel anybody to understand.
The disciples come to Him and they say, “We don’t understand this.”

----Oh yes, he said, that which fell on good ground brought forth some 20, some 50, some 100 fold. That mean that for every seed that was planted, the heads of wheat had maybe 50 or 100 seeds in them.----

Now a logical question we might ask before we come to His answer to the disciples is, “If wheat is so valuable, why is this guy such a lousy planter?” You wouldn’t think that if your seed grain was dear that you’d be throwing it just every old place, would you? But the fact is, the Lord tells us that the seed is God’s word - that of which we spoke when we said, “He who sows plentifully will reap plentifully” – and that God is the farmer, and so He is profligate with His word, with His grain. He throws it everywhere – on good ground, on bad ground, on the path, among the weeds, on the stones – so that by some means, many might have the opportunity to have the word not just bounce off their ears but penetrate into their hearts.

And the Lord tells His disciples this: He said the stuff that falls on the path, that is the wheat that is the word of God that comes to a person who doesn’t really want to hear. So although it may lie on their eardrums, it may lie on that ground that’s been trodden down, Satan, like the birds of the air, will come pick it out and take it away from them and it will be as though they never heard it. And then He said that which falls on the rocky soil is like the word of God that comes to some who are hungry for meaning and purpose in their lives – whose lives are desperate, lives are lives of being wounded, of being fearful – and so when they hear the gospel of healing and of peace, of forgiveness – when they hear that, then they immediately accept it. But they grab it and the expect God to do their thing for them, rather than their doing God’s thing for Him. So, when the hot sun beats down, they spring up with a green shoot and it appears to be a luscious crop of wheat, but there’s no water beneath the roots to nourish it, and it is burned up by the problems of the heat of the day.

And then He says, those who fall among the weeds are those who both hear the word of God and they embrace it; but they believe more in their own problems than they do in God because they are more concerned about the stock market, or world peace, or the next election, or who’s going to win the American league pennant, or why CU is 4 and 3. Anyway, because those thing prepossess them, when the devil in the form of those means – the cares and concerns of life surround them – when they find that they are ailing, or that they are suffering loss, or that their life is contingent, or that their security in this world seems to be in doubt, then they become so strangled with worrying about things in this world that they forget to think about the kingdom of heaven, and they don’t bring forth very much wheat. They don’t bring forth very much nourishment for themselves, and they don’t bring forth very much fruit in the form of the Word of God, to spread the Gospel.

Then He says that which falls on the good ground are those who, hearing the Word of God, allow them to be watered by his tender love from heaven, the roots to sink deeply into the soil of the truth of christ’s gospel, and the sun of righteousness to shine down on them. And they bring forth fruit which saves many more than themselves. As St. Seraphim of Sarov said to someone who wanted to go be a missionary, he said, “That’s fine. But save your own soul and you’ll save a thousand people you don’t even know.”

Now, today, we’re going to bless this icon – I was going to bless it last Sunday, but it was impossible because it wasn’t here. This is St. Tikhon and St. Sebastian Dabovich. How blessed this church is. The people who, when I first came here, wanted to tear the building down and build another one somewhere, they didn’t have the slightest idea at that time how precious this place is. But here we have a picture of two saints, and these two saints actually were here and the same time, and this moment that is shown in this icon here is a moment of history shown symbolically. It shows St. Tikhon, who became our bishop when we came out of the land of Uniatism into the promised land of Holy Orthodoxy, and who in the third year of our Orthodoxy and the third visit he made here, handed our church over to this young monk, Sebastian Dabovich. He was here for only one year, but while he was here he started Orthodox churches all the way from Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana to Kansas City, Kansas, down to Texas, into New Mexico and the Western coast of the United States. He probably baptized more people than any Orthodox priest in the lower 48 ever. He was the first American born man to be ordained an Orthodox priest. He was the first American born man to become an Orthodox monk. And he not only worked in this country, but as you’ll read in his biography,* if you read it, he was traveling all over the world to places like Australia. He even went to parts of Serbia where the people had apostatized from the Gospel because of Islam or some other cause and re-evangelized people and brought them back to orthodoxy. He would serve in a parish here in America and when a war broke out in the Balkans, he would go to be a chaplain to the men who were fighting for the holy cross against Turkish aggression or against the aggression of heretics. And then he would come back here and serve some more.

He was born the year that the American Civil War was heating up. He is an American by birth because he was born on the ship that his parents took from Yugoslavia just as it pulled into San Francisco harbor. In his entire life he wanted nothing other than to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Not just to Serbs, but to people of every nationality, of every race, of every identity, people distributed all over the world. This was his ambition. Of him, St. Nikolai Velimirovich said, “He had no evil passions in him at all.” He was a man of unmixed motives, a man of manifest goodwill. As our Lord said of Nathaniel, “An Israelite in whom there was no guile.” This man was responsible for spreading the seed of God. He could have been anything: he could have been an attorney, or a general, or a businessman. He came to American when America was in it’s growth, in its vigor. He could have stashed away fortunes. Even in the church, he could have become the comfortable dean of some large cathedral and made a salary that would keep him secure. But he never raise a penny for his missionary work. He worked in a parish, he got a little money, he got on a train or a stage coach or the back of a horse and went some place where there was no Orthodoxy and he preached the Gospel. And he did it all over this country. All over this part of the country. Everything west of Eastern Texas bears his mark. Not just Serbian churches, but OCA churches and Antiochian churches bear it as well.

And this, brothers and sisters, is the meaning of, “Him who sows abundantly reaps abundantly,” because he treasure was treasure for God. It was treasure he laid up in heaven, and you can read in the biography* that when St. Nikolai Velimirovich, who would end up as dean of our St. Tikhon’s seminary in Pennsylvania, when St. Nikolai went to the ____ monastery where he was in the infirmary as an old man, St. Nikolai was willing to do anything he could for him. And he said, “My dear brother, Father Sebastian, is there anything you want, anything you need?” Sebastian Dobovich smiled at his old friend, this man who had traveled with St. Tikhon and St. John Kochurov, and St. Alexander, had traveled with them to the Episcopal Seminary in Wisconsin, hoping to convert the Anglicans to Orthodoxy at that time, smiled at his old friend and he said, “I want, I need only the kingdom of heaven.”

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, seek ye first God’s righteousness, and all the rest will be given unto you so abundantly. Not just of your money, of your time, of your love for God, of your testimony of the truth of the Gospel, and you will reap a crop abundantly, pressed down, running over in bushels, spilling on the ground, more than you could desire, more than you could ask for.

*Read the Biography of St. Sebastian Dabovich by following this link:
http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/general/archimandrite-sebastian-dabovich-serbian-apostle-to-america.pdf

110th Anniversary - Bishop Benjamin

2008-11-02T19:46:00.001-08:00

The 17th Sunday of Pentecost
110th Anniversary Celebration
Homily given by Bishop Benjamin of San Francisco and the West

There is no time when a pastor feels more incapable of comforting than when a child dies. We heard the story in this morning’s gospel from Luke, that while Jesus was passing from one place to another, He passed by the Nain, and a funeral was progress. A funeral procession was in progress, and the people of the city were bringing the body of the only son of a widow to be buried.

Imagine the grief, imagine the sorrow, imagine the emptiness that that mother felt. I don’t if you, and I hope none of you ever had had that occasion to experience the death of a child. But it is incomprehensible. One cries out do God and says, “Are you at the desk? Whose running the universe? It’s not supposed to be like that. Parents are not supposed to live longer than their children. It’s not supposed to be like that.” And yet, it happens. And it’s those time we feel the farthest from God.

But I’m here to tell you as I tell the parents. The child could be 9 months and the parents 22. The child could be 50 years old and the mother 80. It’s still not supposed to be like that. It’s just not supposed to happen. I remember when my own mother died my grandmother could not even go to the funeral. It was incomprehensible to her that my mother should pass away before she did.

What kind of words can a pastor give that make it go away? In fact, brothers and sisters, the Rabbi’s say that when someone dies, God weeps. It was not God’s plan that any of this children, be they nine months old or fifty years old, die. And God feels the sorrow and the pain of His children.

Christ, in the gospel today, looked into the eyes of that mother, and He saw real pain. He saw real questioning. He saw her complete lack of understanding of how this could happen, and her questioning, “How could God have abandoned her?” and He reached out to her, and in a moment touched her son and he was raised from the dead.

It’s the foretaste or Christ’s entire ministry on earth. He came to earth for no other reason than to raise the dead. He came to earth for no other reason than to search for His friend Adam, and Eve. When Adam sinned he took himself away from the source of life, and he died. It wasn’t a punishment. No more than when you turn off the light switch, the light goes out. It’s not a punishment, it’s just what happens. And when Adam took himself away from the source of life, God, he died. And all of his children were condemned to die. But God looks into the heart, into the eyes of everyone who suffers and He sees in it the reflection of His own grief at the loss His beloved – at the loss of you, the loss of me, the loss of Adam, the loss of that young son on the funeral bier going the cemetery. God experiences that same sorrow.

But it’s not enough. It’s not for God to let us all kind of stew in our juices as it were. To reap the benefit of our sin. But He sent His own Son, His own beloved Son, into this world to suffer Adam’s death, to suffer my death, to suffer your death, to suffer the death of that widow’s son, so that He could go down into Hades and destroy death, making death, Adam’s death His own.

And so each one of us in the Christian Church, Orthodox Christians, we’re baptized into Christ’s death and raised with Him. And we’re able to rise with Him because He dies our death, He dies Adam’s death. So at any time when we weep, when we feel the sorrow at the loss of someone, we should remember that we’re not the only ones who are weeping, we’re not the only ones who feel loss, but God feels it with us. God shares our sorrow and He has made it His own so that He can turn our sorrow into joy.

Christ is Risen!
Indeed, He is Risen

The 16th Sunday of Pentecost

2008-11-02T19:20:00.001-08:00

The 16th Sunday After Pentecost

We hear this gospel every year. It’s maybe, in an odd way, one of the most irritating and disturbing of all the gospels. Of all the things that Jesus asks us to do, the one that makes us most angry is to forgive people who have injured us and to love our enemies. We can recall the great wave of patriotism, but also the great wave of anger, that swept across the country when the 9-11 attack took place on our nation. And in the hearts and minds of most Americans, I’m certain, was very last of all any thought of forgiving or praying for or desiring good for those who had planned and had perpetrated the attack.

It is very difficult for us to understand because we are weaned on justice. It’s a kind of a civil religion for us. We know what our rights are. We know that we can always sue if we feel personally injured. Or we can file charges if we feel the laws have been broken to cause us harm. And we feel not only that we CAN do these things, but that we ought to do them. So when it comes to our enemies, it’s very difficult for us to imagine having any good thoughts or intentions toward them. Yet the lord has made it very clear to us that being a Christian means imitating him, it means imitating his father. We have to remember that our Lord Jesus Christ, when being nailed to the cross, did not cry out to heaven, “Father, send down thy lightening and smite these sinners.” He didn’t call down God’s wrath upon the emperor, or upon the legions, or upon the centurions, or upon the Sanhedrin that had convicted Him, or upon the high priest who had condemned Him, or Pontius Pilate who had stood aside and let Him be lynched. Instead He said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” We understand that our life is a life in God. Week after week I’ve mentioned that to you: That when it says we who believe in Jesus will not perish but have everlasting life, it means believe IN Jesus; it means to be within his body, to be part of him, have his life in us. Otherwise, what does Holy Communion mean if not that God’s life is in us? And what is God? St. John tells us very simply: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.

Maybe our trouble with idea of loving our enemies is that we have really sloppy, kind of sick, sentimental ideas about what love is. I remember when I was a kid, I’ve mentioned it before, the song “What is love? Five feet of heaven and a pony tail.” Well, folks, that is not love. Love is not even the great rush of hormonal attraction that comes upon young men and women when they find their true love for the first time. It is not the commitment that comes from obligation, nor is it all some kind of nostalgic, romantic recollection of the good old days and the wonderful times. Love is, quite simply, ultimate concern. It is caring about the ultimate and temporal disposition of the object of love.

When we say that God loves us, we mean that God wants the best for everyone. There is no one in whose death or damnation God delights. God does not damn anyone. We understand that. We understand that the pastor in Chicago who screamed out, “God damn America,” was doing something God wouldn’t do, and that is to condemn. What he should have said, if he believed it, was, “America may damn itself.” That’s a matter of judgment.

The point, quite simply, is we know from the scriptures that “God desireth not the death of any sinner but that all should turn from their wickedness and live.” And that our hope has to be that all will turn from their wickedness and live. If our Lord could not only forgive those who were so cruelly crucifying him, but could impart absolution to the thief on the cross, who in the desperation of his last moments, cried out, “I deserve this punishment. Remember me O Lord when thou comest into Thy kingdom.” This man to whom he said, “Today you will be with Me in paradise.” If our Lord could forgive Peter, who three times denied Him, after having promised, “I will go to prison and to death for You,” then we also ought to forgive those who injure us. But this is not again that kind of romantic stupidity that sometimes is interpreted as love in our culture. It’s not, “Hey, hit me again. It feels so good when you stop.” No, that’s not what it is. It’s not being a sucker, it’s not being a fool, it’s not making yourself vulnerable to being injured. It is making yourself vulnerable to being disappointed. It’s making your heart vulnerable to being hurt again and again, because we always have to harbor hope and prayer for our enemies no matter how wicked they may appear to us to be now.

And so our Lord calls to our attention how His heavenly Father causes the sun the rise on the good and on the evil alike, and His rain to fall upon the fields of the just, and of the unjust. And if God, in His distributive justice, pours out His love equally upon all of His creatures, then we are obliged to struggle to forgive; we’re obliged to struggle to love; we’re obliged to struggle to pray for others.

Bishop Benjamin tells a story about two Jewish holocaust survivors who met in New York. One of them told about how wonderful his life in America had been, and how he had found a new meaning, and a new purpose, and a new joy. The other one said, “All I think about everyday is those Nazis: how I hate them, how I despise them. How could they do what they did?” And the first one said, “I see. I am here in America, and you are still in the concentration camp.”

Hatred and anger injure the perpetrator more than the object of the hatred or anger. It is their revenge on us if they can make us think day and night about how ill treated we were, then we are still in the prison of their control. And so, brothers and sisters, to pray for them, to say, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” – this is the cure for all that anger, for all of that rumination about past injuries. Yes, stand up and demand that right be done and that wrong be persecuted and prosecuted. But do not call upon God, or desire of Him, that those are the perpetrators should suffer eternal damnation or loss. But call upon Him to touch their hearts and warm them, to turn them, and to save them.

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

The 15th Sunday after Pentecost

2008-10-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Apostle Paul, in writing to the church in Corinth, speaks to them about the people of the old covenant. He tells them how on Mt. Horeb, on Sinai, Moses saw the glory of God, and beholding the glory of God, Moses shown with that light which he’d beheld, and how when he came down from the mountain he was aglow with the presence, the shekinah, the glory of the Most High. And the people of Israel, rather than marveling and saying, “What a wonder this is!” and sharing in the glory that God had revealed to them, constrained to Moses that he should cover his face so that they should not be frightened.
In that they were much like the Gadarenes who we heard about a couple weeks ago, who when Jesus had exorcised a man of demonic obsession and possession, had caused the pigs to run down the hill headlong and drowned themselves, didn’t say, “What a wonder this is! Tell us what we need to do,” but instead said, “Please get out of town, we don’t like you drowning our pigs.”
St. Paul says, however, that we, the people of the new covenant, we have received not simply the reflected glory of God, but that just as God commanded the light to shine forth in the darkness in the beginning when he said, “Let there be light,” and behold there was light; just as God called the natural light, the physical light, the light that ____ being from nothingness, that God has revealed to us the uncreated light, the eternal light, God’s uncreated energy, his holiness, his grace. This uncreated light, this light that God calls forth from the darkness of our dark and sin laden, and burdened, and worried, and troubled, and wounded hearts, and caused to shine a flame within a lantern. This light is revealed to us in the face of Jesus Christ. Not a reflected light. Not a light that Jesus saw and that then shown forth from his countenance, but his own uncreated energy, his own divine love illumining our hearts.
St. Paul relates the consolation first: that God has shown in our hearts the light of his uncreated energy through the face of Jesus Christ. Then he says, “But, that doesn’t mean, that like some prosperity gospel, I’m telling you everything from now is going to be just hunky-dory. I’m not telling you that there are no problems. Look at your daily existence. You’re abused by others, and yet you don’t allow the abuse to destroy your self confidence. You are beaten up but never beaten down. Sometimes desperate, but never in despair.” He says that because of this that we see death working in the world, and yes even in our own bodies, each one of us knows that the law of nature planted in our chromosomes the law of nature dictates that there is a terminus ___ to this fallen humanity which we have inherited from our parents. As the psalmist says, “The days of many are three-score and ten,” that’s the optimum, that’s what they strive for, and even if by chance man should extend those days to four-score or longer, yet all is essentially destruction, death and ashes. They will eventually, no matter what science does to extend this physical frame, no matter what vitamins or therapies or treatments, no matter what diets, no matter what inoculations are given to us to drag out our physical existence a little longer, still it is death working in us. It is because of this anomaly, that we who are children of the light, in whom the love of Christ should be growing daily, who should be becoming ever more god like, who should be inclining more and more toward grace, toward truth, toward the kingdom of heaven, feel that our human bodies are themselves becoming subject to new pains, new fatigues, new injuries, to new degenerations.
And here is how St. Paul explains it: He says if we had this treasure in some kind of golden flask, if we were robotic creatures, or some kind of precious spheres, then it would be our glory and not God’s glory that we would incline toward. But it is because we have the treasure of God’s grace; because divinity – the spark of the Godhead itself – was poured into jars made out of baked clay (that’s how he describes our bodies) because of that, the glory passes to God and is not assumed by us.
Well the Apostle Paul was living in a world, preaching in a world, where everything ridiculed what he was proclaiming. You know, because I’ve told you, that that gentile world to which Paul went, regarded the human body as, well, in its youth, a thing to be admired, to be cultivated, to be formed through exercise, even to be lusted after. And then as it aged they regarded it as a prison in which the soul was captured. They did not believe that the body was a precious, a sacred, thing. They did not understand that human individuality, that human personality, exists because we are bodies, because we are sentient creatures able to know and be known, to see to hear to touch to taste to smell, because we have vocation. We are not droplets of some kind of atman Brahman that flows back into the celestial sea of soul substance; but we are individuals and we are not created for recycling over and over again. We are not bound, as the Greeks thought, to a cycle of reincarnations that will be repeated until somehow or other, through the acquisition of, according to the Greeks, philosophy, and according to the Romans, law, we would manage to escape our bodies and to float back into the celestial sea of stars. This is the universal assumption of the people of St. Paul’s time.
I mentioned last week that when St. Paul preached in the Areopagus, when he told the Athenians that he was there to speak of Jesus Christ who was risen from the dead, probably at least partly because of his country Greek, they thought he was telling them about two new Gods: Jesus and Anastasius.
They didn’t understand what he was saying, and they finally said, “Well, come back some other time. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” St. Paul was in a world where it seemed as though his message was ridiculous and yet where he was able to touch the hearts of people – no the hearts of the people who thought themselves the wisest, the richest, and the most powerful. In time, over the decades, and through the first two centuries, Christianity would trickle up. Where in the world has a movement ever begun which was embraced first by slaves, by manual laborers, by the dregs of the earth, by the poverty stricken and that then worked itself up through the bureaucracy, the civil service, the military, the ranks of the aristocracy and finally to the imperial throne itself. This is really a trickle up theory, isn’t it?
But you see it was in those lower classes finding a meaning for their life in a set of circumstances that appeared to provide no hope, no purpose, no meaning. It was in their being willing, as St. Paul said, everyday to be in danger of death because of their assertion that they knew in their hearts that the eternal God had become man, and taken flesh, and conquered death, and had physically risen from the dead, and that he would raise them as well. It was because of that that then the middle class, going to the arena, and seeing these poor peasant folk, these poor urban poor, these ridiculous off-scourings of the earth, standing up before lions and gladiators and proclaiming their faith in the risen Lord that it is said that for every Christian who died in the arena that a hundred more left the arena, and again that it is the blood of the martyrs that was the seed of the Church.
So this is what St. Paul is telling us. He is telling us that we are put in the world so that, not just in our good times, not by our prosperity, not by our success, not by our dramatic architectural edifices or by our exercise of great power, but because of how we handle fatigue, pain, lowliness, wounds, sorrow, threat, distress, danger, insecurity. That it is in how we handle these things that the world sees the difference between the God who is in us and the god who is in the world – the god who wants to draw men down, down to the earth from which he was taken, return him to the state of an animal, to deprive him of the glory of the knowledge of God revealed in the face of the Jesus Christ. This is what the Holy Apostle tells us. This is why sometimes during those periods of communist oppression, some of the bishops and priests, some of the monastics in the captive lands under communist domination declared that they were more fortunate than their brothers and sisters in the west because they knew how the deck was cut, they understood what the circumstances were, they were clearly aware of the price of faith, there was no cheap grace for them, that embracing Christ meant abandoning a great deal of security, safety, even their own lives.
It was because of this that St. Nicolai Velimirovich, having been captive and persecuted and virtually destroyed, and having survived Dachau, when he was asked, “What is there in your life that you would go back and relive?” said, “The best time in my life was when I was in Dachau.”
And the man interviewing him looked at him like he was a mad man, and he said, “No, then we knew what was lightness and what was dark; we knew who was on God’s side, and who wasn’t, we knew what we were here for and we didn’t mix up our priorities. We had nothing else to bog us down.”
How many people this morning are depressed? They’re depressed because twenty years ago they didn’t have any money in the stock market, but now they do and they’re afraid their going to lose it. So their hearts are aching and they’re failing and they’re in anxiety and despair because they don’t know what the economy is going to do. This is the first time in my life since I became aware of politics that I have no known just exactly what I thought our government ought to be doing. I don’t have a clue. I think bush was right when he said that all - the old bush – when he said that all economics is voodoo. I don’t think that anyone knows what to do. But you know, if I don’t live with my money, with my stock shares, if I don’t live with that, if I don’t live for it, it’s not going to hurt me, it’ll just be another way I have to live. It’ll be a detour on the road of life, but it is not how long it takes you to get down the road of life or how many detours you take, but as the little blue fish says in Finding Nemo, “Just keep on swimming, keep on swimming.” That’s what God judges you by. Like we said before, in every other race that man ever ran there was one winner who got a crown and a gold medal, but in the race that we are running we all get crowns and gold medals if we finish the race. If we just don’t sit down and say, “I’m so tired of doing this. I’m so bored. I’m so unhappy. I’m so disconsolate. I just think I’ll sit on this rock and I’ll stop fighting the good fight and running the race, and I will then say to myself, ‘You know, there probably isn’t any reward,’ or even worse, ‘Self, you know, you’re pretty good. If all these other people around you, all these other wicked people whose sins I know very well, if they’re going to get there, I’ll probably get there too.’” So, quitting the struggle: that’s the only way you can be lost. He who endures to the end shall be saves. And so St. Paul tells us, he says over and over again in different ways, “We are hard pressed on every side, and yet we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but we are not in despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed. Ever carrying about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus that the life of Jesus might be manifested in our body.” Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us take up our obligation, let us have our feet shod and our loins girded, our staff in our hand. And be like the servants of God waiting for their master to come, and let him, when he comes, find us, not bowed down under the burden of our own self-imposed despair, but waiting to hear from, “Well done thou good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of they master.”

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

Leave Taking of the Cross

2008-09-29T10:41:00.001-07:00

September 21, 2008
The Leave-taking of the Cross

When the prophet Elias was on the mountain praying to God that he could die because he thought he was the only believer in the world, he thought he was the only person faithful to God, God revealed to him that he had reserved for himself in Israel 7000 men who had not bowed a knee to Baal. In the strength of this knowledge, Elias was sent to perform the mission that God gave him, coming to Mount Sinai and beholding God, hearing his voice.
We have come to a point in our own history, the history of mankind, that leaves people in consternation. It was not much more than 15 years ago that some academic historians had declared the end of history. They had said that with the fall of the Soviet Union, that now we would grind our way on joyously, day by day in everyway getting better and better and that there would not be anymore calamities or clashes among nations. Of course, these people who, because they were anti-soviet thought of themselves as conservatives, were worshiping the same god of history, the same god of the machine, the same dialectic process that Marx and the Bolsheviks worshipped. Both sides, both Nazis and fascists, and Soviet Bolsheviks, were bowing their knee before a mechanical god, a god who ground out this process through time and through the interaction of matter with matter. Thus they were not atheists, though the claimed themselves to be, but they were slaves of a god who was the process
It wasn’t so very long ago that the dominant school of theology at this resident theological seminary here in Denver, Iliff, was what was called process theology. When Episcopalians had to explain why they went from holding in high value the mystery of marriage, condemning abortion, and declaring homosexuality a sin to tolerating, encouraging, and elevating those who practiced those things, their answer was, “It’s the process.” Their thought was the truth changes. How convenient the truth always seemed to change in direct relation to our desires for the outcomes. That we’re always able to redefine it in relation to what we wished to be true, to relieve ourselves of the burdens of decency, honor, morality, righteousness.
In 1908, a man wrote this: “The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and liberals, progressives. The business of the liberals is to go about making mistakes, and the business of the conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
In other words, the world at that time had divided itself into two parties who warred with each other over ideology, both of whom were convicted of some idea that was other than the Christian idea. One convinced that somehow or the other the lot of human kind would grow greater and greater, more humane, as time went on, as the dialectic process worked its way through. And the other convinced that the market itself, a great organism crunching up little people and spitting them out would somehow produce a homeostasis, again and again, which would be the market process and restore the economy and make everything right. And both of these people who looked at each other with disdain both parties who despised each other, were worshipping the same false god: the god who grinds out truth through process.
You see, when St. Paul tells us that there’s nothing in which we can boast except the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, he’s reminding us that in the world there are many things in which people boasted. The Romans in their laws and in their armies, the Jews in their righteousness and in the covenants they had with God.
But he said, “God forbid that I should glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
His source of glory was in defeat, in an apparent defeat: the arrest, trial, persecution, crucifixion, and death of God in the flesh. And yet the Apostle says it is in that only that we can glory, because it is that only that makes sense out of senselessness, order out of chaos.
The generation I am part of only came knowledge, only became alert in the world, in the last moments of the Second World War. We have never really known serious calamity. We’ve called recessions economic disasters, and we’ve called flares up of combat in various corners of the world wars, and we have called the fall of the market a great economic crisis. But for us there’s never been any real serious problem that faced culture or our nation. More people died by far in the tidal wave that overtook Galveston at the beginning of the 20th century than died in the fall of the twin towers, and yet because one was caused by people and other one by nature, we construed the fall of the tower to be a much greater calamity. In fact, those who are among us now who came to sensitivity, to knowledge, before the Second World War, they’re aware of what real tragedy is. They’re aware of a world in which evil fights evil and people become gravel in the gizzard of the great beast that are ground into powder by the process of history. We’ve seen some of it in our own time, but it hasn’t fallen on us. When the Serbs of Kosovo, when the people of Bosnia became victims of ideology, of a clash of ideology, of the KLA which is an international terrorist group against Milosevic who was nothing but a throw back to the pseudo-Bolshevik Yugoslavian communism, then millions suffered, but we didn’t suffer.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we cannot glory in our peace. If we have too much peace, if we have too much prosperity, too much security, then we begin to glory in those things. But God forbid that we should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world is crucified to us and we unto the world.
Some of those 7000 men in the early 20th century who had not bowed a knee to Baal, or having bowed had repented, were a group of English scholars. One of them was C.S. Lewis, you know him, he was a little later.
A man who, having started out as a believer became an agnostic and then an atheist, tinkered and toyed with Marxism, went out one day asking himself, “Why should anyone believe in a personal God?” and came back asking, “Why should not one believe in a personal God?”
A man who has given the world a great deal of Christian literature that’s especially edifying to little children, but also to adults, who spoke in That Hideous Strength of a great ecological movement that would come in the future in which life itself would be destroyed and replaced by mechanical life; in which all brains would no longer be necessary because there would be a super brain, a big mainframe (this was in 1943) that would do all the thinking for the whole world.
Another one of these folks was a man named T.S. Eliot who also had toyed with bolshevism and who said that one day the thought came to him, “How can I dedicate my whole life to a philosophy which says the only consolation I have is that a thousand years from now, when my bones have rotted, when I’ve returned to the dust, that my descendents will look back on me as some evolutionary precursor” – he used the term lemur – “some monkey in the process of social evolution.”
Another one of these people was Owen Barfield who was fortunate enough to live long enough to see the Orthodox Christian church regain its equilibrium enough to become again a missionary church, and who died as an Orthodox believer.
And then there was G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, having come to believe defined himself as an orthodox Christian, but when he went to find out what that meant, there was no canonical Orthodoxy even available to him. He lived in a time before Kallistos Ware and before Anthony Bloom; when English people thought of the Eastern Church as the exotic leftover of a dying culture, so he became a Roman Catholic. But his ambition, his longing, the longing of his heart, was to find and to embrace Orthodoxy. And he wrote, not in 2008 but in 1908, these words:

O God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry.
Our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide,
Take not they thunder from us, but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches, from lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men
From sale and profanation of honor, and the sword
From death and from damnation, deliver us Good Lord.

Now the beginning of the 20th century was a strange time. It was actually the last decade of the 19th century. And, from 1890 to 1910, people had a great optimism. There was a treaty being formulated to unite all of Europe into one great political entity with no boundaries, with one currency, with one common market. There was the expectation that science had now created the answer to every problem, or was capable of creating it, so that we would no longer need superstition or religious faith to answer questions, because scientists would be able to answer every question we could address to it. That man almighty had conquered.
There was built into this system a thought called social Darwinism which said that the human race had arrived at this high level of development – or at least the white race ahd – by natural selection; and that now that we had reached a point where we had removed those things that drove natural selection – that is starvation, disease, and war – that we had to recreate them.
We had to find some new way to select out those who were from the “shallow end” of the gene pool, to cleanse the gene pool, and that we would produce man almighty, the god-man of whom Nietzsche spoke, the super man, when he said, “If God is dead, all things are possible.”
And in this optimism, men began to reject their Christian faith and to become worshipers of false gods and false philosophies. In the city of Berlin in 1890, 95% of the people were baptized, about 80% were baptized and Lutheran and the rest mostly Roman Catholic, and only the other 5%, the Jews, were not baptized. But within the next 20 years, only 15% of the children born in that city of Berlin were brought to the baptismal font either by their Catholic or Lutheran parents, because, you see, God had become superfluous. We had answered all of our questions, we solved all of our problems.
In 1908 though, Chesterton, a prophet, looked out and said, “Our people drift and die; the walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide.”
And in 1914 the world was plunged into the First World War, not because people hated each other, or wanted to fight each other, because of a doctrine of nationalism that taught that each nation considered itself as more highly evolved than the others. So we could have Serbianism, and Francism, and English nationalism, and German nationalism, and Italian nationalism, and Austrian nationalism, and Magyar nationalism, and these could all bash heads with each other, and some of them would move forward a little and some backwards. All would be okay, because it was like a football game – you might have to carry some people off the field, there might be a few people who would have to sit out the next few games – but it was all a big game. BUT it is not a big game when a cannonball falls on you. For the people of the lower end of the gene pool, it was a way to cleanse the gene pool. So all the nations that engaged in the First World War fought because they were willing to do so. They fought because it seemed to them to make sense to get rid of the dead weight in humanity, to kill off a few million people in order to make the human race more vital and healthy. When the Czar tried to prevent fighting, he was overruled by his generals.
Yes, the great ruler, the autocrat supreme of all of Russia was told, “You can’t do that,” by his generals, “We didn’t plan that way. Mobilization has started, we can’t stop it.”
When the Kaiser eve took second thoughts and said, “I don’t really want to engage on two fronts,” he was told by his generals, “You’ve already started the machine. The wheels are grinding. Just let it work itself out.”
So we saw the fall of the German empire, of the Russian empire, of the Austrian empire, and almost of the English empire. When the world emerged from that war which was supposed to last till Christmas and ended up lasting 4 years, then the whole planet was swept with the Spanish flu. We had indeed weakened the whole human race. The whole of society from continent to continent had become enfeebled and starved, and so more people died from the flu than died from the war.
And now these people who were so optimistic that we had solved all our problems, that we had answered every question or were soon going to answer it, did they come back and say, “God, we humbly repent. We were very wrong. We’re sorry. Take us back again”?
No! They entered into the roaring twenties, like the people I described last week at the bottom of Mt. Sinai. They sat down to eat and drink and rose up to fornicate.
Said, “Party on dude.”
And they became total cynics.
They said, “Oh now, you see, Darwin has taught us that all creation is the result of a process. Einstein has taught us that all physics and chemistry are really ultimately random, and Freud has taught us that we’re really just animals. So we don’t have to be responsible for our actions.”
So in 1929, when Germany couldn’t meet its war debt, and the French banks refused to give them more time to pay, and the American banks refused to back their notes and help them out, we thought we were punishing the Hun, the people who had been responsible for WWI – or were forced to take the blame for it. They were just the unfortunate ones who blinked first and then found that their armistice had turned into an unconditional surrender. The whole world was plunged into a depression. A depression from which, let me tell you, no one successfully brought about a recovery except Adolf Hitler. He created a recovery in Germany by building planes and boats and motorcycles and trucks that nobody needed to buy so that he could put people back to work. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt reassured us we had nothing fear but fear itself – and that was an important thing people: we could have had our own Bolshevik or Nazi revolution here if he hadn’t calmed our nerves. We really could have, here in the United States. It was possible.
He still also said, “Well we’ll just try something, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”
He had not the least idea, nor did his economists, nor did the republican economists, what to do to get us out of that depression. It was only WWII that brought us out of it. Only WWII that brought us out of it. Fortunately, after that war, some things like the GI bill managed to give us a better educated workforce, take some people out of the labor market for a while, and give us a chance to recover.
What I’m telling you is, that what’s going on now is what’s gone on before, especially among civilized people where we no longer think of it as just going out, raping and pillaging our neighbors lands, stealing what he has and bringing it back home, and then waiting for him to come back and get us. But where we cover it over with a patina of righteousness, of philosophical uprightness, of political acceptability, and of biological explanation. It’s been going on before and it will go on in the future. There will be crises, and there will be recoveries, and there will be suffering. Because there is no progress, however apparent it seems progress is, except the progress of individual souls and communities of people from the fallen state to union with God. That is the only real growth, the only real dialectic in the universe. It’s a dialectic between my soul, between the soul of the church, and God who calls us to union with himself. Yes, we can become more complicated, more elaborate. Now we can have economic crises in one corner of the US that takes the whole economy of the world down with it. We can have a little war here that turns into a big war there. We can have a nasty little, hateful, sadistic state somewhere in the corner of a rocky mountain range off in central Asia that can unleash nuclear contamination or set off bombs in the cities of great powers without their having any ability to answer it.
Progress, yes? Yes, the collision assault is more effective than the sword – you can kill more more efficiently and you don’t even have to touch them to do it. But that’s not progress. It is only as we become more Christ like, as we witness to the world, as we put forth our Orthodox faith, as we manifest our sanctification in Christ, as we demonstrate grace that is in us that we give the world any hope. We are the priests – not me, not even Fr. Eugene and Fr. Averky – we ALL are the priests of God’s salvation to the world. The mediators of God’s grace to mankind; the agents of bringing hope and light to a planet that over and over again, on a higher, and higher level is able to make the same hateful, destructive, and selfish mistakes. Chesterton closed his poem with this verse (and I have to tell you that a thrall is a peasant, a laborer bound to the soil, the lowest class in society, a working proletariat):

Tie in a living tether the prince and priest and thrall,
Bind all our lives together, smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation aflame with faith and free,
Lift up a living nation, a single sword to thee.

And he’s not talking by “nation,” about Great Britain or the United States. He’s talking about the kingdom of God united, hopeful, visionary, a city set on a hill, from which men take light into the darkest night, and by which they are directed out of the sloth of despondency and purposelessness into the heavenly truth.

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