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
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
January 18, 2009
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
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
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
January 11, 2009
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!
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
…….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.
“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
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.
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.
Monday, February 16, 2009
The 26th Sunday After Pentecost
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!!
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!!
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The 25th Sunday after Pentecost
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.
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.
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