Leave Taking of the Cross

September 21, 2008
The Leave-taking of the Cross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elevation of the Cross

September 14, 2008
The Elevation of the Cross

We now know we have discovered almost __ from archeological discoveries, that many of the Jewish people after the return from Babylon understood that the Messiah was not going to come as a triumphant conquering king on horseback with an army to drive away their enemies, but that He would be a suffering servant, as Isaiah had related. One who would be bruised for our transgressions and wounded for our iniquities. And yet, the very truth of the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord is reflected in the fact that there could probably have been no bigger scandal, both to Jews and to Greeks, if one were going to make up a myth, than the story of a man who was hanged on a tree and then rose physically from the dead. Both of these things were abhorrent to the people to whom they were preached and could only be accepted on the level of faith. To the Jews, the cross of Christ was stumbling block. St. Paul uses the word scandal – the word scandal is stumbling block. If you wanted to protect your house at night, you would put around it on the paths and at various intervals, big stones. And then if people attempted to sneak up on you in the dark, they would trip over these stones and fall. And these were called scandaliza, or stumbling stones. They were meant to protect you.
And the cross of Christ was a stone of stumbling to the Jews in their blindness. Why? Because in the Old Testament had declared, it had been decreed, “Cursed is he who is hanged upon a tree.”
The Old Testament had declared that whoever was suspended from a tree as a form of execution, that that person bore a curse. The indication was that his share in life had been cut off. Yet, in understanding this, we discover what the real meaning of the text was: that he who would hang upon the tree would indeed be cursed because he would take upon his shoulders the curse that lay upon mankind.
“On the day on which you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall surely die.”
So, to heal the consequences of humanity eating from that tree, Christ himself came and became the manifestation of the tree of life, the tree from which Adam and Eve could have eaten in the garden, but refrained from eating.
The Jews said, “How can He be Messiah? First, we know the Messiah remains forever and He said, ‘I will be lifted up from the earth.’?”
They understood when He said, “I will be lifted up from the earth,” that He meant He would be crucified.
Have no question about it, the Jews who were listening did not understand this as some kind of parable, it was clear to them when He said, “If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me,” that He was talking about being suspended upon a cross.
And they saw this as nonsense, as foolishness, as the abrogation of everything that they had expected. So when the cross of Christ was preached to the Jews, only those whose eyes were spiritually open, whose hearts were able to listen to the word, who were able to see with the eyes of their soul, were able to see that He Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree.
That when He cried out, “Father! Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabachthani. My God, why has thou forsaken me?” He was crying out with the voice of all humanity, that He was repeating not only the hymn of David in the psalms, but He was repeating the lamentation of Adam outside the gates of paradise. But it was not God who had forsaken Adam or David, it was Adam who had forsaken God, and David who had turned is back on God.
To the Gentiles, the cross and resurrection were great foolishness because it was a given, it was as certain to them as global warming or random evolution are to people today, that the body was evil. The material universe was decaying. It was a trap, a prison, in which pure soul matter was captive. Most Greeks believed that there were two kinds of souls – good ones and evils, and that they were all imprisoned in these clay pots called bodies. It’s why the Greeks began to regard the body with disdain. To say that a person rose from the dead was to them an absurdity. You know Americans don’t understand that.
When I taught a class on death and dying, I would ask people, “What’s your idea of life after death?”
And I’d always have three or four people say, “Well, I believe in reincarnation because this isn’t the life I ordered.”
And I’d say to them, “Isn’t that interesting. The real religions that believe in reincarnation, that is to say Hinduism and Buddhism, for the most part do not regard reincarnation as something good. They regard it as a trap, as a cycle, a being forced back into the flesh again. And they regard as good only escaping from the body.”
Why? Well, David can explain to you how when Alexander the Great came to India, he brought Greek philosophical ideas right at the moment when Buddhism was taking shape and Hinduism was in crisis. So the ideas that were current among the Greek philosophers became current among the peoples of India and China. The body was a prison.
When St. Paul went to the area of ___, to Athens to preach to the Greek philosophers about Christ, and he said, “Jesus Christ is risen from the dead,” the Greek philosophers partly because of their own stubbornness, partly because of Paul’s bad Greek said, “He’s teaching about two new gods: Jesus and Anastaisius- resurrection.”
They thought resurrection was a god. It could not occur to them, they could not get it through their thick heads, that the body was not made for destruction but for glorification. A single tribute to the glorious and honorable character of human individuality, of personality, of personhood is the human body which can touch, and taste, and feel, and hear. Which is capable of sensation, which has a face that can be seen and can see, capable of being known and of knowing, capable of being located and which has an eternal destiny – a destiny of union with God in which we will shine like the stars in heave, shine in bodies. The idea that God created each of us as precious personalities, each of us individual, each of us to love as no one else has ever been loved, cries out for the eternity of human nature, for its redemption, its restoration.
By the way, I read from one of the postings on the internet, there’s an Egyptian Orthodox priest in California whose name is Butras. He’s 72 years old, and he has begun through the use of satellite to telecast and broadcast sermons to all of Arabia and all of the Islamic east.
What he’s telling people is, “Jesus Christ is a God of love. He doesn’t invite you to be frightened of him. He doesn’t threaten you. He welcomes you. He did die on the cross; not in vengeance from an angry father, or in ransom to a devil who had a right to claim his life, but as an act of pure selfless love, he stretched out his hands and accomplished both our atonement with the Father and our redemption from slavery to sin and death.”
And he’s preaching that, it’s being broadcast all over Arabia, and people are contacting him and saying they have converted, they have become Christians. And al Qaeda has put on his head a $30 million prize if someone kills him. Now we only have an $8 million prize on the head of Osama bin Laden. They call him Islam’s public enemy number one. Why? Because he’s teaching to hate Moslems? Because he’s teaching to make holy war on Moslems? Because he’s teaching that we should despise them? No, because he’s teaching the cross of Jesus and the love of God for his people.
So, brothers and sisters, it still remains a scandal. The Greeks wanted wisdom, they wanted to understand how they could escape and become stars in the sky or enter into some kind of Elysian joy, or whatever it was that particular branch of Greek philosophy held up as it’s ideal. And the Jews refused to accept Jesus because he was crucified. So what a great and marvelous thing it was when the Gospel of Christ could penetrate into a heart that was hardened either by Greek philosophy or by Jewish misunderstanding. The veil that the Jews had made Moses put over his face when he came down from the mountain because they couldn’t stand to see the transfiguration light shining reflected from his face, St. Paul says remained over their eyes. What a wonderful thing when that veil can be pierced, when that load of prejudice and of ignorance could be raised, and when those that either asked for signs and miracles or who wished to hear wisdom about escaping from the body, allowed the cross of Christ, the wisdom of God and the power of God to penetrate into their hearts and through his love to be converted.

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

The 12th Sunday of Pentecost

September 7^th, 2008

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

Glory forever!

There is probably no gospel verse that’s repeated more in our time in the English language than that verse John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” You see at baseball stadiums people with signs saying, “John 3:16,” people signing their names and writing that afterwards, people having that as their license plate. Yet, how tragic, that the very simplicity of the words evades most of those who utter them or who quote them. For it doesn’t say, that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten so that everybody who believes THAT Jesus is the son of God, or THAT Jesus came into the world, or THAT Jesus died and rose again should not perish and everlasting life; but everybody who believes IN Him. And to believe IN Christ doesn’t mean to believe THAT Christ – the devil believes THAT Christ. The devil knows that Jesus is God now – he didn’t understand it exactly before; he thought he could ensnare Him in hell and bind Him there, and that’s why he let Him in, so that He could break the gates of bronze and the bars of iron. But now he understands that. The devil has perfect faith in all the doctrines of Orthodoxy – he knows them all to be true. And yet, the devil has perished because he does not believe in Christ. That is to say, he doesn’t understand that salvation is not just being plucked out of the fire and then set up as your own individual idol with your personal Jesus; but that being saved is being transplanted into the kingdom of heaven, as a planting, as a vine connected to the vine, as a branch of the vine. That being a believer in Jesus means being taken from the kingdom of darkness and citizenship in that kingdom and made a citizen of the Light.

Yesterday and every Saturday for the last month we have baptized children. We have taken these children who were, as the baptismal service says, “children of the body,” and we have made the children of the kingdom. They have been born again with the opportunity to grow in the faith and grace that is given to them, so they may remain faithful to their citizenship in God’s kingdom.

So our Lord tells us here that God so loves the world that He sent Jesus so that we could become one with Jesus. The Church, we understand is His body. As the apostle says, “We are very members of his flesh and of his bones;” members incorporate, no allegorical, symbolic, or analogical members but physical members.

That’s why we venerate God’s mother so greatly because we, when we were born again, became part of the body of Christ. All the body of Christ, every cell, every organ, His flesh, His blood, His genes, every part of Him with the exception of His maleness, was taken from the flesh of the Holy Theotokos.

And having understood this, we go back to what the Lord tells us about the people of Israel. They were a group too, just as the Church is the body of Christ, the new Israel, a pilgrim people moving from the darkness and wickedness of a fallen world into the kingdom of heaven; so the Jewish people, the Israelites were moving. They had been slaves, literally tormented, forced to labor with great pain and with great agony, and forced to gather their own straw to build bricks to erect houses to honor the gods of the Egyptians. And when God brought them out after many trials of the Egyptians, they stood at the bank of the Red Sea and turned to Moses as though he had led them out to slaughter.

And then he said, “Stand fast and behold the glory of the Lord.”

God parted the sea and with a pillar of fire blocked the Egyptians, and then the pillar went before them and led them, and the sea closed and drowned Pharaoh and his chariots, and the people were delivered. A miracle beyond expectation, a glorious deliverance, a wonderful salvation, a foreshadowing of Christ’s own death and resurrection. Yet when the people got into the wilderness and they travelled in nine days to the mount of the Lord and camped there, no sooner was Moses up on the mountain, fasting for 40 days waiting to receive from God his marching orders and the covenant of the people after their deliverance from slavery, than the people in the valley there began to feast and to drink and to party and to build for themselves idols like the ones they had seen in Egypt and to say, “Maybe he led us out here to die in the desert. Maybe if we go back into Egypt and ask Pharaoh really nicely he’ll let us back into Egypt and let us be his slaves again.”

When Moses came down his heart was broken. And you know that Moses took the first tables of the law and smashed them. He broke them into fragments to show the people that they had broken the covenant even before they knew it. People who had seen great miracles, great marvels, who had experience great deliverance, who had felt in their hearts the joy of salvation, and determined that they would ignore that, that they would forget it. They would turn their backs on the God who was the pillar of fire that led them out of slavery, and that they would turn to the worship of the very demons that had ruled and obsessed them in the home of their captivity. The people then began to wander, and God, having forgiven them did not leave them without hope. He brought them to the borders of the Promised L

and expeditiously, quickly. They came to the borders of Canaan, and God said to them, “Enter in and take possession, this is the land of promise.”

And the people said, “We’re afraid.”

So they sent spies – twelve men to look at the land and to examine it.

And they came back and they said, “It’s a rich land, a land flowing with milk and honey. In its mountains are iron and gold.”

They brought back with them a bunch of grapes that was so large that two men had to carry it on a stick between them.

But they said, “The men there are ferocious. They’re huge and they’re strong.”

And the Israelites said, “We don’t think we can risk it.”

So all the people except for Joshua and Hurr, all ten of the 12 spies advised the people, “No, stay out here in the desert where you’re safe.”

And so God said, “None of those who tasted the manna in the desert before now, none of those to whom I have offered salvation and who hardened their hearts, shall enter into my rest.”

They hardened their hearts and their bones were buried along the winding road which they wandered in the desert for 40 years because they refused to accept God’s invitation to enter into salvation.

How Moses heart must have been rent again. He had led the people out of Egypt, and he was leading them into deliverance. Do not be mistaken, the author of Hebrews tells us, and I’ve told you before, that if had they chosen to enter into Canaan, they would not have gone in and fought the Canaanites, they would have walked into Paradise itself and they would have been restored to the grace that god had bestowed on Adam and Eve before the fall. They would have been delivered in a way analogous to the way in which Enoch and Elijah were delivered, but they refused it and instead every person who had come out of Egypt, who had seen the mighty acts of God and then had spat in his face, everyone who had turned his face toward the setting sun and walked away from the gate of paradise, everyone died in the dessert. Only their children, those born in the wilderness along with Joshua and Hurr who had argued that the people needed to enter, were allowed to enter into the promised land after 40 years of ______.

And while they were in the desert, the people tried Moses and they caused great pain to his heart.

They said, “Are there not enough graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die?” They longed for the flesh pots of Egypt, for the cucumbers and the swine’s meat.

They said, “There’s nothing to eat here except this manna.”

And then God gave them quail, and they said, “This quail is making us sick. We want some variety.”

When they found it difficult to wander from oasis to oasis, God gave them a rock, which the apostle says was an icon of Christ Himself. A rock that travelled with them, from which God would give them water.

And they provoked Moses so that rather than saying, “God is going to give you water from this rock,” he said, “Must I get you water from this rock,” and he struck the rock twice.

And God said, “Ok Moses, now you’ve joined them. You’ve taken credit for giving them the water and you may not enter into the promised land.”

So Moses was allowed to climb up onto the Mount Gilboa and to look over into the promised land, but he did not see it until Christ conquered death with His death.

And while they were in the wilderness, they continued to sin. They continued to protest that God was not doing enough for them, to complain because they were stuck in this place where they had chosen to remain. And serpents came and began to bite them: poisonous snakes, the very images of their own hateful and poisonous thoughts and words.

And people began to die, and they came to Moses and said, “Pray for us.”

So Moses prayed to God and he took bronze and he made with it a serpent, a serpent called a seraphim serpent, a flaming serpent, a hot fiery serpent, a molten serpent; and he put it upon a cross and he held it up in the air and he said, “When you’re bitten, when your sins come back to strike you, when the maliciousness of your own words and thoughts causes you to be stung with the sting of death, look up and live!”

So the people when the looked up to the serpent, they saw there their own sin represented on the cross, they received life from this emblem of death.

And that’s what the Lord was referring to when He spoke of His passion, when He said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so shall the Son of Man be lifted up.”

We understand, brothers and sisters, that God constantly is offering to His people not only the grace of faith, but many, many signs and wonders, miracles and manifestations, many marvels, many tokens of His being with us, of His grace toward us, and of His love for us.

And it’s we who are always saying, “What have you done for me lately God? What did you do for me today God?”

And if God doesn’t do it today, and He hadn’t done it yesterday, and we don’t experience it tomorrow, we begin to say, “There is no God,” and to build golden idols, and to sit down to eat and drink, and to stand up and fornicate like the people in the desert. We begin to become pagans again. We are like infants requiring constant attention from our God, and if he leaves us to ourselves so that we can learn to walk, then we become angry with him

When I think about Moses and how his heart was broken, and how many, many times he grieved, how he cried out to God in anguish, how he wished he had not been the one that was chosen, and how he saw his adopted mother, that Egyptian woman who came out with them, and how he saw his real mother, and how he saw his sister, and how he saw his brother Aaron one by one parish in the desert to be buried in the sand, and how he then himself fell asleep upon the mountain, not even sure that the people would possess the faith when the time came again to cross the Jordan and enter into the promised land, I realize what the Lord meant when he said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross,” for Moses’ cross everyday was the burden of bearing the people of Israel.

Brothers and sisters, it is not just us, the priests who bear the cross, the burden of the people.

For the apostle told us, “bear one another’s burden’s brethren, and thus shall you fulfill the whole law of Christ.”

We can become people of despair and sadness, broken hearted and fearful. Right now, I have five people I’m praying for who have cancer, four of them in the parish, for their healing and their deliverance from this scourge; I have two people who are undergoing tests for other serious diseases that we’re praying will turn out not to be positive and if they are, that God will either deliver them or mitigate the symptoms. But those people don’t trouble me as much because I understand that death is working in all of us, but that life is also working in us. It’s those in whom I see deadly sins, destructive and corrosive habits, dispositions toward evil, the blinding of the eye of the soul, laxity toward God, a slow devolution of the joy that came with faith. For these people are not physically infirm, but they’re spiritually infirm. All those, including me, everyone here will, unless the lord comes quickly, be placed in the dust of the earth, buried, will die. But we will then pass from this life into the next, into paradise. We will receive the reward of our high calling, we will rise with Jesus in the day of resurrection, and we will share with him, not only in his kingdom, but in his divinity. But those whose souls are stung by the serpent of their own sin, or refuse to look up, whose eyes are averted from the cross upon which the fiery serpent who is the emblem of Christ himself bearing our sins in his own body, on the tree is suspended; those people will pass into the earth and their souls will be turned away eternally from everlasting life.

We pray for as many as have within them a spark of the love of God, a spark of grace, of that old hope, of that old joy, that God will fan it again into a fire of fervent love for him, of faith, of hope, of joy, so that they may be saved. And we pray for our departed loved ones, for those who died in deep and profound faith, and those who died in weak and laxadaysical faith, that God will restore them to grace. That he will pluck them as it were, brands from the fire, and count them also worthy of sharing with us in the kingdom of heaven.

I am not as worried, brothers, about the people who are physically infirm for whom I pray everyday and my heart burns, and I feel grief, and I say, “God deliver them please.”

And sometimes I even am weak enough to say, “God, why is it? Why so many sick people? Why so much suffering?” and then I remember that God didn’t cause it.

It’s the brokenness of this fallen world that our own sins have brought about. Not that any one of us is being punished by his sickness or by her sickness for their sins, but the collective sins of the human race have caused disease and tragedy and natural disaster and the wickedness of men who victimize all of us, and cause Orthodox Russians and orthodox Georgians to shed each others’ blood, to bury each others’ houses and temples, who hate each other, brothers who despise and disdain brothers, and my heart is grieved.

And when I see, as we have seen in the last week, two of our principal hierarchs, men who I had respected and honored, removed from their responsibilities not for what they did, but for what they didn’t do, because they became lax, not because they ate the sheep of Christ, but because they failed to protect the sheep of Christ, and sent home in disgrace to pray for the rest of their lives in repentance for God’s mercy toward them.

And I say of these men who I looked up to, who I honored, who were my examples, who we commemorated with great honor, “If they have fallen so low, what more will become of us?”

But then I recall, it’s not my job. It’s not Hirsch who was lifted up on the cross, it was Christ. And when I take up my cross everyday and follow Him, that He’s carrying the cross, it’s just barely resting on my shoulders. Of that cross that ground his flesh to the ground, he said to me, to you, “My yolk is easy and my burden is light,” because He is carrying it with us. So when we look at the broken world and are disposed to despair, let us remember that there is one hope that makes life even worth pursuing – and it is our sure and certain knowledge that He Who delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, Who brought them through the Red Sea, Who fed them with manna in the desert, Who gave them water from a rock, Who led them as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day, is feeding us as well, nourishing us with His own body and blood, having brought us from the Red Sea in baptism, brought us down to hell and raised us up again, and that He is able to bring to completion that good work that He has begun in us as long as we are one of those whosoever believes IN Him receives salvation through Him.

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

Glory forever!

Apologies

I've been a bit delinquent about posting the last month or so due to vacation and school starting (and any number of other excuses). I hope it hasn't inconvenienced anyone. At this point, the blog is finally up to date with Father Joe's sermons.

The 11th Sunday of Pentecost

August 31, 2008

The 11^th Sunday of Pentecost

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

Glory Forever!

We understand that the great gift that Christ gave to us, the gift itself that provides the gift of life everlasting, life in the kingdom of heaven, is the gift of forgiveness of sins. For by the forgiveness of sins we are able to be restored to the condition that Adam and Eve possessed before they fell, and we’re able to renew our grace filled nature by our confession and our contrition. So the most wonderful thing that Christ’s precious blood does for us is to resolve a predicament, that by human nature the many offenses that we commit want to sink into our souls and weight them down and burden them heavily and cause them to make our spiritual nature bend prostrate to the ground in the same way that a curved spine causes the physical nature to be prostrate.

So today we hear a parable that the Lord tells about a king who had taken account and found that one of his servants had been responsible for his being in lack of a substantial amount of money. This amount of money is literally a king’s ransom. We have been given to understand that this is not the case of a man who wasn’t making enough to make ends meet. It wasn’t the case of a poor man who was misappropriating a little here and there to feed his family. The sum involved here is substantial. The crime is not petty theft; it is high treason. This man had either through dishonesty or through carelessness managed to lose a substantial portion of the kingdom’s wealth. The king should have been expected to execute him for this high crime simply on its face. But the man fell down and said, “Have mercy on me master, and I will pay you all.” The king didn’t just say, “Okay, get up. I have postponed your punishment. Go out and try to repay it.” Instead he forgave the man both the act by which he had through dishonesty or through lack of attention deprived the king of his wealth and also of the debt itself. The man ought to have gone out rejoicing. He ought to have been filled with such great gratitude. For in a moment he had been not only relieved of the punishment for his dishonesty or his carelessness, but also of the obligation to make recompense. A great weight had been lifted both from his soul and from his shoulders, and yet, what does he think?

He thinks, “I’m not going to let this happen to me again.”

So he finds a truly poor servant, one who had borrowed a few dollars from him, and he grabs the man by the throat and says, “Pay me all now!”

And the man uses the same words he had used: “Have mercy on me Master, and I will repay all.”

This man, rather than showing compassion, has his fellow servant thrown into the debtors’ prison, until by hook or by crook, somehow or another, he should pay off that small debt. The verdict against this man when the king hears about it is that he is rearrested and this time he is sold into slavery, in bitter and harsh labor for the remainder of his natural life. For, not the debt that he incurred, but for his refusal to be as generous in a small thing as the king and had been in a great matter.

The moral the Lord tells us of course is that forgiveness on our part is the precondition to receiving forgiveness. We have a contract. There are not many legal contracts in our Christian faith.

There is one that we sign every time we pray when we say, “Forgive us our debts in the same, to the same extent, as we are willing to forgive our debts. Forgive us our offenses against you in the same way, to the same degree that we are will to forgive the debts, the offenses of our neighbors against us.”

And what is the meaning of this “In the same way?” It is that as God consigns our offenses, our sins, our wrong actions, consigns them to oblivion, He does not ignore them, He eradicates them. He removes them from His memory and from existence; so we have to be willing to remove those offenses against us from our hearts. Now does it mean that we have to be suckers? No it doesn’t. It’s not wise, it’s not prudent, to allow yourself to be abused again and again by the same people in the same way. You have to be on your guard. You have to be wise enough, prudent enough, if for no other reason than it is a sin to tempt our neighbor with the possibility of repeating a sin we know he already, or she already, has the weakness to commit. That’s a kind of scandal. If we know that someone is likely to steal, we ought not put out money in front of them and walk away. If we know that someone is likely to lie, the we ought not put them in a situation where they are likely to feel that they have to be braggadocios or immodest. So yes, we don’t have to be ignorant for the sake of our brother, but it is precisely for his sake and not so that we can get even that we remember these things.

Today we celebrate the feast of two great Orthodox bishops. One of them is in our service book, the other is on our calendar. Each of these men understood in a real and deep way what the nature of forgiveness what. Each one had a confrontation with other bishops about this issue, and in both cases it was about the Roman church that they had their argument.

The first is Cyprian of Carthage. He was a man who grew up in Carthage, in a place where, in the third century, the people still worshipped the god… Baal. They brought their extra children and they burned them in fire and sacrifices to this demon god. Of all of the fathers of the church who reflected upon the paganism that had preceded Christianity in the classical world, all of them showed some compassion, some understanding, even some appreciation of the lessons, the parables, and the myths that had prepared the world for the coming of Christ, except for the Carthaginian fathers.

For they said, “Our parents are certainly damned to hell.”

Why? Because they, out of greed, passed their children through fire as sacrifice to demons. They decided it wasn’t a good idea to have too many kids because that divided the family’s wealth too much, so when you had more than the one or two you wanted, the rest you would place in the hands of the statue of Baal. The hands were far enough apart that as the fire touched the little spine, the baby would contract and fall through the hands into the fire. Before doing that, the child’s face muscles would contract and there would be an apparent smile on the face.

The Carthaginian mothers would say, “Oh isn’t that sweet. He’s going to be with Baal; he’s happy.”

The Sardonic grin. That’s what it’s called – the sardonic grin. It reminds me of those women, who having had a partial birth abortion, with the child’s brain sucked out in the birth canal, asked the doctor to give them the baby’s body so they could hold it in their hands and pretend that this was some kind of a miscarriage or a natural calamity. It is murder of the worst kind. Cyprian knew that this was the paganism from which his people had learned. So when persecution came under Decius, under the emperor, and North Africa suffered worse than any other part of the Roman empire – the total number of martyrs in North Africa exceeded those of the whole world put together under the roman emperors. When he saw this coming, he insisted that his people remain steadfast, courageous. As Bishop of Carthage he had seen so many of his flock – men and women, even virtual children, 12 and 13 year olds – go joyfully to their execution at the hands of Roman authorities rather than deny Christ.

But some of the people of Carthage had worked out a little deal. They could offer incense to the idol, the same Baal before whom, perhaps, their grandparents had burned their aunts and uncles.

They could stand before that statue and pretend to offer a sacrifice, but in their hearts they would say, “Well, we’re still with Jesus.”

You see the Roman authorities liked this, cause they didn’t care what you believed; it was what other people thought you believed. If by your half lie, you were willing to create doubt in the eyes of others, and if enough people could justify themselves by saying, “Oh well, we’ll just pretend that we’re idolators,” then the whole spirit, the heart of the church, could be broken.

And then there were those who took even a less obviously evil way. They wouldn’t even go to the idol. They’d instead go to the recorder of documents and they would pay and for a certain amount of money they could get a piece of paper that would say that on a certain day they had offered incense to a certain idol.

They would say, “My hands are clean! I didn’t bow down to any pagan statue. I didn’t throw incense before the emperor’s image or before Baal. You see, it is only a piece of paper.”

And then there were those who when the authorities came and demanded of the deacons and readers that they hand over their volumes of the holy gospel of their lectionaries of the epistles, would instead say, “Well, I can’t give you those, but I can give you a medical book. I can give you a book of philosophy.”

And the authorities were delighted because then they could say, “The deacon so-and-so has handed over this volume of sacred scriptures of the Christians to be burned in the fire.”

And by doing this they could break the courage and the heart of the Christian community. At this point, the Romans had become very, very adroit at propaganda. They were not concerned at all with lugubrious tortures, nor were they concerned with righteousness of intention. They were only concerned with public appearances. Cyprian then was caught in a situation that put him between two points of opinion. The reason that we can call him a great Orthodox father is because he understood the paradoxical nature of our faith.

As the persecutions began to come to a close, there were people who came back and said, “Oh well, yes, we got a document,” or, “We showed up but didn’t offer incense,” or, “We offered incense but didn’t really mean it.” And there were those who said, “Yes, we were scared to death, so we really did offer incense.” And these people would come back and say, “Come on everybody. Shouldn’t we be able to go to communion this Sunday? I mean, after all, we’re sorry now.”

There were two opinions about that. There was in the North African church called the rigorists, and they said, “Look. My brother, her cousin, our grandparents – they were burned alive. They were eaten by lions. They slain by the sword because they wouldn’t deny Christ. Now you sucker, you think you can come back and you can sneak into church. No. There’s no forgiveness for you. Not in this world. Not in the world to come. You’ve been baptized, you’ve been sealed, you’ve received Holy Communion. You denied Christ. You belong to the Devil.”

Then there were the other people who said, “Oh come on now. Can’t we just realize that sometimes some weak people fail. Let’s be lenient with them.”

So Cyprian was caught between these laxists and the rigorists. He realized that with the rigorist position you got a God who was no more compassionate and kind than Baal himself; who demanded the blood of his own people in payment for their infidelity. And he realized that with the laxists you had an opinion in which people gradually would stop going to confession. Why? Because they wouldn’t take their sins that easily. Or when they sinned, they would expect easy healing of their wounds. They wouldn’t expect to have to do any penance, because you see people don’t understand that the purpose of penance in the Chruch is not to punish people. It is to bring them to repentance, to contrition. That’s why the penitential manuals say the punishment for adultery is 7 years excommunication, but the spiritual father may at his discretion shorten it to three years or even less. Why? Because what is required is two things: an example to the whole body of Christ that publicly known sins should be publicly repented so that no one lose their sense of the awesome wickedness of these actions. And the second thing is that the person himself should be brought to humility so that he would understand the wrongness of his actions.

St. Paul, in 1^st Corinthians excommunicated a man who married his father’s widow. This is considered, as I said before, by the Church, to be incest. It’s an evil act.

He said, “I hand his body over to Satan that his soul may be saved.”

But as soon as the man repented with bitter tears, undid the evil he had done, Paul immediately said to the Corinthians, “I want you to receive him back. Even though I am absent in body, I’m present in spirit, I forgive him. I restore him.”

So Cyprian took this position: we should not deal lightly with serious sin, especially apostasy or acts of the shedding of the blood of the innocent. On the other hand, we should not hold people in hopeless despair, but should seek the mercy of God. The only sin that cannot be forgiven is the sin that we deny, and therefore refuse to repent. If we turn evil to good, and good to evil, then yes, we will not be forgiven because God will not intrude on our hearts and compel us to be sorry.

So, today we celebrate Cyprian who stood up against the pope of Rome. Who said to him, do you really think that you in Rome, who witnessed the blood of two apostles, do you really think the Holy Spirit speaks more clearly through you than through the other bishops? Do you think you have some special gift? No. What you have is that the churches of all the world pass through your city so you know the fullness of the tradition. But you don’t have any intuition superior to that given to the other bishops of Christ.

When the issue came up of the baptism of those who had been baptized by heretics, Cyprian took a hard position.

He says, “If you were baptized by someone who denied the trinity, or who denied Jesus was true God and true man, even though water was poured in the name of the… you should have to be baptized again. If you were baptized by somebody out of communion with the Holy Orthodox Church, you should have to be baptized again.” But then he said, “This is my position.” Then he went on to say this: “Some my brother bishops receive people” – as we do because our rules come down in America from the Russian church, we receive people who were baptized by heretics – by Calvinists, by Wesleyans, by Anglicans, by Lutherans, as long as the form and the intention were present, and we validate them.

But he said, “If any bishop does this thing that I think is a mistake, I want you to know this: that any priest who calls him out for it, he is the schismatic. It’s the priest who’s the rebel, no the bishop. Because the bishop is exercising his own economy given to him by God, but the priest is being arrogant, willful, and insubordinate.”

Now I will mention one other saint. Saint Aidan was bishop of Lindisfarne. The people of England had been evangelized at one time, and then, as the roman army went through, many receded back into paganism. And there was a king in Northumbria, named Oswald, and he had had a bishop there to try to convert his people. But this guy came with a rule book rather than with the scriptures in his hands. He was so hard, so difficult on the people that they resented. And Oswald sent, instead of calling for another British bishop, he called for a bishop from a land that was called then Scotland and is now Ireland. And this man was Aidan. He didn’t speak the language of the people there – he spoke the Gaelic language. But the king himself would stand up - because he and his family had been exiled among the Gauls at one time - he would stand up and he would translate the sermons of Aidan. People were healed and delivered. They accepted Christ. The gospel that Aidan preached was, in his words, a gospel of first giving milk and not expecting them to be fed on solid food when they are newborn in Christ. He didn’t push down on them heavy disciplines in terms of fasting, or regulations in terms of manners. Only the moral law and the doctrine of Christ. And he was responsible, not even able to speak the language of the people, to bring about the conversion of many many people.

In America, we don’t have many intelligent, capable, moral, upright, celibate priests. We have a hard time getting bishops. I wouldn’t mind if we sent off to Romania, to Serbia, to Russia and got a few guys who didn’t speak English and brought them here to be pious examples to us. They could use translators. Archishop John used to call his secretary every Thursday, and in three hours he could write all the letters for the whole diocese and receive all the letters and have them read to him. He was my spiritual mentor and didn’t very often speak English at all.

He said, “I spoke German, Latvian, and Slavonic. I came to America to learn English, and they taught me Russian.”

But Aidan was a good example because he loved his flock. Because, like Cyprian, he would neither take a position that was too hard for people to bear, nor so easy that it scandalized and corrupted them. So, when the Roman missionaries came and urged his flock to accept Roman hegemony, he said, “No. It is you guys, by your changes, who created all these problems,” and he refused to bow a knee to the bishop of Rome.

You know, the English bishops gathered together with the British bishops and they asked their senior elder bishop, “How shall we know when this man, Augustine of Canterbury comes, how shall we know whether we should embrace him, or disdain him?”

And the elder bishop said, “When you approach and he will be sitting, if he rises from his chair and embraces you as brother bishops, then you embrace him and you do what he says. But if he sits and he expects you to come and bow before him, equals before equals, then reject him.”

So for a few centuries still, in some places, especially on the island of Iona, until the 11^th century, the customs of the ancient Orthodox English church were preserved in spite of the presence and the innovations of the church of Rome.

So we honor today these two bishops who understood what it is to mediate forgiveness within the body of Christ. We glorify our God who grants us forgiveness of our transgressions, both voluntary and involuntary, both minor and grievous as long as we with true faith, with a broken hearts with humble spirits and tears, we fall down before Him and ask forgiveness.

To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages through their prayers.

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

Glory Forever!

The 10th Sunday of Pentecost

August 24, 2008

The 10^th Sunday of Pentecost

This Friday is the feast of the beheading of St. John the Baptist. Most often this feast falls in the middle of the week, it is ignored by us and overlooked by us. It’s importance is not entirely internalized. It would probably be a great feast if it were not that the church had not at some point determined that these would either be feasts of our Lord or of the Theotokos.

Well, you might ask, “What is so special about the beheading of St. John the Baptist?” I mean, we have many, many martyrs and we celebrate the day of their martyrdom with solemnity, but why is this day more solemn, more important? It is because of the many lessons that are taught to us by this particular event that happened in the history of the church. This particular event, this particular happening, this particular act of a tyrant teaches at least half a dozen specific lessons to us. It offers us an example, as well, of how God works in all things to bring good out of evil for those who love him.

We know that St. John the Baptist was the cousin of our Lord. He was conceived six months before the conception of our Lord Jesus Christ, and born six months before our Lord was, because he was the last of the Old Testament prophets. Of him, it was said by our Lord, that he was the greatest man born of woman; he was the greatest human being, our Lord Jesus Christ who is God aside. Also, John’s vocation was to go before the face of the Lord to prepare his way. So he stands as a peculiar bridge – he is at once the last of the Old Testament prophets and the first of the NT evangelizers. He completes the old covenant. He points to the Lord and says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” He gathers together in himself the significance of all of those who had gone before prophesying about God’s deliverance of the kingdom. The Lord even said of John that in his appearance the tradition was fulfilled that Elijah would return before the Messiah came, because our Lord said that John came in the spirit of Elijah.

He preached in the wilderness of Judea and of Galilee, and he preached along the Jordan River. People came to hear him from all the cities and villages. He had so many disciples that practically everyone had heard John, and many, many had been baptized by him. Baptism for the Jews, immersion, was first and foremost the way that a Gentile was converted to Judaism - being immersed three times in the mikvah, the ritual bath, and then being circumcised if he were a man. The rabbis said that it was the immersion that made one a Jew. It was emblematic of conversion to Judaism, of a washing. But John told the Jewish people that they needed to be immersed, they needed to be washed in preparation for the coming of the kingdom of God. And he also told them to be baptized for remission of sins. Sins had never been capable of forgiveness in the old covenant – that is to say, sins committed intentionally, with knowledge, with a high hand. Accidental sins – ritual impurity, even sins of passion – could be forgiven by sacrifice, but intentional, premeditated sins had no forgiveness in the old covenant. John baptized for the remission of sins, so much so that the early Christian writers said that although John was not able to give the Holy Spirit, so he was not able to fill those who he baptized with God’s spirit. He was able to wash away sins in a way analogous to, in fact in the precise way, in which Christian baptism washes away sins. John was given grace by anticipation to empty people of their guilt; he simply could not fill them with the power of God for it was not yet given. It rested upon him and he could not impart it.

And as John preached, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” he looked at the mob that was coming to him and he said, “You generation of vipers! Who told you you could escape the anger to come? If you want to show that you are repentant, live in a way worthy of repentance.”

And he said to the soldiers, “Do not participate in massacre. Be content with your pay. Don’t rob people.”

He told each estate to live in accordance with Justice and mercy, for he said, “The axe is set to the root of the tree and every tree that does not bring forth good fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire.”

As John was preaching, Jesus came to him and we know that he baptized our Lord of whom he said, “I am not worthy to unloose the sandals from his feet.”

And then John, having pointed at Jesus and said, Tthis is the lamb of God,” having testified that he saw the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon him, having announced that the Messiah was at hand, said, “I must grow lesser as he grows greater.”

So John, from that point on, began to diminish in his importance within the economy of salvation. How difficult it must have been for any human being who had a massive following, to step aside and hand over all of his disciples to someone else. How judgmental most of us would have been if we had had a following of millions of believers who hung on our every word, and then a guy came along who couldn’t even hold onto the five thousand whom he had fed with the loaves and fishes in the wilderness; who ultimately ended up with only 12 followers, and one of them betrayed him. Plus the women who followed him. John began even to lose that divine inspiration that had rested temporarily upon him. For, having declared our Lord to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, he then had to send his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you really the one who was to come, or shall we look for another?” In other words, he lost his certainty because that prophetic spirit had departed from him.

John was arrested. He was arrested by Herod the tetrarch of Galilee. Herod, whose father had been King Herod who had murdered the children of Bethelehem. This Herod was a puny duplicate of his father – half pagan, half Jewish. Of his father, Augustus had said, “It is better to be his suios” – his sow – “than his uios” – his son, because he wouldn’t eat pig but he killed many of his own children. But this Herod was a pale reflection of that. And he had a lovely wife who was the daughter of the king who ruled over Damascus, but he fell in love with his own brother’s wife. And his brother being weaker than him even though he also was a tetrarch, he took her for his own. He committed in the same moment incest and adultery. He took her for his wife against the law of God.

And when John spoke publicly against this, and called on Herod to repent, Herod had him arrested. He had him thrown into prison. Yet, Herod still had within him a hope and an expectation of God’s visitation of his people. And so Herod, occasionally, would go down into the prison. And he would sit down and ask John to tell him what his message was. And he would listen to John preach, and John would preach to an audience of one plus the guards. Herod would be moved to such excitement by the possibility of the truth of this message that he would start to do good things. He was kind of like was said by Monica Lewinski about Bill Clinton: that she had to make sure she saw him on Sunday afternoon when he came home from church, because if he came back with his “Sunday school face” on, she knew that he was starting to repent and that he would get rid of her. And so, Herod would think of doing good, and he would do some acts of charity, and then he would become excited by the fact that John was attacking him and he would draw into himself and become morose.

John probably would have remained in jail for the rest of Herod’s life, except that Herodian, Herod’s illegitimate mate plotted against him. On Herod’s birthday she brought in her own daughter, Salome – a little girl, 14 years old or so. And she bade her to do seductive dancing – what we used to call “the dance of the seven maidens” – in front of all of Herod’s chiefs of state, and satraps, and important men. She pandered her daughter as entertainment to this lascivious crowd of drunks.

When they’d all drunk well, and she had danced exquisitely according to the art of the “belly dance,” then Herod stands up, and knowing that the people were pleased, said, “I will give you anything you ask of me, my dear. Even half of my kingdom!”

Now the girl was probably excited. She would have been happy, probably, to have a Hannah Montana DVD.

But she went to her mother and said, “Herod said I can have anything I want. What should I ask for?”

Rather than saying to her, get the dowry from him now, or get your money to go to the university, or even a pink convertible, she said, “I want the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”

And so this girl, who had been used, who had been abused, and who now had been offered a chance to at least fulfill some of her legitimate human expectations, and hopes, and desires, was turned into a murderess. And obeying her mother – and that’s the first lesson children: You don’t obey your parents if they tell you to sin. You don’t obey them. You don’t talk disrespectfully toward them, you don’t call them names, you simply say, “I cannot do that. That is a sin,” alright? But she did what her mother told her.

She said, “I want by-and-by, the head of John the Baptist in a charger.”

How disgusted she must have been when a couple hours later it was delivered to her.

Here’s what went through Herod’s mind, he said, “I shouldn’t be doing this. I should not kill this prophet of god. But you know, I made a promise, and if I break the promise, isn’t that sin?”

No it is not a sin to break a promise it was a sin to make to begin with. But then there was an undercurrent to what he was saying. He wasn’t just talking about breaking his promise - he was thinking about what his men were going to think of him. If he had promised to do whatever she said, and then he didn’t do it, would he be the laughing stalk of all his chiefs of state and satraps and important men? So Herod sent the executioner, and the executioner executed the order, and John the Baptist was beheaded. Well we learn from that that if you make a rash promise or a commitment and it leads to sin or destruction, you should not follow it. You should back off from it. You should repent it. You should withdraw from it.

So, the little girl was brought a bloody head in a pool of blood on a platter. That was her reward. That’s what her mother bought for her by her mother’s indulging in sin and hatred and desire for revenge and murderous spirit. This is what Herod gave her as a gift of his own cowardice, of his selfishness, of his own self-insecurity.

So, now John is dead. And it would appear that evil had triumphed over good; that the forces of darkness had destroyed the forces of life. For had not this false king of this world been able to stop the mouth of the one who was sent to be the forerunner, to go before the face of the Lord and prepare his way. But unbeknownst to Herod, unbeknownst to anyone on earth at that time except to our Lord JC, Herod facilitated the Lord’s cousin fulfilling the rest of his mission. For having preached on earth in the land of Israel the coming of the Messiah, he was now destined to descend to the dead and to preach to every soul from Adam on, all who had died from the original sin until the known day, that the Messiah who had come to earth was soon to come into Hades itself and to loose the pangs of death and to raise up as many as turned to them. So John became the preacher of the destruction of hell, of the resurrection of the dead, of life everlasting.

That’s why, here, on this icon, when you see our Lord raising Adam and Eve, you see John the Baptist pointing and saying, “This is the one I told you about. See, he’s here now.”

He gave a warning to hell that it’s days were numbered. So Herod, who thought, by an act of violence, by an act of cunning, by yielding to the entreaties of his sinful cohort that he somehow or another could stop that ringing in his ear that caused him guilt and made his nights sleepless. Herod, rather, sent on his way to dead, the prophet who went before the face of the Lord in hell to prepare the way there as he had prepared the way on earth; and to be the vanguard of the resurrection of all flesh.

So this is why St. John the Baptist’s day is so important. We call it a feast day, and it says on the calendar it’s a fast day. We’re allowed wine and oil on that day. Among our traditions, many of our people do not eat anything off of plates that day – they only eat things from bowls. They do not use sharp instruments on their table on that day, in respect for the acts that severed the head of the prophet and forerunner. Some also don’t eat things that are round on that day – that have the shape of a head. These are not important religious truths, they’re simply little ways of reminding ourselves that this great feast on which the light began to shine in hell, was also a day of great sorrow because for a time the world was deprived of the preaching of the prophet of grace, of he who was to declare that the valleys should be filled in and the mountains laid low, and the way for the Lord, a highway for God, should be prepared in the wilderness.

So, on St. John the Baptist’s day, on Friday, if you’re not able to be here, at least remember that this was the day on which the forerunner suffered because of human sin. Remember the web of evil that started out with the lust a man and woman for each other that made them commit the sin of adultery, to abandon their own spouses. Herod ended up driven into exile. Herodias, in fleeing, fell through the ice in the winter. And it was said by those who accompanied her they couldn’t get her out of the ice because as soon as she fell through the water froze around her and all that appeared was her head on the surface of the ice, in just imitation of the way that she had ordered the severed head of the forerunner.

Let us then, in repentance, accept God’s mercy and through the prayers of St. John the Baptist, honor God who awards every good intention and is able to turn the evil devices of men to an outcome by which evil is destroyed.

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