Fr. Joseph's Homilies

August 2, 2009 - Feeding of the five thousand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 1, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 19, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 5, 2009 - Ss. Athanasius and Sergius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 15, 2009 - St. Vladimir of Kiev

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glory forever.

Memory Eternal

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

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

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

June 21, 2009

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

Glory to Jesus Christ!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glory forever!

June 9, 2009

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

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

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

June 7, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glory Forever!

May 31, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is and ever shall be.

May 24, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samaritan woman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, He is risen!

Sunday of the Paralytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, He is risen!

Sunday of the Myrrh Bearing Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palm Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday fo St. John of the Ladder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feast of the Annunciation

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

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

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

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

Glory Forever

Veneration of the Cross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glory forever!

Orthodoxy Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgiveness Sunday

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

Forgiveness Sunday

Sermon to the children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sloth, despair – there’s actually four parts –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sunday of the Last Judgment

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

Sunday of the Last Judgment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday of the Prodigal Son

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

Sunday of the Prodigal Son

Children’s sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday of Zaccheus

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

Sunday of Zaccheus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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