Sunday of All Saints

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.

Today is the Sunday of All Saints. On this day the Church celebrates not just two or three or a handful of saints, but literally all the saints in every generation, including our own. On this First Sunday after Pentecost, we commemorate all the saints to remind us that the Holy Spirit has come for the purpose of making sainthood possible. A more personal way to say this is to say that because the Holy Spirit has descended and now dwells within the Church, each of us has access to being cleansed, sanctified, glorified and numbered with all the saints who have ever walked with God. On this Sunday we don’t simply remember the saints gone before us; we remember that we also are called to become saints or holy ones of God! It is a gracious and highly-exalted calling, representing our opportunity to enter today into the eternal communion of God’s life and love and to be transformed by it from endless shame to everlasting glory.

There are a few things about this we must be certain to understand right off the start. First, that the Holy Spirit has come to make us holy. That is His purpose and His work, and He accomplishes it well. He initiates it, He enlivens it, and He perfects it according to the will of the Father. We do not make ourselves holy; it is the Spirit’s work, thank God! Second, as the Spirit is truly holy, so He makes God’s saints truly holy. There is no such thing as “positional righteousness” except in the imaginations of men who have separated themselves from Orthodox teaching. God’s work is real. His transformation of fallen humanity is real. The holiness He imparts to His people is also real. The lives of the many saints throughout the Church era demonstrate this fact reliably and incontrovertibly. And finally, although sainthood is the work of the Holy Spirit and very real, it is also fundamentally a calling, meaning that it is something we must respond to. God calls, but we must answer. Sainthood will not happen in us automatically. We must give our willing consent to the process and enter into it actively.

When each of us was chrismated, God granted us the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. No one has been denied this precious deposit. From that moment forward we were meant to live by the Holy Spirit, or in other words to follow His guidance into the life of the Church, and by so doing, allow His presence and operation in our lives to become an ever-increasing reality. This process is what some have referred to as acquiring the Holy Spirit.

Addressing this very subject, St. Seraphim of Sarov wrote: “Prayer, fasting, vigil and all other Christian activities, however good they may be in themselves, do not constitute the aim of our Christian life, although they serve as an indispensable means of reaching this end. The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.”

“The acquisition of the Holy Spirit” is the fundamental action of the Christian life, and involves submission to the Spirit in order to cooperate fully with His sanctifying work. One who is filled with the Spirit is one who has learned to set aside his own fallen will in order to will and to do what God wills and does.

This is what I like to call “The Gethsemane Factor”. You’ll recall that prior to His arrest, false trial, and crucifixion, our Lord prayed in the garden of Gethsemane with great agony that He might be spared the events awaiting Him, but concluded each request with the words, “Yet not My will, but Thine be done”. This He did for our sakes, to show us how we must live. Our Lord knew He would have to endure these things for our salvation, yet He wanted to teach us how absolutely necessary it is for those who would follow God to submit their own human will to the good and perfect will of God.

This is not to say that our Lord’s agony was an act, or somehow not real. In a mystery both terrible yet beautiful to behold, the God-man Jesus Christ genuinely struggled to bring His human will into full conformity with His divine will to accomplish the great and fearful work He had come to earth to do.

Is it any surprise then that our number one struggle in this life is to bring our own human will into conformity with the will of God? Come to think of it, that might indeed be a surprise to many Christians, for far too many never give a thought to accomplishing the will of God in their lives, and even routinely excuse themselves whenever they choose do that which is in direct opposition to His will.

Here’s something I want you to remember: a willful person can never accomplish the will of God. Human willfulness is always in opposition to the Holy Spirit, and only the one who has learned to crucify his willfulness and submit to God’s will can begin to acquire the Spirit of God.

What do I mean by willfulness? I’m not talking about free will in and of itself, for this is God’s gift to us that we might choose love. Only a person with a free and unconstrained will can freely choose to love his God and his neighbor as himself. It is a free will choice to enter into the communion of God’s love and be transformed by it. But willfulness, at least according to my definition, implies a certain loss of freedom, the misuse and distortion of free will, for it is the habitual and slavish devotion only to the self, to one’s own stubborn desires, passions, and fallen inclinations. It is the natural state of one who has not yet received the Holy Spirit, according to St. Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 2. And after the Spirit is given, the struggle against willfulness to gain the fulness of the Spirit is the major work of the Christian life.

Because of this, so much of the life of the Church engages us in a direct assault upon our stubborn willfulness. We are given a structured worship, authored in antiquity by the Holy Spirit, instead of a contemporary, made-up service that we mislabel as “spirit-led”. We are given a rule of prayer to guide us, rather than letting us entirely make up our own prayers or not pray at all. We are given a Church calendar with seasons of fasting, seasons of penance, and seasons of celebration to sanctify our time and set the boundaries of our life. We are given the confessional to remind us that we do not answer to ourselves alone, but to God, to the the community of the faithful, and to the counsel and guidance of a father-confessor. Many Orthodox Christians fail here, for they either resist confession, or they treat the penance they are prescribed as little more than “advice” which they can take or leave as they please. That’s willfulness!

Everything that God has provided in the life of the Church, everything we are called to do as Orthodox Christians, has as its goal the crucifixion of our fallen self-will and the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. This is why many Orthodox Christians do not live the Orthodox life in fulness, for they are not yet ready to overcome their willfulness and submit themselves to the Spirit’s leading.

I think it is vital to develop an awareness of this, and to keep it before ourselves continually, for we face little conflicts between our willfulness and the Spirit’s leading daily. Shall I say my prayers today, or make excuses for myself? Shall I fast, or eat what I want? Shall I come to the service, or stay home and relax? Shall I be kind today, or treat people badly? Shall I be pure, or give in to my lusts? Shall I go to confession, or keep my little secrets? Shall I obey my penance, or lay it aside to do as I please? Constantly our willfulness challenges the will of God, but do we even recognize that this is taking place? Do we realize that every decision is the choice to either obey God and acquire the Holy Spirit, or to willfully resist Him, grieve the Spirit, and gain nothing? Do we ever consider The Gethsemane Factor in our daily lives and enter into that agonizing struggle to declare, “Not my will, but Thine be done”?

Today we are reminded that we are called to be saints, and nothing less than saints. The Holy Spirit awaits our response. We must crucify our willfulness and submit to the work that the Spirit does in our midst, in our Church, in God’s kingdom. It is God’s work, my beloved. Our work is only this: to give our willing consent, to say “Yes” to the Spirit’s leading, and put to death our stubborn opposition. May God remind us and lead us in this daily.

+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

Today the Holy Orthodox Church commemorates the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. This was the council which condemned the Arian heresy that claimed Jesus was a created being who only later was glorified by God. The council upheld the tradition of the apostles regarding the eternal divinity and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. We remember the Spirit-led work of these Holy Fathers on this Sunday, right between the feasts of Ascension and Pentecost, because this timing helps us remember the promise made to the Church by her Lord. Jesus told His followers that He would not leave them as orphans after His ascension, but would send the Holy Spirit who would guide His Church into all the truth. The Spirit came at Pentecost, and remains with the Church to this day. Through the Holy Spirit, the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council aggressively defended the truth and quite literally saved the Christian faith at a time when the whole world was filled with the darkness of error and deceit. Our commemoration of the Holy Fathers of Nicea is therefore just as much a commemoration of the work of the Holy Spirit Himself, and a grateful recognition that He labors in synergy with holy men to uphold the truth of God and bear witness to the apostolic faith in every generation.

We can see an early example of the Holy Spirit working together with holy men this way in Acts chapter 15. There the Spirit is invisibly present in the council of Jerusalem, during which the apostles had to decide on the difficult matter of what to do with Gentile converts to Christianity. At last, in a letter sent to the Gentiles abroad the council declared its decision with the words, “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us…” [Acts 15:28] With these words, the council of apostles and holy hierarchs was not trying to bolster its position or authority, but was simply recognizing that the Holy Spirit aided the Church in times like this, as the Guide into all the truth that Jesus had promised. This set the precedent that every successive authentic Church council would follow.

There have been seven ecumenical councils--meaning, councils whose decisions have been accepted by the entire Church, universally and throughout time--which were convened whenever any heresy endangered the purity of the Orthodox faith. Through all these councils, it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us--meaning our Holy Fathers in every age--to articulate, clarify, and advance the Christian faith delivered once for all at that first Pentecost so long ago.

In our day, far too many believers ignore these historic and Spirit-led councils with the claim that “All I need is my Bible and the Spirit to lead me into all the truth.” How delightfully ego-centric! Such people make the HUGE assumption that there would even be bibles in existence today or any recognizable semblance of Christian faith to adopt had not these councils acted as they did to preserve the truth. “But God would have found some way to preserve His truth!” they might protest. And yes, He did find a way, and this was it: the Holy Spirit, working together with holy men, in His holy Church.

People have a hard time accepting what God actually did in history, preferring to substitute their own ideas of what He should have done. Perhaps this is because if they acknowledge what God actually did, that would mean that there is a higher authority than themselves; a Church to which we are accountable rather than vice-versa. When man is in a state of delusion, he imagines that the Church which Christ established, His very Body, which He promised the gates of hades would never prevail against, to which He granted the Holy Spirit to abide in it and to lead its faithful into all the truth, is somehow fundamentally less reliable than me with my bible. This is what Arius believed, and we see where that belief got him. And yes, it is delusional. God’s plan is and always has been centered on His Church.

Did you know that the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council are even alluded to prophetically in the Old Testament? In Genesis 14 we read of the foreign kings waging war and taking Abram’s brother, Lot, captive. Verse 14 tells us, "And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan." There Abram defeated the kings and set his brother free. Three hundred eighteen is also the exact number of Holy Fathers who were present at the council of Nicea. These were servants of God, raised in His own House (the Church) and armed with the knowledge of Truth, who fought against the Arians that had taken many souls captive with their foreign and corrupt teaching, and defeated them to bring freedom. The Church has recognized that this Old Testament story gained a New Testament fulfillment in the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. This leads us to the understanding that it is not only Christ who fulfills Old Testament prophesies, but sometimes even His Church and His saints alike, because all are one in divine life and mission.

In our reading from Acts this morning, the prophecy continued with St. Paul warning the Ephesian elders to guard the flock and care for the Church of God which He had entrusted to them, for “from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them” [Acts 20:30]. Arius was such a man, a presbyter of the Church, whose perverted teachings nearly overthrew Christianity until the servants of God prevailed against it.

In our gospel lesson from John 17, Jesus told us what the stakes are. He said, “And this is eternal life, that they know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent”. Eternal life hinges on true knowledge of the only true God, which the heretics pervert in their efforts to lead many astray. This knowledge is never merely theoretical, cerebral, or abstract; it is experiential, spiritual, and actively saving. Neither is this knowledge relative to what we choose to believe about God. Rather, the true knowledge of God is wedded to the Church, comes forth from the Church, and is fully known only within the Church. We come to know God not by reading about Him but by living in union with Him in His Church. The knowledge of God is not words and doctrines alone but life and communion.

It was this very life which they possessed that allowed the Holy Fathers to recognize the error of Arius when they encountered it. It wasn’t just that Arius was teaching something new; he was teaching something lifeless. It was a false teaching that did not unite its adherents to Jesus Christ, that did not lead to the true knowledge of God, that did not impart the grace and salvation of God. For this reason it had to be condemned. And all who do not confess the Symbol of Faith which came forth from the Council of Nicea also risk the condemnation of alienation from the true knowledge of God and from eternal life.

My brothers and sisters, we do not pronounce that judgement ourselves. We love all men and reserve for them the same hope of salvation that we hold for ourselves, regardless of their church affiliation or their beliefs. Yet we do not regard all churches or beliefs as equal before God. There is one true Church and one true life and communion within that Church. It is this Orthodox Church to which we must be faithful, even while we pray for the peace of the whole world and the salvation of all men. We are not called to judge but to witness, showing forth the light of God’s life in love to the fallen and broken world around us. Our witness must not consist of empty words or of dogmas we have not bothered to live, but of lives that have found their way into communion with God and are undergoing the transformation of love. This is what people want to see and what we can show them, for the Holy Spirit is still dwells with the Church, and still works with holy people to bear witness in a fallen and broken world. May God grant us to be that people.

+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Blind Man

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

“Christ is Risen!”

This morning’s gospel lesson [John 9:1-38] centers on the man born blind who is miraculously healed by our Lord Jesus Christ. This is truly a wonderful story, but I’m going to skip over most of it today and focus on just one little excerpt. I want us to take a closer look at the question that the disciples posed to Christ at the very beginning of this passage. They asked Him, “Lord, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Clearly this was an uninformed question. It was asked at an early point in the disciple’s walk with Christ when their knowledge of God was still fairly underdeveloped, and thus it reflects a fairly primitive understanding of God. In essence, their assumption was that if something bad happened to someone it must be a sign of God’s judgment. It’s really not unlike how most of the world seems to think. Whenever there is an earthquake or tsunami or other human tragedy, immediately people start making accusations that God is mean and punishing people. People often impose their ideas and concepts on God, and most often these ideas are false and don’t describe the true God.

Obviously the disciples were mistaken about God and it led them to form false conclusions regarding His actions and purpose. Which one of us hasn’t done that as well? Sometimes we’ve misrepresented God to others; sometimes to ourselves. In either case in may have been quite awhile before we learned that we were mistaken about God and had wrong ideas. The important thing is to always be open to learning the truth about Him so that we won’t stay trapped in a prison of our own ignorance.

Something else to notice here is that the disciples, by misunderstanding God, also limited Him to just the few possibilities their minds could conceive. “Who sinned Lord, this man or his parents?” Well, neither actually. There is a third and somewhat grander alternative you missed, O Disciples. This man was born blind that the works of God might be manifested in him, that his eyes and the eyes of millions more would be opened to eternal life.

How much bigger is the real God than the often puny little “god” we might conjure up in our minds? God’s works are powerful and expansive and we nearly always underestimate them. How many times have we limited God to just the handful of possibilities that we imagined? “Lord, if I don’t marry this person, or get that job, or live in this neighborhood, or go to that school, my life will just be miserable!” Many times we place before God the only possibilities that we see (or perhaps the only ones that we secretly want), and demand that He come through for us. But by doing this, aren’t we shutting the door to His sovereign and almighty will, and more or less refusing to let God be God and reveal what He wants for us? Can we say that we really want to know God’s will, or for that matter, God Himself, if we do this?

But let’s return to this idea the disciples had that the young man’s blindness was a judgment for sins somebody committed. They were wrong, obviously, and had a lot of growth ahead before they could begin to comprehend that God acts out of love and mercy, not wrath and cursing. And it’s true that we too sometimes have mixed-up ideas about God until we grow to know Him as He truly is.

For example, for some people God is a projection of their unique psychology, perhaps a harsh and loveless figure, who is enraged at their every failure and dismissive of every attempt to please Him. Is this the true God, or one that’s been manufactured out of the deep fears and insecurities of the person himself? Other people see God as little more than an extension of their political or social views. They wrap Him in the flag of their country or the colors of their political party; He becomes a capitalist, a socialist, or the queen of the gay pride parade. God becomes what they want Him to be, reflecting the passions, bigotries, or even the immorality of the people themselves. Each of these “gods” is really just a projection of one’s own ego, together with whatever delusions are thrown into the mix.

To a greater or lesser degree we all do this and probably have attached ideas to God that may not be true. This was the case with the disciples. The God of judgment who would blind a baby to punish someone for unknown sins was not the true God, but it was the only “god” these men knew until Jesus revealed to them the Father and showed them the way to know Him in truth.

And the wonderful thing about this story is, that from there they grew into that true knowledge of God and became authentic and living reflections of Him. Let’s consider for a moment the writer of this gospel, St. John. He and his brother James were once known as the sons of thunder because they became so enraged at a Samaritan village that would not receive Christ, they actually asked the Lord for permission to call down fire from heaven to destroy the entire place and all the people in it! Years later this same man would be known by a far loftier nickname, the “Disciple of Love”.

How is it that John went from being a homicidal hothead who wanted to nuke an entire village to cinders, to becoming the serene and peaceful elder who wrote so beautifully of the love of God in his later epistles? The answer is that he left behind the false god of his youthful imagination and came to know the true and living God. In the process, his very life became a genuine reflection of this one true God and of His infinite love for mankind.

Here is an interesting thought for us to ponder. It seems that we can either create a god who is just a reflection of ourselves, or we can embrace the true God who created us, and become a living reflection of Him. So we have a choice: follow the god of our imagination, or come to know our Father who art in heaven.

Which would we rather do? If your answer is to know the true God and become a reflection of Him, then we can do this by fully embracing the life of the Church. From the worship services to the prayers we do together and at home, to being regularly exposed to the scriptures, the teachings of the fathers and the lives of the saints; from our participation in the grace of the sacraments and especially the confessional, along with obedience to the practical guidance of a spiritual father, to everything else that comprises the life of the Church, these things work together to reveal the Father to us, and to form and transform us into the true knowledge of God our Savior.

This is what they were designed by God to do. And we cannot pick and choose among these things, but must take them all together as an integrated whole. A person who wants to know God cannot be willful, deciding for himself what he needs to accomplish that goal and rejecting whatever he dislikes. If you like reading the bible but hate going to confession and rarely do it, well, good luck with that! Chances are your stubbornness is not going to help you know God in the way that you could. We can’t make up our own god and we can’t make up our own rules, if knowing the one true God is our goal in life.

And I hope that this is the major goal in life for all of us. That’s why we’re here in the Orthodox Church; there is no other reason. May we not lose sight of that.

+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Paralytic

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

“Christ is risen!”

Today’s gospel lesson [John 5:1-15] centers on our Lord’s healing of the paralyzed man beside the pool at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem. I’d like to take two approaches in examining this story. First we’ll consider the spiritual meaning of the Sheep Gate pool and the miracles of healing once associated with it. This pool has far more significance to us than we may realize. Secondly we’ll take a closer look at the paralyzed man himself to see if there is something in his character that we might want to emulate. Can we identify some characteristic that made him, let’s say, more “receptive” to the grace of God, and can we adopt this to our own benefit?

So let us begin with the Sheep Gate pool. This was the spot where the sheep who were bound for sacrifice in the Temple were ritualistically washed. It was a filthy and unpleasant place to be and the only reason people were found there was because of an invisible angel who would come at certain seasons to stir up the waters and infuse them with healing power. John tells us that the first person to step into the pool after the stirring of the water would be healed of whatever disease he had. For this reason, great numbers of invalids, the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed would gather at those times in hopes of winning the liquid lottery and going home healed.

The Sheep Pool was a type of the baptismal font. Even long before these miracles of healing began to take place, the washing of the sheep who were bound for sacrifice in the Temple pointed to a fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who one day would also pass through waters before His voluntary sacrifice upon the cross. Christ appeared and was baptized in the Jordan, this time not for His cleansing, but for ours. He hallowed the streams of the Jordan, making the waters of the baptismal font the means of our purification and cleansing from all sin.

As the time of Christ’s appearing drew near, God intensified the prophetic revelation, introducing a new element into the picture by sending divine power into the Sheep Pool, manifesting in miracles of physical healing. The intent of this action was to prepare the Jews to embrace Christian baptism as something much more than just a ritualistic cleansing, but as the mystical new birth of water and the Spirit, during which the Holy Spirit Himself descends into the font to make it the fountain of incorruption, the remedy of infirmities, the laver of regeneration, initiating the healing of soul and of body by uniting the baptismal candidate to the life-giving and glorified humanity of Christ.

We see what great mercy God showed to the Jews by patiently manifesting these signs to them, in an effort to lead them to Christ! Even the afflictions of the people beside the pool represent the many spiritual illnesses which Christian baptism heals. It heals the blind, whose spiritual eyes are darkened so that they cannot distinguish good from evil, the lame, who neither practice virtue nor make any spiritual progress, and the utterly paralyzed, who are in complete despair because of their inability to accomplish anything good.

When the fullness of time had come and the Son of God finally appeared among men, He came deliberately to the Sheep Pool and healed the man with the worst affliction present. He did this to demonstrate that He was the true Lamb of God “who taketh away the sins of the world,” bringing complete salvation to humanity. But He also picked this particular man to heal, in order to reveal the good spirit within him as an example to us.

Our Lord approached the man who had been paralyzed for 38 years and had been lying beside the pool for perhaps as long a time and asked him, “Do you want to be healed?” Today we would consider that to be, what we might call, a stupid question. I mean, what’s the man supposed to say: “No thank you; I’m just here working on my tan”? It might be hard for us to imagine not feeling frustrated or offended by such a question. But here we get some real insights into the character of this man.

First, we see that through his sufferings he had learned to be patient and to not lose hope. Is that even possible? To our way of thinking if a person suffers, and especially if he suffers for a very long time, he is supposed to become angry and cynical, right? And this guy had suffered terribly. Time after time the waters were stirred up by the angel, and each time some other person, less needy than he, vaulted into the pool ahead of him. No one took pity on him or would help him, but everyone shoved him back to put themselves first. Over the years he was repeatedly exposed to the selfish worst that humanity can display, but he didn’t allow it to darken his soul. He rose above it all by keeping a steadfast hope in God and remaining pure in heart and simple in thought.

When Jesus came to him and asked if he wanted to be healed, it was the man’s hope that answered, saying, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the water”. No doubt he had prayed many years for God to send someone to help him, and he thought perhaps that Jesus was the answer to his prayer. Boy, was he ever right! And what a beautiful soul this man had formed within himself by this time. He was not beaten down, discouraged, and resentful, but full of expectation to see his prayers answered and the mercy of God finally revealed.

Do we recognize that the difficulties we face in our own lives can either destroy us or turn us into beautiful souls as well? When we are faced with struggles, do we allow ourselves to become angry and resentful, to question or blame God, or complain “Why me?” as if somehow we deserved a trouble-free life? Maybe we do at first, but we can learn to adopt a better response. We can learn to accept that there is no salvation without bearing our cross, or without facing struggle of some kind and of some duration in our lives. We’d rather not suffer, but when we see that we can endure it with patience and with hope, trusting in God to use it to purify and perfect us, then our struggles and sufferings truly become the means of our salvation and lift us up rather than wear us down. This is true whether our struggles are physical, emotional, or spiritual in nature.

Struggles, difficulties, and suffering appear and will continue to appear in our lives. There’s little we can do to prevent that from happening. But we can choose whether we will allow these things to bring us to God or turn us against Him; to instill in us hope, or to crush us entirely. I’m sure we’ve known people whose problems have only made them more joyful and confident in God, and others who became grim and darkened and now want very little to do with Him. And the choice between those two states is ours as well.

May we follow the good example of the paralytic and allow a simple, pure, and steadfast trust in God to grant us beautiful souls and life eternal.

+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Myrrh-Bearing Women

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

Christ is Risen!

Today we commemorate the Myrrh-Bearing Women, those brave disciples of Christ who defied all danger, coming to His tomb to anoint His precious body for burial according to the custom of the Jews. On this day we also remember Ss. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who also showed great courage in asking Pilate for the body of Christ, that they might take Him down, wrap Him in linen place Him in the tomb. The actions of all these people were taken at great personal risk to themselves, as the enemies of God still burned in their hatred of Jesus Christ and would have gladly killed any of His followers. But these actions were motivated by love and the desire to do what was right for the Lord. And such love conquers all.

A cynical person might have wondered, “What is the use of taking such a foolish risk? Jesus is dead, the situation is hopeless; why risk facing death yourself?” The devil often tempts us to look upon situations as being without hope of redemption, and our actions as being fruitless and lacking purpose. When faced with difficult or dismal situations in our own lives, we are often tempted to think that things will never get any better, that all hope is dead and gone, and that perhaps the very best thing that we can do is to cut our losses and bail out. How easily we forget that Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life! Where there is life, and especially the resurrection life of Christ, there is always hope, and nothing is beyond redemption.

This is the lesson that the Myrrh-Bearing Women learned when they came to Christ’s empty tomb very early in the morning on the first day of the week. They were filled with sorrow, but motivated by love. Then they beheld the angel sitting in the tomb who said to them “…You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples—and Peter—that He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him, as He said to you.” What a joyous message! And at that moment the world changed forever! Never again would anyone be entirely without hope, no matter what the situation or what the devil might say otherwise. Christ is risen, and those who were dead in the tombs are set free! Christ is risen, and the power of the devil is destroyed! Christ is risen, and never again can anyone say “I am hopeless”. For Christ is risen to grant newness of life and the hope of resurrection to glory.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

There is even more here to give us hope. We note that the angel said to the women, “Go, tell His disciples—and Peter [that Christ is risen from the dead].” He mentioned Peter separately and not as one of the Lord’s disciples because Peter had hotly denied knowing Christ and refused to be associated with Him. And then the rooster crowed and he remembered Christ’s words, “Before the cock crows, you shall deny Me three times” and Peter went out and wept bitterly. We can hardly imagine the depths of sorrow that Peter felt at that hour, and the crushing burden of guilt that he felt. Though perhaps we can. Perhaps we have had such dark hours in our own lives and know something of what he went through. The loneliness of a sinner who feels cut off from God is unbearable. But the wonderful news here is that Christ did not leave him in that terrible state, utterly without hope. The angel came with a divine message of love and redemption: “Go and tell Peter that Christ will meet him as He said”. Peter’s tears of repentance did not go unnoticed by the God of love, and when Jesus met him, three times he asked him, “Peter, do you love Me?” Three times Peter replied, “Lord, You know that I love You.” And thus his thrice-denial was washed away by his thrice-affirmation of love, and the infinite mercy of Jesus Christ. What a beautiful and intimate story, and how encouraging it is to us who perhaps have also denied Christ or felt distant from Him in those darker moments of our own lives. Earth has no sorrow that heaven can not heal, and no situation of ours is beyond redemption if we put our trust in God.

Let us contrast this story with one of another former disciple, Judas Iscariot. Judas also turned away from Christ, betraying Him for thirty pieces of silver. He did not know that his betrayal would result in the death of Jesus, and we he found out what the Jews intended to do, he went back to return the silver and try to make it right. But it was too late. The Jews told him to take care of the problem himself. And so he went out and hanged himself.

I floated this idea once before--it’s kind of interesting to think about--that what if, instead of listening to the voice of the devil who prompted him to commit suicide, miserable Judas had crawled back a few days later to throw himself at the feet of the risen Jesus. Dare we imagine that Christ would have forgiven him as He forgave Peter, and—as strange as it may sound to our ears—that today we would speak of a “St. Judas” as the one who betrayed Him but was later restored in mercy? It’s just speculation and therefore of little value. But we can say for certain that that by taking matters into his own hands, by acting so severely out of anger and hopelessness, that Judas removed himself from all possibility of redemption and left us with a very sad tale to contrast with Peter’s beautiful story.

There is a lesson in here for us. Be very careful which voice you listen to, and who you allow to be your guide in times of sorrow. The voice which says to you “Not even God can help you now” prompting you to take desperate actions, is not the voice you should listen to. It is the voice of the devil, full of hatred and venom, He wants you to forget of the love and power of Christ, and turn away from Him that you might share the devil’s own fate. Instead, we must always listen to the angelic voice of sweetness which says, “Christ is risen! Go and meet Him and fall down before Him. He will grant you redemption and healing, and ease your terrible burden.”

My brothers and sisters, Christ is risen and we must never forget this, or allow this glorious message to be taken from us. We have hope, a hope that will not disappoint, a hope that brings light and life and the promise of all things being made new. Let us love one another and allow that love to conquer all and motivate us in every action toward one another and all those around us.

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Let us adore His third-day resurrection!

+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Triumphal Entry of our Lord into Jerusalem

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

Today is the Sunday of the Triumphal Entry of our Lord into Jerusalem, also known as Palm Sunday. With Great Lent ’09 now officially done and gone, we the faithful have been granted the opportunity to join with our Lord in the remarkable journey of Holy Week; a journey that has in fact already begun and is now taking us from the decay and stench of Lazarus’ tomb to the life-giving and myrrh-scented empty tomb of our risen Savior.

What exactly do I mean by saying we can join with our Lord on the journey of Holy Week? Do I mean this in a sort of figurative way, as if to say that if we come to all the services and pay really close attention, we’ll almost feel as if we were really there and will have such a warm and inspiring experience? Surely I must mean that we only symbolically join with our Lord. Actually, no. Our union with Christ is not merely figurative or symbolic. It is a real union, and furthermore, it is a mystical union. What this means is that through the action and operation of the Holy Spirit, we are joined with Christ in ways far beyond human understanding, to participate with Him in everything He accomplished for our salvation, including His death, burial, and resurrection from the dead.

Western man has decided that he has a problem with such things, you know. Over the centuries since the so-called Enlightenment period, we have pompously come to declare our rational minds as our greatest and highest faculty, and the only one through which we now seek to understand and interact with all that we imagine to exist in the universe. Before that time we at least acknowledged that there were also things unknowable to the mind alone, including the mystical energies and actions coming forth from God which were beyond the ability of man to comprehend, though we could certainly experience them, participate in them, and benefit from them through the faculty of faith. But over time, as Western man elevated his reason to the exclusion of every other means of experiencing reality, his faith degraded, became itself rational and limited to human reason, and he lost his ability to commune with God on the mystical level.

Our journey during Holy Week is exactly such a mystical communion with Jesus Christ through the holy services of the Church. We are truly united to Christ on a level beyond intellectual knowing, in order that we might join with Him through the Triumphal Entry, the rebuking of the hypocritical religious leaders, the Mystical Supper with His disciples and the Upper Room teaching, the agony of Gethsemane, the betrayal of Judas and the denial of Peter, the arrest and unlawful trial, the scourging and mocking, the terrible march to Golgotha, the crucifixion, death, burial, and glorious third-day resurrection.

In summary, we don’t just observe Holy Week, we enter into Holy Week and participate in all the events of our salvation, by virtue of the fact that we are mystically united to Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. As you take a moment to reflect on this and consider it, I would ask one simple question: Can you think of any better way to spend the next seven days of your life?

It’s really no wonder that we require forty days of fasting and prayer and spiritual attentiveness to ready ourselves for this remarkable and saving journey of Holy Week. In fact, we might wonder if forty days was really quite enough for us! Or more to the point, we might wonder if we spent those forty days as wisely as we might have, to gain from them as much as we should have. Chances are the honest answer to that is no, we really didn’t. But by the grace of God we still may have gained more than we realize.

We often begin Lent with high hopes, don’t we? We might decide, “This year I’m going to really make the effort to keep the full fast, and as a matter of fact, I’m even going to lose a few extra pounds! I’m going to be faithful in my prayers, remember the poor, come to all the services, and stay focused 100% on my repentance”. And these all are fine goals, even if we do fall somewhat short of realizing them. Quite often it seems like the wheels fall off our cart sometime just after the first week of Lent and how we struggle to get them back on and make the sort of progress we had hoped for!

In fact, by the time those forty days are over, we may find ourselves feeling pretty worn out, beaten down, and perhaps even defeated. At the end of Lent, instead of feeling spiritually renewed, we might actually feel fairly dry and lifeless, kind of dead really, and wondering if--after all is said and done--we are simply miserable and hopeless.

And this is why, at exactly this point, our Mother the Church has us gather together at the tomb of Lazarus. At the end of our Lenten struggle, with the sting of defeat still fresh in our minds, that tomb is opened and our nostrils are assaulted with the stench of human corruption. Therein lies poor Lazarus, rotting away, and seemingly beyond all hope of redemption. All of a sudden we realize, that is us! There we lie, all bones and rot, defeated by our enemy Death, and fading away to nothingness! But then a voice is heard unexpectedly, that with clarity and beauty cries out, “Lazarus, come forth!” And suddenly corruption is reversed and flesh is restored. The heartbeat returns and the lungs fill with air. Slowly, the eyes are opened, the body sits upright, and Lazarus is raised from the dead!

Yes, Lazarus is raised as a symbol of the universal resurrection, but for us, the timing couldn’t be better. Seeing the power of God manifested in what is certainly the most hopeless of human situations, we realize that we need not be utterly dismayed by our failures, though they may be as numberless as the stars of heaven. At the raising of Lazarus we take new and unexpected hope. God is able to give life even to the lifeless, and to raise with Him even those who seem to be dead in their trespasses and sins.

In the book Gifts of the Desert by Kyriacos Markides, the author recounts a conversation with Bishop Maximos in which the elder described the Church, the Ecclesia, as a hospital in which the reality of healing from the effects of sin takes place. He says, “It is indeed a hospital. As in the case of an ordinary hospital, in the Ecclesia we can meet doctors, nurses, recovering patients, sick people, and very sick people. Sometimes we can even find corpses”. “Do corpses have a chance?” one of his listeners asked. “Naturally they do,” replied Maximos. “Doesn’t the Ecclesia call Christ the Giver of Life? In whatever category we may belong within this spiritual hospital, we always have the hope and the possibility to achieve our own resurrection and the restoration of our spiritual health.”

What a great message this is to us who so often are overcome with sadness at our continual failure before God! Our efforts, our struggles are so important to our salvation, but they are never enough to win the prize and always fall short, even in the lives of the greatest of saints. It is Christ who gives life to the faithful, to those who desire life, who persevere in seeking Him until the end. Christ is the Lover of mankind and the Giver of Life, and He alone is our hope.

And so you see, my brothers and sisters, that even if you come to the end of Lent feeling beaten or deeply disappointed over your failings, your weakness in pursuing the things of God, you are still not beyond the power of God to raise you and to give you life. The good Christ comes to us, and finding us dead in our tomb, resuscitates us together with Lazarus that we might not be left behind or miss this glorious journey of Holy Week.

As we continue this journey together, let us see it as our opportunity for progression from death to life. Throughout this week, the Church will be incrementally filled with the symbols of Christ’s victory, together with the sweet smells of flowers, rose water, bay leaves, and incense, and will go from the darkness of the Bridegroom services to the brilliant light of Pascha. May the same transformation take place in our souls as well, lifting us out of sorrow to the place of joy without measure.

+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

St. John Climacus

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

On this Fourth Sunday of Great Lent, the Orthodox Church commemorates St. John Climacus, the author of “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” which is a book featuring a series of short sermons on achieving perfection in the Christian life.

St. John was born in Sinai in the 6th century and was tonsured as a monk somewhere between the ages of 16 to 20. At the age of 35 he left the cenobitic or communal form of monasticism to become a hermit for 40 years. It was during this time that he received the grace of continual prayer and the gift of tears. Fellow monks began to seek him out in great numbers for guidance in the spiritual life until he became so popular that he was accused of making a mockery of the eremitic lifestyle. He responded to this in humility by renewing his silence and refusing to see any visitors. After about a year of this, those who had harshly accused him repented and pleaded with him to resume his work of guiding others.

Soon after this, he was appointed the Abbot of the monastery at Mt. Sinai, built on the very spot were Moses encountered God in the Burning Bush. It is said that on the day that St. John was installed as the new Abbot, Moses himself appeared, giving commands to those who served at the holy altar!

The Ladder of Divine Ascent was written primarily for those involved in monastic endeavors, but over the years it was found to be a book useful to all serious Christians who sought to subdue the sinful passions and purify their love for Christ. Each of its 30 chapters encourage the reader to put away the love of earthly things and continue an upward climb, step by step in the acquisition of virtue, progressing toward a state of spiritual perfection in Christ.

Sadly, the things we are speaking of here represent what we must almost describe as the Christianity of a distant, bygone era. Today’s Christians are not generally concerned with the subjugation of their sinful passions or the pursuit of virtue in Christ. Part of this may be due to the fact that many Christians think that their salvation is already a done deal and thus they see no need to overcome sin and gain virtue. But even most Orthodox Christians today seem to struggle with the idea of actually gaining victory over their passions and growing in virtue, as if such things were impossible for us.

We live in an age of great spiritual darkness and faintheartedness that often makes even the smallest spiritual effort seem incredibly difficult to us. Things as simple as keeping our little rule of prayer can often overwhelm us and seem infinitely beyond our meager abilities. We don’t know a great deal about being strict with ourselves or of forcing ourselves to do the things that are hard. We fear spiritual struggle and much too quickly accept the notion that a kind of spiritual mediocrity is the best we can ever hope for in our lives.

But St. John Climacus understood that man was created for much higher and greater things. We are created to work together with God, in synergy, uniting our will and action to His grace and divine energies to accomplish what we by ourselves alone could never do. There are many places in Scripture where we are specifically told to cooperate with God in this way and to labor diligently and daily to eliminate sin from our lives and progress toward Christian perfection.

One such place can be found in II Peter, chapter one, in a passage that sounds remarkably like a ladder of divine ascent itself. Having just reminded his readers of our high calling in Christ and the things given to us by His divine power, the apostle continues: “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: for so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” [2 Peter 1:4-11]

Notice how St. Peter makes it plain that those who remain barren and unfruitful, though they were purged from their previous sins, are not guaranteed salvation as if by “faith alone”. Cooperation with God in the cultivation of the Christian virtues is necessary to make our calling and election sure and for entrance into the kingdom to be granted unto us.

The subduing of our many earthly passions and the uniting of them into one focused passion for God, together with growth in virtue, is the biblical and Orthodox characterization of the true Christian life. As Orthodox Christians, we must seek to embrace what the Scriptures teach and our Holy Tradition echoes concerning the Christian life as one of divine ascent from the state we exist in now to the one God desires for us. In commemorating St. John Climacus and remembering his Ladder of Divine Ascent on this day, the Church is not suggesting that we are all called to live as monks. But it is reminding us that we are all called to live as Christians, and therefore to set our affection on things above, not on the things of this world.

In our heart of hearts we know whether we are learning to love the things of God or whether we are still slavishly attached to the things of this world. We know whether we are cooperating with the saving grace of God in our lives and are working together with Him, or else are resisting. While progress is often difficult to measure, we at least still know whether we are consistently making a sincere effort in good faith, or are giving in to sloth and are making excuses for a careless attitude toward our holy upward calling in Christ Jesus.

Beloved, we are designed to ascend to the heights of heaven and to share in the holiness of Christ in glory. This is what this Sunday of St. John Climacus reminds us of, here in the midst of our Lenten pursuits. I’ll close with the Troparion written to his memory: “Thou hast set up a holy ladder by thy words and hast shone forth as a teacher of monks; thou dost lead us, O John, from the purification that comes from discipline to the light of the Divine Vision. O righteous father, pray to Christ our God to grant us His great mercy.”

+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Sunday of Orthodoxy

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

Today is the Sunday of Orthodoxy, a day on which we commemorate the triumph of the Christian faith over the iconoclasts of the eighth century.

In those days there arose a serious and vicious attack against the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ, which took the devious “back door” approach of an assault upon the holy icons of the Church. Claiming that the icons were equal to idols condemned by the Second Commandment of God in Exodus 20, the iconoclasts (literally, “icon-smashers”) destroyed vast numbers of ancient and holy icons in the churches and persecuted or martyred many thousands of Orthodox defenders of icons. The Seventh Ecumenical Council was convened in 787AD to put forth the traditional Orthodox belief which upheld the proper veneration of icons and anathematized those who vilely accused the holy images of being idols.

The iconoclasts were heavily influenced by a number of factors external to Christianity including among them Gnosticism, which was a very early heresy that denied the incarnation of Christ. The Gnostics held to a pagan belief known as “dualism” which asserts that the material world is evil and beyond redemption, and the only way for man to be saved is to “free himself” from his material shell and become purely spirit. This of course stands in total opposition to the Christian revelation, which proclaims that the material world is not evil, only fallen, and that mankind and all of creation is raised up and restored by being joined to God through the incarnation of Christ.

The apostles fought Gnosticism fiercely. St. John wrote against the Gnostic denial by saying, “By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist…” (1 John 4:2-3) Lest anyone fail to understand the reality of the incarnation, St. Paul wrote clearly, “In Him [Jesus Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9)

The apostles were unabashedly incarnational in their faith and understood that God had joined Himself to man in order that man might be filled with God, ever progressing toward “God-likeness”, being “partakers of the divine nature” as St. Peter wrote. And it is this very thing that the holy icons of the Church portray so well. They show Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh, not merely “appearing” as a man, but literally becoming a man, by adding a true and complete human nature to Himself. They depict His holy ones, the saints, as being human beings filled with God and transformed from their fallen state to a new and higher state through their union with the divine in Christ. What the apostles knew, and the holy icons portray perfectly, is that the joining of humanity to deity in the person of the Son of God, fills man with the energies of His divine nature, restoring the image of God in us, healing the sickness of sin, and leading us to glorification.

This profound understanding of the incarnation with all its salvific ramifications has been greatly watered-down in contemporary Christian theology. Many of today’s Christians have little concept of the incarnation other than the notion that Jesus took flesh in order to die for us upon the cross. The fuller meaning of His incarnation, including the essential Christian concept of theosis so boldly described by St. Athanasius with the words, “God became man so that man might become God,” seems strange and even unchristian to many believers today. They see salvation not so much as the restoration and glorification of humanity in Christ, but mostly as God forgiving our sins in order to save us from His own wrath. They depict grace as an “attitude” of God toward man, rather than as the transformational power given to man through Christ. They see Christian transformation itself as largely a mental process focused on gaining bible knowledge and “right thinking” which allegedly leads to a knowledge of God. This is not unlike what the Gnostics themselves believed, for they also focused on knowledge as the only true path to God.

To put it bluntly, the traditional, Orthodox Christian understanding of the incarnation of Christ is a little too “carnal” for the theological tastes of many modern believers, unknowingly influenced by Gnosticism. In their minds it makes God a little too “intimate” with humanity. It also by extension makes the highly incarnational sacraments of the Eucharist and Christian baptism a bit too “real”. Many Christians prefer to spiritualize these things and reduce them to being symbolic only, lacking any material content. My friends, this is Gnosticism, alive and well, and finding a welcome home in much of contemporary Christian theology.

It’s not surprising therefore that we Orthodox Christians often take a little heat from some of our brethren outside of Eastern Orthodoxy for our use of icons. We are falsely accused of “worshipping” icons and often hear the same tired arguments that the original iconoclasts used, namely that any use of icons is a violation of God’s commandments. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as the saying goes.

Orthodox Christians do not “worship” icons, nor the saints that they depict. We venerate or give honor to the saints by kissing their images as one might affectionately kiss the treasured photograph of any loved one. Icons therefore not only portray profound divine truths concerning our salvation, but they are also tremendously important to us on the human level, connecting us with Christ and His saints in ways that words and concepts alone cannot accomplish with such satisfaction. Have you noticed that when people are forced to abandon their homes in times of sudden disaster, the two things they most desire to take with them are their financial records and their family photo albums? All those images are so important to the process of connecting us to our family and of reminding us who we are. Icons fulfill a similar human need. Beyond teaching us vital Christian theology, they connect us in real ways to our heavenly family, while definitely reminding us of who we are and of our holy calling in Christ.

This is the fundamental failure of Gnosticism. At its heart it is a denial of that which is human. It focuses on the renewal of the intellect as the only “savable” part of man, and abandons the rest of our humanity as useless. Any contemporary Christian teaching which also focuses exclusively on the “spiritual” aspects of man, while marginalizing or despising the material aspects of our humanity or our salvation, has also failed to embrace true Christianity.

This is why the Seventh Ecumenical council of the Orthodox Church chose to include in its synodikon or “statement of faith” regarding the holy icons a series of anathemas concerning all those who reject the proper Christian use of icons. Most parishes today do not include the anathemas in the synodikon for fear of offending non-Orthodox visitors. But properly understood, these anathemas are not intended as abusive judgments of other believers, but as sincere warnings to them. They state that those who reject the Christian use of icons, or who equate icons with idols, or icon-veneration with idol-worship, stand accursed. When we see that the rejection of icons is rooted in Gnostic thought and leads to the watering-down of Christian theology, these warnings ring true and can be seen as expressions of concern for others, much like a highway sign reading, “Bridge out ahead! Turn back immediately!” The Church is not in the business of putting curses on people, but of saving them. And this is the true purpose of the anathemas; to warn, to direct toward repentance, to save from error.

There is much error pervading Christendom today. When so many of our friends argue against the holy icons, unaware that by so doing they are attacking historic Christianity and aligning themselves with eighth-century heretics, things have definitely gone bad. This is yet another reason why we must keep the traditional use of icons alive in our generation, and fill our churches, our homes, and our lives with these blessed images, properly understood and properly and faithfully used.

+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Prodigal Son

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

Continuing our pre-lenten preparations, we come today to the story of the Prodigal Son. Many people consider this their favorite gospel lesson, because it reveals the great compassion and forgiveness of God the Father toward all straying people who repent and return to His love.

In his classic book, Great Lent, Journey to Pascha, Fr. Alexander Schmemann (OBM) described this parable as the story of man’s return from exile. In that sense, the Prodigal Son represents both mankind in general and each of us individually. As a race, mankind has certainly left God and found itself in exile in a far country, a fallen condition, distant and removed from communion with God, and broken and defiled because of it. Individually speaking, the hope is that each of us will “come to our senses” as the Prodigal did, awaken to whatever dismal state we may find ourselves in, and make our own return to God through repentance.

In both cases, the “far country” spoken of in the parable is not a matter of geographical distance, but of spiritual distance. A person need not be far from the Church to be a prodigal; he can equally be a professing Christian in apparent good standing, faithfully attending services each Sunday, and yet still be distant and removed from God in his heart. It is in fact this latter description that we should pay closer attention to, for there is a greater chance it could describe us.

I’m certain that the majority of us here this morning are people of good intent, who come to church because we genuinely want to, and have within us some urge to seek God. At the same time, because the work of repentance is so difficult and our resolve is often so weak, it may be that we soon find ourselves in a comfortable routine of minimal repentance, minimal participation, and minimal communion with our Heavenly Father...and fairly content with that. In such a case, we too may be living in exile, in a “far country” representing the distance we keep from God in our daily lives.

Perhaps we can’t exactly say that zeal for our Father’s house consumes us, or even singes us. At best it warms us somewhat. And I suppose that’s better than being completely cold toward God. But while most of us feel that we could certainly be more faithful in seeking God, at the same time there seems to be a kind of spiritual sleepiness that keeps us from embracing the Christian life as diligently and faithfully as we might wish. And this often leaves us--when we dare to think about it--feeling pretty bad about ourselves.

We essentially have two ways of dealing with this. The first is to just get used to feeling bad, and live with assumption that a nagging sense of guilt just goes along with being a Christian. Guilt in fact may be such a long-time companion for many of us that we can barely imagine living without it. But if you’ve lived with this, you know what a bad companion guilt is, and what a terrible motivator it is in getting us to live for God. Actually, guilt usually sends us in the opposite direction, doesn’t it? We feel that we can never do enough to please God and so we just sort of give up on being zealous Christians, and settle in at a comfortable distance from God. We can see this as the best that we can hope for, or perhaps as the best that we deserve.

But I’d like to suggest that there is another way.

Something I find interesting about today’s parable is that there is absolutely no mention of the Prodigal Son feeling guilty over his sins. When he “comes to his senses” amongst the swine and begins to realize he must return to his father’s house, guilt doesn’t appear to be his primary motivator. He didn’t say, “Oh my goodness, what have I done? I have squandered my beautiful inheritance and lost all that my father bestowed upon me! Dear me, my self-esteem is really low right now!” No, he didn’t say that and it’s a very good thing he did not, for in that case he probably wouldn’t have found any desire to return home. So what brought him back? Very simply, he was starving to death and knew that his good and kind father would feed him and restore him to life.

That’s it! That’s all there was to it! It may not sound very noble, but true repentance rarely is. The repentant person is generally one who has run out of pride and excuses and has finally come to the painful awareness that he must return to God or die. What ultimately brings us back to God and awakens faithfulness within us is not guilt, but the realization that we are dead without God, and cannot live another day without His mercy.

I suppose we all think that we already know this. After all, we are mature Christians, most of us, and quite wise. But is it possible that we may not quite be the tree-full of owls that we imagine ourselves to be, and in fact are focusing more on our own piety and faithfulness than on the mercy of our Heavenly Father? If so, we will never find joy in the Christian life.

In the parable, our Lord Jesus described the Prodigal as “coming to his senses”. This implies a kind of awakening; a flash of clear thought invading a confused and darkened mind not used to such light, but recognizing it immediately as truth. This awakening not only allowed him to finally see his terrible condition, but also and perhaps for the very first time in his life, to see how important his father and his father’s house was to his survival.

It could be that we very much need this same kind of awakening. Without it, the spiritual helps of Orthodoxy become so many “chores” that we leave undone, and feel guilty because of it. For example, we might focus on how hard it is to keep our rule of prayer and feel bad that we aren’t more “spiritual,” instead of seeing what that rule itself is trying to show us, namely that we are a broken and spiritually-dysfunctional people so in need of the mercy of God to transform us. The very fact that it’s so hard for us to keep a simple rule of prayer should demonstrate to us how removed we are from God and how much we need His life!

In the Psalms we often see the writers depicting themselves as broken and powerless, and surrounded by many enemies to boot! Their prayer was never “religious,” but a direct and fervent plea: “God save me! God deliver me from those that seek after my life! God hasten to my salvation!” In the gospels we often see the same thing. The blind man didn’t make some pious prayer, but fervently cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The Canaanite Woman, despite her utter alienation from the God of the Jews, begged Jesus to have mercy on her and her demon-possessed daughter.

When we see that our souls are sleepy and cannot persist in any sort of spiritual discipline, when our minds wander about in prayer or at church, when we are attacked by evil thoughts and temptations of every kind, this is not the time to be self-absorbed and feel guilty over our bad condition; this is the time to cry out to God and say, “Save me O Lord! Be merciful to me the work of Thy hands! Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!”

I’m not saying we need to become more emotional, maybe just more real. We need to ask God to awaken us to reality, so that when we stand before Him in prayer, when we undertake the spiritual disciplines of Lent, when we make the extra effort to come to the lenten services or whatever God has put before us to do, we will do so with one simple desire: that God would save us, that He would deliver us from our enemies, that He would restore us to life.

Let me offer one final reflection here in conclusion. It’s possible that Orthodoxy took many of us by surprise. When we first entered the Church, we may have had visions of becoming holy people pretty quickly, but found in just a short while that we only seemed to get worse. The spiritual disciplines of Orthodoxy, which at first seemed so wonderful, soon became impossibly difficult and we may have begun to wonder if Orthodoxy was right for us.

May I suggest to you that Orthodoxy was only doing in us what it was designed by God to do. It knocks down pride and false spirituality, and shows us our true human condition. This is a painful and difficult process but a necessary one, for only sinners come to God; the prideful, the vain-religious, the self-righteous never do. The people who become truly holy in the Church are the ones who first suffer the agony of seeing themselves as deeply sinful and in need of God’s mercy. Only then do we come to our senses, leave the swine-pen, and begin our return to God.

The bottom line is that we need our Heavenly Father. He is the reason for all that we do, and the reward of all that we seek. May He mercifully awaken each of us to this truth.

+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Woman of "Canine"

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.

As we continue our pre-lenten preparation, today’s gospel lesson focuses on the faith of the Canaanite woman as described in Matthew 15, verses 21-28. This is a story that some people find rather disturbing because they have a hard time understanding why our Lord made such a harsh statement to the woman who came to Him seeking the healing of her severely demon-possessed daughter. As we heard, Christ actually referred to the woman as a “dog” in saying that it was not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. The “children” of which He spoke were of course the children of Israel, to whom He had come to bring the “bread” of salvation and the mercy of God. But why would He be so rude as to call this woman of Canaan a dog?

It is a sad truth that the Jews of Christ’s time customarily referred to the Gentile pagans as “dogs” because they had come to view them as unworthy of the grace and calling of God that had historically been bestowed upon themselves. This is of course a very common human problem. People of any given race or nationality or religion or even political affiliation may regard themselves as superior in one way or another to all others, and thus can readily justify mean, outrageous, or even cruel treatment of all who are seen as inferior.

I don’t believe that Jesus was simply perpetuating ancient Jewish bigotry here, but was in fact making a strong and necessary move to end it. Remember that it was His own disciples who had been asking Him to send this woman away because of her race, and the fact that she had been pestering them for help. Our Lord was possibly saddened by their closed-mindedness and lack of compassion, and so responded to the woman with exactly the same rude attitude that they were demonstrating. It makes me wonder if He didn’t actually embarrass them by doing this.

By calling this woman a dog right to her face and in front of all His disciples--a woman that He was just seconds away from praising for her great and exemplary faith--Christ was exposing the shameful, triumphalistic attitude they held in their hearts. It is a fact that Christ’s disciples would one day finally learn that the gospel is for all peoples, and not just for the Jews alone. But this was a tough concept for them to get their minds around, and needed a tough cure. We see perhaps the very beginning of that cure being applied here.

Strangely enough, the woman did not seem fazed by this insult. I imagine there are at least three reasons for this. First, it’s quite possible she had expected this sort of treatment from the Jews and had girded herself to face it. That demonstrates both remarkable humility and great determination on her part. Second, it is likely that the love of Christ was so obvious and apparent that the woman simply could not take His comment badly. Have you ever had someone who loved you very much say something that was hard to take, but because they loved you, it softened the blow? In this case, as repulsive as the words might have been, the love of Christ was so great that she was still drawn to Him in hope. She even adopted the insult, likening herself and her fellow Gentiles to the little puppies that gratefully lick up the crumbs that fall from their master’s table. I’m betting that the disciples were utterly astonished at the wisdom of her comeback, and when Christ joyously granted her request, there was not a peep of complaint out of any one of them. This woman had flat-out taken them to school and they knew it.

But I said that there were three reasons why the woman would not let herself be put off by Christ’s initial response and the third is really the main and most important reason. She desperately needed the mercy of Christ to heal her daughter, and because of this, she would not stop asking and pleading her case until she received her answer.

This is exactly the same way that Christ taught us to approach God with our needs. He told us to keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Everyone who asks, receives. He who seeks, shall find. And to the one who keeps knocking, the door shall be opened. In other words, perseverance and persistence is needed in our prayers and in our requests to God. But we often lack this kind of determination and stick-to-it-tiveness. We may be reluctant to bring our prayers to God at all, and when we don’t receive an immediate and gratifying answer, we tend to lose heart and give up quickly. We might lack the faith and simple obedience to Christ that even this Canaanite woman showed. Now who’s taking who to school?

In addition to this, we often create artificial barriers between ourselves and our God. The scriptures tell us that God has broken down the dividing wall between us and Him, but we have a tendency to re-stack old bricks and lay new walls between us. We tell ourselves for example that we are not worthy of God’s mercy, and therefore it’s no wonder that He doesn’t listen to our prayers or heed our requests. It’s ironic that we might be so weak and feint of heart to believe in what God will do for us, but we have more than enough brass to decide what God won’t do for us. Isn’t that strange?

If ever there was a person who had reason to believe that Jesus would deny her request it was the Canaanite woman. She was after all a pagan, whose people historically worshipped such false gods as Baal and El, together with a bewildering array of many other household gods and goddesses. These are not exactly the best religious credentials to bring to the Jewish Messiah. Yet she boldly drew near to Jesus because she had heard of His great love and compassion for all, and was willing to put her complete trust in Him.

What can this teach us?

The story of the Canaanite woman can be described as a story of faith overcoming all human obstacles to gain its reward from Jesus Christ. Can we be so bold as to say in fact that any obstacles between ourselves and God are indeed human obstacles that we ourselves have placed there? Our lack of faith, our sense of guilt over our sins, our spiritual sloth or indifference, our unwillingness to change what needs to be changed in our lives, are all walls that we have built and must take down once again.

I think the most important thing that this story tells us is that it isn’t all about us and our limitations; it’s all about Jesus and His limitless mercy and love. As we prepare ourselves for Great Lent, we must do something that may prove to be incredibly difficult and uncomfortable for us: we must turn our attention away from ourselves for a few terrible weeks and place it upon God. Had the Canaanite woman focused on herself and all the good reasons why Jesus might likely deny her, she would never have found the courage to leave home to gain salvation and the healing of her daughter. It is the same for us. We can stay locked in our own misery, counting all the reasons why God shouldn’t help us, or we can dare to place our hope on Him, believing that He is both willing and able to help us. Will we choose hope or misery?

Yes, it’s really all about Jesus. Great Lent is a spiritual journey, a sort of Orthodox “walkabout” if you will. But it is no ego-centric, “new-agey” journey of self-discovery. Most of us have already discovered ourselves, and likely did not care for what we found. Lent, by contrast, is a journey to discover Jesus, and in discovering Him, finding our True Hope and the Savior of our souls. This is a journey well worth taking, and may God direct us in following it.

+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.