Homily for the Feast Day of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

1 Corinthians 4:9-16; Matthew 9:9-13

As we begin the Nativity Fast in preparation to enter into the great joy of the Savior’s birth, we do so with the recognition that salvation has come to the world through what appeared at the time as utter foolishness.  The eternal Son of God became a human being, born in lowly circumstances in a barn. Imagine how His coming looked to the leaders of the Jewish people who had no expectation of the God-Man, a truly divine Messiah with a virgin mother.  They had wanted a powerful political and military leader who would deliver their nation from the occupation of the Roman Empire.  They also expected their deliverer to be a strict teacher of religious law who would bring earthly blessings upon the righteous and condemnation upon Gentiles and sinners.    

            Jesus Christ certainly did not fit their expectations either at His birth or throughout His public ministry.  On this feast day of St. Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist, we remember that He called Matthew, a tax collector, to be His disciple.  As we remember from the story of Zaccheus, tax collectors were Jews who worked for the Romans, collecting more than was required from their own people and living off the difference.  Their fellow Jews hated them as traitors and thieves.  No one would have expected the Messiah of Israel to call a tax collector to follow Him as a disciple, but that is precisely what the Lord did.  If that were not shocking enough, He also ate with tax collectors and sinners, which in that time and place was seen as participating in their uncleanness.    In the eyes of the Pharisees, Christ defiled Himself and broke the Old Testament law by doing so.   For the Messiah to act in such ways was worse than foolishness; it was blasphemy and a sign that He was not a righteous Jew, let alone the one anointed to fulfill God’s promises to Abraham.    

            In response, the Lord made clear that His apparent wickedness demonstrated a much higher righteousness than that of His critics.  He said that sick people, not healthy ones, are in need of a doctor’s care.   He said that He came to call not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.  Who requires healing, the sick or the well?  Who needs to repent, those who are already faithful or those who are not?  Christ quoted the Old Testament to remind His opponents that God desired mercy and not sacrifice.  In other words, He related to others in ways that embodied the divine compassion toward corrupt and broken people.  He came to heal every infirmity and to restore the fallen image of God in us all, which is why He offered Himself fully on the Cross for the salvation of the world and conquered death through His glorious resurrection.   As so many of the Old Testament prophets had proclaimed, religious ceremonies and rules are worthless for those who refuse to manifest God’s mercy to the human beings they encounter every day.  In conveying the divine compassion to those considered God’s enemies, Christ appeared to be a sacrilegious fool in the eyes of those who had so terribly distorted the faith of Israel.  

            Saint Paul wrote about the ministry of the apostles that they were fools for Christ’s sake.  Before Christianity was popular, established, or well-known anywhere, they left everything behind for a ministry that led to poverty, persecution, and death.   Like the countless martyrs of Christian history throughout the centuries, the apostles certainly appeared as fools to the vast majority of people in their time and place.  Why risk your life for the memory of an obscure Jewish rabbi?  Why not burn some incense to Caesar, become a Muslim, or join the Communist Party?  Why lose your own life for saving Jews from the Holocaust, as did St. Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris? 

            Those of us who face no real persecution for our faith must recognize that Christ still calls us to be fools for His sake in our lives every day.  He scandalized the self-righteous by calling St. Matthew to follow Him and by associating with people of bad reputation.  Christ did not endorse their sins, but He endured criticism in order to draw them to repentance and healing.  He showed them the mercy of God by building loving relationships with them that made it possible to invite them to recover the beauty of their souls. If we are truly sharing in the life of the Savior, we must not become like those who judged Him for treating tax collectors and sinners with compassion.  We must not demonize and condemn our neighbors whose ways of life are not the paths to holiness that we seek to pursue as Orthodox Christians.  Doing so will not draw anyone to the blessedness of the Kingdom, but it will bring judgment upon us for our pride and self-righteousness.  We will then be just like the Pharisees who criticized the Lord for keeping company with disreputable people. 

            Our calling is to remain faithful to the teachings and practices of Orthodox Christianity as exemplified by the saints across the ages.  It is not to accept the lie that all behaviors and beliefs are somehow equally good and holy. That would not be the way of the Lord, Who told His disciples that “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt. 5: 20) Such righteousness requires that we are so transformed by His grace that we do not abandon our loved ones, friends, and acquaintances when they lose their way and make disastrous decisions about how to order their lives.  Our calling is to treat others as the Lord treats us, who are each “the chief of sinners.”   Our Savior looked like a fool to many when He kept company with people known to be sinners, and we should not be afraid to follow His example in maintaining relationships that serve as a signs of God’s steadfast love to broken and confused people whose burdens we never know fully.  If they do not experience a measure of the love of Christ through us, then how will they be drawn to the life of the Kingdom?  If they experience Christians as people who want nothing to do with them, why would they ever want to have anything to do with Christ?

We sometimes forget that those who responded best to the Lord were those who were completely shocked to receive His care, for they knew that they appeared to be lost causes.  That was surely the case for both St. Matthew and St. Zachaeus as tax collectors, thieves, and traitors.   The same was true for St. Photini, the Samaritan woman at the well with a very broken person life, who became a great evangelist and martyr.  The Canaanite woman with a demon-possessed daughter understood that God’s blessings were not only for the Jews far more clearly than did the disciples, and the Savior set her child free.  The only one of the ten lepers who returned to Christ to thank Him for his healing was a Samaritan.  The Lord said that the faith of the Roman centurion, whose servant He healed, surpassed that of any of the Jews.  He said of the sinful woman who anointed and kissed His feet in the house of Simon “her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” (Lk. 7:47)   Their examples show that it is not our place to declare anyone as a lost cause before the mercy of the Lord.  

            In order to have the spiritual strength and clarity to discern how to build relationships with neighbors that convey the healing mercy of Christ, we need the spiritual disciplines of the Nativity Fast, such as prayer, fasting, repentance, generosity to the needy, and reconciliation with those from whom we have become estranged.   These practices also appear foolish in our culture, especially this time of year with its focus on self-indulgence and consumerism.  The great irony is that this season is one of preparation to receive Christ Who, both at His birth and throughout His ministry, looked like a fool according to the conventional standards of His day.  But through what appeared to be foolish, He made—and continues to make-- saints out of tax-collectors, prostitutes, adulterers,  murderers, Gentiles, and other unlikely characters.  So in the weeks before Christmas, let us embrace our calling to live in what seem to be foolish ways that will draw others to the celebration of the birth of the Savior not only on December 25, but in their hearts and lives every day of the year—no matter who they are and no matter what they have done. Christ was born because our only hope, like theirs, is in His mercy for sinners.      

             

Lazarus and the Rich Man: Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost & Fifth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Galatians 2:16-20; Luke 16:19-31

 

It is tragic that some distort the way of Christ into a magical formula for becoming wealthy and successful according to conventional standards.  It is pathetic that some misinterpret the demands of God’s Kingdom to support whatever political or cultural agenda they happen to like.  Our recent readings from the gospel according to St. Luke present the way of Christ very differently, for they demonstrate that He often made those who were last in the eyes of the world the first to receive His healing mercy.  Remember the grieving widow of Nain whose only son He raised from death.  Recall the Gadarene demoniac, a Gentile whom He restored from a wretched existence of isolation and fear.  And today we remember poor Lazarus.

 

A rich man with the benefit of the great spiritual heritage of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets had become such a slave to gratifying his desires for indulgence in pleasure that he had become completely blind to his responsibility to show mercy to Lazarus, a miserable beggar who wanted only crumbs and whose only comfort was when dogs licked his open sores.  The rich man’s life revolved around wearing the most expensive clothes and enjoying the finest food and drink. He surely stepped over or around Lazarus at the entrance to his home on a regular basis and never did anything at all to relieve his suffering.  

 

After their deaths, the two men’s situations were reversed.  The rich man had spent his life rejecting the teachings of Moses and the prophets about the necessity of showing mercy to the poor.   He had blinded himself spiritually to the point that he could not recognize Lazarus as a neighbor who bore the image of God.  He remained blind to the love of God after his death and could perceive the divine majesty as only a burning flame of torment.  When the rich man asked Father Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them of the consequences of living such a depraved life, the great patriarch responded, “‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”

 

That statement applies to the corrupt religious leaders who called for Christ’s crucifixion and denied His resurrection because they wanted a warrior king who would slaughter their enemies and give them earthly power.  We must not rest content, however, with seeing how the Lord’s statement applies to others, for it challenges us even more as those who have received the fullness of the mystery of God’s salvation.  Our responsibility is far greater than that of the Jews of old, for as members of Christ’s Body, the Church, the Holy Spirit strengthens and sustains us in seeing and serving our Lord in our neighbors.  Since every human person is an icon of God, how we treat them reveals our relationship to Him.  Christ taught that what we do “to the least of these,” to the most wretched people, we do to Him.  If we become so obsessed with gratifying our own desires for pleasure or impressing others that we refuse to convey His mercy to our neighbors, our actions will show that we have rejected our Messiah and denied the truth of His resurrection.  We will then be unable to bear witness to His victory over the corrupting power of sin and death.  Regardless of what we say we believe or our membership in the Church, our actions will demonstrate that we want no part of the salvation that the God-Man has brought to the world.   Like the rich man, we will exclude ourselves from the joy of the Kingdom.  Remember the words of the Lord: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.”  (Matt. 7:21)  

 

Lazarus, like everyone else, bore the image and likeness of God.  There is simply no way around the basic truth that how we relate to our neighbors reveals how we relate to our Lord.  What we do for even the most miserable and inconvenient people we encounter in life, we do for Christ.  And what we refuse to do for them, we refuse to do for our Savior.  Our salvation is in becoming more like Him as we find the healing of our souls by cooperating with His grace.  While we cannot save ourselves any more than we can rise up by our own power from the grave, we must take up the struggle to order our lives according to His commandments in order to open our souls in humility to receive His healing mercy as “partakers of the divine nature.” If we do not do that, we will suffer the spiritual blindness of the rich man in today’s gospel lesson and bring judgment upon ourselves, regardless of how much or how little of the world’s treasures we have. 

 

In the midst of our materialistic and consumeristic culture, it is easy to overlook St. Paul’s warning that “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”  (1 Tim. 6: 9-10)   Wealth is not evil in and of itself, but orienting our lives around it so easily becomes a false god that inflames passions of greed, fear, self-centeredness, and a lack of love for our neighbors.  Due to love of money and the self-indulgence it fuels, the rich man in today’s parable became so enslaved to his passions that he closed his heart completely to his neighbors, even to one so obviously suffering right before his eyes. Because he would not show love for poor Lazarus, he degraded himself to the point that he simply could not love God.   As St. John wrote, “whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 Jn. 3:17) The Lord Himself taught that love of God and neighbor are the greatest of the commandments. (Matt. 22: 37-40).   It is no surprise, then, that the rich man experienced the torment of bitter regret after his death, for he was in the eternal presence of the Lord Whom he had rejected throughout his life.  He had learned to love only himself, having turned away decisively from God’s love.  Hence, he was capable of perceiving the divine glory as only a burning flame.  As St. Basil the Great proclaimed to the rich who refused to share with the poor, “You showed no mercy; it will not be shown to you.  You opened not your house; you will be expelled from the Kingdom.  You gave not your bread; you will not receive eternal life.”[1]

 

Some struggle to understand how the requirement of living righteously relates to the gracious mercy of God.  This difficulty often roots in a misunderstanding of our epistle reading from St. Paul when he teaches that we are “not justified by works of the Law but through faith in Jesus Christ.”  The Apostle was responding to the insistence of some of his fellow Jewish Christians that Gentile converts had to be circumcised and become observant Jews before being baptized.  He taught that this perspective, which he strongly rejected, replaced trust in the gracious mercy of the Savior with obedience to religious rules as the very foundation of our hope for sharing in eternal life.  That is a completely different matter, however, from discerning what it means to live faithfully as those who are entrusting themselves to the mercy of Christ.  For example, St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that persisting in gravely sinful behavior has devastating spiritual consequences.  He includes thieves, the covetous, and extortioners, along with idolators and others, among those who will not inherit the Kingdom of God, if they do not find the healing of their souls through repentance. (1 Cor. 6: 9-10)

 

There is no competition between faith and faithfulness, which are like two sides of the same coin. Since the Savior taught that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” we must invest the treasure of our time, talents, and energy in tangible actions that convey the mercy of the Savior to the poor Lazaruses of our lives, as well as to those who grieve like the widow of Nain and who suffer like the Gadarene demoniac.  (Matt. 6:21) Doing so is not a matter of religious legalism but of offering ourselves to the Lord in union with His great Self-offering for the salvation of the world.  It is a matter of living as those who are in communion with Christ. His Kingdom stands in stark contradiction to the ways of the corrupt world.  If we are to gain the spiritual clarity to behold His glory as something other than a burning flame, then our lives must embody the same gracious mercy that we ask from Him every day of our lives.  That is how we will be able to say truthfully with St. Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

 

 

 

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[1]Basil the Great, “To the Rich,” On Social Justice, 49.

Homily for the Great Martyr Demetrios the Myrrh-Streaming & the Sixth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

Timothy 2:1-10; Luke 8:26-39

 

            St. Irenaeus wrote that “The glory of God is a man fully alive, and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Adv. haer. 4.20.7).”  To be a human person is to bear the image of God with the calling to become more like Him in holiness.  The more we do so, the more we become our true selves.  The God-Man Jesus Christ came to restore and fulfill us as living icons of God.  He enables us to become truly human as we grow in union with Him, the Second Adam.  As St. Paul wrote, “For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.”  (2 Cor. 1:20)

            If we need a clear example of how the Lord has extended the ancient promises to Abraham to all people to restore the beauty of our darkened souls, we need look no further than today’s gospel reading about a man so miserable that he was barely recognizable as a human person.  He had no illusions about himself, for he was so filled with demons that he called himself “Legion.” (A legion was a large unit of the Roman army made up of 5,000 soldiers.) His personality had disintegrated due to the overwhelming power of the forces of evil in his life.  That is shown by the fact that he was naked, like Adam and Eve who had stripped themselves of the divine glory and were cast out of Paradise into our world of corruption.  He lived among the tombs, and death is “the wages of sin” that came into the world as a consequence of our first parents’ refusal to fulfill their calling to become like God in holiness.  This naked man living in the cemetery was so terrifying to others that they tried unsuccessfully to restrain him with chains.  People understandably feared that he would do to them what Cain had done to Abel.  But when this fellow broke free, he would run off to the desert by himself, alone with his demons.  The Gadarene demoniac provides a vivid icon of the pathetic suffering of humanity enslaved to death, stripped naked of the divine glory, and isolated in fear.  His wretched condition manifests the tragic disintegration of the human person that the Savior came to heal.   

            Evil was so firmly rooted in this man’s soul that his reaction to the Lord’s command for the demons to depart is shocking: “What have you to do with me?...I ask you, do not torment me.”  He had abandoned hope for healing and perceived Christ’s promise of deliverance simply as even further torment.  By telling the Lord that his name was Legion, he acknowledged that the line between the many demons and his own identity had been blurred.  He had lost his sense of self to the point that it was not clear where he ended and the demons began.  The Savior then cast the demons into the herd of pigs, which ran into the lake and drowned.  In the Old Testament context, pigs were unclean, and here the forces of evil lead even them to destruction. 

            Perhaps there is no clearer image of how evil debases our personhood than the plight of this miserable man.    He is an icon of our brokenness and represents us all.  He did not ask Christ to deliver him, even as we did not take the initiative in the Savior’s coming to the world.   The corrupting forces of evil were so powerful in this man’s life that he had lost all awareness of being a person in God’s image and likeness.  We can also become so consumed by our inflamed passions that we simply ignore that we are living icons of God.  When that happens, we would rather that Christ leave us alone to wallow in the mire of our sins than to heal us.  We can easily become overwhelmed with fear that His salvation will simply torment us, for sometimes we cannot even imagine living without the corruption that has become so familiar.  

            After the spectacular drowning of the swine, the man in question was “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”  The one who had not been recognizably human returned to being his true self.  That was a very upsetting scene to the people of that region and they asked Christ to leave out of fear at what had happened.  We may find their reaction hard to understand.  What could be so terrifying about this man returning to a normal life?  Unfortunately, we all tend to get used to whatever we get used to.  What we have experienced routinely in ourselves or from others, no matter how depraved, becomes normal to us.  The scary man in the tombs was afraid when Christ came to set him free, but his neighbors seemed even more disturbed when they saw that he had been liberated.  

            It should not be surprising that the man formerly possessed by demons and still feared by his neighbors did not want to stay in his hometown after the Lord restored him.  He begged to go with Christ, Who responded, “Return to your home, and declare all that God has done for you.”  That must have been a difficult commandment for him to obey.  Who would not be embarrassed and afraid to live in a town where everyone knew about the wretched and miserable existence he had experienced?  It would have been much easier to have left all that behind and start over as a traveling disciple of the One who had set him free.

            But that was not what Christ wanted the man to do.  Perhaps that was because the Lord knew that the best sign of His transforming power was a living person who had been restored from the worst forms of depravity and corruption.   There could not be a better witness to the salvation that the God-Man has brought to the world than a person who so obviously moved from death to life.  Such a radical change is a brilliant sign of Christ’s resurrection, for He makes us participants in His victory over death by breaking the destructive hold of the power of sin in our lives.   

            Today we commemorate the Great Martyr Demetrios the Myrrh-Streaming, an accomplished military leader who refused to worship the false gods of the Roman Empire and boldly proclaimed Christ.  After his arrest for being a Christian, he was slain at the command of Emperor Maximian when the young Christian Nestor, whom Demetrios had blessed, slew the giant Lyaeus in the gladiatorial games with the plea “God of Demetrios, help me!”  The emperor then had Nestor killed also. St. Demetrios’ relics continue to exude myrrh as a sign of God’s blessing and healing through the intercessions of this great martyr.

            St. Paul instructed St. Timothy to “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.”  The discipline and self-sacrifice of military members to this day requires accepting the possibility of suffering even to the point of death.  Many who survive combat physically endure spiritual, psychological, and physical wounds for the rest of their lives. The witness of model soldiers like St. Demetrios to the lordship of Christ required a deep level of suffering, for he willingly accepted the humiliation of losing his exalted status in Rome and being arrested and killed at the command of his emperor.  He is not a saint because of his military prowess but because, despite the grave dangers to the soul of shedding the blood of others, he gained the spiritual strength to make the ultimate witness of shedding his own blood. The many military martyrs of the early Church embodied the soldierly virtues of courage, discipline, obedience, and self-sacrifice when they laid down their lives out of loyalty to a Kingdom that stands in judgment over even the most laudable realms of this world.  Empires, nations, and their rulers can never heal our souls or raise the dead, but they can easily tempt us to the paganism of making them our highest good.    

If we are to follow the blessed example of St. Demetrios, we must refuse to entangle ourselves in anything, including the worship of earthly realms, that hinders us from becoming like the man formerly possessed by demons who sat “at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”  He was also surely a good soldier of the Lord.  Doing so requires the discipline of enduring the suffering necessary to turn away from gratifying passions that have become second nature to us.  We may be terrified of doing so, fearing what it means to live without sins that have become part of our character. We may have become comfortable losing our true selves in the face of our temptations.  Nonetheless, we must cultivate the courage of the man who, though he wanted to follow Christ into places where no one knew him, obeyed the command to “Return to your home, and declare all that God has done for you.”  Embracing Christ’s healing of our souls is not a matter of satisfying our preferences but of steadfastly enduring the tension and struggle that are necessary to become the evermore beautiful living icons of God that He created us to be.  Doing so requires engaging the battle every day to become fully alive and behold the glory of God.  That is simply what it means to be “a good soldier of Christ Jesus” as we fulfill our vocation to become like Him in holiness, no matter the cost.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homily for Saint Luke and the Widow of Nain in the Orthodox Church

 Luke 7:11-16

Yesterday was the feast day of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke, the patron saint of our parish.  As the author of both a gospel and Acts, St. Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else. He was also the first iconographer.   Luke was a Gentile and emphasized that those who responded best to the Lord were often those least expected to.  He is the only evangelist to record the parables of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the Pharisee and the Publican.  He reports that St. Zacharias, an aged priest who should have known better, doubted the word of the Archangel Gabriel that he and St. Elizabeth would conceive a child, St. John the Forerunner, despite their barrenness and old age.  In other words, he and his wife would be blessed as were Abraham and Sarah, whose story he surely knew quite well.  Then Luke tells us of the Theotokos’ humble acceptance of the Archangel’s astonishing announcement that she would be the virgin mother of the Savior: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.  Let it be to me according to your word.” (Lk. 1:5-38) Who would have expected that a young virgin girl would have responded better to this incredible news than an old priest had to a continuation of what God had done at the foundation of the house of Israel? 

St. Luke was a physician, which may be part of the reason that he records the meeting of the Theotokos and St. Elizabeth during their pregnancies, when John leaped in the womb in miraculous recognition of the presence of the Lord.  Elizabeth was then filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaimed, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”  In response, the Theotokos speaks the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.  For He has regarded the lowly estate of His maidservant; for behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” (Lk. 1:39-48) Luke describes the interaction of two pregnant women, both in unlikely circumstances, who literally embody how God’s salvation is coming into the world.  They embrace their roles at the very center of the story in ways that challenged dominant assumptions about the relative unimportance of women in that time and place.

St. Luke writes that the Theotokos’ song of praise continues with bold prophetic speech about God’s reversal of the standards of our corrupt world: “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.  He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty.” (Lk. 51-53)  It is no surprise, then, that Luke alone records the Savior saying: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.  Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger.  Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.  Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”  (Lk. 6:24-26) The gospel according to St. Luke portrays the Kingdom of our Lord in ways that challenged dominant assumptions about power, wealth, and fame in this world as a sign of God’s favor and a reward for virtue.  Indeed, Christ teaches that they are often the complete opposite.    

In St. Luke’s description of the beginning of Christ’s public ministry, He fulfills this prophecy from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, and to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Lk.4:18-19)  We would have to be spiritually dense not to comprehend that the Lord came to share His gracious mercy with those in great need in every dimension of their personhood as living icons of God.  We will fool only ourselves if we assume that malnourishment, homelessness, disease, trauma, imprisonment, and injustice are spiritually irrelevant.  Were that the case, why would the Savior teach that however we treat “the least of these” is how we treat Him?   St. Luke interprets our Lord’s ministry in a way that highlights how His salvation is a blessing especially for those who are weak and suffering in this world.  If we are truly uniting ourselves to Christ in faith and faithfulness, we must manifest His love in practical, tangible ways to our neighbors who are in need.  If we refuse to do so, we risk falling into an illusory spirituality that has little to do with how salvation has come into the world through the God-Man, born of a woman.

St. Luke knew that our Lord’s Kingdom is not only a future hope, but also a present reality, for as He reports Christ saying, “the kingdom of God is within you.” (Lk 17:21)   Remember how the Lord responded to the question of whether He was the Messiah: “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the   lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.” (Lk. 7:22) Those are the words of the New Adam who came to heal all the infirmities of His suffering sons and daughters. Today’s reading from the gospel according to St. Luke comes right before that passage.  The widow of Nain was having the worst day of her life and had no reason to hope for a blessed or even tolerable future, for in that setting a widow who had lost her only son was in a very precarious state.  Poverty, neglect, and abuse would threaten her daily; she would have been vulnerable and alone.  When contrary to all expectations the Lord raised her son, He transformed her deep mourning into great joy. He restored life itself both to the young man and to his mother.

The Lord’s great act of compassion for this woman manifests our salvation and provides a sign of hope in even the darkest moments of our lives in our fallen world.  We weep and mourn not only for loved ones whom we see no more, but also for the brokenness and disintegration that we know all too well in our own souls, the lives of our loved ones, and the world around us.   Death, destruction, and decay in all their forms are the consequences of our personal and collective refusal to fulfill our vocation to live as those created in the image of God by becoming like Him in holiness.  We weep with the widow of Nain not only for losing loved ones, but also for losing what it means to be a human person as a living icon of God in a world that seems so far from transformation into the Kingdom of our Lord.

           The good news of the Gospel, especially as interpreted by St. Luke, is that the compassion of the Lord extends especially to those who endure the most tragic circumstances and the most profound sorrows.  Purely out of love for His suffering children, the Father sent the Son to heal and liberate us from slavery to the fear of death through His Cross and glorious resurrection. The Savior touched the funeral bier and the dead man arose.  Christ’s compassion for us is so profound that He not only touched death, but entered fully into it, into a tomb, and into Hades, because He refused to leave us to self-destruction.   He went into the abyss and experienced the terror of the black night of the pit.  The Theotokos wept bitterly at His public torture and execution, not unlike mothers today who weep at the loss of their children.  When He rose victorious over death in all its forms, He provided the only true basis of hope that the despair of the grave will not have the last word on the living icons of God. 

            The widow of Nain wept bitterly out of grief for the loss of her son.  Christ wept at the tomb of his friend St. Lazarus, not only for him, but for us all who are wedded to death as the children of Adam and Eve, who were cast out of Paradise into this world of corruption.  We weep with broken hearts out of love for those whose suffering is beyond our ability to ease, those who are no longer with us in this life, and those from whom we have become otherwise estranged due to our common brokenness.  We must learn to weep for ourselves as those who have caught a glimpse of the eternal blessedness for which we came into being and who know how far we are from entering fully into the joy of the Lord.  The corruption that separates us from God and from one another takes many forms and the same is true of our healing and restoration.  The particular paths that we must follow in order to embrace Christ’s victory over death as distinctive persons will certainly vary.  But they must all be routes for gaining the spiritual clarity to learn to mourn our sins and take the steps that are best for our healing and restoration as whole persons in the world as we know it.  If we refuse to take those steps and simply wait passively to ascend someday into heavenly peace, we will only weaken ourselves even further as we refuse to do what is necessary to lift up our hearts to receive the Lord’s healing today.  There is no way around the truth that we must do the hard work of taking up our crosses and following Him, especially in the service of our suffering neighbors in whom He is present, if we want to share in His blessed life.  For as St. Luke saw so clearly, His Kingdom stands in stark contradiction to the corrupt ways of our fallen world.  The same must be true of us.   

             

Homily for the Sunday of Holy Fathers of Seventh Ecumenical Council & Fourth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Titus 3:8-15; Luke 8:5-15

 

There is so much about our culture today that keeps us constantly in a hurry and distracts us from giving the time and focus that are necessary to flourish as the persons God created us to become.  We want answers for the deep struggles of our lives with the speed of looking something up on the internet.  We have lost respect for the many years of preparation that it takes to develop expertise in so many areas of life.  The same is true of our disregard for the pursuit of wisdom, which typically comes through the long experience of a life well lived.  We must be on guard against becoming so accustomed to accepting quick, easy, and superficial answers that we lack the patience necessary to bear good fruit for the Kingdom of God.

 

That is why we all need to concentrate our attention today on commemorating the 367 Holy Fathers of the 7th Ecumenical Council, which met in Nicaea in 787.  The council rejected the false teaching that to honor icons is to commit idolatry, for it distinguished between the worship that is due to God alone and the veneration that is appropriate for images of Christ, the Theotokos, and the Saints.  The council’s teaching highlighted the importance of the Savior’s incarnation, for only a truly human Savior with a physical body could restore us to the dignity and beauty of the living icons of God in every dimension of our existence.

 

We can be sure that these matters are not trending on social media or the focus of influencers who shape popular opinion today.  Perhaps we should take that as a reminder that our faith stands in severe tension with the unserious culture in which we live. The 7th Ecumenical Council addressed matters that strike at the very heart of how we embrace our fundamental vocation to become like God in holiness in a world that so desperately needs the peace of Christ.  Too often, however, we think that iconography simply has to do with wood and paint and is unrelated to the question of whether we are becoming more like Christ and gaining the strength to seek first His Kingdom in the midst of our world of corruption.  The icons are not merely religious art, but reminders that to become a truly human person is to become like Jesus Christ, Who refused to accommodate His ministry to what was popular and easy in first-century Palestine.   That is why those who worshipped only the fulfillment of their desires in this world rejected and condemned Him.  After bearing their abuse with patience to the point of death, He rose in glory on the third day.  

 

Today’s gospel reading addresses what it means to become a beautiful living icon of Christ with different imagery.  In an agricultural society, Christ used the parable of the sower to call His disciples to become like plants that grew from the seed that “fell into good soil and grew, and yielded a hundredfold.”  He wanted them to become “those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience.”  Not all who hear the Word of God will do so, even as not all seeds will grow to fruition.   Some never even believe, while others make a good start and then fall away due to temptation or “are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature.” 

 

We do not have to be experienced farmers or gardeners to see that this parable calls us to fulfill our potential as those who bear the image of God.  Our vocation is to become more beautiful living icons of the Savior, but we diminish and distort ourselves when we refuse to become who God created us to be.  Plants must grow and flourish as the kinds of plants that they are in order to become healthy and bear fruit.  Farmers must care for them accordingly.  The sun, soil, moisture, and nutrients must be appropriate for that particular type of plant in order for them to flourish.  In order for us to bear good fruit for the Kingdom, we must attend to the health of our souls with the patience and focus of a careful farmer or gardener.  We must do so in order to become more fully who we are as living icons of Christ.  If, to the contrary, we become impatient and distracted for whatever reason, we will not persist and will become unable to bear good fruit for the Kingdom.   

 

In today’s epistle lesson, St. Paul urged St. Titus to tell the people to focus on doing good deeds and helping others in great need.  He wanted them to avoid foolish arguments and divisions, “for they are unprofitable and vain.”  St. Paul did not want the people to waste their time and energy on matters that would simply inflame their passions and hinder them from attaining spiritual health and maturity.  He called them to care for their spiritual wellbeing with the conscientiousness of farmers who are single-mindedly dedicated to bringing in a bumper crop.  If they let down their guard to the point of being so consumed by pointless controversies that they ignored basic disciplines like loving and serving their neighbors, they would risk dying spiritually like a neglected plant overtaken by weeds. 

 

If we are to become “those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience,” we must refuse to allow distorted desires of whatever kind to take root in our hearts and minds, regardless of what is happening in our world, our nation, or our families.  We must do the hard, daily work of learning to trust and hope in the Lord as we mindfully turn away from fueling our passions and instead invest ourselves in serving the living icons of Christ who are our neighbors in practical, tangible ways. In order to bear good fruit for the Kingdom, we must refuse to allow anything to distract us from sharing more fully in His blessed eternal life.  Unless we struggle mindfully against these temptations, they will easily choke the life out of our souls. Because our risen Lord has conquered even the grave through His glorious resurrection on the third day, we must refuse to become enslaved to our passions, which are all rooted in the fear of death, and instead focus on becoming more beautiful icons of the Savior. That is the only way to know true peace in this world.

 

Contrary to the immediate gratification that we have come to expect in so many areas of life, to mature to the point that we bear fruit a hundredfold for the Kingdom will take time. It will take the patience not only of the passage of time but more importantly of repentance when we find ourselves distracted and weakened by our passions and fall short of our calling time and time again.  Instead of abandoning the Christian life when we do not get the results that we want on our own timetable, we must accept the truth about ourselves with humility and redouble our efforts to focus on “the one thing needful” of hearing and obeying the Word of God. (Lk 10:42)  We must ground our daily lives in prayer, fasting, and generosity toward our neighbors in order to gain the spiritual strength necessary to persevere and refuse to fall into despair.  Following St. Paul’s advice, we must also take a close look at our lives to see if we are wasting our time, energy, and attention on “foolish disputes” that simply inflame our passions and distract us from patiently finding the healing of our souls. It is so easy to be “choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” to the point that we never mature and bear good fruit.  With the patient endurance of a careful farmer, let us tend the garden of our souls each day and refuse to be discouraged by our failures or the appealing distractions that are all around us.  That is the only way to fulfill our vocation to become beautiful living icons of Christ, the fully divine and fully human Savior Who has brought life to the world.

 

 

 

 

The Countercultural Struggle of Loving our Enemies: Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost & Second Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Cor.  6:16-7:1; Luke 6:31-36

 

We live in a time in which many people think that it is somehow virtuous to hate, condemn, and wish the very worst for people they consider their enemies for whatever reason.  Since every human person is a living icon of God, there is nothing more dangerous to our souls than to embrace such wickedness in our hearts. The Lord said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matt. 5:8) There is perhaps no greater test of the purity of our hearts than whether we respond with love and forgiveness to those who have wronged us, as He did to those who crucified Him, saying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” (Lk. 23:34)   As Orthodox Christians, our calling is nothing less than to embody the mercy of God from the very depths of our being. That sublime vocation goes well beyond being an outwardly religious or moral person who feels justified in determining who deserves our good will, care, and forgiveness.  As those who share in the life of God by grace as “partakers of the divine nature,” we must love all our neighbors as He has loved us. 

 

In today’s gospel reading, the Lord spoke words that have always been hard to hear: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.  Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.”  In this passage from the gospel according to St. Luke, Christ does not rest content with calling His followers to limit their vengeance to “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” even though that Old Testament principle had placed needed restraint on vengeance. (Matt. 5:38) He did not affirm the common attitude of the time, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,” an attitude that unfortunately remains with us today in so many ways, including religion, politics, and ethnicity.   (Matt. 5:43) Instead, the Savior calls His followers to be in communion with Him from the depths of our hearts to the point that we embody the divine mercy, loving our enemies like God, Who cares even for “the ungrateful and selfish.”  That means that He cares even for people like me and you.

 

To become a person so radiant with the love of Christ that we convey His love even to people we do not like and who do not like us obviously requires much more than the culturally accommodated religiosity that is all around us.  To love our enemies as He loves us requires our deep spiritual transformation and healing as living icons of God.  We must not, then, rest content with confessing Orthodox dogma, coming to Church, devoting ourselves to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and avoiding the most obvious forms of sin in our outward behavior.  These endeavors are all virtuous and we must not neglect or diminish them in any way.  We must remember, however, that they provide the foundation and structure of our life in Christ.  It is through them that we open ourselves to receive the strength that we need to take up the difficult struggle each day to reject the habits of thought, word, and deed that so easily lead us to treat our neighbors according to our passions and not according to the mercy of the Lord.  We must do the hard work of actually engaging the battle to live faithfully each day. If we do not and persist in refusing to love others as Christ has loved us, we will weaken ourselves spiritually to the point that we will find it simply impossible to love God, for “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” (1Jn. 4:20)   

 

St. Silouan the Athonite provides good advice on how to grow in love for those who offend us:  

I beseech you, put this to the test.  When a man affronts you or brings dishonor on your head, or takes what is yours, or persecutes the Church, pray to the Lord, saying: “O Lord, we are all Thy creatures.  Have pity on Thy servants, and turn their hearts to repentance,” and you will be aware of grace in your soul.  To begin with constrain your heart to love enemies, and the Lord, seeing your good will, will help you in all things, and experience itself will show you the way.  But the man who thinks with malice of his enemies has not God’s love within him, and does not know God.[1]

 

            It would be hard to overstate how radically countercultural such an approach is in light of the incessant calls to grievance, vengeance, and division that bombard us.  So many people proudly proclaim today that to be true to ourselves means to celebrate and inflame our passions, especially when that leads to the perverse pleasure of exalting ourselves and demonizing others.  St. Paul’s plea to the confused Gentile Christians of Corinth is surely one that we need to hear: “Brethren, we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.  Therefore come out from them, and be separate from them,’ says the Lord, ‘and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.’” Note that the Apostle addresses Gentile converts who had fallen back into many forms of corruption as “the temple of the living God.”  They were not simply people living in a given time and place with a certain set of temptations and weaknesses but truly the Body of Christ by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.  He applies instructions from the Old Testament on the importance of God’s children separating themselves from worldly corruption to them as he admonishes them to embrace the calling to live faithfully as who they had become in Christ.

 

Like the confused, divided, and compromised Christians of Corinth, we must refuse to engage in popular cultural practices that so easily corrupt our faithfulness to the Lord as living members of His Body, the Church.  We are “the temple of the living God” in which all the divisions fueled by fear, resentment, and the refusal to forgive may be overcome.  Like the Corinthians, however, we so easily fall back into the old ways of sin when we refuse to keep a close watch on the thoughts of our hearts and to reject those that keep us from seeing anyone as a neighbor who bears God’s image just as we do. Obvious and subtle temptations are all around us to refuse to treat at least some of our neighbors as we would like them to treat us.  We may not worship in the pagan temples of Corinth, but the spiritual gravity is the same when we give ourselves to the false gods of our passions that blind us to what it means to live as "sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.  Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” 

 

Like it or not, the true state of our souls is revealed by how we treat those we find it hardest to love. That is why we must be on guard against obsessing about the failings of people who have wronged us and cultivating fear and anger toward those who are on the other side of any division or argument. We must remember that we are each “the chief of sinners” and share in the life of Christ by His grace, not according to our personal accomplishments or opinions.  As with the rest of the Christian life, the challenge is not to see and treat others in light of our passions but as God sees and treats us all according to His love.  That being the case, we must take up the struggle in thought, word, and deed each day of our lives to “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”

 

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[1] Archimandrite Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 377.

Homily for the Sunday After the Elevation of the Holy Cross in the Orthodox Church

Galatians 2:16-20; Mark 8:34-9:1

    As we continue to celebrate the Elevation of the Holy Cross, we must remain on guard against the temptation of thinking that all our Lord’s Cross requires of us are mouthing pious words and cultivating warm feelings.  Through His Self-Offering on the Cross, Christ has conquered death and brought salvation to the world.  For us to share personally in His great victory, we must take up our own crosses, deny ourselves, and follow Him each day of our lives.  If we refuse to do so, we will show that we are ashamed of our Lord and want no part in Him or His Kingdom. We will show that we prefer to continue in the old ways of death rather than to enter by His grace into eternal life.    

            Peter was in precisely such a state when he tried to explain to Christ that dying on the Cross had nothing to do with being the Messiah.  That is when the Lord famously said, “Get behind Me, Satan! For you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.”  That is the context for today’s gospel passage as Christ teaches that following Him is not a way to gain anything at all according to the standards of this world, but a calling to offer ourselves without reservation, no matter the cost.  

            The calling to take up our crosses stands in stark contrast to the persistent temptation to try to use religion to exalt ourselves in our own minds.  Some try to use the Cross to support their preconceived notions about political and cultural agendas as they identify their favored type of earthly kingdom with our Lord’s heavenly reign.  Others try to use the Cross to justify their own religious or moral superiority over their family members, friends, or neighbors.  To do any of those things is to be ashamed of our Crucified Lord and His words because it is nothing short of blasphemous to corrupt the great sign of our salvation into an instrument for serving our self-centered desires for earthly glory. Quite to the contrary, our Lord’s Cross calls us to turn away from addiction to gratifying our passions as we offer ourselves in union with His great Self-Offering for the salvation of the world.     

In our epistle reading from Galatians, Saint Paul opposes fellow Jewish Christians who relied too much on their own ability to obey the Old Testament law and would have required the same of Gentile converts.  Refusing to trust in his own ability to obey religious rules, he writes that, “I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.”  Paul took up his cross by enduring many struggles and difficulties out of faithfulness to the Lord, ultimately dying for him as a martyr.   He wrote to the Colossians that “I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church.” (Col. 1:24)

There is obviously nothing deficient in our Lord’s great Self-Offering.  All that is lacking is our taking up our own crosses in obedience to the Lord’s calling to deny ourselves and follow Him. Because of our own passions and the brokenness of our world of corruption, the struggle for faithfulness inevitably requires suffering, but not as though pain were somehow pleasing to God in and of itself.  Such suffering results from the inevitable tension we experience in embracing the struggle to offer ourselves fully to Christ. There is so much within each of us that does not want to do that. Truly taking up our crosses means fighting the difficult battle of confronting our own personal brokenness each day as we reject thoughts, feelings, and habits that would keep us focused on serving ourselves and the false gods of this world.  

  Christ prayed the night before His crucifixion, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but Yours be done.” (Luke 22:42) He ascended the Cross in free obedience, and no one forces us to take up our crosses either.  Many problems and pains come upon us without our asking for them in this life, even to the point of death, and it is so easy to refuse to suffer in a spiritually health way. As Job’s wife suggested, we can “Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9) in response to frustrations and disappointments.  We can refuse to offer our wounds to Christ for healing by ignoring them or convincing ourselves that we are still better off spiritually than the people we like to condemn.  Doing so will simply fuel our passions, blind us with spiritual pride, and corrupt our relationships with others.

Since freedom is an intrinsic dimension of being in God’s image, no one can make us take up our crosses. Only we can unite ourselves to Christ in His Great Self-Offering for the salvation of the world. Regardless of the circumstances, we have the freedom to refuse to fall into despair, for any instance of suffering provides an opportunity to purify the desires of our hearts as we learn to entrust ourselves more fully to the Lord.  Difficulties by their nature present challenges to which we may respond in a Christlike way or according to our passions.  He offered up Himself fully upon the Cross and refused to respond in kind to those who hated and rejected Him.  Likewise, we may unite ourselves to Him in every dimension and circumstance of our lives, including those in which we are sorely tempted not to respond as He did. Illness, broken relationships with others, worries about the future, regrets about the past, crushed hopes, and even the worst losses imaginable all present opportunities to grow in “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Saint Paul wrote that “those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”  (Gal. 5:22-24)

Our self-centered and distorted desires usually rear their ugly heads quickly when we face trying circumstances.  If you are like me, you sometimes react like Jonah when the vine that gave him shade was eaten by a worm.  That was a very small thing, but Jonah became so angry that he literally wished he would die. (Jonah 4:5-11)   Other times we face circumstances so grave that must struggle mightily not to fall into despair about life itself.  Whether in matters small or great, none of us lacks the opportunity to take up our crosses daily as we struggle to find healing for our souls. 

Doing so usually does not require anything particularly dramatic or extraordinary.  It is normally a matter of focusing on the basic disciplines of the Christian life, such as refusing to accept sinful thoughts into our hearts, forgiving those who have wronged us, and trusting that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:39) The more that we open our souls to the Lord’s healing strength through prayer, repentance, and serving our neighbors, the less time and energy we will have for stirring up and embracing the impassioned thoughts that lead to sinful actions.  The less that we cultivate worry, fear, and resentment, the more we will be able to pray to God from our hearts to grant what is best for all concerned in even the most broken circumstances of our lives. We must follow the Apostle’s teaching, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7) This is the path for gaining the strength to take up our crosses, deny ourselves, and follow Christ. 

To do so, we must choose to embrace the struggle of dying to our vain illusions about ourselves, other people, and our world.  Our hope is neither in perfection acquired by our own willpower nor in our ability to dominate anyone else, but in the gracious mercy of the One Who offered up Himself for our salvation purely out of love.  Through the Cross, He has brought life in the midst of death, light in the midst of darkness, and joy in the midst of despair.  We will receive His healing as we persistently offer ourselves to Him in humble faith, no matter what challenges, pains, or disappointments life may bring us.  That is how we may die to the corrupting power of sin and enter into the blessedness of His Kingdom.  The only way to truly elevate the Holy Cross is by denying ourselves and taking up our own crosses to follow the Savior each day of our lives.  That is how we show that we are not ashamed of Him and His Cross, which remains a weapon of peace, a trophy invincible, and the great sign of our salvation.