Lenten Encyclical of Patriarch John X of Antioch and All the East

The Great Lent: When Mercy Dries Up, Fasting Suffers Drought

By God's mercy John X, Patriarch of Antioch and all the East

Brethren, Pastors of the Holy Church of Antioch;

Beloved children in all dioceses in this apostolic see

Brethren and dearest spiritual children, whose strength and anticipation in God, strengthen ours;

Entering this redemptive period which leads us to the Cross (of Christ) and the dawn of His and thus our resurrection, these days bring to us the anticipation to Jesus and His divine consolation for His beloved humans; for whom He descended from His highest, incarnated in the Virgin, submitting Himself to the human law, willingly walking the path of the Cross, in order to rise from the dead, becoming the first fruit for our resurrection from our earthly misery and tribulation.

Jesus chose the path of the Cross, and drank from the chalice of death to simply tell us that the tribulation of our times will not overshadow our hope for light, and that hardship cannot eclipse the brightness of resurrection.

Entering this redemptive period of the Great Lent, we have bid farewell to brothers, fathers and mothers, who were taken away by sudden or forced death, but we anticipate to meet them in Christ's light.

We receive these days while our brothers and sisters, amongst whom are bishops, priests, monks, nuns and beloved children, are abducted and suffer the cruelty of this world.

"We shall not celebrate without them. We did and shall spare no endeavour to ensure their safe return."

Brethren! Despite their severity, these times reinforce the spirit of consolation, growing our sense of empathy. Lent is based on love, reinforced by almsgiving and completed with the leaven of purity and chastity.

Fasting and almsgiving are inseparable.

Fasting, mercy, almsgiving, purity and care for the neighbours and the needy are paths to the doorway to the Godly mercy and thus acquiring God as a friend. A Church Father, Peter Chrysologus (the golden–worded) effectively described the pillars of fasting:

"Brethren, Fasting does not germinate unless watered by mercy. When mercy dries up, fasting suffers drought, for mercy is to fasting what spring is to earth; as the smooth breeze that help buds flourish into flowers, mercy grows the seeds of fasting to become blossoming flowers. Love is to fasting what oil is to a lantern; oil feeds the lantern; similarly, love feeds fasting and enkindles it. Almsgiving is to fasting what the sun is to the day. The sunshine illumines the day, scattering darkness. This is how almsgiving sanctifies the sanctuary of fasting with the light of love".

We all are called upon to consolidate the unity in our Orthodox Antiochian Church. In the Church of Antioch, we are entrusted to the name "Christians" by both word and deeds. Jesus's disciples were first called "Christians" in our land, but we, in our Orthodox Antiochian Church are called upon, by loving each other and unifying our hearts, to testify for Jesus Christ in this contemporary world which is corroded by mere interests.

"For look ye! How these Christians seem to love each other" (Tertullian, Apology 39:7). Tertullian found no better expression in his apology to defend the Christian values and those who follow them. This means that by loving each other, and refusing defamation, we give witness of Lord Jesus in our world.

"The Church of Christ is alien to parties, divisions or disputes; it only acknowledges the zeal for God, a zeal that enflames our hearts. The Church of Christ do not fill the social networking sites and the Media with a barrage of threats, defamation nor disdain."

Brethren! We are called upon, by embracing love and living by the teachings of the Gospel, to overcome all the impediments to our progress, cleanse our inner selves and scrutinise our conscience rather than preaching others.

O merciful God! Who for our sake dwelled in the womb of the Virgin, was born in a manger, patiently endured human suffering, willingly suffered His Passions and who, by His burial, buried the sin that overwhelmed our nature, look upon us in our journey during this Lent, crowning it with the light that shines from Your life-giving tomb. Let us realize that despite its heaviness, the stone of the tomb could not stop the light of resurrection, teaching the world that the bell towers of the Churches in this land have been erected for many centuries even through harsh times and that they will keep ringing echoing Christ's love for all people, endorsing the fact that Christ's children are deeply rooted in this land and announcing their openness to all people despite hardships through the centuries.

O God bestow upon us the spirit of Your peace, alleviate by Your Passions the passions of those who love You, visit our countries casting upon us the beauty of Your presence. Accompany the abducted and the displaced, journey with those who travel and bless our children in the diaspora.

Stand, O God, by those in need; strengthen us to console the hearts of our children with Your words and the acts of philanthropy. Bring the departed closer to you, and crown our fasting journey to witness the Holy Resurrection, hallowed be Your name for now and ever, Amen.

http://www.antiochian.org/lenten-encyclical-patriarch-john-x-antioch-and-all-east

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"How and Why Do We Fast?": Preparing for the Lenten Fast in the Orthodox Church

http://www.antiochian.org/how-and-why-do-we-fast

By Fr. Steven Ritter

Meatfare Sunday marks the last time we as Orthodox Christians eat meat products, and the week following we dismiss dairy as well. Why is this? There are many and learned treatises on this topic far superior to what I will say here, but perhaps we can put some things into perspective.



Fasting is, according to St. John Chrysostom, the third most important element in our spiritual practices outside the worship of God in community. What are the other two? They are almsgiving, which indicates a mature spiritual Christian's willingness to help others, even at the expense of his or her own well-being, and prayer, which should be self-evident as the primary means by which we commune with God and He forms His will in us. However, what we normally hear about most at this time of the year is fasting, and in fact our Lenten season also bears the name of the Holy and Great Fast.

If St. John puts fasting in third place, why this emphasis? There are three reasons that come to mind, though there are of course many more. First of all, fasting is a primal marker of our return to God. As the services remind us, it was by food that our ancestors Adam and Eve were led to their ancient fall from the grace and glory of God to which they were called to participate, and the results of that choice have affected all of us ever since. Our stomachs are, as St. John Climacus calls them, "a clamorous mistress" that demand everything of us, leading us down wrong paths, and continually deceiving us into thinking that our bodily needs are far more than they really are. This translates into other desires as well—we pamper ourselves and continually seek to satisfy that most fickle of masters, the human will. Fasting helps to remind us that we are putting off the things that separate us from God in order to slowly climb back to the Paradise that we lost.

Secondly, fasting disrupts our normal routine and self-centered wills. As creatures of tremendous habit, and often bad habit at that, we need something to serve as a "circuit breaker" to interrupt this process of continuous self-regard. Fasting makes us think twice about the high favor we have for our persons by depriving us of those things that we take to ourselves too often and easily. This includes all facets of our lives as well as that of pure intake of food. We must be cognizant of our need to reach out of ourselves and help others, to dedicate an increased amount of time to spiritual reading and conversation, especially that involving the Holy Scriptures, and to make every effort to attend the extra services offered during this season as a sacrifice to God of prayer and praise. He doesn't need this, but we do, and those who neglect this are missing a great opportunity for a quick injection of spiritual growth.

Lastly, fasting is a way of practicing obedience. That's right! The one thing that we all talk about as being important in the spiritual life is probably the one thing that we hate most of all! Many complain about the lack of genuine spiritual leaders in the world today (a very old complaint by the way, going back centuries) saying that there is no one to whom they can place their trust and submit to in obedience. This argument is a canard, for obedience can be practiced anywhere and any place, if we would just to humble ourselves. Additionally, there is a wise a spiritual elder to whom we can all submit at any time. As Tito Colliander asks in his marvelous book The Way of the Ascetics, "since the time of the Apostles [the Church] has given us a teacher who surpasses all others and who can reach us everywhere, wherever we are and under whatever circumstances we live...Do you wish to know his name? It is holy fasting."

By being obedient to the rules of the Church rather than our own re-interpretation of them, we are practicing the purest form of spiritual and bodily obedience possible, and it's a fact of life that if we cannot do this then the instructions of the most saintly elder would prove impossible for us!



Yet the Fathers of the Church also encourage moderation in how we keep the fast. I have seen the strictest adherence prove to be most harmful to someone because of the poisonous disposition that resulted from it. I have also seen someone who hardly kept the fast at all because of illness or medical issues profit greatly because of sorrow at not being able to keep it more fervently, and even the little done was to them a mountain of great height.

Here are a few things to remember about fasting:



• Challenge yourself—you can probably do much more that you do. It's the old thing about pampering the flesh again. Find a way of fasting that is within your means, that makes you stretch a bit, but that doesn't frustrate so much that you give up. We are all on different spiritual levels and practical abilities.
• Once you find your level, stick to it—nothing disrupts obedience more than variance and making excuses.
• Make your fast a broad-based effort. Find time for reading and extra attendance at the services. The excuse of not having enough time will not suffice, since we all find time for those things we really want to do, no matter how crowded the schedule.
• Always remember to repent for your failings. God is not there to strike you down, but to lift you up, and nothing reaches his heart like sincere repentance.
• Remember that breaking the fast, or failing to keep it as well as you might is not a sin, but failing to keep the spirit of the fast in mind, or denying its importance as a precept of the church, certainly is. And no matter how we might ignore this time of the year, it is still a holy one whether we pay attention or not, and the evil one certainly knows what time of the year it is, and will increase his attacks whether you are prepared for them or not!
• Most of all, approach the fast with joy and anticipation, a time of year that the church gives us to draw closer to God, and to achieve true and genuinely heartfelt reconciliation and forgiveness with and for our family, friends, neighbors, congregation, nation, and the world at large.

May God grant us all a blessed Great Lent!

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Father Steven Ritter is the priest at St. James Orthodox Mission in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and the author of That Your Joy May Be Full, Learning from the Authentic Orthodox Theology of the Spirit (Regina Press).

Dramatic photos: Ukraine’s priests take an active role in protests

• BY MAX FISHER

• February 20 at 11:24 am

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A man kneels before an Orthodox priest in an area separating police and anti-government protesters near Dynamo Stadium on Jan. 25, 2014, in Kiev. (Rob Stothard/Getty Images)

Christianity has deep roots in Ukraine. The majority of Ukrainians are not actively religious, according to polls, but Eastern Orthodoxy is still a major force here. It's the faith that most observant Ukrainians follow, though they're divided between the Kiev and Moscow Patriarchates. (A number of Ukrainians also follow Greek Catholicism.) But churches and priests are omnipresent in the country, and especially so in the protests that have racked Kiev and other cities since late November.

Ukraine's Orthodox and Catholic priests have been frequently seen on or near the front lines of the clashes, ministering to protesters and riot police alike, though at times some have appeared to more closely align themselves near the protesters. Perhaps this is because protesters, camped out for three months in Kiev's Independence Square, and having endured the overwhelming firepower of security forces, are in more immediate physical need. Perhaps it's because of the complex historical relationship between church and state dating to Soviet-era Ukraine. Or maybe it's just where those priests' individual sympathies lie.

Whatever the case, photos tracking the priests as they move between both sides of the physical conflict, as well as minister to the dead and wounded, provide strikingly powerful glimpses into life on the ground in crisis-racked Ukraine.

Priests of different faiths pray  during clashes with police in central Kiev. (Sergei Chuzavkov/AP)

A man prays as people rest inside Mikhailovsky Zlatoverkhy Cathedral, which serves as a temporary shelter and  first-aid post for anti-government protesters in Kiev. (Stringer/Reuters)

A clergyman passes by people resting inside Mikhailovsky Zlatoverkhy Cathedral. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

A priest speaks through a megaphone to riot police and anti-government protesters at the site of recent clashes in Kiev (Konstantin Chernichkin/Reuters)

A Ukrainian woman supporting president Viktor Yanukovich and a priest speak to a line of police in Kiev. (Igor Kovalenko/EPA)

A priest blesses anti-government activists (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

A priest marches with anti-government protesters. (Aris Messinis/AFP)

A priest blesses an anti-government protester at a roadblock in Kiev. (Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)

An Orthodox priest holds an icon as he stands in front of policemen in Kiev. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

A Ukrainian priest walks at the site of clashes during another day of anti-government protest in Kiev. (Maxim Shipenkov/EPA)

A priest talks to Ukranian riot police. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)

A Ukrainian priest stands in front of a line of riot police during a protest (Zurab Kurtsikidze/AP)

A Ukrainian church priest blesses a protester during clashes with police. (Maxim Shipenkov)

An orthodox priest stands amidst Ukrainian protesters outside the European Council building in Brussels. (Yves Logghe/AP)

A priest tends to a wounded anti-government protester in the lobby of the Hotel Ukraine. (Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)

A priest stands in the lobby of the hotel Ukraine. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

An Orthodox priest walks under fire during clashes between anti-government protesters and riot police. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

A priest rushes to give the last sacraments to an anti-government protesters during clashes with riot police in central Kiev. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

An Orthodox priest after clashes between anti-government protesters and riot police. (Yannis Behrakis/Reuters)

An Orthodox priest holds a cross as a woman reacts next to dead bodies following violence in Independence Square. (Konstantin Chernichkin/Reuters)

Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitteror Facebook.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/20/dramatic-photos-ukraines-priests-take-an-active-role-in-protests/

On The Nature Of The Church

February 18, 2014 By Fr. John Peck

by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow

“It is a mistake to understand the Church merely as a hierarchy: the bishops, priests, deacons, or other people who work in the Church. The Church is the entire people of God. The Church reveals itself when it celebrates the Divine Liturgy around its bishop or priest, and everyone has his own ministry within the Church. And the layman – that is, a baptized member of the Church – is not an extra on the stage. A layman is someone who bears a special ministry in the Church. To be a layman is also a ministry, and we are dedicated to this ministry through the Mystery of Baptism.

“Therefore when in the life of the Church everything is done only by hierarchs or clergy, and the laity only attend divine services, this is very dangerous for the life of the Church, because in it the most important principle of church existence is not being realized: the Church as a community of faith, as the people of God, united around their bishop.”

http://frjohnpeck.com/on-the-nature-of-the-church/

On Preserving Virginity Until Marriage: Commentary by Caroline Langston

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A Virgin over the Marriage Threshold

April 20, 2006 4:00 PM

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Commentator Caroline Langston reveals why she chose to be a virgin on her wedding night, at 31. Langston says that for her, abstinence helped make her and her new husband leave their wedding reception in a hurry. Now a mother of two, she questions the notion of "casual sex."

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MELISSA BLOCK, host:

There's no doubt that the culture wars are intense, especially regarding sex. Commentator Caroline Langston says she doesn't take sides, but she would like to share this story about why she chose to abstain from sex until she got married.

CAROLINE LANGSTON reporting:

I was a virgin on my wedding night. It was a day full of sensual details that could have come from a novel, ripe gardenias, the jeweled crowns of our Greek Orthodox service, the cold champagne everyone drank in the hot July sun. You hear a lot these days about wedding receptions that go on and on because the bride and groom are in no hurry to leave, but we were out the door in record time after partying for less than two hours.

But this was not a wedding taking place on, say, Long Island in the 1950s between two teenagers. Our wedding was just six years ago and I was the 31-year-old virgin. The total weirdness of this strikes me sometimes, now that I'm a suburban mom with friends who, for the most part, had much wilder college years than I. Virginity has been big in the news again during the last couple of years, partly because of the Bush administration's support of abstinence-only sex education and partly because of the movie THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN. The central thrust of that movie seemed to be amazement that anyone could arrive at that age in that state in the first place.

The iconic virgin in American culture is, of course, the naïve and ridiculed Janet in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW before she succumbs to the salacious embraces of Dr. Frank N. Furter. Most people don't understand how somebody could remain celibate until marriage and they have no idea why either. In my case, there was no external motivation to stay virginal.

I was religious, but then so are a lot of people. I attended a progressive boarding school where contraception was freely available from the school clinic from a nurse with too much lipstick and a Louis Viton handbag, who was famous for making girls practice inserting their diaphragms over and over again.

Sex was expected, it was unemotional and it was no big deal, but the pressure to just give it up did not match what I wanted in my heart. The big complaint about abstinence from the public health community is that it ignores the statistical reality that some 80 percent of young people are sexually active by age 20 and that only about 20 percent of women will be virgins at marriage.

But research also shows that some vulnerable young women can suffer mightily from the consequences of casual sex. I fit the profile exactly. My father was dead, my mother was preoccupied and distant. Nobody was out there to keep tabs on what I was doing. The anxious misery of my youth would have been magnified exponentially if I had been sleeping with the boys I dated. It did not seem to make the lives of my girlfriends all that much happier, which is not to say that I did not have my own fun or make my own mistakes in judgment. I may not have slept with anybody, but I fooled around with dozens of men, including a college professor on a lacrosse field when I was 16.

More than once, I found myself at a payphone in the middle of the night, trying to call a cab to take me home from an overzealous date. I danced, I drank, I cried in my room late at night while listening to The Smiths. Along the way, though, I received dozens of roses, wrote passionate letters, discovered the erotic charge of intense conversation, experience that's served me well since my husband and I walked out of the reception that hot afternoon.

Maybe it's the word abstinence itself that's the problem, its pinched tones of puritan self-denial. For me, in the end, it is an argument as much about beauty as it is about morality. We grant the value of discipline, waiting and hope in the creation of art, then why not as well in that realm where the physical intersects with the infinite?

BLOCK: Caroline Langston is a writer who lives in Cheverly, Maryland. She also works in NPR's development office.

Copyright © 2006 NPR. 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5353790

The Beltway Catechesis from Caroline Langston

February 18, 2014 By Caroline Langston 

Now that our son is almost ten, he has begun to feel his oats a bit: In the middle of fourth grade, he has begun to log a few life achievements that both we, and he, are proud: he has surmounted some of his attention problems and can stay focused on the tasks at hand—reading about military history, remembering to take out the trash, remembering to modulate his quick-start anger before it bursts from his lips.

He has also learned to complain about having to go to church. Sunday mornings in our house arrive drowsily and sun-soaked, the tendrils of smoke from the censer we always light curling up the stairs.

But by the time we are actually ready to walk out the door, between him and his little sister, it is all over but the shouting. In my daughter’s case, her complaints are minor, and classic: the ill-fitting patent leather shoes, her grumpiness at being told that taking a Bitty Baby stroller to the Divine Liturgy is inadvisable.

My son’s complaints are more subtle, and dangerous. Only occasionally will he trot out the old chestnut, “God is just an idea that somebody made up way back when,” because he knows that I know that at least for now, he doesn’t believe it: For any and all problems he has with God, I have seen him sincerely implore, and sincerely repent, before the invisible and ever-present altar of the Divine.

One of our dearest neighbors, a reader of this blog, has been in treatment for breast cancer these past six or so months, and when we say prayers at night, he always remembers to lift her name like a found jewel. And he was thankful when her chemotherapy regimen came to an end.

He also knows that, in these secular times—some of my best friends are atheists!—I would never respond to that claim in the way my own mother, lightly religious herself but steeped in Southern Baptist tradition, exclaimed: “The very idea!  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Yep,” I say, casually. “Lots of people don’t believe in God. We do, though.” And while he may end up faithless later, he’s living in our house now.

At other times, my response won’t be a light one, but will instead be brimming with passion: Because of course there’s physics! The mysteries of evolution! The world is charged with the grandeur of God!

Believe it or not, the more complicated question is not about the existence of God, but about why it is important to go to church at all. My husband is Catholic and I’m a convert to Orthodoxy—neither of which are “just believe in your heart” kinds of faiths—but the question of why it is important to actually go to church seems to be the one that is more pressing, and relevant.

Let me tell you, when we are trying to get them kicking and screaming out of the door on Sunday morning, I have sympathy for anyone who decided that arguing about church attendance wasn’t worth it, and just decided to throw in the towel.

And sometimes it has involved literal kicking and screaming—out to and into the car, and around the Capital Beltway nearly twenty-seven miles from our house to the Antiochian Orthodox Church we attend in the Montgomery county suburbs. “Damn you,” I said one Sunday morning to one of my children, and I have shouted the F word, and punched on the accelerator while changing lanes.

If this were a movie, this would be the moment that would expose the yawning irony between my pious hopes and the less than beautiful reality of family life. “Shut up and worship the birth of Jesus Christ!” Christine Baranski’s character gripes (I’m paraphrasing) at her children on Christmas in the hilarious 1995 movie The Ref, and the implied take-away from that scene and similar scenes in other movies— would seem to be the essential hypocrisy of any kind of religious indoctrination.

What do these movies want, I wonder? I guess the “authentic” move at this point would be to throw the towel in and, what? Agree that, Yes, Mommy has been an inflexible hypocrite. Let us enjoy this Sunday morning with a walk in the park and a movie afterward. Be spiritual but not religious. You can decide for yourself when you grow up.

Well, too effing bad, I think. The notion that any of us is, or can be, anything other than a hypocrite, seems to be a legacy of good old American Puritanism, in its secular form: That by our ethics and good will alone, we can be perfected.

Instead, I am a sinner.

And as such I need more than the thought experiments of ethics and sentimentality. I need the Body and Blood of Jesus. You can’t get that anywhere else but church, I tell my son.

I have noticed that by the time we are halfway around the Beltway, their griping has stopped. After we have arrived at church, at last, the gold-touched dome with its cross scraping the sky looms over us as we shepherd each other inside.My son lopes away from me, off behind the altar screen where there are no girls.

Half of success is just showing up. My daughter and I light a candle.

When someone dies, we are served Kolliva, made of wheat berries and powdered sugar.

I am building an architecture of the invisible.

When and if they reject it, my children will still remember the Blood of Christ coursing through their bodies; their half-asleep noses will distinguish incense in their dark and dreamlike rooms.

That’s not nothing.

The colors of the icons will still shine, in the afterimages of their eyes.

A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Caroline Langston is a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is a widely published writer and essayist, a winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2014/02/the-beltway-catechesis/?fb_action_ids=746351312053801&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B465038863621881%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

The Love and Mercy of God the Father: An Orthodox Homily on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

         

          In our faith, we speak often of God the Father.  He is the first Person of the Holy Trinity and we invoke His name every time that we pray.  We say the “Our Father,” the Lord’s Prayer, every day and in every service.  We confess our belief in Him every time that we say the Nicene Creed.

            But if we are not careful, we will forget what kind of a Father He is.  We may think of Him as an old man with a white beard in heaven, or as our own biological father somehow made divine, or as a stern, unforgiving authority figure.  When we do, we should remember that God the Father has never had a human body, that He is not a male human being, and that we know Him only through the Son, through the Incarnation, teaching and example of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ.

            Today’s gospel text shows us important truths about God the Father, for it is a shocking and surprising story about how a human father responded to the shameful rebellion of his son.  The man had two sons.  The youngest insulted his father by asking for his inheritance, which was the same as telling the old man that he wished he were dead.  The father did not beat him or cast him out of the family or refuse his request.  Instead, he gave him the money and let him go.  That may have been the hardest thing that man ever did:  accepting his son’s insult with humility and giving him the freedom to leave home and grow up the hard way, in what is sometimes called the school of hard knocks.  At the risk of never seeing the young man again, the father complied with his son’s request.  

            The son then did what many young men would do with a great amount of money.  He left town and spent all his money on wine, women, and song.  That is, he wasted the hard-earned savings of his father on the kind of immoral behavior St. Paul condemned in today’s epistle reading.  He soon ran out of money and became desperately poor.  In a foreign country, he took a job feeding pigs and was so hungry that he envied their slop.  Eventually, the young man came to himself and realized that he would be better off as a servant in his father’s house than in his current state.  So he resolved to go home, to take responsibility for his terrible behavior, and acknowledge that he was not worthy to be called a son anymore.  He wanted only to be one of the father’s hired servants, and he knew that he did not deserve even that.

            But when the young man was still a great way off from home, he saw an old man running toward him.  It was his father, who must have kept watch every day, scanning the horizons in hope that his son would one day return.   On that day, he rushed out to meet his son, had compassion on him, and hugged and kissed him.  The son began his rehearsed speech to confess his sins, but the father was so overjoyed at his return that he apparently did not even pay attention.  Instead, he gave him a new set of clothes and began a party, for his son—who was dead—was alive again; he who had been lost was now found, was now restored to his family.

            We now stand two weeks before the beginning of Great Lent, the most intense time of spiritual discipline in the church year.  Time and again, the services, readings, and prayers of the Church will call us to be like the prodigal son, to come to ourselves and return to the Father.  I know that some of us find all this talk about repentance to be scary and frustrating.  We are afraid that God will not forgive us, that He will not take us back, because of what we have done, thought, and said.  We may be tempted not to observe Lent at all, not to take any steps of repentance, because we think that there would be no point.  We may have already given up on ourselves and on God.

            Probably some of our own biological fathers would not have taken us back had we behaved like the prodigal son.    Perhaps we would have a hard time accepting our own children, spouse, family members, or friends back into our lives if they acted like he did.  But in God the Father we do not deal with a human authority figure or with a creature weakened by passions and sins as we are.  Instead, we deal with a Divine Father Who gave His only begotten Son that all who believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  Like the father in the parable, God the Father is not out to punish sinners or to collect a debt.  Instead, He is eager to forgive, eternally waiting for us to return so that He can restore us to the dignity and glory for which we were created as his sons and daughters.  But we have to do our part by coming to our senses, returning home, and accepting His forgiveness with humility.  

            We often forget that God’s compassion, love, and forgiveness are not passing emotions like we experience.  In ways that we cannot understand, they are abiding characteristics of God.  Unlike human beings, we do not have to catch Him in a good mood to receive His mercy.  We do not have to give Him time to cool down after getting angry at us, for He is not angry.  Like the prodigal son, we bear the consequences of our actions; we suffer, not because God has decided to do us harm, but because we have chosen to harm ourselves by preferring our own will to His, by turning away from our true identity, dignity, and calling as those created in His image and likeness.   What we experience as God’s anger is simply the consequence of refusing to accept His love, of refusing to live as His blessed sons and daughters.  

            Nonetheless, with mercy and humility beyond what we can imagine, God the Father waits for us this Lent to come to our senses, to recognize what we have done to ourselves with our sins and passions.  Like the father in the parable, He gives us the freedom to make mistakes and to learn from them.  He never forces us to do anything.  And no matter how far we fall, no matter how low we go in life, He is eternally watching for us, ready to run and embrace us, to restore us as His beloved daughters and sons, and to celebrate our return. 

            Nothing that we do or do not do this Lent will change God the Father in any way.  He has already given His only-begotten Son to conquer sin and death and bring us into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity.  The Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and has been sent to us by the Son.  Our bodies are already temples of the Holy Spirit.  Through the life of the Church, we have every possible means of sharing fully in the eternal life of God.

            So we have nothing at all to fear from repentance, even if we have fallen into behavior of which we are ashamed and embarrassed, like the sexual sins of the Corinthians which St. Paul addressed in today’s epistle reading.  Contrary to popular opinion today, there is nothing new under the sun.  Marriage between one man and one woman is the only context in which sexual intimacy may occur with God’s blessing and in accordance with His will.  Anything else is sinful, a corruption of what it means for us to live as temples of the Holy Spirit who are created male and female in God’s image and likeness.  No matter our age or life circumstances, we should all avoid any entertainment, relationships, or habits that tempt us toward any other patterns of behavior.  We must control our thoughts in this and other areas of weakness in our lives, using the Jesus Prayer to redirect our energies toward God and away from indulging in self-centered desire.     

            Regardless of what particular sins we have committed, our Father is not out to punish or embarrass us; neither does He need a payment in order to earn His forgiveness.  All that He wants us to do is to come to ourselves, to see the truth about the mess we have made of our lives, and begin the journey home.  That is why we fast, pray, give alms, reconcile with enemies, confess our sins, and devote extra time and energy to the spiritual life in Great Lent.  These practices help us to see how we have weakened and distorted ourselves with sin.  They help us to gain insight on how far we have fallen from the glory intended for the children of God.  We do these practices, not to change God, but to change us:  to bring us to the point where we know in our hearts that we have rejected our Father, chosen the pig pen of our passions over holiness, and are not worthy to be called the sons and daughters of the Most High. 

            And the instant that we do, we open ourselves to receive the eternal mercy of God the Father through His Son Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.  This is the good news of the gospel that we proclaim in preparation for Lent, for it is time to come to our senses and return to the Father Whose love, mercy, and forgiveness are beyond anything that we can imagine.  No matter what we have done, He runs out with open arms to welcome us home.