True Faith Comes Through a Broken Heart: Homily for the Tenth Sunday After Pentecost & Tenth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

1 Corinthians 4:9-16; Matthew 17:14-23 

            We do not have to look hard today to find distortions of the way of Christ that have nothing to do with humbling ourselves before the Lord as we take up our crosses to follow Him.  It is very dangerous to accept such corruptions of discipleship, for there is simply no way to unite ourselves to Him in faith and faithfulness without allowing our hearts to be broken. We continue today to celebrate the Dormition or “falling asleep” of the Theotokos, who after her death was the first to follow Him as a whole, embodied person into the Kingdom of Heaven.  St. Symeon said to the Theotokos at the presentation of the 40-day old Savior in the Temple, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” (Lk. 2:35) We cannot begin to imagine the pain that she experienced as she saw her Son and God rejected and crucified before her own eyes.  She never abandoned Him and surely no one rejoiced at His resurrection as did His virgin mother.  

            Regardless of how young or old our children are, the hearts of parents will be broken for them time and time again.  The same is true of our relationships with our spouses and others with whom we are deeply united in love, for their sorrows become our own.  Most of us have to learn the hard way that those we love are free persons whom we must not attempt to control or make in our own image.  No one involved in such relationships is perfect and we must learn to bear the burdens that we present to one another patiently. 

The father of the epileptic boy in today’s gospel reading stands out as a shining example of how we may lift up our broken hearts for our loved ones to Christ in true humility. This poor man sorrowed over the sufferings of his son, whose seizures put his life at risk by causing him to fall into both fire and water.  He had asked the disciples to heal him, but they lacked the strength to do so.  The Lord spoke truthfully about the spiritual weakness of those who followed Him most closely: “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.”  Then He healed the young man.  The disciples, being unaware of why they were unable to be of help in this situation, asked the Lord about it.  His response must have been hard to hear: “Because you have no faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.” 

            As hard as it is for us understand, the attachment the disciples had to Christ at this point was not true faith in Him.  Since the Savior said that “This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting,” they must have lacked even the most basic spiritual disciplines.  The passage ends with Christ foretelling His Passion: “The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and He will rise on the third day.”  All the gospels indicate that the disciples did not expect the Messiah to die and rise from the grave. They shared the dominant hope for a military champion to defeat the Roman forces of occupation and set up an earthly kingdom, in which they expected to have places of prominence.  Remember that the Lord said, “Get behind me, Satan!” to Peter, the head disciple, when he rejected the prediction of His cross and empty tomb. (Mk. 8:33) The hearts of the disciples would have to be broken through their denial and abandonment of the Savior Who went to the Cross for them finally to become receptive to a Messiah very different from what they had expected.

            St. Paul dealt with such distortions of the way of Christ in the church at Corinth where some built themselves up in their own minds in contrast to the humble obedience characteristic of true apostles.  In contrast to the pretensions of his opponents, Paul wrote that true apostles are fools for Christ, weak, held in disrepute, hungry, thirsty, homeless, and persecuted.  They were obviously not out for praise, glory, or self-satisfaction, but manifested in their sufferings the true way of the Lord as they blessed and forgave their tormentors.  That is why Paul could say with integrity, “be imitators of me.”  By enduring the pain and struggle of a heart broken for love of God and neighbor, he was healed of his passions and became a living icon of Christ.   

The heart of the father in today’s gospel lesson had already been broken by his recognition that he could not heal or protect his son from seizures that could cause his death.  Years of caring for the boy had revealed his own weaknesses and limitations.  The common hopes of parents to see their family lines flourish in future generations rang hollow for him now.  He struggled to think that he could keep his son from dying an untimely death and he was disappointed yet again when the disciples could not heal him.  In Mark’s account of this encounter, we learn that the “father cried out and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!’ in response to the Savior’s words ‘If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.’ (Mk. 9:23-24) In the midst of this man’s brokenness and pain, he knew that his faith was far from perfect.  He had acquired the humility to see the weakness of his faith.  His heart would not be healed by pretending he was something he was not.  He cried honestly to the Lord from the depths of his soul and the Lord heard his plea.  

            As King David wrote in Psalm 50, “a contrite and humble heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” Our hearts will become contrite and humble when we confront how we have marred the beauty of our souls and refused to fulfill our calling to become like God in holiness.  St. Mark the Ascetic wrote that “Remembrance of God is pain of the heart endured in the spirit of devotion.”  We will experience pain in our hearts when we persistently open even our deepest struggles and the darkest crevices of our souls to the healing of Christ. We will then know the infinite distance between the brilliant holiness to which we are called and the dark corruption that festers within us. Doing so requires mindfully dying daily to the slavery of our passions and reorienting the desires of our hearts for fulfillment in God.  We must pray, fast, serve our neighbors sacrificially, and otherwise do all that we have the strength to do in taking up our crosses if we are to follow the Theotokos in the eternal joy of the Kingdom.  

            Remember, however, that even the most conscientious performance of spiritual disciplines lacks the power, in and of itself, to bring healing to our hearts, to our loved ones, or our world.  Even as the Lord chided the disciples for their lack of faith, prayer, and fasting, He foretold His great Self-offering on the Cross and victory over death through His glorious resurrection on the third day.  He alone is the Savior, but we open ourselves to receive His healing by calling to Him in humility from the depths of our broken hearts.  They will be broken when we honestly engage the struggle to turn away from addiction to the self-centered desire that corrupts our relationships even with those we love most in this life.  It is only then that we will be able to say with the brokenhearted father, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”  It is only then that we will be able to entrust our hearts to Christ with integrity.  Otherwise, we will remain spiritual weaklings who are captive to our illusions of self-righteousness and our desires that our children, spouses, family members, and friends play the roles that we have assigned them.  If our hearts are not broken by the weight of our own sins and purified by suffering love for our neighbors, we will never gain the spiritual integrity of the father in today’s gospel reading.  But, thanks be to God, that is possible for us all, if we will only take up our crosses as best we can each day.  Doing so will break our hearts in many ways, but that is necessary if—like the Theotokos—we are to learn to entrust ourselves and all our relationships and attachments to Christ, Who taught that we must “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” (Matt. 6:33)   By enduring the struggle to focus on “the one thing needful” of hearing and obeying the Word of God, we will open our hearts to receive the grace necessary to follow her into the blessedness of the eternal joy for which He created us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don't Drown in a Sea of Despair: Homily for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost & Ninth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

1 Corinthians 3:9-17: Matthew 14:22-34

It is so easy for us today to become so focused on our worries and fears that we start to sink into a deep sea of despair.  We live in a time of almost constant distraction in which we are bombarded with images and messages that make us anxious, angry, and depressed.  We have been formed to ground our sense of wellbeing in serving cultural standards of success, including what we possess, how we look, and whether national events are unfolding in ways that we like.  Even in the richest and most powerful country in the world, people who bear the image and likeness of God will never find true satisfaction in the pursuit of such insubstantial goals.  Even those who seem to have achieved them know that they can disappear in the blink of an eye.  If the horizons of our hope extend no further than that, then we will never have any true peace in our souls.  

 Today’s gospel lesson provides a vivid example of what happens when we attempt to ground ourselves on the weak foundation of such illusions.  St. Peter began to sink like a stone in a raging sea when he turned his focus away from the Lord to fear about where he stood in relation to the wind and the waves.  By his own nature, there was simply no way that Peter could have avoided drowning, but he called out “Lord, save me!”  That is precisely what the Savior did by reaching out to Peter and rescuing him as He said, “O man of little faith, why did you doubt?”  The stress of the storm revealed the weakness of Peter’s faith, which is not surprising because he had gotten himself into this situation by foolishly putting Christ to the test, saying “Lord, if it is You, bid me come to You on the water.”   By his lack of humble trust, Peter literally got himself in well over his head. He had to learn the hard way that he had no other foundation, no other basis or hope for his life, than Jesus Christ.  If left to his own devices, he would have sunk like a stone into a watery grave.    

That is a destination completely different from the one to which our Lord calls us. The God-Man came to do nothing less than to transfigure us in holiness with His gracious divine energies as the uniquely beautiful persons He created us to become.  The Savior called His disciples to “be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”  (Matt. 5:48) He cited the Psalms: “You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.” (Psalm 82:6; Jn. 10:34) While we remain human beings by nature, Christ enables us to become like Him by our personal participation in His grace. That is why theosis is an eternal process, for God’s holiness is truly infinite.  We must not pretend to be isolated individuals looking for fulfillment in the conventional terms of this world, for Christ calls us to become persons united in love with Him and fellow members His Body, the Church. Such uniting love should transform our relationships with everyone we encounter and overcome all merely human divisions that do nothing but enslave people even further to their passions.  We become more fully our true selves not in self-centered isolation or by identifying with divisive factions over against other groups, but through growing in loving relationship with all who bear His image and likeness.  

The contrast between humanity seeking fulfillment on its own terms and our Savior’s restoration and fulfillment of the human person is starker than the difference between night and day.  It is truly the difference been death and life, between sinking to the bottom of a dark sea of sin and becoming resplendent with the radiant glory of God. Our Lord has conquered death, Hades, and the tomb in His glorious resurrection on the third day.  His divine glory has flooded even the darkest abyss, even the most tragic and painful pits of despair into which we can fall.  He has liberated us from slavery to the fear of death as the God-Man Who shares His eternal life with weak, fearful, anxious, and confused people like us.  When we call out to Him with faith from the depths of our hearts, as Peter did when he began to sink, He will illumine our darkened souls to receive His healing light.   

As St. Paul taught, “no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”  No one and nothing else can have that place in our lives, for to ground our existence elsewhere is to commit idolatry.  No matter how virtuous or appealing any project or ideal of this world may appear, it cannot keep us from sinking under the weight of our own sins.  The darkness roots so deeply within us all, both personally and collectively, and nothing but the brilliant glory of the Lord can overcome it.  Whether we know it or not, we inevitably sink like stones into the abyss whenever we make the foundation of our lives anything or anyone else than the One Who has conquered death itself.  All good things have their place in God’s creation and we should despise none of them, but we will not fully embrace the healing of the New Adam until we ground every dimension of our life on Him, our one true foundation. 

 As St. Paul teaches, we are by no means self-made, self-sustaining, or self-defining.   Our true identity is not determined by any merely human accomplishment, ability, or affiliation.   Instead, “we are God’s fellow workers…God’s field, God’s building…God’s temple… God’s Spirit dwells in you.”  Christ has made us members of His own Body, the Church.  The very foundation of our life, of our identity, and of our hope is in Him, not in our achievements, possessions, characteristics, or inclinations.   In order to avoid sinking like stones amidst the raging seas of our passions, we must mindfully turn away from whatever tempts us to reject our true vocation to become ever more beautiful living icons of God.  If we surrender to those temptations, we will become just like Peter in being so overwhelmed by the wind and waves of worry and fear that we will turn our focus away from Christ.

 Let us, then, remain constantly on guard against the temptation to entrust the meaning and purpose of our lives to anything or anyone other than the Lord.  There is no way to do that without cultivating the habits of daily prayer and mindful protection of our hearts from embracing thoughts and desires that fuel our passions.  The next time that you start sinking in the winds and waves, focus your attention on Him, as Peter did, saying “Lord, save me!”  He alone can raise us up from drowning in the sea of our passions. We also must not pretend that we are so strong spiritually than we can simply wait until there is a crisis; no, we must attend to the health of our souls every day.  We all remain too weak before our passions to focus fully on “the one thing needful” of hearing and obeying the Word of God.

 That is why we should all take a close look at our lives during this Dormition Fast and identify the habits of thought, word, and deed that keep us so distracted, confused, and weak that we easily sink like stones under their weight. We need to build new habits to replace them, such as limiting our exposure to images, messages, and media that lead us to hope in the passing things of this world.  We should replace them with edifying spiritual reading and listening to Orthodox chant and spiritual commentary.  Instead of worrying about this or that in the future or despairing about matters beyond our control in the world, we should devote our attention to grounding ourselves on Christ in the present and to serving Him in our neighbors who need our assistance and companionship. 

            The path to transfiguration in holiness is open to us all and exemplified most fully by the Theotokos, the woman who was the first receive Christ as His virgin mother and then to follow Him as a whole, embodied person into the heavenly kingdom upon her death.  As we fast and ask for her prayers, let us entrust ourselves so fully to her Son that we may join her in saying with every ounce of our being, “Behold the servant of the Lord.  Let it be to me according to your word.”  If we remain so grounded on our one true foundation, we will never drown in the sea of despair.   

 

 

 

Preparing for the Transfiguration and the Dormition: Homily for the Eighth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

 Matthew 14:14-22

            Early August is an especially rich time in the life of the Church.  On August 6, we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor, when the spiritual eyes of Peter, James, and John were opened to behold His divine glory to the extent possible for human beings.  For the first two weeks of this month, we fast and pray in preparation for the Feast of the Dormition (or “falling asleep”) of the Theotokos, when she became the first to follow her Son—body, soul, and spirit-- into the eternal life of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Both these great feasts manifest our sublime vocation as “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.  As Christ said to Nathanael, “You shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” (John 1:51)

In order to become transfigured in holiness, we must respond with active obedience to the Savior’s calling in our lives.  Of course, we would usually rather avoid accepting that responsibility like the disciples did when the Lord said concerning the thousands of hungry people who had followed Him into the wilderness, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” Since it was obvious that they did not have the provisions to feed all those people, they had asked Christ to “send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”  The disciples had only five loaves of bread and two fish, an absurdly small amount of food for a large crowd.  But they still obeyed when “He said, ‘Bring them here to Me.’”  The Savior then “blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.  And they all ate and were satisfied.  And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over.  And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

             The Lord revealed His identity as the Messiah that day by miraculously supplying food for hungry Jews in the desert like manna from heaven in the Old Testament.  The five loaves remind us of the five books of law in the Hebrew Bible, while the two fish recall the two tablets of God’s commandments received by Moses.  From these small amounts of food came such an abundance that twelve basketsful were leftover, which reminds us of the twelve tribes of Israel.  Five thousand men and their families were fed, which again recalls the five Old Testament books of law. The Lord miraculously satisfied the hunger of a multitude in a way that showed He fulfills the law, the prophets, and the promises to Abraham, which are now extended to all who respond to Him with humble faith. (Matt. 5:17)   

     Christ showed the disciples and us that we must actively offer ourselves and our resources to become instruments of His salvation in this world, regardless of our weaknesses and inadequacies.  Adam and Eve did the opposite by disobeying the Lord’s command and indulging their self-centered desires. They thus refused to fulfill their vocations as living icons of God and pursued a path leading only to despair and death.  The Savior offered Himself on the Cross in order to liberate us from such a depraved state through His glorious resurrection on the third day.  We unite ourselves to His offering when we lift up our hearts and offer bread and wine for the celebration of the Eucharist in the Divine Liturgy.  He has restored and fulfilled the original purpose of food and drink in order to bring us into the eternal communion of love shared by the Persons of the Holy Trinity. He nourishes us with His Body and Blood such that His life becomes ours as participants in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.  

When “He looked up to Heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds,” the Savior provided an image of the Eucharist.  Had the disciples not offered what little food they had collected to Christ, the crowd would have gone hungry.  If no one offers the bread and wine for the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, no one is nourished by the Eucharist.  By miraculously satisfying so many with so little, Christ revealed what it means for us to live eucharistically as we offer ourselves and our resources for the fulfillment of His gracious purposes for the world.  We must not offer only bread and wine or think that communion with Christ concerns only what we do on Sunday morning.  To be truly in communion with Christ means living every day as those who share in His life and are being transfigured in holiness.  No matter how tiny or inadequate our offerings may seem, He multiplies them to accomplish His gracious purposes for the world.   

During this period of the Dormition Fast, we marvel at how an obscure Palestinian Jewish girl freely offered herself to become the living temple of God when she said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.  Let it be to me according to your word.”  By offering herself fully in obedience, she became the Theotokos, the first to receive Christ into her life and, upon her death, the first to follow Him as a whole, embodied person into the heavenly kingdom.  No one forced her to do so, even as her Son did not force the disciples and does not force us.  Her obedience was not limited to a one-time event but continued throughout the course of her life, including when she stood by the foot of the Cross as her Son died.  Likewise, the disciples’ offering was not limited to the small amount of food they handed over on one day, for they had already obeyed His command to leave behind their occupations and families to follow Christ.  Had they refused to abandon their fishing nets, Peter, James, and John would not have been on Mt. Tabor where they beheld the divine glory of the Lord at the Transfiguration.  The only way to participate in Christ’s transfiguration of the human person in holiness is to persist in offering ourselves to Him in obedience each day as best we can, no matter how insignificant or difficult the particular offering may seem.  

            In order to gain the spiritual strength to do so, we must be obedient in the basic spiritual disciplines of the Christian life, including opening our hearts to God in focused prayer and reading the Scriptures each day, keeping a close watch on the thoughts that we accept in our hearts, and fasting in ways appropriate to our health and life circumstances. We must struggle to forgive those who have wronged us, ask forgiveness from those we have wronged, and give generously to help the needy and support the ministries of the Church.  We must repent of our sins as we receive Christ’s forgiveness in Confession, which we should all do regularly.  And we should receive our Lord’s Body and Blood as often as we can with proper spiritual preparation. 

That is how we may become transfigured in holiness so that we will have the strength to obey His command: “You give them something to eat.”  That is not a calling for a select few, but the Lord’s calling to us all.  In ways beyond our full understanding, the free obedience of an obscure Jewish girl was necessary for the coming of the Messiah.  In her Dormition and translation to heaven, the Lord has given us a radiant sign of our salvation.  We must each bow before the mystery of how her obedience, and ours, plays a unique role in making the world brilliant with the Lord’s holiness and drawing others into the life of the kingdom.  Let us refuse to be distracted from fulfilling our vocation to be transfigured in holiness as we offer the loaves and fishes of our lives for Him to bless and multiply as He sees fit. Let us “lift up our hearts” as we offer every dimension of our life and world for the healing and fulfillment that He alone can bring.