Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church

 

Hebrews 6:13-20; Mark 9:17-31

             If we have embraced the spiritual practices of Lent with any level of integrity for the last few weeks, the weakness of our faith has surely become apparent to us.  Our minds wander when we pray and so much else seems more important than being fully present before the Lord, both in the services of the Church and in our daily prayers at home.   We often make excuses not to fast to the best of our ability and, regardless of what we eat and drink, routinely indulge our self-centered desires for pleasure.  We justify being stingy in sharing our resources and attention with our neighbors, especially when we fear that doing so will compromise our illusions of self-sufficiency and comfort.  By this point in Lent, we have all gained insight into how we have failed to entrust ourselves fully to Christ for healing to the point that we can say with the brokenhearted father in today’s gospel reading, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

In kneeling before the Lord and struggling to believe that Christ could deliver his son from a life-threatening condition, the father revealed the true condition of his soul.  He was bitterly disappointed that the disciples had not been able to help and did not fully trust that the Savior could do anything more.   Nonetheless, he could muster enough faith to offer the young man to Christ for healing, even as he pleaded for Him to “help my unbelief!”  That humble, heartfelt plea was sufficient for his son to receive the Lord’s merciful healing. Despite his doubts, that blessed man still had enough faith to receive healing for his son.  He entrusted himself and his beloved child to Christ as best he could, despite his imperfect faith.

The word given by God to St. Silouan the Athonite applies to him as much as it does to us: “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.”   On the one hand, we must not fool ourselves with an illusory, superficial spirituality that distracts us from experiencing the true state of our souls before God.  Instead, we must know from our hearts how far we are from fully embracing our Lord’s gracious healing and entrusting ourselves and all our earthly cares to Him.  On the other hand, even as we confront the grave tension between the infinite holiness of God and our corruption, we must refuse to despair by accepting the lie that there is no hope for us, our loved ones, and our world in the mercy of the Lord.  Far better is the way of the father in today’s gospel lesson, for he confessed the weakness of his faith even as he paradoxically showed great faith in asking for Christ to save his son.  

He provides us a much better example of honest faith than did the disciples, for they lacked the spiritual strength to deliver the young man from the demon.  The Savior told them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.”  He said that because they were spiritual weaklings who had neglected the most basic spiritual practices for opening themselves to receive Christ’s healing strength. Not one of them got the point when the Lord said, “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him; and after He is killed, He will rise on the third day.”  At this point, they had a superficial faith focused on acquiring earthly power for themselves, not on commending themselves to the God-Man Whose Kingdom remains not of this world.  It was only after the horror of the Cross, the complete shock of the empty tomb, and the appearance and teaching of the Risen Lord that they acquired the faith necessary for them truly to believe.

The deliverance of the young man certainly did not come easily, for the demon convulsed him and most of the bystanders thought that he was dead.  That is an interesting detail, for we often naively assume that Christ’s healing comes with only sweetness and light when, in reality, embracing His healing can seem impossibly difficult.  That is especially the case for finding the strength to resist the temptation to gratify passions that have taken deep root in our souls.  Wrestling seriously with our besetting sins is a battle that causes us to die to so many illusions about ourselves. 

 As we continue the Lenten journey this year, let us persist in the inner struggle necessary to intensify our prayers, to deny ourselves, and to give generously to our neighbors as we take the small steps that we presently have the strength to take in reorienting our lives to toward the Lord.   When the battle even to take those small steps reveals our weaknesses and seems like a lost cause, that is not the time to give up, but instead to obey the command: “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.”  It is only by doing so that we may gain the spiritual clarity necessary to cry out from the depths of our hearts, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”  Indeed, it is really the only time in which we can begin to see the state of our souls clearly, which is necessary in order for us to follow our Lord to His Cross and empty tomb through humble confession and repentance of our sins. In the remaining weeks of the Fast, let us refuse to be distracted by anything that would keep us from entering as fully as possible into the holy mystery of our salvation, for “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him; and after He is killed, He will rise on the third day.” 

 

 

 

 

We Must Learn to Mourn and Rejoice with the Widow of Nain: Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost & Third Sunday of Luke with Commemoration of Our Righteous Mother Pelagia the Penitent of Antioch in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Corinthians 9:6-11; Luke 7:11-16

            I am sure that many people today reject or have no interest in the Christian faith because they have not seen in others the healing of the human person brought by Jesus Christ.  Perhaps they have heard Christians speaking primarily about morality, politics, emotion, or a view of salvation that has nothing to do with the realities of life in the world as we know it.  Or they may have seen many examples of hypocrisy on the part of those who identify themselves with the Lord, but who live their lives in opposition to His teachings even as they look for opportunities to condemn their neighbors.  Regardless, many today have concluded that there is nothing in the Christian life worthy of their devotion.

            Today’s gospel reading provides a different and powerful image of Christ’s salvation in the midst of the tragic realities of life and death.  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 time and place 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 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.  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. 

           The good news of the Gospel is that the compassion of the Lord extends even to those who endure the most tragic and miserable 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.  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.  His Mother and the other Myrrh-Bearing Women were the very first to receive this unbelievably good news.    

            Death is not only a physical reality, but also a spiritual one.  It is possible to have physical health, material possessions, high social standing, and innumerable other blessings while being enslaved to self-centered desire to the point of spiritual death.  Thankfully, Christ said that He “came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  (Luke 5:32) Today we commemorate our Righteous Mother Pelagia the Penitent of Antioch.  She was a beautiful woman from a pagan family who became quite wealthy as a prostitute. Having heard part of a sermon on divine judgment as she passed by a church, she was overcome by remorse for her way of life, repented, and was baptized.  She then gave away all her wealth to the poor, went to Jerusalem, and undertook the great ascetical labor of living alone in a cave as the Monk Pelagius, devoting herself to fasting, prayer, and all-night vigils.  That she was a woman was discovered only when her body was prepared for burial. 

             Saint Pelagia is not alone as a woman whose ascetical repentance led her to become a monk.  For example, Saint Theodora of Alexandria pursued a similar path after falling into adultery.  She did not want to be found by her husband in a community of nuns and, as the Monk Theodore, was known in the monastery for her strict spiritual discipline and piety.  After being accused of fathering a child, she was cast out of her community for seven years as she cared for him and then was allowed to return.  Upon her death, her fellow monks who learned the truth about her mourned for how they had falsely judged her.     

            The paths that these great saints trod were unusual and surely hard for people of our time and place to understand.  They took the identity of male monastics not out of a rejection or denigration of how God had created them as persons of female biological sex, but in order to embrace in their particular circumstances the type of asceticism that they needed for the healing of their souls in light of the spiritual maladies that they had suffered as unique persons due to their sins.  The Church certainly does not impose their vocations on anyone, for as free persons we must all discern the path to the Kingdom that is best for us with the guidance, but never the compulsion, of our spiritual father or mother.  For example, we also commemorate today St. Thais of Egypt, who repented of her debauchery by burning all of her riches in the city square and then spending three years in seclusion as she prayed for the Lord’s mercy.  She did not take on the identity of a male monastic.  “From the moment I entered into the cell,” said St. Thais to St. Paphnutius before her death, “all my sins constantly were before my eyes, and I wept when I remembered them.” St. Paphnutius replied, “It is for your tears, and not for the austerity of your seclusion, that the Lord has granted you mercy.”[1] 

            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. 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.  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. 

            St. Paul wrote that “he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”  That is true not only in terms of almsgiving, but also in terms of how deeply we invest ourselves in what is necessary for the healing of our souls.  Many people today surely do not take the Christian faith seriously because they have not encountered people who do precisely that.  In ways appropriate to our own circumstances, let us take Saints Pelagia, Theodora, and Thais as examples of those who fulfilled in their own lives the teaching of our Lord: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”  (Matt. 5:4) The widow of Nain provides us all a sign of the hope that is ours in Christ.  Through our humble repentance, may we open ourselves to receive the joy that overcomes both the dark night of our spiritual blindness and even of the grave.        

               

 

   

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[1] http://ww1.antiochian.org/node/16761