The Long Journey Home of Repentance: Homily for the Sunday of the Prodigal Son in the Orthodox Church

St. Luke 5:11-32

The relationship between parents and their adult children can be difficult, especially when young people assert their independence for the first time.  Though it is not always the case, tensions often seem strongest between parents and children of the same sex; that is, between fathers and sons and between mothers and daughters. Perhaps that is because they often have so much in common and see themselves in one another.

The parable of the Prodigal Son focuses precisely on such a relationship.  A young man asked his father for his share of the inheritance, which the father gave him.  The son’s request amounted to telling his father he wished he were dead so that he could inherit his share of the estate.  The old man meant nothing more to him than a source of cash to fund a decadent lifestyle in a foreign land.  The young man did his best to end their relationship and apparently had no intention of ever returning home. He treated his father so shamefully that we would expect neither of them to want to have anything to do with the other ever again.  Members of families become estranged to this day over much less.

When the money ran out, the son found himself living in a time of famine in a strange land where the best job he could find was feeding pigs.  He was so hungry that he envied the pigs their food.  Given the Jewish context of the parable, this detail shows that he had fallen to the most miserable state imaginable.  That is when he “came to himself” and realized that even his father’s hired hands had more than enough to eat. He resolved, “I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ The son had learned his lesson the hard way and saw the gravity of what he had done.  He had broken his relationship with his father beyond any repair he could imagine.  The most he could hope for would be to return as a mere servant.  

The father, however, was not concerned at all about what the son deserved for his actions. He must have looked out into the distance every day with the unlikely hope that his son would eventually come home.  That is when he saw the prodigal still a long way off “and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.”  That was a shocking response, both to the son and to anyone else who happened to see it.  In response to the young man’s confession, “‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’”  the father  said, “‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’”  In response to the complaint of the older brother about the injustice of restoring and even celebrating the prodigal, the father reiterated his reason for rejoicing:  “for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’”

            The Church directs our attention to this parable as we continue our preparation for the season of Great Lent, which in turn prepares us to follow Christ to His victory over death in His glorious resurrection on the third day.  As we anticipate the intensified repentance of the coming weeks, we must learn to see ourselves in the young man who was so enslaved by self-centered desire that he thought nothing of breaking off the most fundamental relationship of his life.  He acted not as a son in a life-giving relationship of love, but as an isolated individual out to get what he wanted for himself.  Nothing else and no one else mattered.  We do the same thing whenever we do not live according to our great dignity as those created in God’s image and likeness as His own sons and daughters.  Instead of finding true fulfillment by purifying our hearts as we reorient our disordered desires toward union with the Lord in holiness, we think, act, and speak in ways that degrade and weaken us.  We may not envy the food of pigs, but when we wallow in pride, anger, lust, slander, and other passions, we become barely recognizable as God’s beloved children.  By trying to live outside of a relationship with Him, we turn away from the very foundation of what it means to be a human person.

            The young man in the parable finally “came to himself” and realized both how needlessly miserable he was and that he had no right to be called his father’s son.  By embracing Lenten disciplines such as prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and forgiveness with integrity, we will have no lack of opportunities to come to ourselves as our illusions of religious self-sufficiency fall away.  Our minds will wander, our stomachs and taste buds will protest, our attachment to money will flare up, and we will find it very appealing to hold grudges and say nasty things about others.   We may notice all kinds of strange, tempting thoughts and desires popping into our minds.  When such struggles arise, we may be tempted not to complete the Lenten journey. 

Just as stretching and strengthening a weak, constricted muscle is painful, taking steps to reorient our lives to Christ will make us feel our lack of spiritual health.  The more clearly we see the true state of our souls, the more we will know that we have rejected our Lord in ways too numerous to count due to our own self-centeredness.  The point is not simply that we have broken a law or done something wrong.  It is much more serious, for we have made ourselves unworthy and undeserving of being called His sons and daughters.

            The father in the parable is, of course, an image of our Heavenly Father, Who “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  (Jn. 3:16)  The old man restored his son fully with fine clothing and a joyful celebration, saying that “my son was dead, and is alive again.”  The young man had made himself dead to his father by taking his inheritance and ending his relationship with him.  As we come to ourselves through the spiritual clarity gained through the struggles of our Lenten repentance, we will come to know that we have done the very same thing in relation to God.  We have wanted His blessings for ourselves and then made Him irrelevant for so many dimensions of our lives.  We have acted as though God were dead. In order to save us from the path leading only to the grave, the Savior entered into death, the wages of sin, in order to bring us into eternal life through His resurrection.  Only One Who did so could restore us, who were enslaved to death, as His sons and daughters.

            We should not dismiss Lent’s call to repentance out of fear that we will not perform any spiritual discipline well enough to earn God’s mercy.  The son in the parable earned nothing from his father; his restoration was worked purely through gracious love.  Likewise, Lent is not about earning anything from God at all, but instead about helping us prodigal sons and daughters come to ourselves as we take the long journey home to union in holiness with our Lord.  No matter how miserable and wretched we have made ourselves  as we have tried to shut Him out of our lives, He reaches out to us, calling us to cooperate with His gracious will to restore and fulfill us completely as those who bear His image and likeness.  The disciplines of the coming season provide us with opportunities to open our souls more fully to the healing mercy of the Savior.  He rose from the dead in order to bring us up with Him from the grave of our sins to the blessed eternal fellowship of the Kingdom.  The least we can do is to make good use of Lent as we come to our senses and begin the long journey home to Him.

Preparing for Lent with Humility: Homily for the Sunday of the Pharisee and the Publican in the Orthodox Church

2 Timothy 3:10-15; Luke 18:10-14

            The Savior said, “He who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”  These words speak directly to each of us, for we all follow in the path of our first parents in refusing to live in a manner worthy of people created in God’s image and likeness due to our pride. Our great dignity means that we will become more fully ourselves only as we become more like God in holiness.  True humility requires recognizing how far we are from fulfilling such an infinite goal.  It is only through humility that we will be able to participate in the joy of the true exaltation of our Lord’s glorious resurrection.

It is certainly possible to use religion, or anything else, to distract us from humbling ourselves before God. Like the Pharisee in today’s parable, we can make prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and other virtuous actions ways of blinding ourselves to the truth.   How appealing it is to magnify our own accomplishments in contrast to what we see as the failings of others.  When we engage in that kind of self-congratulation, it becomes impossible truly to offer our lives to the Lord. Instead, all that we say and do becomes simply an act of self-worship, a form of idolatry.  The Pharisee in the parable may have used the word “God,” but he was really praying only to Himself.

Anyone who has ever tried to pray in a focused way will understand why he did that.  We usually find it extremely difficult to be fully present before the Lord, whether during services or in our private prayers.  Profound humility is required to open our hearts to the One Who is infinitely “Holy, Holy, Holy.”  When even a glimmer of the brilliant light of the Divine Glory begins to shine through the eyes of our souls, the darkness within us becomes quite apparent.  The temptation is strong to shift our attention to whatever we think will hide us from that kind of spiritual nakedness.  To focus on how good we think we are, especially in comparison with others, is an appealing way of changing the subject as we become ever more blind to the true state of our souls.

The Publican was an easy target of criticism for the Pharisee.  Tax collectors were Jews who collected money from their own people to fund the Roman army of occupation.  They collected more than was required and lived off the difference.  Consequently, the Pharisee believed that he was justified in looking down on someone who was both a traitor and a thief.  Ironically, this tax collector would not have disagreed.  He knew he was a wretched sinner, and his only apparent virtue was his humble acknowledgement of this true spiritual state.  Standing off by himself in the temple, this fellow would “not even lift up his eyes to Heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.’”

Despite his miserable way of life, the tax collector somehow mustered the spiritual strength to expose his soul to the blinding light of God in prayer from the depths of his heart.  He knew that this was not a time for excuses or changing the subject.  No, it was time simply to accept the truth.  Christ said that the Publican, not the Pharisee, went home justified that day.  The difference was not who had done more good deeds or obeyed more laws; it was, instead, who had the humility that is absolutely essential for  opening our souls to the healing mercy of Christ.   Without such humility, pride will destroy the virtue of everything that we do.  With it, there is hope for us all.

In just a few weeks, we will begin the spiritual journey of Great Lent, the most intense period of repentance in the life of the Church as we prepare to follow our Lord to His Cross and empty tomb.  There could be no greater sign of the folly of exalting ourselves and condemning others than the Passion of Christ.  He brings salvation to the world in a way completely contrary to prideful self-congratulation that hides from the truth.   What could be more humble than for the eternal Son of God to empty Himself, take on the form of a servant, and become obedient to the point of death for our salvation? (Phil. 2:7-8)  St. Paul wrote, “Therefore God also has highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:9-11)

It is only by knowing the depths of our brokenness that we will be able to embrace personally the heights of the Lord’s humble, suffering love, which is well beyond our full rational comprehension. That is why we need to devote ourselves to prayer, fasting, almsgiving, forgiveness, and other forms of repentance in the weeks ahead.  If we do not, we will likely fail to gain the spiritual clarity of the tax collector, who was aware only of his sin and need for God’s mercy. We will never enter into the deep mystery of our salvation if we do not open the eyes of our darkened souls to the light of Christ so that we may see our true state before Him.

The Church calls us to pray daily and with special intensity during Lent.  Instead of congratulating ourselves for whatever apparent success may have in doing so, it is better to remember that our struggles in opening our souls to God reflect our weakness and need for strength that we cannot give ourselves.  They provide an opportunity to pray the Jesus Prayer or otherwise simply to turn our attention back to the Lord the best we can with a sense of our need for His mercy.  In contrast, the worst thing we could do when struggling in prayer would be to become like the Pharisee who reminded God of his good deeds and condemned the tax collector.  It would be better not to pray at all than to do so in such an idolatrous way.

Our struggle to pray provides great opportunities for growth in humility, as do our difficulties in fasting, forgiving, showing generosity, and otherwise reorienting our lives to God.  Given our spiritual brokenness, we will usually find it much easier to eat whatever we want, hold grudges, be selfish, and otherwise serve only ourselves than to resist our self-centered desires as we open our lives to Christ in humility for healing.  To do so, however, is simply a path to greater blindness and weakness.  It is a way of degrading ourselves, of refusing to live according to the truth of who we are called to become in God’s image and likeness.

Likewise, it is possible to perform all spiritual disciplines in a corrupt way that serves only our pride, especially when we use them to condemn others.  As we begin our preparation for Great Lent this year, we should all be on guard against the temptation of self-exaltation in any form.  For if anything we do could earn God’s favor and make us so much better than others that we would be justified in condemning them, there would be no Lent because there would have been no need for our Lord to conquer death through His cross and resurrection.  The weeks of preparation for Holy Week and Pascha are necessary because we cannot save ourselves by religious or moral practices.  Our only hope is to participate in Christ’s exaltation by uniting ourselves to Him in humble faith.  The coming season will provide us with many opportunities to do precisely that.  If by the end of Lent, we see ourselves as clearly before God as did the tax collector and ask only for mercy from the depths of our souls, we will be well prepared to follow our Lord to Jerusalem, where He showed, once and for all, how humility leads to exaltation.

Patient, Humble Faith for the Healing of our Souls: Homily for Hieromartyr Charalampos, Bishop of Magnesia and the 17th Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

2 Timothy 2:1-10; Matthew 15:21-28

            Good parents know that, while it may be easier to do things for our children, it is often best to let them learn by doing themselves.  They will not do everything well the first time, but neither did we. Children whose parents make everything easy for them will not become mature, capable, or self-confident.  Part of growing up is learning to handle the frustration of not getting it all right immediately.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus Christ responded to the request of the Canaanite woman for the healing of her daughter in a way that she surely found frustrating.  When she, as a Gentile, called on Him as the Jewish Messiah or “Son of David” to cast out the demon, He did not answer her at all.  Then the disciples made the situation even more tense by begging Him to send her away.  That is when the Savior said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  In response to those words, she knelt before Him and said, “Lord, help me.”  Christ then truly put her to the test by saying, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”  In other words, He was reminding her that she was not a descendant of Abraham and, according to the conventional assumptions of the day,  had no claim on the blessings brought by the Messiah.

That is when the Canaanite woman uttered a profound theological truth:  “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”  She acknowledged that, if those promises applied only to those of Hebrew heritage, she had no more claim on them than dogs had to the food of their owner.  Those dogs would not have been beloved pets, but more like scavengers that the Jews viewed with caution.  Nonetheless, even dogs could lick up the crumbs that fall from the table.  In other words, she knew better than our Lord’s disciples that the ancient promises were for the benefit of all.  The Lord praised her great faith and healed her daughter when she put the request in those terms.

We probably find it hard to understand why Christ responded to this woman’s pleas as He did.  Had He immediately granted her request and not referred to her as a dog, we would be more comfortable with the story.  In order to understand this conversation, we have to remember that He was guiding a particular person to grow in her faith.  Like a good parent or teacher, He did not do all the work for her or make things too easy.  Instead, He challenged her to face head-on who she was in relation to Him.  He prodded her to grow into a mature understanding of how the blessings of His ministry could extend to her and her fellow Gentiles.  That was not only a truth she needed to learn, but that His disciples needed to see enacted before their very eyes as He praised the faith of a despised foreigner and delivered her daughter.

The Savior put this woman to the test and she responded with humble faith.  She did not take offense due to hurt pride when He seemed to ignore her and then gave the impression that she should go away and stop bothering Him.  She did not deny that, as a Gentile, she had the standing of a dog, an unclean animal that was not really part of the family, in the eyes of the Jews.  Indeed, her great expression of faith is based on the acceptance of that lowly designation.  The Savior’s response enabled her to see clearly who she was in relation to Him and how shocking it was that His mercy extended even to the Gentiles.  Christ surely spoke to her in this way because He knew she had the spiritual strength to respond as she did for her own benefit and that of her daughter and the disciples.  And since we are focusing on her story today, the account of this woman’s humble faith benefits us also.

It is tempting for any group of people to forget or ignore the truth about where they stand before the Lord.  The Roman Empire persecuted the early Christians because the Romans believed that they were civilization itself.  They charged those who refused to worship their gods with treason and hatred of humanity, for they believed that those gods protected their realm.  There was no higher good for them than to preserve their way of life.  How tempting it remains for nations and other groups hypocritically to identify themselves with all that is good and to use that identification to justify hating and condemning others.

We commemorate today the Hieromartyr Charalampos the Wonder Worker, a bishop who endured terrible tortures at the hands of the Romans at the advanced age of 113 before being beheaded at the beginning of the third century.  His example and miracles brought many to believe in Christ.  St. Charalampos embodied the humble faith shown by the Canaanite woman, for he did not abandon the Lord when loyalty to Him resulted in horribly brutal treatment and even death.  Like other martyrs, he accepted being viewed as an enemy by his own rulers for the sake of the Savior, Who Himself had been executed by the Romans as “the King of the Jews.” They carried out such executions in order to make clear what happened to people who dared to challenge their authority and unique place in the world.

Obviously, St. Charalampos and the other martyrs faced difficult trials through which they demonstrated their faith.  Their path was certainly not easy and required profound patience, as well as the humility to accept being treated much worse than a dog.  Through their suffering, they bore witness not only to how the Lord’s salvation extends to Gentiles with faith in Him, but also to His great victory over death in His resurrection on the third day.  The Savior’s resurrection was not a mere concept to them, but the ultimate truth of their lives, which they embraced by literally taking up their crosses and following Him through the grave to the empty tomb.

While God does not call us all to become martyrs in that sense, He does call us to cultivate the humble faith which they and the Canaanite woman so clearly possessed.  In order to do so, we must reject the temptation to think that we stand before God on the basis of any worldly characteristic or accomplishment, whether as particular people or as members of a group of any kind.  Making power and success in this world the highest good was the basis of the idolatry of the Romans.  By refusing to deny Christ even to the point of death as traitors to Rome, the martyrs obviously did not worship the false gods of this world.  By accepting that she was an outsider to the people of Israel even as she begged for Christ to heal her daughter, the Canaanite woman showed that the ultimate meaning and purpose of her life was not defined by conventional distinctions between people, nations, or religions.  Instead of building themselves up over against others by the corrupt standards of earthly power, these holy people embraced the selfless way of Christ, Whose Kingdom is not of this world. Their examples demonstrate that how we stack up according to human standards does not give anyone a greater or lesser claim on the Lord’s mercy than anyone else.

Like them, we must not give up when difficult circumstances test our faith.  It is precisely through our disappointments, struggles, and persistent challenges that we will grow in our understanding that the life in Christ is not about getting what we want on our own terms or schedule or achieving any earthly goal.  It is, instead, about finding the healing of our souls as we share more fully in the eternal life of the Savior as the particular persons He created us to be.  Our paths will not be identical to those of St. Charalampos or the Canaanite woman, but we must look to them as examples of the persistent, humble faith in Christ through Whom “many will come from the East and the West to share the banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”  (Matt. 8:11)

Presenting Our Talents in the Heavenly Temple: Homily for the 16th Sunday After Pentecost and 16th Sunday of Matthew in the the Orthodox Church

2 Corinthians 6:1-10; Matthew 25:14-30

            Today we continue to celebrate the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, when the Theotokos and St. Joseph the Betrothed took the forty-day old Savior to the Temple in obedience to the requirements of the Old Testament law.  This is a feast in which we celebrate how the Child born at Christmas has fulfilled the hopes of the children of Abraham and extended them to all people with faith in Him.  Righteous Simeon held Christ in his arms and proclaimed, “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.”  The elderly Prophetess Anna also “spoke of him to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”  The Old Testament temple and priesthood were preparatory signs of the coming of the Great High Priest Who offers Himself for the salvation of the world.  He has fulfilled the law and the calling of every human person to become like God in holiness, for He has joined humanity to divinity in Himself as the God-Man.   

            In order to celebrate this feast properly, we must go beyond speaking words about what Christ has done, as true as those words are.  We must present and unite ourselves to Him personally, making every dimension of our life an entrance into the heavenly worship of the Kingdom.  For our Savior is the One “Who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and Who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by a mere human being.” (Heb. 8:1-2)  Everything that we think, say, and do in this world may participate already in heavenly glory through Christ, when we unite ourselves to Him in holiness.  In order for that to happen, we must obey St. Paul’s instruction:  “We entreat you not to accept the grace of God in vain…Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”  If we are not offering ourselves to the Lord today, then we are refusing the only opportunity we have to share more fully in His life.  The past is gone and we have no idea what the future will hold.  We must be good stewards of the opportunities available to us right now, if we want to find the healing of our souls.

            As the parable in today’s gospel reading makes clear, we must invest ourselves more fully in the life of Christ. The point is not what particular challenges and opportunities we have on a daily basis, but whether we are responding to them in a way that serves God’s purposes for us, our neighbors, and our world. The servants who invested their talents such that they produced more were exalted.  The servant who, out of fear, buried his talent in the ground and produced nothing lost what he had and was cast out.  The point was not how much they began with, but what they did with what they had.  Regardless of the circumstances of our lives, we all face the same challenge to enter more fully into the blessed life of the Kingdom.  “Now is the day of salvation” for us all because the ultimate question is whether we are uniting ourselves to Christ in the present reality of our lives.  If we are doing so, then we are becoming more fully the people God created us to be in His image and likeness through the eternal ministry of our Great High Priest.  If we are not, we are refusing to cooperate with our Lord’s gracious invitation to share in the life of the Kingdom. That is a path that leads only to greater spiritual weakness. 

            In the parable, the man with one talent hid it in the ground because he was afraid of his master. Notice that the master said that the servant, at the very least, could have put the talent in a bank and produced a little bit of interest for him. We may be tempted to refuse to give our time, energy, and abilities to serve Christ because we are afraid that He will not accept our offering. We may think that we will fail at what we have set out to do or perhaps somehow look foolish in the eyes of others.  We may feel weak or guilty or otherwise believe that opening some area of our lives to the Savior will result only in harsh condemnation. 

            Remember, however, that the master in the parable would have accepted even a small amount of interest from one talent put in the bank.  He told the unfortunate servant that the proper response to his fear was at least to do something productive, not to be paralyzed by anxiety or shame.  On the one hand, it could be understandable why we would hesitate to unite ourselves to the Lord.  It can be painful and embarrassing to acknowledge the truth about our own brokenness and need for healing.  Since God is infinitely holy and we most surely are not, the temptation not to expose ourselves to Him is powerful.  We like to think that it would be better to avoid the pain of condemnation, failure, or hurt pride by keeping the Lord—and a recognition of the truth about our lives-- at arm’s length.  Consequently, we bury our talent in the ground as we refuse to offer and open ourselves to Christ.   

            The problem, of course, is that the assumptions driving the fears that  keep us from being good stewards of our talents have no basis in reality.  The Master Who calls us to offer our lives to Him is Jesus Christ, Who endured crucifixion, death, burial, and descent into Hades for our salvation.  Purely out of love for us, He offered up Himself in order to conquer the grave in His glorious resurrection on the third day.  In His earthly ministry, the Savior had mercy on every repentant sinner who came to Him, including St. Peter who denied Him three times before His crucifixion.  He healed diseases of all kinds, cast out demons, and even raised the dead.  There is no reason to let fear of rejection deter us from humbly offering ourselves to Him for the service of the Kingdom.

            If we wonder what it would mean for us to be good stewards of our talents, all that we need to do is look around us.  Christ said that He “came to serve, not to be served” (Matt. 20:28) and there is no shortage of ways to serve Him in our parish, in our families, and in our neighbors, friends, and acquaintances.  To the extent that we help even the lowliest person, we serve our Lord.   We must also be good stewards by devoting our time, energy, and attention to prayer, reading the Bible, studying the lives and teachings of the saints, and gaining strength in resisting our self-centered desires by fasting and other forms of self-denial.  We must deliberately invest ourselves in daily practices that enable us to offer ourselves to Christ.  If we do not, our focus will remain simply on ourselves, and especially on fulfilling our passions in ways that further enslave us to them.

At the end of the day, we must offer ourselves to something or someone.  Remembering how Christ has fulfilled the ancient prophecies of the Old Testament, let us unite ourselves to Him as our Great High Priest by making each moment of our lives a point of entrance into the eternal liturgy of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Righteous Simeon and the Prophetess Anna waited decades for the Messiah.  Since He has already come, let us give our whole lives to Him.   That is the only way to be good stewards of our gifts as we refuse “to accept the grace of God in vain,” but instead do all that we can to cooperate with Him for the healing of our souls.  Anything less amounts to burying our talents in the ground and refusing to invest ourselves in the service of the Kingdom.   

Tangible Holiness Through Personal Encounter with Christ: Homily for the Translation of the Relics of John Chrysostom and the 15th Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

Hebrews 7:26-8:2; Luke 19:1-10

It is fair enough for people to ask why the Orthodox Christian faith inspires our loyalty.  There are so many other religions available to us, as well as non-religious perspectives according to which we could live our lives.  We are free to believe and live as we choose, so why should we identify ourselves with Jesus Christ and His Church?

From the earliest years of the faith, the example of how personal encounter with the Savior changes people has been a powerful witness.  The early Christians laid down their lives for Him as martyrs.  They shared their possessions such that the needs of every member of the community were met.  They crossed ethnic boundaries in shocking ways that manifested their unity in Christ. They cared for the sick during plagues and rescued children who had been abandoned by their parents.  In contrast to a decadent culture, they embraced chastity in a way appropriate to their vocations as married people, monastics, or widows.

Profound personal transformations certainly occurred during our Lord’s earthly ministry. Today’s gospel reading tells the memorable story of Zacchaeus, who responded to the Savior’s initiative by repudiating his dishonest, greedy way of life as a tax collector.  After Zacchaeus welcomed Christ into his home, others complained that “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.”  In that time and place, it was scandalous for the Messiah to identify himself with such a corrupt person by accepting his hospitality.  In response to that charge, Zacchaeus spontaneously repented by giving half of his possessions to the poor and restoring what he had stolen four fold. We do not know the details of the Lord’s conversation with Zacchaeus, but it had such an impact on the tax collector that Christ proclaimed, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham; for the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.”

The shocking transformation of Zacchaeus serves as testimony to the healing power of Christ in relation to some of the most powerful temptations that we experience.   Recall what St. Paul wrote to St. Timothy about the dangers of loving money:  “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. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” (1 Tim. 6:9-10)  It is one thing to be content with having the physical necessities of life, but quite another to seek the meaning of our lives in the comfort, status, and security usually associated with wealth in this world.

Personal experience teaches that possessions easily become our false gods, but they cannot ultimately satisfy us.  Wealthy and famous people may live in misery, while the humble poor may experience great joy. Those whose lives revolve around money and what it can buy will never be at peace, for there can be no guarantee about what tomorrow will bring. No matter how much or how little we have, worrying about keeping it and acquiring more often enslaves us to self-centered desire and obscures our vision of the needs of others.  It turns our trust away from God and toward an imaginary vision of ourselves as being self-sufficient. When, like Zacchaeus, we open our disordered relationship with money to Christ, we will turn away from self-centeredness to embrace generosity toward others. To live that way in the midst of such a materialistic culture will bear witnesses to the power of the Savior to make us already participants in a Kingdom not of this world.

Today we commemorate the recovery of the relics of St. John Chrysostom, who had died in exile in Armenia thirty years earlier due to the persecution of the Empress Eudoxia.  His casket would not be moved until a letter of apology from Emperor Theodosius the Younger was placed on it.  St. John’s body was found to be incorrupt and was placed on the patriarchal throne in Constantinople, where he was miraculously heard to say, “Peace be to all.”

The life of any saint is a brilliant icon of what happens when a human being becomes radiant with the holiness of God.  Since our basic human calling is to become like God in holiness, we should think of the saints simply as true human beings, not as a special class somehow separate from the challenges of life in the world as we know it.  It is by responding faithfully in the midst of those challenges that they become “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.  The ancient practice of honoring the relics or physical remains of a saint reflects our belief that the body of a Christian is a temple of the Holy Spirit and destined for resurrection into eternal life.  In the Old Testament, contact with the bones of the prophet Elisha raised a man from death. (2 Kings 13:21)  In Acts, handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched St. Paul worked miracles. (Acts 19:12)  It should not be surprising, then, that God continues to do great things through the relics of the saints.  These are signs that His salvation concerns the whole person and conquers even death itself.

In commemorating the translation of the relics of St. John Chrysostom, we must not simply marvel at the great events of past centuries.  Instead, we must recognize that God calls us all to the same holiness present in the lives and relics of the saints.  Like Zacchaeus, they were all imperfect people living in a world of corruption.  They all endured temptations and had to struggle for healing from self-centered desire in various forms.  At some point and in some way in their lives, they also repented like Zacchaeus in reorienting their lives to God as they did their best to set right what they had done wrong.  Like him, they responded to Christ’s gracious initiative in welcoming His healing and strength for charting a new course.

The change in Zacchaeus was profound and obvious.  It involved what he did with his money and power, and definitely impacted the people he encountered every day in practical ways.  He did not abandon the world, but began to live faithfully in it and to bless his neighbors.  The holiness of the saints is similarly tangible.  Chrysostom’s teaching, preaching, and prophetic service of the Church, for example, were clearly evident throughout his faithful ministry.  If we unite ourselves to Christ in holiness, we must also become living icons of what happens when a human person encounters the Savior.   He has held nothing back from us and gives us all countless opportunities to find the healing of our souls as we share more fully in His life by responding faithfully to our daily challenges.   Our calling, then, is to respond like Zacchaeus, Chrysostom, and all the saints in offering even the deeply disordered dimensions of our lives to Him for healing.

That is how we may provide a witness to the power of Jesus Christ to transform broken people like you and me into “partakers of the divine nature.”  We must become living relics of His salvation, living proof of what happens when people with all the weaknesses and problems common to humanity unite themselves in holiness to Him.  Ultimately, that is how we will give an account of our loyalty to Christ as the Savior.  It is only when we follow in the practical path of the saints that our lives will become signs of the good news heard by Zacchaeus:  “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham; for the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.”

The Savior’s Healing of Whole Persons: Homily for the Twelfth Sunday of Luke and the Venerable Euthymios the Great in the Orthodox Church

2 Corinthians 4:6-15; Luke 17:12-19

            Our generation is not alone in finding it difficult to appreciate the spiritual significance of the human body. Across the centuries, an abiding temptation for many is to believe that physical things simply cannot become holy.  Of course, that perspective often serves as an excuse to justify living as we please in daily life while giving God only our thoughts and feelings.  Whatever such a spiritual path may be, it is not the genuine Christian faith and lacks the power to heal us as the whole persons God created us to be.

Today’s gospel passage describes our Lord healing ten men who suffered from the dreaded disease of leprosy.  Christ’s healing ministry showed that His salvation encompasses every dimension of the human being:  body, soul, and spirit.  He demonstrated how His gracious love restores broken, weak people to their dignity in the image and likeness of God.  Were our bodies spiritually irrelevant, intrinsically evil, or otherwise not integral dimensions of who we are, the Savior would surely not have devoted Himself to blessing the sick.  But since we are creatures of flesh and blood in a world of death and decay, He restored people to health as an enacted icon of His gracious purposes for us all.  For He did not come merely to teach or even to forgive, but to restore and fulfill us as sons and daughters who truly share in His eternal life. He came to heal us in every way possible.

Perhaps we have heard stories of the Lord’s healing mercy so many times that we take them for granted.  Today’s particular account has a couple of details that should focus our attention.  First, the men whom Christ healed had leprosy, a dreaded disease that separated its victims from anyone who did not have it.  Notice that the men stood at a distance when they called out for healing, for they were considered dangerously unclean.  Here we have a sign of how easily our sins can separate us from others, including those we love the most in this life.  We may become overwhelmed with guilt and shame to the point that we would rather withdraw from relationships than confront the painful truth of how we have harmed them.  Unless we embrace the healing of Christ, the causes of our separation from one another will simply fester and weaken all concerned.  If He could cleanse people of leprosy and restore them to a normal life in first-century Palestine, we must not place limits on how He can heal us and our broken relationships today.  For that to happen, we must respond to Him with the humble faith of the Samaritan leper.

This is the second noteworthy detail:  The only one of the lepers who returned to thank Christ for healing him was a hated Samaritan, considered a foreigner and a heretic by the Jews.  After the man fell down before Him in gratitude, the Lord said, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”  This shocking detail reminds us that the Savior’s therapeutic ministry extended to those very much on the margins of society, to those outside the class of people considered neighbors.  Because He came to bring all people and the entire creation into the blessedness of the Kingdom of God, however, Christ’s mercy for suffering humanity extended also to him.  The Samaritan’s physical and social disability were signs of his need for healing and restoration that he could not give himself.  Out of deep gratitude for this completely unexpected and shocking blessing, the Samaritan alone returned to give thanks.  Consequently, he was healed that day in a way that extended beyond the merely physical.  His example should remind us of the importance of expressing gratitude to the Lord for His mercy and of extending that same mercy to the suffering people we are tempted to view as strangers and enemies.

Saint Paul knew that even a great apostle received the healing of Christ like an earthen vessel, like a container made of clay.  The great “transcendent power belongs to God and not to us,” for we are weak in so many ways.  He writes of “carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our bodies. While we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”  Through his many sufferings as an apostle, Saint Paul became a living icon of the Savior’s victory over corruption in all its forms, including the grave.  By enduring abuse, imprisonment, and ultimately martyrdom, he gave testimony with his own flesh and blood to the One Who both rose from the dead and shares His eternal life with those who unite themselves to Him in humble faith.  By such a ministry, St. Paul became an instrument for others to receive grace and give thanks to God.

The apostle’s teaching and example remind us of the necessary place of the body for the healing of our souls.  We celebrated at Christmas the birth of our Lord as a human infant with the same physical characteristics as any other baby.  He had to become fully one of us in order to fulfill our vocation to become like Him in holiness as “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.   We commemorated His baptism at Theophany, for His physical immersion in the Jordan restored the entire creation to holiness and was the occasion for the revelation of the Holy Trinity.  As those who have been baptized into Christ’s death, we have died to sin and risen up with Him into a new life of holiness.  (Rom. 6:3-4)  It is simply impossible for us to respond faithfully to this high calling in a way that is somehow separate from our actions each day in our own flesh and blood.

There are different callings in life that point us on distinct pathways to the Kingdom.  Today we commemorate St. Euthymios the Great, an exemplary monastic who worked miracles, embraced rigorous asceticism, taught and led others wisely, and defended the Orthodox faith.  Much discipline and self-denial are required for such a way of life, for so many desires are rooted deeply within us and disoriented by our self-centeredness.  It would be a grave error, however, to think that only monks and nuns should undertake such struggles.  For example, to shut our eyes and ears when media and entertainment threaten to inflame our passions for sexual pleasure and hatred toward real or imagined enemies is a necessary form of spiritual vigilance for people in our culture today. To fast moderately serves the health of our souls and our bodies, as it gives us strength in controlling our desires for immediate satisfaction on our own terms.  And limiting our self-indulgence in food and drink just a bit should free up resources to give to the poor and needy in whom we encounter the Lord.

Since we are earthen vessels, we are weak and unworthy of the promise of healing that is ours in Jesus Christ.  That is why we must attend to how we are offering ourselves to Him practically so that we may gain the strength to turn away from everything that hinders us from sharing in His life as fully as possible.  We cannot separate our bodies from our souls; and in light of our Lord’s birth and baptism, the physical dimensions of life certainly do not have to separate us from Him.

Recall that through His healing of people suffering with leprosy, a Samaritan became an example of faith and gratitude.   Through the offering of the Eucharist, bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ.  Through the blessing of holy matrimony, the intimate relationship of man and woman is oriented toward the Kingdom as husband and wife become an icon of the relationship between Christ and the Church.  The Savior comes to heal us all in every dimension of our life as embodied persons who bear the divine image and likeness.  Remembering that we are flesh and blood, let us fall down before Him in thanks as we accept this great blessing for the healing of every dimension of our humanity:  body, soul, and spirit.

Joseph the Betrothed, a Model of Obedience: Homily for the After-Feast of & Sunday After the Nativity of Christ in the Orthodox Church

Galatians 1:11-19; Matthew 2:13-23

Christ is Born!  Glorify Him!

As we continue to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world, we should acknowledge that we are probably so familiar with the Christmas story that we often imagine it happened in a world quite different from our own.  We tend to make His Nativity a sentimental event that we celebrate yearly with various cultural customs before going back to life as usual.  When we do so, however, we miss the point of how this great Feast challenges us to live faithfully in the very same world in which the Savior was born as a vulnerable Child.

Today we remember a crucial, and often overlooked, figure in the real life drama of Christmas:  Joseph the Betrothed, an elderly relative of the Virgin Mary who reluctantly became her guardian when she had to leave the Temple where she had grown up.  One of the verses chanted at vespers last night states that “a strange betrothal fell unto his lot,” and that is surely an understatement.

Betrothal was an arrangement in which a man became the guardian of a woman; it did not imply the intimate relations of marriage.  As an 80 year-old widower, Joseph did not want to take on this responsibility for the teenaged Virgin Mary, but he obeyed God’s command nonetheless.  That is how he came to play a key role in the salvation of our world of corruption.

The story of Joseph connects with so much of the heritage of the Old Testament.  An evil ruler wanted to murder the young Savior because He viewed Him as a threat.  Pharaoh had ordered the deaths of Hebrew male infants long ago in Egypt, and now a wicked king like him reigned in Israel.  Herod slaughtered the young boys in and around Bethlehem when he realized that the wise men had tricked him.

In the Exodus, the Hebrews had fled Egypt on the night of the Passover.  Now the young Messiah flees Israel to go to Egypt at night.  Once the danger had passed, Joseph brought the family back to the Promised Land, just as the Hebrews eventually returned after wandering in the desert for forty years. Recall also the story in Genesis of another Joseph.  He went to Egypt unwillingly, as a slave, but eventually saved his whole family from a famine by bringing them there.

Matthew’s gospel describes Joseph’s role in the Lord’s early life with obvious Old Testament symbolism.  The point is not simply to glorify Joseph, of course, but to show how Christ fulfills God’s promise of a Savior to the Hebrews and to all people.   Joseph’s story is a clear reminder that God calls people to cooperate with His gracious plans to bring salvation, blessing, and healing to the entire world. No, that world is not one of imaginary sentimental perfection, but the very same one inhabited today by those who suffer from persecution, abuse, and war.  There are still many Herods among us.

The necessity of our free response to God’s calling in such a world should be obvious at Christmas.  The Theotokos freely chose to say “yes” when the Archangel Gabriel visited her with the good news that she was chosen to be the Virgin Mother of the Son of God.  Despite his reluctance to become her guardian in the first place, old Joseph accepted the responsibility.  And then after being horrified to discover her pregnancy, he had the faith to believe the message of the angel that the Child was conceived of the Holy Spirit.  Despite his advanced age, Joseph successfully guided his family to Egypt as they fled the murderous Herod.  He had not anticipated involvement in such a dangerous set of circumstances in his latter years, but he did what had to be done for the safety of his family, as so many parents struggle to do today in life-threatening circumstances around the world.

The example of Joseph reminds us that God uses our cooperation to accomplish His gracious purposes in the world.  That was certainly the case in the Old Testament:  Abraham, Moses, David, and countless others responded to God’s initiative, and He worked through them, despite their many failings.  The same is certainly true of the Theotokos, for through the free response of a teenaged Palestinian Jewish girl came the Messiah in Whom the ancient promises to the descendants of Abraham are fulfilled and extended to the entire world.

The details of our Lord’s conception, birth, and infancy show that God does not force people to obey Him.  It is entirely possible to disregard God and refuse to live as those created in the divine image and likeness.  Herod provides a shockingly clear example of where the choice to turn away from truth and goodness leads.  Doing so does not simply weaken us as particular people, but also frustrates the accomplishment of God’s blessing and healing of the world.  Just look at the pain and brokenness that violence, hatred, and lust for power still bring to people today.  Unfortunately, Herod remains an all too familiar figure whenever the lives of the weak and innocent become inconvenient and expendable before the dominant forces of the world as we know it.

Our calling is not simply to avoid becoming like Herod, but to become as much like the Theotokos and Joseph the Betrothed as we possibly can.  Though there is obviously a uniqueness in how she freely agreed to contain the Son of God in her womb as His Mother and Living Temple, we may all become better temples of the Holy Spirit as we welcome God’s sanctifying presence more fully into our lives.  Her life plans changed at the Annunciation, and we must recognize that the healing of our souls likely will not occur according to our own preferences.   That was certainly the case for old Joseph, who took on responsibilities that he did not want because He knew that was God’s calling in his life.  Because this unlikely couple freely obeyed God, salvation has come to the world.

Let us celebrate Christmas by growing in our cooperation with God’s good purposes for us in the broken world we inhabit.  That means rejecting the lie that we are isolated individuals who will find fulfillment in getting what we want on our own terms in any area of life.  It means learning to see and serve Christ in neighbors, family members, and coworkers, in the lonely, sick, and suffering, and especially in anyone we are inclined to view as an enemy.  It means turning off nonstop media and disregarding intrusive thoughts as we open our hearts to God in the stillness of the Jesus Prayer.  It means undergoing a change of mind such that fulfilling our role in the salvation of the world becomes what is most important to us, even when that is difficult and we would rather be doing something else.  The next time that you feel that way, remember Joseph the Betrothed, the old man who put aside his preferences in order to become a refugee with his unlikely family.   Knowing how God used his faithfulness, how can we set any limits on what He will do with ours?  All that we have to do is to listen and cooperate. The rest is in God’s hands.