Those Who Have Received Christ's Merciful Generosity Must "Go and Do Likewise": Homily for St. John the Almsgiver, Patriarch of Alexandria & the Eighth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

2 Cor. 9:6-11; Luke 10:25-37

             It is terribly tragic when people fall into the delusion of thinking that they love God and neighbor, when in reality they are using religion to serve only themselves and the false gods of this world.  One symptom of doing so is to narrow down the list of people who count as our neighbors to the point that we excuse ourselves from serving Christ in all who bear His image and likeness.  When we do so, we disregard not only them, but our Lord Himself, the God-Man born for the salvation of all.  Our actions then reveal that we are not truly united with Him because we seek to justify ourselves by serving nothing but our own vain imaginations.

            That is precisely the attitude that the Savior warns against in today’s gospel reading. After describing how the Old Testament law required loving God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” the lawyer wanted to justify himself by limiting the people he had to love.  That is why he asked, “And who is my neighbor?”  He wanted to limit what God required of him in a way that served his convenience and prejudices.  That way, he could assume that he was a righteous man as he went through life serving only himself and the few he deemed worthy of his concern.   

            The Lord’s parable does not allow us, however, to place any limits on what it means to love our neighbors.  He tells us about a man who was robbed, severely beaten, and then left on the side of the road to die. Surely, anyone who saw him in that condition would have an obligation to help him.  All the more is that the case for the religious leaders who were going down that same road.  They knew that the Old Testament law required them to care for a fellow Jew in a life-threatening situation.  Like the lawyer, however, they must have come up with some excuse not to treat him with even an ounce of compassion.  We do not know exactly what they were thinking, but they somehow rationalized passing by on the other side without helping him at all. 

            Ironically, a Samaritan—a hated foreigner, a despised heretic-- is the one who treated the unfortunate man as a neighbor.  The Samaritan did not limit his concern to his own people.  He did not restrict the demands of love in any way.  Even though he knew that the Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, he responded with boundless compassion and generosity to this fellow’s plight.  He did not figure out how little he could do and still think of himself as a decent person.  Instead, he spontaneously offered his time, energy, and resources to bring a stranger back to health. Even the lawyer got the point of the story, for he saw that the one who treated the man as a neighbor was “The one who showed mercy to him.”  

            The Lord used the story of the Good Samaritan to show us who we must become if we are truly united to Him in faith.  Purely out of compassionate, boundless love, Christ came to heal us all from the self-imposed pain and misery that our sins have worked on our souls.  He came to liberate everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, from slavery to the fear of death, which is the wages of sin.  Like the Samaritan, He was despised and rejected as a blasphemer.  In the parable, the religious leaders were of no help to the man who was robbed, beaten, and left to die.  They passed by and left him to suffer in the state in which they had found him.  Likewise, the legalistic, hypocritical religious leaders who rejected the Messiah were of no benefit to those who needed healing from the ravages of sin.   They interpreted and applied the law in order to gain power in this world and were powerless to heal anyone. We must be on guard against the temptation to become like them by distorting our faith in ways that would excuse us from seeing and serving Christ in every suffering neighbor.    

Christ has brought salvation to the world, not by giving us merely a religious or moral code of conduct, but by making us participants in His divine life by grace.  By becoming fully human even as He remains fully divine, He has restored and fulfilled the basic human vocation to become like God in holiness.  Only the God-Man could do that.  If we are truly united with Him, then His boundless love must become characteristic of our lives.  Among other things, that means gaining the spiritual health to show our neighbors the same mercy we ask for from the Savior.  Doing that even for those we love is difficult because our self-centeredness makes it hard to give anyone the same consideration we want for ourselves. 

The challenge of conveying Christ’s love to people we do not like for whatever reason may seem impossibly hard. Remember, however, what the Samaritan in the parable did for the robbed and beaten man.  He administered first aid, took him to an inn, paid the innkeeper to care for him, and promised to pay for any additional expenses when he returned.  Christ does the same for us in baptism, the Eucharist, and the full sacramental life of the Church, which is a hospital for our recovery from the ravages of sin. He also calls us to spiritual disciplines—such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—through which we will prepare to welcome Him during the Nativity Fast as we open ourselves to receive the healing necessary to convey His mercy to our neighbors.  He enables us to pursue a life of faith and faithfulness through the ministries of His Body, the Church, as a sign of the salvation of the world.    

The generosity of our Lord is truly infinite.  The more that we share in His life, the more His generosity will become characteristic of us.  As St. Paul wrote, “he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”  This entails that those who offer themselves to serve Christ in their neighbors “will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.”  Today we remember two saints known especially for how they manifested the generous mercy of the Lord.  Saint John the Almsgiver, Patriarch of Alexandria, directed the church’s resources to help thousands of needy people, including paying ransom for the release of captives. He distributed alms on Wednesdays and Fridays, visited the sick three days a week, and brought those who had done wrong to repentance through his personal example of great humility and mercy.[1]  Saint Martin of Tours was a Roman soldier and a catechumen when he cut his cloak in two and gave half to a shivering beggar on a freezing night.  Then “Christ appeared to the saint wearing Martin’s cloak. He heard the Savior say to the angels surrounding Him, ‘Martin is only a catechumen, but he has clothed Me with this garment.’”  After his baptism and departure from the army, he became a monk and then a bishop.  “He is called the Merciful because of his generosity and care for the poor, and he received the grace to work miracles.”[2]  

Their blessed examples show that it is possible to be so fully united to Christ that His generous mercy becomes characteristic of us in relation to those who are robbed, beaten, and left for dead by the side of the road, whether literally or figuratively.  In the Good Samaritan, we see the boundless mercy of our Lord for all His suffering children. Today and throughout the coming weeks, we are receiving an offering for the suffering people of the Holy Land.  Let us not miss this opportunity to unite ourselves more fully to Christ as we invest ourselves in His compassion and generosity, for by doing so we “will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.”  As those who have received such infinite mercy from the Savior, how can we not obey His command to the lawyer, “Go and do likewise”?   

 

 

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[1] Saint John the Merciful, Patriarch of Alexandria - Orthodox Church in America (oca.org)

[2] Saint Martin the Merciful, Bishop of Tours - Orthodox Church in America (oca.org)

Loving Our Neighbors More than Our Money is Part of Being "A New Creation": Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday After Pentecost & Fifth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

Galatians 6:11-18; Luke 16:19-31

            There is perhaps no more powerful example of our need for Christ’s healing of our souls than that contained in today’s gospel reading.  A rich man with the benefit of the great spiritual heritage of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets had become such a slave to gratifying his desires for indulgence in pleasure that he had become completely blind to his responsibility to show mercy to Lazarus, a miserable beggar who wanted only crumbs and whose only comfort was when dogs licked his open sores.  The rich man’s life revolved around wearing the most expensive clothes and enjoying the finest food and drink, even as he surely stepped over or around Lazarus at the entrance to his home on a regular basis and never did anything at all to relieve his suffering.   

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

That statement applies to the corrupt nationalistic religious leaders who called for Christ’s crucifixion and denied His resurrection because they wanted only a warrior king who would slaughter their enemies and give them earthly power.  We must not rest content, however, with seeing how the Lord’s statement applies to others, for it should challenge us even more as those who have received the fullness of the mystery of God’s salvation.  Our responsibility is far greater than that of the Jews of old, for as members of Christ’s Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have every spiritual benefit to strengthen us in serving our Lord in our neighbors.    Since every neighbor is an icon of God, how we treat them reveals our relationship to Him.  Christ taught that what we do “to the least of these,” to the most wretched people, we do to Him.  If we become so obsessed with gratifying ourselves or serving worldly agendas that we refuse to convey His mercy to our neighbors, then we will reject our Messiah and deny the truth of His resurrection, for we will not live in a way that reflects His victory over the corrupting power of sin and death.  Regardless of what we say we believe, we will bear witness through our actions that we have become blind to the good news of our salvation.  And like the rich man, we will exclude ourselves from the joy of the Kingdom.  Remember the words of the Lord: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.”  (Matt. 7:21)   

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

Our calling is not to any form of religious legalism, but to embrace the healing and restoration that the God-Man shares with us.  In our epistle reading, St. Paul strongly opposes fellow Jewish Christians who required Gentile converts to be circumcised in obedience to the Old Testament law.  In contrast to those who would insist that Gentiles become Jews before becoming Christians, Paul writes that, “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”   We enter into the life of the New Adam by being reborn in baptism as we put on Christ like a garment.  Being united to Him from the depths of our souls by the power of the Holy Spirit, we may become radiant with the gracious divine energies, manifesting the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness.” (Gal. 5:22) The contrast between the plight of the first Adam, miserably enslaved to the fear of death in our world of corruption, and the holy glory that Christ shares with us is so great that Paul describes our salvation as nothing less than “a new creation.”  Our risen Lord raises us from death to life, making it possible for us to participate in the new day of His Kingdom even now, which is something that even the most exacting obedience to the best set of religious laws could never achieve.      

In the midst of our materialistic and consumeristic culture, it is easy to overlook St. Paul’s warning that “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”  (1 Tim. 6: 9-10)   It was surely the love of money that led the rich man in today’s parable to become so enslaved to gratifying self-centered desire that he closed his heart completely to concern for his neighbors, even those so obviously suffering right before his eyes. Because he would not show love for poor Lazarus, he degraded himself to the point that he could not love God.   St. John wrote, “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 Jn. 4:20) The Lord Himself taught that love of God and neighbor are the greatest of the commandments. (Matt. 22: 37-40).   It is no surprise, then, that the rich man experienced the torment of bitter regret after his death, for he was in the eternal presence of the Lord Whom he had rejected throughout his life.  He had turned away decisively from God’s love and was capable of perceiving the divine glory as only a burning flame.  

If we have become “a new creation” in Christ, then we must live as members of His Body, manifesting His love and mercy for our suffering neighbors each day of our lives.  We must do so in relation to people in our own city, as well as to those who suffer around the world, including the living icons of God who are currently undergoing such horribly tragic circumstances in the Holy Land.    His Eminence, Metropolitan SABA, has directed all the parishes of our Archdiocese “to collect aid for our brethren at the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and to partake in the relief of their suffering while demonstrating the Christian communion of humanity in times of affliction…”[1] Beginning today and throughout this month, please put offerings marked “Holy Land” in the collection plate, which we will then send to the Archdiocese.  We must remember to place our almsgiving in the context of intensified prayer, especially for peace and blessing for those now suffering so terribly, and in renewed spiritual struggle to purify the desires of our hearts from self-centeredness in all its forms.  That is the only way that we will learn to respond to the “poor Lazaruses” of our day in light of the “new creation” of the God-Man, in whom “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)       

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.antiochian.org/regulararticle/1812

Entrusting Ourselves to Christ with Truly Humble Faith: Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost and Seventh Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Galatians 2:16-20; Luke 8:41-56

            It is worth asking what we want to achieve by practicing our faith.  Why do we come to church, pray, fast, give to the needy, forgive our enemies, confess our sins, and otherwise struggle to reorient our lives toward God?  Perhaps we do these things because we want to put God in our debt so that He will do our will.  Maybe we want to become socially respectable, making ourselves look virtuous in our own eyes and in those of our neighbors.  It could also be the case that we want to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors, especially those we do not like, presenting ourselves as more pious and moral than we think they are.  Of course, these are all distortions of true Christian faith, but the real test of our faith is not simply in what we generally want from religion, but especially in how we relate to the Lord when we face deep challenges that break our hearts and threaten to lead us into despair.   

             In today’s gospel reading, Jairus and his wife were put to the ultimate test when the Lord said of their daughter, “Do not fear; only believe, and she shall be well…[and] “Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.”  Jairus was an upstanding Jewish man who was responsible for the good order of a synagogue.  He was surely respected by his neighbors and thought to be righteous, but we have no idea what Jairus had thought about Christ other than that he knelt before Him and asked Him to come to his house, where his daughter was dying.  After she had died, whatever faith he had was surely stretched to the breaking point.   

             We also do not really know how Jairus and his wife responded to the Lord’s challenge to believe that their daughter would return to life and health.  Nonetheless, they had enough faith to go into their house with the Messiah Who had promised to save their daughter if they believed and did not fear.  Mourning and weeping had already begun, and others laughed at the Savior for saying, “Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.”   In the midst of their despair, Jairus and his wife somehow found the strength to trust in Christ’s promise, which enabled them to receive a miracle well beyond all expectations.

             Something similar occurred with the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.  She had impoverished herself by spending all her money on physicians who could not heal her. There was no medical cure for her condition, which also made her ritually unclean.  She was isolated, poor, and miserable.  Her religious and social standing were completely different from that of Jairus, who was at the center of the Jewish community, for she was very much on the margins.  All that we know about her attitude toward Christ is that she reached out and touched the hem of His garment in the midst of a large crowd.  She probably did not want to draw attention to herself by asking for healing and or to risk rejection from Him, for anyone who touched her would have been considered unclean also.     

             When the woman reached out for the Lord’s garment, she was healed immediately, but Christ knew that someone had touched Him; her secret was out.  Instead of running away in fear or becoming defensive or angry, the woman then “came trembling, and falling down before Him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched Him, and how she had been immediately healed.”  Then the Lord said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”      

             As different as Jairus and this woman are, they have in common that they were both at the end of their rope and tempted to fall into despair.  It did not matter that one was an admired example of religious piety and that the other was an outcast.  Questions of how observant they were of the Jewish law or of what people thought about them had become irrelevant, for they knew no way out of the tragic circumstances they faced.  To their credit, they did not look for scapegoats to blame for their grave problems; neither did they do anything self-destructive.  Instead, they humbly offered the deepest pains of their lives to Christ for healing beyond what they could expect or even understand.  They entrusted their brokenness to the Lord without reservation and, thus, opened themselves to the healing of the human person that He has brought to the world. 

            The woman did not say anything at all until after her healing, which came through the only gesture of faith that she had the strength to make:  reaching out to touch the hem of the Savior’s garment in the middle of a crowd.  She was healed instantly, but spoke only after she had been found out.  She did so with fear and trembling, falling down before the Lord and stating publicly why she had reached out for healing.  That was likely the most difficult and embarrassing moment of her life.  In response, the Lord said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”  The Savior did not relate to her as a bundle of impurity, but simply as a beloved child of God who had opened her heart to Him as best she could.   

            The pain felt by Jairus and his wife was in no way lessened by their respectable position among the Jews.    Jairus had asked Christ to come to his house where his daughter was dying, but he and his wife surely struggled to believe that the Lord could actually raise her from the dead.  After He did so, “her parents were amazed; but He charged them to tell no one what had happened.” Their faith, however weak and imperfect, was all that the Savior needed to work an extraordinary miracle.  

 The Lord showed mercy throughout His earthly ministry to suffering people who offered their personal brokenness to Him for healing, regardless of where they stood in the religious and social pecking orders of the day.  He praised the spiritual understanding of a Gentile woman and cast a demon out of her daughter. (Mk 7:24-30) He said that no one in Israel had greater faith than the Roman centurion whose servant He healed. (Lk 7: 1-10) He restored the broken life of St. Photini, the Samaritan woman, by disregarding the prejudices of the time through His shocking conversation with her.  (Jn 4:1-42) The Savior did not treat them according to their social standing or level of religious observance, but according to His love for all the living icons of God.    

           Contrary to those who thought that obeying the Old Testament law would heal their souls, St. Paul taught that we are “not justified by works of the Law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 2:16) Only our risen Lord has delivered us from the corrosive fear of death through His glorious resurrection on the third day.  Even the strictest obedience to religious law could not resurrect Jairus’ daughter or anyone else; neither could it stop the chronic bleeding of the woman or deliver us from slavery to our self-centered desires.  It is only by opening our souls to Christ in brutally honest faith, no matter how weak or imperfect, that we may become participants in his restoration and fulfillment of the human person as a living icon of God.

 We must learn to see that we stand before Him just as did Jairus and the woman with grave, ongoing challenges that no level of religious observance, in and of itself, has the power of heal.  We must die to the pride that would make us think that we will become worthy of God’s favor if we will only accomplish this or that. The point of all our spiritual disciplines is not to attempt to put God in our debt, to achieve any earthly goal, or to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors in any way.    It is, instead, to help us gain the humility to have the faith necessary to entrust our deepest pains and fears to the One Who has conquered even death and Hades.  Acquiring that kind of faith is not easy and surely not a matter of simply going through the motions of religious practice.  It is, instead, a matter of allowing our illusions of self-sufficiency and self-righteousness to be destroyed as we come to see clearly where we stand before the Lord as those with broken hearts who often totter on the brink of despair.  He graciously accepts faith even the size of a mustard seed, such as that of an outcast woman who secretly touches the hem of His garment or of parents who can barely believe that death will not have the last word on their daughter.  If we can acquire the humility to entrust ourselves so fully to Christ, then His words will apply to us also: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”       

 

Becoming a Human Person Fully Alive to the Glory of God: Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

Luke 8:26-39

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

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

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

            Perhaps there is no clearer image of how evil debases our humanity than the plight of this miserable man.    He is an icon of our brokenness and represents us all in many ways.  He did not ask Christ to deliver him, even as we did not take the initiative in the Savior’s coming to the world.   The corrupting forces of evil were so powerful in this man’s life that he had lost all awareness of being a person in God’s image and likeness.  We can also become so distorted by self-centered desire that we lose all sense of being a living icon of God.  When that happens, we would rather that Christ leave us alone to serve our passions than to set us free from them.  We can easily become overwhelmed with fear that His healing mercy will simply torment us, being so spiritually blind that we cannot even imagine a life without the corruption with which we have come to identify ourselves.  

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

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

            But that was not what Christ wanted the man to do.  Perhaps that was because the Lord knew that the best sign of His transforming power was a living person who had been restored from the worst forms of depravity and corruption as a sign of the glory of God.   There could not be a better witness of the salvation that the God-Man has brought to the world.  When someone moves from slavery to personal decay to the glorious freedom of the children of God, that person has moved from death to life.  That person has become his or her true self as one who bears the divine image and likeness.  Such a radical change is a brilliant sign of the truth of Christ’s resurrection, for He makes us participants in His victory over death by breaking the destructive hold of the power of sin in our lives.   

The presence of the pigs in this story reminds us that the man to whom Christ restored his humanity was a Gentile. The Savior has fulfilled God’s promises to the children of Abraham such that all with faith in Him are “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Gal. 3:29) His Kingdom is not a nation-state, is not defined according to ethnicity or cultural heritage, and knows no geographical boundaries.  The Messiah repudiated the temptation to set up such an order, for His reign is the complete opposite of earthly powers so enslaved to the fear of death that they have become blind  to how their enemies bear the image of God every bit as much as they do.  People will never find the healing of their humanity by refusing to turn the other cheek and go the extra mile in order to break cycles of retribution and violence which have become second nature in our world of corruption.  No one will become more truly human by continuing to pour fuel on the fires that consume the lives of the living icons of God, regardless of their religion, nationality, or politics.   Those who do so degrade themselves and become more and more like the wretched man overcome with evil who lived naked in the tombs, a terror to himself and everyone else.

We must not reject Christ’s healing out of fear that He will only torment us.  Sin only has the power in our lives that we allow it to have, and we must all embrace the eternal journey of opening ourselves fully to the Savior’s restoration of our humanity.  Since we all bear God’s image and likeness, the path to such blessedness is open to us all if we will take the small steps of which we are capable each day through prayer, fasting, almsgiving, forgiveness, repentance, and the other basic spiritual disciplines of the Christian life.  We must cultivate the mindfulness that is necessary to resist the personal disintegration that comes from identifying ourselves with our passions.   That is not easy because often nothing is more appealing in the moment that wallowing in pride, anger, lust, resentment, and other distorted desires to the point that we have more in common with pigs at a trough than with the man after his deliverance, when he sat “at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” 

  When we experience temptations, we must make them opportunities to embrace Christ’s healing of our corrupt humanity through His victory over death. We must die to sin in order to rise up with Him in holiness.  We must crucify the distortions of our souls that have become second nature to us.  When the struggle is hard and we cannot imagine being set free, we must remember the difference between a person disintegrated by the power of evil and one gloriously restored as a living icon of God.  That is precisely what is at stake whenever we face the choice between welcoming Christ’s healing presence in our lives or hiding from Him in fear as we cling to our passions.  May God grant us all the spiritual clarity to become fully alive and radiant with the divine glory.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bearing the Good Fruits of Peace for the Living Icons of God: Homily for the Sunday of Holy Fathers of Seventh Ecumenical Council & Fourth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

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

         In the midst of the ongoing tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land, we must attend to the wisdom of our father in Christ, His Beatitude Patriarch John X of Antioch, who stated this week that “Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace…” He writes that we pray “for peace in the entire world, for stability, and for the repose of the souls of those who have passed away. We pray that the wounds of the sick be soothed and they might recover, for the wounds of every hurting person, every bereaved mother, every brother, and every sister, for everyone’s wounds. We ask the Lord to protect us and grant us peace…”[1]

             His Beatitude’s words resonate so strongly with the many petitions for peace in the Divine Liturgy, such as our prayers “for the peace of whole world…and the union of all.”  We pray for “peaceful times,” “the sick and the suffering, for captives and their salvation,” and also for “deliverance from all tribulation, wrath, danger, and necessity…”  These and so many other petitions show that as we enter mystically into the blessedness of our Lord’s Kingdom in the Liturgy, we must not think that God’s peace is reserved entirely for the eschatological future.  We pray for reconciliation and blessing for all the living icons of God today, in the world as we know it, as a sign, no matter how dim, of the fulfillment of His gracious purposes for all who bear the divine image and likeness.   

             To pray for peace in this way does not require us to become naïve or idealistic about how deeply the brokenness of the human person extends within our hearts or how it impacts our relationships with other people.  It does not demand that we pretend that Cain’s murder of his brother Abel is not repeated daily.  It does, however, require us to gain the spiritual clarity to see that, regardless of nationality, politics, or anything else, every human person remains a living icon of God and a neighbor to be loved. How we treat those we are least inclined to recognize as neighbors and most inclined to view as our enemies is precisely how we treat our Lord. (Matt. 25: 31-46) Nothing reveals the true state of our souls more than that.   

         Even as we mourn the horrible suffering of people in the Holy Land, today we commemorate the 367 Holy Fathers of the 7th Ecumenical Council, which met in Nicaea in 787.  The council rejected the false teaching that to honor icons is to commit idolatry, for it distinguished between the worship that is due to God alone and the veneration that is appropriate for images of Christ, the Theotokos, and the Saints.  The council’s teaching highlighted the importance of the Savior’s incarnation, for only a truly human Savior with a physical body could restore us to the dignity and beauty of the living icons of God.    

         The 7th Ecumenical Council addressed matters that strike at the very heart of how we embrace our fundamental vocation to become like God in holiness in a world of hatred and violence that so desperately needs the peace of Christ.  Too often, however, we think that iconography simply has to do with wood and paint, and is unrelated to the question of whether we are becoming more like Christ and gaining the strength to love our enemies as He loves us.   The icons are not merely religious art, but reminders that to become a truly human person is to become like Jesus Christ, who, according to St. Paul, “is our peace… and has broken down the middle wall of separation” so that “He might reconcile…both [Jew and Gentile] to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.” (Eph. 2:14-16) The more that we become like our Lord, Who worked this reconciliation, the less we will see anyone through the darkened lenses of those who demand “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  Instead, we will become more like the Savior, Who closely associated love of enemies with fulfilling the commandment to “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)  

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

         This parable warns us about what happens when we fail to fulfill our potential as those who bear the image of God.  Our vocation is to become more beautiful living icons of the Savior, but we diminish and distort ourselves when we refuse to become who God created us to be.  Plants must grow and flourish as the kinds of plants that they are in order to become healthy and bear fruit.  Farmers must care for them accordingly.  The sun, soil, moisture, and nutrients must be appropriate for that particular type of plant in order for them to flourish.  In order for us to bear good fruit for the Kingdom, we must attend to the health of our souls with the conscientiousness of a careful farmer or gardener.  We must do so in order to become more fully who we are as living icons of Christ.  If, to the contrary, we become obsessed with the worldly political agendas that He repudiated and a desire for vengeance against our enemies, we will never bear good fruit for the Kingdom.   

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

         If we are to become “those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience,” we must refuse to allow hatred, vengeance, and obsession with worldly agendas to take root in our hearts and minds.  We must do the hard, daily work of denying ourselves and serving others, especially those whom the world encourages us to view as our enemies.  In order to bear good fruit for the Kingdom, we must refuse to focus on anything that will distract us from becoming more beautiful icons of Christ, Who loved and forgave even those who crucified Him.  Unless we struggle mindfully against this temptation, we can easily become obsessed with defining ourselves and our neighbors according to the standards of our world of corruption, which is driven by the fear of death.  Because our risen Lord has conquered even the grave through His glorious resurrection on the third day, we must refuse to become enslaved by such fears and must never allow anything to distract us from becoming more beautiful icons of His love, mercy, and reconciliation.  The Savior Himself refused to define His Kingdom in popular nationalistic terms against the Romans, the Gentiles, and the Samaritans, or in legalistic terms against those considered hopeless sinners by the religious establishment.   He came to restore everyone to the beauty of the living icons of God.  In Him, “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.” (Col. 3:11)

         He alone is our peace and the peace of the entire world.  If we are truly becoming participants in His life, then we must refuse to define ourselves or anyone else according to divisive worldly agendas driven by the fear of death.  We must grow in His likeness as we pray for all who suffer and for an end to violence and oppression in all their forms, and as we give generously to meet the urgent needs of our neighbors in the Holy Land and around the world.  We must remember Whose icons we all are and refuse to live as though anything or anyone other than the God-Man were the true measure of our lives.  That is ultimately why we have icons in the Orthodox Church, for they proclaim who Jesus Christ is and who He enables every human person to become.   It is not by hating and killing people that the Savior’s peace comes, but by the love, forgiveness, and reconciliation that He has brought to the world through His Cross and empty tomb.  As the Lord said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.antiochian.org/regulararticle/1783

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

The Greatest Test of our Souls is Whether We Love our Enemies: Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost and the Second Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Cor. 6:16-7:1; Luke 6:31-36

    One of the great challenges that many of us face in embracing Orthodox Christianity is getting over some form of religious legalism, which is the belief that how we relate to God is primarily a matter of obeying rules that govern how we behave. Of course, how we treat people every day is a vital dimension of faithfulness to Christ, Who intensified the requirements of the Old Testament commandments, for example, against murder and adultery in the Sermon on the Mount. He did so, however, not by lengthening the list of bad things that good people should not do. Instead, He went to the very heart of the matter: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matt. 5:8)

    The laws of the Old Testament were necessary to make clear to the Hebrew people the basics of how they were to act as those in a covenantal relation with God. Jesus Christ is not simply a religious teacher, but truly the God-Man in Whom the ancient promises, laws, and prophecies are fulfilled. He is a Person in Whose life we share as those who are in communion with Him as living members of His Body, the Church. The Church is the bride of Christ and we must live as those in a “one flesh” union with Him in which we become “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.

    It is only in this context that we can understand our Lord’s teaching in today’s gospel teaching: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” In this passage from the gospel according to Luke, Christ does not rest content with calling His followers to limit their vengeance to “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” even though that Old Testament principle had placed needed restraint on vengeance. (Matt. 5:38) He did not affirm the common attitude of the time, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,” an attitude that unfortunately remains with us today in so many ways. (Matt. 5:43) Instead, the Savior called His followers to be united with Him from the depths of their hearts to the point that they embodied the divine mercy, loving their enemies like God, Who cares for “the ungrateful and the selfish.”

    To become a person so radiant with the love of Christ that we convey His love even to people we do not like and who do not like us is obviously not a matter of meeting a basic legal standard of outward behavior. To love our enemies as He loves us requires our deep spiritual transformation and healing as living icons of God. It is not enough to be kind to our friends, to those we think will return our good will, or to those with whom we have something in common according to conventional social standards. It is not enough simply to restrain ourselves from abusing our enemies or even to go through the motions of being decent toward them. No, we must become brilliant with the gracious divine energies to the point that we convey the merciful love of Christ to everyone.

    If we approach this sublime calling merely as a matter of obeying a religious law, we will either fall into despair or delusion about our ability to fulfill it. The vocation to become like God in mercy and holiness is obviously something we cannot accomplish by willpower or behavior modification alone. And if we think we have already done so, then we have become blinded by spiritual pride to the point that we do not see ourselves clearly at all. The fact that we seem inevitably to fall short of loving our neighbors, and especially our enemies, as ourselves indicates that we have a truly eternal vocation that we should never think that we have completed. The struggle that we all have in treating other people, especially our enemies, as we would like to be treated, reveals that we have not yet embraced fully the Lord’s gracious healing of our souls. St. Silouan the Athonite saw the love of enemies as a clear sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. He taught that when the soul “grows humble, the Lord gives her His grace, and then she prays for her enemies as for herself, and sheds scalding tears for the whole world.” These words reveal our need for ongoing repentance as we turn away from fueling the passions that make it so appealing to condemn others and turn humbly toward cooperating with the Lord’s gracious healing of our souls. That is the only way for us to share so fully in the life of Christ that we embody His boundless mercy.

    Today’s epistle reading reinforces the profundity of this spiritual calling, for St. Paul addresses the terribly confused and compromised Gentile Christian of Corinth as “the temple of the living God.” The Corinthians were largely converts from paganism who had to be corrected at every turn from their tendency to fall back into their pagan ways of worshiping false gods and engaging in gross sexual immorality. St. Paul quotes Hebrew prophets who admonished the Jews to be entirely separate from the corrupt ways of other peoples. What is so shocking is that he applied that instruction to the Gentile Christians of Corinth. Those who had been hated enemies for their immorality and paganism are now themselves “the temple of the living God” in Jesus Christ. They are His people, His sons and daughters, to whom the promises of Abraham have been extended through faith. Because of this great dignity, St. Paul tells them to be clean “from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”

    While the apostle did provide them with clear instructions on how to live as Christians, Paul was anything but a legalist who thought that the following a code of behavior had the power to heal the soul. As he wrote to the Ephesians, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph. 2:8-10) Neither Jew nor Gentile could earn salvation by their own merit, but by embracing the gracious healing of the soul through faith in Christ. Such gracious healing is not passive or abstract but participatory and transformative, for we are all fellow workers with God who must “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” (Philipp. 2:12-13)

    If we are to find the healing of our souls, we must struggle to do what we can each day to treat those we are most inclined to disregard and condemn as we would like them to treat us. We must take every opportunity to convey the mercy we have received from Christ to our neighbors, especially those we consider our enemies. When we fail to do so, we must use our weakness to fuel our humility before the Lord and our sense of unworthiness to judge anyone else. We must pray, fast, give to the needy, and mindfully reject the nonsense in our own minds, and in all factions of our culture today, that would encourage us to treat anyone as anything less than a living icon of God. As hard as it is to accept, whether we are sharing in the life of Christ is most clearly revealed in how we treat those we find it hardest to love. This is not a matter of legalism, but of whether we are acquiring the purity of heart necessary to see God, especially as He is present to us each day of our lives in those we are least inclined to see as beloved neighbors. That is the ultimate test of whether we are making “holiness perfect in the fear of God.”