Christ's Baptism Renews the Whole Creation: Homily for the Synaxis of the Holy Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John in the Orthodox Church

 

Acts 19:1-8; John 1:29-34

In this season we celebrate the great feast of Theophany, of Christ’s baptism by St. John the Forerunner when the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son of God and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove. Epiphany reveals that the Savior Who appears from the waters of the Jordan to illumine our world of darkness is truly the God-Man, a Person of the Holy Trinity.  He is baptized to restore us, and the creation itself, to the ancient glory for which we were created.

By entering into the water, the Lord made it holy, which means that He restored and fulfilled its very nature.  We need water in order to live.  The earth needs water in order to become fertile, bearing fruit and giving life to animals of all kinds.  We wash with water and use it to maintain cleanliness and health.  Without water, we become weak and die, as do other creatures.  And in the world as we know it, water can kill us through floods and storms. Since the creation has been subjected to futility through the sin of human beings, the very water through which God gives us life may become the means of our death. But when water is blessed, God restores it to its natural state, to its place in fulfilling God’s purposes for the flourishing of the creation in holiness.  And since our homes are where we and our families live each day, how could we not want His blessing on our marriages, our children, and the physical space where we offer our lives to the Lord?  When we bless our homes, we join what is most important to us to Christ’s healing and restoration of the entire universe. We find strength to make our daily lives a liturgy, an entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the natural state of those who bear the image and likeness of God.

Tragically, our first parents turned away from their high calling and ushered in the unnatural realm of corruption that we know all too well, both in the brokenness of our hearts and in our relationships with one another.  God gave Adam and Eve garments of skin when they left paradise after disregarding Him.  Through their disobedience, they had become aware that they were naked and were cast into the world as we know it.  Their nakedness showed that they had repudiated their vocation to become like God in holiness.  Having stripped themselves of their original glory, they were reduced to mortal flesh and destined for slavery to their passions and to the grave.   Because of them, the creation itself was “subjected to futility…” (Rom. 8:20)

As we prepared for Theophany, we heard this hymn: “Make ready, O Zebulon, and prepare, O Nephtali, and you, River Jordan, cease your flow and receive with joy the Master coming to be baptized. And you, Adam, rejoice with the first mother, and hide not yourselves as you did of old in paradise; for having seen you naked, He appeared to clothe you with the first robe. Yea, Christ has appeared desiring to renew the whole creation.”   If it seems strange to think of Christ being baptized in order to clothe Adam and Eve, remember St. Paul’s teaching that “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”  (Gal. 3:27)   In baptism, Jesus Christ clothes us with a garment of light, restoring us to our original vocation to become like Him in holiness.  He delivers us from the nakedness and vulnerability of slavery to our own passions and to the fear of the grave.  Through His and our baptism, He makes us participants in His restoration and fulfillment of the human person. He is baptized in order to save Adam and Eve, all their descendants, and the entire creation, fulfilling the glorious purposes for which He brought us all into existence.    

Life after baptism is not, however, without pain, disease, death, and other sorrows.  In contrast with the divine glory of the appearance of our Lord, the darkness of sin within us and our world of corruption becomes all the more apparent.  In the aftermath of Christ’s birth, Herod the Great had all the young boys in the region of Bethlehem murdered. St. John the Forerunner, who prepared the way for “the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world,” was arrested by Herod Antipas for prophetically denouncing the king’s immorality.  After the one who baptized Him was arrested, the Lord went to “Galilee of the Gentiles” to begin His public ministry in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that “’the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’” (Matt. 4:15-16) 

We are baptized into Christ’s death in order to rise up with Him into a life of holiness in which we regain the robe of light rejected by our first parents. In every aspect of our darkened lives, He calls us to become radiant with the divine glory He shares with us as the New Adam.  In order to do so, we must find healing for the passions that have taken root in our hearts and have distorted our relationships even with those we love most.  In how we treat everyone from those closest to us to complete strangers, we must find healing from the corruptions of pride, hatred, anger, resentment, and the desire to dominate others.  It does not matter whether we are at home, work, school, or other settings, or whether we think we are in private or in public. If we have put on Christ in baptism, we must become living icons of Christ’s salvation and mercy to all we encounter.

We must also be on guard for all the ways in which we remain inhabitants of “the region and shadow of death.”  Because the Savior has hallowed the water and the entire creation through His baptism, absolutely nothing is intrinsically evil or profane.  No dimension of God’s good creation requires us to return to the nakedness of passion in any way.  We are without excuse for doing so, for Theophany reveals that we are always on holy ground and must speak, act, and think as those who wear a garment of light.  Though we fall short of meeting the goal each day, we must always strive to manifest our Lord’s healing of the human person in every thought, word, and deed.  We must become like holy water restored to its natural place and blessing the world as a sign of its salvation.

            If we are to discern how to fulfill our vocation to bear witness to our Lord in the midst of a world still enslaved to the fear of death, we must embrace the full meaning of our baptism.  That requires constant vigilance against allowing self-centered desire to creep unnoticed into our hearts and distort our vision of ourselves, our neighbors, and our world.  That requires turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, and treating others as we would have them treat us, especially when we think we are justified in responding in kind to those who have wronged us.  That requires turning away from whatever fuels our passions so that the desires of our hearts are purified and directed toward their true fulfillment in God.  As we celebrate Theophany in “the region and shadow of death,” let us focus mindfully on living each day as those who have died to sin and risen up into a life holiness.  That is how we may become brilliant living epiphanies of the salvation of the world as we wear the robe of light that Christ has restored to Adam and Eve, for He is baptized to do nothing less than “to renew the whole creation.”

 

 

Homily for the Sunday Before the Theophany (Epiphany) of Christ in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Timothy 4:5-8; Mark 1:1-8

Today is the Sunday before the Feast of Theophany (or Epiphany), when we celebrate Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan and the revelation that He is truly the Son of God.  His divinity is made manifest and openly displayed at His baptism when the voice of the Father declares, “You are my beloved Son” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove.  Theophany shows us that Jesus Christ, who was born in the flesh for our salvation at Christmas, is not merely a great religious teacher or moral example.  He is truly God—a member of the Holy Trinity– and His salvation permeates His entire creation, including the water of the river Jordan.  Through Christ’s and our baptism, we become participants in the holy mystery of our salvation, for He restores to us the robe of light which our first parents lost when they chose pride and self-centeredness over obedience and communion.  He enters the Jordan to restore Adam and Eve, and all their children, to the dignity of those who bear the image and likeness of God.  

At the time of His earthly ministry, however, people were looking for a very different kind of Savior.  The word “messiah” means “anointed one,” and the Jews wanted a leader who would deliver their nation from Roman oppression, not unlike how any people living under military occupation by the armies of another nation typically want their liberation and independence.  Christ’s own disciples thought of Him in those terms until after His resurrection, for even those closest to the Lord had great difficulty accepting that He was not the earthly king they had expected.  They were so focused on how Jesus Christ might fulfill their dreams for power in this world that they were blind to His true identity as the Son of God, the incarnate second Person of the Holy Trinity, the divine Word Who spoke the universe into existence. His Kingdom is not of this world and stands in prophetic judgment over those who idolatrously use religion to bring themselves glory and dominion in this world.

In order to prepare the way of a Messiah Who did not fit popular preconceived notions, God sent a very bold prophet who surely made most other people uncomfortable.  St. John the Baptist and Forerunner was a strict ascetic, living in the desert, eating only locusts and honey, and wearing camel skin.  Like all the true Hebrew prophets before him, John did not serve anyone’s worldly agenda.  In addition to his stark appearance and lifestyle, his message was severe to the point of being insulting.  He proclaimed God’s truth and did not care who might be offended, perhaps because harsh words were necessary to open people’s eyes to where they stood before God.   John mocked the Pharisees and Sadducees, calling them a brood of vipers—a bunch of slimy snakes.  He told the rich to share with the poor, soldiers to stop abusing their authority, and tax collectors to stop stealing from the people.  He let no one off the hook, fearlessly proclaiming God’s word even to those who had the power to destroy him. Ultimately, he lost his head for criticizing the immorality of the royal family. 

God shook up Israel with John the Baptist, the Forerunner of our Lord, who began to open their eyes to a Messiah Whom they did not expect.  They needed a call to repentance from a wild and holy man who served none of the petty kingdoms or factions of this world, but who instead called everyone to repent by changing the direction of their lives in relation to God and neighbor.  They were to make straight whatever crookedness was in them.   They were to abandon hypocritical and self-serving distortions of God’s Law.  No one was to say, “But I am a child of Abraham or a religious leader or a well-respected person, so repentance is not for me.”  No one was to point to the offenses of others as a distraction from reorienting their lives toward God.  The Forerunner called everyone straightforwardly to greater holiness in preparation for the coming of the Messiah, Who is truly the God-Man.

As we prepare for the Feast of Theophany, we must recognize that John’s message applies to each of us today in ways that should make us all uncomfortable.   If we have put on Christ in baptism, we must conform our character to His because we have already received the robe of light.  Having celebrated His birth as Orthodox Christians, we have already proclaimed that the Savior is not merely one of many insightful teachers or inspiring examples, but truly the Son of God.  In Him, we are “partakers of the divine nature” by grace as members of His Body, the Church.  The more that we share in His life, the more clearly we will see how infinitely much more room we have for growth in embracing the healing of our souls because none of us has become a perfect epiphany of what Christ’s salvation means for those who bear the divine image and likeness.

It would be different if the Epiphany of Jesus Christ as the Son of God were merely an idea to be grasped as an abstract truth. It would be different if Theophany were a calling to thwart those we deem our enemies or to achieve some conventional personal or political goal.  This feast is nothing like that, however, for it calls us to enter into the great mystery of our salvation by becoming radiant with the divine glory that the Savior has shared with us.  We must no longer live as those driven by obsessive insecurities and fears rooted in the fear of death, but as those clothed with a robe of light and enabled to shine like an iron left in the fire of holiness.  

In order to share more fully in the eternal life of the God-Man, we must follow the path of ongoing repentance proclaimed by John, always seeing ourselves as those who must prepare the way of the Lord in our lives.  That means that we must persist in cooperating with Christ’s healing mercy, actively making straight whatever remains crooked.  Like those who first heard the Forerunner, we have become too comfortable with life on our own terms, perhaps thinking that we are somehow God’s favorites and that repentance is for someone else, likely for particular people or members of groups upon whom we like to look down.  John would have none of it and would correct us to our faces in no uncertain terms for our hypocrisy.  As he did to the Jews of the first century, he would tell us to stop trying to turn God into an idol who serves our agendas for gaining whatever we happen to want in this world.  He would call us, instead, to become true icons of our Lord, sharing as fully as we can in the divine healing and transformation made possible for us in Jesus Christ.

Those who have put on Christ in baptism and who have received the Communion of His Body and Blood must become epiphanies of His fulfillment of the human person in God’s image and likeness. As we prepare to celebrate Theophany, let us gain the spiritual clarity to behold the glory of Christ’s baptism by straightening the crooked areas of our lives.  Instead of finding ways to ignore the preaching of the Forerunner, let us take his sobering message to heart as we confess and repent of our sins and reorient ourselves to our Lord and His Kingdom.  The Messiah is born and is on His way to the Jordan where His divinity will shine forth.  Will we have the eyes to behold His glory?  Will we be ready for Him?  There is only one way to prepare:  namely, to repent as we turn away from all that hinders us from shining brightly with the divine glory manifest in the God-Man. Nothing can keep us from doing so other than our own stubborn refusal to prepare the way of the Lord by making His paths straight in our own lives.  There is no other way to enter into the great joy of the Feast of Theophany.

 

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!: Homily for Christmas in the Orthodox Church

Galatians 4:4-7; Matthew 2:1-12

Christ is Born!  Glorify Him!

      We gather today to celebrate the Nativity in the Flesh of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world.  He is born to fulfill the vocation of every human person to become like God in holiness as “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.  Because He has truly become one of us, every dimension of our life in this world may become a point entrance into the blessed peace of the Kingdom of Heaven.  In contrast with that high calling, the lack of such peace today in so many other parts of the world, including especially the Holy Land and Ukraine, as well as in our own society, relationships, and hearts, becomes quite apparent.

The Prince of Peace was born in the context of a brutal military occupation that required the elderly Joseph and the pregnant Theotokos to take a long and difficult journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a census. There He came into the world like a homeless child, born in a cave used as a barn with an animal’s feeding trough for his bed.   Herod, who reigned over Judea under the authority of Rome, plotted to kill the Messiah from His birth, for he certainly did not want a rival king of the Jews.  He cared far more about his own power than the lives of innocent people, as many rulers have done up to the present.  That is why Joseph had to lead the family to Egypt at night as they fled for their lives, just as refugees do today in the land of our Lord’s birth and in so many other places.

When the One Who spoke the universe into existence becomes part of His creation, the tension between the way of the Lord and the path of slavery to the fear of death becomes obvious.  Angels proclaimed His birth and the promise of peace not to those who will stop at nothing to destroy those they perceive as threats to their power, but to lowly shepherds who had no power or prominence.   Though the Messiah was expected to be a new King David who would give earthly power to the Jews, Gentile astrologers from Persia traveled far to worship a Lord Whose Kingdom transcends the divisions of empires, nations, and ethnicities. He fulfills the ancient promises to Abraham such that all who believe in Him become the adopted children and heirs of God.  The God-Man is born to restore all to the blessedness of Paradise as the New Adam.  He comes to heal us from every dimension of the brokenness that still leads Cain to slaughter Abel, from the desires of our hearts to how we engage with our neighbors, society, and world.   He comes to make us radiant with holiness and “perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect,” which requires especially love for our enemies.  (Matt. 5:48) 

The Savior born this day is the Prince of Peace, but not of the illusion of peace that comes from blinding ourselves to the humanity of those we fear and resent to the point that we beat them into submission, whether literally or figuratively.  He is the Prince of Peace, but not of the illusion of peace that comes from indulging our self-centered desires as we neglect the needs of others and refuse to see them as living icons of God.  He is the Prince of Peace, but not of the illusion of peace that comes from projecting our hopes for wellbeing on the success of nations, cultures, and agendas that operate according to the standards of a world enslaved to the fear of death.  Christ’s peace is nothing less than sharing in His life to the point that we become those who will be blessed in His Kingdom:  the poor in spirit; those who mourn their sins; the meek; those who hunger and thirst after righteousness; the merciful; those who acquire purity of heart; and the peacemakers. To know His peace is to become so much like Him in holiness that, regardless of what sufferings and obstacles may come our way, we make even the deepest challenges of our lives points of entrance to the joyful blessedness of His Kingdom.  (Matt. 5:3-12) 

Even as the circumstances surrounding His Nativity were not peaceful by conventional standards, welcoming the Prince of Peace into our lives requires embracing the inevitable tension of mindfully entrusting ourselves to Him as we share in His fulfillment of the human person in the image and likeness of God.  That is not a matter of sentimentality or trying to use religion to achieve any worldly goal, but of responding with true spiritual integrity to the gloriously good news that the Son of God has become one of us—in the world as we know it--for our salvation.  The more that we undertake the struggle to do so, and to treat every neighbor as one for whom the Savior was born, the more we will participate personally in the true peace of Paradise brought by the God-Man.  Let us celebrate this glorious feast by doing precisely that this day and every day of our lives.  

 

 

  

Are We Looking for a Kingdom Not Like the Other Nations? : Homily for the Sunday Before the Nativity of Christ in the Orthodox Church

 

Hebrews 11:9-10, 32-40; Matthew 1:1-25

 As we conclude our preparation for celebrating the Lord’s Nativity, we must resist the temptation to corrupt this blessed season into an excuse for glorifying ourselves in any way.  Instead, we must allow our hopes for whatever we want in this life to be called into question by the God-Man, Who was born in such strange circumstances to fulfill a kingdom not of this world that stands in prophetic judgment over all our agendas, preferences, and desires. We must learn at Christmas to hope only in Him.

Christ is born to fulfill the ancient promises to Abraham, who “looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”  The many generations of preparation for the Savior’s birth did not occur through the unbroken progress of any earthly city, kingdom, or culture, but through a history characterized by corruption, idolatry, slavery, and exile.  The prophet Samuel was the last of the judges of Israel over a thousand years before Christ was born.  When his sons ruled unjustly, the people asked for a king so that they could be like the other nations.  God told Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.”  (1 Sam. 8:7)

We do not have to know much about the Old Testament to know that wanting to be like the other nations is the exact opposite of what God intended for His people.  Their kings abused their authority like the rich and powerful of any period with David, the greatest of them, infamously taking Bathsheeba, the wife of his soldier Uriah, and then having him killed.  Far from shying away from recalling these horrific events, Matthew highlights them, for he writes in the genealogy that “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” When he wanted to build a Temple for the Lord, God told David, “You shall not build a house for My name, because you have been a man of war and have shed blood.” (1 Chron. 28:3) Doing so surely went with the territory of being a powerful ruler, but wallowing in the blood of those who bear God’s image is a paradigmatic sign of the slavery to the fear of death that sin has brought to the world.  It inevitably threatens grave damage to the soul.

Even David’s son the wise Solomon, who did build the Temple, later fell into the worship of false gods.  Because of Israel’s ongoing unfaithfulness, the kingdom divided into two, with both eventually going into exile after being defeated at the hands of their enemies. Those who returned from Babylon were then dispersed yet again by the Romans.  Those who distort biblical faith today in the service of earthly kingdoms and political ideologies inevitably fall into the idolatry of worshiping their own lust for power and demonizing their earthly opponents.   In contrast, we must follow the example of Abraham, who “looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” (Heb. 13:14) No nation or piece of land must ever become an idol for us or an excuse not to love our neighbors as ourselves.    

The shock of exile for the Hebrews was so important that Matthew describes the Lord’s genealogy accordingly:  “So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ were fourteen generations.”  The prophet Daniel and the three holy youths Ananias, Azarias and Misael all went into captivity in Babylon, where they refused to worship other gods and were miraculously delivered from death, respectively, in the lions’ den and the fiery furnace.  Christ, before His Incarnation, was with the youths in the flames.  Being unconsumed by the fire, they also provided an image of the Theotokos, who contained the Son of God within her womb without being consumed by the divine glory.        

It was not by seeking earthly glory or self-interest that these and other prophets foreshadowed and foretold the coming of Christ.  Far from making political calculations or seeking vengeance against anyone, they simply refused to abandon hope in God and to worship idols, even when their refusal seemed certain to lead to their deaths.  Consequently, they are among those who “suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”  These holy people did so because they lived in expectation, not merely of more tolerable earthly circumstances for themselves, but of the fulfillment of a promise that would not come in their lifetimes and transcended all conventional boundaries, “since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.”

Though no one forces us to choose today between idolatry and faithfulness, we so often freely worship idols when we ground the meaning and purpose of our lives in some vision of cultural success or personal fulfillment that serves only to inflame our passions and blind us to the humanity of our neighbors.  Even without being forced into exile, we have become accustomed to hoping for nothing more than a somewhat better life in Babylon, however we may define that.  We face the same temptations that our Lord’s ancestors did, and we regularly fall into some version of the sins they committed. On the one hand, it is reassuring to know that the Savior’s genealogy included people whose lives were far from perfect.  In addition to recalling David’s grave sins, Matthew lists Judah, who fathered children with his daughter-in-law Tamar. He also mentions Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute, and Ruth, a Gentile.  The presence of these particular women in the genealogy foreshadows the scandalous, but also perfectly innocent, conception of the Lord by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.  By including their names among the ancestors of Christ, Matthew reminds us that He is born to bring healing to all the broken, scandalous people of the world, not only to those  who appear respectable according to any set of conventional expectations.  No one is excluded from the possibility of sharing in His salvation.  

 The checkered past of the Savior’s family tree should also remind us of how easy it is to entrust ourselves to false hopes that extend no further than the grave.  When the Son of God became a human person, He did not do so with all the trappings of the false hopes we typically embrace.  He was not born into a family of great wealth, power, or fame.  There was certainly no sin involved in the virginal conception of our Lord, but the circumstances were hardly conventional.  Joseph, the older man to whom the Theotokos was betrothed as her guardian, would have divorced her quietly, had not an angel told him the truth about the situation in a dream.  Living under the military occupation of the Roman Empire, they had to go to Bethlehem for a census at the time of His birth, where He came into the world in the lowly circumstance of being born in a cave used for a barn with an animal's feeding trough as His crib.   

  Despite the temptation throughout Christ’s ministry to overthrow the Romans by force and set up an earthly reign as a new King David, He refused to be distracted from His vocation to conquer death itself, which required that He submit to execution on a Roman cross and wear a crown of thorns, being mocked as the king of the Jews.  Though the false hopes of His disciples had been crushed and He appeared to fail by all conventional standards, the Savior rose in victory on the third day.  His disciples then learned to hope anew for the fulfillment of God’s promises in ways that required a complete change of mind and heart, for they took up their crosses as they learned to serve a kingdom not of this world.  Along with countless generations of martyrs and confessors, they repudiated the idolatry of serving themselves or any earthly agenda as they came to hope only in the Lord.

Our responsibility is even greater than that of those who came before us, for we have received the fullness of the promise.  Time and again, however, we live as though the promise had not been fulfilled, as though a Savior had not been born.  Sometimes we even distort Christ into an inspiration for responding in kind to our enemies with the conventional means of this world, as though King David had fulfilled, rather than dimly foreshadowed, the fullness of the promise.  We must remember that our Savior rejected the temptation to use religion as a means to the end of gaining power, praise, or success in this world.  We must focus on welcoming Him into our lives in humble obedience as did the Theotokos, not on trying to dominate others, for doing so will only fuel our passions and distract us from entrusting ourselves to our Lord and His kingdom. 

  As we prepare for Christmas, let us embrace the scandalous calling to hope in nothing and no one other than the God-Man Who is born to heal and fulfill all who bear the divine image and likeness.  His human lineage shows that He came for people as conflicted, confused, and compromised as we are.  They wanted to be like the other nations and endured exile in foreign lands as a result. We wander as aliens from the everlasting joy of His Kingdom whenever we put serving ourselves or any worldly kingdom or goal before obedience to Him.  We exile ourselves from His blessed reign whenever we view or treat anyone as anything less than His living icon or as a foreigner or stranger from His love.  Like Daniel and the three holy youths, it is time for us to refuse to worship false gods and to trust that the Savior is with us and with all who endure the lions’ dens and fiery furnaces of life in a world still enslaved to the fear of death.  Having been prepared by prayer, fasting, generosity, confession, and repentance, let us receive the God-Man born for our salvation at Christmas, for He alone is our hope and the hope of the entire world.