I am sure that
most of us have already heard the sad news that our Father in Christ, His
Eminence Metropolitan PHILIP, fell asleep in the Lord earlier this week.
Funeral services will be in New York in a few days. We will remember him in our prayers for the
departed in our services for the next forty days and we should also remember
him in our daily prayers.
On this third Sunday of Great Lent,
we are halfway through our penitential journey and reminded of the need to
persevere to the end. That is certainly
what Metropolitan PHILIP did, serving as bishop since 1966 and leading the
Antiochian Archdiocese in ways that greatly strengthened and expanded the
presence and unity of Orthodox Christianity in North America. His leadership was a key factor in the
formation of mission parishes like St. Luke and in welcoming so many converts,
of whatever religious and ethnic backgrounds, into the Church. Ordained as a deacon sixty-five years ago,
our departed Father in Christ shaped the Orthodox Church as we know it in ways
too numerous and profound to describe in a homily. Suffice it for now to say that his long
ministry impacted the faith journeys of all of us here today in ways of which
we are probably not even aware. We
should all thank God for richly blessing us through him.
I know that Lent may seem like a
long, difficult period of intensified prayer, fasting, generosity, forgiveness,
and reconciliation, but it is actually only a few weeks of spiritual
preparation to follow our Savior to His cross and empty tomb. If we want to become the kind of people who
can persevere in faithfulness for however many years the Lord chooses to give
us, then we need to prepare in order to take up our crosses, die to our
self-centered desires, and follow Him. As Metropolitan PHILP and other
steadfast Christians know, the really hard challenges are not following fasting
guidelines or making it to a few extra services. They are found in crucifying the habits of
thought, word, and deed that lead us to worship and serve ourselves instead of
God and neighbor. They are found in learning
how to offer even our broken relationships, deep sorrows, personal weaknesses, and
pains of body and soul to the Lord as opportunities to grow in obedience,
humility, and self-sacrificial love for the sake of our neighbors and the
fulfillment of His gracious purposes for the world that He created.
If you are like me, you need the
intensified spiritual practices of Lent to help you gain the strength necessary
to take up the crosses in your life. If you
are like me, you need to acquire a new perspective on the daily circumstances
in which you find yourself, on how you have learned to think about and treat the
neighbors you encounter every day. If
you are like me, you need to die to living according to the familiar
conventional ways of life in the world as you know it. In other words, we all need to follow Jesus
Christ to the cross, dying with Him to how sin and corruption have taken root
in each of us so that we may rise with Him to the new life of the Kingdom.
As we see in great examples of
perseverant faithfulness like Metropolitan PHILIP, that is not done in an
instant, but over the course of a life.
No matter how old or young we are, now is the time to look to the trophy
of the cross for inspiration and hope. Remember
that we do not go to the cross alone. No
matter what we are tempted to think at times, our Savior is no stranger to
temptation, suffering, pain, and death. He sympathizes with our struggles
because He endured them. He was
literally nailed to a cross, died, was buried, and descended into Hades in
order to bring the joy of life eternal to corrupt, weak, imperfect people like
you and me through His glorious third-day resurrection. And in order to follow Him to the joy of
Pascha, we must likewise take up our crosses, which we do one day at a time by
learning to obey God a bit more faithfully in the small details of our
lives. Giving more attention to the Lord
and the needs of our neighbors, fighting our addiction to self-centered desires,
confessing our sins, and doing our best to reconcile with our enemies, these
are all ways of gaining the strength to take up our crosses and follow Jesus
Christ into the heavenly joy of His glorious resurrection. He is our hope and our salvation.
May God grant our departed
Metropolitan PHILIP paradise as His good and faithful servant, and may He grant
us all a blessed remainder of Lent as a time of preparation for the many
challenges in faithfulness that surely lay ahead in our lives. We need not worry or cower in fear about our struggles,
for our Savior has turned those challenges into opportunities to share more
fully in the victory over sin and death that He worked through His cross and
empty tomb. As did our departed Father in
Christ, let us all persevere in following Him.
In his introduction to The Forgotten Faith, Fr. Philip LeMasters, an Antiochian Orthodox priest and convert from Protestantism (“Baptist to Presbyterian to Episcopalian”), provides essential context for understanding how the book is meant to be read. “The origins of this book,” writes LeMasters, “are in brief informal talks that I have given to visiting classes from Abilene Christian University, Hardin-Simmons University, and McMurry University, which have come to St. Luke”—his parish—“in order to learn a bit about Eastern Orthodox Christianity.” He continues, “Those institutions are, respectively, Church of Christ, Baptist, and United Methodist, but their students come from a wide variety of religious backgrounds.” Thus, while he writes, “I have attempted to find points of contact to enable any reader to understand why the members of our Church believe, worship, and live as they do,” remembering that his visitors come from Protestant institutions and that Protestantism is a part of his own spiritual background proves essential to rightly reading The Forgotten Faith, which in this light offers a helpful introduction to American Orthodoxy for interested Protestants.
Among the book’s other strengths, I actually found the fifth chapter—by far the most bizarre and likely the least attractive to the book’s intended readers—to be the most interesting. In it, LeMasters highlights the 6th century Eastern saint Symeon the “holy fool.” St. Symeon and those “fools for Christ” like him throughout history embody a sort of Christian continuation of the Cynic tradition of Greek philosophy, the most famous adherent perhaps being the eccentric 