Christ Comes to Free Us All from Our Infirmities: Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday After Pentecost & Tenth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Ephesians 6:10-17; Luke 13:10-17

             When Jesus Christ was teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath, he saw a woman who was bent over and could not straighten up.  She had been that way for eighteen years.  The Lord said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity.” When He laid hands on her, she was healed.  When the woman stood up straight again, she glorified God.  As was often the case when the Savior healed on the Sabbath day, there were religious leaders eager to criticize Him for working on the legally mandated day of rest.  He responded by stating the obvious:   People do what is necessary to take care of their animals on the Sabbath.  “So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath?”  Then “all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by Him.” By restoring the woman in this way Christ showed that He is truly “Lord of the Sabbath” and that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”  (Mark 2:27-28)

           In these weeks of the Nativity Fast, we pray, fast, give to the needy, and confess and turn away from our sins as we prepare to celebrate the wonderful news of the Incarnation of the Son of God, the glorious proclamation of our Lord’s birth at Christmas for the salvation of the world.  Today’s gospel reading reminds us that Christ does not come to place even more burdens on the backs of broken people that will never help them to gain the strength to straighten up.  He is not born to enslave us further to chronic, debilitating infirmities of whatever kind.  No, He has united divinity and humanity in Himself in order to share His healing and restoration of the human person with all who respond to Him with humble faith.   That is a very good thing for us who are well acquainted with illness, pain, disability, and death.  We also have diseases of soul, of personality, of behavior, and of relationships that cripple us, keeping us from acting, thinking, and speaking with the joyful freedom of the children of God.  We are all bent over and crippled in relation to the Lord, our neighbors, and even ourselves.  We have all fallen short of fulfilling God’s gracious purposes for us, as has every generation since Adam and Eve stripped themselves of the divine glory.   Indeed, “the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” (Rom. 8:22)

            Joachim and Anna knew long-term frustration and pain all too well, for like Abraham and Sarah they were childless into their old age.  God heard their prayers, however, and gave them Mary, who would in turn give birth to the Savior Who came to liberate us all from sin and death.  We celebrated yesterday the feast of St. Anna’s conception of the Theotokos, which foreshadows the coming of the Lord to free us from the infirmities that hinder our entrance into the blessedness of the Kingdom.

            The history of the Hebrews was preparatory for the coming of the Christ, the Messiah in Whom God’s promises are fulfilled and extended to all who receive Him with faith, regardless of their ethnic or national heritage.  Christ did not come to promote one nation or culture over another or to set up an earthly kingdom of any kind in any part of the world, but to fulfill our original calling as those created in the image and likeness of God.  He unites divinity and humanity in Himself and makes it possible for us to share in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity as distinct, unique persons who become radiant with the divine glory by grace. God breaks the laws of nature, at least as we know them in our world of corruption, in order to save us, enabling elderly women like Sarah and Anna to conceive and bear children and a young virgin named Mary to become the Theotokos, the mother of His Son, Who Himself rose from the dead after three days in the tomb.  He is born at Christmas for nothing less than our liberation through breaking the bonds of death and healing every dimension of the brokenness of our life in this world of corruption.     

           The Lord surely did not treat the woman in today’s reading as being undeserving of His mercy due to her disability, her sex, or any other human characteristic.  Instead, He revealed her true identity as a beloved person, a daughter of Abraham, by enabling her to regain the basic human capability of standing up straight for the first time in years.   On that particular Sabbath day, Jesus Christ treated her as a unique, cherished child of God who was not created for slavery to a wretched existence of pain, disease, and despair, but for blessing, health, and joy. 

            The good news of Christmas is that the Savior is born to set us all free from captivity to the decay, corruption, and weakness that have taken root in our souls and in our world. He comes to deliver us from being defined by infirmities of any kind so that we may enter into the joyous freedom of the children of God.  The New Adam comes to us through the holy obedience of His virgin mother, the New Eve, to heal every dimension of our brokenness, including the common temptation for men to view women in light of their own passions and to treat them as being somehow less in the image and likeness of God than themselves.  The supremely honored position of the Theotokos in the life of the Church reminds us of the falsehood of such assumptions. As St. Paul wrote, “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) Our Savior comes to deliver us all from slavery to the bondage of seeing and treating anyone as less than a living icon of God for any reason.

Especially in these weeks of preparation for Christmas, we must remember that salvation came to the world through the free, humble obedience of a particular Palestinian Jewish teenaged girl who said “Yes!” to God with every once of her being. The only way to prepare to welcome the Savior at His Nativity is to become like her as we receive Him with humble faith, even as we turn away from all that keeps us weakened and distorted by our passions.  As St. Paul taught, we must “put on the whole armor of God,” grounding ourselves in truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the Holy Spirit.  Unlike those throughout history to the present day who have foolishly identified their spiritual enemies with their earthly adversaries, he teaches that “we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” 

While there are certainly dangers in giving too much attention to the demons, there is even greater danger in becoming careless and complacent before the familiar temptations that habitually weaken us.  To receive Christ’s healing for the passions that keep us spiritually crippled, St. Paul advises that we must “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”  We should never presume that we are so spiritually strong that this guidance does not apply to us.  That is why we must embrace the basic spiritual disciples particularly stressed in seasons such as the Nativity Fast, like prayer, fasting, generosity to the needy, and confessing and repenting of our sins.  That is why we must read the Scriptures and learn from the example and teaching of the saints. These are basic building blocks of the Christian life, not because they meet some legal requirement, but because they are channels through which we open ourselves to receive His healing strength.

  When we are tempted to despair that we will ever receive Christ’s healing, we should remember that He is present with us even more so than He was to the woman who could not stand up straight, for we are living members of His Body, the Church, having put Him on like a garment in baptism.   We are “one flesh” with Him in the Eucharist and He dwells in our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The way to healing and restoration is not through obsessing about our sins or giving up hope, but through persistently turning to Him with love.  As St. Porphyrios taught, “If you give your heart to Him, there will be no room for other things.  When you have ‘put on’ Christ, you will not need any effort to attain virtue.  He will give it to you.  Are you engulfed by fear and disenchantment? Turn to Christ.  Love Him simply and humbly, without any demand, and He Himself will free you.”[1]     

Let us use the remaining weeks before Christmas to turn to the Savior in humble love, trusting that He is born to heal us all from our infirmities and bring us into the blessedness of His Kingdom.  He delivered Joachim and Anna from barrenness and comes to set us all free from the sorrow of our first parents as daughters and sons of Abraham by faith.  The healing force of His words, “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity,” extends to us all.  Now is the time to prepare mindfully to enter into the great joy brought to the world by our Lord, the New Adam, Who was born of a woman, the New Eve, for our salvation. 

 

 

 

 

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[1] St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, 135.

We Must Open Our Eyes to the Light of Christ in Order to Prepare for Christmas: Homily for the Twenty-sixth Sunday After Pentecost & Fourteenth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Ephesians 5:8-19; Luke 18:35-43

On the last couple of Sundays, our gospel readings have reminded us what not to do if we want to prepare to welcome Christ into our lives and world at His Nativity.  The rich fool was so focused on money and possessions that he completely neglected the state of his soul.  The rich young ruler walked away in sadness when it became clear that he loved his wealth more than God and neighbor.  The weeks before Christmas are the most commercialized time of the year when we are all bombarded with messages that the good life is primarily about having a lot of money and being able to buy whatever we want.  Since the Lord warned so clearly of the folly of giving our hearts to the false god of riches, it is sadly ironic that the celebration of His Nativity so often occurs in ways that contradict the blessedness of His Kingdom.   

In contrast, today’s gospel reading gives us a model of how to receive the Lord for our healing.  The blind beggar was the complete opposite of the rich, powerful, and popular people of any time and place.  He had to sit by the side of the road and beg; there was no realistic hope that the course of his life would ever change.  He surely had no illusions about his circumstances, for he was defined in that setting by his disability.  But when told that the Savior was passing by, the poor man grasped at his one chance for healing and a new life.  That is why He refused to stop calling out loudly for Christ’s help even when others criticized him, saying “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  The more they criticized him, the louder he shouted.  He did not care what others thought of him in that moment, but was determined to do all he could to receive the Lord’s mercy.  After Christ restored his sight, the man followed Him and gave thanks to God.

One of the reasons that we need these weeks of the Nativity Fast in preparation for Christmas is that, unlike the blind beggar, we often lack a sense of urgency about presenting our darkened souls to Christ for healing. We have learned to ignore our spiritual blindness by distracting ourselves in the vain effort to find fulfillment by abusing God’s blessings to gratify our self-centered desires.  Since we are not literally blind and destitute, it is much easier for us to ignore our true state than it was for him. In our affluent society, we do not have to be rich in order to wrap ourselves in a warm blanket of creature comforts as we indulge in food, drink, and other pleasures to distract ourselves from seeing clearly where we stand before the Lord and in relation to our neighbors.  We are often so much in the dark that we feel no sense of urgency to call out to Christ from the depths of our hearts for His healing mercy.  

That is why we must follow St. Paul’s guidance to the Ephesians to “walk as children of light—for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true.”  Instead of remaining comfortable with “the unfruitful works of darkness” in our lives, we must “expose them” to the light of Christ, for “when anything is exposed by the light it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light.”  If we remain in the dark, we will never learn to see ourselves, or anyone or anything else, clearly.   Instead, we will see everything in terms of our passions, which means that we will place gratifying our desires before both serving God’s gracious purposes for us and meeting the needs of others.  St. Paul’s warning to the Ephesians against drunkenness applies also to anything that would blind us to the great spiritual urgency of being “filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart.”

It should be obvious that we all routinely fail to treat and speak to our neighbors as the living icons of God that they are.  We have all welcomed thoughts and desires into our hearts that obscure the light of Christ and lead us to stumble in the darkness.  Our spiritual vision becomes less focused every time that we do so as we fall prey to our familiar temptations.  Especially during the Nativity Fast as we prepare to welcome the Savior at Christmas, we all need to hear the phrase from the ancient baptismal hymn that St. Paul cites: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.”

The blind beggar shows us how to open the eyes of our darkened souls to the light of Christ.  The man “cried, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’  And those who were in front rebuked him, telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’”  He provides us with the basis of the Jesus Prayer, the heartfelt plea for healing, help, strength, and restoration that we should use often.  Others told him to be quiet, but this fellow called out to the Lord with even greater intensity.   When we pray the Jesus Prayer or otherwise cry out to the Lord from the depths of our hearts, we will very likely be tempted strongly to think about or do something else.  There is much within us all that would rather embrace some distraction that will enable us to stay in the dark and gratify our passions.  When that happens, we must pray with even greater intensity and humility as we lift up our conflicted and compromised hearts to the Lord. 

Christ asked the blind beggar, ‘”What do you want me to do for you?” He said, “Lord, let me receive my sight.”  And Jesus said to him, ‘Receive your sight; your faith has made you well.”’  We must open our darkened souls to the brilliant light of the Savior in order to gain our sight, in order to know the Lord from the depths of our hearts as we share more fully in His blessed eternal life.  We are preparing to receive Christ more fully into our lives at His Nativity, and what better way is there to do that than to be present to Him with our minds in our hearts as we call for His mercy?  Fasting and almsgiving will strengthen our prayers in this regard.   Struggling with both disciplines will reveal our weakness before our passions and should fuel our humility and sense of urgent need for the Lord’s healing.  They are also practices that help to purify the desires of our hearts and direct them toward fulfillment in God.  They teach us that we actually can live without gratifying every self-centered desire. The less focused we are on catering to our taste buds and stomachs, the more resources we should have to share with those in need.  Growing in selfless compassion for our neighbors is an essential dimension of being illumined with the light of Christ.  

As we prepare to celebrate the birth of the God-Man at Christmas, we must be distracted neither by obsession with earthly cares nor by an unhealthy focus on the darkness that remains within us.   As St. Porphyrios taught, “Don’t occupy yourself with rooting out evil.  Christ does not wish us to occupy ourselves with the passions, but with the opposite.  Channel the water, that is, all the strength of your soul to the flowers and you will enjoy their beauty, their fragrance and their freshness.  You won’t become saints by hounding after evil.  Ignore evil.  Look towards Christ and He will save you.”[1]  In the remaining weeks of the Nativity Fast, let us look toward Christ with the urgent expectation of that blind beggar who let nothing stop him from persistently calling for mercy from the depths of his heart.  If we do so, then we will have the eyes to behold the glorious light of the Lord when He is born for our salvation.  

 

 

 

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[1] St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love:  The Life and Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios, 135.

Preparing to Welcome Christ with Joy Through Humility: Homily for the Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost & Thirteenth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Ephesians 4:1-7; Luke 18:18-27 

            As we continue to prepare to welcome Christ at His Nativity, we must keep our focus on becoming like those who first received Him with joy.  That includes the Theotokos, whose Entrance into the Temple, where she prepared to become His Living Temple, we celebrated last week. That includes unlikely characters like the Persian astrologers or wise men, certainly Gentiles, who traveled such a long distance to worship Him.   What better news could there have been than that the Prince of Peace was coming “to preach good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord”? (Lk. 4:18-19) As we sing during these weeks of Advent, “Dance for joy, O earth, on hearing the gladsome tidings; with the Angels and the shepherds now glorify Him Who is willing to be gazed on as a young Child Who before the ages is God.”  

            We must remember, however, that there were those who did not welcome the birth of the Savior at all, such as the corrupt King Herod who slaughtered many young boys when his plot to kill the young Christ unraveled. He was interested only in his own power as a vassal of the Romans and saw the Savior simply as a threat to be destroyed.  In today’s gospel reading, we encounter a figure not nearly as bloodthirsty as Herod, but who also did not welcome the Messiah, at least once he caught a glimpse of how different He was from what he had expected.  

The rich man expected to find a teacher who would praise him for his record of good behavior.  In response to his question about how to find eternal life, the Lord challenged the man to confront his spiritual weakness. This fellow claimed to have kept all of God’s commandments from his youth, for he thought that he had already mastered everything that God required.  He assumed that he needed no repentance or divine mercy, presumably having already achieved perfection.  That is when the Lord said to him, “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” This was a command that he lacked the spiritual strength to obey, for he was enslaved to the love of money and the comfort and power that it brings.   Upon hearing this command, the rich man did not receive Christ joyfully, but “was sad at this word, and went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.” (Mk. 10:22)  

The Savior then shocked everyone by saying, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!  For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  The common assumption then was that wealth was God’s reward for those who were righteous. Since the man was one of very few rich people in that time and place, he and his neighbors surely assumed that his possessions were due to his exemplary behavior.  Their true spiritual significance was very different, of course, for they showed that he had come to love his wealth more than God and neighbor and, thus, obviously had failed to fulfill the greatest of the commandments. As St. Basil the Great wrote of the rich young ruler, “Those who love their neighbors as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbor; yet surely, you seem to have great possessions!  How else can this be, but that you have preferred your own enjoyment to the consolation of the many…For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love.”[1]   Even though this fellow departed in sadness, the Lord did not condemn the man, but concluded with the statement: “What is impossible with men is possible with God.”  In other words, there remains hope for those who come to see clearly where they stand before the Lord and humbly offer themselves to Him for healing.

 If we want to prepare to welcome the Savior into our lives and world more fully this Christmas, then we must turn away from shallow religious self-justification and addiction to our money and possessions.  Instead of wanting a Lord to congratulate and reward us for our imagined success and virtue, we must follow the guidance of St. Paul to the Ephesians “to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”  He probably wrote from prison in Rome, where no one would have confused him with a paragon of earthly achievement. 

Paul had received Christ rather traumatically when the risen Lord appeared to him on his way to persecute Christians in Damascus.  After being blind for three days, he was baptized, received his sight again, and took up his long and difficult ministry, which ultimately led to martyrdom.  Paul described himself in ways that remind us of the rich young ruler: “My manner of life from my youth, which was spent from the beginning among my own nation at Jerusalem, all the Jews know...that according to the strictest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee.”  (Acts 26: 4-5)   Despite the many sufferings he endured, Paul never walked away in sadness from the Lord, but proclaimed that “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” (1. Tim. 1:15) 

Paul is the complete opposite of those who think that they have somehow put God in their debt by their good behavior or that wealth and power are necessary, or even likely, signs of a person’s righteousness. Instead of proudly celebrating ourselves, he calls us to humility, patience, and mutual love that manifests Christ’s peace.  There is, of course, no true peace in those whose sense of wellbeing is dependent upon showing themselves to be better than their neighbors, defending themselves from criticism that reveals their imperfection, or hoarding wealth.   That lack of peace is precisely what led the rich man to walk away in sadness, for he could not bear to open his soul in humility to see how desperately he needed the mercy of Christ.  To do so would have required acknowledging that he was by no means perfect, for he needed healing far beyond what he could ever give himself.     

There remains, nonetheless, hope for the rich young rulers of this world, for all is “possible with God.”  Likewise, there remains hope for us all, for as Paul wrote, “grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.”  The only way to prepare to receive the Savior with joy at His Nativity is to cultivate the humility of those who know that they lack the spiritual strength to master the greatest of the commandments to love God with every ounce of our being and our neighbors as ourselves.  We pray, fast, give, confess, repent, and forgive during these blessed weeks in order to prepare our hearts to welcome the Savior, the God-Man Who comes to restore and fulfill us as His living icons, making us nothing less than “partakers of the divine nature.” The point is not simply to enrich our private spirituality, of course, put to enter into the blessed peace of Christ, providing the world a sign of its salvation as we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves, to pursue reconciliation with our enemies, and to share with the needy in whom He is present.  Let us continue to prepare to receive Him with the joy of the Theotokos, the wisemen, the shepherds, and angels as the Prince of Peace.  His Nativity is good news for the entire world from which we must never walk away in sadness. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

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[1] Basil the Great, “To the Rich,” as quoted in Andrew Geleris, Money and Salvation (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2022), 54.

Becoming Living Temples of Christ, Who Is Our Peace: Homily for the Twenty-fourth Sunday After Pentecost & Ninth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Ephesians 2:14-22; Luke 12:16-21

 Having begun the Nativity Fast on November 15 in preparation to welcome the Savior at Christmas, today we anticipate the Feast of the Entrance into the Temple of the Most Holy Theotokos. Her elderly parents Joachim and Anna offered Mary to God by taking her to live in the Temple in Jerusalem as a young girl, where she grew up in prayer and purity as she prepared to become the Living Temple of the Lord in a unique and extraordinary way as His Virgin Mother.  This feast directs us to the good news of Christmas, as it is the first step in Mary’s life in becoming the Theotokos who gave birth to the Son of God for our salvation. 

Joachim and Anna had a long and difficult period of preparation to become parents, as they had been unable to have children for decades until God miraculously blessed them in old age to conceive.  They knew that their daughter was a blessing not simply for the happiness of their family, but for playing her part in fulfilling God’s purposes for the salvation of the world   Their patient faithfulness throughout their years of barrenness helped them gain the spiritual clarity to offer her to the Lord.  They knew that their marriage and family life were not simply about fulfilling their desires, but were blessings to be given back to God for the fulfillment of much higher purposes. 

Joachim, Anna, and the Theotokos are the complete opposites of the rich man in today’s gospel reading.  His only concern was to eat, drink, and enjoy himself because he had become so wealthy.  He was addicted to earthly pleasure, power, and success, and saw the meaning and purpose of his life only in those terms.  When God required his soul, however, the man’s true poverty was revealed, for the possessions and accomplishments of this life inevitably pass away and cannot save us.  This man’s horizons extended no further than his dreams of the large barns he planned to build in order to hold his crops.  Before the ultimate judgment of God, he was revealed to be a fool who had wasted his life on what could never truly heal or fulfill one who bore the divine image and likeness.  He had laid up treasure for himself, but was not rich toward God in any way. The problem was not simply that the man had possessions, but that he had made them his god, which is another way of saying that he worshipped only himself and surely was not concerned about the needs of his neighbors.  His barns were a temple of the greed to which he had offered his entire existence in a vain effort to satisfy his self-centered desires.   

In stark contrast, the Theotokos followed the righteous example of her parents.  She was prepared by a life of holiness to agree freely to become our Lord’s mother, even though she was an unmarried virgin who did not understand how such a thing could happen.  When she said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” this young Palestinian Jewish girl bravely made a whole, complete offering of her life to God.  She did not ask what was in it for her in terms of money, power, or any kind of earthly success.  Unlike the rich fool in the parable, she was not blinded by passion and had the purity of soul to put receptivity to the Lord before all else.

The world is full of tragic circumstances today that are caused by people who are so enslaved to their self-centered desires that they think nothing is more important than doing whatever it takes to gratify their lust for possessions, power, and pleasure.   But even if they succeed in gaining the whole world, they will lose their souls because they have offered themselves to false gods which lack the power to heal people from the ravages of sin, let alone to raise anyone up from the tomb.   Those who serve such idols inevitably lack peace within their souls and act in ways that make peace with their neighbors, especially those they consider their enemies, impossible.   

In today’s epistle reading, St. Paul taught the Ephesians that “Christ is our peace, Who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in His flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the Cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.”  That is why Gentile Christians are now also part of the holy temple “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone…”  Though we had been “strangers” to the blessed heritage of the Hebrews, we are now built into the living temple of Christ’s Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Too many people today insist on preserving whatever “dividing wall of hostility” they can use to promote their vain desires for power, wealth, and other signs of worldly success.  Doing so  enables them to justify in their own minds how they refuse to pursue reconciliation with those who pose real or imagined threats to their dreams of earthly glory.  There are ways to “eat, drink, and be merry” that have nothing to do with food and beverage, but everything to do with impoverishing our souls by indulging in self-centeredness to the point that we cannot even imagine living according to the good news that Christ “has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” and brought peace to those “who were far off, and peace to those who were near.”

The Jewish Messiah Whose ministry extended to Samaritans, Roman centurions, Gentiles, the poor, the sick, the demon-possessed, and those viewed as hopeless cases of depravity has brought all with faith in Him into His Body, the Church, the living temple of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.  He worked that reconciliation through His great Self-offering on the Cross by which He has released us from bondage to the fear of death through His glorious resurrection on the third day.  If we want to pursue reconciliation with those we consider our enemies concerning any matter in this world, we must embrace our true identity as “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.”  We must find healing for our souls as we embrace our identity as a holy temple of the Lord.  We must reorient the desires of our hearts toward His Kingdom and away from any version of worldly glory.  In other words, we must become like the Theotokos who offered herself fully and without reservation to receive the Savior.  We enter into His peace not by gaining wealth, power, or victory over enemies, but by offering ourselves to Him with complete receptivity, as she did.  

We are now in the Nativity Fast, the 40-day period during which we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Savior at Christmas.   The weeks of Advent call us to wrestle with the passions that threaten to make us so much like the rich fool that we become blind to the healing and peace brought by our Lord.  Far from obsessing about earthly cares and indulging in the richest and most satisfying foods, this is a season for fasting, confessing and repenting of our sins, giving generously to the needy, and intensifying our prayers.  It is a time for preparing to open our hearts to receive Christ more fully into our lives at His Nativity.  

 The Theotokos entered the Temple, living there for years in preparation to become the Son of God’s Living Temple through whom He took on flesh. The Nativity Fast provides us blessed opportunities to become more like that obscure Palestinian Jewish girl who said “Yes!” to God with every ounce of her being.  It calls us to become more like Joachim and Anna in the patient trust in God that enabled them to offer their long-awaited daughter to Him.  They show us how to enter the Temple by embracing the difficult struggle of learning to offer ourselves and all our blessings fully to the Lord. It is only by following their righteous example that we will gain the spiritual clarity to provide the world a much-needed sign that the Savior born at Christmas truly “has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” that we know all to well.   Let us use these weeks to find healing for our passions as we embrace our true identity as “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in Whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in Whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

 

    

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.”