Homily for the Second Sunday of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church

 

Hebrews 1:10-2:3; Mark 2:1-12

                       We will misunderstand these blessed weeks of Lent if we assume that they are about helping us to have clearer ideas or deeper feelings about our Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection.  We will be even more confused if we think that our intensified prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and repentance somehow earn God’s forgiveness or make us better than other people.  Quite the contrary, Lenten disciples are simply opportunities to open our souls to the gracious healing of our Lord so that we may share more fully in His life.  That is another way of saying that the point of Lent is to grow in our knowledge of God through true spiritual experience and encounter.   

On this second Sunday of the Great Fast, we commemorate St. Gregory Palamas, who defended the experience of monks who, in the stillness of prayer from their hearts, saw the Uncreated Light of God.  The eyes of their souls were cleansed and illumined such that they beheld the divine glory as the Apostles did at the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor.  St. Gregory taught that to know God is to participate in His gracious divine energies as we are transformed in holiness in every aspect of our existence.  He proclaimed that our calling is to know and experience God through true spiritual union with Him that sanctifies every dimension of the human person.  To do so is to encounter the great “I AM” of the Burning Bush from the depths of our souls in a way that illumines us entirely. (Ex. 3:14) It is to shine brilliantly in holiness like an iron left in the fire of the divine glory.

In today’s gospel reading, Christ healed a paralyzed man, enabling him to stand up, carry his bed, and walk home as a sign of the Savior’s divine authority to forgive sins. In doing so, He restored not only a body to health but a whole person who faced all the practical challenges of daily life in the world as we know it.  Though Palamas focused primarily on the hesychasm of monks, he also taught that “those who live in the world…must force themselves to use the things of this world in conformity with the commandments of God.”[1]  When we mindfully embrace the struggle to purify our hearts so that we may live according to love of God and neighbor, which are the greatest of the commandments, and not according to our self-centered desires, we come to know and experience Christ from the depths of our souls more fully.  We pray, fast, give, forgive, and confess and repent of our sins during Lent so that we may open our hearts, and every aspect of our lives, as fully as possible to the purifying healing of our Lord’s gracious divine energies.      

His healing is open to all, regardless of age, sex, marital status, social standing, or any other characteristic.  Christ sent the formerly paralyzed man home to resume a conventional life. Since the Savior is both fully divine and fully human, literally every aspect of our human existence may become radiant with the divine glory, if we will only offer ourselves to Him for healing and hold nothing back.  Doing so requires a great struggle and constant vigilance against the blindness and weakness that our passions so easily bring upon us.  The disciplines of Lent help us to embrace the struggle to open the eyes of our souls to behold the glory of the Lord, to know Him from the depths of our hearts.     

While no particular use of the Jesus Prayer is required of us, we must all call mindfully for the Lord’s healing mercy each day in order to receive His liberation from slavery to the paralysis of sin.  Prayer is not about pondering ideas, cultivating emotions, or mouthing words, but about being fully present to God from the depths of our souls.  Doing so is absolutely necessary to know Christ and become more like Him in holiness.  It is the essential foundation for accepting Christ’s healing and gaining the strength to make whatever challenges we face points of entrance into the life of the Kingdom of the Heaven. In order to know the Lord, we simply must ground our lives in prayer.   

Lent does not call us merely to think or have feelings about our Lord’s Cross and resurrection.  This season invites us to grow in our personal knowledge and experience of the Savior Who offered Himself on the Cross and rose in glory on the third day for our salvation.   Its disciplines strengthen us for the life of holiness possible only for those who share in Christ’s restoration and fulfillment of the human person in the divine image and likeness.  Whenever we pray, fast, serve others with humility, and confess and repent of our sins, we open ourselves to receive the light of the Lord and become more like Him.  These are not practices only for those who live in what we imagine to be ideal circumstances, but are necessary for all who remain weak before their passions with spiritual vision darkened by sin.  No circumstance of our lives excuses us in any way from answering the calling to become radiant with the divine energies of our Lord as we rise up from our beds of weakness and move forward in a life of holiness.  That is the calling of the God-Man to us all. 

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers records that God revealed to Saint Antony the Great of Egypt that “there was one who was his equal in the city. He was a doctor by profession and whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor, and every day he sang the Sanctus with the angels.”  The example of that righteous man shows that the only limits to our participation in the life of Christ are those that we choose to impose on ourselves.  As we continue our Lenten journey, let us make the circumstances of our lives, whatever they may be, points of entrance into the blessed life of our Lord.  Let us know Him as God from the depths of our hearts as we come to   shine brightly with the divine glory by grace.  That is not a matter of rational speculation, historical remembrance, or cultivation of emotions about the Savior’s Cross and empty tomb, but of lifting up our hearts and entering into the joy of the One Who destroyed the power of sin and death by His glorious resurrection on the third day.

 

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[1] The Triads, II.ii.5.

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent (The Sunday of Orthodoxy) in the Orthodox Church

 

Hebrews 11:24-26, 32-40; John 1:43-51

 On this first Sunday of Great Lent, we commemorate the restoration of icons centuries ago in the Byzantine Empire.  They were banned due to a misguided fear of idolatry, but restored as a proclamation of how Christ calls us to participate in His salvation in every dimension of our existence.  The icons convey the incarnation of the God-Man, Who had to be fully human with a real human body in order to be born, live in this world, die, rise from the grave, and ascend into heaven.  Were any aspect of His humanity an illusion, we could not become “partakers of the divine nature” through Him.  Icons of the Theotokos and the Saints display our calling to become radiant with holiness by uniting ourselves to Christ as whole persons, which includes how we use food, drink, money, sex, natural resources, and every other dimension of the creation.

Today’s commemoration reminds us that our Lenten journey is not an escapist distraction from life in our bodies or in our world.  Quite the opposite, the icons call us to embrace our struggle to find healing for every dimension of our personal and collective brokenness in the brilliant light of the Lord. The God-Man shares His salvation of the human person with us so that even our deepest struggles may become points of entrance into the blessedness of His Kingdom.  During this season of Lent, we must pray, fast, give, forgive, and confess and repent of the ways in which we have refused to embrace our calling to become ever more beautiful living icons of Christ, which is necessary for us to gain the spirituality clarity to see that every human person bears the divine image as much as we do.  If we are approaching this season with integrity, the ways in which we have fallen short of our high calling will quickly become apparent to us.  The more we struggle against our slavery to self-centered desires, the more apparent their hold upon us will become.  If you have been surprised during the first week of the Great Fast how your passions have reared their ugly heads, you are certainly not alone.  Indeed, that is likely a sign that your Lenten journey is off to a good start.    

We must not despair when we catch a glimpse of our brokenness, however, because our goal is not mere psychological adjustment, moral progress, or any type of success according to conventional standards.  It is, instead, as the Savior said to Nathanael, to “see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”  As those who bear the divine image and likeness, our calling as human persons is nothing less than sharing fully in the eternal life of the God-Man.  Though doing so is truly an eternal goal, we participate already in a foretaste of such blessedness when we open our hearts to His healing through repentance.     

Even as the icons proclaim the truth of our Lord’s incarnation using materials like paint and wood, they call us to manifest His holiness in our own bodies.  They remind us to make our daily physical actions tangible signs of Christ’s salvation.  In fasting, we limit our self-indulgence in food in order to gain strength to purify and redirect our desires toward God and away from gratifying bodily pleasures.  In almsgiving, we limit our trust in possessions in order to grow in love for our neighbors, in whom we encounter the Lord.  In prayer, we limit our obsession with our thoughts and usual distractions to become more fully present to God as we open our hearts to Him.  As experience teaches, even our smallest efforts to practice disciplines that open our hearts to receive Christ’s healing mercy reveal that there is much within us that would rather remain in the darkness of corruption.

Nonetheless, we must remember that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and called to become radiant with the glory of our Lord’s resurrection.  Literally no aspect of our humanity is excluded from the vocation to shine with God’s gracious divine energies.   No matter how difficult the struggle with our passions may be, we must not become practical iconoclasts by refusing the calling to become more beautiful living icons of Christ in any aspect of our existence.  Instead, we must open even the dark, ugly, and distorted dimensions of our lives to the healing light of Christ as we call out for His mercy from the depths of our hearts.

The Savior entered fully into death through His Cross in order to overcome the corruption of the first Adam.  He rose and ascended in glory in order to make us radiant with His holiness.  As we celebrate the historical restoration of icons today, let us continue the Lenten journey in ways that will enable us to become more beautiful living icons of God, for that is what it means to become truly human.  The disciplines of this season are simply opportunities to do precisely that as we become by His grace those who will “see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”

 

 

 

Homily for the Sunday of Forgiveness in the Orthodox Church

 

Romans 13:11-14:4; Matthew 6:14-21

             On the last several Sundays, our gospel readings have challenged us to return home from our self-imposed exile.  Zacchaeus gave more than justice required to the poor and those whom he had exploited from his ill-gotten gains, and was restored as a son of Abraham.  By her persistence and humility, the Canaanite woman received the deliverance of her daughter as a sign that Christ calls all people to return home to Him in faith.  The publican returned to his spiritual home by humbly calling for the Lord’s mercy, even as the Pharisee exiled himself by his pride.  The prodigal son took the long journey home after coming to his senses about the misery of being in exile from the father whom he had abandoned. We recalled last Sunday that the ultimate standard of judgment for entering into our true home of eternal blessedness is whether the Savior’s restoration and fulfillment of the human person in the divine image and likeness has permeated our lives and character.  Today’s gospel reading reminds us to embrace forgiveness, fasting, and almsgiving in ways that direct us back to the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were cast out when they stripped themselves naked of the divine glory and entered into an existence so tragically enslaved to the fear of death that their son Cain murdered his brother Abel.  Within a few generations, their descendant Lamech proclaimed that he would avenge anyone who wronged him seventy-seven fold. (Gen. 4: 24)   We do not have to look very closely at our world, our personal relationships, and our own hearts to see how we have followed in their path of corruption as we stubbornly persist in exiling ourselves from the eternal blessedness which God offers to us all.  

          The season of Lent calls us to take steps, no matter how small and faltering they may be, along the path back to Paradise.  As the Lord offered up Himself on the Cross, He said to the penitent thief, “Truly I tell you, you will be with me today in Paradise.” (Lk. 23:43) Hades and the grave could not contain the Savior Who entered fully into death, for He is not merely human but also God.  The icon of Christ’s resurrection portrays Him lifting up Adam and Eve from their tombs.  The joy of His empty tomb places all our wanderings and sorrows in light of hope for “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” 

             Our first parents refused to fulfill their calling to become like God in holiness and instead distorted themselves and the entire creation.  We participate in the Savior’s restoration of the human person in the divine image and likeness when we receive the garment of light in baptism as we rise up with Him into the new life of holiness for which He created us. Christ covers our nakedness and restores us to the dignity of beloved children of the Father who may know the joy of Paradise even now. Upon being baptized and then filled with the Holy Spirit in chrismation, we receive the Eucharist as participants in the Heavenly Banquet.  In every celebration of the Divine Liturgy, we return mystically to our true home. 

  Doing so reveals that our calling is nothing less than to become perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect. Because He is infinitely holy, we must never think that we have reached that goal.  So much of the corruption of the old Adam remains within us, for we do not live daily as those clothed with a robe of light, but prefer the pain and weaknesses of choosing our own will over God’s.  We typically prefer to live according to our passions in ways that direct us back to exile, not to our true home of the blessedness of the Kingdom of Heaven.

             That is why we must all approach Lent with a deep awareness of how we far we are from sharing fully in the New Adam’s completion of our vocation to become like God in holiness.  The only way to escape our self-imposed exile is to take intentional steps to share more fully in the life of the One Who has opened up Paradise through His glorious resurrection.  As St. Paul taught, we must “put on the armor of light” and “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”  That means mindfully investing our energy, time, and attention in ways that strengthen us spiritually as we conform our character more fully to Christ’s. It means refusing to invest our energy, time, and attention in whatever weakens us spiritually and makes us less like Him.  Lent calls us to give ourselves so fully to prayer, fasting, generosity, and other spiritual disciplines that we will have nothing left for “the works of darkness” that fuel our passions and bring only despair.

             A holy Lent is not about going through the motions of religion in order to gain the praise of others or even of ourselves; such vain hypocrisy will never help us gain the spiritual strength necessary to love and forgive our enemies. The same Lord Who said from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” tells us that we must forgive others their offenses against us if we want the Father to forgive our sins.  (Lk. 23:34) Refusing to forgive others is a sign that we are not pursuing the journey home from exile.  If His merciful love is not becoming characteristic of us, then we are not orienting our lives toward Paradise.  Forgiveness is certainly a difficult struggle that will open our eyes to how strong our inclinations are to remain estranged from God and neighbor.  If we refuse even to crawl slowly along its path, we will know only the  misery of slavery to our own desires and refuse to enter into the eternal joy of the resurrection.   

             Precisely because it is so hard to forgive as we hope to be forgiven, we need spiritual disciplines like fasting, prayer, and almsgiving to direct us to our true fulfillment in God.  Our first parents’ self-centered refusal to restrain their desire for food enslaved them to death and corruption.  We have tragically reproduced their spiritual and personal brokenness from generation to generation.  Struggling to abstain from satisfying ourselves with rich food during Lent will help us see more clearly how far we are from Paradise due to our addiction to gratifying our self-centered desires.  It should also help us grow in patience and humility in relation to neighbors who have treated us according to their passions.  Humility fuels forgiveness, but pride makes forgiveness impossible by blinding us to the truth about our souls. In Forgiveness Vespers, we ask for and extend forgiveness to one another personally. Since we are members together of the Body of Christ, we weaken one another whenever we refuse to embrace the Lord’s healing.  We do not have to give obvious offense in order to do that, which is why we must all learn to see that pride invariably weakens our ability to share in a communion of love with our neighbors. It is precisely our pride that keeps us in exile from God and one another.   

             Even as we stand on the threshold of beginning the Lenten journey that leads us back to our true home, we must be prepared for our passions to fight back mightily when we wrestle with them.  Pursuing spiritual disciplines brings our weaknesses to the surface, often leading to anger at others as a way of distracting us from reckoning with our own sins.  As St. John Chrysostom asked, “What good is it if we abstain from birds and fishes, but bite and devour our brothers and sisters?”  We must mindfully struggle to keep our mouths shut whenever we are tempted to criticize or condemn one another this Lent.  Whenever we fall prey to our passions, we must ask forgiveness of those we have offended and get back on the path to Paradise with renewed commitment.  No matter how many times we wander from the narrow way, we must return to it.

             Lent calls us to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”  We must do so in order to return to Paradise through His Passion.  When we set out to pray, fast, give, and forgive with integrity, we will learn quickly how much we still share in the corruption of the old Adam.  That should help us see how ridiculous it is not to extend to others the same mercy that we ask for ourselves.  If we refuse to do so, we risk shutting ourselves out of Paradise.  In preparation for the struggles of the coming weeks, let us humble ourselves and forgive one another so that we may acquire the spiritual strength to “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”  Let us begin our Lenten journey with the joyful hope that “now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.  The night is far spent, the day is at hand.”  May every step of the journey lead us further away from exile and closer to our true home, the Paradise that our Lord has opened to us through His glorious resurrection on the third day.   

 

 

Homily for the Sunday of the Prodigal Son in the Orthodox Church

 

Luke 15:11-32

            The themes of exile and return are prominent throughout the entire narrative of the Bible.  Adam and Eve were cast out of Paradise.  The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt until Moses led them back to the Promised Land.  The kingdoms of Israel and Judah went into exile in Assyria and Babylon, respectively, with only Judah returning home.  The Jews endured a kind of exile when the Romans occupied their land and longed for restoration through a new King David.  Our Lord provided the true restoration of a kingdom not of this world, leading all with faith in Him back to Paradise through His Cross and glorious resurrection.  The canon of the New Testament concludes with the Revelation or Apocalypse, which portrays the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the joyful fulfillment of all things in Him. 

 As we continue preparing for our Lenten journey, the Parable of the Prodigal Son reminds us that true repentance is a matter of returning home from self-imposed exile.  It shows us who God is and how we have all chosen to turn away from a loving relationship with Him due to our insistence on serving our own self-centered and foolish desires, no matter how miserable and weak they have made us.  The parable calls us never to fall into despair, no matter how depraved we have become, because we remain the beloved sons and daughters of a Father Who wants nothing more than for us to return from exile and embrace our true relationship with Him.

The younger son had done his best to reject his father completely, for he had treated him simply as a source of money for funding a decadent way of life that gratified his passions.  He did not relate to his father as a beloved person, but only as the source of his inheritance. That was essentially the same as wishing that his father was dead; it was the very worst insult that he could have given the old man.  The prodigal son rejected his identity as a beloved son so that he could live as an isolated individual who was free to indulge his passions in any way that he saw fit with no responsibilities toward anyone.  Once he burned through the cash, however, he faced the harsh realities of being a stranger in a strange land during a famine.  He sunk so low that he envied the food of the pigs he tended.  The Jews considered pigs unclean and this scene shows that he had repudiated not only his father, but all the blessings promised to the children of Abraham.     

In the midst of his misery, the young man finally came to himself and realized that he would be better off as a lowly servant in his father’s house, where there was bread to spare, than in some Gentile’s pig pen starving to death.  He recognized how he had broken his relationship with his father and no longer had any claim to be his son.  Reality had slapped him in the face to the point that he gained a new level of spiritual clarity, for he understood the shameful gravity of what he had done.  Then he began the long journey home in humility.  

That is when the young man got the greatest shock of his life.  In ways that contracted all the customs and sensibilities of that culture, the father ran out to hug and kiss the son who had so gravely insulted him.  The old man must have scanned the horizon every day in hope of his son’s return. Despite the son’s despicable behavior, the father did not view or treat him according to what he deserved.  He did not even consider receiving him as a servant, but said, “‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’” The party began, but the older son was offended by the injustice of the celebration, as he claimed to have always obeyed his father and was never given a party.  This fellow missed the point of the father’s joy, for “It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”  He had returned from exile to the Promised Land and been restored as a descendant of Abraham.  It was simply obvious to the father that this was a time to celebrate. 

           The parable reminds us that our return from exile to the joy of our Lord’s Kingdom is not a reward for good behavior.  We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. (Rom. 3:23) Each of us is the prodigal son, for like him we have chosen to repudiate our identity as the children of God in order to live as anonymous, isolated individuals according to our own desires.  It does not matter what we have put before God, for if we have put love for anything before Him then we have rejected our vocation to know the great joy of becoming like our Lord in holiness. The passing pleasures the prodigal son sought were base and brought him into obvious misery, even as our first parents’ unrestrained desire for the forbidden fruit resulted in their expulsion from Paradise into our world of corruption.  His behavior was obviously shameful, but our habitual sins are equally dangerous, if not more so, due to their subtlety in turning us away from our calling to share more fully in the life of Christ.  That is especially the case if we distort the spiritual disciplines of Lent into opportunities to become more like the older brother in slavery to vainglory and self-righteous judgment by wanting a reward for our apparent virtues and condemning our neighbors for their failings.  He refused to enter into the celebration of the return from exile of a beloved child of God.  He referred to the prodigal as “this son of yours,” for he had become blind to his calling to love him as a brother.   We can easily do the same thing to our neighbors, thus shutting ourselves out of the joy of the Kingdom where, thanks be to God, none of us hopes to get what we deserve. 

 The father restored the prodigal son by clothing him in a fine robe, shoes, and a ring.    The young man had surely been half-naked in stinking, filthy rags during his journey home.  Adam and Eve had stripped themselves naked of the divine glory when they put gratifying their own desires before obedience to God.  In baptism, we receive the robe of light they rejected as we put on Christ like a garment, but still we refuse to live each day as those who have been restored to such great dignity as the beloved children of God.  The father had the fatted calf slain for a great celebration.  Like the confused Gentile converts of Corinth whom St. Paul had to remind about the holiness of their bodies, we must remember that “Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.  Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (1 Cor. 5: 7-8) In the banquet of the Eucharist, we already participate mystically in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, being nourished by His own Body and Blood.  Yet we all fall short of our calling to live each day in communion with Christ as members of His own Body, the Church.  Like the prodigal son, we so often think, speak, and act as isolated, anonymous individuals enslaved to the self-centered desires that have taken our hearts captive.  No matter how appealing or noble we find the objects of our desires to be, we obscure the distinctive beauty of our souls when we act more like bundles of inflamed passion than as beloved children of our Father.   

 As we prepare to follow our Lord back to Paradise through to His Cross and empty tomb, we must recognize like the prodigal son that we have exiled ourselves and then begin the long journey home.  Like him, we must not allow the fear of rejection to deter us.  Like the father in the parable, God is not a vengeful tyrant set on retribution.  “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8) and constantly reaches out to us, calling us to accept restoration as His sons and daughters. All He asks is that we repent by reorienting the course of our lives toward the blessedness of His Heavenly Kingdom.  With King David, we must pray, “Do not remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions; according to Your mercy remember me, for Your goodness’ sake, O Lord.” (Ps. 24) “A contrite and humble heart, O God, You will not despise.” (Ps. 50) We must mindfully refuse to allow the hurt pride called shame keep us from returning to our true home. Now is the time to leave behind the filth and misery of the pig pen and to enter by grace into the joy of a heavenly banquet that none of us deserves.   Now is the time to end our self-imposed exile and direct our steps to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, our true home.

 

            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“God Resists the Proud, But Gives Grace to the Humble”: Homily for the Sunday of the Pharisee and the Publican in the Orthodox Church

 

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

 

Today we begin the Lenten Triodion, the three-week period of preparation for the spiritual journey that prepares us to follow Christ to His Cross and victory over death at Pascha. The first step in our preparation is to remember that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” (Jas. 4:6) Today the Church reminds us of how easy it is to distort the spiritual disciplines of Lent in a fashion that makes them nothing but hindrances to the healing of our souls.  Today we are warned that it is entirely possible to distort prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and other spiritual disciplines according to our own pride such that these tools of salvation become nothing but instruments for rejecting the healing mercy of the Savior. 

 Contrary to what we would like to believe, embracing these practices with integrity is not a way to impress God, ourselves, or our neighbors.  It is not a way of accomplishing anything at all by conventional human standards.  Pursuing spiritual disciplines does not in any way justify us in having any negative opinion whatsoever about anyone else.  Far from exalting ourselves, our most feeble attempts at purifying the desires of our hearts will quickly reveal the weakness of our souls. At the very least, they will bring to the surface how disinclined we are to be fully present to God, how addicted we are to satisfying our various appetites, and how much more we care for our own possessions and comfort than for the wellbeing of our neighbors.  We will then face the choice of how to respond to these challenging revelations.  If we want to pursue Lent for the healing of our souls, we must refuse to fall prey to the common temptation to turn our disciplines into ways of blinding ourselves from the truth about where stand before the Lord, as did the Pharisee in today’s gospel reading. 

 The Pharisees were experts in the Old Testament law, which they interpreted very strictly in terms of outward behavior.  The Pharisee was correct to fast, tithe, pray, and live a morally upright life.  The problem is that he did so in ways that served his pride to the point of grave spiritual blindness. Instead of pursuing these disciplines in humility so that he would gain the spiritual clarity to see himself truthfully before God, he used them as justification to condemn a neighbor.  Doing so revealed only his own sinfulness.  We can easily fall into the same trap this Lent, for there is a strong temptation to ignore the brokenness of our own souls as we obsess about the apparent failings of others.  As those who confess that we are each “the chief of sinners” before receiving Communion, we must focus on our own need for the Lord’s healing mercy and refuse to become the self-appointed judges of our neighbors. When we embrace such proud delusions, it becomes impossible for us to follow our Lord to His Passion in a true spiritual sense. Doing so amounts to refusing to receive His grace, for we will then be so full of pride that we will imagine we have already reached the heights of holiness by our own accomplishments.   Even as we think that we are models of righteousness, we will worship only ourselves as we deny our need for the Savior’s victory over death.  Like the Pharisee, we will use the word “God,” but in reality we will pray only to ourselves as we wander ever deeper into spiritual blindness. 

 The more we devote ourselves to spiritual disciplines, the greater the temptation will likely be to focus on the apparent failings of others in order to distract ourselves from the struggle to become fully present to God, stripped naked of all our pretensions and usual efforts of self-justification.  We need profound humility to become fully present to the One Who is “Holy, Holy, Holy” as we “lay aside all earthly cares” to focus on the one thing needful.  When even a glimmer of the brilliant light of the Divine Glory begins to shine through the eyes of our souls, the darkness within us becomes obvious. The temptation is strong to shift our attention to whatever we think will hide us from that kind of spiritual vulnerability. 

 The Publican was an easy target for the Pharisee, for tax collectors were Jews who collected money from their own people to fund the Roman army of occupation.  Like Zacchaeus, they collected more than was required and lived off the difference. The Pharisee believed that he was justified in looking down on someone who was both a traitor and a thief, even as we typically think that we are justified in condemning those we love to hate.   Ironically, this tax collector would not have denied the charge. He knew he was a wretched sinner, and his only apparent virtue was that he knew he had none.  Standing off by himself in the temple, the man would “not even lift up his eyes to Heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.’”

            Despite his miserable way of life, the tax collector somehow mustered the spiritual strength to do something the Pharisee could not:  He exposed his soul to the blinding light of God from the depths of his heart without trying to distract himself from the truth.  Christ said that the Publican, not the Pharisee, went home justified that day.  That was not because he had done more good deeds, obeyed more laws, or been more conventionally religious or moral, but because he had the humility to encounter God honestly as the sinner that he was.  Such humility is absolutely essential for opening our souls to the healing mercy of Christ.   Without it, pride will destroy the virtue of everything that we do and plunge us into even greater spiritual darkness and delusion.  But with it, there is hope for us all to receive the healing mercy of the Lord.

There is surely no greater sign of the folly of exalting ourselves and condemning others in the name of religion than the Passion of Christ.  Highly religious people like Pharisees and chief priests rejected Him and called for His crucifixion because they had blinded themselves spiritually with their pride and lust for power.  It was not the tax collectors and other public sinners who wanted Him dead, but those who were so self-righteous that they could accept only a Messiah who confirmed that they were deserving of glory and praise.  They defined themselves as holy over against “the sinners,” even though they were the guiltiest of all due to their pride.  Had they come to recognize that and cry out to the Lord from the depths of their hearts for mercy like the publican, they surely would have received it.

There is no clearer warning to us about the dangers of pride corrupting our Lenten disciplines than today’s gospel reading.  The point is not, of course, that we should all become public criminals, but that we must use our ascetical practices to grow in our humility as those who know only our need for the healing mercy of the One Who offered Himself fully on the Cross and rose in glory for our salvation.  Whenever we catch ourselves thinking that at least we are better than that person or group of people, we must focus our minds on the words of the Jesus Prayer or otherwise call out to the Lord from our hearts “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”  If we have identified some earthly agenda with God’s Kingdom such that we exalt ourselves in our own minds over adherents of competing agendas, we must likewise fall on our faces in humility. We must embrace such spiritual clarity not only with our rational minds, but also with our hearts this Lent. As the Savior said, “He who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”  Now is the time to prepare for a spiritually beneficial Lent that will help us grow in the humility necessary to see ourselves clearly as we reorient our lives toward the great joy of Pascha, for “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

 

 

Holiness Requires Humility and Persistence: Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost & Seventeenth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Corinthians 6:16-7:1; Matthew 15:21-28

 Unless we are very careful, it is easy to fall prey to the temptation of defining holiness in ways that serve our preconceived notions, which may have very little to do with finding the healing of our souls by sharing more fully in the life of the Savior by grace.  We often see righteousness through the lens of our own sensibilities about worldly divisions and disputes in ways that have more to do with serving our own passions than with serving the Lord.  Today’s Scripture readings challenge us to wake up from such delusions and to see ourselves clearly before His infinite holiness.   

In order to understanding these readings, we must remember that as Gentiles we would be complete strangers to the promises to Abraham apart from the coming of Christ.  It is only by faith in Him, as the One Who fulfills those promises, that we are now heirs to the great spiritual heritage of the Hebrews.  We read today about a Gentile woman from the region of Tyre and Sidon who wanted the Lord to cast a demon out of her daughter.  She was likely of higher social class than were the Jews of the area and there was a history of severe tension between these groups.   That surely colored the scene when this Canaanite woman called on the Jewish Messiah as “Son of David” to deliver her daughter.  At first, He did not answer her at all.  Then the disciples made the situation even more tense by begging Him to send her away.  That is when the Savior said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Then she knelt before Him and simply said, “Lord, help me.”  Christ then put her to the test by saying, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”  As a pagan, she and her people were thought by the Jews to be as unclean as dogs and spiritually inferior.  The Lord spoke to her in terms that pressed the point of her presumed vast distance from the God of Israel as a Gentile.  The same thing, of course, would have been presumed about us and our ancestors. 

 With those stinging words, He challenged her to state a revolutionary theological truth that hardly anyone else at the time understood.   She responded with these words: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”  With that statement, she acknowledged that, if God’s blessings applied only to those of Hebrew heritage, she had no more claim on them than dogs had to the food of their owner. Nonetheless, even they could lick up the crumbs that fell from the table.  This Gentile woman knew better than our Lord’s disciples that the ancient promises to Abraham were ultimately for the salvation of all.  The Lord then praised her great faith and healed her daughter.  He had spoken harshly to her in order to challenge her to see and articulate the shocking truth that His salvation extended even to Gentiles with humble faith in Him.  That was not only for her benefit, but also for His disciples, who needed to see that His salvation extended even to a hated foreigner and includes people like you and me.

 The church in Corinth was composed primarily of Gentiles like this woman.  St. Paul’s correspondence with them is filled with admonitions to stop living like pagans and embrace their identity as God’s temple, the Body of Christ.   He had to address matters including: political divisions within the church; members suing one another; tolerance of incest; men having relations with prostitutes in pagan temples; abuses in the celebration of Communion; arguments over which spiritual gifts were most important; and denial of our hope for bodily resurrection.  The Corinthians were in a complete mess, hardly being a shining example of holiness.  If you ever wondered why there were spirited debates about what to require of Gentiles who became Christians in the first century, the problems in Corinth are your answer.  Even when the apostles decided not to require circumcision and obedience to dietary and other Old Testament laws, they did insist that Gentile converts abandon sexual immorality and any involvement with the worship of idols.

 It is in this very broken context of a compromised Gentile Christian community that St. Paul reminds his readers that they “are the temple of the living God.”  Despite their many failings, he calls them to embrace their identity in fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy: “[A]s God said, ‘I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Therefore, come out from them, and be separate from them…and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters…’” Pointing to this foundational point of their identity, St. Paul declares that “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”

 Christ did not require the Canaanite woman to convert to Judaism as a condition for delivering her daughter.  We know nothing about this woman’s life, but as a Gentile she may well have participated in rituals and behaviors of the sort that corrupted the Corinthians.  The Lord’s mercy to her was not something that she had earned by following religious laws.  She was able to receive His mercy because of her humility, which enabled her to confess the truth about where she stood before the Lord.  She offered herself fully and without excuse, kneeling in humility before a Jew and pleading for the blessings of the one true God, which was a completely absurd thing to do according to all the common assumptions of that time and place.  That is how her spiritual vision was clarified to the point that she knew the truth about how our Lord’s mercy extends to all with faith in Him, even the despised Gentiles.  She is a very different character from St. Symeon, but like him she recognized that Christ is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.” 

 Likewise, the mercy of the Lord is so great that He enabled even the notoriously confused Gentile Christians of Corinth to become “the temple of the living God.”  Their ancestry and imperfection were not the point; what was important is that they had received Christ in faith, putting Him on like a garment in baptism.  Likewise, whatever heritage or culture we claim, whatever struggles and failures we have had, whatever wounds we bear, however our hearts are broken for those we have wronged or for the suffering of our loved ones, we must remember our true identity in Christ and “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”  Forgetting the past, we must focus on doing what we can today to live as God’s holy temple as we offer ourselves, especially the weak and distorted dimensions of our lives, in humility for Christ’s healing. 

 To do so does not mean feeling sorry for ourselves or becoming paralyzed by hurt pride when we confront how we have fallen short, whether in the past or today.  It does not mean despairing of healing in the future.  It does not mean giving up when we fail to resist any temptation or when we do not seem to be progressing on a schedule that we have set.  It means instead that, as we come to see with a measure of clarity where we stand before the Lord, we refuse to stop calling for His mercy from the depths of our hearts as we undertake the daily struggle to turn away from sin and share more fully in His salvation.  It means that we let nothing keep us from embracing our true identity as God’s temple, as members of Christ’s Body.  In Him, we are no   longer strangers and foreigners but beloved sons and daughters of God called to “make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”  Let us live accordingly.

 

If We Do Not Invest Ourselves In the Life of the Kingdom, We Risk Losing Our Souls: Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost & Sixteenth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

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

          It is easy to overlook how often the Lord used money and possessions to convey a spiritual message.  Perhaps that is because almost everyone struggles with being overly attached to material things, for they can meet our basic physical needs and provide comfort and a sense of security.  Due to our self-centered desires, however, they so easily become false gods as we make them the measure of our lives.  As Christ taught, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also….You cannot serve both God and mammon.” (Matt. 6: 21, 24)

Today’s gospel reading uses precisely such imagery.   Three servants received large sums of money, called talents, from their master when he went away on a long journey.   He was a shrewd businessman and expected them to make the most of what he had entrusted to them.  One invested so wisely that his five talents turned into ten.  The one given two talents did the same and earned two more.  They both doubled their money and earned the praise of their master when he returned.  But the third servant, who had only one talent to invest, was not such a good steward.  Out of fear that he might lose what little he had, he simply buried the money in the ground and produced nothing at all. The master scolded him for not even putting the money in the bank and earning interest.  Then he took away his talent and gave it to the first servant. Near the end of the parable, we read that “to everyone who has, more will be given and he will have abundance, but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.”

The Lord used this story about investing money as a way to convey the importance of being a faithful steward of all our blessings.  Life itself and all our abilities and possessions come from the Lord.  Ever since He created us in His image and likeness, He has called us to invest ourselves in ways that enable us to flourish as His sons and daughters as we share more fully in His life. He calls us to an abundant life that bears fruit for the Kingdom, blesses others, and radiates the light of holiness throughout the world.

Before such a high calling, we may feel as inadequate as the servant who buried his one talent in the ground out of fear.  Like him, we do not want to lose what we have, and it is usually less stressful to guard against loss than to take the risk of investing for gain.  So we choose to remain as we have been, perhaps thinking that whatever we do will never amount to much anyway.  Maybe we imagine that only people whose circumstances and experiences are not as broken as our own could ever really invest themselves in the service of the Kingdom in ways that would bear good fruit.  Perhaps we have tried and failed so many times that we have given up. 

If we see ourselves in the cowardly servant who buried his one talent in the ground, we must recognize that what he did led to the very opposite of what he had hope for.  He brought only further weakness and loss upon himself, losing even the one talent and being cast out into the darkness.  A person who is unable to move physically for a long period of time loses muscle mass and strength, knowing only greater weakness and pain.  The same is true of our life in Christ.  Trying to play it safe by being spiritually stagnant never works.  If we are not actively offering our gifts and abilities to the Lord, we will diminish ourselves to the point that we lose what little spiritual strength we had.

What St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians in today’s epistle reading applies to each of us, regardless of whether we have one or ten talents, regardless of whether we think that our present situation is especially conducive to becoming a channel of blessing to anybody.  As St. Paul put it, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor. 6:2) If we are going to be faithful stewards, we have to begin with our lives as they are now.  To wait until all problems have been resolved and we have time, energy, and resources to spare is to accept an illusion, for our lives will never be without challenges.  Cowardly servants will always find reasons to be afraid and to bury their talents in the ground.  The more that we weaken ourselves by doing that, the harder it will be ever to invest ourselves in ways that bear fruit for the Kingdom.  It is nothing but a lie and a delusion to think otherwise.

St. Paul endured beatings, imprisonment, attempts on his life, shipwreck, and so many other difficulties before he died as a martyr.  He did not wait until life was completely peaceful and calm before serving God and blessing his neighbors.  He describes the life of the apostles “as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” (2 Cor. 6:10)

Though the details are different, our calling is ultimately the same as his.  No matter how sad, sick, frustrated, deprived, or conflicted we may be, the Lord calls us all to invest our lives in the service of His Kingdom.  We will not do that with the prominence of St. Paul, but that is beside the point.  The servant with only one talent was still called to be as faithful with what he had as the one who had ten.  Like it or not, we have the lives in this world that we have and we can change nothing about the past.  What we can do is to refuse to be paralyzed by fear and insecurity as we offer ourselves to become more faithful stewards of God’s blessings. 

We must never diminish the importance of even the seemingly smallest investments of ourselves that we make for the Kingdom.  Everyone can devote a few minutes daily to cultivating the habits of prayer and reading the Scriptures.  By taking even small steps to follow the fasting guidelines of the Church or to endure illness or other difficult trials patiently, we can all embrace self-denial in ways appropriate to our spiritual health and life circumstances.  Everyone has opportunities to refuse to harbor hateful thoughts about their enemies and to pray for them.  Our lives are filled with opportunities to repent as we purify the desires of our hearts and reorient ourselves toward the love of God and neighbor.

We should never refuse to do what we can today to become better stewards of our talents because they seem so small or because we have failed to do so in the past.  As the parable shows, the way to gain greater spiritual strength is to be “faithful over a little,” making the most of what God has entrusted to us.  As St. Paul wrote, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”  No matter what we think of our gifts and limitations, we all face the same question of whether we are going to offer ourselves as best we can for growth in union with the Lord, becoming like the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  They do not look like much on their own, but when transformed by the Holy Spirit they become the Body and Blood of Christ, our true participation in the Heavenly Banquet.

We do not have to be spiritual superheroes in order be faithful stewards of our talents and play our role in fulfilling God’s purposes for the world.  We simply have to offer in obedience what only we can offer to the Lord—namely, ourselves-- and let Him do the rest.  Then we will receive back infinitely more than what we had offered in the first place.  And our life in this world, no matter how humble, will then produce fruit for the Kingdom even “thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.” (Mark 4:8) Surely, there is no better investment than that.