Homily for the Sunday of the Last Judgment (Meat Fare) in the Orthodox Church

 

1 Corinthians 8:8-9:2; Matthew 25:31-46

             In case you have somehow not noticed, Great Lent begins a week from tomorrow.  On this Sunday of the Last Judgment, the Church reminds us that the point of the upcoming season of repentance is not the keeping of religious rules or the performance of any form of piety as an end in itself.  Our vocation in Lent is, instead, to open our souls to the healing mercy of the Lord so that we may enter more fully into His victory over sin and death at Pascha.  The ultimate test of whether we will do so this Lent is not simply a matter of how strictly we fast, how many services we attend, or how much money we give to the poor.  It is, instead, whether we will unite ourselves to Christ such that His love permeates every dimension of our character to the point that we treat our neighbors as He treats us.  At a deep level, that is what repentance is all about. As today’s gospel lesson reveals, every encounter with those who bear God’s image is an encounter with Christ that anticipates our ultimate judgment, which will reveal whether we have become living icons of His healing and restoration of the human person.  

            As we begin the last week before Great Lent, the Savior teaches us that how we relate to our neighbors, especially those we are inclined to overlook, disregard, and even despise due to their weakness and suffering, is the great test of our souls.    How we treat the hungry and thirsty, the stranger and the naked, the sick and the prisoner, manifests whether we are gaining the spiritual health to love as Christ has loved us.  How we relate to our suffering and inconvenient neighbors, whoever they are, is how we relate to our Lord.  We must not rest content with a culturally accommodated faith that congratulates us for being concerned almost exclusively with the wellbeing of our family, friends, and others with whom we identify for some reason.  We are Gentile Christians, strangers and foreigners to the heritage of Israel who have now been grafted in by grace and become heirs to the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham through faith in the Savior.  We will condemn only ourselves if we refuse to share the undeserved lovingkindness that we have received with the strangers and foreigners of our day, including those we may be tempted to view as our enemies.  We will repudiate the love of our Lord and show that we want no part in His salvation if we persist in finding excuses to justify our neglect of anyone who experiences the bodily sufferings of those with whom Christ identified Himself as “the least of these.”   

            Whether in Lent or any other time of the year, we must reject the temptation of trying to impress God by doing good deeds of any kind.  Instead of serving our pride by obsessively trying to justify ourselves through religious legalism, our calling is humbly to take the small and imperfect steps that we currently have the strength to take in conveying His selfless love to other people.  The point is not to measure ourselves according to an impersonal standard of perfection, but to grow in conforming our character to His as we serve those who need our help.  Doing so is an essential dimension of being able to say truthfully, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20)

            On this last day for consuming meat until Pascha, we must also resist the temptation to obsess about whether we will be able to follow all the Church’s canons about fasting in Lent.  Such canons are guidelines that we embrace for the healing of our souls with the guidance of a spiritual father.  They are not objective impersonal laws from a book that everyone must obey in the same way.  Today we read St. Paul’s teaching that the key issue in the question of whether to eat meat that had been sacrificed in pagan temples in first-century Corinth was how doing so impacted others, for “food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. Only take care, lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.”  To cause another to fall back into paganism would be to “sin against Christ.”  His words show that what is truly at stake in fasting is not a mere change in diet or the fulfillment of a law for its own sake, but learning to relate to food in ways that help us acquire the spiritual strength to love and serve our neighbors.  By abstaining from the richest and most satisfying dishes to the best of our ability, we gain strength to reorient our desires from self-gratification toward blessing others.  Eating a humble diet frees up resources to give to the needy in whom we encounter Christ.  Lenten foods should be simple and keep well for future meals, thus freeing up time and energy for prayer, spiritual reading, and serving our neighbors.  Even the smallest steps in fasting can help us gain a measure of freedom from slavery to our passions as we learn that we really can live without satisfying every desire for pleasure.   Especially if we are new to this practice, it is important to begin with the very small steps that we can actually take in a spiritually healthy way. Trying to do more than we really can do at this point in our journey is invariably counterproductive and discouraging.  As people with responsibilities in our families, at work, at school, and in relation to our needy neighbors, we must not deprive ourselves of nourishment to the point that we lack the energy necessary to act as good stewards of our talents every day.   

The spiritual discipline of fasting is simply a tool for shifting the focus away from ourselves and toward the Lord and our brothers and sisters in whom we encounter Him each day.  If we distort fasting into a private religious accomplishment to prove how holy we are to ourselves or anyone else, we would do better not to fast at all.  That is the vain effort of trying to serve ourselves instead of God and those who bear His image and likeness.  In Lent, our focus must be set squarely on Christ and His living icons, not on us.  The fundamental calling of the Christian life is to become like our Lord, Who offered Himself up for the salvation of the world purely out of love.  If we are truly in communion with Him, then we too must offer up ourselves for our neighbors. And as He taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan, there are no limits on what it means to be a neighbor to anyone who is in need, regardless of nationality, religion, or anything else.  

The particular form of our self-offering will vary according to the needs of the people we encounter and our gifts, callings, and life circumstances.  Discerning how to live faithfully is not a matter of cold-blooded rational calculation or meeting objective standards, but of being so conformed to Christ that we become a “living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1) such that the Savior’s healing of fallen humanity becomes present, active, and effective in us.  Instead of defining ourselves over against one another in an endless cycle of competition and grievance in a pathetic effort to distract ourselves from the inevitability of the grave, we must grow as persons in communion with Christ and all those who bear His image and likeness.  His eternal life will truly become ours as we unite ourselves more fully to His great Self-Offering on the Cross for the salvation of the world.  The more we acquire the character of those liberated from slavery to the fear of death, the greater our freedom will be from the passions that blind us from seeing and serving Christ in every neighbor.

            Whenever we encounter the Lord in a suffering person who needs our care, there is inevitably a kind of judgment that reveals who we truly are. That is the case when we see His living icons suffering today as the victims of natural disasters, wars, and other catastrophes around the world. It is the case when those who bear His image are sick, lonely, hungry, imprisoned, or in any other circumstance in which they need our friendship, care, and support.  Since we are not yet those who respond generously to everyone without a second thought, we must mindfully struggle against our self-centeredness and indifference to the sufferings of others.  In order to do that, we must not shut the eyes of our souls to the brilliant light of Christ when the darkness within us becomes all the more apparent.  We must respond to what every judgment of our souls reveals by taking the steps we can to open and offer our hearts to Christ more fully so that we will become more beautiful living icons of His restoration and fulfillment of the human person in the divine image and likeness.  In order to do that, we must persistently refuse to fuel our passions with self-indulgence as we fast as best we can and humble ourselves while calling out for the Lord’s healing mercy from the depths of our hearts.

            Be prepared this Lent.  Fasting is a wonderful teacher of humility, for it is such a hard struggle for most of us to disappoint our stomachs and tastebuds even in very small ways. Serving our suffering neighbors is also a wonderful teacher of humility, for most of us are experts in coming up with excuses for disregarding them.  When these disciplines reveal our weakness, we must not despair, but instead call on the mercy of the Lord from the depths of our hearts and then take the next small steps that we have the strength to take on the blessed path to the Kingdom.   If we will do so throughout the remaining time of our life and persist in returning to the path whenever we stray from it, then we will have good hope of being among those quite surprised to hear at the Last Judgment, “’Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’”  Like the people on His right hand in the parable, that will not be because we have calculated rationally how to earn a prize or met some objective legal standard.  Instead, it will be because the self-emptying love and gracious mercy of Christ have permeated our souls and become constitutive of our character.  Every day of Lent, and every day of our lives, let us live accordingly, for “‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’”  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homily for the Presentation (Meeting) of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple in the Orthodox Church

 

 Hebrews 7:7-17; Luke 2:22-40

Today we celebrate a great feast of the Church that speaks directly to the spiritual challenges that we all face on a daily basis.  For today we celebrate the Presentation of Christ, forty days after His birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Theotokos and St. Joseph bring the young Savior there in compliance with the Old Testament law, making the offering of a poor family, a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.  By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the old man St. Simeon proclaims that this Child is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.”  The aged prophetess St. Anna also recognizes Him as the fulfillment of God’s promises.

            Our epistle reading from Hebrews reminds us that the One brought into the Temple this day is the Great High Priest Who offers Himself on the Cross and destroys the power of sin and death through His glorious resurrection.  Christ does so in order that we may enter into the Heavenly Temple and participate by grace in the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity.  The priesthood and sacrifices of the Old Testament foreshadowed Christ’s fulfillment of them.   The Savior’s offering and priesthood are eternal, for He intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father. There is no question, then, that the Christian life is not about achieving any earthly goal on its own terms but about entering into the blessedness of the Heavenly Kingdom, both as a present reality and a future hope.   

            Every day of our lives, in all that we think, say, and do, we have the opportunity to join ourselves more fully to Christ as the Great High Priest.  He will bless and heal every dimension of who we are in this world as we offer ourselves to Him in holiness.  He offered Himself fully, without reservation of any kind, and the only limits to His restoration of our souls, even in the world as we know it, are those that we stubbornly insist upon maintaining.  Christ calls us to present ourselves to Him fully, without reservation of any kind, as we enter into the Heavenly Temple through communion with Him.  All that we must leave behind is what cannot be blessed for our salvation, what cannot be united to the Savior in holiness.  In other words, all that we must leave behind are our sins.

We have surely all accepted lies of one kind or another about who we really are.  It is so easy to define ourselves by our disordered desires, by sins we fall into time and time again, or by worldly categories that simply inflame our passions and serve only earthly kingdoms of one kind or another.  It is so tempting to think that whatever wins the praise of others, gratifies some desire, or does not call us into question must somehow be right.  Instead of trying to make a false god in our own image, Christ calls us to embrace the hard truth that we will become more truly ourselves by becoming more like Him.  He offered up Himself to the point of death on the Cross in order to conquer the power of death, the wages of sin.  The more we offer ourselves to Him by dying to the power of sin in our lives through ongoing repentance, the more we will become our true selves in His image and likeness.     

            We must not limit our celebration of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple merely to remembrance of an event long ago, for we commemorate the feasts of the Church by entering into the eternal reality we celebrate in them.  We cannot truly celebrate this feast without uniting ourselves more fully to the Lamb of God Who is also our Great High Priest.  Our celebration must extend beyond this service to how we live each day, especially in offering ourselves more fully to Him for greater participation even now in the life of the Kingdom of heaven.  As with just about anything else, doing so is a process, a journey of reorienting our lives to God that does not find completion in an instant.

            The Theotokos prepared to become the Living Temple of the Lord in a unique way by literally growing up in the Temple in Jerusalem.  By devoting herself to prayer and purity for years, she gained the spiritual clarity to say “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” in response to the shocking message of the Archangel Gabriel that she was to become the Virgin Mother of the Savior.  Saint Joseph initially did not want to accept the inconvenient calling to become the guardian of the teenage Mary, but his many decades of faithfulness gave him the strength to accept this unusual vocation in old age, and even to risk his life in leading the family as refugees to Egypt in order to escape the murderous plot of Herod. 

            When the Theotokos and Saint Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the temple forty days after His birth, Saint Simeon recognized Christ and proclaimed “Lord, now lettest thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to Thy people Israel.”  Simeon was an old and righteous man, and the Holy Spirit had revealed to him that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah.  He certainly had not acquired the spiritual strength to do so by accident, but through a long life of faith and faithfulness.  The same is true of the elderly prophetess Anna, a widow in her eighties who “did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.”

            Those who brought the young Savior to the Temple in obedience to the Old Testament law and those who recognized Him there were all people who had offered their lives to God time and time again.  They were of different sexes, ages, and backgrounds, which shows that it is not the outward circumstances of our lives that determines where we stand before the Lord.  All may enter into the Heavenly Temple through Our Great High Priest, for in Him such differences become spiritually unimportant.  What is crucial is that we open ourselves to become more fully who we are in Him as those who bear the divine image and likeness.

            The struggle to do so is never ending.  Surely, the journeys of the Theotokos and Saints Joseph, Simeon, and Anna did not go as any of them had expected.  They all faced challenges and sorrows.  As Simeon said to the Theotokos, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also,” for she would see her Son rejected and crucified.  Of course, the particulars of our challenges are different from those of these great saints, but we must use them in the same way.  Namely, we must embrace them as opportunities to offer even the weakest and most painful dimensions of our lives to Christ for healing and transformation.  That does not mean that all our problems will go away or that we will always feel as though we are making progress, but that they present the greatest opportunities we have for entering more fully into the Heavenly Temple through our Great High Priest.

When we unite ourselves to Him as best we can as we struggle against temptation and wrestle with our passions, we will come to know both our own weakness and His gracious strength more fully.  By doing so, we will gain the spiritual clarity to reject superficial distortions of Christianity focused on emotion, worldly success of any kind, or the condemnation and hatred of any person or group.  Since He is “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to Thy people Israel,” His salvation not limited in any way by the idolatrous divisions that we find so appealing in defining ourselves over against neighbors who are living icons of God. Our Savior has triumphed through His Cross and empty tomb due to His unfathomable love for all who bear the divine image and likeness. Every time that we offer ourselves to Him in obedience, we enter more fully into His great victory over sin and death.  Let us celebrate His presentation today by using all our struggles for our salvation as we unite ourselves in holiness to our Great High Priest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

Repentance Requires Our Free Cooperation with the Merciful Grace of God: Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday of Luke (“Zacchaeus”) in the Orthodox Church

 

Luke 19:1-10 

What does true repentance look like?  Whenever we are tempted to think that it has to do only with how we feel and not with how we act, we should remember the story of Zacchaeus.     As a Jew who had become rich collecting taxes from his own people for the occupying Romans, Zacchaeus was both a traitor and a thief who collected even more than was required in order to live in luxury. No one in that time and place would have thought that such a person would ever change.  He was considered the complete opposite of a righteous person, and no observant Jew would have had anything at all to do with him. 

  We do not know why Zacchaeus wanted to see the Savior as He passed by.  He was a short little fellow who could not see over the crowd, so he climbed a sycamore tree in order to get a better view.  That must have looked very strange:  a hated tax-collector up in a tree so that he could see a passing rabbi.  Even more surprising was the Lord’s response when He saw him: “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.”  The Savior actually invited Himself to Zacchaeus’ home, where the tax-collector received Him joyfully. 

             This outrageous scene shocked people, for no Jew with any integrity, and especially not the Messiah, would be a guest in the home of such a traitor and thief.  He risked identifying Himself with Zacchaeus’s corruption by going into his house and eating with him.  But before the Savior could say anything to the critics, the tax collector did something unbelievable.  He actually repented.  He confessed the truth about himself as a criminal exploiter of his neighbors and pledged to give half of his possessions to the poor and to restore restore four-fold what he had stolen from others.  He committed himself to do more than justice required in making right the wrongs he had committed.   In that astounding moment, this notorious sinner did what was necessary to reorient his life away from greedy self-centeredness and toward selfless generosity to his neighbors.  As a sign of His great mercy, Jesus Christ accepted Zacchaeus’ sincere repentance, proclaiming that salvation has come to this son of Abraham, for He came to seek and to save the lost.

           The importance of cooperation or synergy between the human person and God shines through this memorable story.  We do not know Zacchaeus’s reasons for wanting to see Christ so much that he climbed up a tree, but in the process of doing so he opened his soul at least a bit to receive the healing divine energies of the Lord. He did not have to condemn Zacchaeus, who surely already knew how corrupt he was.  When people complained that Christ had associated Himself with such a sinner, He did not argue with them, but instead let Zacchaeus respond by doing what was necessary to receive the healing of his soul.  The Lord did not force Zacchaeus to do anything at all, for he responded in freedom when he encountered the gracious presence of the Savior.

 Zacchaeus was so transformed by the mercy of Christ that he became an epiphany, a living icon of the restoration of the human person in God’s image and likeness.  This formerly corrupt and money-hungry man resolved to share with his neighbors a measure of the grace that he had received, for he gave half of what he owned to the poor and restored all that he had stolen four-fold.  In response to the gracious blessing he had received from Christ, he bore witness to the healing of his soul by blessing others.  He did not simply feel sorry about his sins, but acted in a way that showed he was reorienting His life away from the love of money and toward the love of God and neighbor. He was learning to obey the greatest of the commandments.  For as Christ taught, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength…[and] You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mk. 12: 30-31)

           Zacchaeus provides a wonderful example of repentance because he freely united himself to Christ by taking practical steps beyond any measure of justice.  In doing so, he was transformed by the merciful generosity of the Lord, like an iron left in the fire of the divine glory.  His transformation was not a reward for what he had earned in any way, for he did not ask for or receive from Christ what he deserved.  The healing that the Savior brings us all is never a matter of getting what we deserve, but instead manifests the boundless mercy and grace of the Lord Who conquered death itself in order to make us participants in His eternal life.  Zacchaeus’s example shows us that the more fully we know the gravity of our sins and the sickness of our souls, the better position we are in to cooperate with our Lord’s abundant mercy and to convey that same mercy to others.

             In the prayers before receiving Communion, we confess that we are each the chief of sinners.  That does not mean that we have broken more laws than Zacchaeus did, but that the light of Christ has illumined the eyes of our souls such that we can catch at least a glimpse of the truth about ourselves. We never know the hearts and souls of other people and must never even attempt to judge anyone else as though we were God.  The only true statements we can make about the state of someone’s soul are those that we make about ourselves when we receive the grace to see ourselves clearly   We do not know our sins fully, but when we know the sorrow of falling short of the infinite goal of becoming like God in holiness, then we can confess our brokenness and call out for the Lord’s mercy as we take concrete steps to redirect our lives toward Him. That is why we must all make regular use of the holy mystery of Confession.  We receive the Lord’s gracious strength for healing as we confront the hard truth about our sick souls.   We must do so in order to receive His Body and Blood for the forgiveness of our sins and life everlasting.  Doing so is not optional, but a free choice that is absolutely necessary in order for us to be transformed by personal encounter with the Lord as Zacchaeus was.   

             Saint James stated the matter clearly: “Faith without works is dead.” (Jas. 2:26) To repent is not merely to feel sorry for our sins, but to turn away from them and toward Christ so that we may receive the Lord’s gracious divine energies for our healing and transformation.  That is what Zacchaeus did in response to the initiative of the Savior in coming to His house.  Given the importance of hospitality in that culture, Zacchaeus surely shared a meal with Christ, which in that time and place was understood to establish a close personal bond between them.  When we receive the Eucharist, our Lord’s gracious initiative makes us “one flesh” with Him through our communion in His Body and Blood.  If we are truly in communion with Christ, then His life will shine through ours.  Even more than Zacchaeus, we will then share with our neighbors the gracious mercy that we have received in practical, tangible ways that go beyond any standard of justice.  Even more than Zacchaeus, we will rejoice that salvation has come to our house and extend God’s blessings to others.   

            No matter how tempted to despair we may be today about ever finding healing for our personal brokenness, the transformation of Zacchaeus provides a sign of hope for the fulfillment of the Lord’s gracious purposes for each of us.  This memorable little man shows us how to respond in freedom to the One Who “came to seek and to save the lost,” which includes us all.  If the Savior’s healing extended even to someone like Zacchaeus, a notorious traitor and a thief, then there is hope even for you and me as the chief of sinners. All that we must do is to take the steps we presently have the strength to take in reorienting our lives according to the love of God and neighbor as we confess our failings and call on His mercy.  If we stay on this path, refusing to deviate from it and getting back on it whenever we stumble, then salvation will come to our houses as we share the great blessing we have received with others.  For we are also sons and daughters of Abraham by faith in Jesus Christ, Who says to each of us, “I must stay at your house today.”  Like Zacchaeus, let us chose to receive Him joyfully for the healing of our souls.   

 

  

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acquiring the Spiritual Clarity of the Samaritan Leper: Homily for the Twenty-ninth Sunday After Pentecost & Twelfth Sunday of Luke with Commemoration of Venerable Makarios the Great of Egypt, the Anchorite in the Orthodox Church

Colossians 3:4-11; Luke 17:12-19

        During the season of Christmas, we celebrated the Nativity in the flesh of the Savior.  Born as truly one of us, He is the New Adam Who restores and fulfills us as living icons of God.  During the season of Theophany, we celebrated the revelation of His divinity as a Person of the Holy Trinity at His baptism, where the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove.  Christ has appeared in the waters of the Jordan, blessing the entire creation, enabling all things to become radiant with the divine glory.  When we put Him on like a garment in baptism, we participate in the sanctification that He has brought to the world as we regain the “robe of light” lost by our first parents. 

            We must never think of our Lord’s birth or baptism, or of our own baptism, as somehow the end of the story.  Saint Paul wrote that, “when Christ, Who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”  As we confess in the Nicene Creed, there is a future dimension of Christ’s appearance, for He “will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom will have no end.”  We “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”  When Christ returns in brilliant glory, the true state of our souls will be revealed.  The Last Judgment will be the ultimate epiphany or manifestation of whether we have embraced His healing and become radiant with His gracious divine energies.  It will be impossible to hide or obscure on that day whether we are full of darkness or light.  

            To shine eternally with the light of Christ requires that we undertake the daily struggle to purify and reorient the desires of our hearts toward fulfillment in God and away from slavery to our passions.  The Colossians to whom Paul wrote were mostly Gentile converts who needed to be reminded that they had repudiated corrupt pagan practices and put on Christ in baptism.  That is why Paul told them to “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”  It is contradictory to unite ourselves to Christ and then to refuse to conform our character to His.  In order to gain spiritual health, we must mindfully reject all that keeps us from becoming living epiphanies of our Lord’s salvation. As Paul notes, “anger, wrath, malice, slander…foul talk” and lying should have no place in our lives, for in baptism we have “put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.”  We must vigilantly turn away from the darkness and remain focused on receiving the light.

    As those who live in hope for the coming of the Kingdom, we must struggle every day of our lives to enter more fully into Christ’s restoration and fulfillment of the human person in the image and likeness of God.  There is no other way to appear with Him in glory, whether today or when His Kingdom comes in its fullness.  And the merely human distinctions that we so often celebrate due to our passions and insecurities have nothing at all to do with sharing in the life of our Lord, for as Paul wrote, “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.” 

    Today’s gospel reading provides a shocking example of this truth, for the Lord’s healing mercy extended even to a Samaritan with leprosy.  Among the ten lepers the Lord healed, the only one who returned to thank Him was a hated Samaritan, someone considered a despised heretic by the Jews.  After the man fell down before Him in gratitude, the Lord said, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”  Our Lord’s gracious interaction with this man shows that His healing mercy extended even to those conventionally understood to be sinners and enemies.  The Lord’s love for humanity transcends all the petty divisions of the fallen world, and we must not pretend that His benevolence somehow does not extend even to those we consider our worst enemies.  There is simply no way to become a living epiphany of His salvation if we persist in remaining more attached to our own grievances and prejudices than to the boundless love of our Lord, before Whom we are all “the chief of sinners.”     

    The Savior praised the faith of a Roman centurion, who was an officer of the Roman army that occupied Israel.  By any conventional standard, that man was His enemy.  (Lk 7:9) The people of Nazareth tried to throw Christ off a cliff when He reminded them that God had at times blessed Gentiles through the ministry of great Hebrew prophets and had not helped Jews.  (Lk 4:29) He shocked everyone by talking with St. Photini, the Samaritan woman at the well, and then spending a few days in her village.  (Jn 4:40) The list could go on, but the point is obvious that our Lord’s love for broken, suffering humanity extends literally to all who bear the divine image and likeness.  He was born and baptized in order to bring all people into the Holy Trinity’s eternal communion of love.  It is only “the old nature” of corruption that would keep us so enslaved to hatred, division, and vengeance that we would imagine that those we consider our enemies are any less called to become brilliant epiphanies of His salvation than we are.   

        One of the great virtues of the Samaritan leper is that he did not allow fear about the hatred of others toward him to keep him from remaining focused on finding healing and expressing gratitude.  Together with a group of Jewish lepers, he called out “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” He obeyed the Lord’s command to head toward the temple in Jerusalem to show himself to the priests.  No one at the time would have expected a Samaritan leper to receive anything but rejection and condemnation from the Messiah and other Jewish religious authorities.  When he realized that he had been healed, he did not immediately head back to Samaria to his own people, for “he [alone] turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and…fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks.”  He did not allow fear of rejection to keep him from showing gratitude for this life-changing miracle.  Christ, of course, did not condemn him in any way, but said “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”  The Samaritan shows us the importance of finding healing from our fear of criticism and our love of praise from other people.  He did not allow concern for what others thought or said about him to keep him from calling for the Lord’s mercy, obeying His command, or giving thanks.   

          A fellow monk once asked St. Makarios the Great of Egypt, one of the great Desert Fathers from the fourth century, how he could be saved.  Abba Makarios told him to go the cemetery and abuse the dead. So he insulted them and threw stones at their graves.  When the monk returned, Makarios asked what the dead said in response.  He reported that they said nothing.  Then he told the monk to go to the cemetery and praise the dead, which he did.  When asked by Makarios what they said in response, the monk reported that they said nothing.  “Then Abba Makarios said to him, ‘You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.’”[1]

         If we want to open our darkened souls to the healing light of Christ, we must gain the spiritual clarity of the Samaritan leper.  He was so focused on receiving the healing mercy of the Lord that he died to concern about what others thought or said about him. In order to become living epiphanies of His salvation, we must find healing from the obsessive desire to ground the meaning and purpose of our lives in the attitudes, words, and actions of other people, which can be a very subtle temptation.  Like the Samaritan, we must refuse to allow worry about the opinions of others to keep us from focusing our energies on calling for the Lord’s mercy, obeying His command, and giving thanks for His blessings.  Doing so is necessary to “Put to death…what is earthly in you” and to live as those who “have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.”  In order to “appear with [Christ] in glory,” we must not allow anything to keep us from uniting ourselves to Him with the humble faith of the Samaritan.

    

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[1] As cited in “Orthodox Road:  Rediscovering the Beauty of Ancient Christianity.” https://www.orthodoxroad.com/a-lesson-from-the-dead

 

“The People Who Sat in Darkness Have Seen a Great Light”: Homily for the Sunday After Theophany (Epiphany) in the Orthodox Christian Church

 

Ephesians 4:7-13; Matthew 4:12-17

          In this season we celebrate the great feast of Theophany, of Christ’s baptism when the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son of God and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove. Epiphany reveals that the Savior Who appears from the waters of the Jordan to illumine our world of darkness is the God-Man, a Person of the Holy Trinity.  He is baptized to restore us, and the creation itself, to the ancient glory for which we were created.  He comes to make all who wandered in the blindness of sin and death radiant with the brilliant light of holiness.

        Tragically, our first parents turned away from their high calling and ushered in the realm of corruption that we know all too well, both in the brokenness of our own hearts and in our relationships with one another.  God gave Adam and Eve garments of skin when they left Paradise after they chose to serve their own self-centeredness instead of Him.  Through their disobedience, they had become aware that they were naked and were cast into the world as we know it. They tried to become human apart from God, Who made them in His image, and their nakedness showed that they had repudiated their vocation to become like Him in holiness.  Having stripped themselves of their original glory, they were reduced to mortal flesh and destined for slavery to their passions and to the grave.   Because of them, the creation itself was “subjected to futility…” (Rom. 8:20)  We have all followed in their way of proud self-centeredness, which inevitably leads to spiritual blindness and despair.

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

        Our lives after baptism are not, however, without pain, disease, death, and other sorrows.  The more we are illumined by His light, the more clearly we will see the darkness that remains within us.  In contrast with the divine glory of the appearance of our Lord, the darkness of sin becomes all the more apparent.  In the aftermath of Christ’s birth, Herod the Great had all the young boys in the region of Bethlehem murdered. Today’s gospel reading refers to the Forerunner’s arrest by Herod Antipas for prophetically denouncing the king’s immorality.  After the one who baptized Him was arrested, the Lord went to “Galilee of the Gentiles” to begin His public ministry in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that “’the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’” (Matt. 4:15-16)

        The Jews who suffered under the oppression of the Romans and their client kings knew all too well about darkness, death, and crushed hopes.   Their homeland was controlled by foreigners who worshiped other gods and exploited the people.  Understandably, the dominant expectation among the Jews was for a Messiah like King David to defeat their enemies and establish a reign of national righteousness.  Jesus Christ, however, rejected the temptation to become an earthly king throughout His ministry, from His testing by Satan in the desert to His crucifixion.  He repudiated the idolatrous attempt to identify the heavenly reign with any version of politics or religion as usual in our world of corruption, for they can not help us attain the purity of heart necessary to see God.   Even though the Savior did not seek earthly power, the powerful still viewed Him as such a threat that a wicked king tried to kill him as a small child and the Roman Empire crucified Him at the request of corrupt religious leaders.  He rose in glory over the very worst that those whose hearts were full of darkness could do to their enemies.  Our true hope is in Him, not in any of the false gods that tempt us today to seek first something other than His kingdom.

        We are baptized into Christ’s death in order to rise up with Him into a life of holiness in which we regain the robe of light rejected by our first parents. In every aspect of our lives, we must become radiant with the divine glory shared with us by the New Adam.  In order to do so, we must find healing for the passions that have darkened our hearts and distorted our relationships even with those we love most in this life.  It does not matter whether we are at home, work, school, or other settings, we must reject the temptation to become blinded by pride, lust, hatred, anger, resentment, or the desire to dominate others.  If we have put on Christ in baptism, we must become living icons of His salvation and peace in every thought, word, and deed.

        For that to happen, we must be on guard for all the ways in which we have become accustomed to “the region and shadow of death.”  That requires struggling mindfully each day to obey the Lord’s command: “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  Because the Savior has hallowed the water and the entire creation through His baptism, we must remember that nothing in our life and world is intrinsically evil or profane.  No dimension of God’s good creation requires us to return to the nakedness of passion in any way.  Theophany reveals that we are always on holy ground and must speak, act, and think as those who wear a garment of light.  Though we fall short of fulfilling that goal each day, we must constantly strive to turn away from corruption and embrace our high calling “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”  That is His gracious will for us all.

        If we are to discern how to fulfill our vocation to bear witness to our Lord in the midst of a world still enslaved to the fear of death, we must focus on opening even the darkest corners of our own souls to the brilliant healing light of Christ.  Doing so requires resisting the temptation to pretend that we know the hearts of others and are in a position to judge them, for that is simply a distraction from doing “the one thing needful” of hearing and obeying the Word of God from the depths of our hearts.  Doing so requires constant vigilance against allowing self-centered desire to corrupt our souls and distort our vision of ourselves, our neighbors, and our world.  Doing so requires turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, and treating others as we would have them treat us, especially when we think we are justified in responding in kind to those we consider our enemies.    Doing so requires turning away from whatever fuels our passions so that we may build peaceable relationships even with those we find it hardest to love.  As we celebrate Theophany in “the region and shadow of death,” let us focus mindfully on living each day as those who have died to sin and risen up into a new life of holiness through the Lord Who has baptized by John in the Jordan for our salvation.  Anything else is a distraction from embracing the full meaning and purpose of our baptism as those who now wear a garment of light and are called to become living epiphanies of the salvation of the world each day of our lives in every thought, word, and deed.

Homily for Theophany (Epiphany) in the Orthodox Church

 

Matthew 3:13-17; Titus 2:11-14; 3:4-7

          Today we celebrate that Jesus Christ is truly the Son of God and One of  the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity.  At His baptism by St. John the Forerunner in the Jordan, the voice of the Father proclaims, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove.  The meaning of the Feast of Christmas is fulfilled at Theophany, for now it is made clear that the One born in Bethlehem is truly God come to restore our fallen humanity and to renew the entire creation as the God-Man.  The Savior now enters the flowing water of a river in order to make it holy, in order to bring His blessing upon the world that He created.  The entire creation was subjected to futility because of the rebellion of our first parents, and now the New Adam comes to restore it and us.  As St. Paul wrote, “the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now” for it also “will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.“  ( Rom. 8: 21-22)

At Epiphany, we celebrate that the Creator has become part of the creation in order to make it a new heaven and a new earth.   At Theophany, we celebrate that no dimension of our life or world is intrinsically profane or cut off from sharing in the holiness of God.  All things, physical and spiritual, visible and invisible, are called to participate in the divine glory that our Lord has brought to the world, to become even now signs of the coming fullness of God’s Kingdom.  He sanctified our flesh and blood at His birth, and at His baptism He demonstrates that we, too, are saved along with the rest of the creation, for it is through water that we share in His life.  “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ.”  In baptism, we receive the garment of light that Adam and Eve lost when they degraded themselves and the entire creation through slavery to sin and death.

When we bless water at the conclusion of Liturgy today, we will participate in our Lord’s fulfillment of His gracious purposes for all reality.  Holy water is a sign that God desires everything to find restoration and perfection in His Kingdom.  Though we pollute it and it often seems like our enemy in storms and floods, water is fundamentally God’s gift to sustain our lives.  We simply cannot live without it, and neither can anything else in nature.   By entering into the Jordan at His baptism, Christ has restored and fulfilled water’s life-giving purpose as a sign of His gracious will for every dimension of the universe that He spoke into existence.

At Epiphany house blessings, the priest sprinkles holy water in every room, which is a sign of God’s blessing upon even the small details and physical settings of our daily lives.  The house blessing is also a calling to sanctify every aspect of ourselves as we become more fully the distinctive human persons God created us to be in the divine image and likeness.  To do so requires entering more fully into Christ’s baptism such that we die to sin and rise up with Him in holiness. The healing of our souls is not a one-time event, but an ongoing journey of sharing more fully in the restoration that He has brought to the world.  True Christianity is not an escape from any of the challenges of life, but instead the path for becoming an icon of the fulfillment of the human person, and of the creation itself, in God.

This Theophany, let us live as those who have become epiphanies of what happens when people put on Christ like a garment.   As St. Paul wrote to St. Titus, that means “to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world; awaiting our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, Who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for Himself a people of His own who are zealous for good deeds.”  Doing so is our only way to provide the world a much needed sign of its salvation in the Lord revealed as God in the waters of the Jordan.

 

Homily for the Sunday Before the Nativity of Christ in the Orthodox Church

 

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

 As we conclude our preparation to welcome Christ at His Nativity, we must resist the temptation to corrupt this blessed season into merely a time full of food, family, and fun.  Contrary to popular opinion in our culture, Christmas is not a celebration of this world on its own terms or of ourselves. We are preparing to celebrate nothing less than how the God-Man has entered fully into our life and world, becoming truly one of us even as He remains truly divine and makes us “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.  For the healing and restoration of the human person and of creation itself, He was born to fulfill a kingdom that stands in prophetic judgment over our inclination to place our hope in what is passing away and can never truly satisfy and sustain us as His living icons.

Christ is born to fulfill the ancient promises to Abraham, who “looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”  The many generations of preparation for the Savior’s birth did not occur through the unbroken progress of any earthly city, kingdom, or culture, but through a history characterized by corruption, idolatry, slavery, exile, and bitter disappointment.   The prophet Samuel was the last of the judges of Israel over a thousand years before Christ was born.  When his sons ruled unjustly, the people asked for a king so that they could be like the other nations.  God told Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.”  (1 Sam. 8:7) As we read in the Psalms, “Do not put your trust in princes…in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; In that very day his plans perish.” (Ps. 146:3-4)

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

Even David’s son the wise Solomon, who did build the Temple, later fell into the worship of false gods.  Because of Israel’s ongoing unfaithfulness, the kingdom divided into two, with both eventually going into exile after being defeated at the hands of their enemies. Those who returned from Babylon were then dispersed yet again by the Romans.  Those who distort biblical faith today in the service of some arrangement of earthly power inevitably fall into the idolatry of placing their hope in the false gods of this world and demonizing those who stand in their way.  If we are truly entrusting ourselves to Christ, then we must follow the example of Abraham, who “looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” (Heb. 13:14) No nation, agenda, or geographical area should ever become an idol for us or an excuse not to obey the Lord’s teaching to love our neighbors as ourselves.

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

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

No one forces us to choose today between idolatry and faithfulness, but we so often freely worship false gods when we ground the meaning and purpose of our lives in some vision of cultural success or personal fulfillment that serves only to inflame our passions and blind us to the humanity of those who seem to stand in our way.  Even without being taken away into exile, we typically hope for nothing more than a somewhat better life in Babylon, however we may define that.  We face the same temptations that our Lord’s ancestors did, and we regularly fall into some version of the sins they committed. In addition to recalling David’s grave sins, Matthew lists Judah, who fathered children with his daughter-in-law Tamar. He also mentions Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute, and Ruth, a Gentile.  The presence of these particular women in the genealogy foreshadows the scandalous, but also perfectly innocent, conception of the Lord by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.  By including their names among the ancestors of Christ, Matthew reminds us that He is born to bring healing to all the broken, scandalous people of the world as we know it, not only to those who appear respectable or who are members of this or that favored group. 

When the Son of God became a human person, He did not do so by being born into a family of great wealth, power, or fame.  There was certainly no sin involved in the virginal conception of our Lord, but the circumstances were hardly conventional.  Joseph, the older man to whom the Theotokos was betrothed as her guardian, would have divorced her quietly, had not an angel told him the truth about the situation in a dream.  Living under the brutal military occupation of the Roman Empire, they had to go to Bethlehem for a census at the time of His birth, where He came into the world in the lowly circumstance of being born in a cave used for a barn with an animals’ feeding trough as His crib.   

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

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