In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
God has revealed Himself to us. That is the beginning of everything. We see that from the first book of Moses [Genesis]. God has revealed Himself to us. Everything after that is our response to God’s revealing Himself to us. It is He who is in charge, not we. He shows us that He loves us, that He cares for us, that He is always with us and nurturing us. How we live as Christians is a response to that declaration of love. The declaration of love that God has been giving us ever since the beginning is fulfilled and completed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, our Saviour.
God put flesh on His love in the Incarnation of His Only-begotten Son. He allowed us to mistreat His Only-begotten Son. Nevertheless, in His love for us, His Son rose from the dead, and is with us to this day, giving us not only hope, but, in fact, re-uniting us to God the Father from whom we had separated ourselves in our self-centered rebellion. In Christ, all these crazy things that we have been doing to ourselves over the course of history, have been reversed. It is possible for us in Christ to become whole, to be completely healed, in fact.
Talking about his own experience, the Apostle Paul writes that when he, himself, who had been living in a very misguided way and persecuting the Church (because he thought he was doing right according to the Law), encountered Jesus Christ face-to-face on the road to Damascus, his life was turned about. The Apostle could be changed like this because his heart was in the right place. However, his head was out of focus. He was being led by his head instead of by his heart. That encounter with Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus turned things about and put them into the correct focus.
Our Saviour today, as we are singing in the hymns, taught us about obedience. He that created everything, and He that created the Law, also obeyed the Law that He created. Why not ? It has to be understood (and this is where people have been constantly going wrong) that the Law is not mere legislation ; it is not something that can be changed. It is not something that can be modified by an amendment, because it is all governed and regulated exactly by its summary, which most of us neglect to remember. What is the summary of the Law and the Ten Commandments ? Quoted by our Saviour Himself, the summary is : “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind … and you shall love your neighbour as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37, 39).
Love is the whole basis of the Law. Therefore, the Ten Commandments are not like legislation. They are our sense of direction. They are our compass. If we are truly responding to God’s love and doing what the summary says – loving God with all our being – then we would have everything in the correct order. It would be impossible for us to have another God, except the one God. It would be impossible for us to make idols, substitutes of things created, to put in place of the Creator. We would keep the Day of the Lord holy. We would worship the Lord. We would respect our parents, and we would abstain from murder, theft, lying, and coveting, etc. All these things are positive things. The Law is a positive thing. It is a measure of how a believer lives life, how a believer who has encountered God’s love lives out this love.
It is important, therefore, for you and for me, it is important for Orthodox Christians living here in this city where so many people are preoccupied with making money, to remember not to be distracted. It is easy for people to turn money into one of those substitutes for Him, which come between the Creator and themselves. In so doing, they could even easily lose their sense of direction. If it is not money, it would likely be position or power. They are all related. We, who are Orthodox Christians, have to be careful to remember to keep first things first in our lives. That means keeping alive always the love of Jesus Christ in our hearts, nurturing that love, because that love is the source of our being. That love is the purpose of our living.
It is not an option for an Orthodox Christian to be maintaining the personal relationship in communion of love with Jesus Christ. It is the root of our being. It is who we are. From that comes everything in our lives. From that comes the ability to live positive lives. If people have difficulty in living life, it is often because they have forgotten Jesus Christ. In Christ, it is possible to live through every imaginable difficulty, overcome every imaginable obstacle sooner or later, as long as we are living in Jesus Christ, and in harmony with His love, and therefore, knowing His will.
It is possible for an Orthodox Christian to return to the state of Adam and Eve before the Primordial Fall – it truly is. There have been saints who have done this in the course of their lives, because they have completely given up their self-will. They have given themselves over completely to Jesus Christ, and in this atmosphere of love, they know instinctively what He wants of them. They do not even have to ask Him. Their hearts tell them before they can even ask what they should be doing, what is the right thing to do, to say, to think, and how to be in any situation. It is possible, because that is the direction that the Lord’s love takes us. It takes us to reunion of communion with Him. In reunion of communion with Him, it becomes possible to be like Him as we see and hear Him in the Gospel.
I cannot speak from experience. However, I can just say that I have seen this written in the lives of the saints. I have seen some people myself, in the course of my travels around the world, who, if they are not in that condition already, are very close. It can be done. Such purity of life can be lived by giving one’s self over to the Saviour. In giving one’s self over to the Saviour like this, fear is removed, because as the Apostle John says : “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). We do not have to be slaves of fear when we are full of the love of Jesus Christ.
Saint Basil the Great, whose memory we celebrate today, was such a person. He became such a guiding force for the whole Church that 1700 years later his influence is still alive in our Church. Why ? Because he was such a person. He gave himself over to the love of Jesus Christ. This is what obedience to the Law means. It means lovingly doing God’s will (not slavishly and fearfully doing what I am told). I must lovingly offer my compliance with God’s will, so that I might be a fulfilled human being, a whole human being.
It is not a small work we have to do as Orthodox Christians here in this city, but the Lord has been very busy blessing our progress. I look forward to seeing what else He is going to do in this community, and with Orthodox believers in this city. May God grant us the ability to follow the example of our Saviour Himself in His obedience to His own parents, to the Law which He created Himself, to His living in harmony with the creation that He created. May the Lord give us the ability to give ourselves over to Him in love, so that His light may shine in us, so that people may see His love at work in us, and be encouraged and drawn to Him, and see and believe. May the Lord enable us truly with all our lives and with all our being to glorify Him : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The task of being a shepherd, especially the sort of shepherd that the Saviour is, is not an easy one, and it is certainly not one that I have ever been comfortable in undertaking, because the difference is so great between Him and me. Yet, according to the Scriptures this morning, according to the teaching of the Apostle Paul, the Holy Spirit gives gifts, in accordance with the will of God, and in accordance with the needs of the people, the sheep. Therefore, regardless of what I think about myself, and whatever my inadequacies may be, my responsibility must be to try to be as well as I can a shepherd with the same motivation as that one Shepherd.
There is, in the end, only one Shepherd – our Saviour, Jesus Christ. There is only One who is in charge of the whole Church, and that is Jesus Christ. There is only One who is in charge of this diocese, and that is Jesus Christ. I have great hope and confidence in Him, that whatever are the shortcomings of me, as the bishop, and whatever are the shortcomings of any priest in the diocese (because we are all simply human beings, and we are all makers of mistakes), nevertheless, the Lord in His love for us will make up the difference between our lack and what is the need of the Church.
This has been the case, anyway, throughout all Christian history. There have been human beings who have failed greatly, who have been led astray greatly by the Tempter. Always the Saviour has been able (because He is the Creator of everything anyway, and because His love is so great) to bring things back into the correct focus and the right direction.
In the other reading for today, the Saviour is emphasising once again the importance of our being child-like. He says, as He accepts children to Himself, blesses them, and lays His hands upon them, that we all have to enter the Kingdom as children. The problem is that instead of being like children, child-like, we often behave childishly, and there is quite a difference, a very big difference.
It is very important for us to remember what sort of person Saint Gregory the Theologian was, and the few others, also, who like Saint John the Theologian, carried the title “Theologian”. It is necessary to remember that they came to this title, this appellation, because they were so full of the love of God. They were so full of the love of Jesus Christ, that, in fact, they became like children. They became like children because of their complete and utter trust in the love of Jesus Christ. Such people are persons who have actually grown up (this is one of the Orthodox paradoxes – we grow up to be a child). To be a truly adult Christian, we have to have child-like, pure faith. Such faith is not confused by fear, and especially not paralysed by fear. In order to arrive at such paradoxical purity, it is necessary that we open our hearts to the Saviour, and give ourselves over to Him. It is crucial that, because of love, we trust Him in everything.
My nephew gave me The Mountain of Silence to read, and I should have read it a long time ago. I am very grateful to my nephew for giving me this book, and pressing me to read it, too, because I have to give it back. He wants to make sure that I read it soon. In The Mountain of Silence there are many stories told about Athonite elders who have lived recently : Elder Paisios in particular, and Father Maximos, who is still living in Cyprus, and Archimandrite Sophrony and others like them. All these men (and women too, because the Eldress Gavrilia of Greece is also mentioned many times in this book), are people who, even though they may appear to be eccentric, have given their whole lives over to the Saviour, and are loving the Saviour completely. Some of them, like the Elder Porphyrios in particular, and the Elder Paisios in quite a similar way, were so full of the love of Jesus Christ that they were able to tell people all their problems, correct their problems, help them at a distance, phone them up and tell them what was the problem – that sort of thing. They are people who have managed to give themselves over so much to the love of Jesus Christ, that their hearts became like those of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Their hearts instantly respond to the love of God, and they know what God wants without having even to ask.
This is not the call of “specialists” only, because this Paisios, this Porphyrios, this Gavrilia and many others, even in the last century, who were of a similar devotion to the Saviour, are not different from you and me. They are human beings with the same sort of temptations and weaknesses, but they were ready to give themselves over to the Saviour, and trust Him with everything in their lives. This call is the call to everyone of us. The Saviour’s love is the same for each of us. He created each of us in His image, and we are supposed to be in His likeness. This likeness is love. This love is selfless. This love gives gifts, and allows the gifts of the Saviour to grow.
The Holy Spirit gives particular gifts to us all, according to who we are. He gives these gifts not for us alone, not at all. He gives these gifts for the sake of everyone else around us. That is why these elders, these Gavrilias, these Porphyrioses, and these Paisioses (if you can say it like that in English), gave themselves over to hours and hours and hours of people coming to them in confession, just as happened to Saint Seraphim. We have all probably read or heard about how many years he lived in the desert by himself (the desert of the forest, that is), and how, when the time came, Saint Seraphim, full of life, was in the monastery, and for hours on end was hearing people’s confessions, and hearing their heartbreaks.
Gifts are given to these people for the well-being of everyone else who is hungry, and thirsty, and lost. The good Shepherd who knows His sheep, knows us. He knows our needs. He knows all our weaknesses. It is, in fact, beyond my ability to comprehend what is the nature of His love, and how it works itself out in our lives. However, I do see, everywhere I go, the fruit of that love : in pastors feeding their sheep, in pastors teaching their sheep, in faithful people being nourished by these pastors. The sheep grow up and become strong believers, who are magnets of Christ’s love themselves, bringing people to the Saviour by their example. I see this more and more.
It is important that we all pay attention to the fact that the Saviour is so active amongst us because He loves us, because He is with us, because He cares for us. Even if we have all sorts of difficulties and troubles, He is still with us. He is still helping us out of all these things ; He is helping us through all these things and healing the pain of our hearts. He heals the scars of our hearts. He renews us. He makes us over into who we are supposed to be in the first place. He lifts us up, and gives us the ability to live in joy.
The characteristic of a Christian, par excellence, is to be able to live in joy : as did Saint Seraphim of Sarov, and the many Greek saints of the last century. It is the characteristic of the way of Christ : this peace and this joy which give life to everyone and everything around.
Glory to God that He has such concern for us, that He has such patience with our stubbornness and our blindness. Glory to God that He is so ready to heal our weaknesses, our fears, our fragilities, and to provide for the needs of His rational flock. Glory to God that we are able to be here together, glorifying our Saviour. Glory to God, also, that there are such Orthodox Christians who are interested in celebrating an obscure birthday of this relatively obscure bishop. Glory to God for your love, for your care, and for your faithful service to Christ, whom we glorify, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
On this day, we are remembering the Seventh Ecumenical Council as always at this time of year, and we are also remembering the restoration of icons to the Church, and the implications that come with that. The restoration of the icons to the Church has its actual roots in the Incarnation of Christ, because God took flesh. He could be represented in paint and in other matter as well (as He has been from the beginning of the Church’s life).
However, the implication goes far beyond iconography. There is an aspect of Christian living that seems to have eluded people one way or the other over the past 2,000 years. It is true that intellectually we may have a firm grasp of the truth of the Incarnation, but living it out is the hard part which continues to elude us. We live in a society which wants to reduce Jesus Christ simply to being some sort of philosopher, or “nice guy” (which is even worse). There is almost nothing worse than being a “nice guy”. Because we who live in this society seem very often to fall into that trap of the “nice guy” mentality, the true living of Christian life will continue to elude us.
Our responsibility as Orthodox Christians is to know Jesus Christ, and being faithful to Jesus Christ, to carry Him with us wherever we are and whatever we are doing, so that, even if we are not very good at transmitting the image and likeness of Christ, at least we are trying. At least, if we are failing somehow, we are ready to say : “I am sorry. I will try to do better”. And at least, if we are not so strong as we thought we might be in Christ, and not saying and doing things as clearly Christ-like as they might be, we are still able to pray to the Saviour to make up the difference. And He does. We are still able to pray to the Saviour to help us to forgive people, people who ridicule us, people who make it difficult for us to continue to be faithful. And He does. He does bring forgiveness to them, to us. He does bring healing and reconciliation to them, to us.
In this community, the Lord has given many resources, both physical and spiritual, as well as particular challenges (not small ones, either). The Adversary, Big Red, is not leaving this community alone. He has been working one way or another, trying to discourage one person or another through illness. These things are not coincidental. These are the attacks of the Adversary. It is not simply that someone gets sick. It is not only illness. Always, and perhaps more seriously, the Adversary walks around trying to sow seeds of doubt, suspicion, anger, and division amongst us in one way or the other. We, who have been given this opportunity to be part of this community and to participate in the struggles of this community, must, absolutely must, be putting on the whole armour of Christ daily. This container of holy water should be refilled and blessed very frequently. That is part of the armour that we need to be taking up daily. We need to be daily taking up and putting on our confidence in Christ, our Saviour, and His love for us by deliberately asking for His help right from the beginning of every day.
Approximately ten years ago, Archbishop Paul, the Abbot of the Kyiv Caves Monastery, came to Canada, and passed across the country with the relics of some of the saints of the Kyiv Caves. He left these relics amongst us. An icon was written at the Holy Transfiguration Hermitage to carry these relics. The icon contains the relics of the saints whose images are on it. There is Saint Agapit, the physician ; Saint Mark (the grave digger) who is the exorcist. If we go to the Kyiv Caves, his hat (or helmet) is there in the caves, and people are daily exorcised by the application of this hat. There is Saint Moses the Hungarian, the healer ; there is Saint Alipy, the iconographer ; Saint Spiridon, the prosphora-baker ; and Saint Nestor, the chronicler. All these famous, well-known Fathers of Kyiv are founders and protectors in many ways. I believe that the Lord is sending this icon for the protection of the Archdiocese, though it will remain mostly at the Cathedral in Ottawa for encouragement and strengthening.
The Lord, in His mercy and His love, knows us, as He knows the apostles whom He calls today. He knows us. He knows our needs. He loves us. He cares for us. He is with us. He is supporting us. He is never abandoning us. As difficult as we sometimes feel it is, and as dragged out as we sometimes are feeling in looking after the responsibility of establishing our presence and the presence of Orthodox witness in this community and in this building, as tired as we are, and sometimes as discouraged as we are, the Lord, nevertheless, is with us. The Lord, nevertheless, is taking care of us. The Lord, nevertheless, is ahead of us, preparing the way for us. The wonder of it all is that the Lord, in His love, takes the time (He has infinite time) and the trouble, not only to prepare the way of this community together, but also to prepare the way of each of our lives. The Lord, in His mercy, is with us. The Lord in His mercy, is before us, all around us, and in us. The Lord, in His mercy, is working through us.
It is important for us daily not to fall prey to the father of forgetfulness down below, but to embrace the Father of remembering – our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Remembering is loving ; the two things go together. We exist, because the Lord loves us, and He remembers us. Therefore, let us renew our confidence in our Saviour. Let us continue to take up the burden of the responsibility, a burden which Christ says is light. It is light if we are directly connected with Him. Let us embrace His protection, and let us fulfil our responsibility regardless of what comes. Let us fulfil our responsibility in the love of Jesus Christ – His love of us, our love of Him. Let us glorify Him, with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
In these days we are hearing texts about the Second Coming and the need to be prepared for it. Of course it is true that it is necessary to be prepared. It is important that we remember what this preparation is like for us who are Christians. It is especially important that we pay attention to this now, because in these days (and in fact, as long as I have lived), there have been people on the radio who talk about the End Days. They talk about it with great fear and trepidation, and they give people a feeling of guilt all the time. They entice us with something that we want, but at the same time, something that we are deadly afraid of, somehow.
The End of all things is not a small event at all. It is beyond my comprehension. The End of all things is inexplicable. It is serious, yes, and awesome, yes ; but for us who are Orthodox Christians, it is much more than an awesome event and a spectacle. It is the return of the Bridegroom. It is the return of Him whom we love. It is the culmination of all the work of His self-emptying love since the beginning of all. We, who are believers, ought to be anticipating this with a certain amount of uncertainty about ourselves and our preparedness. Nevertheless, with longing we await the Lord who is to come, so that we may be able to live in His love, without any more sickness, sorrow, suffering, dying.
The expectation of the Orthodox Christian is a mix. Yes, there is repentance, and we have to be prepared. Repentance is part of our daily life : it is a fundamental element of our way of life. Our hope is that, in this attempt to repent, to turn about from selfishness to the way of Christ, to the way of selflessness, in our turning about, the Lord will accept our love, our offering of love, our turning about. We love the Lord, and He loves us and we long to be eternally with the One whom we love. We hope that He will admit us along with the wise virgins into His banquet hall in His Kingdom.
The way of repentance is an element of our life which people seem to be forgetting in ordinary parish life. It does not matter where we go, somehow many people everywhere have the very mistaken idea that when we come to church, we should somehow be standing amongst the community of the perfect. When we encounter people’s weaknesses, their shortcomings and their sins, voluntary and involuntary, people tend to become disappointed or disillusioned. The Church has never been anything but a hospital for sinners. We must come to recognise that we ourselves, because of the love of Jesus Christ, because of knowing Who He is and what sort of love He has for us, and having confidence in Him as well, need to be like those four men today who carried the paralytic.
These four men knew what sort of love Jesus Christ had for them and for their friend, whom they carried on his stretcher. Their confidence in Christ was great enough that when they found that the house was packed full (and even the outside as well), and that there was no way at all for them to get their friend in to the Saviour, as we heard in the Gospel reading today, then they went up on the roof, and they opened it. This is something that could be done in the Middle East by moving tiles around, although we could not do it here very well. There obviously would be massive destruction to open this roof, and to let down someone on ropes in order to put such a person before the Saviour. Nevertheless, they did open the roof, and they lowered the man before the Saviour. The Lord saw their faith. He understood their love, and He taught a great lesson to everyone (to them and to us) when He said to the paralytic : “‘Son, your sins are forgiven you’”. In the end, it was through this “Your sins are forgiven you” that the paralytic rose from his bed and walked. Faced with this, people were able to say : “‘We never saw anything like this!’”
It is the responsibility of us all to have confidence in our Saviour when we see the weaknesses of our brothers and sisters, and to be like those four men, and carry that person in our prayer to the Saviour. We must give that person to the Saviour, who, in His love, will touch that person, correct that person, and heal that person. It is not our responsibility to laugh at, or condemn the person for being paralysed, because paralysis in life comes from sin. Sin is all bound up with fear. There is not one of us who is not subject to fears in one form or another. These fears paralyse us from doing the good that we ought to do. Sometimes they stop us from doing anything at all. Fears can be so intense from time to time. It is the Lord who frees us from these fears, from the chains with which the devil binds us. It is the Lord who sets us free from these fears, and enables us to become more and more productive workers together with Him in His Kingdom.
That is why it is important that we intercede for each other all the time, and not only occasionally. We must pray for each other all the time. We should be praying for all the members and friends of this parish on a regular basis. If it is possible, those who have time should pray for all the people on the parish list every day, saying simply “Lord have mercy” for each of them, but at least praying for each of them. By doing this, we are being like those four men with the paralytic, supporting each other, bringing each other before the Saviour, and offering each other before the Saviour so that He might correct, heal, strengthen, nurture, and give whatever we need.
Today, we are here all together before the Lord in His Kingdom, which is the case every week at the Divine Liturgy. Every time we are assembled, standing here together in the Temple of the Lord, in the Temple of His Kingdom, we are standing here all together as He feeds us with His own hand, and with His own life. We are standing here today, as we always will be doing at the Divine Liturgy. We are participating in the whole of God’s saving acts from the beginning to the end, from the time of Creation past the Second Coming. In a mystery, as we are standing here today, we are standing in the Kingdom after the Second Coming, also.
When we are offering the Gifts to the Lord, as we hear in the Divine Liturgy, we are remembering God’s saving acts. After “Thine own of thine own”, if we listen carefully, we can hear that we are offering all God’s saving acts from the beginning, including the Second Coming. For us, in a mystery, the Second Coming is a past event. That is why it is possible for us to have such confidence in the Saviour’s love, in view of the Second Coming. He is already merciful to you and to me in giving us a taste of that banquet, together with the wise virgins, and the others who are wonderful in the Saviour.
As we are participating in these ineffable Mysteries of God’s love, let us ask Him to refresh this love, which is our life, and enable us more and more, day by day, even without ceasing, in our hearts to glorify Him : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Saint John, the abbot of Sinai, wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent. The metaphor of the ladder describes our progress as Christians in our life towards God. However, this progression is not some sort of technique that we can acquire. Such a technique would tell us that if we simply do this thing, and this thing, and this thing, then God will reward us, and admit us into the heavenly Kingdom. That is not how it works, although many (including the naïve Muslim) believe that this is so.
If we had this sort of naïve, simple system which would give us the password for reception into the Kingdom of Heaven after we had lined our ducks up correctly, then that would be very much like bribing God. That is not how it works at all. Many parents try that with their children, and I have seen that that does not work either. It does not work with human beings, and it certainly does not work between God and us. Any system which presumes that God clearly wants to be placated is just plain blasphemous. God is not interested in correctly lined-up ducks. God is interested in our hearts and our love. A careful reading of the Book of Job will show that this is the truth.
The metaphor of the ladder in the book The Ladder of Divine Ascent is simply a description of how we grow in love for God. There is nothing in Christian life that does not have to do with the love of God. It is true that there are many details involved in the living of the Christian life, and yes, there are some rules. However, those details and those rules are only there to provide some sort of order. The foundation of everything is still only Jesus’ question to the Apostle Peter when He says : “‘Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?’” (John 21:15) That is what the Lord is asking you and me always : “Do you love Me ?” With the Apostle Peter, our answer naturally is : “‘Yes, Lord; You know that I love You’” (John 21:15). Afterwards, the Lord says to the apostle : “‘Feed My sheep’” (John 21:17).
The “ladder” is given to us to help us. If we love the Lord, then we will grow up in Him. Growing up in Him means that if we love Him, we have to show it by doing something about it. Some people pray. Some people spend their whole lives praying and interceding for other people. It is true, in fact, that if it were not for these people praying, then the world would have fallen in on itself a long time ago. It is because there are believers around the world interceding before God in love on behalf of everyone else, that we still have opportunities to repent. Imitating the Lord, some people do good things. Some people help other people. Some people encourage other people. Some people feed the hungry, and visit the sick, and clothe the naked, and go and help people in prison, just as we sing about the Lord every Sunday in Psalm 145.
The love of Jesus Christ in action means that we have to do something that is supportive and life-giving to people around us. Mostly, these are not the people we would choose, rather, the Lord sends to us those whom He knows that we can help : people at work, people at school, people on the street, people we bump into. We do not very often have the opportunity to choose who it is that we, like the Saviour, will serve. He gives them to us, and our heart tells us in His love how we are to serve.
In the Gospel reading today, we heard about a child who is possessed by a devil, tormented by a devil, and no-one can do anything about it. This child is brought to our Saviour, and His disciples could not help the child. They wanted to, but they did not know how. We would have to say that they did not yet have enough love. Our Saviour Himself tells the devil to come out, and the devil comes out. His disciples ask Him : “‘Why could we not cast it out?’” The Saviour says : “‘This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting’”. The apostles were not “grown-up” enough in the love of Jesus Christ to be able to do this. However, in the Acts of the Apostles (which we will be reading very soon after Pascha) there will be many evidences of the apostles doing precisely that, and more, because they had been filled with the Grace of the Holy Spirit. By this time, they were overflowing with love. The power of the Grace of the Holy Spirit was acting in them, and they were healing people in the love of Jesus Christ. Sometimes they were even raising them from the dead in the love of Jesus Christ. It was not that the apostles were employing some technique to raise someone from the dead or heal them from their diseases. It was their love of Jesus Christ, their compassion in Jesus Christ, which enabled the Lord Himself to do this. Through their intercession and their presence, the Lord raised the dead and healed the sick. It was the love of Jesus Christ that was acting and that was giving life.
If we are going to grow up in Jesus Christ, we cannot expect that we should be so different from those disciples and apostles 2,000 years ago. The Saviour calls every one of us to be holy as were the apostles ; He has shown us in the course of the last 2,000 years all sorts of ordinary Orthodox believers who became holy just like them. We have such examples of holiness even into the last century, and probably in this century as well. There are people who love Jesus Christ, who have grown up in Him, and through their prayers, people are healed from their diseases and even raised from the dead.
Those things that are spoken of in the Gospel today and in the Epistle are not merely something for 2,000 years ago. They are not limited only to those apostles. As the writer to the Hebrews says, and I love this phrase (I have heard it and remembered it since I was five because other believers repeated it many times) : “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, He works the same amongst us now in His love as He did in those days with His apostles. What He requires from us, and what we need to give, is the “Yes” : the “Yes” of those apostles, the “Yes” of the Mother of God. I have not with my own eyes seen people raised from the dead, but I have heard in my lifetime of people who prayed, and as a result of this prayer, people were raised. In my lifetime this has happened in the world. People have been healed many times from diseases, and this I have seen with my own eyes. At the prayers of faithful people, many have been healed from all sorts of diseases since those people who love Jesus Christ, because of compassion, fast and pray, and the Lord blesses. Growing up in Jesus Christ means growing up into His love, so that we are at one with His love. In unity and harmony with His love, we act in accordance with His love. We bring the healing love of Jesus Christ to people near us, and to our environment.
The love of Jesus Christ is not a thing that just sits there on a shelf, and we look at it, and say : “Isn’t that nice !” Rather, His love is life. His love is alive. We are alive in His love. If we do not use this gift of love that Jesus Christ gives to us, if we hold on to it, the same thing happens to that love in us as happens to a pansy or to any other flower. How many times has a child brought freshly-picked flowers to his mother, held tightly in the hand. The child says : “Here Mama, look ! These are for you !” What is left of those flowers ? Some sort of squashed pulp is all that is left of those flowers. A flower is delicate, and has to be held loosely in the hand.
Human beings are like those flowers. They have to be held carefully and loosely in the hand. The love of Jesus Christ can only live and grow if it is offered and shared with an open hand and with an open heart. When we give the love of Jesus Christ to other people, when we share the love of Jesus Christ with other people and with creatures, God renews this love in us. The more we give, the more He gives us to give. That is why the Cross and the “ladder” come to us, and also examples of great repentance, like Saint Mary of Egypt next week. By God’s mercy and His love these examples come to us to remind us that, as difficult as life is, God is with us. He loves us. He gives us the strength that we need. Nevertheless, we have to say “Yes” to Him.
In the few weeks that remain in Great Lent, let us offer our abstinence from food, and our extra time in church (which should actually be the usual time in church). Let us offer all this to Him, asking Him to renew His love in our hearts, so that when we arrive at Pascha, we will be able to rejoice with true Paschal rejoicing. When we arrive at Pascha and we exult in this true Paschal joy, let us ask Him to let this love continue to grow as we offer to Him our abstinences and our co-suffering labour with Him. Thus, may everything about us glorify Him, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is a good thing for us to pay attention to what we just heard in the Gospel reading today, not only in the context of itself, but also in the context of what is coming, and how human beings are. Today, our Saviour is telling the apostles precisely what would be coming. He is preparing them by telling them that He would be crucified, that He would die, and also that He would rise again from the dead.
In two short weeks, we are going to be hearing about how the disciples, when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, could not comprehend it, did not expect it, did not know what was happening, and could hardly believe it. Of course, we understand now. However, at that time, resurrection was unheard of. It is not as though they had not been told before, and it is not as though they had not been prepared by our Saviour Himself, that this would happen. Yet, their fallen human experience was so limited that they could not comprehend it. It is not even a question of doubting. It is plain, simple, non-comprehension. The apostles could only comprehend it when they encountered Jesus Christ, face-to-face, risen from the dead. Even then they could not really comprehend it, but they began to make a step in that direction, anyway. During the rest of their lives, they began to live out precisely what are the implications of this Resurrection.
Two of the apostles asked our Saviour if they could sit, one on His right, and one on His left, when He comes in glory. He responded that instead, they would have to be baptised with the baptism with which He would be baptised, and drink the cup that He would drink. When they said that they would be able to do this, they did not know what they were saying. Nevertheless, it came to be. He said that He, the Saviour, the Son of God, did not come to be served. He came to serve. It is in this way that the apostles grew up after the Resurrection. They grew up as servants of Jesus Christ, serving together with Him.
This is the way of Christ – to serve, to be the servant of all. Being a servant in this context is not something that is slavish. It is not something that is done because of fear, since nothing for a Christian should be done out of fear. It is done because of love. We Christians serve. We serve Christ. We serve each other. We serve strangers. We serve the needy. We serve whomever the Lord gives us to serve because we love Jesus Christ. His love propels us into serving in our daily life. One could say that to serve, to try to be of service, is second nature for a Christian. Even if we are compelled to serve, even if we are indentured to serve, the Christian way is, as the Apostle Paul demonstrates to us, that we serve the Master and obey the Master with the love of Christ. We do this, despite any possible maltreatment by a master. Indeed, a harbinger of this behaviour was the Patriarch Joseph before he rose in the court of the Pharaoh.
All sorts of pop psychologists are going to say that if we are busy trying to help people all the time, that is because there is some sort of interior hurt that comes from our childhood and that needs fixing up. They say that we are always trying to help people because we have been bruised ourselves in our childhood, or something like that. There are various theories that are applied one way or another in psychology. Well, when it comes down to it, it is just as well that people might think that we are cracked. I admit it myself, on a regular basis, if you have not noticed. When people ask me : “How are you ?” I say : “I am cracked”. Well, I hope that I am mostly cracked in Christ, but probably there are some other things as well that the Lord is still working on. It does not matter, though, if the world thinks we are cracked, because the way of the Christian is not the way of the world. The way of the world is all focussed on “me” : “I am number one”. “Make me comfortable in this world”. “Let us get as much as we can”. “Let us fill up our barns with wheat (as in the parable the Lord told), and then die bitter”.
That is not the way of Christ. The way of Christ is all love. It is all hope. It is all life. It is life-giving. It is service, because this service that we do in Christ, for Christ, in and with each other, is all part of the same life-giving work. It is all life-giving. It is all because of love, filled with joy. It is true that we get tired (and sometimes cranky) because we get overworked. Still, the fundamental of it all is that we are loving Jesus Christ. We are in love with Jesus Christ, and in this love we want to serve. We look for every occasion to serve, to be helpful, to encourage, to strengthen people around us.
It is that sort of love that I have been blessed in my life a number of times to experience simply by being near it. I have never been near anyone so fiery as Saint Seraphim, for instance, and some other saints like him ; but I have been near several holy persons in the course of my life. Just being next to them can give us a strange combination of a sense of intensity of love for Jesus Christ, a real energy, and at the same time, a great peace – great peace. This is peace greater than we can encounter anywhere else, except sometimes, perhaps, here in the Temple of the Lord together with each other. Perhaps once in a while we may have this moment, this sense of peace in prayer. However, in the presence of such a person, the love of God, the peace and the joy all together are so intense that it is overwhelming. This is how we all ought to grow up and become. There is still time for us all to make steps in that direction.
We cannot on this day omit mentioning Saint Mary of Egypt because she is for us such a great example of what is the meaning of repentance. Repentance means simply to turn about (a 180 degree turn) : turn about from darkness, turn to the light ; turn about from death, turn to life ; turn about from selfishness, turn to love. Saint Mary of Egypt, as we hear in her Life, lived an extremely broken life in which with delight she was pulling people down with her into despair. Yet her heart was searching. When she was confronted by the Lord’s love in Jerusalem, in the Temple of the Resurrection, she did, in fact, turn about completely. Then she gave herself up 100 per-cent to serving Jesus Christ, in love with Him, so much so that she withdrew into the desert. She was not seen or heard of for who knows how long, until Saint Zossima came along to prepare her for her death.
All these things are done and accomplished by the Lord’s love. The Lord prepares you and me, too, for the moments of repentance in our lives, in the same way as Saint Mary of Egypt. He prepares us for great blessings. He is always there, going ahead before us, ready to meet us with His life-giving love. Our responsibility is to be prepared to accept that life-giving love when the Lord presents Himself to us. Our responsibility is, like Saint Mary of Egypt, to turn about from our self-serving to serving Him in everyone, to turn about from loving ourselves and only ourselves, to loving Jesus Christ. Nothing else matters. I become my true self in the context of loving Him.
We have two more weeks in which to focus ourselves in our prayers. We have yet time to concentrate our efforts in abstaining from too much eating (and eating things that it would be better not to eat), and in serving Him and caring for other people. Let us ask the Lord to give us this Grace in the last days of Great Lent, so that when we come to the end of Great Lent and we are celebrating the joy of Pascha, we will be able to encounter the Resurrection with joy and love. The Lord has prepared us for this in the same way that He prepared the apostles for the Resurrection. We will be able to live in the Resurrection during the days after the Resurrection. Through this abstinence, and through the Resurrection, our lives will be straightened to serve Him better in the coming year with more love, more focus, with deeper service, with deeper joy. In doing this we will glorify Him together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Christ is risen
It is a special joy for me to have the possibility to come today, the last day of Bright Week, to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. It is very important for us to remember the words of today’s Gospel. The words of the Prophet and Forerunner, John, apply most particularly to us and to our daily life in Christ. The Forerunner said that “‘He must increase, but I must decrease’”. That means that even in those early days of the revelation of Who is Jesus Christ, His cousin, the Prophet and Forerunner, John, already understood very well Who He is, and what is necessary. People came to him and said : “‘Rabbi, He who was with you beyond the Jordan, to whom you have testified – behold, He is baptising, and all are coming to Him’” (John 3:26). In the world, and apart from Christ, that would, in fact, start a competition. People would say (to paraphrase) : “These people belong to me. These are mine”. They would form a party, and start arguing about who belongs to whom, and who is better than whom. This is not the way in Christ. This is not the Orthodox Christian way. Even though we fall into the temptation sometimes, it is not our way.
The way for us is the way of the Forerunner. The Forerunner expressed his great joy that so many people went to Christ to be baptised because he knew that Jesus Christ is the Bridegroom. We cannot have anything except joy that the Bridegroom is amongst us, and that people respond to the Bridegroom. We are the Church, the Bride of Christ. We are responding to the Bridegroom with love and affection, recognising Him and uniting ourselves to Him. The Prophet and Forerunner expressed this joy, and he said : “‘He must increase, but I must decrease’”. The way of the Christian, the way of the Orthodox Christian, is precisely like the way of the Prophet and Forerunner. Everything has to point to Jesus Christ in our lives in the same way as in this icon of the Mother of God, who is the image of our Church. She is holding Jesus Christ in her arms in this icon, and she is pointing to Him. It does not matter what form the icon of the Mother of God takes, whether it is this very expression or not ; nevertheless, the Mother of God is always directing or drawing us to her Son. Everything about her life pointed, and does point to her Son. Even in these days, when sometimes the Mother of God will appear to one person or another, one group of persons or another, she is always directing us to her Son.
This is how our life must be as Orthodox Christians. The way we live our lives ; the things we do ; the things we say ; the way we react in difficult times ; the way we react when we are in trouble, when we are attacked – this always must be pointing to Jesus Christ, and involving Jesus Christ. In Orthodox ancestral countries, we see this simply in the way people talk. People are always saying : “Glory to You, O Lord”, “Glory to God”. They are always saying things like : “Help me”. “Help me, Lord”. “Save me, Lord”. People are always saying these things. They always bring the blessing of Christ upon themselves when there is difficulty. When they want to do anything, when they want to drive a car, when they want to leave the house, they make the sign of the Cross, and bring Christ’s blessing with them. When we go to the grocery store or wherever else we are going in any given day, we are taking Jesus Christ with us.
In certain parts of the Slavic world (mostly in western Ukraine and Carpatho-Rus’), people will not talk to each other until first they have said : “Glory be to Jesus Christ”. The answer is : “Glory be forever”. If Christ is not glorified at the beginning of the conversation, then no conversation is going to happen. We do not find that absolutely everywhere in the Orthodox world. This custom may be a bit extreme, but it is spiritually prudent. In case anyone wonders where that custom came from, I believe that those western Ukrainians and those Carpatho-Rusyns got it from monks a very long time ago. If we are in a monastery, and we want to talk to a monk or a nun, we have to knock on the door of the monastic and say : “Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and save us”. The answer inside has to be : “Amen”. Then the conversation can begin.
Even if we do not talk just like that, and behave just like that, our life as Orthodox Christians needs to grow into this. We have just sung “As many as have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ”. We carry Christ with us. Our life, like that of the Mother of God, must point to Jesus Christ. When people encounter us, they should be able to feel love, joy, peace, gentleness, kindness, long-suffering, and all those other fruits of the presence of the Holy Spirit that the Apostle Paul speaks about (Galatians 5:22-23). When we have this about us – love, joy, peace, gentleness, kindness, long-suffering – it is evident that Jesus Christ is alive and active in our hearts, and we are being like Him. That is to say, we are being servants like Him, and our love works like His.
Brothers and sisters, let us pray that Grace will come from our Saviour Jesus Christ, to help us to live in the love of Jesus Christ, and to glorify Him single-heartedly, single-mindedly, putting Him above everything, so that like Saint Seraphim, our whole life will proclaim with love : “Christ is risen”.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Christ is risen
When Saint Mary Magdalene and the other women ran to the apostles and said that they had seen the Risen Christ, did the apostles immediately believe them ? No. The apostles went and saw the empty tomb, and even then they were not sure until finally they were convinced by a series of events. The questions of the Apostle Thomas are in line with the same hesitancy of all the other apostles.
This is important for us Orthodox Christians to remember in our spiritual lives now. In the course of our everyday life there are many people saying plenty of things, trying to draw us away from the truth of Jesus Christ. There are many theories, and much this-and-that these days which is intent on taking us away from Christ.
Also, there are always thoughts, because, while we live our lives, thoughts come and go. There are questioning thoughts, doubting thoughts, suspicious thoughts – all sorts of thoughts. We have to learn how to discern what is the truth.
What is the truth ? As we know also (the Lord Himself warned us that it would be the case), there are many people who come pretending to have secret knowledge about the truth about Jesus Christ. Such people are proclaiming that they have secret knowledge about the end of the world. This is so common. People are afraid of the end of the world. Any time someone claims to know, by some sort of divine revelation, that the end is coming soon, and on a particular day, people become very afraid. However, at the same time they tend to believe this sort of silly talk. No-one knows the time of the Lord’s Coming. Our Saviour Himself said when He was amongst us that only the Father knows the time, the day, and the circumstances of the culmination of all things. That means that only the Father knows the time of the Saviour’s return.
Christians cannot survive unless they read the Bible, unless they know the Bible in their hearts. Also, they cannot properly understand the Scriptures unless they are reading what the Fathers said about the Scriptures. Therefore, when people say one thing or another, make one suggestion or another, propose alternatives, it is important for us to know the Scriptures, and to know what is the truth about Jesus Christ.
What happens, for instance, when the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Mormons come to your door ? It is important that we know the truth in the Scriptures, so that we will not listen to their distortions of the Scriptures (because they rewrite things). We have to know what Christ, Himself, and the apostles gave us. We have to know our Scriptures. However, to argue about Scripture with people, in my experience, is never fruitful. This is because they have an idée fixe, and they are not going to listen to anyone. The only thing that will affect them is the love of Jesus Christ in our hearts, and our prayers for them. If they are willing to pray with us (and most of them are not), then Jesus Christ may get through to them.
Thus it is with thoughts, too. Thoughts come from all sorts of different places. They are not all only generated by our brain. Thoughts come from our environment and they penetrate us. Thinking is not only the functioning of those cells in the gray matter in the brain ; it is much more than that. Thoughts come also from the Tempter himself. There are many sources of these thoughts.
It is important for us, in knowing Jesus Christ, knowing Him who is the Truth, Himself, and knowing the Scriptures, and knowing the Orthodox way, to be able to discern whether a thought is a truth or a lie. It is not easy, and it is not simple. However, because the Grace of the Holy Spirit is in our hearts, the Lord can teach us to see, hear, and understand clearly what is the nature of one thought or another, and whether we should accept it or reject it. By rejecting it, it is important for us not so much to try to fight with the thought as to turn our backs on it, and to turn ourselves to Jesus Christ and to say : “Save me from this thought”.
All this is connected to the Apostle Thomas in one way or another. The Apostle Thomas, having seen and having immediately believed, then, like the other apostles, went abroad, and took the love of Jesus Christ with him. In more cases than not, when the apostles were going amongst the people, it was not by arguing that they brought people to Jesus Christ. It was by speaking the truth about Him, who is the Truth. It was about living the love of Jesus Christ in their midst.
The Apostle Thomas went first to Egypt. I remember reading that, just a few years ago, they had discovered a little portion of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew in upper Egypt, and that it was to the 50s or 60s that this portion of the Gospel was dated. It was dated to those years because of other documents and artifacts that were found around it. This is less than thirty years after the Crucifixion. The Gospel in written form was already copied by hand, transmitted to Upper Egypt, and then somehow lost or buried. Probably something happened, and the Gospel was buried with other documents of the same period (perhaps to protect them).
Nevertheless, we have a little particle of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew from such an early date. The Apostle Thomas may have been one of the means by which the written Gospel already had reached Egypt in those early days. After going through Egypt from north to south, the Apostle Thomas went across the Indian Ocean to India where he began to live and speak about Jesus Christ. He converted a prince in northern India to begin with. He went first to northern India, and then to southern India. In the state of Kerala (“the pepper state” on the west coast), he converted many people from the Brahmin class, the top-ranking priestly class of the Hindu religion. He converted very many of them, and then he went around to the other side of India, to Madras. It was there that he was finally killed by pagans after he had brought many more people to Christ.
There are Indian families today, Orthodox Christian Indian families in the area of Kerala and also in the area of Madras, who know all their Christian ancestors back to the Apostle Thomas. The rest of us are not usually so sure who our ancestors are past 100 years or so.
However, the people who received the Gospel of Jesus Christ in India 2,000 years ago had the witness of the Apostle Thomas, whose doubt has produced so much fruit. These people are still Christians today. The personal encounter of Jesus Christ has been handed on. This is the true Tradition of the Orthodox Church – the handing on, and the personal encounter with the one Lord, Jesus Christ.
We are inheritors of the work of all the apostles, the Apostle Thomas amongst them. We have inherited their personal encounter as well. It is the way of the Orthodox Christian to come to a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. We have met Him. We know that He loves us, and we know that we love Him. We have to be grateful to those apostles for their readiness to share this love with those around them, so that we, today, can experience this love, this hope, this joy, this peace. May we be able to share with others in our own lives this same love, joy and peace.
Our Saviour, who inspired the apostles, who was so infinitely patient with them (and, as we saw today, with the Apostle Thomas), did not wag His finger at the apostle, but He just said, as it were : “Come, touch and believe”. Let us ask the same patient Saviour, in His infinite love and patience, to give us the strength to live in His love, to give witness to His love to those around us, to live in His truth, and thus to glorify the Risen Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Christ is risen
It is sad for me as I travel from parish to parish in the Paschal season, because wherever I go, there are many new people coming from Russia, and I see how quickly they have become Canadianised in a negative way. When I say : “Christ is risen” to them they say : “Indeed He is risen” very quietly. That is the Canadian way. Canadian habits are all right in some ways, except when it comes to saying “Christ is risen”. When we say : “Christ is risen”, we are proclaiming what is the centre of our life. We really must say : “Indeed He is risen” with audible strength. The usual insipid Canadian response will not do. That limp response is the equivalent to saying : “Yeah, sure, of course He is risen”. If we are Orthodox Christians, what does this mean ? The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the centre of our life. That is why we are here today. That is why Russia survived seventy years of persecution, death, destruction. That is why the Orthodox Church is alive today in Russia. The Church is being resurrected.
Therefore, it is very good that I have a chance this year to come in the Paschal season because I see this happening here, and I have a chance to exhort you to wake up and to remember who you are. You are, we are Orthodox Christians who live by the Resurrection. We live in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Let us all be strong in our Orthodox Faith, and show it by how we respond on these days.
Today, the Acts of the Apostles is telling us about the diaconate : what is the meaning, the purpose of the diaconate, and how it came to us. The apostles, as we heard, were very busy with preaching the Gospel. However, they were also so busy feeding widows, distributing food to the hungry, and meeting so many other urgent needs, that they had no time to do their first responsibility, which was to preach to the world about Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit inspired the apostles and told them to set apart deacons. The deacons were to do the work of caring for those who were in need in any way. That is precisely what deacons are doing, and ought to be doing until this very day. It seems that our Church has become somewhat forgetful in North America, and does not have nearly enough deacons.
However, God by His mercy is raising up men to become deacons, and they are serving as they follow in the footsteps of Stephen, Timon, Parmenas, and all the others that we heard of today. Their responsibility is to lead people in worship (as they do, and as they have always done). However, at the same time they also care for the people who are in need. As the eyes and ears of the priest, they keep watch in the parish in order to see who is sick, who is in need, who has problems one way or another. They make sure that in some way the needs of these persons are seen to. That is what deacons ought to be doing. It is their work to be helping the priest like this, so that the priest can bring the sacraments to the shut-ins and the sick. Through them, the parish council can make sure that if someone is in a particularly tight spot, perhaps the parish, as brothers and sisters in Christ, can help that person in whatever way that might be.
Service is the way of Christ. Above all, we love Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ loves us. We are here precisely because of that. However, it does no good (and we can see it in the Gospels and the Epistles all the time) for us merely to say : “I am a Christian ; yes, sure, I love Jesus Christ”. It has to be demonstrated in concrete ways. Earlier this week, we had the reading from the Acts about Ananias and Sapphira (see Acts 5:1-11). They were two early Christians. In those days, everything was held in common. By mutual agreement, Ananias and Sapphira fell into a temptation. They were selling their property. Ananias and Sapphira, as the Acts tell us, decided that they would only give part of what they got for this property for the life of the Church, and they hid the rest from the apostles. Therefore, when Ananias came and laid at the apostles’ feet the proceeds from this property, and said, as it were : “This is all there is”, the Lord taught the Apostle Peter that this was not true. The apostle said (to paraphrase) : “You are not telling the whole truth here. Did you not sell it for so much ?” Well, that was true, and because that was the case, Ananias fell down dead. Sapphira came in later, and then the Apostle Peter asked her : “‘Tell me whether you sold the land for so much ?’” She agreed in the lie her husband had told, and said : “‘Yes, for so much’”. The apostle then said to her : “‘The feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out’” (Acts 5:8-9). And immediately she died also.
The problem here is not that Ananias and Sapphira did not give everything, because that could have been allowed. It could have been agreed that they would keep part of the proceeds for whatever they had to do with these proceeds. The problem is that they told a lie. They told a lie, and this lie is what brings death. That is what happened with Adam and Eve at the beginning. They disobeyed the Lord, and, beguiled by the serpent, they took the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. After that, they hid from God. Then of course, Adam blamed Eve – it was really bad. They began to lie, because to hide from God means that we accept fear and we run away. We cannot be like that. The way of Christ is not like that.
The way of Christ is living the truth. Above where I am standing we see written on the wall (it is Jesus Christ, Himself, speaking) : “‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’” (John 14:6). Jesus Christ Himself is the Truth. We are living in that Truth. There is no other truth. That is another crazy Canadian idea, that there can be many different sorts of truths : there is this truth for one, and that truth for another. That is just plain stupid. There is only one truth. There is only one. Just by definition, truth is truth, and it is only one. If there are alternatives, then there is no truth ; there are only ideas and opinions. There is only one truth, and the one Truth is Jesus Christ, whom God the Father sent to us. When Saint Arseny had those words put on that wall, he knew what he was doing for you and for me. Ever since I became acquainted with those words many, many years ago, I have been impressed with the importance of them. No matter what else he did, Saint Arseny left us a great legacy just in having those words written on the wall. We are living in Jesus Christ, who is the Truth.
This gives me again another opportunity to make a correction, in case anyone fell into this trap. Today we heard how Saints Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome (the Myrrh-bearing Women) came to the tomb of Jesus Christ in order to anoint His Body with spices. However, instead, they found that He had risen. These women are the first witnesses of His Resurrection. Because there is so much lying circulating about Saint Mary Magdalene these days, I must say that Saint Mary Magdalene, equal to the apostles (who indeed was the woman who had seven demons cast out of her), was not a prostitute, as the recent phantasy book, The Da Vinci Code, tries to pretend. The Scriptures never said that. The apostles never said that. The Church’s tradition never said that. That is an invention of some Europeans in the Middle Ages. That is not an Orthodox understanding, and it is not the truth. Saint Mary Magdalene was not the woman in the Scriptures who was a prostitute, and who was healed. Saint Mary Magdalene was delivered of demons, and that is quite a different thing.
The other lie that is being circulated, associated with The Da Vinci Code (this is terrible ; this is really bad), is that Jesus Christ did not die on the Cross. The lie suggests that He only pretended to die, but by a clever trick, He appeared to rise from the dead ; He got married to Mary Magdalene, lived in the south of France, and had children. That is such an evil story. It is truly evil. It is especially evil in North America because people are so lost, and they have abandoned the Christian Faith. Thus, they easily believe this lie. They are swept away by this lie.
You and I, Orthodox Christians, live in Him who is the Truth, and we know the truth. We know the truth about the Truth. It is our responsibility when people say that they believe what this crazy phantasy book says, to correct them, and say that it is only a phantasy, and not history. The true history, which is demonstrated in the writings of the Church and in some documents, is that Saint Mary Magdalene, after her missionary journeys, settled in Ephesus near the Apostle John the Theologian. There she died and was buried. Her final resting place was in Constantinople, not France. Let us remember that her relics ended up in Constantinople, and one portion of her relics is in the Monastery of Simonos Petra on Mount Athos.
More important than these details about Saint Mary Magdalene, however, is the fact that Jesus Christ truly did die, and rise from the tomb. He rose bodily from the tomb, and we know it because there are so many eyewitnesses to this fact as recorded in the Scriptures. Until this day, there are very many other witnesses of Jesus Christ, who makes Himself known to millions and millions and millions of Christians. Then, finally, we know it because millions and millions and millions of Orthodox Christians in the former Soviet Union were prepared to die for love of Him, for Him who is the Truth, because of their experience of the Risen Jesus Christ.
We, who are Orthodox Christians, must remain in harmony with all these believers who knew, and do know the truth. We know the truth, too, and when we hear these lies being spread, we have to correct them. It is not our responsibility if people do not believe us. That is their problem. We have to speak and correct them.
Now, back to the Myrrh-bearing Women, who were the first to see the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the end of the Gospel, it is said that they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. Would we not be, under those circumstances ? Let us put ourselves in the shoes of those Myrrh-bearing Women going to anoint His Body and finding that He is not there. The stone has been rolled away. At first we might think that someone had stolen Him, and then we find out from the angel that He is risen from the dead. An angel speaks to them and says : “‘Tell His disciples – and Peter – that He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him’”. Would any of us not be shaken up considerably ? I have no idea how I would react under circumstances like that.
Finally, the Myrrh-bearing Women did talk. They did tell the apostles. The Apostle Thomas was not there when the other apostles encountered the Risen Christ. The Apostle Thomas is called “Doubting Thomas”, but he is not alone. We recall that the other apostles did not believe until they saw. The other apostles also had to see. Doubt was good in this case, because when Jesus Christ appeared to the apostles and showed Himself risen from the dead, it confirmed their faith. They were unswervable after that.
The Myrrh-bearing Women, themselves, give to the rest of us an example of what is the way of a Christian. Christ, at the Last Supper, washed His apostles’ feet. And He said that you and I are supposed to live our lives in the same way. We are supposed to be caring for each other, not demanding to be cared for. Our Lord said : “‘I am among you as the One who serves’” (Luke 22:27). All we Orthodox Christians are in this world as servants. Those women came to the Saviour as servants, loving Him, wanting to give Him the last rites, the last anointing as it were, because there was no time when they buried Him to finish the ritual of anointing and properly bury Him. They came because of love and service.
In the whole of the history of the Orthodox Church, who has served as the example of service ? We have deacons, men that are expected to be the living examples of servants for the rest of the Church from the time of Christ. However, it is the women of the Church, following in the footsteps of all those women in the Scriptures, who are truly living out this service.
Women in this parish have held this place together year after year. It is women in all sorts of parishes who, because of love for Jesus Christ, make sure that the church has what it needs. The church is looked after. It is women’s groups who have cared for children and made sure that they had money for education. In many parishes, the women would make sure that they knew the dates of the birthdays and name-days of the children, so that they would send them a card from the church to remind them that they are prayed for and remembered. It was women very often in our past who made sure that people who were in the hospital had a flower or a card, and had someone amongst the women who, in addition to the priest, would go and visit. Yes, it is the job of the priest and the deacon to go and visit. However, often a person lying in a hospital bed will say in his heart : “It is nice that the clergy come to see me, but it is their job. When my brothers or sisters from the parish come to see me, it gives me extra encouragement, extra joy” (or words to that effect). This is the way. It is women who have in the past embodied this.
Brothers and sisters, our life is a life of joy, a life of love, a life of service, a life of living in the Truth. Let us ask the Saviour to renew our hearts in His love, so that having confidence in Him, we will not be afraid to step out, and do and say things that He asks us to do and to say, because He said : “‘I am with you always, even to the end of the age’” (Matthew 28:20). That is not only until the end of the world, as it says in so many Western translations. It is until the end of everything. When we are alive in Him, there can be no end. His Resurrection means for you and for me that when we are alive in His love, there is no end. God is love, and there is no end of His love. Let us, therefore, brothers and sisters, step forward in faith and in love, and let us glorify our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Today, the Lord heals the paralytic by the Sheep Pool. When He heals the paralytic by the Sheep Pool, He tells the man who is healed : “‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’”. It should be emphasised that this man had been paralysed for 38 years, not just a couple of days. For most of his life, he had been lying beside the Sheep Pool waiting for someone to put him into the water when the waters would be stirred up by an angel, so that he could be healed. However, no-one ever did – and then the Saviour came.
The people knew very well who this man was. Nevertheless, they saw him on the Sabbath day, walking, carrying his bed. That is against the Law according to Jewish law because carrying a bed is considered to be work. They did not pay any attention to the fact that this paralysed man was walking normally. They did not, as they ought to have done, give glory to God straight away. Immediately they noticed what was obvious to them – that he was breaking the Law. Of course, when they found out everything, they were angry with the Saviour Himself, too, because He healed on the Sabbath. Healing on the Sabbath was considered by them to be work.
Nowadays, we are in a very crippled condition ourselves. Even though the Sabbath was not done away with after Christ came to us, we do not keep it any more. We do not even keep the Lord’s Day properly any more. Except perhaps for going to church, the Lord’s Day is no different from any other day. Even if people might go to church, very often for them the rest of the day is filled with all sorts of work and all sorts of other busy activities. All this activity fills up and occupies what the Lord gave us as a day of rest for our own good. The Lord, however, always emphasises that : “‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’” (Mark 2:27). That is another thing that was forgotten by the critics of the Saviour. What better day, the Saviour shows us in another place in the Gospel (see Matthew 12:11-13), what better day on which to do good : to heal, to restore people who are created in the image of God ? “This is the day that the Lord has made : let us exult and be glad in it” (Psalm 117:24). What better day, indeed !
Today we have all this brought into sharp focus for us in the healing of the paralytic at the Sheep Pool. We have also the healing by the Apostle Peter of another paralysed man. However, this was not accomplished by the Apostle Peter himself because he always said : “In the Name of Jesus Christ, arise”. He, and all the apostles always did that. They never took credit for themselves for anything that they did. Rather, they always gave glory to God. They always recognised that it was Jesus Christ Himself who was doing whatever was being done through the apostles.
The apostles’ greatness is found in their transparency. It was because the Apostle Peter had become transparent in Christ that when Dorcas (also called Tabitha) had died, and he was called to come, he came and he prayed, and he discerned what was the will of God for Tabitha. It was not that he was praying, girding himself up so as to energise himself by some mysterious technique in order to work a wonder. Not at all. This apostle, or any apostle, never did anything so base or blasphemous as to try to apply some non-existent technique so that by his own will he could, as they used to say in the American south : “Haul off and make a miracle”. It is not like sorcery in any way whatsoever. What he was doing was discerning what was the will of God for Tabitha. When he had listened long enough to understand in his heart that the Lord was going to raise her, the Apostle Peter spoke for the Lord. He told her to get up, and she did. However, it was because the apostle was transparent in Christ’s love that he was able to understand what the Lord directed him to do. Then he did it.
Therefore, why should we not be quiet on the Lord’s Day, and spend time with our families ? We will have just been in the Temple of the Lord, and we will have received the Body and Blood of Christ. In the past, in every monastery I have been in, normally after the Divine Liturgy, those who have been in the Liturgy (and especially those who have received Holy Communion) take a “PLN” (which is a post-liturgy-nap). We take a rest after we have done the work of praising the Lord, and after we have received the Grace of God. When we take this rest, we allow ourselves to rest in Christ, focussed on Christ, and we allow His Grace to renew us inside. Then, getting up, we spend time as quietly as we can. This is the ideal, but the devil comes and tempts us, and stirs us up. If we can, we should spend quiet time afterwards, just being with the Lord, and being with each other in the joy of the Lord. That is the purpose of this day.
In my grandmother’s time, however, on the Lord’s Day people went to church, and then they did nothing. Everything had to be cooked the day before because they would not do anything on Sunday. They drew the window-blinds ; they sat in relative darkness in the house, and if they read anything, they read the Bible, and that was all. It was like this because they chose to obey the Mosaic Law of the Sabbath. It was very strict. This strictness included obedience by force. It was because the obedience was oppressive that my grandmother and grandfather did not go to church for a long time in their lives. It was too strict. On my grandmother’s side it was extremely strict Presbyterian, and on my grandfather’s side it was very strict Baptist, although there was a similar mentality. Their families seemed to be oppressed by the rules, the rules and the rules. It was strict Calvinism. It can be said that they read too much Old Testament and neglected the New Testament. To be sure, they were God-loving people, but rules, rules, rules ! It kept their children away from the church for a while. In Scotland or in southern Ontario in those days it might have worked, but in western Canada it did not work any more. People would not accept those rules.
What they would likely have accepted was the truth of love. They would probably have willingly done those things and they would have been quiet on the Lord’s Day, if it had been understood by them that the parents did the very same things with joy. However, the parents did not transmit that joy very well to the children. If the children had understood that being at peace and being quiet with the Lord, simply being with each other in the Lord was a joyful thing and a good thing, and that one could read something other than only the Bible, that one could read something uplifting, then I am quite sure it would have been all right. Nonetheless, those children never stopped being believers, even though they were rebellious for a time.
Nevertheless, the whole point of everything is not so much how precisely we will observe the Lord’s Day, but rather what sort of person we are. We, as Christians, are loved by God. At least some of us may have been raised in an environment in which God is loved in return. Thus, it is in an atmosphere of loving God that we would have been nurtured. It is a life-giving atmosphere. It is a life-creating atmosphere. This is what we want to provide for each other, even if we are not strictly observing rules about no work. At least on the Lord’s Day in particular, we try to slow down, and we try to keep the Lord in the fore-front of our heart and our memory during that day especially. By doing that, we have hope that when we go to work the next day, the memory of the Lord is going to be with us.
Every day of our lives as Orthodox Christians, we are tested. “Do I love Jesus Christ more than anything ? I know He loves me, but do I love Him ? Is He in the fore-front of my everyday life ? Do I let His love carry me through all the difficulties and the trials of everyday life ?” When people are testing me by snarky remarks or other sorts of teasing remarks, or even by lying, or whatever else people do, when I am confronted with all these difficulties with other human beings, am I listening to my heart to see what the Saviour is guiding me to do and to say in any of these particular situations ? On the other hand, do I forget, and give vent to my negative emotions ? Do I analyse and calculate with my mind, and forget the Saviour ? When I run away with my emotions, and when I am calculating in my mind what is the best thing to do and to say, every time, I am out of kilter. This wild, emotional and tumultuous way is always away from the right way. There might be some good in it, but that is because the Lord makes good out of bad. If I am going to calculate and try to assess something mentally, it has to be with Jesus Christ. If I am going to have my emotions involved in something, those emotions still have to be in, and subject to, Jesus Christ. I have to involve Jesus Christ in everything. If I do, I will be helped. If I do, I will be mostly peaceful. If I do, I will be well-directed. If I do, I will, even without thinking, be able to speak for the Lord, and the Lord will say, through me, what the other person needs to hear. I do not have to think up what someone needs to hear ; the Lord will give it.
However, our hearts have to be open. We can notice, by the way, that when the apostles are doing everything that they are doing, and going everywhere that they are going, and enduring everything that they are enduring, they are doing all of this in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It was Jesus Christ who, when He washed their feet, said that they should be like Him, and do as He does. Therefore, wherever those apostles went, whatever they did (even if they were speaking about Jesus Christ), they always behaved as servants. They were always putting themselves at the disposal of people they were with, and they were helping them in one way or another. The Apostle Peter was definitely helping the paralysed man, and he was helping Tabitha. He was helping not only Tabitha, but all the people around her who depended on her, because she was such a strong believer.
Today, God willing, we are going to be ordaining n to the Holy Diaconate. By how he serves, by how he exercises the particular gifts that God has been giving to him amongst the people, he will be trying to show how Jesus Christ is serving us. He will be trying to show how a Christian is supposed to live. He will also be trying to show how we must serve each other, because serving is the essence of being a Christian. The word “deacon” means servant (actually it means “slave”). We understand in our democratic environment that the word “servant” is nicer. But still, for people who have their noses in the air, being a servant is not at all a pleasant thing. No matter who we are, we Christians must be like Christ : a servant. Deacon n will be exercising this in front of us, and amongst us. It is important for us to pray for him so that we can support him in his serving, so that he will be the best example possible for us of the meaning of Christian service.
Let us, brothers and sisters, do our best to keep our Saviour in the fore-front of our hearts. Let us ask Him to remind us daily (because we do need those reminders) that He is with us, that He loves us, that He is supporting us, that He is educating our hearts and minds, as He promised, and that He will not abandon us. He is always with us, but we need those reminders. Let us ask Him to keep reminding us, so that we will be able to serve Him faithfully and well, with the whole heart and with love, and glorify Him, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Christ is risen
As I go across the country from place to place, I tend to draw attention to the Paschal greeting : “Christ is risen. Indeed He is risen”. The farther we go into the Paschal season, the more uncertain it seems to sound. I generally say that we are too polite as Canadians to respond in a proper way, with some boldness, sense of enthusiasm, and assurance : “Indeed He is risen”. Sometimes when I say : “Christ is risen”, the response is very faint. Ultimately, I think that it is not merely Canadian politeness, shyness, and backwardness about such things that is the problem.
The main problem for us is remembering in our hearts what is the implication of the Resurrection for us. Why is it so important for us ? We are so burdened with cares and distractions every day. There is not any one of us who does not suffer from trials and tribulations in the course of our life. There is not one of us who does not have difficulty with other persons from time to time. There are people that some seem to be able to get along with, but others cannot. There is something about one person or another that does something in the heart – we do not know what it is. If we look into our heart long enough, and ask the Lord long enough, He will reveal what it is, and He will help us, correct, and heal us. However, as long as this sort of irritation or whatever other sort of negative feelings are going on between me and another person, and I do not do anything about it, but just let it be, it is simply going to keep festering, and that’s all there is to it.
We forget to ask the Lord : “What is the matter with me that I am reacting this way ?” “What is there in my heart that has not healed, that I am reacting to such-and-such a person in this way ?” We forget to ask Him. We just live with it. On top of all that, we very often do not even pray for the person that is so inexplicably an irritation for us. Therefore, there are all these factors involved, and many others, in the difficulties of our daily lives. So-and-so does not like me, and I do not know why. This is very common. So-and-so does not like me, and I feel that I am somehow worthless because so-and-so does not like me. What matters is not whether someone or other likes me or not ; it is whether I love that person in my heart that matters. If someone does not like me, that is the responsibility of the person who does not like me. Except for praying for that person, I cannot do anything about it if someone does not like me. I can guard my heart in the love of Jesus Christ, making sure that my heart does in fact respond warmly to the person who does not like me for whatever reason that may be.
We have to be ready to take responsibility, ourselves, for all these situations, and not be immaturely dependant on the approval of, or the liking by someone else. We have to grow up in Christ, and understand that His love for us is unconditional. We have to learn how to love other people with the same unconditional love, and allow the Saviour Himself to look after the deficiencies of inter-human relationships. Human beings are specialists at being deficient in inter-human relationships.
The Lord, the Healer of everyone, straightens everything out, as He does with the Samaritan Woman. In His short conversation with her, not only does He point out that she is living a misfocussed and deceiving life, but that she is off track in how she thinks she is so right in her worship. I have high regard for this woman, first, because she knows her Scriptures – the way she responds tells us that she knows her Scriptures ; second, because her heart is open enough to see immediately what sort of Person is sitting before her and talking with her. She immediately responds and says : “‘Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet’”. He immediately begins to ask her burning questions, and He straightens her out. Immediately, her heart responds with gladness, and she immediately shares her joy and amazement with everyone around her. She says : “‘Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did’”. She recognises Who He is : the One giving her living water that wells up unto life everlasting.
She shares immediately. Such is her sharing, and such is the power of the sojourn for two days of the Saviour and His disciples in Samaria, that a significant response comes from those inhabitants who say to her (as it were) : “Now we truly know. We have encountered Christ personally. Now we truly know Who He is. We do not depend only upon your witness. We know for ourselves”.
There is so much to say about all the words of this Gospel reading. Suffice it to say that Saint Photini allowed the Lord to turn her life about so much, that not only did she become a saint both by her manner of life and by her manner of death, but many of her family became saints too, and martyrs, and so forth. They were strong witnesses for the love of Jesus Christ. Having encountered Him, they embraced Him, and lived in Him.
We, ourselves, after 2,000 years, are still participating in the same sort of experience as Saint Photini and the people of Sychar in Samaria. If we grow up in a Christian family as children, we come to know Who is Jesus Christ from our parents because they speak of Him and live in a certain way. However, there comes a time in our life when our heart has its door opened, and the light goes on, as it were, in our personal encounter with Jesus Christ. We, ourselves, like those Samaritans, come to the point where we say to our parents and our friends, those people who bring us to Christ : “Now I know. It is not simply intellectual any more ; it is not simply a mental process that I understand in the mind that it is right what you say about Jesus Christ. In my heart I know. I have finally encountered Him personally in my heart. I know Him. I love Him myself, and my heart confirms everything you have ever said about Jesus Christ. My heart confirms how you yourself live in the love of Jesus Christ”. This is how we Christians grow up.
I consider Saint Seraphim of Sarov to be one of the most mature Christians of all time, precisely because of how far this response went in his life. He submitted himself to the love of Jesus Christ in everything, and allowed Jesus Christ to remake him, and make him whole. The Saviour is the Saviour. He is the salvation of all because He makes us healthy. If we learned Latin in school (as most people do not get to do any more, which is too bad because we have a deficient understanding of our English language because of that), we would understand that “salvation” comes from the word that means “health”. It does not just mean being rescued. It means “health”. Therefore, when we are in Christ, and we are speaking about salvation, we are speaking about being healthy, whole, one, undistorted, unbroken in His love, alive in His love.
Even though Saint Seraphim was battered and beaten up by events in life, and all bent over, nevertheless he was whole. He was healthy. He said at the end of his life, every day of the year, and to everyone who encountered him : “Christ is risen, my joy”. He could say : “Christ is risen, my joy” to everyone around him because his assurance of the reality was so strong ; his understanding of how important it is to remember the Resurrection every day of our life, was so intense. He understood how easy it is for every human being to get burdened down by everything, and to let the awareness of the importance that Christ is risen fall into the background of our perception of ourselves and of everyday life. By God’s Grace, he was able to say : “Christ is risen, my joy” everyday to everyone he encountered. He said : “my joy”, because by that time in his life, no matter how broken any person might have been that met him, that person was his joy in Jesus Christ. He could see, and with his whole heart understand that everyone that he met was a creature of Christ, and a reflection of Christ, even though the reflection might be dim.
That is why Saint Seraphim is so important for us. That is why it is necessary that we remember his example, and keep the Resurrection of Christ in the fore-front of our minds by God’s Grace and mercy. God grant that our hearts be so full of the Resurrection life and love of Jesus Christ, that we will ourselves be inclined to glorify Jesus Christ, saying : “Christ is risen” to people we meet at any time of the year. (If we say it too often, of course, people are likely going to say that we are putting on airs.) Still, we all need to be reminded through the course of the year that Christ is risen – that He is truly risen. If we become so lax in the way we respond after only a few weeks of celebrating the Resurrection, how much more important is it for us, later in the year, sometimes to hear from a brother or a sister that reassuring and strengthening greeting : “Christ is risen”.
Brothers and sisters, it is a serious matter to live the Christian life because nearly everything around us is aimed at drawing us away. Let us ask the Saviour to keep holding our hand, to keep holding onto our hearts, so that we will not be distracted and fall away, but be faithful, like Saint Photini (Svetlana) and all her relatives who are on our Church calendar. Along with many other holy families, of whom many now are on our calendar as holy examples, let us ask the Lord to keep the fire of our love for Him burning all the time. Then when someone will say to us : “Christ is risen”, our hearts will not hesitate, but instead instinctively and immediately, and with fire, will answer : “Indeed, truly He is risen”. Let us ask the Lord to give us the strength to be faithful to Him every minute of every hour of every day, and glorify Him in our whole life always, and everywhere, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It seems to me that very many people in the world have not caught the importance and the meaning of the last word that we just heard from the mouth of our Saviour : “‘Many that are first will be last, and the last will first’”. Certainly, in the world in which we are living, the first thing that matters is striving to be first, striving to be recognised, striving to be thanked, striving to be comfortable in this world all the time. As a poet said : “I am the captain of my own ship…”.
As long as we have this attitude while we are living our lives, there is nothing clearer under these circumstances than that Christ is in the backseat, not in the front. In the context of that mentality, He is on the backburner or even off the stove, and certainly not on the front burner. The way of the Christian is the way of suffering and service, following precisely in the footsteps of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, and imitating Him in every way. This means living a life of love, which puts the service of God and doing His will first, above everything else, as we allow Him to direct our lives and to look after our needs. When we are doing everything ourselves and showing how competent we think we are at acquiring everything we need, we are saying, in effect : “I am afraid of the Lord. I do not trust Him to look after me. I do not trust Him to provide”.
It is important for us, Orthodox Christians in North America, to do our best to live in accordance with what is the foundation of the Orthodox way, however that may work out in our lives. Not one of us is the same, and we are not all called to be monks ; but neither are all monks, by any means, the same. Monks or not, all Christians are to have loving Christ and serving Christ as our first priority. Even monks and nuns often do not succeed so well at this. However, still it is important for us, when we wake up in the morning, to try our best to put the Lord, His service, and doing His will first. Of course, we must allow Him to show us how He wants us to live that out. He is not asking every one of us to live in some basement suite or some sort of shack somewhere. He does expect us to live with dignity in this world as well as we can. Nevertheless, because He loves us and gives us everything that we have, He expects us, because of love, in the same way to acknowledge that He gave us everything, and that we owe Him everything. We have to live our lives in gratitude accordingly.
Today, we are celebrating the memory of all the saints, both known, and unknown. It is interesting that there are actually some people who think we have too many saints because our Church calendar is so full, and there are so many names on that calendar. They seem to think that we should be paring it down, and simplifying it all. The fact is that God calls every last one of us, everyone, and not merely some chosen few. The ones who are on the calendar are the ones that are stronger examples, somehow. It could be said that those are the ones that the Lord has set apart as examples for us. We cannot even say that the fact that they are on the calendar is our doing. It is the Lord’s doing that they come to be listed on the calendar.
Not even all the saints are on the calendar of the Orthodox Church throughout the world. There is a list of saints that is in use generally throughout the whole Orthodox world, but there are plenty of other saints that are more locally known. Then there are some saints that are known only in their diocese, and others that are known only in their parish. There are some saints that are known only by a few people. There are plenty of saints altogether unknown to us.
We do not and cannot have too many saints. We have lots, but not enough. There might be enough saints if every one of us were holy, and if the whole world were holy. Then it would be enough, I suppose, but then I am not God to say that. That would be my guess.
It is important for us to remember that being a saint is not being a “professional Christian”. It is the average way, the normal way a Christian should be. We, who are not like that, are far below average. There are many ways of being holy. Some people become recognised as being holy because they die for the sake of Christ. Some people are known to be holy by other people because their faith has been put to the test. They have been tortured in one way or another, and they do not give up. In fact, I think a few of them may have weakened at some moment, but they came back, confessing fully and repenting fully, and they are still named on our world-wide calendar. However, the normal way for us all to be holy is to be trying to live the life of simple, straightforward, honest Christian love and service. Therefore, let us try to remember this when we are living our lives.
Now for the travelogue. For the past two and a half weeks, I have been in Ukraine, leading a pilgrimage of 22. It turned out that many people did not know about this pilgrimage, because for some strange reason it was not advertised in our Messenger. That is because of temptations that befall us before and after any pilgrimage, and even during it. This sort of thing always happens. One cannot go on a pilgrimage without being tested at first, tested during, and tested afterwards. This testing is not from God, but from below. During this pilgrimage, certain parts of our anatomy were very much put to the test, because we spent up to thirteen hours in a day, sitting in an old bus that was not air-conditioned (except for opening the windows). This old bus was nick-named by Metropolitan Onouphry of Chernivtsi the “Pakistan Express”. Mercifully, this time, unlike all the other times, there was cool weather for most of our stay (in the teens, and the twenties). There was frequent rain, and we did not have to live constantly in our personal, private sauna there (not that a sauna is anything to complain about – but 24 hours a day is a bit heavy).
The pilgrimage began in Kyiv. While I was participating in necessary meetings, the pilgrims went to venerate the saints in the Far Caves. After that, we went to the Vvedensky Monastery in Kyiv, which is the Monastery of the Meeting of the Lord. This monastery was founded after the Crimean War, about 150 years ago or so, by Saint Dimitra. She was the widow of a warrior who was killed in the Crimean War, and she was a Bulgarian. After the death of her husband, Dimitra moved to Kyiv, became a nun, and then received the blessing to establish her own community. Because she had some friends in the imperial court in St Petersburg, she got extra funding to help this along. During communist times, the monastery served as a jail for the army, so naughty soldiers spent time in this monastery building. One of the priests, who was serving in one of our dioceses, had been given a discipline in this jail when he was a young soldier and not 100 per-cent obedient. However, in that particular army, 100 per-cent obedience does not necessarily mean that one would therefore escape from that sort of discipline. Therefore, when anyone might see an icon here in this Temple of a nun holding a church in her hand, it will be understood that that is Saint Dimitra of the Vvedensky Monastery in Kyiv. Her relics are in the basement of that Temple. That Temple is Braille-friendly because the iconostasis and the icons are carved in marble, bas-relief.
I will give you a very short account of the pilgrimage. After Kyiv, we drove to Sumy, which is about 300 kilometers to the east of Kyiv, very close to the Russian border in the diocese of Sumy and Akhtirke. We served Vigil for Ascension in Sumy, and the Divine Liturgy in a village an hour and a half bus ride outside of Sumy to the west called Romne. In the evening of Ascension, we went back to Sumy, and then we drove south for an hour to Akhtirke, the second cathedral city of this diocese. There, in the evening we served a Moleben to the Mother of God. In all the places that we were, there are wonder-working icons of the Mother of God. There are many of these wonder-working icons of the Mother of God in Ukraine. Why ? I believe that it is because the people need the encouragement and strength of these signs of the Lord’s love. We need encouragement and reminders in the course of our suffering here. Through the Grace of the Holy Spirit come wonders from these icons : sometimes oil is streaming from them.
From Sumy, we went to Romne. In order to do that, we had to go back through Kyiv, because Kyiv is the only place on the Dnieper River where there are bridges. Having few bridges is an old, long-standing defense tactic, and it helped to minimise the damage of the Nazis on that territory in World War II. The Ukrainians have not changed it to this day. There are still no bridges on the Dnieper River, except in Kyiv. There are not many bridges there, so getting through Kyiv takes quite a bit of time. Kyiv now has 3,500,000 people. For Sunday Divine Liturgy, we went from Romne to Pochaiv. I, and the subdeacon from Edmonton who was accompanying me, had gone there on Saturday to serve Vigil with the monks. In 1994, when I first went to Pochaiv, there were sixty monks. Now there are over 300. That is an example of how life seems to be improving, spiritually speaking, in Ukraine. On the other hand, we might just as well forget it in terms of material improvement. Except for the rich people, it is still a hard life economically. Nevertheless, spiritually, life is really mushrooming there ; Orthodox Christian life is really mushrooming.
Vigil was the typical Vigil for Saturday night for them (four and a half hours in length). Does that sound intimidating ? Well, it is not all that bad. It is not all that bad even for the bishop who might have to anoint many of the 5,000 in the congregation. This anointing alone can take half an hour in itself. It could take the bishop right until the end of Matins (which they serve with no shortcuts). He cannot lose any time on each anointing – there is no conversation. I was not alone doing the anointing. They counted, and said I had anointed about 800 people by the time they dragged me out. However, what I did not notice was that there were six priests also anointing on the side, and each of them had anointed 700 or 800 people too. Those monks are very clever and they know how to save the enthusiastic bishop from himself. (He wanted to anoint everyone.)
Then we went to Chernivtsi, which is about 250 kilometers to the south. We got there rather late because no bishop can get away from Pochaiv very quickly. There are plenty of people to talk to, including the parents of Matushka Irina Melnyk. The local pray-ers pray to God there, and they do so in order to protect the monastery from the dangers of the take-over attempts that sometimes happen on the part of the Autocephalists and the Uniates there.
In Chernivtsi, Metropolitan Onouphry always welcomes us with love and open arms. In fact, this is the province of Ukraine which has produced the greatest number of Orthodox immigrants to Canada in the last 100 years. However, it is important to understand for the sake of information, that the province of Chernivtsi did not belong to Ukraine until World War II when Stalin annexed it from Romania, to which it had always belonged. The diocese of Chernivtsi is still packed with Romanian speakers. In our own diocese there are quite a few Romanian customs that people do not necessarily pay attention to, because we think that all Bucovinians are Ukrainians. The main part of our inheritance in this diocese is from this province of Chernivtsi.
Thanks to Metropolitan Onouphry, a few people went in a mini-van with a Romanian-speaking guide to Sochava, Radaouts, and Voronets in one day. They learned how to drive fast in that van, and they also learned that even if visas are not required to cross that border back and forth, nevertheless it is not so easy to cross that border. The reason they very much wanted to go this time was that Matushka Dianne Kennaugh, thinking that she was Austrian in ancestry, had done some research on part of her family, and found that they all came from Radaouts, and from a village close to Sochava. They did some investigations, and found that there was no-one left from the family, and whoever else was left there had been given a “vacation”, shall we say, to go somewhere else. Stalin was good at that, and so were other Communist regimes good at giving “vacations”, or “tickets to exotic places” like Tobolsk, Vladivostok, Arkhangelsk. They had the opportunity to venerate the relics of Saint John the New of Sochava. Although I have been there, I never got to venerate these relics, so they are more blessed than I am. We never know how God can bless us. He blesses us in many ways that we do not expect, but about what we think that we want now, He often says : “Not now”. We probably do not know why until later sometimes (if we ever really know). The Lord knows why. They were very blessed by the Holy Spirit, and very much uplifted by the whole experience of going into Romania.
After that, we went to the second and most serious part of our pilgrimage (which included not only going to holy places). We visited a village called Kolomeya in which there is a 400-year-old Temple built out of wood, from whose walls sometimes comes myrrh. People are sometimes delivered from demons and diseases just by touching the walls.
Then we began to visit orphanages. For the last three times that I have gone, this pilgrimage has always involved encountering orphanages, and the poor in one way or the other. People who are on the pilgrimage come armed with suitcases full of things that are necessary for needy children, and for some of the adults, too. Orphanages over there are nothing like what we expect of an orphanage here. They have only a minimum of absolutely everything. Many of these orphanages are operated by people who are not, shall we say, those most guided by Christian principles and honesty. Things that should go to the children often go to them and to their families. However, we are concerning ourselves as well as we can with people that are the most trustworthy. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, children from these government-run orphanages are told goodbye, and that is all there is – bye-bye. At that age, the doors open, and – bye-bye.
As a result of this, terrible things happen to these children, and the jails are full of such people. When the children are ejected from the orphanages at the age of 15, they encounter predatory people ready to pounce on these helpless victims. Garbage bins are full of such children who have been killed one way or another. It is very popular for people who run prostitution to snare the young people as soon as they come out of these orphanages. We learned to our horror that at the recent World Cup, there was a whole village set up beside the places where the athletes lived, and there were 4,000 girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who had been taken there from Ukraine and Romania for the purpose of sexual slavery. Annually, a hundred thousand young women are removed from Ukraine because of this sort of slavery. Five thousand of them are in Canada, it turns out, at the present. We, who think that we are so nice, are not so squeaky clean as we think.
This is how denial and deception play with us. We cannot simply look down on the weaknesses of other people. We have to be prepared to say, as my Mother used to say : “There, but for the Grace of God, go I”. We have it good in our lives. We are comfortable, and that is our downfall, because we think that we are so self-sufficient and we do not need to pay attention to the suffering of other people. Those 5,000 and more girls brought to Canada as slaves (and there are probably boys in the same boat) were brought here with false promises of a real job, and not because they wanted to enter this way of living. They were living lives in poverty that Canadians cannot comprehend. They had no one, because they were already abandoned. How can we help them here ? We can remember that everything is not simple, or how it appears to be. We can pray for the captives, and remember that these are captives, also. We can look these persons in the face when we see them, treat them as human beings, and pray for them. If the Lord puts any of them in our lives, we can do what the Lord gives us to do for such a person. The way of the Lord is the practice of love. Again, as my Mother used to say : “Practice what you preach”. Therefore, asking the Lord to help us do just this, let us glorify Him : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is good for us to remember what n had to say last night regarding the way in which the Lord has enabled human beings in the course of history to know Him, if they will to do so. It is a question of whether the heart will listen to the Lord. Will the heart recognise the one God as the Creator of all, and try to listen to Him, and be obedient to Him ? As n was outlining last night, this was apparently the case in early China, because the nature of the prayers of the Emperor demonstrate a recognition of God as a loving God. However, the Chinese nation, as well as anyone else, got lost. We got lost in our own passions, lost in doing our own will instead of God’s will. That is where the problems always have arisen for us : doing our own will, and not God’s will.
The Apostle Paul today is speaking about how the Lord in His creation reveals Himself to us. Are we, ourselves, prepared to accept the revelation ? The fulness of this revelation came in the Incarnation of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. In the context of our self-deforming, it is very difficult for us to accept God’s love as it presents itself. As human beings seem always to do, we, using our own intellect, think of a “better way”, somehow. Usually we do not bother to pay any attention to the Lord and to His will, and we do not actually accept Him as Who He presents Himself to be. Instead, we reinvent Him. That is, for instance, what Arius did, what Nestorius did, and others have done ; and especially in these days, this is what many people are doing. They are remaking Christ so that He will fit their idea of what seems easier to take. However, when we do this, our troubles multiply – they do not get less. It is our responsibility, especially as North Americans trying to witness for Christ here in North America, to put Christ first always, at all times, and everywhere. We must let our hearts be open to Him, to His direction, and try to be ready to follow His will, and not what we think might be a “better idea”.
God having His will with me, sometimes, sends me from place to place, it seems. Two weeks ago, I was in Ukraine, serving in a series of little villages outside of Lviv in western Ukraine. This is an area where the Orthodox Church (especially the canonical Orthodox Church) is under a great deal of pressure. Fifteen years ago, all the canonical Orthodox churches (except one) in the whole diocese were taken away from the parishioners and given to someone else. That is because of the way the government operates. At that time, all churches belonged to the government, and the government could do whatever it liked. It still does. All those buildings were taken away, and then the canonical Orthodox faithful had to start over from nothing.
Within a few years, some arrangements were made with Ukrainian Catholics. In a few of the parishes in these little villages, Orthodox and Greek Catholics alternate, taking turns on Sundays. One Sunday the Orthodox go first, followed by the Greek Catholics ; the next Sunday the Greek Catholics go first, followed by the Orthodox. However, in most of the places, they had to find a piece of land, and that was not easy. Then they had to get permission to build, and, finally, they had to build. A week ago, I was serving in a little church on the edge of a town called Chervonograd close to the Polish border. In Chervonograd, there are already two parishes that have been re-established. The one in which I was serving was right on the edge of the town. They were very creative. The building may look strange to us. It looks as though it were part of a ship, a sailing ship without the masts. It is amazing. When we go inside the Temple, we feel as though we are in the hold of a ship. It is a very literal way of expressing through architecture the metaphor of the Church as being a ship. Usually, we expect the church to look like an upside-down ship, representing the ark of salvation. Sometimes the Temple can be cruciform, but the basic idea is that the Church is a ship. The English word “nave” (the middle part of the church) comes from navis, the Latin word for ship.
Because their parishioners had found sponsors who had money, in some other places much bigger Temples had been built, more in line with what we would expect, with domes and cruciform shape. Nevertheless, the way the architecture was done in Chervonograd was very interesting and pleasing. Each of these Temples is unique, with a combination of the traditional shape of the church with domes, and with exterior decoration which makes it look somehow more modern. A person simply has to go to Ukraine and see this, although I think we do not only have to go to Ukraine. I am quite sure that in other countries where building is going on, similar combinations of traditional architecture and modern taste and ideas go together very well. It is the inspiration by the Grace of the Holy Spirit that makes these things possible, because people in these places obviously love Jesus Christ above all. They were willing to listen to the Lord saying to them (as it were) : “Buy here ; talk with this person ; do this ; do that”, and they did. They were able to rebuild. They were willing to listen to the Lord, and listen to Him say to them : “It must be done ; it can be done ; it will be done ; just do it. Do not be afraid – just do it”.
In this building, it is much better than before, because you do not have to take down and set up every Sunday. It is not yet your permanent home, but nevertheless, you have come a long way. You have a visible presence in a good place, and there is a sign that can be seen from the street. The church can be found now, and people do not have to depend on anyone else. You have made a big step forward. The Lord will show you the next step. However, I say to you as the Lord says to the apostles today : “‘Follow Me’”. Immediately they followed Him. Let your hearts listen to the Lord, also, so that when He speaks to you and says : “This has to be done ; it must be done ; it will be done, because I am with you” – then just do it. Do not be afraid. Whatever the Lord is leading you to do next is always scary, and often does not make sense. However, if you do what the Lord says to do, it happens, because He is blessing and He opens the doors.
Through the prayers of all the saints of North America and all the saints of China, may the Lord give you the strength and the ability to hear Him. May you continue growing and building and increasing the Body of Christ here in n, to the glory of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is hard for us, generally, to take the words of the Lord about the lilies of the field and the sparrows and live by them. However, the fact is that this is how the Lord created us to be. If we are not like that, we are far short of who we were created to be. If we have not come to this, we are far short of the sort of person we can become.
We have on our calendar many saints, including Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, whose memory we are keeping today. He was one of those saints, in fact, who in a strange way, I think, did come to live in accordance with this Gospel passage. He was so much like this that people called him a Fool-for-Christ. He behaved in ways that were unusual. In the first place, he went about in bare feet quite a bit. For Orthodox bishops that is generally a no-no. If people do not laugh at the bishop for going about in bare feet, they will criticise him thoroughly for doing so. However, I still remember almost forty years ago in Vancouver when a subdeacon at Holy Resurrection Church was telling me about his encounter one time with Saint John. In San Francisco there was a Church feast-day, and when the Archbishop came to the Temple, there were not very many people there at all. And so, in his mantya, he went out of the Temple with his pastoral staff, and he walked along the street until he came to a hotel. In this hotel there was a ballroom, and a large number of the parishioners were celebrating the Feast ahead of things somehow, in their own order. They were celebrating in this ballroom but they were not in church. Saint John came, I am told, and with his mantya, stood there in the door, and thumped the floor with his pastoral staff a couple of times. People saw him standing there. Everything stopped. He turned around, went back to the Temple, and people followed after him. He did not have to say so many things, but he certainly lived by Whom he followed.
He followed Jesus Christ. He suffered much in the course of his life. He was in exile more than once. Yet, no matter how painful and difficult the circumstances of his life might have been, he continued to be faithful to Jesus Christ, as he looked to Christ to supply everything, just as the Gospel says. The Saviour did supply everything for him. This is a man who died not long ago.
Why should we be able to ask so many things and expect so many things from the Lord ? The answer is that our relationship with Him is all love. Our very life comes from Him. Everything comes from Him and His love despite the times when we yield to the temptation to think that we are the source. It is still because He blessed me to have it that I have anything. Everything comes from Him, beginning with my life. My life comes from Him because He loves me. Everything in creation is the result of His love. Everything, whether we accept it or not, whether we reject it or not, whether we co-operate or not, everything that is (not only on this planet) is the product of His love. Everything is created because God loves it into existence.
Our problem mainly is that we listen to the Tempter. We get preoccupied with ourselves. We say, in response to this Gospel : “Am I not supposed to be taking some initiative here, and doing something myself ?” The answer is : “Well, yes, you are”. However, taking this initiative has to be preceded by asking the Lord : “What is Your will ? I want to do Your will. I love You ; I know that You love me, and I want to do Your will about everything. What do You want me to do ?”
There are, and have been, many people whose hearts have been so connected in love with the Lord that they instinctively knew what was God’s will. Everything that they did bore fruit because it was God’s will. They knew that it was the right way to go. However, if we are not so attuned to the Lord in our hearts as all that, we can still open our hearts towards the Lord when we are faced with choices, and first ask Him the right thing to do.
The Lord does provide. I just heard this week about a certain person who does not have very much of an income at all. However, this person had given away quite a bit of money out of love and care for other people. Within a month, the Lord had re-supplied it all. This person is living on next to nothing, and yet the Lord does look after this person. There are many monks and nuns in this diocese who are living precisely on that basis. They are serving Him. They are helping other people. The Lord does look after them, and He supplies whatever is necessary for life.
Knowing what is the will of the Lord is a very direct product of living in the Scriptures, living in the Gospel. That is why it is important for us to read the Scriptures all the time. The Lord shows us how to live our Christian life by the things that are written in the Scriptures from 1 Moses [Genesis] to the Apocalypse. He shows us how we are supposed to live. He shows us how He loves us. He shows us how we are supposed to behave towards each other. He shows us how we are supposed to live our lives in thanksgiving and in service.
We have Fathers and Mothers in the Orthodox Church who have written many things which give us examples of how we are supposed to be living in response to God’s love. They were able to write what they wrote, not because they wanted to write what they wrote, but because circumstances demanded that they write what they wrote. There was a specific need that demanded that they write, and so they wrote. However, they wrote out of their experience of life in the Scriptures, and life in communion in their hearts with the Lord. As a result, what they wrote for us (I guess one could say as long ago as the second century) is still used by us to help us keep on track.
Living the Orthodox Christian life is not concerned with rules. Rather, it is concerned with love in Christ, with Christ. It is concerned with coming to know God’s will and doing it, so that we always know what is the right thing to do. Ultimately, we do not even have to ask, because our heart tells us right away. I am not saying these things because of having my own experience. Rather, I am saying these things because I have seen it so much already. I have not only read it or heard people speak about it. God is merciful. He has let me see many examples of this, and therefore I can share it with everyone (except that I have a sneaking suspicion that many of you here have seen much of the same thing already in the course of your lives). At a young age, I had not seen very much myself, but it was not long before the Lord began to expose me to such people.
The Lord loves us. It is His desire that we be protected, that we live lives that are productive, that are fruitful, that are healthy, that are constructive, that are supportive to other people. As He gives life to us, we give life to other people in Him. Let us ask the Lord to give us more courage, hope, and strength in the midst of all of the difficulties that we endure in the course of our lives. Let us ask Him to enable us never to take our eyes off Him, so that our hearts will never be distracted from Him, and that the whole substance of our lives always will serve Him and glorify Him in everything, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
When the Apostle Paul is speaking to us today about how we should be living correctly, and the consequence of living incorrectly, he does not get a very good hearing from most people these days. However, what he says is the absolute truth. He says that when people are living in self-will and licentiousness, the result of it is death. Primarily, the root of it all is their turning their backs on the Lord, and doing whatever they think best and not consulting the Lord at all, but just going according to the winds that blow in their minds. If this were my ancestors speaking to me, under those circumstances in which I find myself very frequently (although not quite as frequently as in my greater youth), they would say : “That is why the wind is blowing in your mind, because there is nothing there”. Ultimately, there is a vacuum if Christ is not at the centre of everything. He is our anchor. He is our sense of direction. He is our Everything. If He is not our Everything in life, we are empty-headed, and blown about by every wind of who-knows-what. Ultimately, the result of that is spiritual death. All sorts of terrible things could happen to us.
Often we are going our own way. We invent our own direction. We pay attention to some psychologist or psychiatrist or some philosopher or some popular, money-making speaker or some theorist. Such a person tries to make things appear to be rosy, and the sensible way to go. However, without Christ, we go nowhere at all. As I have said many times throughout my life : “The reason that psychiatrists are so much needed and that they can make a living is that people do not have the real source of healing at hand. If it is at hand, it is ignored”. We are weird people, because the Saviour, who is our Life, who is our Everything, is entirely capable of straightening out everything in our life. We see how He healed the servant of the centurion. We see how He raised people from the dead. We see how He does everything. We see how He heals until this very day. We are somehow afraid of the Lord, who loves us, and is with us, and assures us of His tender, loving care for us. We do not trust Him to do what He says He will do. Instead, we will often turn to everyone and everything else first.
Another example of this is what it is like to go to confession, and what it is like for a priest or a bishop to hear confession. Long ago, when I was in seminary, Father Schmemann said : “People often erroneously think that it must somehow be exciting for a priest to hear the confessions of all sorts of different people”. However, he said : “Such people are absolutely wrong. It is boring. It is boring because people’s sins are all the same. It is all repetition”.
Everyone seems to comes to confession thinking that he or she is committing some unique new sin, and it is so horrible. Well, yes, it is horrible. Sin is horrible. However, there is nothing unique about any of it. It is hardly likely that there is any sin that any one of us can come up with that someone else has not already committed somewhere, sometime. In normal parish life, the priest who is hearing these confessions finds that confessions are all variations on a theme. Over and over and over again, he is hearing the same thing from which people are suffering. Human beings are all approximately the same, regardless of how we like to think otherwise. We are quite the same. Thus we say to ourselves : “Why is it that I keep coming to confession over and over and over again for the same things in one form or another ? It is always the same thing. I am bored with my own confession”. This has to do with the fact that we do not truly grasp in our hearts yet that the Lord is the Lord of everything in my life. All this boringness and repetitiveness is sin. It is all because I forget.
What am I forgetting ? I forget to listen to the Lord first. I listen to my wayward, confused, conflicting thoughts first, instead. I do not often ask the Lord about what is the right thing to do. I just go ahead and do whatever seems good according to my thoughts, according to my logic, according to some book I read, according to some television or radio programme I saw or heard recently, according to what my neighbour said to me over tea recently. I am influenced by all these instead of remembering to ask the Lord first. Even if I do ask the Lord first, I still find myself having to go to confession because I still do not hear Him properly. I still do not live as well as I ought to live, in accordance with His will. We all ought to have the sensibility and sensitivity about trying to live in accordance with the Lord’s will. The confessions of holy people are very profound, albeit that they might be simple, direct and very straightforward. The confession may boil down to sorrow for having disappointed Him who is truly our Everything in life. After all, we love Him with our whole being, and we want to please Him with our whole being. Nevertheless, we know that we fall short. It does not matter how holy a person can become. The holiest of persons is going to recognise how far he or she still is from living in accordance with the fulness of the love of Jesus Christ. That person will know how much better it could still be.
By the way, very often people are misunderstanding what it is to live in the Kingdom of Heaven. Our society, particularly, is full of all sorts of crazy ideas leading us to think that living in the Kingdom of Heaven is somehow static. The phantasy is that once we have “made it” to the Kingdom of Heaven, we merely sit around on fluffy clouds and have a nice time. That is the way the Muslim think about Heaven. They envisage that we do nothing but sit around and eat grapes and other delicacies ; we indulge ourselves in unmentionable activities and we participate in one unending, eternal party. This childish phantasy is, to my mind, extremely boring. That is not how Christians think about Heaven. That is not the way of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Kingdom of Heaven certainly has to do with the banquet, the heavenly banquet of the Lord in which we are participating here today. It is very different from how the Muslim have distorted it. Feeding on the Lord’s presence, living in His love, we endlessly, endlessly, continue to grow in love and dynamism. God is unknowable, because He is so great, but He brings us into Himself in His Son as members of His Body. In the Body of Christ we are taken into the Holy Trinity, and we are able in love to grow up in this love which never ends, and always changes, always continues to mature and grow. It is never boring. It is never static. It is always alive, and more alive. If we want to read a nice allegory about how this can be, let us have a look at C S Lewis. His Narnia books, and The Great Divorce, particularly, give some good ideas about how it might be (although it is all allegory). We cannot expect the Kingdom of Heaven to be just as he writes.
There is nothing static about the love of Jesus Christ. The love of Jesus Christ is always providing us with surprises : how He leads us unexpectedly over and over again. We who went to Ukraine on a pilgrimage recently, encountered this many times over in those fourteen days : how the Lord knew exactly what we needed, and what the people there needed. He put us together at the right time in the right places in ways that we could never have organised if we had even tried (even with the strongest computers). We could never have done it, but the Lord did it, and continues to do it all the time. In our daily lives here, He is doing it. However, we have to have the eyes of our hearts open to see and to comprehend what is going on, and glorify and give thanks to Him for it quickly, immediately. The more we are able to recognise the activity of His love surprising us with His tender compassion, and the intimacy with which He is concerned in our lives, the more we are ready to recognise this and give thanks, then the more we are ready to grow up in Him. As a result of this, we are all the more able with joy and divine power to share with others the Lord’s tender care for us.
The Lord’s tender care shows itself today in the healing of the centurion’s servant. The Lord’s tender care shows itself in the Gospel passage that we just read a couple of days ago about the healing of the Apostle Peter’s mother-in-law (see Mark 1:30, 31). The Lord’s love shows itself in all sorts of different ways in the Gospel. His love also shows itself in different ways in our lives here, today, now. This is the way that leads to life, as the Apostle Paul was saying in the Epistle reading today. This is the way that leads to the health and the stability that enable us to live through the worst sort of turmoil and suffering in life. This is how we get to know that the Lord is with us. He is strengthening us, and He will see us through no matter what, because He loves us. He wants us to live with Him and be alive in Him. He does not abandon us. He does not abandon me. He does not abandon this community. He does not abandon even this city as crazy as it seems to be becoming. He gives us work to do. We Orthodox Christians must remind people of Who is their end, and what it is that they are looking for. He gives us as a sign of hope and life to everyone around us.
Brothers and sisters, let us not leave ourselves open to the accusation of my ancestors to me about empty-headedness and its results. Instead, let our hearts, our minds and our whole being be full of Jesus Christ. Let us hope on Jesus Christ, and live in His love, and glorify Him in eternity, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
When it comes to being a human being, a regular, recognisable human being, there are some standard characteristics that we generally expect to see in such a person, regardless of gender. It is into these characteristics that we normally grow up. If we are really going to be true human beings, then we are going to grow up as human beings patterning ourselves after the most perfect of them all, Jesus Christ Himself, and His Mother, the Theotokos, also. The foundation of that identification is love, and a perfect relationship between this human being and God and His will. As we know from the Scriptures, and as we also know from our inheritance, God is love (see 1 John 4:8, 16). Everything about God and our relationship with Him has to do with this love. We live out and express this love in one way or another.
In the Gospel reading today, we heard about the two demoniacs who are so fierce that no-one could pass by them. These demoniacs are people who became possessed in one way or the other by the devil, and they were living at the very best an irrational life. However, this was far worse than a merely irrational life. It was a completely distorted life. It was a twisted life, a caricature of human life, we might say, because their behaviour was the opposite of how a normal human being should be behaving, and especially a Christ-imitating human being.
When our Lord heals the men, they are instantly restored to being normal human beings. This is like the deliverance that we hear about during the course of the liturgical year in the Gospels of Mark and Luke of a particular demoniac in this region being healed and being restored to his own right mind. Saint John Chrysostom passes to us the apostolic understanding that the other two Gospels focus on the fiercer of the two possessed men rather than present a supposed second occasion. There are other persons in the Scriptures who are being delivered from possession by the devil and being restored to their normal, integral personality. They were restored to a personality in harmony with the Lord, a personality in harmony with God’s will, a personality in harmony even with itself. We know that it is highly irregular for swine to be raised anywhere on Jewish territory. However, human beings have always been like this, and it is important for us to understand that. Yes, the law is the law, and the rule is the rule, but people often take the law into their own hands, regardless. In this particular out-of-the-way region hidden from the sight of most people, swine were being raised.
When the legion of demons enter the swine, immediately the little pigs, that were going about their normal business as pigs do, go insane, jump in the lake and drown. That is a very, very clear illustration of what happens when we separate ourselves from the Lord, and when we play around with the powers of darkness and say to ourselves : “I want to do it my way, and I am going to try to make the Lord conform to my way” (instead of the other way around). As soon as I do it my way (without consulting the Lord first), and I go in a contrary direction, already I am becoming like those demoniacs and like those pigs. I am behaving irrationally. I am giving myself over into the hands of the powers of darkness when I do this. For you and for me, the only way we can live, is to live in harmony with God’s will (in other words, in harmony with His love), and to live out His love.
Today, we are celebrating the memory of the Fathers of the first six Ecumenical Councils. Very many people in our western cultures like to speak about these Fathers as though, in the course of those several centuries and their various Councils, they were developing Christian doctrine on the basis of some logical development (or even worse, on the basis of some philosophical principles). Those Councils had nothing to do with doctrinal development. We Orthodox do not understand development in this way. In the Orthodox Church there is no such thing. There is no such thing as change when it comes to what we believe about God, what we believe about our Saviour, Jesus Christ, what we believe about the Church, and what we believe about all creation in this relationship. There has been no change.
Therefore, why these Councils and why these definitions ? These Councils came about precisely because, in various periods, there were people who had it in mind that they could come up with a better way to say things so that others could understand and grasp things. In their attempt, they distorted everything and ultimately made people crazy. Such thinkers were people who were falling away from true understanding and from living in harmony with what God revealed Himself to be – which is the point of everything. God reveals Himself to you and to me. It is for us to live in response to that revelation of who He says He is. Who are we to tell Him to be different ? Even until this very day, the Lord reveals Himself in the same way to believers everywhere.
As the Epistle says, He is the same : “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever”. The Greek, however, says “unto the age”, rather than “forever”. God is the same. His love is the same. However, as Arius did, there remain today many who think that they can try to redefine Him and to remould Him according to their limited logic. That is why the first Council was convoked. Arius tried to suggest that Jesus Christ is not the uncreated Son of God, but rather some sort of creature who volunteered to be the “sacrificial lamb”, as it were. However, that is not at all the meaning of the Incarnation. If the Son of God Himself had not done what He did, reconciliation with the Father would not be possible. Yet we know that reconciliation with the Father did happen because that has been our experience in common for 2,000 years.
There were others also who came along and thought that they had clever ideas. There were people such as Nestorius, who had a hard time accepting that Mary could be the Mother of God. He tried to change her into being merely the Mother of Christ, thereby reducing Christ Himself. It is very complicated. It is more than just a little bit confusing when people are thinking, thinking and thinking and trying on the basis of their criteria, logic, and philosophies, to make sense of the Christian Faith. The tail cannot wag the dog, and the cart cannot go in front of the horse.
Our experience of Jesus Christ, our experience of His revelation of Himself to us must, absolutely must, lead, define and determine everything. This is what the Fathers were doing in all those seven Councils (actually there were eight, but the eighth has not been recognised universally yet). The Fathers were listening to the Holy Spirit as well as they could. Sometimes the listening had to persist during a meeting which lasted longer than a year in order to come to a true understanding of Who is Jesus Christ. They were asking themselves : “What is our Tradition of Him, and how can we with words as clearly as possible, speak about it ?” That is what theology is. That is all that theology is – speaking in clear, correct words (and one would have to say even in inspired words) about our experience of God.
Nowadays, people are speaking about theology as though it were something that can be learnt in some university somewhere. People go and get a degree, and then call themselves a “theologian”. In calling themselves theologians, such people can very often be heard to say strange things about Jesus Christ, things that do not connect with Him, and our 2,000 years’ experience at all. What sort of theology is this ? It is only philosophy and egocentric idea-systems trying to dress themselves up as theology. Very few people can speak about theology, and those are persons, generally, who do not have a university degree to prove that what they are saying is correct. Papers mean nothing.
Therefore, what is our call from the Lord in the context of these swine, and also in the context of the Epistles today ? Our responsibility as Orthodox Christians is in the context of the love of Jesus Christ, and in living in obedience to the love of Jesus Christ. Our responsibility is to become human beings as closely resembling Jesus Christ as possible. That is also what we should be trying to do as a believing community, as a Christian family : trying to live as closely as we can to the example of Jesus Christ. In doing so, we become an example to the people around us of what is sanity, true sanity, true humanity.
People seem to like to make fun of us Orthodox Christians, however. For us, time is a little bit flexible (sometimes very flexible). Food seems to be an obsession (not that we want to eat so much, but we want to feed others so much). We want to give people food, and we want to offer them hospitality. In all our Orthodox cultures, the faithful practically kill themselves trying to give hospitality to people who come to their homes. This is all the expression of Christian love.
There are still people alive in Canada who remember when very many more Canadians (even Anglo-Canadians) behaved more like that. However, probably since I was about twenty or so, that way of living has catastrophically fallen away from most Canadians. Canadians in general have fallen in on themselves. They tend to look to themselves and they are afraid of other people. It is for us to show the example of how human beings are supposed to live. We do this by not being afraid of other people who are created in God’s image. People are a wreck because they are broken. We can show them how they can be healed.
That is our responsibility. It is not so small, and it is not so easy. However, it is, as Father Alexander Schmemann rightly said, full of joy. Father Alexander always spoke about joy, and he said that if joy is lacking from anyone, then Christ is lacking from us. There cannot be Christ in us without there being joy. Even when we are suffering a lot, in the midst of that suffering, there is still joy in the heart. There is still hope. There is still confidence. There is still a sense of direction and life, even though there is great and intense pain.
Let us cultivate that joy, that love of Jesus Christ in our hearts. Let us exercise that love and joy on each other. Let us do our best to show Christ to each other, and together let us sow a seed in this city that will grow and produce not just twentyfold, not just forty or fiftyfold, but at the very least a hundredfold, to the glory of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Let us bring people into His Kingdom and join them to His Body, with us to glorify Him together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
In the life of Father John and his family, we have an example of the working out of what we have just heard in the Holy Gospel. It is important for us to remember this, and especially to remember the words of the Gospel, and the assurances of love that our Saviour gives to us. We, ourselves, must take confidence in these words of love in our living of our lives in Christ. Our Saviour, no matter what, is always with us. He emptied Himself in His love, in order to keep us in loving harmony and in union with Him. Everything about Him and His relationship with us is concerned with this love.
It is important for us to remember the life of Father John in this context, and the life of his whole family, because his inheritance was all concerned with and filled with living in the confidence of this love. He was not the first person in his family to serve Christ. There were five generations of clergy before him in his family. His father was a Pentecostal minister and missionary. In his childhood, Father John was in China and India because of his parents’ love for Jesus Christ. While he was in India, the way that Orthodox Christians whom he met there worshipped and loved God affected him very much, also. It seems to me that, to a great extent, his experience of his parents’ love for Christ, and of the love for Christ of Christians he encountered in other parts of the world, confirmed him in his own desire to serve Jesus Christ in this same single-minded, single-hearted way. That was, as far as I can recall, in my experience of him for about 25 years, completely characteristic of him.
Father John (or “Papa John” as many prefer to say) was full of the love of our Lord, and he wanted to serve Him, to serve Him only. He was willing to do what sometimes seemed to be ridiculous to other people, in order to be faithful to our Saviour Jesus Christ, and to the truth about Him. That is why he gave up everything, and came into the Orthodox Church, because of embracing the whole, full truth about Him who is the Truth, Jesus Christ. He told Archbishop Sylvester that he did this because he had found the Pearl of great Price (see Matthew 13:46).
It is because of his obedience and his love that we ourselves are able to be here today in this building. It is because of his loving obedience (even though there were many difficulties, and he made mistakes, like everyone else). It was Father John’s love for Jesus Christ that enabled him to gather people together to establish one of the earliest English-speaking missions in the country, and then to do what was thought to be impossible. What was the impossible ? I do not know that it is being done anywhere else yet – but by his prayers and by his example, it became possible here : the re-unification of the anglophone Holy Transfiguration community with its russophone mother parish, Saint Nicholas, to make our cathedral community. For the most part, people got along reasonably well after that reconciliation, and a truly life-giving and strong community was formed.
If we are being accurate, then we will accept that it is also because of Father John that we are now in this particular building. I am quite sure that if Father John had not been so convinced by the Mother of God that this was the right thing to do when he was venerating the Kursk Root Icon of the Theotokos (as many know from his own words), then I do not think that we would be here today. Of course, that is just as well, because if it were not God’s will, we should not have been here. It was also because of Father John’s love for Jesus Christ, and the joy with which he lived that love of our Lord, that this cathedral community is able to be such a family in Christ. If we are going to be faithful to his love for our Lord Jesus Christ, and if we are going to live following his example of living the love of our Saviour, then, making mistakes (as he made mistakes) and repenting (as he was repenting), we ourselves are going to do everything that is possible, with God’s help, to maintain this community as a loving family, even though it is quite a big family in quite a big house.
Being a big family like this one is not easy. Sometimes, we have to associate with one another in sub-group families in order to keep together. Nevertheless, the community still somehow has to be maintained as a united family, because the Lord would not have given the responsibility to Father John to bring all this into being if that were not how it is supposed to be. The Lord would not have brought things about as He did if that were not what we are supposed to be doing in this city, in this diocese. Our situation is as it is, because God wills it. Father John has been co-operating with that Will, not necessarily always knowing precisely what he was doing, and why. Nevertheless, this is the fruit of his love of Jesus Christ.
Father John was a good father. He was a good father, and not only to his physical family and blood-relatives. It is a good thing for the rest of us (especially fathers) to remember his example, and to do something similar, as well as we are able. No-one can be Father John again (not even his children). No-one can be Father John again, because there only ever was one – God only created one of him, as He creates only one of you and one of me. That does not mean that there cannot be similarities, however. We can encourage each other by the example of our lives, and by the memory of his good, Christ-loving example. Those of you who heard from him in his last week amongst us, heard how full of joy he was, even when he was faced with the possibility of a cancer (and everyone knows what his family already went through with Suzanne in that, and how the prospect could have been extremely upsetting for him). By God’s Grace and mercy, he was full of joy, full of peace, and full of acceptance of God’s will, no matter what it would bring about. He was radiant with joy, as people have been testifying.
Well, is not that an example for us : how to be encouraged in our own difficulties and struggles in trying to follow our Lord Jesus Christ ? Our Saviour was in him, facing everything he faced. Although he did not have an easy life, as he faced everything he was confronted with, and as he endured everything he was given, he was still able to be so effervescent with the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, so emptying of himself. Even the night before he departed, he was still emptying himself, serving, loving, and giving of himself one hundred percent to people around him, being the father that he was to everyone around, and in the foot-steps of Christ, serving people all around him.
Our Saviour gave him this joy, this strength, this peace, this ability to face something difficult or something horrible, with joy and with victory. Then the Lord took him just like that, in the middle of the night. No-one expected anything. The Lord took him just like that. Well, how merciful was that, because anything having to do with colon cancer is unpleasant (to make a real understatement). The Lord spared him and his family such an ordeal. Yet we know by his love, by his faith, by his confidence in Jesus Christ, that if the Lord had asked it of him, then he would have lived through that ; he would have endured it as he had always gone through everything – with love and confidence in our Saviour, and with joy.
We are full of heartache right now, and we are full of tears, mixed with joy, in the Orthodox way. It cannot be otherwise, as long as we remember the fundamental : that the love of Jesus Christ, and joy in the hope of the Resurrection (which the texts are assuring us about) all have meaning. It is not some sort of crazy, philosophical idea. It is reality. Father John lived, and continues to live that reality. We are following with him in the same path, loving the same Jesus Christ with him. We have him, along with many others now, to intercede for us, and to support us in the work that we have to do.
Let us not get lost in the cares of this world ; but let us remember him, his love, his faithfulness, and be encouraged, ourselves, to persevere in the same love. Let us allow the Lord to give us the same joy, the same strength, and the same sense of direction. Then, when our time comes, we will meet him there in the Kingdom of Heaven, with all those others whom we love, who have gone before us, and who are glorifying the Saviour. With them, we will unite our hearts and our voices in eternal praise of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, in the Kingdom, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
We are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of this parish here in n, and its witness in the town of n. The people who have been living and serving here from its foundation fifty years ago have been doing so, following the example of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, for whom the parish is named. They have been doing this to the best of their ability. That does not imply that every parishioner here is therefore a saint. However, it is to imply that people in this parish have been doing their best to live a Christian life.
Saint Seraphim was living very much in accordance with the Gospel in his life. The one thing that is needful in living our life is to live in accordance with, and in the love of Jesus Christ. It is our way and our calling from Christ to follow Him. He is the Way for us, and He is the Truth. Saint Seraphim recognised this, and that is why he gave himself completely to the Lord in this way, to Him who is the Truth. Life in the nineteenth century was not so different from the society we live in now. In those days, as it is now, there were all sorts of people being led by philosophical ideas who thought that there is more than one sort of truth, who thought that there are alternative truths, and that they could develop different sorts of truths. The fact is that God has revealed Himself to us. In His Self-revelation, He has clearly shown us that there is only one Truth, and that is Himself. Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and the Son of God, said to us : “‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’” (John 14:6). Therefore, if we are following in the Way, we are following Jesus Christ. We will encounter the Truth, and nothing but the Truth, because it is Jesus Christ who is the Truth. In Him we will have life, and life in its fulness (see John 10:10). That is precisely what Saint Seraphim in the course of his life came to experience – life in its fulness, in the love of Jesus Christ. He himself was able, therefore, to live in accordance with the Truth.
Saint Seraphim was not some sort of specialist. He was an ordinary human being just like everyone else. However, Saint Seraphim was able to live the fulness of human life in the way God created us to be. He showed us that, like him, other human beings can do the same. There have been many saints before Saint Seraphim, and there will be saints after him who will teach us the lesson that the Lord is always trying to teach us : that He is with us, that He cares for us, and no matter how difficult life might be for us, He is there for us, and He will help us overcome everything. He will put everything right at the consummation of all things.
Saint Seraphim lived in a monastic community. People who do not live in monastic communities have the idea that in monastic communities people are all perfect, somehow, that they are all Grace-filled, and that they are not fallen people any more. The monks are thought to be (in the popular mind) “professional Christians”, and “experts” in how to live the Christian life. Then, when monks and nuns are found to be making mistakes or arguing with each other (and sometimes not even liking each other so well), people outside this monastic community will tend to think that there is something wrong. However, there is nothing at all wrong. Monks and nuns are human beings like everyone else, and they live in a Christian family like everyone else. They suffer from temptations just like everyone else. If in your family and mine we sometimes have disagreements, why should we expect that amongst monks and nuns it would be any different ? Indeed, in good monastic communities, the monks who are following the Gospel as well as they can, learn quickly how to forgive quickly. They learn how to reconcile quickly as my parents said (following the Apostle Paul) : “Do not let the sun go down on your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26). That is why in good monastic communities every day ends with mutual forgiveness. They do not merely say : “I am sorry”. They actually make a prostration in front of each other, and ask each other’s forgiveness. Sometimes they even get blessed with holy water to make sure that they have strength to forgive.
Saint Seraphim lived in such a community. The single-hearted way that he was following Christ (even though he was under complete obedience to a spiritual father), made some of his brethren irritated. He got a lot of criticism, and sometimes even ridicule. In a Christian family we are not necessarily living in a perfectly supportive atmosphere, and it is the same thing sometimes in monastic communities, too. It is not always just roses. There are thorns there, too, sometimes. However, God is merciful. After some time, Saint Seraphim withdrew into the desert of the forest, and he became so filled with the love of Jesus Christ that in some cases we understand that he was shining like the sun. The Grace of God was radiating from him in a similar way that the Grace of God was radiating from the face of Moses after he was on Mount Sinai. This is because of God’s love. This is because God was reassuring people of His love, and how life can be in the Kingdom. He was giving us hope. Saint Seraphim is an example of this hope that Jesus Christ wants us all to hold on to, to live in, to grasp, to make our own.
If we read the life of Saint Seraphim, we understand that as a result of his love, he was given Grace to help very many people who were facing all sorts of difficulties in their lives. When people become holy, they do not become holy only for themselves, so that they can sit on some rock somewhere, and only be holy by themselves with Christ. Nothing of the sort. When people become full of the love of Jesus Christ, more is asked of them. The Lord gives them Grace to do more and more. They become examples of what our Saviour said that Christians are supposed to be – salt and yeast (see Matthew 5:13 ; 13:33). We are supposed to be salt and yeast. Neither of these alone does anything but be itself. However, each, mixed with the environment (let’s say flour, for the sake of bread), does something very important. The yeast makes the flour rise and transforms it into bread, and the salt gives flavour which makes the bread really good, and tempts us to want to eat it all.
This is how Christians are supposed to be in the world. Filled with the love of Jesus Christ, we are supposed to be able and willing, competent in Christ by the Grace of the Holy Spirit, to help people in the way that bread is helped by yeast and salt. Yes, it is true that we will get opposition. Yes, it is true that we will not be understood. Yes, it is true that we might be rejected, and treated as foolish. However, the fact is that our Saviour, Himself, was not treated any differently. Saints in every age have been treated in a similar way – not understood, nor appreciated, until the Lord makes it clear to some people that this person is needed for the Church’s welfare. There are many saints that are not on the calendar and never will be. There are many saints that are not even known to us.
In fact, because I know some of the people who are resting here in this cemetery, I think that I can say that some of those unknown saints are resting here. I encountered them in their lives, and I know what sort of people some of them were (amongst them founders of this Temple). I believe that this is the case. These persons are holy, and the Lord used them for a great deal of good even though they faced considerable difficulty, misunderstanding, and even, sometimes, rejection. Nevertheless, their faithfulness bore fruit, and that is what is important for you and for me today.
We must remember the example of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, his faithfulness to Jesus Christ, and the fruits that came from it, not only in his lifetime when people were healed and their sorrows were assuaged, but even until this day. By his intercessions, people are helped and strengthened. Throughout our life also, the Saviour calls us in obedience to Him, in His love, to help other people find Him. In Saint Seraphim’s life, and in the lives of all the saints, we see that they never pointed to themselves or called attention to themselves, saying : “Look at me ! I made it : I am holy”. None of them would ever admit that he or she was holy. The most that anyone could get out of them, I am sure, is that they loved Jesus Christ to some extent (but they would say not nearly enough), and that they were unworthy. That they would all say, I am quite sure, because I have heard many of them say so to me. However, they clearly loved Jesus Christ, and longed to love Him much more. This is what will be the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven : loving Jesus Christ more and more – endlessly, being more and more and more alive in Him – endlessly.
Through you and me other people can see Christ (even though there may be difficulties because of our weakness). People who are called saints are those whose lives reveal Christ very clearly. The Lord’s Grace flows through them to us. Despite all the distortions of our fallenness, and our inability to be obedient to Christ’s love, despite our sometimes stubborn willfulness, it must become our hope and our prayer that people nearby us will nevertheless see something of Jesus Christ in us. It is our prayer that they find consolation, hope, and courage to continue in whatever He has called them to do. In the life of a Christian, nothing else really matters. When we love Jesus Christ, and when we are living His love to the best of our ability, despite all the difficulties, everything works out because it is He that is leading us. Things do work out (although sometimes we are tempted to think that they will never work out because of the perpetual, repeated difficulties that we face). However, things do ultimately work out for His glory, even if it means that I have to die.
We all have to die, anyway. I was told yesterday, and I believe that it is right, that when it comes to dying, it is not something that we have to accept grudgingly as a reality. In the love of Jesus Christ, it is something that we should be able to give as an offering to the Saviour. When the time comes, we can be prepared in love and trust of Jesus Christ to offer our own death to Him as an offering of love. He knows when the time is right for Him to take up this offering.
Long ago, I knew a monk who was 107 when I first met him. He was saying then that God had forgotten him (he had a sense of humour to some extent). Everyone and everything that he had ever known was already gone, and all these “young people” of seventy or eighty (even strange ones in their thirties like myself) were around him. He did, in fact, live to the age of 111. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, this monk fled from the monastery where he was living in central Russia, rode a horse until it died, and then walked all the way to the Arctic coast, to Pechenga in northern Finland, further north than Murmansk, and further north than Arkhangelsk.
That is where he finally stopped, and he lived there until the 1940 war in which the borders between the Soviet Union and Finland were adjusted again. Then he had to leave that monastery on the Arctic coast, and go south into central Finland and live in a completely strange monastic community again. When anyone is living as a monk, the idea is to go there, and stay there for the rest of one’s life. Transplanting is not in the picture. However, for some reason in his life, it was God’s will that he should be transplanted twice. Therefore, he was in Valamo Monastery, living in a little room. When I met him, he had been there for about 38 years in his cell by himself, with a cell attendant across the hall. At 107 years of age, he could stand up for his prayers, but could not really walk all that far.
The most important thing about Father Akaky was his regular, faithful, living out of his life. The novices, who were living above him, said that they could set their watches by him. Precisely at midnight they could hear him start to sing : “O heavenly King”, the prayer that starts almost all our services. His reading the midnight hours at twelve o’clock gave us a lesson in faithfulness. Every time I was in church, I saw him in church, too, in his wheel chair. He wanted to be there. He loved to be there. That was his life. By simply giving this example, by doing what was his calling to do, praising the Lord at all hours of the day and night, he was strengthening and encouraging the young men who were wondering whether they should continue or not.
Sometimes we feel that our lives are limited and not necessarily accomplishing all that much. We are not the deciders of what our lives are accomplishing or what is the purpose of our lives. It is the Lord Himself who decides this purpose, and what persons are touched by our lives. We have no say in the matter. We have the responsibility to respond to His love, and to live in accordance with His love. The Lord will multiply our offering as He did with Saint Seraphim and many others, and He will draw to Himself those who are looking for Him.
Brothers and sisters, may God bless you, protect you, and save you. May the Lord give you strength and courage to persevere in your life in Christ, and in all difficulties to hold on to Him, just as the Apostle Peter did on the water. The Lord will keep your head above the waves, and as a result, you will glorify Him, as you were created to do, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
One of the drawbacks, it seems to me, of being raised in Canadian society is the extent to which we are formed to depend on various sorts of systems, organisations, etc., for things to be accomplished in life. When we are faced with the reality of Christ, there is a big tendency in our country to try to box in Christ. We try to make Him subject to one sort of system or another. Perhaps we try to invent a technique to get out of Him what we want. My suspicion is that today, in the case of this exorcism which the Lord accomplishes (but that the apostles previously could not), what the Lord is driving at is that the apostles had not yet caught on to the fact that it is not a technique. In my experience, I do not think there is a technique for exorcising anyone.
Only our Saviour can be the Exorcist of someone who is possessed. When our Saviour is speaking about the faith that is required, I think that it is truly our Orthodox understanding that He is the one who accomplishes it, that enables us to let Him work through us. They have to have confidence in Him that He can do it, and they must co-operate with Him in order that He will do it. Therefore, if there is a mountain pushed into the sea somewhere, it is because the apostles, knowing God’s will, co-operate with Him in prayer, and it is done. However, it is not because the apostles know some technique. Anyway, when it comes to techniques and such things, what technique can there be when the shadow of an apostle will heal someone (as we read in the Acts of the Apostles). Just the shadow of an apostle passing over someone brings the Lord’s healing (see Acts 5:15). There is no technique in that. It is the Grace of the Holy Spirit.
In our life in the Orthodox Church (especially in North America), we are falling into a trap of systems and “correct”, “acceptable” ways of going about things according to bylaws, and so forth. The Orthodox way has nothing to do with these systems. It does not matter how many bylaws we have. The Orthodox way is not found in the bylaws, and these governmentally-approved, politically-correct manners of doing things.
The Apostle Paul is saying today, in effect : “You have many guides. You have many people who will give you some sense of direction in Christ, but you do not have many fathers”. He not only regarded himself as a father to all the people that he had brought to Christ, but, he, in fact, behaved as their father, whether they always accepted it or not, whether they always understood it or not. He behaved as their father.
The Orthodox way is focussed on interpersonal relationships of love : love in Jesus Christ, reference to Jesus Christ, faith in Jesus Christ, trust in Jesus Christ, living in harmony with Jesus Christ. Christ is our life (see Philippians 1:21). He is everything. We are nothing. He must increase and we must decrease (see John 3:30). He is the reason for our existence. He is the reason we are here, together. We are here, together, because we have some sort of love for each other in Christ. We show Christ to each other and encourage each other in Christ.
This is the Orthodox way. It has nothing to do with prestige ; it has to do with responsibility. It has nothing to do with earthly power ; it has to do with authority in Christ. Not only bishops have such authority. Indeed, lay people also have such authority in Christ.
The laity in the Orthodox Church are not insignificant players. In fact, if it were not for these holy, Christ-loving lay-people, the Orthodox Church would not exist. Most especially, the Orthodox Church would not exist these days in the territories of the former Soviet Union where it was only the faithful who were “free” (even though they paid for it with their lives, sometimes). They were still the only ones who were free to pray and be faithful, and they dared to do what Christ was calling them to do – to be the Church. I have heard many stories of just how the Lord, through the prayers, the faithfulness and the bravery of these Orthodox lay-people, protected the Church in these Orthodox countries that used to belong to the former Soviet Union.
It is still the responsibility of the lay-people here in North America to be faithful, to pray, to be Christ to each other. The responsibility and the challenge have not gone away simply because the economy is better. In fact, our challenge can be even greater because we have become spiritually fat, physically fat, forgetful and neglectful in our cozy comfort. Indeed, the cozy comfort makes our continent a land of forgetfulness. It is my prayer that in this community we will be able to live up to the words of the Gospel, to the example of the apostles, to the example and witness of the Mother of God after whom this parish is named. It is my prayer that we will be able, like her, to be faithful to Christ (to Him, and not just to some system), and allow Him to lead and guide our lives on the right way. There is only the Orthodox way when it comes to following the right way. Have no fear in following the Mother of God’s example. Let us entrust our lives to her intercessory prayers and to her protection, asking that she will enable us to be faithful to her Son, as she has always been and is to this day, so that we may glorify Him, together with her and all the holy Church : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
As we are standing here today, in the middle of a hierarchical Divine Liturgy, perhaps it seems strange to some people to hear the bishop say that the Christian life is actually very simple. Well, it is very simple. It is just not so easy. Very many people are saying these days that Islam is very simple and straightforward, because in one’s life there are only five things one has to do. In the Christian way it is simpler still. There is really only one thing we have to do : that is to love as our Lord loves, and everything else falls into place. If we love as Jesus Christ, then everything falls into its place naturally. Everything follows from loving Him.
The Old Testament summary of the Law (which our Saviour Himself quoted) says : “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind … and you shall love your neighbour as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37, 39). The two commandments are the same. It is all one thing – love. “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16), says the Apostle John. If we are in Him, everything about us has to be love, too. Everything about the Christian way has to do with love, and there are no two ways about it. I suppose it could be a bit boring and repetitive to hear the bishop always talking about love, love, love all the time, and it is not because I was ever a hippy. (I have been quite hippy in my day but I have never been a hippy. I am supposed, according to the doctor, to get rid of some more of these hips, but that is another story.)
This love is the essence of what it is to be a Christian, and I have to be talking about it, because that is all there is to talk about, really : how to manage to live in the context of this love. That is all we can all talk about. When it comes down to it, when we are speaking about the Lord, and we are speaking about our joy in the Lord, it is all a reflection of one aspect or another of this love, this one thing that is truly the essence of our Christian life.
Our worship is an aspect of that. Our worship is a bit complicated because we have had 2,000 years of various cultures glorifying God according to their ways and their contexts. We, somehow, here in Canada today are worshipping Him in a distillation of all this joy of Christians worshipping the Lord for 2,000 years. It is not only 2,000 years of worshipping the Lord, either. It is far more than that, because our worship of the Lord did not just come from nowhere. It did not appear from some sort of instant, divine inspiration to the apostles. They worshipped the Lord in the context that they already knew : the Temple, the synagogue. Our worship, which is indeed very much based on the Psalms and the Old Testament, all grows out of what the apostles were accustomed to. Were we to make a serious survey, we would be able to understand that our Liturgy has roots that go back 6,000 years and more.
As Orthodox, we are not ever living in isolation. We are living in a living context, and that context is God’s Self-revelation. He reveals Himself to us in the whole course of our history from the very beginning, from Adam and Eve. Even before, when He was creating everything, God was revealing Himself to us in love. We are the fruit of His love. We are living in the eternal context of His love and the fruit of His love.
It is still hard, though, for us to do some of the consequences of this basic love because of how we tend to be turned in on ourselves, and because of the bad choices that we have sometimes made in our lives. These choices are always concerned with turning our backs on life and love, turning our backs on the Saviour. In other words, we have mostly been turning in on ourselves and putting ourselves in front of Him. All the idiotic things that have happened to human beings since we have existed are connected with that : putting ourselves before God and His love, and even trying to escape from His love. In having listened to the devil, we are afraid of God’s love. We are embarrassed like Adam and Eve if we are caught in our rebellion. Like Adam and Eve, we blame each other, blame someone else, tell lies, run away and hide.
There is nothing that has changed about human beings since we began. There is zero change. We keep talking about how much more advanced we are, how intelligent we are, and how capable we are. However, all this technology that we come up with, and all these wonderful and good things that we come up with, ultimately add up to zero unless they are involved in God’s love, unless they are offered in Christ, and unless they are used in Christ. They are all otherwise only escapes. We have become the victims of email, mobile phones, and now BlackBerries – it is true. It is very easy to become a slave of all these things unless these technologies are given to Christ.
If these technologies are given to Christ, and they are used particularly for His glory, if they are used because they are helping us to serve Him better, and we offer these technologies and techniques to Him, then we do not necessarily have to regard ourselves as actual victims of mobile phones, email, and BlackBerries. If they are offered to the Saviour, He gives us the Grace not to be jumping to it every time it rings, but to make it wait, like everything else, until it is its place. Using technologies is like being retrained by the Lord like a child, because a child does not know what interrupting is. A child gets an idea, and says : “Mommy, Daddy ! Do you know what ?” and right away cannot wait to say whatever it is or ask whatever it is. These telephones and these devices can be precisely like that in our lives. As when we are training children, we always have to say : “Now just wait, I have to finish this thing, and then you can say this or ask that”. Everything has to be in its place. It is the same with this thing that is here in my pocket. It has to know that it cannot be turned on during the service, and it has to wait until after coffee-time before it gets any attention.
Almost always, the difficult thing for Christians in life is to forgive. That is why it is important to pay attention to this Gospel lesson today that our Saviour has given us. Our Saviour gives us the parable about the steward who owed 10,000 talents. How much is a talent ? It is fifteen years’ wages for a labourer. One talent is fifteen years’ wages, and this king was owed ten thousand of these. When he was not being paid, the king commands that the debtor and his family and all their possessions be sold and payment be made. The man begs for forgiveness and says that he would pay everything, and the king who was owed forgives him everything. He forgives him the 10,000 times fifteen years worth of income, and he says in effect : “All right, because you have repented, I can have mercy on you”. The king who was owed the money could do this because he was able to love in this way, and so he could forgive.
What does the man himself learn from this ? Nothing. He immediately goes to someone who owed him 100 denarii (the denarius is one day’s wage). He throws him in prison because he could not pay. When the fellow servants understand what had happened, they tell the king about it. Having summoned the unrepentant servant, the king rebukes him, and condemns him to the debtors’ prison until he can pay all that he owed. Therefore, what he got from his master was definitely “just deserts”, because he could not forgive the debt in the same way, even though what he was asked to forgive was small in comparison.
When you and I look at this Gospel reading, we have to connect ourselves with the person who owed 10,000 talents. Who is the Master that is forgiving us this debt ? This debt which we have is there because of our selfishness, our rebelliousness, our turning in on ourselfness – all that. We have accumulated this debt because of our turning our back on Him, and our non-love. We have been turning our back on the Saviour. Let us recall the passage in another place : “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Thus, when we are rebelling against Christ, when we are turning our back on Christ, and when we are turning in on ourselves, we are inviting precisely this death, and we are participating in this death. What is death ? Death is the work of “Big Red” (of course you know to whom this refers), because everything about him is against life, against the truth. It is all lies, emptiness.
When we face Christ, the encounter is life ; it is light ; it is love ; it is fulness ; it is reality. There is nothing fake. If we turn our backs on the Saviour, we embrace death. We embrace the opponent of God, and Light, and Love. We embrace the father-of-lies. Our indebtedness to Christ is immense and immeasurable, because He is freely giving us life in His love. He Himself is doing everything for us. We do not have to do anything. We cannot do anything, anyway. He does it all for us. Our Lord did everything on the Cross, and in the Resurrection, and He is still doing everything for us every day, with every breath of our lives. He is saying to you and to me, as it were, as to the Apostle Peter on the waves : “Take my hand. Stand with Me on the waves, and live”.
Instead of remembering all this, we can become very much like the man who was ungrateful. We forget. We punish someone else for doing something so little or offending us in some little way. We nurse grudges about little things against one person or another. We gossip sometimes. We get lost in busyness. We forget the love of our Master who forgave us everything, and not only forgave us everything, but continues to forgive.
People are always asking : “Because I was hurt so much by one thing or another, how am I supposed to forgive ?” The Lord Himself says what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to bless those who persecute us, and pray for those who despitefully use us. When people misuse us, we pray for them ; and when people are even trying to kill us, we bless them (see Matthew 5:44). That is the Orthodox way. That has always been the way of the martyrs. All this “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” so-called justice that we are trying to wage on each other in North America accomplishes nothing. Our penitentiaries seem to have little to do with penitence. They are coming to be just plain prisons these days. There is not really much that is penitential about them. We Orthodox Christians have to teach again the society in which we live (our society did know before, but it has to be re-taught) how to love and how to forgive.
How do you pray for someone who has really hurt you ? As I am always telling everyone, Saint Silouan (and Archimandrite Sophrony after him) taught (and rightly so according to my experience and the experience of many others) that the best way to pray for anyone is repeatedly to say : “Lord have mercy”. That simple prayer asks the Lord to be His loving, forgiving, healing, restoring Self to whomever it is that we are praying for. At the same time as we are praying : “Lord have mercy” for someone who has really hurt us and abused us, the Lord’s love, passing through our hearts, warms our whole heart, softens our heart, and enables the forgiveness. We have so very much trouble forgiving. However, when we say : “Lord have mercy”, He enables it. There is no technique in forgiving. There is no if-I-do-this, this-will-happen automatic forgiveness. I cannot make myself forgive anyone. The only way forgiveness can come is to love. It has to be practised through this very simple, Gospel-based prayer : “Lord have mercy”.
Let me conclude by saying that in this parish we have a long history of the application of precisely this sort of Christian love. It is not perfect, because who is perfect ? However, we have a parish here which was founded on the love of Jesus Christ, founded on the desire to worship Him fully and wholly. This community has lived this way all these years – founded in love, and desiring to worship the Lord fully, with all the understanding, with all the heart. As a result of this long heritage (based on a good foundation which was fed and re-fed with love), this congregation here in n (even though it has changed its composition quite a few times over the years) has, in this love, borne plenty of fruit. There is some visible fruit amongst the people in this community. However, there is also a lot of not-so-visible fruit from this community in this province and in this diocese. You probably will never know all the things that the Lord has been accomplishing through you and your faithfulness, and the exercise of your love.
You have been faithful as well as you have been able to be. You have been put to the test quite a bit, and that part is not going to stop. Everyone who loves our Saviour, Jesus Christ, is put to the test – not by the Saviour (He is the One who protects us and supports us), but by the opposition down below. Also, broken people who cannot believe that He can love us like this will put us to the test quite often.
It is important that we prove that we are for real, and not just another spin-doctoring, window-dressing fake. However, if we continue to be faithful in Jesus Christ, the Lord will continue to multiply the offering. I might as well tell you about n, for instance. She is a product of the love of this community. You do not see her. Where is she ? She is in Ukraine. What is she doing ? She is, on our behalf, applying this Christian love in practical ways for people who need it. She is doing our work for us over there. I hope also that you do not forget to pray for her, and the people who are working with her over there. I hope people are not going to forget about this child sponsorship program, which has been so fruitful, and in which we Orthodox in Canada have been so involved.
Dear brothers and sisters, persevere in the love of Jesus Christ. God is with us. He loves us. He is always with us. There is no doubt about His presence in this community, and the fruit coming from His love in this community. Let the Lord continue to nurture you and nurture the people that He gives to you. He draws them to Himself by your personal witness of love in Jesus Christ. Bring people to Him, and He will do this nurturing. We do not do it. The Lord does it all. With our heart, soul, mind, and strength let us glorify our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Apostle Paul exhorts us this morning to be strong and steadfast in love. He is speaking about his love for the Corinthians, although he expresses that love to everyone else to whom he writes, also. His love is quite general, and not partial to one place or another. What sort of love are we talking about ? In fact, there is only one sort of love for Orthodox Christians, and that is the love of Jesus Christ. This has been the case, in fact, since the beginning of creation.
However, we have never been able to understand properly what the Lord has been trying to give to us. He gives to us a relationship of love, a relationship of life, a relationship of co-creating, co-working in His creation. That is why He placed Adam and Eve in the garden : to be co-workers in His creation, to teach them to become complete human beings. However, they got distracted, just as we all so often get distracted. They went according to a different way. They wanted to become like God, since they listened to the temptation of the serpent.
Even with the Incarnation of Christ, even with His Suffering, Death, and Resurrection, even with all His Self-sacrifice and re-opening the way for us to the heavenly Kingdom, we still generally seem to prefer to do things our own way instead of the Lord’s way. From the beginning, our way has led to paralysis and corruption. The Lord’s way has always led to life. It has always led to health. It has always led to joy and energy.
If we hope as Christians to live a life that is pleasing to the Lord, we have to see the Lord’s love, appreciate the Lord’s love, and participate in the Lord’s love. We have to learn to love, and to behave in our lives according to the selfless love of Jesus Christ. It is not even our love : it is His. If we are able to love, it is because He gives us the strength, the energy and the Grace to do it, to live it.
Human ways are almost always selfish, just as we saw in the parable that the Lord told about the vineyard. Instead of understanding that they had life by being tenants in this vineyard, that everything they had was life-giving in this vineyard, the tenants decided that they would rather take it over for themselves. They decided to take over everything because the landlord was away. In the end they killed the heir in order to ensure that they could have it for themselves. However, by doing that, they undid themselves completely.
That is what happens to us every time we do the same thing. In our lives, we cannot run everything. We have to allow the Lord to run everything. According to our Saviour’s own parable, we have to be like birds or flowers, trusting completely in the Lord to feed us and to look after us (see Matthew 6:26, 28). When we are able to put our lives in His hands and to trust Him in this way, He fills in everything else, and enables us to live up to our potential as fruit-bearing creatures. Our responsibility on earth is not to be comfortable here but to be like yeast and salt as our Saviour said (see Matthew 5:13 ; 13:33). It is our responsibility to spread the joy and peace of His love, and to share it with the people around us. We must introduce the people around us to Jesus Christ by the way we live this life, and by the way we have joy and peace in Jesus Christ whom we bear. That is how our lives are to be lived.
That is why the Apostle Paul was able to be so effective, and why, we would have to say, he was able to be in his life so “durable”. Not many people are able to endure the things that he had to endure : being in prison, being beaten (and almost killed a number of times), being shipwrecked, and lost at sea. There is the famous example of what happened to him on his way to Rome for trial and execution. They were lost at sea and landed on Malta, where the Apostle Paul was bitten by a snake, and did not die because he prayed. He could never have done all these things unless he were filled with the love of the Lord. In Jesus Christ we can do what is apparently impossible otherwise : only in Jesus Christ. His strength is what we need. It is His strength, His life that we need.
It is important for us, daily, to take hold of that life and that love. Daily we have to ask the Lord to be with us, and to help us through all our struggles. We have to call upon Him in any sort of need, and trust that He will look after us, save us, and protect us, no matter what is happening to us. This is the Orthodox Christian way : to be conscious of Jesus Christ and His love for us, and to trust Him every moment of every day.
Let us ask the same Lord, our Saviour Jesus Christ, to send the Grace of the Holy Spirit to our hearts to enable us to put our lives in His hands more today, and even more tomorrow, and after tomorrow, that we may mature as He wants us to, and glorify Him in this life, and in the Kingdom of Heaven, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Today, we were hearing our Lord asking His disciples : “‘Who do you say that I am?’” The Apostle Peter replies : “‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’”. Our Saviour then says to him that flesh and blood had not revealed this to him but the Grace of God sent from the Father revealed it.
This is the essence of our Orthodox Christian way. The Apostle Peter was a man just like everyone else. He was tempted just like anyone else. He denied Christ because he was afraid. Several times he tried to run away from his responsibility because he was afraid. However, every time he repented, he turned about and he went back to Christ. Christ forgave him. Christ strengthened him. Christ made him strong by the Grace of the all-holy Spirit.
It is important for you and for me to remember that the Apostle Peter had his weak moments too. He was not a perfect person. He was a human being like you and I are human beings. He could be afraid. At the time of the Crucifixion and the condemnation of Christ, he was so frightened of what might happen that he pretended that he did not know Christ. We know all this from the Scriptures. Yet with tears he turned again to Christ.
Our way is the same way as his. You and I sometimes forget our way, and sometimes we forget Whom we are serving. Sometimes we fall down. However, when we have turned back to the Lord with tears and asked for His forgiveness, He is waiting to receive us with love. He is waiting just as He was waiting for the Apostle Peter to turn back to Him. He is waiting for us to turn back to Him, to take His hand, and to stand on the waves of the sea with Him, looking at Him, confident in His love. On that particular occasion when the Lord is walking on the water towards the boat on the Sea of Galilee, and the sea is stormy, and they are afraid, still the Apostle Peter says : “‘Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water’” (Matthew 14:28). The Lord does, and this apostle walks on the water (until he takes his eyes off Christ, and notices all the wind and the waves). He begins to be afraid, and to sink. However, as soon as he begins to sink he cries out : “‘Lord, save me’” (Matthew 14:30). The Lord takes him by the hand and says to him : “‘Why did you doubt?’” (Matthew 14:31) He pulls him up, and the Apostle Peter stands again on the water with our Saviour.
You and I, in the midst of the turmoil of life in the middle of the waves and disturbance of life, must be like the Apostle Peter and look at our Lord, and not at the trouble around us. We must look at the Saviour, and trust Him. When the Apostle Peter looked at the Saviour and trusted Him, not only did he stand on the water, but the storm was stilled.
Brothers and sisters, we are living in a very difficult time in human history. There are more wars than we could ever have imagined would be happening at the same time. People are feeling afraid everywhere. We, who are Orthodox Christians, must show them the way : the way of love and trust in Jesus Christ. It does not matter what happens to us as long as our eyes and our hearts are focussed on Him. He is our Saviour. There is no other. He will protect us. If the time comes for our lives to end, He still will protect us and draw us to Himself, and in love He will give us eternal life. That is how we live our Orthodox life – loving Jesus Christ, knowing Jesus Christ, and serving Him.
Our whole Orthodox history has been focussed on nothing else but knowing and loving the one, true Jesus Christ, and living in accordance with that love. He is the one, the only Truth. We live in that Truth, the Truth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who took flesh because of love for us. He was crucified, died, was buried, rose again from the dead, ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and sends upon us the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father (see John 15:26). We do not, as Orthodox Christians, have philosophical ideas about who that one, true, same Lord Jesus Christ is. We only explain our love. We only explain our personal encounter with Jesus Christ, and how that affects our lives, and how we live our life because we love Jesus Christ. Everything about us is concerned with that.
Today, when the Apostle Peter confesses Jesus Christ, our Saviour says to him : “‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’”. Peter in Greek means “rock”. It is not only on the Apostle Peter himself, by the way. The rock is also the rock of his faith in Jesus Christ, and the Rock Himself, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. This is the foundation of our Church.
When times are difficult, when times are troubling, when we are feeling afraid like the Apostle Peter, when we have doubts like the Apostle Peter, when we are afraid enough even to betray and deny Christ like the Apostle Peter, nevertheless, let us recall the Saviour’s love. Let us turn about, take His hand, and stand in His love. Our life of love affects people everywhere around us. The Lord is using us as His missionaries of love. A person does not have to have a degree to be a missionary of Christ’s love. We just have to know Jesus Christ, love Him, and be willing to serve Him.
Brothers and sisters, like the Apostle Peter let us hold on to the hand of Jesus Christ. Let us look into His eyes and His heart, and allow Him to give us strength, hope, peace and the Grace to follow Him, and to convey His love to those who are hungry, thirsty, and searching. In this way He will draw them to Himself through us. Together, we will more and more glorify our Saviour, and God willing, enable this city to become an Orthodox Christian city.
This has to be the aim of our lives : to be yeast and salt in this city (see Matthew 5:13 ; 13:33) so that the Lord may bring this city to Himself. May we, together with this whole city, glorify our Saviour, Jesus Christ, in eternity as well as here, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Today, we have heard about the unexpected catch of fish at the command of the Lord. As a result of this, there is in the Gospel according to Luke, the first recognition of the Apostle Peter and the others that Jesus might be the Christ. The apostles trust Him, even though they had not caught any fish all night. They let their nets down again, and they catch more than they could cope with. The Lord reveals Who He is. Always, the Lord’s revelation of Himself is based on love and life. He is giving us everything. It was through Him that all these things came to be, these things that were created. He is the One who spoke them into being at the command of the Father.
The Apostle Paul, who had been a persecutor of the Church, encountered the Saviour and was filled with His love. It was because of this personal encounter of love that the Apostle was able to endure so many things as we heard described in the Epistle this morning. He endured a lot of suffering. He endured it because he knew that the Lord loves him, and he loves the Lord.
Nothing has changed between those days and now. Everything about being an Orthodox Christian always has been based on this loving relationship. People have endured unimaginable tortures, difficulties and hardships for the sake of the love of Jesus Christ. Take, for instance, those Alaskan Fathers (and the martyrs in particular) whose memory we keep today. It was not a simple thing to walk across Siberia, but that is what these monks did. They walked from Valamo Monastery, which is close to the Baltic Sea, all the way across Siberia. Most of the walking had to be in wintertime, by the way, just to make it interesting, because in the summertime (just as in northern Canada) there is muskeg, quicksand, and all sorts of mosquitoes. They walked in the wintertime about 8,000 kilometres and finally came to the east coast of Asia, to around Vladivostok, I suppose. There they took a ship, and sailed through a very stormy area of the North Pacific for a couple of months more, and then arrived on Kodiak in Alaska.
They did all this for the love of Jesus Christ. They stayed there and defended the state of life of the Aboriginals against the money-grubbing fur traders, again, for the love of Jesus Christ. They competed as to who would have what part of Alaska to evangelise, for the love of Jesus Christ. No part of their life was easy, ever. For struggles and suffering, these men were in the same league as the Apostle Paul and all the other apostles, because all the apostles had nothing but difficulties in spreading the love of Jesus Christ.
However, this love of Jesus Christ is very contagious. Glory be to God that this love is so contagious. Those of us living here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with all our conveniences, have a tendency to become lax. The phenomenon sometimes shows itself in Canada in the fact that people have become by and large “Sunday Christians” (not everywhere by any means, but it does show itself from time to time, because the Tempter is so clever with us).
However, it is important for you and for me, always, when there is a tendency to slide in that direction, to say : “Why am I satisfied with Sunday morning only ? Why have I become so lazy, and so ungrateful to God that Sunday morning is the only thing that I am ready and prepared to give to the Lord ?” Sometimes we may say this (or words to that effect) even grudgingly because we have to get up early on a day off. If we have gotten into that condition of heart, it means that we have been listening to the Tempter, and we have forgotten about the reason for our being. It is time then to call out to the Lord, saying : “Help me, and save me from my laziness and forgetfulness”. Let us not forget that the devil is the master of making us forget all sorts of things. Let us say to the Lord : “Save me from the evil one’s traps, and help me to remember who You are to me, Lord”.
The way of the Orthodox Christian is the way of being in His Temple with joy, and worshipping Him with love and with joy. It is the way of supporting our brothers and sisters by being here together, praising the Lord together, and by interceding for our brothers and sisters all together. This is the way of the Orthodox Christian, the way of showing our love to the Lord, and our gratitude to Him for everything that we have and everything that we are. We should not be satisfied just with Sunday, but we should be grateful for the opportunity to be able to be here in His Temple many other times in a given week (as many times as work and other responsibilities will allow).
It is necessary for us to make sure, brothers and sisters, that it is this love, this commitment to Jesus Christ, that is the centre of our life, the driving force of our life, and that nothing will ever get between us and Him who loves us and gives us life. Let us ask the Lord to give us the same love that these Alaskan martyrs had (Saint Juvenaly, the priest-monk, and Saint Peter the Aleut in particular), so that we may unswervingly confess Him with every part of our life in everything that we do, everywhere we go. With these martyrs, in the wholeness of our life, let us glorify our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
When the Apostle Paul is saying to us this morning that we were called out to be a distinct and separated people, he is not saying that we should live in some sort of sectarian enclosure surrounded by walls in a fortress sort of environment. He is not telling us to keep everyone else out so that we will not be contaminated by those around us. There are some people who mistakenly interpret those words in the direction of fortress mentality, but that is not at all what the Apostle means. He is saying that we have to be a distinct people, God’s own, and that the way of our life has to be clearly different from the way of the fallen world around us. Why ? We are to be this way because we know Who is the Truth.
We know Jesus Christ. We live in Jesus Christ. Because we live in Him, and because this relationship of living in Him is one of love and life, and joy and peace, we have to share it with the people around us. We always have to be careful to guard the peace that is within us, and to be faithful to Him who is the Truth. It does not take much for any one of us to fall into a hole, and live like everyone else who is without the Lord in this world. It is a complicated thing being yeast and salt in the world (see Matthew 5:13 ; 13:33), because we have to keep our identity. We have to be active. We have to be life-giving and creative in the world, and yet not take all the darkness of the world into ourselves, and become poisoned and paralysed by that.
You and I who are living in the world must keep our eyes perpetually on the Lord – not just the physical eyes, but the eyes of our heart. We must always remember Whom we are serving. When we are slipping, we must always ask for forgiveness and restoration. It is a daily exercise.
It was very interesting, flying back from Chicago the other day. It turned out that I was sitting next to an important person in the steel industry. He was a person who had an understanding of how life is supposed to be. For a change, I was not unhappy that I had my ear talked off for an hour and a half while I was in the plane, because this particular man, who has travelled, and is travelling all over the world, has a decent sense of how a human being is supposed to live. He is some sort of a Christian. He was talking about this Thanksgiving weekend, and saying that he is always teaching his family (and now he has grandchildren) that if we are going to be thankful in our life, the best way to be thankful is to keep giving. When it is his birthday, for instance, most of the time he does not let people give him presents. He gives presents to his family and his friends on these celebrations. He said that with regard to Thanksgiving, for him it is not just an occasion for eating and being tokenly grateful to God. For him, Thanksgiving is also an opportunity for making sure that other people have something to eat, too. This man had some sense about what is the right way to live.
Just this morning, the Lord Himself who is always giving to us, gave us an example of how this love has to be lived out. When the Lord comes across this funeral procession at the gate of the city of Nain, He encounters something that was very familiar to Him but of which we in Canada with our moderately socialised system are often not conscious. This widow’s only son, who is young, has suddenly died. She has no-one left in the world. A woman who is a widow with no family in that sort of a society (in those days for sure, but in most of the world still to this day), has no way to survive. In certain societies she could work and she could survive, but there are many societies in which a woman is not allowed to work publicly. For such a woman it means starvation ; it means begging on the street. It is a complete catastrophe, an implosion of everything, and it even could mean death. She has no-one to look after her and protect her, because that is how those societies work. The Lord in His compassion restores her son to her. We can imagine, to a certain extent, the joy of a widow, who, having lost her son, has her son restored to her. However, I think we cannot really comprehend the enormity of the joy, the magnitude of the joy and the gratitude to the Lord that she must have felt at that particular time.
You and I also have been given everything by the Lord very much in the way the widow of Nain had been given her whole life and everything about her life back to her. We have been given everything. It is important for you and for me, if we have not developed that habit yet, to begin to learn how to give thanks to God sincerely every day for all the wonderful things that He is giving to us : our lives, our families – everything. As we are raised in our western ways, we are so accustomed to thinking about life as though we are doing and accomplishing everything ourselves, as though we achieved everything that we have through some sort of enterprise in one way or the other. In such a case, the Lord is definitely on the back burner of everything. For us, He is the source of everything. If I have acquired anything, if I have anything that is good in this life, then it is because the Lord has blessed it to be so, and He has given me Grace to accomplish whatever it is. Whatever it is that I have and can do, I have to share it : I must share it.
This is the way of Christ, the way in Christ, the way in love. Nothing can be held in a closed hand. It must always be held in an open hand. Everything in our whole life must be held in an open hand. It is a perpetual offering back to Him in gratitude : an open hand and an open heart. Brothers and sisters, during this Divine Liturgy we are giving thanks. All our life as Christians is taken up with giving thanks. While we are giving thanks, let us seriously do what we are saying in our prayers : “Let us commend ourselves, and each other, and our whole life unto Christ, our God”. Let us glorify Him, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Apostle Paul hit the nail on the head regarding the behaviour and attitude of people, when he was speaking this morning about how some people in those days were being circumcised only in order to escape the criticism of those who were insisting that the Old Testament Law had to be followed to the letter. People who are behaving this way are behaving simply out of fear. The whole point is (especially from everything the Apostle Paul is saying) that the way of Christ is not the way of fear at all. The way of Christ is the way of love, of life, of actual freedom, freedom which North Americans do not really know and understand. It is the way of true freedom : living in love with Christ, doing God’s will because of love for Christ – not because we are afraid of what might happen if we do not obey the Law, if we do not do what He says. We do what He says because we love Him. We follow His example and we follow His path because we love Him.
This is the way of Christian obedience. It is not : “Do what I tell you ; do it because I say you should do it”. True obedience is imitation of Christ. I am going to offer my imitation of our Saviour because He loves me and I love Him, and I want to be like Him. This is how love works. People who are married have to know about that. People who have ever been in love also probably have to know about that, because we try to emulate the one whom we love. We try to be pleasing to the person whom we love because we love that person. It is not because of some sort of slavish attitude. If the relationship between a loving couple is really honest, if they love each other, then they try to be pleasing to each other because of love.
Thus it is between us and Christ. We try to be pleasing to Him because we love Him. That is the nature of Christian obedience. It is not just rules and rules and nothing but rules. In this parable today about Lazarus and the rich man, we have yet another concrete example of how Christians are supposed to live (or not supposed to live), as the case may be. The rich man is obviously going to the Temple, and he is making the necessary sacrifices. He is being carried in and out of his palatial estate every day, going about his business. Every day, this poor Lazarus is sitting at his gate. I do not think those were the days when they had curtains around the sedan chairs. In all likelihood, it was not possible for this rich man to be carried out, and escape noticing that Lazarus was sitting there. To him, Lazarus was like a piece of furniture. He really was not paying any serious attention to him.
This man sitting outside his door was his opportunity to practice his love of God. However, this rich man (like most people are doing even to this day) would have been saying : “Let him get a job ! What is he doing sitting there, leeching off me ? Let him get a job and do something constructive instead of sitting there, even if he is covered with sores and the dogs are licking him. Let him go and look after himself. Do not bother me !”
In fact, Lazarus had been put there by the Lord so that this rich man would do something for him. We have to remember that this was before the welfare state. If one did not have work, the only other alternative was to beg. Let us turn our attention to Lazarus himself sitting outside the gate starving. Who knows if Lazarus did not starve to death outside that gate because the rich man did not feed him ?
When the rich man dies, he sees Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. Then the rich man becomes worried about his brothers, and asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers so that they would be rescued from the same fate as his. However, if Lazarus should go to his brothers from the dead in order to warn them, what would be the effect ? Lazarus, appearing to someone in a dream, is going to be frightening. He is going to warn them that if they do not straighten up, they are going to come to the same place as their brother. Let us take note of the underlying environment of fear : Lazarus should frighten his brothers with fear, so that because of fear they should comply with God’s Law and do what is right, so that they will not come there. The fact is, you know, that the Lord does not want us to come into His Kingdom because of fear. He wants us to enter His Kingdom willingly with love and in freedom, not because of fear. The Apostle John tells us : “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). This is the way of the Christian life : to be without fear. Fear is one of the major tools of the devil by which he regulates our lives and paralyses us. Being afraid of God is not the best motivation for entering the Kingdom of Heaven. He wants us to come into His Kingdom in love, and in freedom.
Sometimes people ask me : “How do I show God’s love ?” Obviously, we are showing our love for God by being here together this morning in His Temple as we are worshipping Him. That is one way of showing our love for God. The second way of showing our love for God is by communicating with Him in our prayers every day at home. People who love each other do not ignore each other. If they ignore each other, they do not really love each other. If they are a married couple and never talk to each other, that is not much of a marriage. Love requires communication. It requires affirmation. It requires renewal all the time. It requires constant, mutual feeling in order to be truly alive.
This is how it is between us and the Lord. We need to be telling Him that we love Him. We need to be quiet with Him sometimes, letting Him tell us that He loves us. However, it does not stop there. It can never stop there, because Christian love must be expressed in concrete ways, beyond just talking. In a marriage, you cannot just say to your spouse : “I love you ; I love you ; I love you”, and leave it at that. That never suffices. Love has to be expressed in concrete ways as well. I am getting old now, and I find that many people have never seen the operetta, My Fair Lady. They do not know about the young poet who tells Liza in all sorts of poetry how many ways he loves her. She gets all irritated and exasperated, and she tells him to stop talking about love and to show her in concrete ways that he loves her. That is precisely what we have to show each other : that we love each other. We have to demonstrate to the Lord in concrete ways that we love Him as well.
How do we do that ? We do that by how we treat Lazarus. By that I mean by how we treat all the odd and strange people that the Lord puts in our path in any given day. How do we behave towards these people ? Do we condemn them for their weirdness, their eccentricities, their weaknesses, or do we thank God for the opportunity to meet such a person and say a good word to this person ? A good word is hard to come by these days. Mostly everywhere you go, people groan, moan and complain about this and that. They do not talk about anything good. They have forgotten all about the movie, Bambi. Thumper’s mother said : “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”. People can be really gloomy these days. They need a good word. They need – we all need – to hear a good word from time to time.
The Lord does, in His mercy, send people to speak to us good words, nurturing words, helping words, correcting words sometimes, too. Without fear, we have to try to be an example of what it is to have joy in Christ : by how we behave towards a cashier in a store, for example. I saw two cashiers just the other day. Those poor persons looked so down that they did not want to talk. The relationship between human beings is painful to them, because people are often so grumpy – so they try to avoid communication. We have to show them the light of the love of Christ. Those poor cashiers that are beaten down by grumpy people have to be shown the love of the Lord. We have to show the love of Jesus Christ in countless ways, in all sorts of unexpected ways to unexpected people : people in airports, stewards and stewardesses on airlines. There are all sorts of persons that the Lord sends to us whom we must address with this love, with this joy in Christ. This love of Christ in us will die unless it is expressed. It must be expressed, and it must be expressed in all sorts of ways every day, and not only to our friends, not only to our family, not only to this congregation. It has to be expressed to the people around us every day amongst whom the Lord has placed us. We must express this love of Jesus Christ.
Then we will be following the right path. Then we will truly have hope of being in the Kingdom of Heaven because we will have allowed this love (which is the nature of life in the Kingdom of Heaven) to flow amongst us and through us, now, here, today, and every day. We express this love and share the Lord’s love without preaching, without quoting Scripture or quoting anything. We simply have to be a loving person to everyone around us. If the occasion comes to say something about Scripture, if the occasion comes to speak about Christ openly and clearly, it will present itself. A person will ask a question, and we have to answer. We have to be this love first. The Saviour is saying to us in a number of places that we have to be like salt and yeast in bread (see Matthew 5:13 ; 13:33). One cannot distinguish salt and yeast from the rest of the flour or anything else in the mixture. One cannot see where it is, but it is definitely active. Bread rises because the yeast is active, and the bread has flavour because the salt is active. This is how we have to be.
When it is time to be seen, the Lord will give that occasion. Just living this love with joy is the main thing of our life, especially as Orthodox Christians, because the Lord has given us everything. There is nothing lacking in our Faith. He has given us every tool, every resource necessary to live this life. We have to use those tools. We have to take them up, and we have to employ them.
Brothers and sisters, let us ask the Lord to give us the strength, the courage, the hope, and the strength of love to do exactly this. Let us concretely express His love, day by day, wherever we are, in the midst of whatever situation He provides for us so that everything about our life will declare His glory, together with that of the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
“‘Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?’” The Lord is underlining some important matters for us to pay attention to in our dispositions as we are passing through our lives. The Apostle Paul was telling us this morning that our lives as Christians are supposed to be lives that are full of gratitude. Everything about our lives is supposed to be full of gratitude towards the Lord for everything that He gives us, beginning with the gift of our lives. We are supposed to be giving thanks to Him every day for everything. The Divine Liturgy is focussed upon giving thanks to the Lord for everything that He is doing for us, that He has done for us, and that He will do for us. This Divine Liturgy, as with every Divine Liturgy, is rooted in giving thanks to Him for His love, His mercy, His life, for His tender care for us as well.
After they had asked to be healed, these lepers were walking back towards Jerusalem. They were on route to do what the Saviour had told them to do – to show themselves to the priests, which was in accordance with the Law. Why ? In accordance with the Mosaic Law, whoever is healed of a disease such as leprosy, has to go and be examined by the priests. The healing has to be proven, because a leper in those days (as is still the case in many parts of the world), is separated from society because people might catch their disease. These lepers lived in little colonies of poverty all by themselves. We do not see it at all in North America, but in other parts of the world such groups of suffering people still exist. These are people who have been separated out, and who are living in dire poverty. They are rejected. People who encounter them anywhere run away from them. In some movies like The Robe we can see what happens with lepers (although the lepers in movies appear to be too healthy – leprosy really is a wasting disease).
These people had to show themselves to the priests. The priests had to pass them through a series of tests to be absolutely certain that the disease was gone. Then they could be returned to normal society and to normal life. Let us also not forget that anything having to do with any weakness or any disease in those days implied absolute destitution. There was no such thing as welfare or universal health care such as we have here in this country. Even if it does not work all that well sometimes, it is still a big gift from God.
The nine, who did not go back to our Saviour to say thanks, were like many of us as we pass through our lives and experience the Lord’s blessings. Perhaps our experience is not as dramatic as being healed from leprosy (when the Lord healed parts that had already fallen away). When the Lord restores and heals people, He does not do a half job of it. He heals completely. I do not recall ever seeing an instance in the Scriptures when the Lord is healing, and He only half heals. When He is restoring these lepers, He is restoring their lost parts, too. These nine, walking along, going back to the city to show themselves to the priests, saw themselves healed. Just like most people, they probably said : “Oh ! Isn’t that nice ! I deserved that !” They just carried on, very happy of course, very joyful that they could return to normal society, but somehow saying : “Well, I deserved that ! I must have done something right”. They immediately forgot where the healing came from. They immediately forgot God’s Grace, His mercy. They immediately forgot to give thanks where thanks was due. Thanks is definitely never due to ourselves for all these mercies. Thanks must always be directed to the Lord. It is important for us when we are paying attention to these words, and the words of the Apostle, to recall in our future days this way of thanksgiving.
Orthodox life has always been full of little habits that reinforce this mindfulness. It is our custom, for instance, when we are going for a drive, to make the sign of the Cross and ask God’s blessing on the driver. Again, when we go out of the house, it has always been a custom amongst Orthodox believers that we make the sign of the Cross. We may even have a little icon near the door which we kiss when we go out and when we come back in, giving thanks to God for the safe return home (because we never know what can happen to us when we go out of the house – unexpected things can happen). We bless our children when they go out and when they come back in. We bless them when they get up in the morning, and we bless them when they go to bed, as we do for ourself. This is our Orthodox way. We bless food when we are beginning to prepare it. We bless food when we are eating it, and we bless God in thanksgiving when we have consumed it. Because of gratitude, we bless everything all the time because the Lord has given us something to be blessed, something to eat, somewhere to go, health to walk, health to drive, protection in the course of our lives.
Making the sign of the Cross on all these things has been the way Orthodox people have remembered to give thanks to the Lord. We need habits. We are not somehow perfect, intellectual creatures who can remember everything. We need these habitual little things in order to remember, because if we are really honest with ourselves, when we go about our lives without these things, we can be like Pooh Bear, a bear of little brain. At least, that is how I sometimes go about my life, and I do not suppose that I am so different from everyone else. Little brain forgets the most obvious things : forgets to say thank-you when gratitude must be expressed. Why do we forget ? Empty space. My mother accused me of that quite a few times. She was right, of course, because mothers always are.
Giving thanks is truly the essence of the Orthodox way. When the light of Christ is shining in our hearts, as we heard from the Apostle this morning, our lives shine with Christ’s love. This light helps us wash away all the obstructions, all the dirt, all the selfishness. It helps us remember Whom we are serving, where we stand, and what we are doing.
As we are standing here today in this Temple, we also are giving thanks for the twenty years of service that n has been giving to the Church. Looking at this congregation here, I am remembering how it was for us twenty years ago, in another building near by, all crammed in. I am remembering farther back than that. I am remembering almost 28 years ago, when I first came to this community : the garage with a few people. The first thing that happened to me when I came back from seminary that season was that I was instructed to lead the choir. We have baptisms by fire : this is the Orthodox way. We learn best by doing. We jump in and do it. How do we learn to swim ? We jump in the water and we just start swimming. How do we pray ? We just begin. We open our mouth and our heart, and we start. That is always how we go about it.
However, I also am remembering how frightened everyone was. They were loving the Church, and loving Christ, but they were afraid of making mistakes (because many could be and were made). They were wanting to do things right for the Lord. It seems to me that we might be getting into that department in our worship here. Also, to some extent in our general parish life, we are getting into that department. By this I mean that I am referring to the danger of doing things right but paying too much attention to the externals and forgetting the heart. There was such a tendency before and there is such a danger now. In no way can we allow ourselves to think that we can rest on any laurels because You-know-who-down-below is always ready to trip us up when we start thinking that we have “got it made in the shade” or that we are really doing it right. We can always do much better.
Moreover, standing here today in the Temple, with the singing as it is being rendered to the Lord, I cannot help but think about how we are fitting in with other parts of the world where people are singing habitually with their whole hearts as a congregation, as it is being done here. They do it with joy. They do it with harmony. I saw this in Slovakia just last year. That made me remember this congregation. I am remembering you, wherever I go, because of these connexions. It made me also remember how in my childhood I was impressed with how the Welsh sing. I am thinking that Welsh people coming to this congregation and hearing the singing of this congregation would feel right at home, even if they did not recognise the melodies (but they would catch them quickly).
At the same time that we are giving thanks that we are able to give something good to the Lord, something beautiful to the Lord, it is really important for us not to start making any comparisons whatsoever between ourselves and anyone else. That is another one of our big weaknesses as human beings. There is the temptation to think : “Look how wonderful it is in this parish ! It is really beautiful to worship the Lord here ! They cannot do it better down the street. We are better”. We cannot ever think that we are better than anyone else. As soon as we think that we are better than someone else, the Lord is going to come and put out a little stick to trip up our heels, so that we fall flat on our face and recognise where we really are. That is what has been happening to me during my whole life, so I know that it is going to happen. If we take our eyes off the Lord and stop being thankful to Him for everything, we will get into deep trouble. The wake-ups are pretty sharp.
It is better not to have a sharp wake-up or a big trip-up, and fall down with a bloody nose or a black eye that lasts quite a while. If someone asks what happened, we can only say : “I tripped over my own feet (which is really what happened)”. It is important for us to look to the Lord, to give thanks to the Lord for everything, to be grateful to Him that we are able to offer all this worship and beauty to Him, and to be supportive to everyone around us. We must help them to do as well as they can, and even to do better, and not put them to shame. We must encourage them, help them, boost them up, strengthen them, because this is the Orthodox way. Let us not say : “Look at us ! Aren’t we great ?” Instead, let us say : “Do not look at my mistakes and my stupidity. Look to the Lord. Give thanks to the Lord for everything, and let me help you, too”. That is our way.
Continuing to give thanks to the Lord for everything, let us praise our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
I suppose by this time that many of you will have seen the very old movie called It’s a Wonderful Life. You can find it at your favourite video store. It is a good story, but it is not especially Christian (especially that bit about angels getting wings when bells ring). That is really a bit too sentimental and too far out. Nevertheless, this film has a good point.
In case you do not know the story, here is a little outline. There is a man who is tempted to kill himself because suddenly his life is in a terrible condition. He had been sort of wishing that he had not been born. He had been thinking that his life was a complete failure and useless. He had gone into bankruptcy, etc. I will not tell you the whole story. An angel comes to him and shows him how different life would have been if he had not been born. If he had not lived, all sorts of terrible things would have happened. He was very much a catalyst for good things in other people’s lives. When people are tempted by the devil in this particular way, that is one of the things that they are blinded to : what life would be like without them. They forget, even though their lives are very painful, that the Lord is using them for good in many unexpected ways.
It is important for us to remember that particular detail today when we remember the ancestors of the Lord. We hear the genealogy of the Lord today going back to the beginning, fourteen generations times three. All these people that are listed in the genealogy are people who prepared the way for the coming of Christ. They are all people whose lives said “Yes” to the Lord. They were preparing for the Mother of God herself to say her ultimate “Yes”. Her “Yes” in life was not just “Yes” to the Incarnation, but “Yes” to the Saviour in everything in her life. If any of those persons had not been born, she would not have been prepared properly to become the Mother of God.
Now we are living after the fact, after the fact of the Incarnation. The same thing goes for us – for you and for me. Each of us the Lord creates uniquely. He loves us uniquely. As painful, difficult, and full of woe as sometimes our lives may be (sometimes to ourselves appearing useless), our lives are not useless. It is important that we go through all these difficulties in our lives with the eyes of our heart on the Saviour and with our confidence in Him.
I had a phone call early this morning when I was just waking up from some place in the east, from a family who are relatively new immigrants to the country, and who have had considerable difficulty. They arrived here as English-speakers, so it is not as though they had all sorts of linguistic difficulties one way or the other. Nevertheless, they were facing the difficulties that immigrants face. They were a whole family of people who had no permission to work. They had no money, and they were struggling and struggling. However, they were determined to keep their hearts on the Saviour, and to do what they had been taught to do – that is to trust Him, even though they just felt like giving up and running away. As a result of their faithfulness, their taking prosphora every morning, and their taking holy water every morning as believers can do, the doors finally opened. They are finally getting their passports and work permits. They simply wanted to call me this morning and give glory to God for the fact that this was finally happening. Despite all the difficulties they had in getting themselves settled in this country, the Lord has opened the doors for work to come. This family I knew in Europe quite a number of years ago. They have the potential to be very beneficial to our Church in this country. They have the gifts to be very good for our agriculture as well. I am looking forward to seeing what the Lord is going to do with this family.
The same thing goes for you and for me. We struggle. Yes, we do struggle, but the Lord is with us. However, without us, without our persevering and our struggling, other people would be falling down and getting lost. The Lord does not always show you and me who it is that is affected by our faithfulness, although sometimes we get a hint. What is important is not what use I am in the world. In the end, we are so materialistic in North America. The value of most things is limited to their usefulness. An ant is useful to a human being for what ? A hippopotamus is useful to a human being for what ? That is too often how we are assessing things. One person is useful to another human being for what ? What a degradation of God’s creation !
Our value is not in our utilitarian merit. Our use is in who we are : the fact that we exist in the first place. That we affect other people for good is all great, but the important thing is that God created you and me. He created us because He loves us. Who cares about the exact processes that doctors and scientists now understand and were taught in school. Human beings have been born and have been created like that for many thousands of years. What matters is that everything is because of God’s love. What is important about creation is what is its unseen foundation.
The source of everything is the fact that God loves His creatures. He loves you and He loves me uniquely, and He loves us all together as His children. Our value rests in this love that produces us and this love that sustains us. This love, this communion between us and Him is the meaning and purpose of all our life and all our interpersonal relationships. Yes, it is good that there are very many unseen, unknown, positive effects from the struggle and the life of each of us. In the end, it is still most important that God loves us. We love Him, and we are living in that love.
Let us respond to the demonstration of God’s love for us, His intimate care for us that is shown in this genealogy : the tender, unique, personal care He gives to each of us. Let us give thanks to the Lord for that. Living in the context of that, let us live our lives glorifying our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is necessary for us to have the right attitude when we are going about living our lives in Christ. The Beatitudes, which we just heard and sang, and then heard again read in the Gospel, are important for our everyday life. Through the Beatitudes we may understand how blessing comes from God, and how we live our lives under His protection, with His blessing.
In North America where we are all living (and where most of us grew up), we are taught in every aspect of our secular life that we do everything ourselves, that we acquire everything ourselves, and that we make everything ourselves. If there is any reference to God, it is sort of on the edge. Generally, in North America we are trained to think that God is out there somewhere, disconnected from everything. That is not at all the truth. This is not the way it is. We Orthodox understand how things truly are.
“God is with us”. We love to sing that at Christmas-time and Theophany-time (although that particular group of verses is available to us in Compline and also in Great Lent – although usually only monks get to do it then because parishes are generally not serving that service). We have a musical setting that most of us can sing, which is very beautiful and expresses the emotion of our hearts. We certainly like to sing these verses : “God is with us ; understand all you nations, and submit yourselves, for God is with us”. In those words we are asking all the nations, ourselves and everyone else also, to submit themselves to God’s love. That is the thrust of the Beatitudes.
We know that if we want to accomplish anything, it has to be with God’s blessing. Therefore we must turn to Him. We must forget ourselves. We have to stop thinking that we are accomplishing everything ourselves. It is easy to say, but when we are raised the way we are, it is not even possible for us by ourselves to stop thinking like that. We cannot do even that by ourselves. It is necessary for us to understand that even for that, even to acquire a correct understanding of how things are in the universe and in the creation, and in our relationship with the Lord, we have to ask for the Lord’s help. We have to ask for the Lord’s help for everything. That is why, in doing this, Orthodox Christians in various parts of the world have been able to survive the most terrible torments that human beings can suffer, and still have joy, and still have hope. There are all sorts of books and stories about believers in the Soviet Union who lived through and survived the gulags of Stalin, Khrushchev and others. These writings describe how they spent tortuous years there in horrible prison camps. Still the believers were able to express joy. Still they were able to express their confidence in the Saviour. Still they were able to remain faithful and to be blessed by the Lord.
When people came to this country a hundred and some years ago with nothing (I do mean nothing – so much of nothing that modern Canadians cannot even imagine that), they got off the train in the forest, and with an axe and a shovel built themselves a life. Yet these people, believing in God, turning to Christ, with His help managed not only to establish themselves well but to provide well for their children and all their other descendants. It was because they were believers, because they loved the Lord, because they turned to Him and trusted Him for everything.
Saint Nicholas, whose feast-day we are celebrating, was just such a person who put love for the Lord first in his life. Because of this love for the Lord, because he knew the Lord in prayer, in his heart, in the context of the Divine Liturgy and in the context of his whole life, he was able at the First Council in Nicaea to defend the truth about Jesus Christ against the wrong ideas of Arius. He supported the true Faith of Jesus Christ, and the true Faith prevailed at this First Council. Much more than that, however, he is known for how he practiced this love by caring for other people, how he provided for the poor, how he rescued orphans, how he protected widows, how he fed the hungry, how he visited the sick and those who were in prison. He lived the Beatitudes. That is why at the Divine Liturgies which are served for holy people like Saint Nicholas (and he is not alone amongst saints of this sort), we read the Beatitudes, because he, and others like him, lived the Beatitudes. They lived the Beatitudes because they loved Jesus Christ.
As a bishop, Saint Nicholas was truly what a bishop should be to his people : a loving father, a father who cares about his flock, who cares about his children, and who tries to provide for them. He is the example to believers on all levels (from lay people all the way to bishops) because he practiced the love of Jesus Christ. He did what Jesus Christ Himself would do for other people. He always turned to Christ asking for direction and for understanding, and the Lord gave it to him. Until this day, people turn to Saint Nicholas. Mostly, it seems that they turn to him when they are travelling, because after his death, Saint Nicholas is showing us that he is particularly concerned with those who are travelling. He rescues people in danger of death on the sea. We often have an icon of Saint Nicholas in our cars. He still cares about the small details of our lives 1500 years and more after his death. He cares because he loves Jesus Christ. He hears our pleas to him for help in our travelling, and in whatever else we ask of him. He cares about us and he prays to the Lord on our behalf because of his love for Jesus Christ. This love has never changed, but only multiplies after his death and his entry into the Kingdom with the Lord.
This is our Orthodox path : the way of love. It is the way of caring for other people, and the way of caring for the creation in which we live. Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is very well known for his concern for ecology. This is not merely because of some basic principle. It is because this is the Orthodox priority. We are poisoning things so badly in our environment ; we have to be responsible in cleaning it up. We Orthodox have to lead the way in this part of our life, too. It is appropriate that the Patriarch of Constantinople is going to do this. The rest of us ought to pay attention to this as well. It is for us to ask the Lord about how we can do our part in caring for human beings, for animals, for the soil, for the trees and rocks. The Lord, as He inspired ( and does inspire Saint Nicholas), will inspire our hearts also. He will renew and multiply our love, and He will help us do what is right. It is not that we have not been doing a lot that is right already, but He will help us do even more. We have the role, the responsibility as Orthodox leaders and examples, to do this. May the Lord give us all strength to follow the Saviour in the same way, with the same love as our holy Father Bishop Nicholas, and with him let us glorify our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
We live in an environment that is very skeptical, very doubting, very separated from God, in fact. In the West, there has been a long history of misunderstanding about the relationship between God and human beings. I was reading a book by the current Pope which is good in itself. It is about the Divine Liturgy, and is mostly all right, but he shows in the title precisely what is the difference between them and us. In the title he says : “God is near us”. However, we always say : “God is with us”. Especially when we are speaking about the Divine Liturgy, and receiving Holy Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, we must be saying “with”, and not “near”. In the West, God seems to be thought of as “out there somewhere”, “looking at us from a distance”, and therefore disconnected from us. Some people do not even think that He is looking at us.
We, on the other hand, understand that the Lord is with us. He is in us. He is everywhere, and nothing exists apart from Him. We express it in our tropar to the Holy Spirit : “Everywhere present and filling all things”. There is no separation between Him and what He created because, if there were, it would not exist. His love sustains everything that exists. Everything that exists is held together by His love. It originates in and emanates from His love, and continues in His love.
I find it important, every time we hear this Gospel reading, to say : “Pay attention”. The Lord is being told that His Mother, brothers and sisters are outside waiting. (First cousins, and even second cousins are considered brothers and sisters in many cultures.) The Lord is saying : “‘My mother and My brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it’”. That is not to say that the Mother of God and His relatives did not hear the word of God and keep it (especially the Mother of God). In fact, that is why she is who she is to us and to the whole world. She hears the word of God and she keeps it.
In this way, we are enabled to be brothers and sisters of the Lord, ourselves, in that we hear the word of God and keep it. Our kinship with the Lord is not based on blood, which is the whole point of the Epistle. It is not based merely on blood, inheritance and genes. Rather, it is based on our loving relationship with the Lord. Everything is based on, and rooted in our relationship of love. As the Apostle Paul was saying, rules and laws tend to produce an attitude of slavery in us, and we do things because there is a rule that says we have to do it. However, doing something because we have to do it, even if we do it, does not bear the same Grace as doing something because we love to do it.
There is a blessing that comes with being in the Temple of the Lord on Sundays or on feast-days because I have to be there as an Orthodox Christian, because it is a rule. However, the blessing goes far deeper in our hearts, and has much more effectiveness in our lives if we come to the Temple every week and every feast-day (and even oftener if possible) because we love to be here worshipping in the Temple of the Lord, in the presence of the Lord. It is because of love that we are here. We are here because we are free to be here. We freely choose to be here. We freely want to be here. This being here produces much deeper roots in our hearts and in our lives than being here because I must be here. Still, that is not to say that the Lord is confined to what I just said. There have been many people who have come to the Temple of the Lord because they were told they must. After being in the Temple of the Lord and worshipping the Lord over a period of time, the fire of God’s love is struck in their hearts. They no longer come because they must. They come because they want to, because of love.
When we are living in the environment of the Grace of the Holy Spirit, rules (which are not always the best things to live by because of a tendency to slavery) become life-giving, nevertheless, because of the Lord who is the Giver of life. The Lord is not confined by what a bishop is going to say about rules, regulations, his preference for other ways, and his various sorts of prejudices. The Lord knows the hearts of His children, and He comes to the hearts of His children and turns their hearts softly into love. He brings them to life. The Lord puts them on fire, and He enables these burning hearts, full of love for Jesus Christ, to bear much fruit.
It is not for nothing that there has been even up to the present day the example of women who were unable to bear children for one reason or another. When it became impossible according to normal human behaviour to have children, then they did. Sarah was the first and greatest example, I suppose, but there have been many since then. The Lord does this not only to give consolation to the parents who are childless, but also to show everyone that the Lord is the Lord of all creation. He does what He wills in creation in order to give us hope, in order to give us confidence, in order to remind us that He does love us, and that He can overcome all our limitations.
The Lord prepares the way for the birth of His Only-begotten Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Underlining this preparation by these various sorts of events, He shows His love for us ultimately in the “Yes” of the Mother of God, when the Archangel Gabriel came to her, and in the continuing “Yes” of the Mother of God throughout the course of her life. It is this which enables her to be to us, even to this day, the sign of what it is to be a Christian, the sign of what is the Church. The Lord shows His great love in sending to us His Only-begotten Son, so that we may be able to be united with Him, and live in Him.
We celebrate today His love, His tender care for us and for all our spiritual ancestors. Let us ask the Lord to freshen up the fire of our own love for Him in our hearts today, and ask Him to help us to be able, with the same sort of joy and lightness that the Mother of God had, and does have, to serve our Saviour, Jesus Christ, and glorify Him together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Incarnation of the Word of God is what the world has (and always has had) great difficulty accepting, because the Incarnation means the putting on of humanity by the Son of God. All sorts of people, somehow, cannot swallow the fact that God would empty Himself in this way. Such people cannot bear to face the fact that God took flesh, that Jesus Christ truly is the Son of God, that this Child who was born in a manger is the Love of God incarnate. They invent all sorts of other theories about who He is in order to satisfy their intellect. They try to reduce Him to some sort of philosopher, or social “nice guy”, or an avant-garde activist of some sort. However, that He would be simply the Love of God incarnate, come to earth to restore communion between us and God the Father, is beyond them. All the substitution theories by the way, all those other theories that people have come up with in their desire to make Christ more “palatable”, do not work, logically speaking.
The only way reconciliation could be achieved between us and God the Father was by the Incarnation, just as it happened. You and I, 2,000 years later, are singing the same hymns, more or less, and reading the same Gospel stories as Christians have been doing all this time. We have been encountering personally the same Lord Jesus Christ that the Apostle Paul encountered, and by whose love he lived : the same Lord Jesus Christ that all the apostles encountered, and in whose love they lived and died. It is the same Lord Jesus Christ that Christians have been encountering personally all along. My favourite old man that I love to quote from my childhood, Ole Olson, always used to say over and over again, quoting from the Epistle to the Hebrews : “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). That is how it is, exactly. He is the same Lord Jesus Christ, whom we all are encountering, in whatever time we live, and wherever in the world we live, and in whatever culture we live. It is the one Lord Jesus Christ whom we are encountering, in whose love we live, and in whose love we die.
It is very important for us to keep this in mind especially now, at this time of the year, because remembering it now might help us to remember it during the rest of the year. Being an Orthodox Christian is not an intellectual exercise. To be an Orthodox Christian does not require a degree in philosophy. To be an Orthodox Christian requires love enough to do as the Mother of God did, and always has been doing : that is, to say “Yes” to His love. We have to live in accordance with His love.
In order to live in accordance with His love, our hearts have to be in communion with Jesus Christ. We have to be talking with Him regularly. We have to be refreshing in our hearts our experience of Him by reading the Gospels regularly and the Epistles, too (and that is not to exclude the Old Testament, because it is all bound up together). We cannot have the New Testament without the Old Testament : it is all one. Jesus Christ sums everything up. The whole Old Testament prepared for Him. As we were hearing, prophecies were fulfilled in the movements of Joseph and his family in accordance with the Scriptures. No-one would have known what to expect, nor been able to understand the events when they occurred if the way of the Lord had not been prepared.
Even though our Lord came as promised, He did not come as various people had decided He must come. In their minds they turned Him into a political figure, not a Child in a manger in a cave in Bethlehem, the lowest of the low, apparently. They expected Him, as did the three Wise Men, to be born a king in a palace. However, He was not. The Lord is always dealing with us in paradoxes. Our hearts have to be attuned to Him so that we can recognise Him in our hearts.
As they have been my whole life, many people these days are frantic about the Second Coming and the Antichrist, and so forth. Fear, fear, fear. Fear is the primary instrument of the devil. Fear is not the characteristic of people who love the Lord. In fact, the Apostle John said : “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). If we truly are Christians, if our hearts are attuned to the Lord, and we are living in Him, our lives would be marked by lack of fear. Whenever the Antichrist may or may not show up as a person, we, in our hearts, have to be able to know the difference. According to the Scriptures, we will not know the difference by how things appear, by glitzy activities. We will not know the difference by all sorts of fancy argumentation. Like the apostles on the road to Emmaus, it will be because our hearts burn within us, and witness to the love of Jesus Christ that we will be able to tell the difference between the true and the false Christ. It requires a communion of love in our hearts.
This communion of love is accompanied by tell-tale signs. Warmth, joy, peace, stability, goodness, kindness, gentleness accompanied by firmness are all indications that Jesus Christ is present. It is for us to nurture our hearts through continual exposure to the Scriptures, and daily prayerful communication with the Lord. Then we will have real hope of being able to recognise our Saviour at the Last Coming, and, just as importantly, to recognise Him at work in other people around us and in the creation.
May the Grace of the Holy Spirit enable our hearts to have such longing for our Saviour’s presence, that we will every day without hesitation turn to Him in everything and, with love, glorify the all-holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.