In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Gospel reading today is reminding us of that perfect communion which is between the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Three Persons of the Holy Trinity live in perfect unity and perfect communion, and yet each Person retains a distinct identity. The Father is the Father. The Son is the Son. The Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit.
I am not going to go into a recitation of the Athanasian Creed to explain the Holy Trinity this morning. What is important is this matter of perfect communion in love which Jesus says that He has with the Father. It is very difficult for us to understand things like that because we are generally very slow about such things. Even though the Lord has sent the Holy Spirit upon us and filled us, we are still slow. He gave us everything that we need to understand, but we still cannot put two and two together to make four, and come to understand life in the Kingdom. This perfect communion that Jesus Christ has with the Father is what He came to give to us through Himself, through our being members of the Body of Christ, through our being baptised into Him and chrismated with the Gift of the Holy Spirit. The Lord wishes to take us up, we who are members of the Body of Christ, into perfect communion with the Father through Him. He wishes us to be in perfect communion with Him so that we can be in perfect communion through Him with the Father. He wants us to live always in love. How we learn to be in perfect communion with Jesus Christ is to be in communion with each other.
The devil is always trying to break up communion in Christ. He is always trying to throw around distractions, get people angry, get them upset, get them perturbed, and distract them from what their true purpose is, which is being one with Jesus Christ. This is one of the tactics he was using when he encouraged this young boy to fall asleep in the middle of Saint Paul’s sermon and fall out of the window. The devil’s scheme was that he should cast doubts on the apostolic ministry of Paul, and that he would cast doubts also on the power of the Lord to give life by making people discouraged and filling them with sorrow in the midst of the joy of being with the Apostle. He wanted to stab them right in the heart so that they would not listen to the Apostle. That is why things happened more or less as they happened. Even though the boy fell out of the window and everyone thought he was dead, the Apostle went down and said : “‘Do not trouble yourselves, for his life is in him’”, and they took him up alive. Most of us would not survive a fall out of a window, and even most boys would not survive a fall out of a window of more than one storey in height. Nevertheless, the prayers of the Apostle were such that, in his unity with the Lord, the Lord gave life to this boy who should have been dead. We see that the Apostle is in no way calling attention to himself.
As we see in the Acts of the Apostles, the Lord is continually giving life to those who have physically died. However, more importantly, He gives life to people who are spiritually dead – those who are dead in these sorts of sins : bitterness, anger, jealousy, envy ; people who are dead in the sins of selfishness, pride and rebellion against the Lord. He gives them life. There is more than one way to be in the tomb and have the Lord give life. One can be a zombie. Zombies (as you may remember from the movies) were the living dead. They were supposedly people who had been dug up out of a grave and robot-like were wandering around, catching people and making them zombies like themselves. Figuratively speaking, there are people who behave similarly all around us. They are so full of themselves that they do not have a second for anyone else. They do not care about anything at all except self-preservation. Their lives are lost in themselves, and they are dead to everything. There are also people who are dead because they are full of hatred, full of bitterness, full of anger, and their mouths are used only for vicious words and cutting remarks. Such people, also, are like these zombies : they appear to be alive, but they are not.
The Lord calls us to bring true life to these people and to show them what true life, eternal life actually means. True life consists in giving oneself in love selflessly with no strings attached : I give myself in service to others. The Lord is calling each one of us to be servants of everyone else, and to be seeing what we can do to help everyone else. He is calling us to see what we can do to bring life, hope, love and power into the lives of those who are all caught up in themselves, and totally lost, taken up in the sorrowful emptiness of serving themselves only.
It is our responsibility to teach them forgiveness, to teach them how to forgive. Most of the world does not know how to forgive but instead knows how to wreak vengeance and to take life. The world is getting more and more bloody and bloodthirsty all the time. It is our responsibility to break that cycle with our love, with the power of our prayers and with the power of our union with Christ in His life-giving love. It is our responsibility to bring life to the world, to bring light to the darkness and to raise out of the living tombs those who are wandering around dead but still capable of hearing the word. Living the love of Jesus Christ, it is for us to give them this word of life, by being in communion with each other and with God, and by bringing them into communion with us in Him.
This morning, let us once again strive to unite ourselves to the Lord and unite ourselves with each other. Let us remember that our calling is not to get something out of anyone but to give and forgive. Let us see what there is that we can do to help everyone else, not expecting anything in return. Thereby we will truly live Orthodox Christian lives. Thereby we will truly be united in Christ. Thereby, we will be taken up into perfect communion with the Father. Thereby we will be showing that we are alive in the Holy Spirit and that our whole lives glorify the all-holy Trinity : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.