God is with us

Bishop Seraphim : Homily
God is with us
25th Sunday after Pentecost
11 December, 2005
Ephesians 4:1-6 ; Luke 10:25-37


In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

In the Epistle reading this morning, the Apostle Paul is speaking to us about how everything is gathered into one in Christ. It would be very helpful if we all kept in mind that particular admonition of the Apostle this morning, because we live in a time and a culture in which the opposite is understood. In most of Canadian society and in most Canadians’ attitude these days, God (where He is considered at all) is merely a sort of philosophical concept, something that we turn to when we have some great need or other. (Notice that I am saying “something” and not “Someone” in this case.) These people think that God is “out there somewhere”, far away, and that we approach Him or it, feeling guilty and full of fear, and so forth.

All these concepts are contrary to what we, as Orthodox Christians, understand Him to be. The Lord is not a philosophical concept or idea. He is not a construct of our imagination. He is not some sort of sociological development. God is the Creator of everything that is. It is He who, because of His love, brought everything into being. If there are any scientific attempts to understand the origin of the universe, all those origins are still very understandable by the action of God’s love. Even the “Big Bang” theory conforms very well to the explosion of God’s love. He brings everything into being because of His love, not merely because of a compression of gases. Where did those gases come from ? If we accept the theory that in the beginning there was a primeval mass which eventually explodes, then the question must be answered : “Where did that come from ?” We understand that the primeval mass comes from God. God is the Creator of everything. He is not only the Originator of everything, who winds up the universe, puts it on a shelf and lets it tick away. God sustains everything. He sustains everything, always. Therefore, when Pope Benedict (at that time Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote a book about the Divine Liturgy, entitling it God is near us, he showed that he was off the mark. God is not simply near us. When we say that God is near us like that, we are suggesting that He is nearby, but separate. This is not at all the case. We Orthodox say that God is with us. Especially at the great feasts of the Nativity and the Theophany, we love to sing at Great Compline that “God is with us”. This is right and true. God is with us. He is not looking at us from some distance. He is with us. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He is closer to us than we can be to ourselves. That is how “with us” He is.

The Lord in His love sustains with love everything that He created because of love. Since God is love, as we believe, and as the apostles have taught us (and as we experience also in our life), everything is both created by and sustained by His loving presence. It is important for us to remember that, because there are societies where people get depressed so easily that they forget to turn to God at all. They wait for crisis moments before they turn to Him. In fact, we do tend to put God on the back burner of our lives, instead of remembering that we depend on Him for everything. In our very technological and sort of pseudo-scientific age (i.e. “science without God”) we tend to think that we are doing everything ourselves. We seem to think that we are achieving and acquiring everything for ourselves by ourselves. We also like to think (as a poet of a couple of hundred years ago said) that we are the “captain of our own ship”, and the “master of everything round about us”.

However, that is not the case at all. Yes, we acquire many things, and we accomplish many things in the course of our life. Moreover, everything that we have that is good, in fact, we have because God has blessed us to have it. We have it as a responsibility. Nothing that we have is for ourselves alone. The Apostle Paul always makes that clear to us. Everywhere in his writings he is teaching us that what we have been given as gifts (whether they are material gifts or spiritual gifts or intellectual gifts) are not for us alone. They are given to us in order to be of use to other people, in order to build up the Church of Christ, in order to be useful and helpful to people. The Lord gives everything to us to be used as yeast and salt (see Matthew 5:13 ; 13:33). He gives us these things in order to make more life, to make more love, and to increase everything. The Lord is the Giver of Life.

Many of the scientists, for instance, do not ask themselves properly how it is that after some of the cataclysmic catastrophes that have occurred on the earth in the past (with the extinction of dinosaurs, and so forth), life came back so quickly, and in such great variety. After a cataclysm such as that, creatures that had never existed before now existed, and in large numbers. Where did they come from ? It is not that these things just bubbled out of the sea by some sort of fortuitous strike of lightning upon the waters. This had to do with the activity and the result of God’s love. God, who is the Creator and Sustainer of everything, renews creation. He renewed everything in a fresh way when the time of the dinosaurs came to an end. When we finish poisoning the earth in our time, the Lord will likely renew it again. He will clean it up.

The Lord, the Giver of Life, engages you and me, made in His image, and called to be in His likeness, to be co-workers, co-creators and co-guardians in His creation. That is why He gives us these gifts – in order to be this sort of co-worker and co-guardian. That gives us the opportunity to be such a person as the Samaritan today. This Samaritan was, to the Jewish people, a despised and disgusting sort of person. He was an outsider. He was semi-Jewish, but not really believing and worshipping correctly in accordance with the Jerusalemite understanding. The Samaritans were in fact treated like dogs in those days. Yet, according to the Lord’s parable, when a Jewish man, is beaten up and left for dead, several clergy walk by and do not dare touch him because they would be defiled by the possibility of touching a dead body (because they were not sure if he were dead or not). Even if he was not dead and he was bleeding, even that would make them unclean and unable to serve in the Temple. Therefore, they did not touch him. However, it was this very unclean and untouchable person who came along, expressed God’s love, and brought God’s healing to this man. The Samaritan restored him at his own expense and not at the government’s expense. A denarius is at least a day’s wages for a worker. It is not exactly a small thing that this man is giving up of his own substance in order to restore this injured person to health and well-being again.

In many ways in Canadian society, we who are Orthodox Christians find ourselves being like this Samaritan. Very many Canadians say that they are disappointed with Christianity in one way or another, because of the failures of Christians, and because of the poverty of Christian witness in the past. We, who are traditional, do not try to water down Who Christ is for the sake of making people more comfortable. Therefore, we preach and live and teach and serve Jesus Christ who loves all these broken-up Canadians, and who Himself, like the good Samaritan, wants to heal them. He wants to heal them, to renew them, to bring them back to life. It is we who are the hands and feet of that Samaritan. It is we, unlikely people, who are called by the Lord to bring renewed hope throughout the society in which we live.

In all the places throughout the country where there are churches, we are mostly small, and not seen by most Canadians. Our Temples can be sitting on a main street (some of them quite big, and some of them with very nice architecture) and yet people do not see them at all. They are not aware of them or if they are aware of them, they think that perhaps it is some sort of Sikh temple, or something like that. They do not imagine that it could be a Christian church that is standing there. In the long run, people who are coming to us across the country, are people whom the Lord Himself sends to us.

I am very much impressed by the seriousness of some of our parishes in terms of trying to be visible and to reach out. For instance, a parish in n that had recently built a new building, decided that they were going to try to make their church visible. They wanted to let people know that they were there, so they published a pamphlet. It is a nice little explanatory pamphlet (professionally done) about what is the Orthodox Church, and what is this parish. They printed 10,000 of these, and delivered them all by hand, door to door in the whole area around the church. They delivered 10,000 of them. As a result of this, four people came to the church. They advertised in the phone book. They advertised in the newspapers. Once in a while someone would come to the church from that. They were doing something to make themselves visible. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people who come to the church there are people who simply show up one Sunday morning. Some of them come because they know someone in the parish. They have encountered this Orthodox Christian, and they understand that there is something good and different about this person that attracts them. Therefore, they dare one Sunday to come to church. Sometimes they do not stick, but some of them do stick. There are other people who come, and no-one knows why or how they got there. Out of the blue, the Lord did something in that person’s heart one Sunday morning, and that person arrives in the church.

This is the way yeast operates in bread. It hides, as our Lord said in His parable – The Kingdom of God is “‘like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it was all leavened’” (Luke 13:21). What became of that yeast hidden in the flour (because once it is mixed together we cannot tell one from the other) ? It gives life. It raises the whole thing. What happens when someone puts a little pinch of salt in the flour ? After water is added, where is the salt ? However, we can certainly tell its presence by its taste. That is how we are to be. That is how we are perhaps behaving in this country. Slowly, our Church is growing and developing in unexplainable ways, precisely because the Lord is using us as His yeast and salt. This community has been here for ten years in n, and we have not grown very much visibly. On the other hand, there are people I know who have passed through this parish. They are in one place or another elsewhere in the country, still alive in Christ, and still serving Christ in a different parish. I rather suspect that the service of this community is not confined to this province. I understand also that this area is not one of the easiest places to establish the Orthodox Church. That is partly because this area is so old in Canadian settlement. However, there are yet older and tougher places.

That does not mean that the Church cannot be properly established here. This city, like everywhere else in the country, has people whose hearts are looking for Christ. They are hungering and they are thirsting. They are looking for Christ. It is up to us to live our lives sincerely and lovingly, following Christ, with open hearts, open arms, being hospitable in the way the Samaritan was. Actually, if the Levite and the priest of the Temple had really listened to their hearts on that particular day that our Lord spoke of in the parable, they might have let go their service in the Temple that day for the sake of this broken human being. This broken human being is truly important to the Lord.

It is necessary that we in our lives here in this city, keep the sense of equilibrium, of balance, and remember that the Lord is with us. He is not far away from us. He is with us. He is helping us at all times, giving us strength at all times, and protecting us at all times in this environment. Even if we do not necessarily see it, He is bringing fruit of life from our lives, as we touch people who are around us in our daily lives. He does something with it. He does not ask us to be or do everything : He asks us to be co-workers with Him. However, He does the major work all the time. We are the catalysts. We are the yeast. We are the salt.

The traditional saying of the Jesus Prayer by Orthodox Christians underlines our understanding that God is with us. When people are being taught how to do the Jesus Prayer properly (that applies mostly to monks, but other people are doing it too), they are given to understand in the first place that the purpose of saying the Jesus Prayer is to encounter God, to deepen one’s love for God. We do not just say some sort of prayer in order to become better focussed mentally, or to become some sort of guru or yogi or something like that, because of the ability to concentrate. The repetition of the prayer is all concerned with love. Everything about the Christian way is concerned with love. The person who is being taught how to say the Jesus Prayer is taught to focus. Where ? On the heart. The person has to look not out, but in. One finds Christ here, in the heart, in the center of our being. That is where we find Christ. It is a tricky business, so when most people are asking how to say the Jesus Prayer, that particular direction is not given to them in the beginning. The person is taught to say the Prayer slowly and carefully, and perhaps to look at an icon of Christ. After that, of course, the person can begin to look in. We have to remember for Whom we are looking when we are looking in. When we look in, we are going to see just soot. Everyone of us is in about the same condition. It takes some time to learn how to find Christ in there.

God is with us. The Lord is nurturing us. He is supporting us. He is enriching us with His love, always, and everywhere. 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.