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.