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.