Letting the Lord be in Charge of our Lives

Bishop Seraphim : Homily
Letting the Lord be in Charge of our Lives
13th Sunday after Pentecost
10 September, 2006
1 Corinthians 16:13-24 ; Matthew 21:33-43


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.