'Unsettling Times' - A Contemporary Commentary

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

 

Another Grim Milestone - Watching the news yesterday evening, I learned that we have now surpassed 500,000 American COVID-19 deaths in about one year's time. This is the largest number of deaths in the world by far. This staggering figure surpasses the number of deaths among American soldiers in World Wars I & II and the Vietnam war combined. The news channel I was watching had a moving tribute to a handful of representative citizens who lost their lives. Some of them were quite young. This has been an ongoing American tragedy, and perhaps all we can do is pray with deep respect and conviction: Memory Eternal! And let us all continue to remain vigilant and follow the prescribed guidelines meant for our collective protection.

Domestic Concerns and International Horror - The news flowed into the latest edition of 60 Minutes. The first segment covered the alarming increase of threats of violence toward many American federal judges. They clearly need and deserve more protection.

The second segment covered the murderous and even genocidal reign of Assad in Syria. Some brave Syrian journalists and photographers have chronicled these horrendous crimes and shared them with the Western world. The thousands of saved photographs of tortured victims smuggled out of Syria (and verified by American intelligence as to their authenticity) are a grim record of just how horrible this has been for thousands of Syrians. Whole towns and villages have been ravaged and women and children are among these victims, with many tortured beyond recognition. The goal is to bring Assad to justice "one day" on an international level. The evidence is overwhelming, but the path to that justice will prove to be difficult. 

The Future of QAnon - The third segment of 60 Minutes dealt with the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, discussing its future following its many unfulfilled expectations. It is a troubling movement and since we live in unsettling times it could very well be a potent combination of fear, paranoia, and manipulation that draws people into such a world of fantasy and unreality. Is it too naive to think that practicing Orthodox Christians cannot be susceptible to such conspiracy theories? Probably so, but we have the "tools" on hand that protect us from such delusion. In the Church's spiritual tradition, the Fathers teach us about the virtue of diakrasis. This is usually translated as "discernment," the capacity to discern - and then choose - between good and evil; truth and falsehood; reality and fantasy. Archbishop Kallistos Ware has called diakrasis a "spiritual sense of good taste." The saints claim that the gift of discernment is essential to the spiritual life. Otherwise, we can fall into what is called plani in our spiritual tradition. And this means delusion and fantasy.

Keeping our gaze on the crucified and risen Christ remains absolutely essential. Following the precepts of the Gospel and looking to the saints as icons of sanity and holiness. Confessing our sins and seeking spiritual guidance, reading the Scriptures and receiving the Eucharist. Cultivating the virtues of humility, patience and love. These are the wonderful gifts granted to us in the Church so as to liberate ourselves from the fear, paranoia, and manipulation that threatens us and our children in what are, indeed, unsettling times. I often like to recall the words of Fr. Thomas Hopko: In the Church you can keep your sanity.

Watching the news post-dinner is hardly an opportunity for relaxation in today's deeply troubled world. It reinforces Fr. Roman Braga's urgent plea: "Stay in the boat!"

 

The Gospel Has Turned Things Upside Down

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

We have entered the season of the Triodion, that vast compilation of lenten hymnography gathered together in one book over the centuries that will guide us through the pre-lenten period; and then on through Great Lent and Holy Week; taking us to the very brink of the paschal celebration of the Death and Resurrection of Christ. 

The inspired hymnography of the Triodion interprets the Scriptures in a direct and accessible manner, in the process making it challengingly clear that each person and event from the Scriptures – Old or New Testament; positive or negative – is meant to be applied to our own lives as someone or something to emulate or avoid. The Church always treats the Scriptures as a living Word, not as a chronicle of the past or as an abstract system of belief. This form of concrete realism is indeed more challenging than a presentation of untested ideas. 

Be that as it may, the Triodion opens with the Sunday of the Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee (LK. 18:10-14). In the Orthodox Church, this reading is part of the pre-lenten cycle always prescribed for the fourth Sunday before Great Lent begins. The intentions of the Lord in delivering this parable are clearly expressed in the solemn pronouncement following the parable itself:

 

For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted. (LK. 18:14)

 

The pride and self-righteousness of the Pharisee – he who “exalts himself” – is rather starkly contrasted with the humility and repentance of the Publican – he who “humbles himself.” From these two examples of a revealed interior disposition, it is only the publican who is “justified” according to Christ. With a kind of “folk-wisdom” that would have resonated for his rural flock in early 20th century Serbia, Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich recasts the parable in an earthy story form that seeks to reinforce Christ’s teaching:

 

A man went into the forest to choose a tree from which to make roof beams. And he saw two trees, one beside the other. One was smooth and tall, but had rotted away inside, and the other was rough on the outside and ugly, but its core was healthy. The man sighed, and said to himself: “What use is this smooth, tall tree to me if it is rotten inside and useless for beams? The other one, even if it is rough and ugly, is at least healthy on the inside and so, if I put a bit more effort into it, I can use it for roof-beams for my house.” And, without thinking any more about it, he chose that tree.

 

And just to be certain, Bishop Nikolai drives home the moral point in the following conclusion:

 

So will God choose between two men for His house, and will choose, not the one who appears outwardly righteous, but the one whose heart is filled with God’s healthy righteousness.

 

The Pharisee acted according to the Law, keeping himself free externally from sin, fasting twice a week and paying a tithe on all that he had. How many parish priests secretly wish that that was precisely how their parishioners would live and act!? (For the moment we will not investigate just how parishioners would wish their priests to act). In fact, conventional wisdom would lead up to expect that in such a parable, the Pharisee would be praised precisely for his exact piety; and the publican would serve as a stark reminder of how not to live. 

However, Christ turns all of this conventional wisdom "upside down," for it is the interior orientation of the heart that Christ is most concerned with; and it is here that the Pharisee twisted righteousness into self-righteousness which is basically a form of idolatry – that of the “self.” Do any of us escape that self-destructive trap? If not, then better to admit it, as St. John Chrysostom reminds us:

 

It is evil to sin, though here help can be given; but to sin, and not to admit it – there is no help here.

 

The humility of the publican is perhaps best expressed in a series of short descriptions – unwillingness to look up towards heaven, the beating of the breast, the plaintive cry: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner” – rather than an intellectually-constructed set of abstract notions. 

Why is it so hard to be humble? Perhaps because it frightens us. But what would the source of this fear possibly be? We fear being taken advantage of, of being used by others, of losing ground in our struggle to not only get ahead, but to survive in a harsh world. We may pay lip-service to humility as Christians, but we act as if deep down we “know better.” Humility is hardly a recommended survival tactic! I would rather doubt that humility is the “stuff” of self-help literature. 

This silent and implicit rejection of the virtue of humility makes a certain amount of sense if we equate humility – wrongfully, I am certain – with weakness, timidity, passivity, fear of conflict, etc. So we usually practice a safe form of humility when that will keep us in our “comfort zone.” But do we know better? Can we actually doubt the strength of a universally-acclaimed Christian virtue without having experienced it ourselves? Certainly we recognize the truth that we literally depend upon the humility of Christ for the gift of salvation! We praise and glorify Christ precisely because of His surpassing humility. Perhaps, then, if we ever made a sustained effort to be humble, we would appraise this essential virtue differently. As the saints teach us:

 

Until a human person achieves humility, he will receive no reward for his works. The reward is given not for the works but for the humility. (St. Isaac the Syrian)

A humble person never falls. Being already lower than any, where can he fall? Vanity is a great humiliation, but humility is a great exalting, honor and dignity. (St. Makarios the Great)

 

The Gospel – based on the scandal of the Cross – has turned many things upside down. In God’s judgment, according to Christ, the proud are humbled and the humbled are exalted. The parable of the Publican and the Pharisee sets this choice before us.

 

Another Word on Zacchaeus

 

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

 

The biblical scholar Brendan Byrne said this about Zacchaeus: "Maybe he is not such a bad tax collector after all!" Knowing the reputation of biblical publicans - or tax collectors - that may strike us as a surprising statement. But he comes to this possible conclusion based upon a careful reading of the text, specifically Lk. 19:8. That is when Zacchaeus responds to Christ's presence in his home by declaring: "Look, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor and, if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold."  

The Greek behind these words make it perfectly clear that they are spoken in the present tense, and not the future tense ("I will give") found in certain translations, such as the NRSV. In other words, when Jesus saw Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree and then called him down and invited himself to his home, Zacchaeus was already acting in a way consistent with the very precepts of Christ. Of course, we do not know how long this has been going on, or the inspiration behind his own form of benevolence. But the point seems to be that his "conversion" occurred before his dramatic encounter with Jesus. 

When Jesus then says with great solemnity that "Today salvation has come to this house, since he is also a son of Abraham" (v. 9), He is acknowledging that Zacchaeus is acting in such a way that his "wholeness" (one of the meanings of salvation) is already a part of his ongoing personal transformation into a righteous person even though he is a tax collector.  

As an honest an even generous tax collector, Zacchaeus is a genuine son of Abraham. He is not on the outside, as tax collectors were considered to be great sinners; but rather he is on the inside of the People of God. He is included not excluded. "For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost." (v. 10). Brendan Byrne titled his commentary on the Gospel of Luke, The Hospitality of God. Here is one of the most engaging and convincing signs of God's hospitality now revealed in the presence and teaching of Christ. This is a hospitality that should ever form our own conceptions of "other people," regardless of just how sinful we consider them to be.. 

In this light, the people who need conversion are those described somewhat vaguely as "they," as in "And when they saw it they all murmured, 'He has gone in to be a guest of a man who is a sinner'." (v. 7) Who are these mysterious "they?" The disciples of Christ? Perhaps, but most probably the "crowd" that often witnesses the Gospel events and comments on them off to the side (like the chorus in a Greek tragedy). Thinking and reacting outside of the "new wineskins" of the Gospel, their conventional piety cannot embrace one such as Zacchaeus. We are all too familiar with such conventional thinking, because it just may be our own.

Following up on Brendan Byrne's commentary, he offers a good summary paragraph of where this episode with Zacchaeus has led us:

"If we are right to translate Zacchaeus' statement in the present tense, it would seem that he did not have to undergo a conversion to be included in the community of salvation. Whether he had to undergo a conversion in any sense is not clear. What changes for Zacchaeus is his position with respect to the community. Jesus brings him in from the margins  to the center ... It challenges the community to become more effectively a beachhead of the kingdom, where lost human beings can find welcome and new life in the grasp of a hospitable God." (The Hospitality of God, p. 151-152)

The ones who desperately need a conversion experience are the "they" of this episode,  those who are spiritually circumscribed by a mode of thinking that the Son of man came to challenge and transform. Our post-resurrection communities need to be ever-vigilant to those same challenges and potential transformations. Perhaps something to meditate on as we approach Great Lent.

Ascending with Zacchaeus

 

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

“Today salvation has come to this house.” (LK. 19:9)

 

According to our liturgical calendar, this coming Sunday is called “Zacchaeus Sunday.” And this particular Sunday is the first “signal” that we are approaching the beginning of Great Lent. Those with the slightest familiarity with the Church’s liturgical cycle know that we are now five Sundays and four weeks away from the Lenten season. Great Lent, therefore, will begin on Monday, March 15. With the four pre-lenten Sundays subsequent to Zacchaeus Sunday, no one can claim that Great Lent caught him/her unaware. We are given ample “warning” for what just may be a seismic shift in lifestyle once we embrace Great Lent.

Zacchaeus Sunday, of course, is based upon the appointed Gospel reading of LK. 19:1-10, and the account there of how Zacchaeus and his household were “saved” by the healing and forgiving presence of Christ. This was in response to the conversion of Zacchaeus and his repentance before the Lord. It is quite interesting that we have the name of this particular publican. Perhaps he was a known member of the earliest post-resurrection Christian community centered in Jerusalem, yet scattered throughout Israel. Be that as it may, this conversion had a strong impact on the early Church as this account was recorded by the evangelist Luke.

In a relatively short, yet very dramatic narrative, St. Luke vividly brings to life not only the encounter between Zacchaeus and Christ, but a series of profoundly interconnected themes that deserve our close attention. These four are clearly essential:

+ desire
+ repentance
+ atonement
+ salvation

Zacchaeus, as Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote in his now classic study Great Lent, is the “man of desire.” It was his burning desire “to see who Jesus was” (19:3), that led him to “climb up into a sycamore tree to see him.” (19:4) Though despised as a publican/tax-collector who defrauded his fellow villagers in Jericho, that position gave him a certain begrudged “prominence,” so the spectacle of Zacchaeus scrambling up the sycamore tree must have exposed him to public ridicule and derision. Zacchaeus’ desire must have been strong indeed to suffer that anticipated reaction. Thus, desire to “see Jesus” can lead anyone to overcome many of his/her human frailties and limitations, as well as the fear of violating any of the accepted rules of social etiquette if necessary. Our human limitations, that sinfulness that leaves us all short of the glory of God (ROM. 3;23), is represented here by Zacchaeus being “small of stature.” Our own sinfulness “cuts us down to size” and leaves us short of the stature of Christ that we are meant to grow into. Desire to change is a first movement on to the path of this desired growth. In hearing or reading this passage, we learn to humble ourselves in the realization that the sinful publican Zacchaeus has attained a stature that we need to emulate: “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” (EPH. 4:13)

Once Zacchaeus and his household are blessed with the presence of Christ, he openly repents of having “defrauded anyone of anything.” (19:8). His heart has been “wounded” by the obvious love of Christ who, in turn, had to suffer the reproach and murmuring of the witnesses to this event for being “the guest of a man who is a sinner.” (19:7) Jesus had heard this before, but always remained untroubled or “above” such accusations in His messianic role of bringing “good news” to “prostitutes and publicans.” Zacchaeus atones for his former sinfulness by openly declaring “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” (19:8) This is not a legalistic transaction. Zacchaeus is not purchasing the favor of God. Rather, he is moved to a concrete expression of a changed life that goes far beyond mere words or internal disposition.

The unmerited gift of salvation is how Christ “seals” the initial movement of Zacchaeus toward the restoration of his full stature. Salvation – soteria – means wholeness; the wholeness of soul and body that only God can restore. Zacchaeus has received this gift of salvation because, contrary to certain elements then current within Jewish piety that would have left him marginalized as a religious and social pariah, “he also is a son of Abraham.” (19:9) The salvation of Christ is extensive and intensive: universally offered to all of people, and offered to the “worst of sinners.” This is made clear by Christ’s solemn pronouncement that closes the narrative concerning Zacchaeus: “For the Son of man came to seek and save the lost.” (19:10) All – Jew and Gentile, the righteous and the unrighteous – are lost but God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (I TIM. 2:4)

In one of the many fine paradoxes - or ironies – found in the Gospels, the despised publican Zacchaeus becomes our teacher: “So the last shall be first, and the first last.” (MATT. 20:16) When that sinks in deeply, we can begin our own ascent to God on the ladder of the virtues, as Zacchaeus ascended on his humble sycamore tree.

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

Here is an amazingly perceptive article about the eschatological vision of Fr. Alexander Schmemann and how that vision can lead us up from the dead end of not only a polarized society, but even from a polarized theology. Fr. Alexis Vinogradov has been a life-long student of Fr. Schmemann's thought, and has translated many of his works from the original Russian into English. That would include Fr. Schmemann's Radio Free Europe talks, when he was able to speak directly to the people of the former Soviet Union, stuck in a drab culture and starved of a religious view of reality and the world under the communist regime imposed in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. There is no doubt in my mind, that Fr. Alexander Schmemann's understanding of Christ and the Church, as experienced directly in the Eucharist, is the way forward for Orthodoxy in America.

I highly encourage everyone to take the time and read this article.

 

SCHMEMANN FOR OUR TIME: CHRIST, THE CRISIS OF OUR AGE

by Fr. Alexis Vinogradov | Ελληνικά

 

 

 

Each year since his death in 1983, Father Alexander Schmemann’s legacy is evoked through an established annual lecture in his name at St. Vladimir’s, the theological seminary in New York in which his ideas flourished, nourishing generations of clergy and faithful and, through numerous publications and lectures, reaching the broader world. A permanent academic chair or annual event implies that the individual named represents a benchmark of thought and achievement for the institution, a legacy which his spiritual heirs are committed to honor and promote. Here, I ponder how Fr. Alexander might formulate the Church’s response to the crisis of our time.

In a foundational idea of his work, perhaps best expressed in his famous lecture, Between Utopia and Escape, Fr. Alexander advocates for the middle path between two extremes—a sectarian isolation from the real world at one pole, and at the other pole, its counterpart of “progress” towards an ephemeral secular utopia. Yet his proposed middle path is not a compromise between the two extremes, but rather the victory of an ascension out of both dead-ends towards an eschatologicalvision of the tangible, real world, the home of the Incarnate Lord of history.

Now, for Fr. Alexander eschatology is not some obscure theological category that deals with the future post-mortem concerns of man, but rather is the manifestation of the kingdom entering and transfiguring Time itself. For him this transformation is manifest perfectly in the Liturgy. In his The Eucharist (p.129), Fr. Alexander writes that in the liturgy,

 

our remembrance “becomes our entry into Christ’s victory over Time, over its collapse into ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’. It is an entry not into some abstract motionless ‘eternity’ but into ‘life everlasting.’”

 

This ascendancy over the tyranny of Time is seen in the kairos which proclaims the kingdom as the Eucharistic liturgy begins, and further in the recounting of the saving acts that “have come to pass,” including in these acts the “second and glorious coming” which we yet anticipate. Here, in the liturgy, the linear sequence of history is suspended within the primacy of eschatology: events of eternal significance, borne in the timeless One who is now, and remains always, “in our midst”! And while theologians argue about what “happens” to the holy Gifts, they overlook that we first call upon the Holy Spirit to effect the change “upon us,” and in consequence “upon the gifts here offered.” It is us, the gathered faithful, who are being transformed, shaped into a New Creation, made able to gaze into the ineffable dimensions of the Spirit, and thus perceive the world and all its matter as symbol of the kingdom.

At the moment of this writing, America is enduring domestic terrorism warring upon its sacred institutions of law and government (spurred by leaders publicly ordained to preserve them)—the seditious occupation of the Capitol—on a day that ironically coincides with the Christian Church’s celebration of the renewal of all creation by the immersion of Christ into the Jordan waters. So here we are, concretely in the middle of the cultural cycles of Law and Revolt, the polarized forces of Conservatism and Liberation, and here Fr. Alexander speaks of Christ as precisely the one Crisis that resolves the irreconcilable tension of these extreme poles of human concourse that permeate every fiber of our lives.

If etymologically krisis means the sifting that separates the toxic from the healthy organism, the biblical “chaff from the wheat,” then what Schmemann says must ring true for every facet of human affairs:

 

“Christ is the only one crisis which is blessed and saving…in Him the Law is fulfilled as well as Revolution…the whole meaning of Christianity is to soar upwards out of this rhythm, this course, these dynamics of the world. Christianity makes it possible to live by the truth of the revolution inside the law and by the truth of the law inside the revolution, their fulfillment in each other—it is the kingdom of God, truth itself, beauty itself for it is Life and Spirit.”  (DEC.8, 1975, JOURNALS)

 

The following words of that same journal entry, give us a sense of how stifling Fr. Alexander would find today’s warring “sides” not only in society but especially in the Body of Christ:

 

I see the key to the Christian perception of culture, of politics, and, of course of religion itself—a ‘holding it all together.’ Christianity is freedom from conservatism and from revolution. Hence a ‘rightist’ Christian is as frightening as a ‘leftist’ one, and I know why I lean towards the left when dealing with the rightists, and to the right when I am with leftists.

 

If Fr. Alexander alerted us to the curse of the primordial Fall of man manifest in this cycle of law on one side and the drive towards freedom from law on the other, if he was able to show us how in himself Christ embodied the reconciliation and fulfillment of the two opposites — what answers does Schmemann himself either show or provide for our own path in imitation of Christ? What answers does he give that would offer genuine hope for the Church, and consequently for the world? How do we rise with Christ into the New Creation that He has made of us by His fellowship in our earthly flesh?

When we look to Fr. Schmemann’s writings on saintly figures, his biographic sketches like the well-known Three Metropolitans, or his eulogies on luminaries like Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, we see that he dwelt less on their theological or historic achievements than on the small details of their personality and manner of being. In Metropolitan Leonty, Schmemann highlights his gentleness and love of children; in the great scholar Bulgakov, not his theories, but rather his deep immersion in the luminous experience of the liturgy. Character, not grand works, marks these personalities.

In his excursuses on Russian literature, Fr. Alexander always highlighted the manner of seemingly insignificant figures, such as the old obscure and annoying woman, the true heroine in Matryona’s House, “without whom,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “the whole world itself could not stand”; or about Chekhov’s Head Gardener, whose protagonist could never see his neighbor, no matter how soiled, other than a glorious child of God.

Clearly, not only the Church’s cloud of witnesses in her saints, but also this rich field of living and literary characters shaped Fr. Alexander’s own unique personality. I can never read the account of the first attempt to arrest Jesus in the gospel, without thinking of Fr. Alexander. The officers return empty-handed to the Pharisees and give this excuse: “no man ever spoke like this man!” (Jn.7:46). Fr. Alexander drew us who were fortunate to live in his time, by the manner in which he spoke words of life, of truth, and of joy. Even his unequivocal and even acerbic “condemnations” (peppered liberally among his Journal entries) are invariably noted in a spirit of grief for the errant and wrong-doers, and never to expose them as enemies that need to be crushed. He was well aware that even many of his “heroes” and saints failed in the realms of the world’s “success.” For Fr. Schmemann the crisis revealed in Christ, the true discernment of spirits, is not to curse the wrongdoer, but to identify and unmask the idols that stand in for the truth, and possess their victims (1 Jn. 5:21). A theology denuded of witnesses to the kingdom of light and joy, a theology that polarizes man against his brother, is no theology at all.

Fr. Alexander stood humbly before the expanse of history, articulating the difference between the kingdom revealed, made sure and present in Christ—and the manner in which this kingdom is discerned and enacted in its historic and cultural setting. We are perhaps only now, in our current crisis of political, cultural, and religious polarization and the exponential tribalism and divisions in the Body of Christ, recognizing that each of us finds ourselves caught in the death-bound confines of one or another polarity, the camp of our own “righteous” group and mindset. To walk in the assurance of immortality of “sons of God” (Lk. 20:36), is to stand liberated from this cyclical trap, to rise with Christ into the New Creation that he has made of us by his fellowship in our earthly flesh. Only in this freedom do we have a “word” to offer to the world.

---

Fr. Alexis Vinogradov is Retired Rector (1978-2015) of St. Gregory Theologian Orthodox Church in Wappingers Falls, NY.

 

Learning from the Three Holy Hierarchs

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

"The human person is an animal with the command to become like God." - St. Basil the Great

This last Saturday, January 30, we commemorated The Three Hierarchs - Sts. Basil the Great (+379), Gregory of Nazianzus (+390), and John Chrysostom (+407). Outside of the Scriptures, these 4th c. theologians/pastors are three of the great Founding Fathers of our Orthodox Christian theological legacy. They truly shaped it in a way that remains normative to this day. The link immediately below is to a short summary of how this feast developed in the late 11th - early 12th century.

https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/01/30/100350-synaxis-of-the-ecumenical-teachers-and-hierarchs-basil-the-great

In addition, I would like to encourage everyone to read one or more of their works. Their style is quite accessible. They are free of all academic jargon for the simple reason that they were not academics holding a chair in this or that university. They were bishops/pastors guiding their respective flocks in the late 4th and early 5th century Christian world. I have therefore put together a series of links to SVS Press and its editions from the Popular Patristic Series of some of the most prominent of the written works of these Fathers. (And they are relatively inexpensive). Some are treatises, others are collections of their homilies that spanned their lifetimes. All of it is very good.

As we are getting close to the pre-lenten season, perhaps here is a good book or two for Great Lent. As put aside our iPhones and TV sets during Great Lent to some extent, at least, here is a good way to "redeem the time" in reading solid Orthodox literature.

If anyone is actually interested, and would like a recommendation or guide in choosing one or more of these titles, please contact me.

St. Basil the Great - 

On Social Justice - Social justice with a clear and definite Gospel foundation.

On the Human Condition - Great essays on what it means to be human from a theological perspective.

On Fasting and Feasts -  Wonderful homilies on a variety of themes that still engage us within the Church today.

On The Holy Spirit -  An absolute classic that ranks with On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius. Biblical interpretation (exegesis) at its dazzling best.

On Christian Doctrine and Practice - A series of treatises covering a wide-range of theological and practical concerns.

On Christian Ethics - A great antidote to humanistic, autonomous ethics.

St. Gregory the Theologian

On God and Christ, The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius - Again, absolute classics that defend and describe the Holy Trinity. Unmatched.

On God and Man: The Theological Poetry of St. Gregory of Nazianzus - Poetic theology that is free of sentimentalism.

Festal Orations - Another great collection of homilies from one of the greatest Christian rhetoricians off all time.

 

St. John Chrysostom

On Wealth and Poverty (2nd Ed.) - A "must-read" collection of six homilies on the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Opens the mind and heart to Christian charity.

The Cult of the Saints - Great homilies on a theme that still perplexes some Christians.

On Marriage and Family Life - Although written in the 4th c., this still contains some real gems of insight to married Christians raising families.

- Fr. Steven

Meeting the Lord in the Temple

 
Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

This wonderful Feast of The Meeting of our Our Lord in the Temple (February 2) commemorates the event recorded in the Gospel According to St. Luke (2:22-40). This occurs forty days after the Nativity of Christ. Hence, this particular Feast brings to a close an entire cycle that began eighty days earlier with the onset of the Nativity Fast on November 15. The Circumcision of Christ that occurred eight days after His birth falls between the Feasts of the Nativity and the Meeting. 

One of the hymns for the Meeting nicely brings out this sequence of events, placing them in the context of fulfilling the Scriptures:

 

Search the Scriptures, as Christ our God said in the Gospels. For in them we find Him born as a child and bound in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger and fed upon milk, receiving circumcision and carried by Simeon: not in fancy nor in imagination but in very truth has He appeared unto the world. To Him let us cry aloud: Glory to Thee, O pre-eternal God. (Great Vespers, Litiya)

 

It is interesting to note how this hymn stresses the true humanity of the Lord by such expressions as "not in fancy nor in imagination but in very truth." Our Lord did not seem to be human, but He was truly human, otherwise He could not have saved us.  For, as St. Gregory the Theologian famously said: "What is not assumed is not healed."

Christ is brought to the Temple in Jerusalem by His mother and Joseph in fulfillment of the Law (LEV. 12). Unable to afford an unblemished lamb, they offer a pair of turtledoves. Yet, the Mother of God is carrying the unblemished Lamb of God in her arms and then offers Him to the righteous Simeon. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, St. Simeon prophecies to the Virgin Mary: "and a sword will pierce through your own soul also" (LK 2:35). This has always been understood as pointing to the maternal suffering of the Mother of God who will behold her Son dying on the Cross.

In a wonderful homily, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (+1944), revealed the humility of the Lord as the beginning of the path that would lead to His ultimate sacrifice:

 

The Infant was born on earth - the eternal God in a humble manger, but there was a place for Him in the Temple, for the Temple was built for Him. And He was brought into His Temple, where it pleased His Name to dwell (I Kings 8:29). But He came there not to receive veneration, but to serve many, in the form of a servant, veiling the radiance of His Divinity with the abject humility of the flesh. He came there as a son under the law, obedient to the law which He Himself had given to Moses, manifesting Himself as the model of obedience; for He came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it. His Mother came to dedicate Her firstborn Son to God, to give God the Son to God the Father, and to offer the redemptive and purifying sacrifice. In giving birth to the Infant, She did not know sin; but just as He, sinless, came to receive from John the baptism of repentance, so She too, in Her immaculate birth, came to offer a sacrifice for sin, having in Her arms the One who truly was the Sacrifice for the sins of the entire world... It is not for glory but for the offering of sacrifice that the Lord is brought into His house, which had to receive and encompass the One who cannot be encompassed. (Churchly Joy, p. 59-60)

 

If we search carefully, we discover that all of the Feasts commemorating the events in the early life of the Lord also point forward to the sacrifice of the Cross and the life-giving death of Christ. Bound in swaddling cloths and lying in a cave at His Nativity anticipates His later entombment when bound in burial cloths. The blood shed at His circumcision anticipates His blood shed upon the Cross. And being offered as a lamb in the Temple anticipates His sacrificial death as the Lamb of God.

In a very wide context, we realize that the Old Testament "meets" the New Testament when the Messiah is brought to the Temple, the dwelling-place of God. Jesus Christ is now the place of the divine presence, for His flesh is the "temple" of His divinity. The representatives of the Chosen People for this meeting are the righteous elder Simeon and the prophetess Anna. The elder Simeon received Christ into his arms and blessed God in the process.  The Old Testament (Symeon) meets the New Testament (Christ). We are all quite familiar with the magnificent hymn of St. Simeon, known as the Nunc Dimittis, chanted at every Vespers service:

 

Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation,which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people, a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel. (LK 2:32)

 

If we, too, could depart from this life with those words on our lips and in our hearts, that departure would be glorious!

Sadly, the prophetess Anna would probably be seen as a "fanatic" today because "She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day" (2:37) for the greater part of eighty-four years! Both Simeon and Anna realized that this meeting was of the deepest significance possible, for the young Child promised to be "the redemption of Jerusalem" (2:38). For this reason, the prophtess Anna "gave thanks to God" (2:38).

Participation in the liturgical cycle of the Feasts is a major component of the "battle of the calendars."  This is especially true when "competing" with entertainment or sports events.

Considering the depth of the great Feasts of the Church's liturgical cycle, expressed in a kind of theological poetry that amplifies what is found in Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church; revealed in beautiful iconography; and further enhanced in our communal liturgical gatherings; it seems only natural for Orthodox Christians to avail themselves of the opportunity to come together in worship whenever possible.

Lacking in "fun," but filled with divine grace, the Feasts make present the events being commemorated by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Actually, nothing is lacking - except perhaps "instant replay." But this is more than made up for by the fact that there are no interminable "commercial breaks" that would break the flow of the service. Expert pre- and post-Feast "analysis" is provided by the writings of the Holy Fathers and contemporary Orthodox theologians who offer insightful commentaries on the deepest levels of meaning of the Feast.

There is no final score, but "those who keep my words to the end" are all considered to be "conquerors" promises the Lord (REV. 2:26).