A Heart Untouched?

Dear Parish Faithful,

“Were not ten cleansed?  Where are the nine?” (LK. 17:17)

In St. Basil the Great’s First Prayer in Preparation for Holy Communion, he acknowledges – and we acknowledge along with him when we offer this prayer up to God – that we are so often “thankless and graceless.”  St. Basil makes this claim after enumerating what “Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ our God” has done for us:  taken on our human nature, suffered crucifixion for our sake, and renewed our human nature by His own blood.  Yet still, says the saint, we remain “thankless and graceless.”  So much for building up our self-esteem!  Is that in reality a pious and rhetorical exaggeration embedded in a prayer meant to inspire genuine feeling within us; or has St. Basil simply articulated a “hard truth” about our human nature “corrupted by sin” - to borrow yet another phrase from his magnificent prayer?

Based on experience, it is hard not to believe that St. Basil is correct in his over-all assessment, and that he has done us a great service in reminding of this unfortunate characteristic of our human nature, a characteristic brought to life vividly in the Gospel narrative of Christ healing ten lepers, but only being thanked by one of them – and that one was a Samaritan!  (LK. 17:11-19)  The failure of nine lepers to return to Christ and offer thanksgiving is singled out for an unflattering comment; while the return of the Samaritan leper is singled out for open praise.  Christ most certainly does not need or demand our thanksgiving!  What he pointed out was for the sake of those healed and for those who witnessed the healing.  Healing is meant to touch the body and the “heart,”  so that the healed one’s life is totally redirected toward God.  Sometimes, however, the body can be healed, but the heart left untouched. That Gospel passage – heard just last Sunday – is a reminder that we can fall prey to just such a temptation:  to have been healed by Christ and yet to either “forget” to return to Him in thanksgiving; find other distractions more compelling; or simply to do so in outward form only.  I just coincidentally read in a book about another ecclesiastical figure that the famous Western medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, wrote in his Summa Theologiae:  “It is evident that every ingratitude is a sin.”  That was based on the logic that since gratitude and thankfulness were virtues, their opposite must be a sin.  However one may assess that “scholastic” logic, it seems to ring true.

In Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s classic work, For the Life of the World, we heard his unique voice recalling our initial vocation to be “eucharistic beings,” human beings who offer gratitude and thanksgiving to God in the full awareness that all things come from God and have the potential to lead us further toward God.  This includes the very food that we eat on a daily basis.  We can eat and drink unto ourselves, and thus we eat and drink ultimately unto death.  Or we eat and drink to the glory of God, and then food becomes sacramental as a means of uniting us with God.  Our heavenly Father restored the eucharistic meaning of food precisely in the Eucharist, when He gave to us the flesh and blood of the Son of Man for our lives and “for the life of the world.”  The bread and wine represent all food and all life as offered up to God in a spirit of profound thanksgiving to the very Source of life.  We, in turn, receive this food back now as Holy Communion, through which we are united to Christ and have Christ dwelling within us.  Fr. Schmemann captures this approach to life in his chapter entitled, simply, “The Eucharist:”

When man stands before the throne of God, when he has fulfilled all that God has given him to fulfill, when all sins are forgiven, all joy restored, then there is nothing else for him to do but to give thanks.  Eucharist (thanksgiving) is the life of paradise.  Eucharist is the only full and real response of man to God’s creation, redemption and gift of heaven.  But this perfect man who stands before God is Christ.  In Him alone all that God has given man was fulfilled and brought back to heaven.  He alone is the perfect Eucharistic Being.  He is the Eucharist of the world. In and through this Eucharist the whole creation becomes what it always was to be and yet failed to be. (p. 38)

I hope that you will agree with me that to say we have a great deal to be thankful for is a massive understatement.  This does not refer to what we have but to who we are:  sinners now healed by Christ and made worthy to enter the Kingdom of God.  The “leprosy” of our sin has been cleansed away.  Now we need to turn back to the source of our healing, praise God with a loud voice, and fall down at the feet of Jesus and give Him thanks.   Just like the Samaritan.

St Nicholas, A Living Rule of Faith

Dear Parish Faithful,

“God is wonderful in His saints, the God of Israel!”

I would like to wish everyone a blessed St. Nicholas feast day, and more specifically I would like to wish all of our parish members with the name of Nicholas a blessed name day.  Yesterday evening we were able to serve and celebrate a  wonderful Vesperal Liturgy for the Feast, and it is clear that St. Nicholas remains a beloved saint among our parish faithful, for the service was quite well-attended, including a fair share of our Church School children and young adults.  We hope that same spirit carries over into the weekend as we prepare for our St. Nicholas Day pageant and charity dinner on Sunday.

As we well know, St. Nicholas was a bishop who served in Asia Minor in the opening decades of the fourth century.  As a hierarch of the Church, he was a man who had authority meaning, further, that he was someone to be respected and obeyed.  This has been a characteristic of the Church’s hierarchy “from the beginning,” as we heard in the Epistle reading appointed for St. Nicholas and other great hierarchs of the Church:  “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as men who will have to give account” (HEB. 13:17).  This sacramental, pastoral and administrative authority of the episcopos (bishop) was further strengthened by the Apostolic Father, St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century:

Let no one do anything that pertains to the Church apart from the bishop.  Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is under the bishop or one whom he has delegated.  Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; just as wherever Christ Jesus may be, there is the catholic Church.  (To the Smyrnaens, 8)

These well-known exhortations, many of which became the basis for later Church canons pertaining to the authority of the hierarchy, could certainly be multiplied from a variety of impressive sources. Yet, it is therefore quite significant that the troparion for St. Nicholas mentions nothing of the bishop’s authority, but rather stresses his pastoral image and care for his flock:

In truth you were revealed to your flock as a rule of faith, an image of humility and a teacher of abstinence; your humility exalted you; your poverty enriched you. Hierarch Father Nicholas, entreat Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

As Fr. Thomas Hopko has written, this troparion “ … has become in Orthodox liturgical services the ‘general troparion’ for most canonized bishops of the Church, thus revealing the ‘mind of the Church’ about what a Christian pastor should be.”  (The Winter Pascha, p. 40)

Granting the role of authority that a bishop “inherits” in his consecration to the episcopacy, the Church concentrates on the qualities of a true pastor, of one who will “shepherd” the flock entrusted to him by the Lord that the bishop sacramentally represents to and for his flock.  The troparion has nothing to say about “power” or “authority.”  Quite the opposite!  We hear of humility, abstinence and even poverty.  These are Christ-like characteristics that we learn of from the Gospels.  Only by manifesting such qualities is the bishop a man who will receive the support, love and obedience of his flock in a spirit of trust and confidence in his leadership. This happens when a bishop leads by example.  He then becomes a living “rule of faith” as the troparion opens with, meaning essentially that the bishop is a living, flesh-and-blood realization of the Gospel.  Whenever we experience a “crisis of leadership” in the Church, it is precisely such Christ-like characteristics that are so painfully lacking in the Church’s hierarchy.  The faithful realize this, and the whole Church then suffers from a lack of trust and confidence in that leadership.

In relation to St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, there is a fine passage from the great iconographer, Leonid Ouspensky, who summarizes the Church’s love of this great saint throughout the centuries:

The quite exceptional veneration of St. Nicholas is well known.  He is revered not only by Christians but often also by Muslims.  In the weekly liturgical cycle of the Orthodox Church, among the days of the week dedicated to the Savior and to different orders of heavenly and earthly sanctity, only three persons are singled out by name:  the Mother of God, John the Forerunner and St. Nicholas.  The reason for the special veneration of this bishop, who left neither theological works nor other writings, is evidently that the Church sees in him the personification of a shepherd – of one who protects and intercedes. According to his Life, when St. Nicholas was raised to the dignity of bishop he said: ‘The office demands a different type of conduct, so that one may live no longer for oneself but for others.’  This ‘life for others’ is his characteristic feature and is manifested by the great variety of forms of his solicitude for men:  his care for their preservation, their protection from the elements, from human injustice, from heresies and so forth.  This solicitude was accompanied by numerous miracles both during his life and after his death.  Indefatigable intercessor, steadfast uncompromising fighter for Orthodoxy, he was meek and gentle in character and humble in spirit.  (Quoted in Time of the Spirit, p. 69)

Following Christ faithfully, St. Nicholas endures as the purest manifestation of authority and leadership in the Church:  a living rule of faith, practicing humility, abstinence and voluntary poverty as an example to his flock.

O Bishop Nicholas,

You have divinely taught all things well,

And now wearing your unfading crown,

you intercede for our souls. 

(Vespers of the Feast of St. Nicholas)

The Testing of our Patience

Dear Parish Faithful,

I would like to expand on a point that I included in last Sunday’s homily concerning the nature of the Nativity/Advent Fast.  That would be about the necessary virtue of patience that accompanies any period of preparation in the life of the Church.  We are directed to observe a fast as we prepare for the advent of the Son of God in the flesh.  This is only for forty days, but that can seem like a very long period to make some alterations and adjustments in our lifestyles!  Clearly, it has its challenges, all of which we are very much aware of.  We know that  the “sacred” number of forty – years or days – is a very scriptural number, always implying a period of expectation and fulfillment, a movement begun and completed in accordance with the express will of God.  That could be the forty years of Israel’s wandering in the desert, or the Lord fasting for forty days in the wilderness.  Yet, less specifically, we need to understand the great length of time that Israel was forced to wait for its deliverance.  If we think in terms of Abraham to Christ, we become aware of the 3x14 generations that St. Matthew lists in the opening genealogy of his Gospel.  That is a long history indeed, filled with God’s providential care for His chosen people, but also filled with apostasy and betrayal on the part of Israel.  A history embracing Israel’s victories against its surrounding enemies, but also its subjugation and humiliation at the hands of other enemies.

While this tumultuous and even torturous history of Israel was unfolding, the prophets were both exhorting and chastising the people, but also speaking of deliverance.  Although this is a very complex development, there were clear indications among the prophets of a Messiah figure – sometimes very human, but at times a transcendent figure – around whom and in whom these longings for deliverance were concentrated.  He would be the Lord’s Anointed, and as such he would proclaim deliverance and salvation to Israel.  That profound and poignant sense of longing for deliverance is beautifully expressed in the two hymns found in the opening chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel, the first from St. Zechariah (LK. 1:67-79); and the other, the Magnificat of the Theotokos (LK. 1:46-55). One needs only to read the Book of Isaiah to get a sense of this messianic longing which took on universal dimensions, so that all the peoples of the earth would come to know the one true God and then come to Zion to worship Him.  We read of The Prophet, the Son of Man, the Suffering Servant of the Lord, and of the Messiah throughout the prophetic books of the Old Testament.  This basic human longing for regaining a “lost paradise” in one form or another was gathered around these mysterious figures “promised” by the prophets who, in turn, were those chosen by God to deliver God’s word to the people of Israel.  But many generations were disappointed that these prophetic promises were not fulfilled in their time.

If we can appreciate this sense of waiting and longing, we can understand better how we, as contemporary Christians, in a very modest sense, are re-living or actualizing the experience of Israel as we await the advent of our Lord in a specially-designated period known as the Nativity/Advent Fast.  This designated forty days serves as a microcosm of Israel’s testing and preparation. Waiting implies expectation, perhaps even a certain sense of excitement. (Ask your children about that!). But it also implies patience, stabilized and strengthened by trust and faith in God, especially when we encounter obstacles, temptations, doubts, diversions and distractions.  Therefore, if Israel waited for the Lord’s Anointed, so will we as the New Israel of God.  Of course, we know and believe that the Messiah has come as Jesus of Nazareth, and our festal cycle again allows us to also re-live and actualize that advent on an annual basis, so as to renew our sense of fulfillment of the prophecies of old, and to again “greet” the newborn Christ Child with great joy and thanksgiving to God for working out our salvation “in the midst of the earth.”  All Christian believers of all ages can experience a child-like joy in the birth of Christ, the Son of God who became flesh.  We have the decided advantage of knowing all of this in advance, and this has been expressed very powerfully in the Epistle to the Hebrews, wherein the author, after reminding the early Christians of the great faith of the saints who lived before Christ, further reminds them of the great privilege of having lived in the time of fulfillment:  “And all these, though well-attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect”  (HEB. 11:39-40).

We cannot join “the world” in its indifference to Christ. And we cannot descend to the level of the crass commercialization of Christmas.  We are, after all, Christians!  Our goal is to fulfill the words of the Apostle Paul (heard last Sunday as the Epistle reading):  “I therefore … beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”  (EPH. 4:1-3).  This will test our patience, our trust in God, and our faith.  It has never been otherwise.

'But our commonwealth is in heaven...'

Dear Parish Faithful and Friends in Christ,


“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  (MATT. 22:21)

The 2012 presidential election is now over, and President Barak Obama has been re-elected, creating a sense of satisfaction, joy and post-election euphoria for over 59,000,000 million US citizens; while Mitt Romney’s defeat has created a sense of dissatisfaction, disappointment, and post-election blues for over 57,000,000 million US citizens.  No other event in our country’s shared political and social life involves so many people focusing their attention and passion on that singular event as does the presidential election every four years.  Given the emotional and intense partisanship created by the presidential election, we thank God that the process remains orderly and peaceful, and that the results are accepted without overt expressions of civil unrest – something that remains a real threat in other countries throughout the world.  Life goes on.  At that level the democratic process is highly successful.  (However, I read that as many as 23% of population claimed that the election adversely affected inter-family relationships.  Hopefully, those relationships will heal with time).  If anyone has awakened with a post-election “hangover” further irritated by disappointment or even anger, I would suggest following the gracious lead of Mitt Romney, who said in his concession speech that he would pray for president Obama’s success for the sake of the country.  We do this, of course, in every major liturgical service within the Church when we offer the following prayerful petition to God:  “For the president of our country, for all civil authorities, and for the armed forces, let us pray to the Lord.”  We need every president – despite the litany of unrealizable promises that we hear - to succeed at some level regardless of our political party loyalties.  We all co-exist in the same country, regardless of ideological or party differences.  And we all want a promising future for our children and grandchildren – though we live with the knowledge that nothing is guaranteed.

In the New Testament there do exist passages that display a positive assessment of the civil authorities, beginning with the well-known words of the Apostle Paul:  “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.  For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”  (ROM. 13:1)  Elsewhere, we read in one of St. Paul’s pastoral epistles:  “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.  This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (I TIM. 2:1-4)  Yet, the words of Christ cited above make it clear that “Caesar’s” authority is limited to the political sphere of our lives, pervasive as that may seem to be at times.  Ever since Aristotle, at least, there is a deeply-entrenched belief that we, as human beings, are best defined as being a “political animal.”  There is no denying that that is true to a certain extent, but it fails to account for us as spiritual beings who have received the “breath of life” from God, making each and every one of us “a living being.” (GEN. 2:7)  In that sense, Caesar cannot touch the “things that are God’s” – our soul, our conscience, our heart and our relationship with and ultimate loyalty to God.  In fact, the teaching of Christ leaves room for peaceful civil disobedience, when the “things of God” clash with the “things of Caesar.”  Any law that we, with a good conscience, believe violates the Law of God, we have every “right” to protest with all of the legal means at our disposal and to resist at least on an internal level.  Even if we think we are fighting a losing battle.  That is true for a democracy and not just limited to more totalitarian regimes.  So, we can pray for our civil authorities, even though we may (vehemently) disagree with certain of their policies that clash with our Christian worldview.

I do hope that if you find yourselves aligned with the disenchanted this morning, that you not only “move on” – a rather superficial admonition often callously and cynically tossed off by the victors – but continue holding in respect the process we thankfully embrace for electing our public officials, including the president of these our United States.  (There’s always the next election!). Again, life goes on.  For any mature citizen – and especially for a Christian – party affiliations must be subordinate to a desire for the common good, regardless of just how hard you may have to swallow, or how tightly you may have to grit your teeth.  That common good is the prayer of the Church which can lift us above the level of the merely political into the bright light of the Kingdom of God.

“But our commonwealth (Gk. politeuma) is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ …”  (PHIL. 3:20)

Faith, Voting, and our Ultimate Loyalty

Dear Parish Faithful,

Tomorrow is Election Day 2012.  By late Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning, the American people, within the democratic process, will have either re-elected President Barack Obama, or replaced him with Gov. Mitt Romney as the new president.  It has been a brutal campaign in many ways, and potentially divisive as party allegiances have been sharply drawn and fiercely defended.  This evening, in our Fall Adult Education Class, we read and discussed together a fine article entitled “The Kingdom of God:  the Apostle Paul’s Perilous Proclamation.”  The final section of the article is further entitled “Application of Paul’s Proclamation for Orthodox Christians Today.”  The author, John Fotopoulos, offers an excellent paragraph in this section that makes essential reading before voting tomorrow, at least in my opinion.  This, because he places this election and “politics” in general, within a much wider context that is about our ultimate loyalty.  Here is that challenging paragraph as we conclude the eve of the election and prepare to exercise our right to vote tomorrow:

“Paul’s proclamation declares in no uncertain terms that Christian identity is to be found primarily in the Lord Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God. Paul did not ask the Roman Christians that he converted to renounce their Roman citizenship, but he did remind them that their true citizenship was in heaven from where they were expecting their savior to return.  Today in the contemporary American political scene, many politicians and televangelists have framed Christian faith and identity as loyalty to a particular political party.  Some Americans cannot even imagine the possibility of being a Christian without loyalty and support of some political party.  But what light do Paul’s writings shed on these ideas?  For Paul it would seem that political affiliations are permissible, but this should not be the source of one’s views or identity, nor should it be the chief focus of one’s loyalty.  Rather, the Lord Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God are to inform an Orthodox Christian’s identity, and this is to be the source of an Orthodox Christian’s thought and ideals.  One or another social or political issue must not define the views and political affiliations of Orthodox Christians, but rather these views and affiliations should b shaped by the totality of the gospel message.  In short, Orthodox Christians are not to pick and choose what they find appealing and what they do not in the gospel.  Paul the Apostle challenges Orthodox Christians to bring their beliefs, affiliations, concerns, and behavior into union with the Lord Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God, something for which no human leader, political party, social group, or nation can serve as substitute.” (. 39-40)