Sermon - 26 August 2018 - Matthew 21:33-42

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

As I was digging through YouTube a few weeks ago, looking for a couple videos to show my high school classes at the start of the school year to set the tone and begin to establish the mindset for the year, I came across a video that challenged me instead.  It was an interview with author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek, and began with him asking the person doing the interview, “Do you love your wife?” The interviewer said “Yes”, to which Sinek responded, “Prove it. What’s the metric? Give me the numbers. Tell me the day the love happened.”  His point, of course, was that it’s an impossible question to answer, which it is, whether we’re talking about proving our love for our spouse, for our children, for our parents, or for anyone else, for that matter, but it’s one I’d like to explore briefly this morning.

In my opinion, the question is impossible to answer for several reasons.  First of all, real love is not about feelings and emotions.  To be sure, the feelings and emotions are there, but a relationship built on how I feel from moment to moment is likely to fail.  Our emotions are far too fickle to be the foundation of a lasting relationship. The word used for “love” in the Scriptures over and again is “agape”, which is a love not rooted in emotion, but in sacrifice, and it is agape that St. Paul mentions this morning in the Epistle when he says, “Let all that you do be done with love,” meaning, “Let all that you do be done with sacrifice.” How can we measure the sacrifices we make for our spouse, for our parents, or for our children?  We know that we make sacrifices for them, but if the love for them is real, we quickly lose count of the sacrifices we make for them every day. All we can say for certain is that the sacrifices happen, and that the love is there.

Second, the love we have now for our spouse or for our friends did not appear in an instant.  There are exceptions, of course, such as the love we have for our children, which arrive the instant they’re born, but the vast majority of our relationships are built slowly, over a long period of time.  It wasn’t one event or one day that caused us to realize, “I love this person.” Instead, it was little events, little sacrifices, that were made over a long period of time that led us to the realization, “I am willing to sacrifice everything for this person.”  These little sacrifices take on many different forms over the years. For our spouse, it can be something as simple as folding the laundry or getting them a cup of coffee without being asked to do so. The sacrifices can go essentially unnoticed by our children, as wanting to care for them can be our motivation for going to work in the morning, while worrying about them can be the reason we cannot fall asleep at night...neither of which our children will ever see or truly understand until they have children of their own.  For our parents, it can be the patience required to sit with them in their old age and listen to them as they repeat themselves over and over again without realizing it. It’s easy to say that we’ve been committed to sacrificing for our children from the day they were born, or to say that we’ve been committed to sacrificing for our parents since the day we were born, but to say that it has been easy to make the sacrifice, day in and day out, would be a lie. In the same way that the wedding is not the important part of a marriage, but is only the beginning, the work it takes to sustain any relationship is not about large projects every once in a while to show our commitment; rather, it is about a series of small decision made moment-to-moment, decisions that at times go unnoticed even by us, that cumulatively show our commitment to the relationship.  

Finally, the reason it’s so difficult to quantify the sacrifices we make for the relationships that are important to us is because we make the sacrifices willingly.  Somewhere along the way we made a conscious decision to work at the relationship, come what may. Without that decision, the relationship will falter, and ultimately fail.  With that decision, the sacrifices begin to be made automatically, so much so that to try to quantify them would be impossible.

Now, take all of this, and apply it to our relationship with God, because this is what the parable in the Gospel this morning is referring to.  It’s easy to apply this parable to ancient Israel, and to say that God sent the Prophets, and ultimately Christ, to lead them back to Himself. It is far more challenging to apply the parable to ourselves, but let’s give it a try.  Early on the parable mentions that the landowner “sent his servants to the vinedressers that they might receive the fruit” from the vintage. Anyone who has ever tried to grow anything in a garden, whether it’s vegetables or flowers, knows that it is hard work that cannot be accomplished in a day.  It takes a daily commitment to cultivating the growth of the plants, even and especially when it looks like nothing is happening. And once the harvest time arrives, those who have labored recall the work that was involved, and have a deeper appreciation for flowers that beautify a table and for the food placed upon it.  It can make sense to us, then, that those who actually grew the grapes mentioned in the parable may not have wanted to part with them, considering the work they had put into growing them. On the other hand, perhaps the workers had not done what was required to grow the grapes, and when confronted with the servants who were holding them accountable for the harvest, when asked to prove that they had done the work required of them, the only recourse they could envision was to kill the servants, even if the servant that was sent was the landowner’s son.

So what fruit is God expecting to harvest from us?  What proof does He expect to see that verifies we have done the required work? Put simply, the vintage is our relationships.  This is why the greatest commandment is that we love God and love our neighbor, meaning, that we willingly sacrifice for God and for our neighbor.  This is why, when the rich man in the Gospel reading last Sunday asked Jesus what he needed to do to have eternal life, Christ’s response was to love your neighbor and give to the poor...in other words, sacrifice willingly. Ultimately, this is why the definition of eternal life given by Christ Himself in John’s Gospel, is, “...this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  Eternal life is about relationships. He expects us to have made the daily sacrifices necessary to cultivate loving relationships with one another, and with Him.  

When the day arrives, He will ask us one, simple question: “Do you love Me?”  Hopefully, we will be able to give an honest answer of, “Yes”. However, when our answer is followed by a request to prove it, will we be able to show Him the love we have for Him and for one another?  Will He be able to look back over the course of our lives and see, over the long haul, the sacrifices we made for one another and for Him? Despite the impossibility of the task, may we willingly commit ourselves to living a life of sacrifice, a life of true love, for one another and for God, so that the harvest we produce is bountiful.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Sermon - The Feast of All Saints of North America - 10 June 2018

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

My family will be bored with this sermon, because they have heard the stories I’m about to tell over and over and over again.  But they’re good stories, so they’re worth hearing one more time.

The dining room set in our home is antique cherry wood.  Before it came to us, it belonged to my grandparents, my mom’s mom and dad.  It still feels strange to sit in grandpa’s chair. Not that he ever made a rule about sitting in the chair; it’s just that no one else ever did, as a sign of respect.  One of the pieces of the dining room set is a buffet, about six feet wide and three feet tall. On the buffet is a collection of photos, of family and friends and events from our life.  We have other photos scattered around our home, on the walls and on end tables, but this is the largest single collection. I think every home has such a collection. How could we not?

Above the buffet is a large mirror that takes up about one-third of the wall, and on either side of the mirror are four 8x10 photos, so two on each side of the mirror.  There is a photo of my wife and me at our wedding, one of my mom and dad, one of my wife’s mom and dad, and one of my grandparents, my mom’s mom and dad. While it is completely fair to say that there have been a lot of people who have had a positive impact on my life, there has always been something special about grandma and grandpa, and about grandpa in particular.

He owned and ran a restaurant for over thirty years.  He was Sicilian, and it was an Italian restaurant, and as such he made all of the Italian food from scratch: the spaghetti sauce, the noodles, the lasagna, the ravioli, the meatballs...all of it.  He woke up around 4:30 every morning, and went into the restaurant to begin preparing the food for the day. He would cook through the lunch rush, get home around 3 in the afternoon, take a short nap, make sure things were ok, and then return to the restaurant for the dinner rush.  The restaurant closed at 8, and on a normal night he was home around 9:15. And he would wake up the next morning to do it all over again. Every day, Monday through Saturday, for over thirty years. I know where my work ethic comes from. The restaurant was closed on Sundays, by the way.  That was family day, and we were at their house every other Sunday. The alternating weeks were spent with my dad’s family.

Grandpa had a great sense of humor.  Not the kind that came from telling a joke, because he couldn’t.  He would try, but he would start thinking of the punchline about halfway through telling the joke, and start laughing so hard that he couldn’t finish. So the rest of us were laughing, but not at the joke he was trying to tell, but rather at him trying to tell the joke.  No, the sense of humor I inherited from him was the laughter that comes from everyday life.

As an example, grandpa taught me how to drive.  Their home sat in the middle of ¾ of an acre, with just enough trees to make a decent obstacle course.  So one Sunday afternoon, he took me to the garage, pulled the 1972 Pontiac LeMans out, pointed it at the lawn, moved to the passenger seat, and told me to get behind the wheel.  I was under strict orders to not touch the gas pedal. The car idled at around 35 miles per hour, so just letting your foot off the brake meant the car was moving more than fast enough for someone who was just learning how to drive.  So, I gently let my foot off of the brake, and off we went, to the right of one tree, to the left of another, to the right of the next, around the corner of the house, dodge a couple more trees and around another corner, so that we’re now on the side of the house with the kitchen window.  I promise you, he didn’t look. He was focused on making sure we didn’t hit any trees. But he said, “Turn to your left and wave to your grandma. She should be yelling at us from the kitchen window by now.” I turned to look and sure enough, there she was, arms flailing. I’m not sure what she was yelling at us, but I’m fairly certain she wasn’t happy.  I look to my right, and grandpa is just sitting there, laughing. There are many such stories. Stories of Christmas, and Easter egg hunts, sure, but mostly stories of Sunday afternoons.

Grandpa passed away in September of 1991, three months before the birth of our first child.  He and grandma liked to go to the horse races, and on this day, they had lawn seats. Grandpa drove, as he always did since grandma didn’t have her license, parked the car, and got the lawn chairs out of the trunk. They went in, found a place on the lawn, grandpa set up the chairs, and they sat down. Grandma looked at her program, and looked over at grandpa, and he was gone.  Massive heart attack. That night at grandma and grandpa’s house, I remember my mom asking, “Who am I going to call now when I need advice?” I understood the question then as well as I do now, because there was a simplicity and a wisdom just in the way the man lived that taught the rest of us more than I think he ever realized. Even now, there are times when I will go to the dining room, look at the photo to the left of the mirror, just above the buffet, lean in close, and listen as hard as I can for even a whisper of that wisdom, and for the laughter.

When people ask me why we have icons in our homes and in our churches, why we ask the saints to pray for us, why we celebrate the saints, I tell them what I just told you.  I tell them about my grandpa, because I think everyone has at least that one person in their life who just seems to have the wisdom they need to live the way they should. That is who the saints are for us.  Their lives contain the simplicity and wisdom we need to live the way we should. The icon corner in our home is the buffet, full of photos of the family and events of our Orthodox faith, and even though all of the photos are important, there are those few photos that are just a little more special to us, that receive a special place in our home.  For us, this is the icon of St Alexis Toth.

The church sets aside two Sundays, dedicated to celebrating the saints.  Last Sunday was the Feast of All Saints, so it was the celebration of the entire family.  Today is the Feast of the Saints of North America, so it’s the celebration of the immediate family, of the people whose stories we have heard and told over and over and over again, until we are bored with them.  But they’re good stories, full of the simplicity and wisdom we need to live the way we should. So they’re worth hearing one more time.

Why do we have icons in our homes?  Why do we celebrate the saints? Why do we tell their stories over and over again?  Like the stories about my grandpa, and like the photos on the buffet: How could we not?

Amen.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Sermon - Second Sunday of Great Lent - 4 March 2018

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Each Sunday of Great Lent has two themes, one historical, and one spiritual.  Last week, the spiritual theme was about faith, both having faith, and keeping the true faith, both of which are supported by the historical theme, the celebration of the end of the iconoclast heresy, more commonly referred to as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

On this second Sunday of Great Lent, the spiritual theme calls us to go beyond what we believe, and to put our faith into action.  We see this in the Gospel reading this morning, with the paralytic (and the friends who carried him), who were so firm in their belief that Jesus could heal the man, they broke through the roof of the room where Jesus was, carried the man on his palate up to the roof, and lowered him down.  This goes beyond just thinking that Jesus could heal him; this is faith in action, doing whatever it takes to get to Christ so that the healing can occur.  Notice, by the way, that the paralytic doesn’t ask for healing.  Instead, the Scripture reads,

When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.”

So how do we show our faith so that Christ can see it?  How to we make our faith obvious, not just to Christ, but to the world, or at least to the people who are in the same room with us? Or, put another way, how do we live our faith?  The best description I’ve heard of what it takes to live our faith is this: to live as a Christian, we need to do two things: see Christ in everyone we meet, and become so filled with Christ that people see Him when they look at us (Father Andrew Stephen Damick gets the credit for this).  No, these aren’t easy things to do, but they are possible.  The idea of being filled with God is mentioned in the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Gregory of Nyssa, among others, but it is St. Gregory Palamas, whom we commemorate today, who solidified the idea that we can be so filled with Christ that His presence within us can be seen to those around us as what is normally referred to as the Divine Light.  There are many stories of monks experiencing this Divine Light, which St. Gregory equated with the Divine Light that showed forth from Christ during the Transfiguration.  The idea that we can “see God within us” set off a great debate. Surely we cannot see God.  It’s right there in the Book of Exodus (33:30):

“...you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”  

St. Gregory’s explanation was that while we cannot know Who God is or What God is, we can most certainly experience His actions in our lives, even to the point of having Him act within us.  The distinction is normally called the essence and energies of God.  We cannot know God’s essence, be we can certainly experience His energies. And it is His energies that are experienced when the Divine Light is seen in a person.  The acceptance of this teaching in the fourteenth century, of the distinction between the essence and the energies of God, is often referred to as the Second Triumph of Orthodoxy, and is the historical theme of this Sunday.

So what does it take to experience the energies of God for ourselves?  The Scripture, in St. Matthew’s Gospel (5:8), is also clear on this, and it sounds like simple advice:

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

So there it is. All we need to do is become “pure in heart”.  All we need to do is to become free of all sinful motives, to be devoid of all inappropriate interests, and to have no self-seeking ambitions.  In other words, we need to become selfless.  Being a Christian is hard.  Why should we expect otherwise, when the supreme example of this kind of selflessness is Christ on the Cross, dying for us, unworthy as we are, that we may truly live. We need to consistently see the worth of others even when it appears otherwise and especially when that unworthiness manifests itself in the pain they cause us.  Christ does this with us, and we are called to so the same.  When it comes to being pure in heart, their worthiness of our love and respect is irrelevant, because their worth as a person, as a child of God, is irrefutable.  They are made in the image and likeness of God, and to be pure in heart, we need to see that, regardless.  The first step on the path to purity in heart, on the path to seeing God within ourselves, is to see Him in others.

This is clearly not something that we can immediately do in its fullness, but we can begin to do this, even in small ways. Practice true forgiveness of others. Seek forgiveness from others. Be humble.  We need not do something so outwardly drastic as cut a whole through a roof and enter on a palate.  We need to do something even more drastic: we need to love our enemies.  

This will take a lifetime - a Christian lifetime - to even begin to accomplish, and even then we will fall short.  It is only with Christ that we can become pure in heart, and in doing so, see Him. It is only by realizing He is already within us that we can begin to experience Him in our lives.  As we continue through Great Lent, may we have the will to begin to purify our hearts by putting our faith into action, doing whatever it takes to get to Christ so that our healing can occur.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Sermon - Forgiveness Sunday - 18 February 2018

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

This day, the day before the beginning of Great Lent, goes by many different names.  It is Cheesefare Sunday, a name that emphasizes the seven-week fast that begins at sundown this evening.  It is also the commemoration of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, a name that emphasizes our sinfulness and our need for redemption.  It is known as Forgiveness Sunday, a name that emphasizes the Rite of Forgiveness that happens during Vespers.  And this year, today, the 18th of February, is also the feast of Pope St. Leo the Great of Rome.  It is with St. Leo that I would like to begin.

In one of his lenten sermons, St. Leo writes:

“At every moment the earth is full of the mercy of God, and nature itself is a lesson for all the faithful in the worship of God. The heavens, the sea and all that is in them bear witness to the goodness and omnipotence of their Creator, and the marvellous beauty of the elements as they obey Him demands from the intelligent creation a fitting expression of its gratitude. But with the return of that season marked out in a special way by the mystery of our redemption, and of the days that lead up to the Paschal feast, we are summoned more urgently to prepare ourselves by a purification of spirit.  The special note of the Paschal feast is this: the whole Church rejoices in the forgiveness of sins.”

Nowhere in here does St. Leo emphasize fasting.  Rather, the emphasis is placed on forgiveness. This is in line with the Tradition we hold of beginning our preparation with Forgiveness Vespers.  It is also in line with the Gospel reading this morning, which opens with:

“...if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

The implication here is that the beginning of our forgiveness from God lies in our forgiveness of others.  We ask precisely this of God every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, which, not coincidentally, was part of the Gospel reading yesterday:

“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

So we ask God to forgive us in the same way we forgive others.  Of course, being human, we often place requirements on our forgiveness.  We expect more than just an,  “I’m sorry.”  We expect a real change to occur in the other person.  I’ll forgive you, but you have to promise to never do this again.

That’s not all that unreasonable, considering God expects the same from us.  The first words of Christ’s public ministry are not, “Be sorry, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” but rather, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  The Greek word for “repentance” is “metanoia”, a word that under a strict interpretation means, “change of thought”.  Repentance goes beyond being sorry for what we’ve done, asking us to actually change not just our actions, but the very thoughts that lead to those actions, a request that is repeated over and again by Christ: “Go and sin no more.”   

But the logic there is in the wrong direction.  The commandment is not, “Well, since God requires this of me, I’m allowed to require this of others.”  Rather, the commandment is, “What you require of others, God will require of you.”  So, if we expect others to repent, we better begin by repenting.  Actually, we should probably just repent, and leave any requirements of others to God.

So how do we keep that focus on our sins and on our repentance?  This is where fasting comes in.  Fasting is not the end in and of itself.  Fasting is a means to the end.  Fasting asks us to gain some self-control in an area of our life where it should be relatively easy for us to do so.  If we’re honest about it, we have no chance of controlling our emotions and actions when someone else wrongs us, if we can’t even control whether or not we use half-and-half in our coffee in the morning.  Fasting is nothing new, and it is nothing new that we humans have a hard time with it.  After all, God’s first commandment was to fast from the fruit of one tree, but even that proved to be too difficult for Adam and Eve. So it should come as no surprise that we, their descendants, struggle with self-control in the same way.

Which brings us back to the commandment, “Go and sin no more.” I’ve been reminded of this a lot recently.  My ordination to the diaconate was two months ago yesterday, and throughout the last two months I have made mistake after mistake in serving the Liturgy and Vespers.  It hasn’t been anything earth-shattering, and I’m told that the mistakes aren’t noticeable, but of course that isn’t the point.  So I commit myself to not making the same mistake during the next service.  The trouble, of course, is that, while I succeed at not making the same mistakes at the next service, I instead make new mistakes that need to be corrected.  

And so it is with us in our lives.  We repent of one sin, only to go and commit a different one.  Hopefully, fasting not only reminds us of our need to dedicate ourselves to not repeating a particular sin, but nudges us toward the self-control required to “Go and sin no more.”

In the same sermon, St. Leo mentions this, when he says:

“Initially, men are made new by the rebirth of baptism. Yet there still is required a daily renewal to repair the shortcomings of our mortal nature, and whatever degree of progress has been made there is no one who should not be more advanced. All must therefore strive to ensure that on the day of redemption no one may be found in the sins of his former life.”

As we enter into Great Lent, may we strive to make a little progress each day, at the end of each day, may we long to be a little more advanced, and upon the arrival of Pascha, may we at the very least no longer be found in the sins of our current life.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!