In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Glory to Jesus Christ!
This is the seventh Sunday of Pascha, the Sunday that falls between Ascension and Pentecost. We don’t have a lot of information from the Scriptures about what happened during the nine days between Ascension and Pentecost, other than the community of believers choosing Matthias to replace Judas, which they see as essential based on Psalm 108:8 (LXX): “Let another take his office.”. In doing this, the community makes the final preparations for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the establishment of the Church on earth, preparations that began with the establishment of the people of Israel.
But just what is meant by “The Church”? This question has been asked a lot recently, courtesy of the current quarantine. Since it began, my family and I, like many of us, have been watching the church services online through Zoom or YouTube or Facebook or whatever. And I’ve seen meme after meme claiming that what we have learned from all of this is that we can pray at home, that we don’t need to “go to church”, we simply need to be the church, as if the act of gathering as a community isn’t fundamentally important (although I find it interesting that the people posting these memes have mentioned how their family has gathered together to watch the services). In fact, I saw an ad online yesterday for a t-shirt that said, “The church has left the building.”
In many ways, I guess it depends on your perspective. On the one hand, yes, we can pray at home, and we should. And yes, we can listen to an inspiring sermon at home, and it was wonderful to have the opportunity to hear Metropolitan Tikhon throughout Holy Week. And yes, we can participate in a Bible Study online, and we should continually put in the effort to learn more about our faith. And yes, it is important to care for others and to show our faith through our actions. In short, yes, it is important to live the Christian life continuously, and not reserve it to a specified time slot on Sundays. However, while these things are all good and important, they are not everything. Something is missing from this, and that something is communal, sacramental worship.
You see, when we pray on our own, we have this tendency to fall into the trap of asking God for what we want, and then become disappointed when God says, “no”. When we want to listen to an inspiring sermon, we have a tendency to “shop around” for the sermon that we want to listen to, one that connects with us personally and that makes us feel better, rather than searching out the sermon that will challenge us, one that helps us see our faults and our failings and demands that we actively work to get better. We tend to do the same thing in choosing an online Bible study: we seek out the one that will allow the Scriptures to give us comfort and remain as we are, rather than studying the Scripture that convicts us and requires us to change. Sadly, even when we claim to be helping others, we tend to shift the emphasis to how giving to others makes us feel, and speaking about this wonderful thing we’ve done in private conversations and on social media.
When left to our own devices, private, personal prayer tends to become about us. And that’s the problem.
By contrast, the communal, sacramental worship of Orthodoxy places the emphasis on falling down before God, not for the sake of our gain, but for the express purpose of following His lead and doing what He has instructed us to do. Christ mentions over and again in the Scriptures that we are to worship God, which means we are to go beyond petitions, beyond learning, beyond serving others, in short, beyond ourselves and this fallen world, and fall down before the living God in humble submission to His Will.
It may sound as if parts of this contradict several popular passages from Scripture. For example, in Matthew chapter 7 we read:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. (Matt. 7:7-8)”
Again in John chapter 16, we read:
“Truly, truly I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, He will give it to you in My name. Until now you have asked nothing in My name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full (Jn 16:23–24).”
So we’re supposed to ask for what we want, and God will give it to us, right? From practicality and from experience, we know this is not the case. The clarification comes just three verses later in Matthew’s Gospel:
“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matt. 7:11)”
It’s not about asking for what we want, but rather asking for what we think we need, and trusting that if this is for the best, then God will provide.
John provides the corrective in the passage itself. “In My Name” does not mean to add the phrase “In Jesus’s Name we pray” to the end of our requests. Rather, it is a reference to the fact that when delegates were sent from the king to foreign lands, they were said to be speaking “in the name of the king”. The words did not originate with the one who was sent, but rather from the king who sent the words through the delegate. Asking for something “in His Name” means that if the words do not originate with us, but rather originate from God through us, then we will receive what we ask for.
In serving others, many go to Matthew 25, where we read:
“Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. (Matthew 25:34-36)”
See, it’s about serving others, and that’s enough, right? Four verses later, we get the reminder:
“The King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ ”
Ultimately, it’s not about serving others. It’s about serving God by and through serving others.
I could continue with this, but you get the point. Everything we do is to be done for God, in accordance with His Will, and in the way He prescribes, which, as we see over and again in the Scriptures, is for us to pray together, at specific times and in specific places. And not just to pray together, but to sacrifice together, through our sacramental worship of Him. We are called to take the things of this earth - water, wheat, wine, oil - and use them in our sacrificial offerings, whether it is in baptism when we begin to give our lives to Him, or in the Eucharist when we offer what is His to Him so we can receive Him. The community aspect of these sacrificial offerings was present in ancient Israel. While morning prayers began at home, they were completed with the community at the synagogue. And the ritual sacrifices described in the Scriptures could only be made in the temple. Even in the daily prayer cycle from ancient Judaism, there was a connection with the temple sacrifices, as the afternoon prayer, which happened at roughly 3 in the afternoon, was scheduled specifically to coincide with the time the sacrifices were being made in the temple. And of course, these prayers were not just any prayers. Rather, they were specific psalms and other prayers chosen for the different times of the day, much like our hours of prayer are to this day. Even while we pray at home, our focus is not to be on ourselves, but on the universal Church, using the prayers of the Church.
As we continue to gather in our homes, may we not lose sight of the fact that true prayer is not our prayer, but rather is His prayer, through us. May we not forget the while we are to “pray without ceasing”, time and place are important. And once the quarantine is over, may we never take the time and place for granted ever again.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Glory to Jesus Christ!
