For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts.

Last week was All Saints Sunday. Today commemorates the feast of all local saints – in Russia it’s All Saints of Russia, in Serbia, All Saints of Serbia. Here it’s All Saints of America. We loose site, I think, of the point, however in our youth. The church here is less than 200 years old and our American hymns list all the saints that have been glorified in our country and in Canada.

Rejoice, O continent of North America, illumined by the holy Gospel!
Rejoice, every province, state, city and town,
which raised up citizens of the heavenly Kingdom!
Rejoice, our venerable Father Herman, first saint of our land!
Rejoice O Martyrs Juvenaly and Peter,
for your blood has watered the seed of faith planted in Alaska!
Rejoice, O holy Hierarchs: Innocent, Tikhon, Nicholas and Raphael!
Rejoice, O holy Fathers Alexis, John, and all righteous priests!
Rejoice, All Saints of North America,
for your light has shone forth to the ends of the earth!
We beseech you to pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

However, to list by name all the saints glorified in Russia or Greece, or any of the Elder countries of our faith, would take much longer than even we Orthodox are used to talking in Church! Today is not a day to celebrate just the actions of the local church body (one gets the sense that in America, the OCA is making political hay with this feast). Today is a day to celebrate all the holy men and women in out lands…

Rather than the saints who have “shown forth” in ways that we can see, who are the saints of America that the Church has not seen?

Be sure to weave in the verses from Saint Paul: this isn’t about Christians… ands this feast certainly isn’t about Orthodox Christians. This day is about all those who “do instinctively what the law requires”.

We probably need to ask what are the works that the law requires? Did St Paul imagine that there were gentiles who had gotten themselves circumcised and kept the Sabbath and a Kosher kitchen – even thought they had never heard of the Torah? Probably not: I doubt not but that the Gentiles he was thinking of we polytheists, “idolators” in the Jewish mind. But they manage to “do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God”.

And we, ourselves – I think especially of Orthodox Converts in America – might go looking for those who do what the law requires – as people who are venerating icons properly, who know how to fast keeping all the rules. Certainly that leaves out all the sloppy ethnic types who are, at least here in Buffalo, even now, celebrating their ethnic festival, eating meat and what not in ways that Ain’t Really Orthodox! Makes you feel good that you skipped the dairy in your coffee, eh?

My friend Ana Hernandez used to say to me, “sometimes the Pagans are better Christians than the Christians.”

Again: we’re not talking about “Works righteousness” here. We’re talking about men and women who show the power of God in their lives without even knowing it.

The Akathist of Thanksgiving, that we sing on the last wednesday of every month, says,

The breath of Your Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets, scientists. The power of Your supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Your laws, who reveal the depths of Your creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of You. How great are You in Your creation! How great are You in man!

And hearing that I think of the awe that I have watching the wonderful series, “Cosmos” by Dr Carl Sagan. Or any of the BBC or PBS series on animal life such as Nature or Life or planet Earth. I can not watch one of these things without singing (while sometimes weeping) “How glorious are thy works, O Lord, in wisdom hast thou made them all!” You – secular scientist – have brought me to my knees in awe as surely as the iconographer who painted the image of the Theotokos of the Cup. Even without desiring it or willing it, the light of God shines through your works!

Who else lets the light shine?

It is, perhaps, de rigueur to speak of Martin Luther King, but we might also wonder about others, even less popular. What about the founders of the Haight Ashbury free clinic or the Doctors who work there, what about the founders of soup kitchens or those who work with migrant workers and defend them from our racist attacks and greedy corporations? What about those who died to give peace or those who raised up the standard of peace when all cries were for war?

Who are the saints who shine in our lands?

Eleanor Roosevelt? Black Elk? Chief Seattle?

Who are they who – even not knowing the rules – manage to be better Christians than even the Christians?

Who showed a generous hospitality even when invaded and conquered?

Who turned the other cheek and prayed for their enemies even when the enemies were us?

Who lit the way when all was dark?

Who used their skills to improve the world even when we were not wanting their help?

And against all the yeses for people you might expect, I imagine the millions of slaves and indentured servants, the migrant workers and undocumented immigrants, chinese railroad workers and native american warriors who have through out our history and even to now are giving their lives in the gentle Christ-like ways of Passion Bearers.

As the hands of “good, white Americans” make martyrs of millions.

Today is All Saints of America. And our Icon shows – as you might expect – a handful of respectable men in clergy drag plus one young boy.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, however. Of every tongue and tribe and colour.

If we can only see.

On the coincidence of All Saints Sunday and Memorial day weekend….

But many who are first will be last, and the last first.

Tomorrow the President will lay a wreath at the tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, in a ceremony that will be repeated over and over by governors and even mayors all over the country. I remember places in my youth where this weekend serves also as a memorial for firefighters and police. Everyone decked in solemn colours, nationalist and patriotic melodies sung and played. WOmen and men will be honoured for their self-sacrifice in the name of service to their country, their people, their family and friends.

That is one way to read this weekend. A second way, certainly counter-cultural, radical notes that while many stood as patriots – I think here, especially, of the men and women who rushed to offer themselves for service after Pearl Harbour and in the dust cloud of 9/11 – most of them over the last 200-plus years, for all their humanity and love, were pressed into service, drafted or, in the case of many in the Union Army in the internecine conflict of the 19th Century, tricked.

Many who join the armed forces do so because they are offered no other choice in their poverty and lack of education or in their unemployment. Or because they were forced to join – again, because of their class or race preventing them other oportunities.

And in their death – for oil, nationalist conflict, racist imperialism – our culture turns them into propaganda. We call them martyrs and we hold their images and memory up before ourselves to stir ourselves to like-wise make sacrifices. To believe in something that is not real, to cover up the things that are.

And even 70 years later, we ask questions about Pearl Harbour and the motives of the allies and axis in WW2, the establishment of the Military Industrial Complex on the backs of Patriots, or the desires of the Founders to create a working-class nation to, essentially, work for the upper classes and enslave the natives.

But we call them martyrs.

Another reading sees them all as victims of sin: man’s inability to live in the love and peace offered to us by God causes the death of many who might be innocent or even sinful themselves. Regardless of the motive or intention, it is our fallen state for which they die. Rather than some heavenly good, it is only a human good – in our total depravity that’s all we can do.

And I want to accept all of these readings, from the patriot dream to the radical re-vision to the sinful fall. We are, really, all of those things in our daily lives. And I want to not deny that we are all of those things in our political lives and deaths. Adn I want to sing

Crimsoned with the blood of all your martyrs, O Christ, our God, your church cries out to you: Bestow your mercies on all humanity, and grant the world your lasting peace.

For the Church, however, there are Saints and Martyrs and Passion-bearers. These are not classes, or hierarchies of holiness ranked in a legalistic manner. Unlike the Western tradition, there’s no pattern or set of steps to follow to Sainthood. One is either glorified by the Church – with a feast day and hymnody – or one is not. And even when one is not, one may have a local cultus, a local tradition of veneration for, example, Fr Seraphim Rose or King Henry II of England, which may result in eventual glorification by a Church Body – as happened, eventually, to the entire family of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. These are categories in which we place our own sinful reality to relate to it, not ranking of “power” or “holiness” or “merit”.

It is this last category, Passion Bearer, on which I wish to focus this All Saints Sunday.

To be a passion bearer is to live out in one’s own life the faithfulness of Christ, and to meet one’s own death with the resignation and obedience that Christ embodied. One may not “die for one’s faith”, may not be wrestling with heretics or defending the local shrine. One might simply be walking along to the market or caught at school by a pair of crazed gunmen. One may be killed in apolitical action or die on your own bed of some disease or advanced years. One may give one’s life away in service, or some great act of bravery, or some act of common decency.

In the end while some of us are called to be Martyrs, witnesses for Christ in a real life and death sense, all of us are called to be Passion-Bearers, all of us are called to be Saints. In the end we follow a God who chose incarnation – becoming one of us in our flesh – to save us. And now nothing is common.

Here’s the most important, radical, revolutionary thing about Christianity: God has a navel. I don’t know if it was an “inney” or an “outey”. But he has one. More than that, he’s got a penis: and God is a he. In fact, God is one specific man, born in one specific place, among one specific people – although in a melting pot of about many cultures. Surrounding God was Egyptian, Roman, Alexandrian (Ptolemaic), Silk Road, Persian, Fertile Crescent Babylonian, and 5 or 6 that called them selves “Jewish” or “Hebrew”.

More than that, God had diapers. God also probably ran around half-naked urinating and defecating on the ground while adults might have looked and giggled in either embarrassment or parental joy as the child grew up. God had a neighbourhood. God had an older half-brother – and therefore probably suffered from some bullying and maybe even fights like, “Dad loved my mother more than yours.” God had grandparents who spoiled him. God had a mother who doted on him. God had a dad who – according to one reading – was not too highly respected in his community (as a man who worked with his hands). According to another reading God’s dad was quite well respected. God went through puberty and, I have no doubt, suffered from embarrassing erections under his robe, girls flirted with him, and his voice cracked. God had acne and, after a while, back hair.

If we say – with Paul – that in Jesus the fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell, well then, the fullness of the Godhead liked (or didn’t like) to eat the lentils his mom cooked. The fullness of the Godhead liked (or didn’t like) to drink goat’s milk. The fullness of the Godhead liked (or didn’t like) to go to Torah school. The exact implication of “the fullness of the Godhead” is that God had a specific colour of hair, of eye, a specific tone of voice, a specific sort of body odour, and even a certain, rustic lack of bathing.

God stopped relieving himself on the ground and, eventually, grew to – like the rest of his culture – learn how to wipe his dirty butt with his left hand.

Nothing is common any more – and holiness can be found in any walk of life lived in a Godward direction. The last, the least, the lowest of our world has become the gateway to the holiest. The Saints are our greatest exemplars, the Church sings…

To you, creator of all things, the cosmos presents the saints as first fruits of creation. For their sake, O saviour, rich in mercy, preserve us all in holiness and peace through the Theotokos.

But the Passion-bearers, the women and men who met their life as Christ himself…

These are us.

My own Patron Saint, Raphael Hawaweeny, traveled around the US by trian and car and horse, meeting people where they were. He gave his life in the service of his people.

Tsar Nicholas is called a passion bearer because of his Christ-like countenance of the destruction of his empire and his eventual death. He was called of God to lead his people at a difficult time in history and did so to the best of his abilities. The religious devotion and piety of the family is well documented and not seriously contested.

Holy Orthodoxy does not draw boundaries around her saints, for along with the Tsar, the ROCOR has also canonised as Passion-Bearers*, all their servants who were killed with them, including Alexei Trupp, who was was Roman Catholic and Catherine Adolphovna Schneider, who was Lutheran!

We hold these all – and many others – to be holy men and women who lived their daily lives as best and as Christlike as they could.

What more could be asked of you or I than to do exactly this?

Let us praise the baptist and forerunner, with the apostles, prophets, and martyrs; let us hymn the hierarchs and all the martyred clergy, the Christ-like and ascetic men and women, and all the just, together with the legions of angels. With hymns of praise, let us crown them as we should, seeking a share in their glory at the hands of Christ, the saviour.

Our own war dead – both for us and against us – we may never know the real why of their death, but we can assume, I think, that they in their end, died honourable deaths seeking to “lay down their lives for their friends” as Jesus says.

Regardless of their faith – or lack of it – the acts of bravery, heroism and charity of which we read and hear so much at this time (and around July 4th) tell us enough to know of the sort of men and women we honour. Make no political claims about it, these people are little Christs among us.

But so are those teachers and shop clerks, those letter carriers and public servants, lawyers and perhaps even elected leaders that stand among us, giving their selves in service in a world that is where the admixture of “good” and “evil” result in most of us having to run on blind faith if we are to make any action at all.

Doing the best we have with what we have..

In Book ONe of Lord of the Rings, Frodo says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time,”… and Gandalf agrees. “…So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

We are called to meet the day to day world as Christ would, do bear his Passion in our Lives. Come, let us partake of food for the journey. And then do so.

*Added after more research: Since the reunion of ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate, some saints are “making it” onto the reunited church’s calendar. Sadly it seems as though Sts Alexei and Catherine are not on the new list – but neither are they “decommissioned” as there is no way to do that. And while we’re on the topic, St Isaac the Syrian was a member of the (non-Orthodox) Nestorian Church.

…Parthians and Medes and Elamites, those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya adjoining Cyrene, visitors from Rome – both Jews and proselytes – Cretans and Arabs…

Our hymnody at Pentecost makes much of a difference between our reading of the old law and our understanding of the covenant given to us in Christ. A parallel is also drawn between the giving of diverse tongues today and the division of the tongues at Babel:

The arrogance of building the tower in the days of old
led to the confusion of tongues.
Now the glory of the knowledge of God brings them wisdom.
There God condemned the impious for their transgression.
Here Christ has enlightened the fishermen by the Spirit.
There disharmony was brought about for punishment.
Now harmony is renewed for the salvation of our souls.

Truth be told, I’m disinclined to draw political conclusions from scripture – by which I mean secular politics. I don’t think there is a way to use scripture to prove one should vote Tory or Liberal Democrat. There is no way to support joining one part or another, no way to support one tax law or another. There’s no way to support single-payer health care or no health care at all. There’s no way to prove that you should live in a state that does or doesn’t have gun control laws or that does or doesn’t allow abortion or gay marriage.

No way at all.

I say that mostly because there is no way in scripture for a Christian to force his rules on anyone else – especially the Non-Christian.

There are, however, ways to support Christian ethics within the Christian community and we have stories arising shortly in the book of Acts: the Holy Spirit moves the Church to a common morality and ethic – one based on forgiveness and love rather than black and white laws. And I think we want, however, black and white laws: we want to know who is in and who is out.

Pentecost starts out by telling us that no one is out. In fact, people start out in, it seems: look at that list of fifteen different nations – it’s the entire known world of the time.

If you read this as only Jews of the time (and there is good reason for that) then, by the end of Acts you have to admit it was Jews and Gentiles. But that would be reading Acts as history and I don’t think it is: the writer of Luke & Acts has Jesus already cavorting at the fringes of his cultural rules. This moment at Pentecost is a literary foreshadowing of the end of the text when *everyone* is welcomed into God’s church family. God has reaped a harvest of the entire world ad Pentecost is the first fruits of that harvest.

Now… politics.

Earlier this week, there was a kerfuffle on the internet about a brother priest posting something about the recent law in Arizona.

Immigration is a hard thing for our laws and, I think, we must admit that as much as the left or the right wish, it’s not a black and white issue.

The problem is that laws only deal in black and white issues.

God, however, only deals in people. In persons. In specific icons of God, standing in front of me, right here, right now.

And – apart from my opinion of the law in Arizona – were I living in Arizona, I’d have to disobey the law. The icon of God standing in front of me is far far more important than the law, or other people’s racism or (perhaps ill-found, or maybe well-found) fear.

And while I’d not deny communion to someone who was a racist – ie someone who put simple political or national interest above seeing the Icon of God right there in front of them – I’d have to have a talk with them before I leave them alone with kids or let them teach a class.

Because simply put: there’s no room, at all, for National Identity in the Gospel.

And while when you leave here you may, with your God-enlightened choice – vote as you feel called, when you act you have to account for it.

Part of the reason I don’t care how you vote is because I don’t imagine it makes a lick of difference. As someone once said, “If voting really changed things it would be illegal.” But how you act, to a person, standing in front of you – or how you feel, how you judge, how you project – these are the things we’re to bring to confession. These are the things that, in the first-person, we’re to struggle against.

There is no room at all in the Church of God for racism: nor judgement. I’m not saying I won’t give communion to a racist. But we’re sure going to have a talk first because if you harbour racist thoughts, I’m not sure but what it may be time to go back to catechism class and pick up the basics.

At the root, this racism is what is wrong with Orthodoxy in America. It’s simple racism – putting of national and cultural interests before the Gospel – that makes our problem an issue at all. The Greeks don’t like XYZ. The Russians don’t like ABC. The Arabs or the Serbs have problems with each other. The American Converts, well, a lot of us are just Neocons looking for a safe home for our right-wing politics. I’m reminded of the “Evangelical Orthodox” that get bent out of shape any time their Metropolitan says anything they see as “Anti-Israel” whilst thus condemning their own brothers and sisters in Christ to Apartheid. The Metropolitan knows which side his bread is buttered on, however…

Of course, as a gay man, most Orthodox wouldn’t want me at the party either. I know… so let’s relish the irony for a moment.

mmmm

Done now.

Let me be clear: there is room at Christ’s table for someone who would seek to exlude others. But Christ will change that person until he is open and receptive and as hospitable as Christ himself.

I know God’s not finished fixing me yet. I know that because I’m still standing here wrestling with him and not dead yet.

The governor of Arizona may do anything she likes but I believe we are under Christian obligation to reject her law as St Paul advises us: to do everything according to the secular law that *does not* contravene God’s law. The Empire, when it functions properly, serves God’s purposes – as St Paul says – BUT, the law of the empire is not God’s law. And I believe that the Empire of America is no better or worse than the Empire of Rome save that Rome had no “illegal immigrants”.

The Christian feast of Pentecost is our adaptation of the Hebrew festival of Shavuot or “The Feast of Weeks”. The most modern reading of the festival is that it celebrates the “giving of the law”. But the earlier, pagan understanding of an Agrarian Harvest Festival is still present in the Jewish scriptures. Today we get a different kind of Harvest.

We have seen the True Light.
We have received the heavenly Spirit.
We have found the true faith,
worshipping the undivided Trinity,
Who has saved us.

Saved means “Made whole”. We can’t be whole without everyone.

We are in the midst of Babel here. Our tongues divide us. That person on your street that you don’t like because of their race… their language… their poverty or wealth… their looks… their difference…

That person far more than any other person has been sent to you, an icon of the Face of Christ, for you to venerate and serve to the salvation of your soul.

Go speak in tongues of Divine Agapic Love and draw them into the Kingdom. Its the only way you’ll make it in yourself.

Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves

Do you remember the images of the Christmas tsunami from several years ago? I don’t mean the images of death and destruction but rather of the event itself. As the wave was seen far out on the horizon, the water withdrew from the shore, sometimes several yards out, revealing the sandy sea bottom. Then there was that rushing onslaught of water. Regular waves of course function the same, but to a lesser degree.

Wind and storms seem to function that way as well – although it may only be our perceptions after the fact. But it seems there is always a painful quiet before the storm, a deathly still. My Mom tells this sort of story about being in a tornado: of a greyish yellow light and a deathly still where she says even the rain seemed to have stopped dripping from the leaves. It’s the “calm before the storm”.

Several of the Resurrection stories of Jesus have him speaking of or imparting the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not defined in these stories, but in my favourite one the image is of the Spirit as Jesus’ breath, isn’t it? He breathes on the disciples and says “Receive the Holy Spirit.” It’s kinda of a pun, really, because the word for “Spirit” in Greek comes from the root for wind and breath.

Some how the Holy Spirit, proceeding eternally from the Father alone, is Jesus’ to give to us. This is, somehow, his joy being fulfilled in us.

Among all the images of Jesus’ sacrifice for us, we might miss the most basic understanding – that was common in his own culture. Without getting too deeply into a theological debate of “west vrs east” scope, I wanna talk about pagan vrs Jewish.

In the eyes of Old Testament writers (Psalms 50, 104, 146) all life belongs forever to God, who created it and can never lose it. Humans and other animals enjoy filling up with life (or breath) for a while; then when they die it flows back to God like water (or blood) running back into a sea, leaving the once lively creature empty and weak (that is, dead). A sinner cut off from God, and so from the sea of life that filled her at birth, can only lose that life and die. But God mercifully offers a way out: if the sinner will bring a ram to the temple, and instead of killing it to eat it, kill it prayerfully and leave it for the priests to eat, God will not take that ram’s life back, but will give it to the sinner as a sort of life-transplant. (The sinner does not exactly receive the ram’s life, because there is no such thing; there is only life, some of which was in the sinner, and some in the ram, until both lost what life they had.)
Fr Rick Fabian, writing in Worship at St Gregory’s

Now, follow that for a moment: all life is God’s, we’ve cut ourselves off from God (ie, are dead) and we need more life.

The Greek scriptures – at least written in part by Jews – actually have two words for this, our life, our individual existence, our personal box of “stuff”, is called “psyche“. The life of God, however, the divine life, the fullness of life is called zoe. In our daily life, our psyche, we are cut off from God. Christ says he is the Zoe, the Life. Salvation is, somehow, sloughing off this old psyche and being filled with Zoe.

We are, some how saved – made whole – in the living of Zoe or, perhaps better, in the being lived by Zoe. We do not live in God: but rather God’s life lives us.

Now, how do I tie this all together, tsunamis and Zoe and Jesus’ joy “fulfilled in” us?

The Church Calendar is not a list of historical commemorations, but rather an icon of our Salvation. We see this from the very get-go, the basic images of Nativity at the winter Solstice or of Pascha in the Spring – yes, written for the Northern Hemisphere, but ok. We see it later as the Church starts to add other feasts to the calendar, especially the cycle of feasts of the Theotokos, but also of certain other events. We’ve just passed the feast of “Mid-Pentecost”, which commemorates nothing really, but gives us a chance to read a couple of scriptures and see an icon. We have the feast of the presentation of Mary in the Temple, drawn from extra-Canonical sources. We have, really. Today.

If we look at the idea of Jesus’ Ascension, celebrated earlier this week on Thursday, and the feast of Pentecost, next Sunday, we have really nothing happening today. It’s nearly like this day is a dead zone.

Apart from some idea of historical accuracy – not terribly important to the Early church – there’s no reason to have this nine-day pause between the Ascension and the Pentecost. There must be an iconic reason: a salvific reason that there is this pause. There needs to be something we can learn here.

There’s a couple really – but one comes rather late in the process, so we can set that aside for a moment.

Now, tsunami.

This is the way I see today: Jesus came and went, the first wave. We’re in the calm before the storm, before the big wave, before the huge onslaught of life symbolized by Pentecost. We’re at the low point when, as the waters draw back, we can see the sandy bottom, we can see the the coming event by, really, the absence of it.

What could this be in our own life? What part of our salvation can this symbolize?

If Pentecost is our Baptism, if Pentecost is not only the “birth of the church” but the symbol, the icon of our own entry into God’s new covenant (as Pentecost was also the time of entry into the older covenant) then today – these nine days – must be seen as our own journey, our own pilgrimage to Jesus. Today is, really, the commemoration of our own being lost. Certainly it is not the case that we are lost – the Holy Spirit is not withdrawn from the world for these nine days. But rather in the icon of our salvation this is the time before such…

Where are you?

The tradition among very conservative sorts is that we shouldn’t talk about our life before salvation. It is said that traditional monastics and clergy do not reference the time before their ordination or tonsure. Certainly today in our blogging world we are more used to posting about our past, about our journey. But we’re not out of sync with the past: we see from Scripture that the Apostles all reference their older life. Likewise in their own writings the Church Mothers and Fathers – who also reference their older life.

Today is also a feast of the church, the 7th Sunday of Pascha is dedicated to the Fathers of the 1st Ecumenical council. The Nicene creed lays it all out for us, but it wasn’t new. The stuff in the creed was there, in the Church, all along. Orthodoxy wasn’t invented at the fist council – but it was demarcated. Today’s feast, coming before Pentecost, pictures the idea that the truth of the Church’s reading of the scripture was always there. That God’s triune personal singularity is present in the scriptures of the earlier covenant, that the Father’s pre-incarnate Son is the Creator from all time, that the Virgin’s conception and birth was prefigured in Eve. Today’s commemoration, coming before next week’s birth do the Church, indicates that the Church wasn’t born at Pentecost: but rather only came into her fullness.

So, today, I want to leave the door open: it is a good day to look. Symbolically, at least, the water has withdrawn and we can see all the refuse, the sea bottom.

What’s there? What’s the past for you? Where have you gone that brings you here? When you came to God for salvation, what is it that makes you you? What exactly did you get saved from? To draft language from our evangelical friends, what is your testimony?

And how, when you look at that, do you see, even then, before salvation, your salvation happening?

For what is true of the Church is also true of you: there wasn’t a BLAM! New person.

But that new person grew. The Truth of the Gospel was in your life before you knew that it was Gospel Truth.

Where was the breath of God breathing on you then. Where were you already living the life of the Spirit?

Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.”

Do you have a “fish” sticker on your car?

Or, if not – surely you’ve seen ‘em!

And you know what they mean, right?

Probably don’t have one – not even those of you with cars. I don’t. On the back of my “Delta Sue” is a Blue Ridge Parkway sticker and an Apple logo. There are no political statements and, certainly, no religious ones!

Back in High School, I had a fascination with “Tracts” as we called ‘em. Still do, really, in certain parts of the church, but we’ll get back to that in a minute. In High School I had a huge crush on a Christian Artist. His name was Keith Green. Born in Brooklyn and raised in California, with a swirling ‘fro of dark hair and blue eyes, and a beautiful voice with lots of laid-backness and conviction all at once, Keith was – to my teenage eyes – the perfect man. (I also had a huge teen crush on Love Song, but their band had pretty much broken up by the time I got to be a teenager…)

Naturally, having that much of a crush on Keith, the fact that he wrote tracts made me a voracious reader of his stuff. He would write about all the things a Christian ministry to youth was supposed to write about in the late 70s and early 80s: Jesus, cults, the occult, the Bible and “coming to Jesus”. Unlike the more popular comic-style tracks by Jack Chick, Keith’s were usually heavy on the words (he was a writer, after all) and heavy on the thinking. They appealed to my own intellectual bent. They engaged me and I wanted others to read them. So I ordered a pile and brought ‘em to High School.

Yes, passing out religious tracts in a public high school will get you called to the office to have a talk and yes, passing out tracts on how the Roman ecclesial community is really a cult will cause quite a stir in a good Catholic neck of the woods.

And it’s that last awkward thing I want to focus on here. But it’s a lesson I want to get back to – one other story, first.

Back before 9/11, my then-partner, Alex, and I took a ride around Puget Sound and caught the ferry back from Bremerton. I note it was before 9/11 because I was spooked out that you could see so many Navy Ships so very close from the highway. I hope they’ve fixed that! But we caught the ferry to Seattle and, as we sailed across the sound, someone removed parts of Alex’s “Darwin Fish” from the rear of his car. All that was left was the mouth point. You’d think it was a broken Christian fish just as much as anything else. This – rightly – infuriated Alex. I think he thought just about any Christian was capable of vandalism at that point.

So again, do you have a Jesus fish on your car?

Or, if not – surely you’ve seen ‘em!

And you know what they mean, right?

When I was a scooter driver, they meant “get out of my way”: the person who just did an illegal passage halfway into the far lane to speed by me on my two wheels probably had a Jesus fish on him. The two idiots who shot my scooter – and me – with paint balls while driving past Ingle’s in Asheville had a Jesus fish on their pickup.

So, you know what they mean, right?

Nothing.

Likewise: those tracts, handed out on street corners or left on counter tops in ATM lobbies. In the 1980s someone scratched the word “pray” on every public telephone in NYC. WTF?

Meaningless.

Today’s Gospel story shows us why – you knew I’d get to the Gospel, right?

Absentee Evangelism: the idea that some left-behind printed text or some random plastic symbol can do for me what I am commanded to do which isn’t to “preach the Gospel” but rather to be the Gospel.

The woman went and called people to come to hear this man – yes. But that wasn’t the evangelical moment yet. And they turned to her and said “we’ve heard for our selves now” yes, but that’s not the evangelical moment either – although both are reactions to or maybe follow throughs to the evangelical moment.

Jesus says, “the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Coming into relationship – into eating and drinking fellowship – with Jesus makes one also into a fountain, makes one into Christ, present to those around one. We’re not here trying to preach, bully or debate someone into a “coming to Jesus” – as Keith Green, himself, says. We need to be drawn in, to sit and feast, to hear him ourselves and know him.

The Psalm says not “God is good, you should try it…” but rather, “taste and see… the Lord is Good.”

We draw people into relationship with Christ by entering into relationship with them ourselves.

Absentee Evangelism is any method that tries to bully, coax, argue or preach someone into “getting saved” without bringing them into a personal relationship in the first person – with another Christian, with me. With you. With us, here in this room.

The first step in “saving someone” being friends with them, the first step in “bringing someone to Jesus”, is bringing them to your own house, to your own heart. The first in “getting to spend eternity” with someone is spending time with them, here, now.

St Photini – this woman, talking to Jesus in Samaria – runs and gets her neighbours. But there’s one other crucial issue here: Jesus comes and gets her. At all.

This woman is Samaritan. Jesus is Jewish.
This woman is rejected by her neighbours (we know because she’s at the well at noon, in the heat of the day, rather than with all the chatting women at dawn). Jesus speaks with her.
This woman is a woman. Jesus speaks to her without a chaperone.

Jesus crosses several cultural boundaries to have this conversation.

Most of us are content to chat with “normal” folks – however we define normal. Most of us are content with reaching out to people like us.

To be Jesus here, we need to reach out to people we wouldn’t be caught dead with.

Who are those people? People who might see you and wonder why you hate them? Who are the people whom you hate for whatever reason: they think you’re wrong religiously, they imagine you to be a heretic, they are certain you are a sinner, they know that God hates you.

Whatsoever is wrong with the world or whatsoever we imagine to be wrong with the world in our judgement or whatsoever God sees as wrong in the world because of our sin, the simple solution is that we fail to love enough. Neither pity nor preaching nor teaching nor liturgy nor praying nor certainly judging will bring one more soul into God’s kingdom as much as simply loving.

Simply being in relationship.

Let’s close out with two things, a story and a song: The story first, this one from the Desert Fathers, as recounted by Olivier Clement in his book, Roots of Christian Mysticism:

There was a saint in Egypt who dwelt in a desert place. Far away from him there was a Manichaean who was a priest — at least, what they call a priest. Once, when this Manichaean was going to visit one of his
confederates, night overtook him in the place where the orthodox saint was living. He was in great distress, fearing to go to him to sleep there, for he knew that he was well known as a Manichaean, and he was
afraid that he would not be received. However, finding himself compelled to do so, he knocked; and the old man opened the door to him, recognized him, received him joyfully, constrained him to pray with him,
and after having given him refreshment, he made a bed for him. Thinking this over during the night, the Manichaean said to himself, “How is it that he is without any suspicions about me? Truly, this man is of God.”
And he threw himself at his feet, saying, “Henceforth, I am orthodox,” and he stayed with the old man.

And one more reference to the Jesus people from the 70s in this song that says what Evangelism really looks like:

TWO HANDS

(Tom Coomes-Chuck Butler)

We’re all gathered here
Because we all believe
If there’s a doubter in the crowd
We ask you not to leave

Give a listen to His story
Hear the message that we bring
Feel the faith swell up inside you
Lift your voice with us and sing

Chorus
Accept Him with your whole heart
And use you own two hands
With one reach out to Jesus
And with the other, bring a friend

Many know Him well, others just by name
If you don’t know for what He stands,
You’ve really much to gain

With faith you can move mountains
These are common words but true
We aren’t quite a mountain
But He’s moved us here to you

Chorus
Accept Him with your whole heart
And use you own two hands
With one reach out to Jesus
And with the other, bring a friend

©1971 Dunamis Music

(You can hear it here, just scroll down to the picture of Tommy Coomes and click on the song title, Two Hands.)

Christ is Risen!

In a more traditionalist sort of parish (the kind that tries to emulate monastic life in a way that many Monks no longer do) we would have spent the afternoon, prior to our Pascha service Saturday night, reading the book of Acts aloud here in Church. This used to confuse me, to be honest: I mean, shouldn’t we be reading about the passion or, at least, some pious texts about the Harrowing of Hell? Instead we get Acts. This same practice is happening liturgically: for indeed, everything we do in the season of Pascha comes with a paired Gospel reading and a passage from Acts. What I’ve noticed this week, listening to the daily readings, is that we don’t get excused from anything because of the Resurrection: we have to do stuff for this to mean anything, for it to work. We read the Acts of the Apostles to set ourselves up for our own acts. What are our acts this Pascha?

Today we get the story of Thomas and his cry out to the Lord for contact, for communion. Let me see him. Let me touch him!

Today we also get the first in the cycle of eleven Matins Gospels. As this cycle starts on Thomas Sunday, we can assume the liturgical Fathers intended for us to hear these two Gospels together: that of “Doubting Thomas” and this Resurrection story. Why? Let’s come back to that in a minute.

Last week when I was in San Francisco I had a chat with a clergyman of another Tradition about the Resurrection of our Lord. This was at a Pascha service. What neither he nor I could understand was what I refer to as the “Zombie Rabbi of Palestine” phenomena. This school of thought – most prevalent among those who were or are American Protestants (although they may now be Orthodox, Roman Catholics or even non-Americans trained in America churches) – seems to see the Paschal Event as a sort of stand-alone moment of merely physical resuscitation. In their images – Sunday School books, felt boards, etc – we mostly get to see Jesus walking out of the tomb leaving the graveclothes behind.

This leads some Protestants and former Protestants to ask trick questions like Terry Mattingly’s Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen? The trick part of the questions being there are no biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. What we have, over and over, are accounts of an empty tomb and repeated stories of Jesus showing up after the Passion with no one recognising him. Yes, This is clearly a different Jesus while being the Same Jesus. But what has happened to him is not merely the resuscitation of his body: something else has happened.

The hymns of Orthodoxy are clear too: this is not what our impious and anti-Christian friends refer to as “Zombie Jesus” who eats our brains. The hymns make it clear that no one present witnessed the Miracle – not the soldiers, not the Jewish clergy. But that we, the faithful, are all witnesses, even today.

How is this?

Let’s get back to the Matins Gospel, zooming in on Matthew 28:17. Listen to this: “They worshipped him, but some doubted.” This is the apostles – worshipping him, and some are doubting him.

We usually want to hear “doubt” as something that might disqualify us from the “Faithful”. We want to point out “we do not doubt, for we are believers.” Earlier today… I heard Bishop Alexander of the Antiochian Archdiocese remind us that “Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Fear is the opposite of faith.” To me this is the highlight of Pascha! As in Egypt during the Passover: even when the Jews were whinging and crying to Moses, God still did his miracles so in Pascha. When God was rejected by his own people, he still performed his miracles. Likewise, God can deal with our doubt. Doubt is – as +Alexander noted – part of our faith journey. It is, rather, fear that destroys us – leaves us stranded in the upper room “for fear” after the greatest even in human history.

What I want to know is: why was “Doubting Thomas” not trapped in the upper room in his fear? How bold is he to ask God for a physical relationship?

How bold are we?

Now – back to Acts, to actions. Back to Matthew 28. Throughout this season we are clearly reading about the Apostles as the Church Story shifts from the personal events in the Life of Christ to the response of the Church to those events. At the end of Pascha will be Pentecost and then we will begin the Apostle’s Fast – the one fast that is a prayer for the Church’s mission. This is the season of our response!
But what about the doubters among us? As +Alexander pointed out today, Jesus doesn’t upbraid Thomas for his doubt. Jesus doesn’t kick the doubters out nor does he challenge them for their lack of Doctrine. In fact: he goes right ahead with his teaching. He commissions them all – doubters and worshippers alike – Go make disciples.

Can you imagine a church with room for honest doubt? Can you imagine a church with questions included as a part of serious, adult faith in the Risen Christ? Can you see this as Orthodox? I suggest that this is why the Gospels of Thomas Sunday are combined as they are. The doubters – no less than the worshippers – are part of God’s plan of salvation. This quest to purge the churches of “doubt” and make sure each of us are standing next to only “real” Christians is the legalism of our day.

There is another part here: the traditional statement of “lex orandi lex credendi”. The Law of prayer is the law of faith. Outside of Orthodoxy, much of the Christian world is trying to accommodate people by eliminating things that make people doubt. Virgin births and Resurrections, creeds and claims of salvation – all of these sound just a little odd to modern ears and so we must eliminate them from the Church’s worship. in fact, it is saying this stuff, over and over again, that brings us into the faith. Going into the world as doubting evangelists is part of what makes us believers: remember, doubt is not the opposite of faith. Faith – trust – is action, not just sitting there assenting to stuff.

Get up. Doubters and worshippers alike. Go. ACT. This is not about Zombie Rabbis of Palestine: this is about the arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth – and and the arrival of life in your heart.

Christ is Risen!

After faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

St Mary Sunday is one of those days in the Orthodox year with two Gospels and two Epistles. The cross-reading of Hebrews and Galatians, Mark and Luke, creates an interesting experience, no? The life of St Mary (as it is read in our Liturgy this week) is equally interesting, important for our own edification as well as our education.

If you read it, you will discover something important. Yes, I know: it seems mythological, perhaps. But “real” or “not real”, take a look at the story that the Church tells herself every year. Notice something. Apart from Fr Zosima, who brings the Holy Mysteries to Mary once in the story, we are told only of one other “church” event in Mary’s life: her confession and communion prior to her departure for the wilderness. Mary struggles and makes her peace with her body and her God on her own without benefit of Church or Clergy, with no books or internet. Yes, she’s a Christian – this we have clear – but she’s not one like we want to be…

You know the rules of the fast, do you not? WHen to eat fish and wine and oil, when meatfare is and cheesefare? You know how to avoid these things when you are out about, right? You know how long to fast before communion, or – if you are well read – the other rules of the communion fast as well.

But you know… Mary knows none of this.

We can run down a long list of the things Mary does not know – save by divine revelation (see how well she quotes the scriptures at the end of her life). But she struggles to know God as best she can, given her life, her place, her own experience. She learns that she needs humility and the help of Our Lady to draw near o the Son of God. But her own struggles, her own journey is her own. Not that of the Church.

This is the story the Church tells herself every year, the Sunday before Palm Sunday, the Sunday before we enter into the Holiest Journey of the Year.

Why?

When I was a new convert to Orthodoxy, one of the things that Converts – especially – use to tell me was about the “infallibility” of the Church. The Romans say that the Pope is infallible in matters of faith and doctrine. The Converts like to say the Orthodox Church is likewise. Of course we have no power to make doctrinal statements about such things, so we don’t have the clarification of “matters of faith and doctrine”. We just have that “perfect church” claim. One priest even told me – several times – that the Nicene Creed posited the Church as fourth in line after Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Those same people like to pretend that things have never changed here – as if this Divine Liturgy we serve has not changed since the upper room, as if the Church calendar, the festivals, fasting rules and rites, were handed to us in toto by Jesus himself, prior to his Ascension. As if our English language prayerbook is merely a new tranlastion of a text used in the 1st century.

But Mary knows none of this. Even if she was raised until 12 in the Church, scholars from Thomas Talley to Alexander Schmemman, from Dom Gregory Dix to Hugh Wybrew will tell you that her liturgy was radically different from ours. The rites and traditions she knew would have been strange to our eyes – involving more processions, more readings at “stations”, more psalms chanted in antiphonal ways.

Mary’s church was very different from ours – as ours is different from the early church. It’s not a case of needing to go backwards to recapture the way it was before (before VAtican II, before the Great Schism, before Constantine, before Paul) but rather it is a matter of our salvation, our wholenesss

Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

What Mary knows she was taught by God. And he, alone, has drawn her to salvation. In his own ways. This is the story the Church tells herself in Lent.

We have it good here: the ways of our ancestors distilled and passed to us to maintain. The ways of the Church from 2000 years, encoded and entrenched. We have texts and the internet, we have music recordings and telecommunications. We can beam this liturgy around the world. But, ultimately, we shall have to each work our our salvation with fear and trembling. We may have it Good – but in the good, we have no easy. If we think we have it easy we are lost.

We want to take the ways of the Church and make them into the Law – another Tutor. But, instead what we have are tools. The ways of the Church are not laws but tools for us to work our our salvation, our wholeness, our communion with one another.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!

One of the things I greatly admire in Orthodoxy is her sense of inclusion.

I’ll pause for a minute and let that sink in.

Let me try again: one of the things I greatly admire in Orthodoxy is her willingness to include persons all over the theological spectrum, regardless of their personal beliefs, drawing them all to the table.

You with me?

Orthodoxy means “right belief”, I hear you reminding me, and if someone doesn’t believe rightly, let them be gone – or at least refrain from communion.

Turn to the person next to you and quiz them on their faith…

Do they know what Orthodoxy teaches on minute details about which you, yourself, are 100% sure?

Do they measure up to what you know to be the purest form of Orthodoxy?

If your neighbour isn’t Orthodox enough, raise your hand…

We’ll go back to my opening line…

One of the things I greatly admire in Orthodoxy is her sense of inclusion regardless of your place on the journey of faith.

As a priest not yet burdened with the mystery of confession, I have to admit: if someone confessed doubt in the words of today’s Gospel, I’d be quite happy to admit them to communion. Doubt about anything, including our most treasured doctrines: Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

Today we commemorate St John of the Ladder. The ladder in question is not a vision or a doctrine, but, rather, a teaching tool used by St John and by the Church to offer us the image of continual sanctification, the process by which one in this life can grow to perfection in the Holy Spirit. It’s not a once-done always-finished thing. We have work to do. But it is a step-by-step process, climbing the rungs of the ladder in order.

The most important thing here is the idea of a ladder: it’s a process, a life-long process by which we grown and, in the end, find ourselves resting in Jesus. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

So I confess: The doctrines I accept… but I clearly do not trust them: I want my own way, I want my own things, I want my own wealth (of sin, of gluttony, of hoarding) rather than God’s kingdom of love and peace. So I know them… but I can not bring myself to live as if they are true. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

So I say to you turn, again, to your neighbour and instead of quizzing them… realize that part of your growth is to let go of judging your neighbour and to focus on your own sin. I am a sinner. In my eyes, the rest of you are Christ. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

How do we climb the ladder? The easy way is the Church, coming, participating, slowly growing, moving up as we age. But next Sunday we will read of a Saint who did most all of it alone. We will find her Sanctified and Holy, well versed in the scriptures and teachings. But how? She did it the hard way – alone in the wilderness.

How will you climb the ladder? There is room inside Holy Orthodoxy for you. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

My friend Cam, Rector of Trinity Church here in Buffalo, blew my mind out the day we discussed the following question in our Bible study class:

What group in the New Testament most parallels us, here?

The discussion went like this:

What groups can you think of in the NT?

Apostles
Disciples
Military
Gov’t
Clergy of various sects
Jesus’ Family
Villagers
City Dwellers
Samaritans
(ETC)

It went on for a while. Then Cam asked us who *we* were. Us, here in Buffalo, New York, USA. Who are we? Several answers arose as to who we’d *like* to be. Other answers as to who a given preacher might want to imagine us as. But who are we, in general? What group in the stories of Jesus most parallels us, now?

The answer is the Romans. Not the gov’t or the army but the citizens of the City of Rome; whither flows all the produce, the capital of the known world and from whence flows all the political power and decision-making, the taxes, the demands of civilization. She is the magisterial center of the Orb as she knows it. Her citizens enjoy the fruits of every part of the earth, are served by workers from every race and creed and culture. They have the work done for them. They don’t do the work – even when they want to. It would be unseemly for a real Roman to work. Slaves, yes; plebs, yes. But We White People should be above all that.

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

It’s hard in our society to understand this question, I think. Mindful of those who might read these notes, “our society” refers generally to the USA, to a section of culture defined by age and location and race. Most of my friends are middle class – earning far more than my Mom did when she raise three kids as a single mother – and even she tried to keep poverty away from us all. Our society here, now, is too successful to help us understand this question. We have, pretty much, “the whole world” here already.

Even my Mom, raising three kids as a single mother on the modern equivalent of about $10,000 in annual income, was quite wealthy compared to the folks who live in most of the world (and in a few parts of the USA as well). But me? Hell: I earn more than twice my Mother’s income and I have no kids. Every month, here in my house, we pay in food, rent and utilities, more than 10 times the annual Gross Domestic Product (per capita) of seven out of the ten poorest countries in the world. In fact, depending on which scale you use for the GDP, my house spends MONTHLY, at least ten times as much as the ENTIRE ANNUAL GDP of the 13 poorest countries. Yet I will manage – at some point in the next few days – to do something stupid with my money. (In fact, I did it after I started the draft to this sermon – stopping at my Boyfriend’s shop and purchasing a cable that cost more than the GDP of the bottom two countries on that same list simply for the purpose of routing my internet music from my desktop to my stereo.)

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

I realised earlier this week that I have too many clothes: Not too many for a man who has my social calendar. Not too many for a man who has my budget. Not too many for a man who might need to dress up now and then or get all jiggy now and then or go to a baseball game now and then. No: I have too many clothes for a many who claims to follow someone who said “Sell all you have and give it to the poor.” I was listening to a man speak (can’t say I remember his name) on a podcast and he was talking about a man who had asked him for a shirt. And he wanted to give away his shirt – but not the good ones, you know. And he pointed out, there and then, that this was covetous behaviour He was coveting the things God gave him to share with others.

And try as I might, I still can’t bring myself to successfully give away my clothes.

What would my boss say if I came to work every day in the same things? What would my BF say? What would I wear to Pascha at St Gregory’s church? What will my housemates say?

I have such a cross to bear: I can’t get rid of my stuff!

The American fixation on stuff is traceable – follow me backwards:

1) I was taught that having stuff is better than not having stuff.
2) My parents where taught that same lesson by people who had had nothing.
3) They were taught that lesson by people who fervently believed that God showed his spiritual blessing on us by showering us with material blessing so that working hard to earn material blessing showed God’s blessing all around.
4) They got that fair and square from the Fathers of the Protestant Reformations.
5) Who got it as sort of a fun-house mirrored reflection of the things they critiqued in Roman Catholic theology combined with a distorted focus on only one or two Church fathers – specifically Augustine.

As a bonus I might suggest (perhaps wrongly) that he got it as a material reaction and distortion to his own conversion process from the Gnostics. But without reading the other Church Fathers to balance him out Augustine got the Prots off to a weak start.

It’s traceable right back to the Protestant Work Ethic and, as divorced as that was from historic Christianity so, now, our stuff fetish is divorced from any form of Christianity at all. It’s an addiction. My life is filled with stuff: books, recordings, pictures, electronics, clothes, shoes, bedding…

But I think we can trace a more Eastern route as well: for in the East they succumbed to the Roman state and began to confuse imperial power and wealth with God’s blessing. There’s the other side of our problem – no less heretical, no less opposed to Jesus who was the poorest of the poor. And from that side of the Church we begin to hear stories that maybe Mary and Joseph were quite wealthy. That maybe the wealth of the world was part of the Church from the beginning and that the secular empire – always in opposition to God – can be made to work in Symphony with God’s kingdom in the Church. That’s how Americans end up as the Romans in the Bible.

What does it prosper a man to gain the whole world (the Greek refers to an illusion) and to loose his soul (and here, the Greek actually says something closer to “life”)?

What do you do if you have it all already?

What cross is there that can take away all this crap and give me the chance to “approach the throne of grace”?

O Lord, save your people and bless your inheritance.
Give victory to those who battle evil,
and with your cross protect us all.

So we sing today. There is for us our salvation: the Cross of Christ. If we take up the Cross of Christ we have no way to carry any other stuff.

Today’s feast like the preceding two Sunday’s has nothing, really, to do with Lent. It’s a series of commemorations of political events in the Byzantine world. Today we’re celebrating the Cross’ ability to defend Byzantium (and later, Russia) from Muslims. How ironic that the way the Empire killed Jesus should be seen as leading the Army of Jesus away from his way of Peace.

What does it prosper the Church to gain the whole world and loose her soul?

On the Second Sunday of Lent we commemorate St Gregory Palamas. Gregory was a writer from the 13th and 14th Centuries, living in Thessaloniki or Thessalonica – which most Americans will know vaguely as a city where St Paul sent a couple of Letter. His writing solved a crucial problem in Church theology and, perhaps most especially, drove a sort of wedge between East and West in terms of our understandings, at least on the surface. There is a lot to read about him on the web staring with the Greek Archdiocese’s webpage on the topic.

Today I’d like to point out two cures from Gregory and also point out a caution for us.

Gregory is the cure for the Mental Masturbation we like to call “Theology” today.

I fancy myself a church geek: I know all kinds of liturgical actions, I know minute sillinesses about when to bow and when to prostrate. I know Byzantine liturgical piety ok – and western liturgical piety very well. I can tell you why the little offices are replicas of the Eucharistic liturgy – and therefore should not be tampered with. I know how to clean up the spill after the wine has been consecrated and I know how to play an obscure game in the Roman rite called “Paten, Paten! Who’s got the Paten?” Sometimes I think I even understand Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas.

But I fail at prayer.

When I get up in the morning I sleep through the offices. I mostly forget at night.

Gregory Palamas… brings us here.

Modern folks like to think that theology is all in the head. All in the mouth. We tinker with theology – trying to iron it out, make it smoother, logical and crisp. We think that the latest cultural trends must show up in theology. So we have “God is dead” and “Postmodernism”.

Let me tell you about your marriage.

Imagine sitting down with your spouse – whom you have loved and fought with and feted and fasted with lo these many years. You tell your spouse – him or her – that you’ve read a new book: we’re all just children of primates, apes with less fur and bigger vocabularies. What does it change? DO you still love her? Argue with him? Feast and Fast the seasons?

Imagine you’ve read another book that says we all have three parts in our personality or that we’re nothing but electrons, or that in the end we’re only dust in the wind.

What does it change about the relationship you have?

If you value the relationship. If you value the person of your spouse more than yourself, more than anything else in the world. Will any book change them? If the book is true it may tell you something you need to know about the relationship – but if it is true it is written by someone who, themselves, has such an intimate relationship. But no book can ever replace the experience of laying in your lover’s arms and whispering secrets. No expert can tell you a thing is true if you know it is not – and how do you know? Because in your dance of Love you know the truth.

So it is with God.

And so it is that the Orthodox say that the “true theologian is the one who prays”.

Gregory Palamas saw this 800 years ago: the man who has only head knowledge, logical arguments and book learning knows nothing about God.

The Church knows her husband. She has lived in various levels of intimacy with him for the last 4000+ years – from the covenant with Abraham to Sinai to Babylon to Hannukah; from the Forerunner to Pascha to Pentecost to Nicea; from Boris and Gleb to Innocent to Raphael to you. He has whispered sweet knowledge in her ear on their bed after lovemaking and sent her love letters of wisdom. And nothing that is not-true will be accepted.

We can no more know God through book knowledge and debate than you can know your own spouse through sitting in a bar and “figuring him out” while watching Oprah. You can learn new things and try them out – yes. But they stand or fall on the results. On the experience. On the relationship itself.

You have to go home and live in intimate relationship before experience gives you the knowledge needed.

So it is with “Theology”. We know that “truth” is not a mental proposition but rather is Jesus. Any mental proposition claiming to be “truth” that is not Jesus… well: I hope the mental orgasm was good.

Gregory Palamas requires some Caution here – especially for us converts. I certainly include myself here. God became man in Jesus. Exactly that we might know God. Might touch God. Might hold God and breast feed God – the God in dirty diapers, as I like to say. Jesus as the Divine Lover of the Church, of Humanity. Palamas’ sharp distinction between “essence and energies”, between the parts of God, if you will, that we can know and the parts we can’t, can trip us up. It can become nearly Gnostic of us if we fail to balance his teachings with the reality of the Incarnation. His arguments are not prescriptive but rather descriptive. He’s talking about what Mystical experiences are open to us in prayer and meditation – not about what is closed to us, nor what limits us. He’s talking about the intimacy we can have and pointing out the parts that don’t work. He is not telling us what we can’t do to get there.

And, like any relationship: this is not a one-sided marriage. Do you know the classic comedy image of a husband and wife sitting at the breakfast table? She’s talking while he is reading a newspaper. Imagine that same thing in your bed. How long would you make love to your spouse if they just laid there? Like a dead fish? Maybe even reading a book?

There is in Gregory another cure: one for a VERY common error today. Gregory is the Cure for Cheap Grace.

Especially in America where we are too-heavily influenced by countless layers of “reformation” coming in attempted (or supposed) isolation from that 4000 marriage-bed conversation, where we are not willing to listen to our elders and all too willingly break with tradition exactly because it is tradition: we have come to think of Grace exactly the same way we think of finding a $100 on the street. We think of Grace as “God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense” (as my Sunday School teacher taught me). We imagine that all we have to do is sit here and showers of “grace” will fall on us.

Gregory points out that “grace” is God’s actual presence in our life. As this bread and this wine that we are about to consume is Jesus, Body and Blood, present with us, so to is Grace the actual energy of God moving through you. It is the light of God radiating from him, through you to others. It’s an actual thing. A presence. It’s not a “transaction” made for Free. Jesus paid for lunch: You’ve Got Grace! Your boss gave you a free vacation – grace! No.

Grace is God in your life.

When I hear good Irish music I start to tap my feet and bang my fingers. I play the Irish drum, the bodhrán, and when I hear goood Irish music, I start to play air drum. When I hear exceptionally good music, I’ll grab a notebook and a pen and start to be really annoying, playing. Barring all that, I’ll get up and dance. We dance a lot here at that house – especially in the kitchen.

Gregory points out that grace is the music calling you to dance.

But the rest of the Orthodox teaching on Grace is that Grace is TOTALLY wasted if you don’t get up and dance. More on that in a couple of Sunday, but that’s my parting shot for today. This idea that we can just sit down and “get graced” is not what Grace is. That idea of a free lunch… let it go.

Jesus didn’t buy us a “get out of hell free” card – he gave us a way to dance our way out. But we have to get up off our asses and do it. When our Divine Lover calls us to the marriage bed, we are not to “lay back and think of England”. He will leave us as cold as we deserve.

AS I said at the top of the mark, this is where I fail. I know all the technicalities, all the “official” goods, but I fail at this intimacy. I’m working on it – but I’m sure those people who think Grace is a free lunch will get it before I do.

Asking your prayers….