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.

And the number one legalism of the Fast….

1) I’m not sick enough to suspend fasting.

If you think the fast is about foods… you’ve missed the point. Next year you should try giving up the Fast for Lent.

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.

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….

To this end the Church provides many tools.

Fasting:
The cultural purpose of fasting (if you look at it historically) is, really, to bring the rich folks down to the gastronomical level of the poor. We underscore this when we insist that it’s not a full fast unless you are giving the money you save to the poor. Telling a poverty-stricken family in 8th Century Constantinople that they could only eat veggies was for them no hardship. Telling the Czar of all Russia or Emperor of Rome that he and his family had to eat only veggies creates an interesting image.

The traditional fast for Great Lent in the Orthodox tradition is to abstain from meat, fish, dairy, eggs, olive oil and wine for the entire period. Wine and oil are permitted on Saturdays and Sundays (and on certain other days commemorating the Saints) and Fish is also permitted on the Feast of the Annunciation as well as on Palm Sunday.

But the reality is that for most of us, work schedules, odd lunchtime meetings, health concerns and dietary restrictions might be of more import.

Problems only arise if you insist on reading “The traditional fast for Great Lent…” as meaning “I sin if I fail.”

Once – about 6 months after my Chrismation – I visited my family (who are not Orthodox) and I mentioned later in confession that I had been unable to keep the fast – it was Advent at the time. Fr D said, “That is the last I ever want to hear of food in confession.” Fr V said much the same thing the following Lent when I struggled with my blood sugar as if my life were less important than “the rules”.

This is not about rules, rather it is about desire. The purpose of curbing desire (which is otherwise natural) is because of our unnatural tendency to let desire grow to greed – wanting more than we need to live; and thence to gluttony – hoarding more than we need to live. As Americans we need to be especially aware of our greed and our gluttony: we live in such abundance that even ore poorest are sometimes better off than entire populations elsewhere. Our desire should be for them – rather than for ourselves.

If we get so hung up on our food – or our rejection of food – that we can not see the other, the Icon of God before us, then food has become our idol.

Services
The traditional Orthodox parish would be swamped with services through this time of year. Even the “loosest” Orthodox parish will have a couple of extra services each week. The most traditional will add Daily Matins and 3 or 4 week night services for most of Lent. Certainly it makes good sense to make wider use of the Church’s services. But why stop at Lent? If we can, I would have extra services all year. Our struggle is supposed to intensify in Lent – but not fall to lax the rest of the time. Still: we do what we can and, with my day job, I’m limited as well. So there are three sets of special Lenten prayers posted on the “Common Place Prayerbook” website:

The Daily First and Third hours for Lent are very good for morning use. There is no variable material here.

The Ninth Hour and Typika for Lent make a good evening prayer (before Supper).

While the traditional use calls for a full kathisma or section of the Psalms to be read at each office it makes more sense to read one antiphon or stasis of Psalms at each office. Begin with the First Kathisma on the first Monday of Lent and proceed forward on each weekday with the second on the Tuesday, the third on Wednesday, etc. If you don’t have time to read the Psalms at your regular prayer times, consider adding them as a Luncheon devotion, etc.

On Friday evenings there is Little Compline with the Akathist to the Theotokos, although for all other evenings there is Little Compline.

All of the offices include prostrations during lent, as well as the Prayer of St Ephraim with its prostrations and bows. Prostrations are always good acts, involving your full body in your prayer.

Additional tools are acts of Charity – given the recent situation in Haiti it may be very easy to find something to do! But better to stick close to home. Reach out to the homeless man you see every morning on the way to work. Find a way to get some clothes anonymously to a single mother at your office. Buy a bunch of bagged lunches and give them away. These acts of Charity are to be done in a spirit of joy and thanksgiving for the very act rather than somber piety. But most importantly they are to be done with a sense of connection, of relationship. Someone in another part of the world may need your money just as much as someone here… but the person here may hug you, may point out that he doesn’t need your money, will make it clear that she, too, is a person and an icon of God and not a mere object of your largesse.

Charity in the first person is also an act of humility: an act of saying you’re sorry for hoarding, for greed, for gluttony. I have so many shirts in my closet right now: winter ones, spring ones, summer ones. I need only two or three… and the same in socks and jeans and all. But I have more than I can store in my closet: an embarrassment of clothes and wealth. I need lent to kick me in the backside and make me aware of the other person, the other being, of Jesus standing in front of me.

Take time brace yourself and really struggle this Lent. But not just for lent: the purpose is to be ready to struggle always and forever for the kingdom to be made real.

Hebrews 7:7-17 Epistle, Meeting
Luke 2:22-40 Gospel, Meeting

A sketch…

The Sunday of Forgiveness.
The Expulsion from the Garden.
Valentines day on the Secular calendar.*
The Eve of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple on the CHurch’s calendar.

*And the Western Church calendar: St Valentine is commemorated in the Summer on the Eastern Calendar.

You know the story: after sinning, God comes walking in the Garden in the cool of the evening…

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

And I can imagine all kinds of things… but the patristic comment I most like to see here is God weeping for loneliness.

And then there is this story:

And when the parents brought in the Child Jesus, to do for Him according to the custom of the law, Symeon took Him up in his arms and blessed God and said: Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, According to Your word; For my eyes have seen Your salvation…

And I imagine all kinds of things, including God weeping in Symeon’s arms, having come home, at last.

How is it that we reject our lover?

How is it that we stand naked before the one who knows us most intimately from age to age, and yet we try to hide. And how is it that when he returns to claim us re, finally, rejoice.

How have I sinned against you? How do I find myself hiding from you, afraid to love you, afraid to let you love me?
Like I do God.
As I do to God when I do so to you…

And we prostrate as equals before each other. But God comes as a child to be held in our arms.

This lover.
This light.

How is it that when we were in paradise, we did not want it. And without it we want nothing more?

We are so used to seeing Lent as reparation for our sins, fasting as a chance to drive away lust and greet and gluttony. But what if it is, instead, the long stretch in the gym before the prom night or the spa treatments before the big interview. What if lent is like the diet we take before the wedding…

When our lover will take us in his arms
And kiss us with the kisses of his mouth
and lead us into the bridal chamber
and close the door gently
and ravish us for eternity in love.

let us begin by so loving each other…

Luke 19:1-10 (NRSA)

It’s falling very early this year, no? It’s still mid-January. January 4th if you’re on the old calendar! (I wonder if, on the OC, it’s possible for this Sunday to fall in December? Anyway…) Nex Sunday the Triodion starts. We prepare for Lent. The Journey starts today! And I confess I love Lent! It is my favourite part of the year, my favourite time to stand with God.

I’ve been reading Fr Schmemann’s great introduction to Orthodoxy, For the Life of the World. Most recently I was reading the section on Chrismation and there is a tie-in for us here on Zacchaeus Sunday. We’ll get there in a minute… His journey is not a long one – from his house, up the road, and finally up the tree. He had, of course, a life time of journey before that, all bringing him to this fateful day. The Gospel seems to boil it all down to the symbolism of his tree-climb, which the Fathers saw as a mark of his desire.

Zacchaeus climbed a tree and where have we gone?

When I decided I didn’t believe all of this Christian stuff any more – at the ripe and wise age of 25 or so – I left the (Episcopal) church and journey on a long path through several different religions and “spiritualities”. I also added new levels of meaning to the word “publican” which, at least in the British Isles, means “bar tender”. For a time I was a minister in a non-Christian group – which required an ordination ceremony. My mom was there – along with people from about 5 or 6 different religions. I said on that day that the Holy One sure was full of surprises: because no matter where I went, there He was.

At that ceremony in that non-Christian tradition, two Christian musician friends of mine led the gathered group in a song by Sylvan Dunstan. The first verse reads,

Bless now, O God, the journey that all your people make,
the path through noise and silence, the way of give and take.
The trail is found in desert, and winds the mountain round,
then leads beside still waters, the road where faith is found.

Zacchaeus went up a tree, where have we gone?

Finally, after all that decade of journeying I found myself going, again, to a Church in San Francisco and working for a Roman Catholic university, my Mom laughed and said, “you can’t get away from the Lord.”

Lent is a Journey: everyone will tell you so. Those who make a spiritual practice of reading St John’s great work “The Ladder of Perfection” begin to see the journey as climbing Jacob’s ladder upward. Those who paint icons will tell you of the journey to that inner vision of beauty. Spiritual elders will tell you of the journey to the vision of the Uncreated Light. Today the Gospel tells us of a journey up a tree.

We could talk my journey that brought me here – of your journey that brings your here… but if we focus only on the journey that Zacchaeus makes, we might miss the point: all by itself, climbing a tree to see God-Incarnate can be just as useful as building a Tower to Heaven.

Our Lord was walking that day up the road towards Zacchaeus. A curious thing happens: climbing the tree, Zacchaeus finds that Jesus was already coming to see him. He says, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must abide at thy house.” You almost want Him to say, “What are you doing up that tree, I’ve been waiting for supper all this time, now stop playing and come down!”

It’s not enough that Zacchaeus was looking around: God was looking for Zacchaeus. Mom has it right: you can’t get away from the Lord.

St Nicholas Cabasilas says, “It was not we ourselves who were moved toward God, nor did we ascend to Him; but it was He who came and descended to us. It was not we who sought, but we were the object of His seeking. The sheep did not seek for the shepherd, nor did the lost coin search for the master of the house; He it was who came to the earth and retrieved His own image, and He came to the place where the sheep was straying and lifted it up and stopped it from straying. He did not remove us from here, but He made us heavenly while yet remaining on earth, and imparted to us the heavenly life not by leading us up to heaven but by bending heaven to us and bringing it down.”

That is NOT, however, the only aspect. If we let St Nicholas take us along we’ll imagine that nothing we do is important. God is not some massive chess player with us as pawns waiting to be moved or not. Our desire, our passion, our quest for God is needed as well. James says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (James 4:8)

But there is more…

Jesus comes to Zacchaeus’ house! There is more than just desire, more than just seeing. You can’t do everything God wants from the ivory tower from up in the tree… you have to come down. Relate to God. Relate to People. You have to be in fellowship. Be in communion. It won’t work otherwise.

Remind yourself where you were when God found you. Yes, even there: come here, Jesus says to you, we’re going to have a meal together – This day is salvation come to this house. Salvation – the Greek word root is “sozo”, healing, health, wholeness. It means not that this man was “Saved” that he’s getting out of hell when he dies. It means this man is restored to relationship with God and with others.

Zacchaeus is, for us, a model of repentance. But for us, in this community, there is something more: the crowd doesn’t really like Zacchaeus, yes? Verse 7 says All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

You and I know how people in Church can be. This man was seeking God. God was seeking him. This man and God embraced. And all the “good people” said, “YER DOING IT WRONG!”

The second verse of that song I heard sung so long ago echoes the prayer we utter at each liturgy “for all mankind” – Christains or not, knowing or not, we are all seekers.

Bless sojourners and pilgrims who share this winding way,
whose hope burns through the terrors, whose love sustains the day.
We yearn for holy freedom while often we are bound;
together we are seeking the road where faith is found.

We are all on this journey together – that includes not only us standing in Church. St Paul calls God “Savior of all people, especially – but he does not “only” – of them that believe. Everyone is on this journey. Some may not get there in this life time: and we continue to pray for them after they are gone. Some of us may think we have finally arrived when, as Zacchaeus found, there was something more to do. He thought he wanted only to see this cool guy he heard about. Instead he found himself saying, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore to him fourfold.”

How’s that for a costly tree climb?

Lent is this journey for us. Today, Zacchaeus Sunday, is the day we realise not only that we are seeking God, but, lo, God is seeking us. All of this prepares us for our Baptism – our bringing of our life to Christ. You may remember the beginning of this sermon… where I said I’d been reading Fr Schmemann.

Zacchaeus is not asked to give up much: be is asked to do something different with it, yes. But he is not asked to Stop being Zacchaeus. He doesn’t leave this story as anything other than the Publican he was: he’s just a repentant publican.

When he stands up before the God who has come into his house to have a party… Zacchaeus has his own moment of catching the Spirit. Jesus’ presence, God there, is the Spirit’s presence as well, no? You can’t have on without the other…

Chrismation, confirmation (which we do daily, I think) is each our own Pentecost, says Fr Schmemann.

“Confirmation is thus the personal Pentecost” of each of us, our “entrance into the new life in the Holy Spirit, which is the true life of the Church. It is is our ordination as fully human, for to be fully human is to belong to the Kingdom of God. And again, it is not our “soul” alone – our “spiritual” or “religious” life that is thus confirmed, but the totality of our human being. Our how body is anointed, sealed, sanctified, dedicated to the new life: “The seal of the gift of the Holy SPirit,” says the Priest as he anoints the newly baptisxed, “on the brow, and on the eyes and the nostrils, and the lips, and on both ears, and the breast and on the hands, and the feet.” The whole person is not made the temple of God, and her whole live is from now on a liturgy. It is here, at this moment, that the pseudo-Christian opposition of the “spiritual” and the “material” the “sacred” and the “profane”, the “religious” and the “Secular” is denounced, abolished, and revealed as a monstrous lie about God and us and the world. The only true temple of God is the full human and through us the whole world. Each ounce of matter belongs to God and is to find in God its fulfillment. Each instant of time is God’s time and is to fulfill itself as God’s eternity. Nothing is “neutral.” …

To be fully man means to be fully oneself. The confirmation is the confirmation of each of us in his or her own unique “personality”. It is, to use again the same image, the ordination of each of us to be him or herself, to be what God wants him or her to be, what God as loved in me from all eternity. It is the gift of vocation.

Zacchaeus, the newly-illumined, the saved saint of God, stands up and realises what he has – gives it away. Realises he’s sinned – repents. ALL in response to God’s coming to him, God’s eating with him, God’s presence in his life.

The final verse of that song relies on symbolism that St Gregory of Nyssa found replete in the Song of Songs. His commentary on that work is nearly scandalous for in many passages that we must admit would be “banned in Boston” for sexual imagery, we find the true meaning of God’s searching for us.

Divine eternal lover, you meet us on the road.
We wait for land of promise where milk and honey flow,
but waiting not for places, you meet us all around.
Our covenant is written on roads, as faith is found.’

You are here, now. You feast with God, the eternal lover of your soul and your body and your heart and your mind. Closer to you than any friend or friend with benefits, or friend we cuddle with or spouse we love! When you rise from this table confirmed in your whole self, in your full personhood with God, what will be your covenant? What will be the response that you bring? What will be your life, your fullness, your salvation?

Zacchaeus climbed a tree. Where have you gone? You can’t get away from the Lord.