Sermon on Luke 6.31-36

Today, preaching to us not on the mount, but on the plain, Jesus admonishes us to behave in quite extraordinary and unworldly ways.

He tells us to do to others what we wish they would do to us (6:31). That’s as opposed to getting all you can get, doing what you can get away with, and looking out for number one, which seem to be guiding principles of life in the world.

Jesus tells us to love, not only those who love us, but even those who hate us. St. Maximus the Confessor says that Jesus commands us this “to free [us] from hatred, irritation, anger and rancor, and to make [us] worthy of the supreme gift of perfect love. [We] cannot attain such love if [we] do not imitate God and love all men equally. For God loves all men equally and wishes them ‘to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’” (1 Tim 2:4).

A lot of people in the world and in the Church support family values. As well they should. But sometimes, our idea of strengthening the family goes no further than loving those who love us. And sometimes we even think it includes hating and seeking to destroy those who would tear our families apart.

And that’s not enough. Jesus sets us a higher standard. What about loving our enemies? Or the enemies of our families? What about murderers and drug dealers and prostitutes and rapists, who make our neighborhoods unsafe? Do you want them dead? I have heard fellow Christians speak murderously of evil men. I myself know what it is like to hate and even to want dead someone who would hurt the innocent or the weak. May God forgive me, the sinner. Let me tell you something, God does not desire the death of a sinner, but rather that he repent and live (Ezekiel 18:23). This is the word of the Lord that came to Ezekiel (18:1). So, when we desire the death of a sinner – even if he is a terrorist, even if he hurt our child – we are not like God.

Jesus tells us to do good to those who do no good to us. Giving on condition of getting is just bartering. It isn’t love. Just because someone isn’t in a position to do anything for us, doesn’t mean it’s alright for us to neglect them. If we were Christians, the needy would attract us, not repel us. We would seek people in need – people among whom we could do good without receiving anything in return.

Remember that Jesus said that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35) and they say that this was also the motto of St. Nicholas, the patron of our Byzantine Catholic Church,

Jesus tells us to lend our goods and our money expecting nothing in return. Now this is distinctly unworldly. Already, more than five hundred years before Christ, the Lord plainly says to Ezekiel that a righteous man does not lend at interest (Ezekiel 18:5,8). Nowadays, collecting interest is as common as opening a savings account or an IRA. And, given the economic reality that our money has no fixed value, I suppose sometimes these interest rates are not usurious in that they do not increase the value of our savings so much as maintain it. But it seems we have lost all understanding of usury in the contemporary world and Church.

Even if interest rates are not always usurious in the contemporary context, they often are. Witness the predatory pay-day loan stores that pop up especially in poor neighborhoods to take advantage of those who already have little by offering them needed loans, but with outrageous and crippling interest. The Christian ethical principle to keep in mind with lending is that a loan is always to be made for the benefit of the borrower, not the lender. This is just exactly backwards of how the world thinks.

Meanwhile, Jesus goes beyond prohibiting the collection of interest and commands us to expect nothing in return for our loans. Not even the principal, let alone the interest. Now that’s radical. It’s downright ludicrous, in fact, by any worldly measure. That’s not even what we’d call lending, It’s more like just plain old giving. I think that’s his point.

Treat others as you want them to treat you. Love even those who do not love you. Do good even for those who do not do good for you. Lend without expecting any return. Why? What is the purpose of all this seemingly disproportionate behavior?

Do you know who you would be like if you did all these things? Well, I will tell you: you’d be like God.

God loves us, even when we do not love him. He loves even his enemies, those who hate him, and those who persecute his Church. He loved Paul before, during, and after his persecution of the Church. Jesus loved and forgave those who crucified Him even as they were driving the nails into his hands and feet.

God does good for those who do no good for him. What good can we – we, who are sinful – do for God? What gift can we creatures offer to our creator worthy of his greatness? And yet, he gives us every good thing. All blessing flows from our good God. He gives us our lives, our loved ones. Every simple pleasure and every blessing come from God.

“He is kind [even] to the ungrateful and the selfish” (Luke 6:35) As the life of Hosea prophesies, even if we are unfaithful like Gomer, God is faithful (cf. 2 Tim 2:13).

So this way of life Jesus commands us to today is nothing less than a prescription toward theosis. Do these things and you will be like God. Jesus says that if we do these things, we will be “sons of the Most High” (Luke 6:35). These things, which are impossible without grace, help make us again like God.

 

Sermon on Luke 5:1-11

The people pressed upon Jesus to hear the word of God. So much so, that he felt the need to get into a boat – Simon Peter’s boat, as it so happens – and to put out a little from the land so that he could sit and teach the people from the boat. In their urgent desire to hear the word of God, which comes uniquely from Jesus Christ, who is himself the word of God, they were even making things a bit uncomfortable for him, such that he had to improvise from a boat a sort of makeshift ambo from which to preach. We can understand, maybe, their great insistence on hearing the word from him who is the word.

But are we so eager to hear the word of God? If Jesus were in town, would we press upon him to hear the word of God? As it so happens, Jesus is in town. He is here in this church every day. He is proclaimed in the gospel and he is present here in the holy mysteries – confession, anointing, & eucharist. He is in our hearts and minds and bodies. He is alive in us and in this world.

But how aware are we of his living presence among us? Or, do we live as if he is away in some far-off place? Are we pressing upon him? When the gospel is proclaimed here in this church, do we always give it all of our attention? Or, do we let our minds wander off?

In Catholic churches, it is common to observe an overwhelming preference for the pews in the back. Often, we are far from pressing upon him to hear his word! Zeal and eagerness to participate more fully are often in short supply. An attitude of minimum obligations prevails. That is, we ask not how much we can do to grow closer to God in his holy Church but rather what’s the least we must to do in order to still call ourselves practicing Catholics.

They’ve even drawn up lists of these minimal obligations. For example, in order to be a practicing Catholic, they say we must at least keep these precepts of the Church: 1. We must attend Divine Liturgy (or at least some Divine service) every Sunday. 2. We must confess our sins at least once a year. 3. We must receive Holy Communion at least once a year during the Paschal season. 4. We must also keep holy the so-called “holy days of obligation.” 5. We must observe the Fasts of our Church. And 6. we must provide for the material needs of the Church according to our ability.

Alright, fair enough, these are good things for us to do. I suppose you’ll get no argument from me about that. And I suppose I’ll even go along with the observation that if a person isn’t even interested in trying to do these things, it would really be a stretch to call them a practicing Catholic. However, the attitude that seeks the minimum so ardently that it needs to have all this spelled out has probably already missed the point.

Where is our fire and our love for the Lord and his word?

The Byzantine tradition offers a maximalist approach to the spiritual life rather than this minimalist approach. Our full tradition of liturgical prayer, fasting, spiritual discipline, and charitable work, which is constantly proposed to each of us by our tradition, is likely more than any one of us is even capable of, at least on our own. Of course, one of the reasons we are a Church and not a confederacy of individuals with private pipelines to Jesus is that each member of the body of Christ has his or her own gifts and his or her own vocation within the body. And, together, we can do the work of Christ and live the Life of Christ more fully than we can alone.

And what is that work? Among other things, it is to preach to word of God both in words and, above all, by our love for our neighbors. Love of neighbor is our best and most effective tool of evangelism. It will bring people to the Lord and to the Church more effectively than persuasive arguments – not that there isn’t a time and a place for that as well. But only if we speak the truth in love. If we speak some truth, but not in love, it’s not really the word of God we’re proclaiming, because God is love.

This word of God we are to preach is like the nets, says St. Augustine, that Peter lowers into the deep for a catch. It brings in so many fish that two boats are filled to the point of sinking.  May our evangelism be so effective, by the grace of God.

I want to see that here at St. Stephen. Go and cast your nets, which are the word of God, into the waters of this Downriver area and beyond, throughout Southeastern Michigan.

What’s that you say? You tried that already and it didn’t work? You toiled all night and took nothing? Nevertheless, go out into the deep and cast again. It is the word of God you are casting and it can haul them in so that our little church is filled to bursting.

First, of course, before we can become more effective evangelists, we must deepen our own love and obedience to the word by whatever means necessary. We won’t convince others if we’re not convinced ourselves – if we don’t take this seriously ourselves and strive with whatever strength we have toward God. It’s true that union with God can only be achieved by God’s own grace and not by our effort, but this is not meant to encourage laziness on our part.

When it comes to the spiritual life and growing closer to Jesus Christ, instead of asking, “What’s the least I need to do?” or, “What fulfills my minimum obligation?” let’s learn to start asking, “What more can I do? Am I doing everything I can to press upon Jesus to hear the word of God so that I can live it and preach it to all creation?”

 

 

[1] CCC 2042

[2] CCEO, canon 881 §1

[3] Augustine, Sermon 248.2.

Sermon on Mark 8:34-9:1

“What will the profit be, if someone gains the whole world and loses his life? Or what would someone give in exchange for his life?” (Mark 8:36-37).

Jesus is asking us a rhetorical question. It’s meant to be obvious to us that our life is worth more than the whole world. And that there is nothing not worth giving for our life.

Life is “God’s greatest gift,” just as Joseph says to Clarence in that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. If you’re like me, you watch that movie every Christmas season. Now, it does make some glaring theological errors. For example, we do not become angels like Clarence after we die, but that is a whole other conversation and some things the movie does get right, including this: that life is God’s greatest gift to us.

And this life we have been given, just as the title says, is wonderful. It is filled with wonder. So, let us wonder at it for a while.

And let’s examine what does and does not make life wonderful. In the movie, George Bailey learns eventually that it is not money that makes life wonderful even if, as he says to Clarence, it “comes in pretty handy down here, bub.” He learns that the far more wonderful thing about life is love. The love of friendship, of marriage and family. It seems me that he even learns to love his enemy Mr. Potter by the end.

When George turns to God in his darkest hour, God intervenes to save his life. There are, as I said, some good and true things about this story, despite its few glaring errors. This is what God really does: he saves our lives. We know he is our Savior, but sometimes we forget what he’s saving us from. He’s saving us, ultimately, from death. He comes that we may have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10).

Let’s turn to the scripture, which, as it turns out, is an even better source of true teaching than a Frank Capra movie.

In another place Jesus teaches us, “he who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25). This show us that Jesus is saving us not for the life in this world, but for a different and eternal life. There’s a distinction here between two kinds of life. For that reason, someone might misunderstand and object to Jesus’ earlier rhetorical question with the proclamation that there are some things worth dying for. And of course there are! No one is a clearer example of this than Jesus himself. But when we die for the things worth dying for, even though we die, we live. If we die for the things of this world, on the other hand, we’re dying for nothing and we’re risking a different kind of death

The life in this world is the life of enslavement to the things of this world. Yes, money, the love of which is the root of all evil (1 Tim 6:10), but also all the passions: not only greed, but also lust and hatred and envy and pride and vainglory, and gluttony and sloth and so on. This is part of what Jesus means by “the life in this world” that we are to hate. As I mentioned last week, St. Isaac the Syrian teaches us that “The ‘world’ is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them ‘the world.’” So the life in the world is the impassioned life. And it is not life in this sense, not life in this world or according to the values of the world, that Jesus comes to save, but rather eternal and everlasting life, the life which is part of our true nature, which we were truly created for. Life itself which is union with life himself, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the life.

The way to this life is through the cross, which we continue to exalt today.

In today’s epistle, Paul writes, “I’ve been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

To live as Christ, first we die as Christ. We take up our cross and follow him. We die to our passions and to the things of this world & then in him we know true and everlasting freedom, love, and life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” These must be the most recognized words of the gospel in the United States. We see John 3:16 everywhere: on bumper stickers, t-shirts, in cartoons, in the eye-black under Tim Tebow’s eyes. I once saw a coupon that offered $15 dollars off a full-service oil change if the customer could quote John 3:16. I saw a church sign for a church named “John 3:16 Church.” If it were a Byzantine Catholic parish, I suppose it could be named something like, “Christ the Lover of us all,” but only in America could you see it named after the chapter and verse.

At some point, almost everyone in America has probably looked up this verse. I once heard a priest quip that maybe it’s time we start writing John 3:17 everywhere. Then, after a while, we could move on to John 3:18, and so on. That way, maybe, before they die, people would make it through a whole chapter of scripture.

We quote John 3:16 in our Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. You’ll hear it just after the “Holy, Holy, Holy….” These words have been popular among us Byzantines since before there were chapters and verses to cite. (We liked it before it was cool).

And they tell us that God loves the world. We hear these words so often that maybe they go in one ear and out the other. We might begin to lose a sense of their significance, even of their scandal.

The word for “world” here in Greek is κόσμος. God so loved the cosmos. This word is potent and loaded in the Christian tradition, and particularly in John, who uses it more than anyone. Its meanings are complex and varied and seemingly contradictory. The lexicon gives it no less than eight definitions.

Today we hear from Jesus that God loves the world. But John tells us in another place “Do not love the world or the things in the world.” And, “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). This may be confusing. We’ve just heard that the Father loves the world, but now we hear if we love the world we do not love the Father?

And anyway, how can God love this world? In this world, some children are murdered before they’re born and others are abused. In this world, men crash airplanes into skyscrapers and kill thousands, as we remember from twenty years ago yesterday. In this world, we drop nuclear bombs on our enemies, and their families and children. The ruler of this world is the devil. We see this wickedness all around us and we don’t love it.

At the root of all these evils is our passions. St. Isaac the Syrian writes that “The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them ‘the world.’” The passions, you know, are like greed and sloth, lust and vainglory, envy and resentment, and so on.

When we say that God loves the world, let’s be clear that we are not saying that he loves these things. He does not love the passions and the horrors that impassioned people carry out. God forbid the thought. The word “world” carries many senses, then. And we must carefully consider what is meant.

Jesus is not of the world but is above the world (John 8:23). He creates the world and yet becomes of the world to save the world. We are taught both to love the world and to hate our lives in the world (John 12:25). The devil is the ruler of the world but Jesus is the king of kings and lord of lords. The world brings up these parallels and opposites. And only Jesus Christ and his cross can reconcile opposites.

It’s like we have two worlds here. And I think that’s it really. We live in two worlds at the same time. There’s the world as God creates it and there is the fallen world, enslaved to sin. We must be aware of both worlds – both the cosmos and the chaos – both the way of life and the way of death.

God enters into the midst of both of these by becoming man. By his humanity, he saves, redeems, glorifies, and brings us humans into unity with God – us and also the cosmos, the world. By his incarnation, Christ is cosmically present to the universe. And the whole universe stands in need of his salvific presence, because the whole universe is disordered and suffering from destruction and death of many kinds.

And, make no mistake, death is what we’re being saved from. That’s the whole point of all this here.  God gave his only Son so that we would not perish but have eternal life. Death is an evil. Some of us are accustomed to thinking about moral evil only and we forget about physical evil. We sometimes fail to understand physical evil as evil. We even call it good.

And it has been made good in Christ and in his cross. But we must not forget that this is a paradox, lest we forget all our Lord has done for us. In Christ, all things are new. In Christ, death becomes the means of life, because in him, life goes into the place of the dead, into Hades, so that there is nowhere God is not. Hades was thought to be the place where God is not, the place of the dead. “Will the shades stand and praise you?” asked the Psalmist (Ps. 88:10). He may have thought the answer was no. But now, God is even where God is not.

God is impassible, yet in his humanity he suffers the passion. God is immortal, yet in his humanity he dies. God creates the cosmos, yet in his humanity he is created in the cosmos. God loves the world.

The world is the whole cosmos that God creates. Yet the world is also the passions, the sins, the suffering, and the death. So it gets convoluted sometimes when we’re talking about “the world.” We see the passions and the weakness, the suffering and the death, all of which is evil, and it gets hard to see what’s good about the world.

All of this is reconciled only in the cross. We exalt the cross when we say that we love the world. When we say that God loves the world – that can only make any sense in the context of exalting the cross. God is making the sign of the cross over the whole world. He is blessing us with the cross.

The cross unifies opposites, you see. There’s a vertical bar and there’s a horizontal bar, intersected. The divine intersects the human, in Jesus Christ. Heaven comes down to earth. Life enters into death. Unified, death becomes the way to life through resurrection. The cross is the cosmos as it really is. All of it, in all of its senses, unified.  Opposites are made one in the cross, this wonderful and holy sign.

Sermon on Matthew 22:35-46

If we are practicing Byzantine Catholics, then we are well acquainted with the Book of Psalms. If we are not well acquainted with the Book of Psalms, then we have not yet begun to practice our Byzantine tradition. Our Byzantine tradition of prayer is positively steeped in the Psalter. We pray the Psalms constantly and at every liturgical service, including this Divine Liturgy, though, interestingly, least of all. All of our other services include even more Psalmody. We truly follow the instruction of Saint Paul, when he tells us to “greet one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all [our] heart[s]” (Eph. 5:19). This apostolic tradition is here very much alive.

And remember that tradition is a living thing if it is anything of value at all. The great scholar of history and theology Jaroslav Pelikan said from experience, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; [whereas] traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”[i]

So while we keep the good tradition of singing Psalms, it is good also for us to find a way of doing it that we will actually do, rather than insisting that only one of the ancient ways is worthwhile. Often, if we take that tack, we soon discover that these ancient ways are rather cumbersome, as it turns out, and so we give up the whole thing. Better, as I say, to sing the Psalms according to a rule we will actually keep in our actual real lives.

And one piece of guidance I would give you, whether you asked for it or not, is that your prayer should include at least some psalmody. Not overmuch, necessarily, but some. It is not necessary for lay people to keep the Byzantine monastic cycle of psalmody, which goes through the entire book, all 150 Psalms, each and every week, and twice a week during the Great Fast. That’s a bit much for most of us who are living in the world and, if we try to do it, we may soon burn out and give up the whole thing. Rather, the tradition that stands there to inspire us. If the monks and nuns of our tradition can keep this great discipline, perhaps we can at least pray a psalm each day. That would be a good thing. Don’t be intimidated. Some of them are quite short. Here is a Psalm in its entirety, which we always pray at Vespers:

Praise the Lord, all you nations, acclaim him all you peoples! Strong is the love of the Lord for us; he is faithful forever (Psalm 116).

There, you see? That’s not too much. You can pray a Psalm each day. And it is worthwhile to do so.

The Book of Psalms contains the revelation of God. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And it is the prayer book of Jesus Christ himself. This book in a unique way contains the prayers of God to God. For example, when we pray Psalm 21, we are praying a prayer that was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and which was prayed to our Father in the heavens, by his only begotten Son in his humanity as he hung upon the cross and cried out, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?” “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” This Psalm therefore connects us into an unfathomable inner experience of Christ our God like no other prayer can.

We know this from the gospel. Now, if we were to pray that same psalm apart from its gospel context, we would fathom it even less. In fact, this same great and holy book becomes so unwieldy if divorced from the gospel, that it can even begin to lead some people astray. That which is holy and edifying and divinizing could be confused and distorted and manipulated by the enemy to mean in some cases the very opposite of what God means by it. Never forget that the devil quoted the Psalms while tempting Jesus in the desert (Matt 4:6; Ps. 90:11, 12).

I will give you an extreme example. In the Psalms we proclaim, “Do I not hate those who hate you? abhor those who rise against you? I hate them with a perfect hate and they are foes to me” (Ps. 138:21-22). This is a psalm that we Christians pray. As I said, our monks and nuns pray this prayer every week, and twice a week during the Great Fast. Meanwhile, Jesus has given us a new teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44). We have here a contradiction, it would seem. Some Christians have been so perplexed by this, that they have removed this Psalm and others like it from their own cycle of prayer. We Byzantines do not do this. Rather we seek to know what God means by it.

Speaking about this very Psalm, St. Basil the Great says, “It is not hard for us, if we wish it, to take up a love for justice and a hatred for iniquity. God has advantageously given all power to the rational soul, as that of loving, so also that of hating, in order that, guided by reason, we may love virtue but hate vice. It is possible at times to use hatred even praiseworthily.”[ii]

And then he quotes the same verse I have already mentioned. It’s clear, I think, that Basil is starting with Christ and his gospel, and is understanding the psalms he’s praying only in that context and from that perspective. Therefore, and only because of this, he is able to see that the “ones” we are to hate are no fellow humans or creatures of God, but only vice and iniquity, which God did not make. In interpreting the Psalms this way, St. Basil is following the example of Jesus himself, as we heard in the gospel this morning.

Today, Jesus reveals a manner of understanding the Psalms to the Pharisees he is talking with. He quotes Psalm 109: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool” (Ps 109:1). He reveals this to be a Messianic psalm about himself, the son of David who is none-the-less also the Lord of David. In fact, he is the Lord God who created David and knit him together in his mother’s womb.

Apart from the guidance of Jesus Christ, this psalm would never have been understood that way. The Jews were expecting a Messiah, but that he would be God incarnate went well beyond their expectations, even though that truth was already being proclaimed in their own Psalms. They could not see it there. And neither would we be able to see it if we did have Christ to open our eyes to it.

And so, in addition to praying the Psalms each day, which I encourage you to do, also read something of the gospel. Because it is only in the gospel that the revelation of the Psalms is made manifest. We need both if we are to commune with God in our prayer. “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” says St. Jerome, so let us immerse ourselves in them day and night to grow in our relationship and intimacy with our Lord.

 

 

[i] Carey, Joseph (June 26, 1989). “Christianity as an Enfolding Circle [Conversation with Jaroslav Pelikan]”. U.S. News & World Report. 106 (25). p. 57.

[ii] Homilies on the Psalms