tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-218222032024-03-13T19:01:21.504-07:00The Abandoned MindPut on your miner's caps, light 'em up and follow me. These timbers are old, the walls are crumbly, and the roof could cave in at any minute. Stay together and watch your step. We're about to enter...The Abandoned Mind!Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.comBlogger173125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-11199543208888194982015-06-27T21:27:00.003-07:002015-06-27T21:27:33.985-07:00+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
Our Lord said, “The eye is the lamp of the body,” teaching that if your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be filled with darkness. He further emphasized how great that darkness will be.
The first thing to understand is that Jesus was not speaking of physical sight, but of spiritual sight, or what we might call one’s perception of life. One can have either a Christian perception, a Christian “lens” through which he views, interprets, and understands life rightly, or he can have a worldly perception, a darkened lens, which leads him to misunderstand and misinterpret all things in life, including even the Christian faith and himself as a human being. Much of this world’s narrative is driven by a darkened perspective affecting us all. It is a basic Christian teaching that we all initially come to Christ with a bad eye and full of darkness, needing purification that we might be divinely illumined to become children of the light, freed from delusion.
Not all who enter the spiritual hospital find this healing quickly. This is often because the darkened perceptions and opinions we have formed through having bad eyes masquerade as “wisdom,” or “our deeply-held beliefs,” or even as merely “just the way things are.” In other words, many of us don’t even know that we are darkened in our thinking. We assume we have a good handle on things and imagine ourselves to be far more Christian in our ideas and practices than we may actually be. This is a serious problem.
An extreme example can be seen in those churches that muddy every traditional Christian doctrine and moral teaching, that reject the need of repentance (“Be who you are!”), and that advocate every so-called “progressive” social issue under the banner of inclusiveness and love. The spirit of anti-christ is alive and well in such churches.
In our own individual lives, other examples can be found. I’ll divide these into two basic types, the first being wrong opinions and the second being wrong formation.
When it comes to opinions, we’ve all got them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing unless our opinions are just wrong and we are unwilling to change them. We can be so prideful when it comes to defending our own personal thoughts and opinions, and it is this pride that often leads into some very unchristian behavior.
If we come to the Church for spiritual healing and illumination, we ought first to be willing to lay aside our own ideas and be taught by Christ. A wise man will learn to always mistrust himself and lean not on his own understanding, but on the wisdom of God. If we do hold strong opinions, why not keep them to ourselves rather than inflict them on others? How often do we read in the scriptures—if indeed we read the scriptures—that we should strive to be of one mind with one another, united with God in Christ? How often are we instructed to avoid quarreling and disputes, disagreements and arguments, to lay aside our own self-interests in order to embrace our unity in Christ and in the faith delivered once, for all? Where in the scriptures are we encouraged to be “free thinkers” or to go “against the tide” in the Church, or to “stand up for ourselves” in opposition to one another?
The Christian spirit is one of humility and gentleness and submission to one another in Christ. We may hold to some very strong opinions about theology or politics or social issues or even that most volatile issue of all, how to raise our own families. And some of those opinions may be good, and others maybe not. In either case, I would caution us about forming opinions too quickly, too unwisely, or voicing them too loudly. Allow God time to heal your eye, so that your opinions might come from our Holy Tradition and a Christian spirit, and not from a darkened intellect, or from ego, or from the vain philosophies of this fallen world. Embrace humility, listen deeply, speak little, and gain much.
Now it could be that I have already offended some who might be thinking, “Father wants us all to think like he does and be good little cookie-cutter Christians!” If that’s the case, you may have misunderstood my meaning. One thing I will add is that in the early stages of our Christian journey, we will all tend to think first in terms of our individualism and our so-called responsibility to ourselves, rather than the Body of Christ and our true responsibility to one another. To get from here to there is a process called right formation.
We come to Christ rather badly formed. This is what our Lord referred to as the “darkness” within us. A bad eye leads to bad thoughts and opinions, which in turn leads to bad formation. As we act on the ideas that have little or nothing to do with Christ, we shape our souls in wrong ways, and quite likely the souls of those around us as well. To be properly spiritually formed in Christ should be the desire and pursuit of every person in the Church. However, this is not always the case as some Orthodox people seem to have no concept of spiritual formation.
Somehow, and perhaps we know how, it is possible for people to go years in the Church and remain untouched by the experience. Like a marriage that never quite “takes” and the two remain two rather than becoming one, Orthodox Christians can be married to Christ but never be formed in His image, never be truly united to Him. We can remain just as worldly and clueless in our thoughts and actions as any person who doesn’t know the Lord. To paraphrase Strother Martin from Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure of formation,” or rather, a wrong formation in accordance with the world, and not a right formation in accordance with Christ.
How can spiritual formation fail? Most often because a person never fully engages the faith or lives their Orthodoxy intentionally. That might be because we just don’t pay attention, or it might be because of the little compromises we sometimes make with our faith. We might compromise our prayers, our tithe, the fasts, church attendance, our thought life, our moral actions, our lifestyle choices and so on. We are often so willing to settle for less than for more of God. We might never study our faith or seek to be informed by it. We may flee from the Cross in our lives, always seeking an easier way. Our little compromises can lead up to one big failure in our life, a failure that none of us would choose, if we took the time to think it through.
Now of course we are all sinners and fail God in many ways. But the biggest failure of all would be to prevent the formation of Christ within us by negligence or compromise. Fortunately, the solution is easily available. It’s called repentance. Take seriously the instructions the Church gives as if they were the very words of life, falling from the lips of Jesus Himself. Gather them up and take them into your heart and allow them to change you. The daily laying aside of ourselves and a humble obedience to Christ is the medicine that will heal our eyes and fill our bodies with divine and everlasting light.
+To the Glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-9955059961193312522015-05-24T17:52:00.002-07:002015-05-24T17:52:35.619-07:00Fantasyland+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
On this day the Orthodox Church commemorates the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, held in Nicea in the year 325. It is very revealing of the state of modern Christendom that only a small minority of people appreciate the importance of this ancient council or the vital contributions made to our faith by the Fathers who attended it. These men were the instruments God used to keep the Church from falling headlong into Christological error, and yet they are either marginalized or maligned by so many of our fellow believers today.
I couldn't count all the times I've heard people claim that the Nicene Council was entirely unnecessary because the Almighty God doesn’t need the help of men to preserve His Truth. Of course this completely ignores the all the facts of what actually did happen, and substitutes an airy-fairy, hyper-spiritualized fantasy of what God could have done. Make-believe seems more important than reality to some people.
Others say that the Nicene Council was one of the worst things to ever happen to Christianity, as it supposedly allowed Constantine to seize control of the Church, blend it’s teachings with paganism, and form the dreaded Roman Catholic church, to the eternal rue of true believers (i.e. Non-Catholics) everywhere. Again, this scenario is simply another fantasy, not reflecting truth or genuine history in any way. Yet, it is widely-accepted without question and perpetuated in churches everywhere.
The fact that there exists within so much of contemporary Christendom a pronounced preference for make-believe over reality and fantasy over historical fact should come as no real surprise to us, since this has become the preferred method for deciding what is true throughout the world in general. It seems there is no longer a strong trust in external canons for objectively measuring the truth of personal belief. Church doctrines—regardless of denomination—are increasingly regarded with suspicion or even outright contempt by modern people. Even the authority of the Bible is eroding in the minds of many. A generation ago the phrase, “The Bible says…” still carried a measure of weight with folks. They at least knew that the Bible contained truths that were genuine, whether they liked them or not. But today, and especially among the so-called Millennial generation—said as those born after 1982, and who are leaving Christianity in droves—the Bible is seen less-and-less as authoritative or as bearing any relevance to modern life. The Bible has been reduced to being “your Grandpa’s book,” and thus filled with dusty, old values and out-dated morals that are increasingly in opposition to modern sensibilities.
Of course, the Bible has always been a bit in opposition to modern sensibilities, regardless of the age. St. Paul pleaded with the newly-converted Christians of his day to refrain from fornication and sacrifice to idols, which were very common. The old idea of correcting our behavior to align with the teachings of the Church has largely been replaced by the call to condemn Christian teachings and live however we please.
And so if these things have been superseded, what are the new canons of faith and practice that have replaced them? All things objective and external are being replaced by all things subjective and internal. It is feelings that mostly guide people in deciding what is true today. If I feel good about something, it must be true. Conversely, things that make me feel bad, or make me unpopular with my friends, must be wrong.
When surveyed as to why they are leaving Christian churches these day, many Millennials answer that they found their churches to be judgmental, anti-gay, and in some cases, too doctrinal. Perhaps that is true in many cases. But it could also be that many folks take their cues from a fallen and worldly culture whose values and narratives they have absorbed without question. If you have accepted the argument that being opposed to gay marriage is equal to gay-bashing, hatred, and the denial of equal rights to all, well then, what decent person wants to a part of that scene? If since grade school you’ve been indoctrinated in value-free sex education that purposefully delinks sex from commitment and emphasizes freedom, experimentation, and personal gratification above all, then what use will you have for church morality, which, we are told, only makes people feel guilty? (Guilt makes me feel bad and therefore must be wrong.)
We understand that people don’t like to be told what to believe or what to do with their own bodies. Resisting such commandments is what the progressive spirit calls “freedom.” And yet if we look a little closer we see that there is very little freedom involved here, and far more bondage. People are being told what to believe, with much greater force than any church wields. If you do not toe the line drawn by the forces of political correctness, you risk alienation, hatred, economic retaliation, and persecution.
It is true that the persecution endured today by Christians who stand up for their faith is far from the level of being burned at the stake. While some people have lost jobs or had their businesses destroyed by others who found their beliefs unacceptable, most suffer little more than social tension from those who consider them hateful or out-of-step. But even that little bit of pressure makes many Christians fold like a shirt on wash day. People clam up and refuse to bear witness to the truth. Worse yet, they may call their own church’s teachings into question, rejecting them with an air of moral superiority, and perhaps even reject their church itself to find something more in line with their own feelings.
I personally believe that as the culture of the world continues to “progress” away from traditional values, the Christians who still hold these values will face stronger and more focused persecutions. I don’t envision ISIS-type beheadings; honestly, we are not worthy of such holy martyrdom. But I can easily see punitive lawsuits being brought against churches that refuse to do gay weddings, for example. There is no “live and let live” sentimentality in the hearts of activists! The goal is to make Christians conform to the new “freedom.” Many churches will fold simply because the parishioners who now barely contribute enough to keep the lights on will not wish to fund expensive legal defenses. When faced with the challenge of mortgaging their own homes to defend their faith, many Christians will undergo a sudden transformation of conscience to decide they no longer wish to be a part of the so-called “hate community” of Christianity.
However, I can also see real good coming from all this. The “white-picket fence” Christians and those who were never quite comfortable with their church’s teachings will fade away. In their place will arise the kind of Christian who is willing to suffer for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s. Perhaps these will be the ones who already feel a bit out-of-place in the white bread world: the tattooed hoards, the lower-income families, the minorities and so forth. The people who have often had a hard time fitting into upper-middle class Christianity and even into Orthodoxy itself may well become the Church of the future.
I’m not a prophet and I really don’t know what is to come. And neither should my comments be taken as an “old guy” rant against the young folks of today. Sadly, much of this apostasy was initiated by people of my generation, and the Millennials have merely inherited the bitter fruit of our stupidity.
One thing I do know is that the more uncomfortable we become with the teachings of the Church, the less we have in common with God. The Christian faith is supposed to be challenging. It is supposed to knock down what is false in us and form us in the Truth. The Holy Fathers knew this, which is why they fought so hard to preserve our faith. While much of the world and even many Christians may choose to live in the fantasyland of their own feelings, we should choose to live in our Holy Orthodox Faith and allow it to form, inform, and transform us in opposition to the world.
+To the Glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-23660281830779312022015-01-22T01:12:00.003-08:002015-01-22T01:12:55.151-08:00Gratitude +In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
Today’s gospel lesson is a teaching about gratitude. Ten lepers were miraculously healed by Jesus Christ, but only one returned to thank Him.
Most of us have heard of leprosy and know that it was an especially terrifying disease in the ancient world. Not only could its physical effects be horrible, but people who contracted it became utter social outcasts, forbidden to enter any city or even to draw near to any healthy person, lest they spread their infection. This is why the gospel tells us that the ten lepers stood “afar off” from Jesus. They were not allowed to come any closer. The Jewish laws were very strict about this: no leper was allowed to enter the synagogue to hear the scriptures read or enter the Temple to make sacrifice for their sins. This effectively meant that any Jew who had leprosy was cut off from the life of Israel, and seemingly, from any hope of salvation.
A Jewish leper was sick and alienated from his people and loved ones, and even alienated from God. For this reason, this horrible disease has been employed as a metaphor for sin, which also disfigures humanity, and alienates us from one another and from God.
Now we return to our gospel lesson in which nine Jews and one Samaritan shout at Jesus from the legal distance to have mercy upon them and heal them. Being a country preacher with a pretty decent set of pipes Himself, our Lord Jesus shouted back to the lepers, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” This was a reference to Leviticus 14, which prescribed that any leper whose disease had been healed should present himself to a priest who would follow a prescribed procedure to verify healing and pronounce the patient “clean” and able to reenter normal society.
On their way back, they were suddenly and completely healed of their leprosy. It is certain that all ten men knew immediately of their healing. But only the Samaritan stopped and turned back to Jesus to give thanks and worship Him. Thus only to this one man did Jesus say, “Go in peace. Your faith has made you well.”
Does this imply that the leprosy returned to the other nine men because they didn’t give thanks? I seriously doubt it. Men are often cruel in that way, but God is not. Those men were likely healed of their leprosy for the rest of their natural lives. But their ingratitude, their utter lack of thankfulness to Jesus, was a worse disease from which they might never have recovered.
We could argue that the nine were simply being obedient, following our Lord’s instructions to go show themselves to a priest. But Golly Bill, knowing that they had just been miraculously healed by the Prophet they had besought, knowing that their lives and families and all good things were being returned to them, couldn’t they have taken just a moment to show some gratitude? It seems so. And for their neglect of this, they did indeed receive back their lives, but did not find the eternal salvation that was granted to the Samaritan alone.
Now imagine receiving healing from Jesus Christ, but not His glorious salvation. How is this possible? By the great love of God for us, we may indeed be granted release from disease, or sin, or addiction, or some other terrible thing, but if we lack the proper gratitude, we can wind up making our situation far worse than it was before. Jesus once said to a person He healed, “Go, and sin no more, lest something worse befall you.” What could be worse except condemnation for a lack of gratitude and repentance in acknowledgement of the gift that was given?
Anyone who receives a great deliverance is happy. But happiness is not the same thing as gratitude. Happy is, “Woo-hoo! Now I can go out and really live life and do what I want!” Gratitude, on the other hand, is much more sober. It is the recognition that a life restored by God is a life that is owed to Him.
This applies to all of us, whether we see ourselves as having had a great deliverance or not. All of us have been washed of the disease of sin, which is an even greater miracle than healing from leprosy! We have all been given a new life, a life of regeneration and of restoration to God and to one another. We have all been given a second chance at real life by our gracious God, with the promise of even better things to come. But having received all this, are we properly grateful to the Giver of Life?
What percentage of our new life do we devote to learning and doing the will of God, as opposed to just living? As the scriptures instruct, do we seek to discover what is pleasing to the Lord? Do we try to live in such a way as to make God happy? Or are we mostly concerned with our own happiness?
When we make plans for our future do we think, “How can I put myself in the best position in life to serve God?” or only, “What can I do to really enjoy the rest of my life?” Do we glorify God with our finances, making regular sacrifices with thanksgiving, or do we withhold our offerings to spend on things which please us more? Do we look for ways to serve our parish, or only criticize those who do serve for not doing things better? Do we see the needs of others and help, or only their faults and judge? Are we prayerful, supportive, quick to forgive, and encouraging, building up the parish with love and hope? Or are we too busy living our own lives to notice those around us?
We can see why gratitude to God is so important. Without a deep recognition of the gracious and unmerited gifts He has granted us, we can too easily take them for granted as if we were owed a good life and the best of all things. My brothers and sisters, God owes us nothing, but we owe Him everything. Truly no one of us would ever mean to be ungrateful, just as the nine lepers probably did not mean to be ungrateful. They simply were, because they were too focused on their own lives and the enjoyment that awaited, and did not stop to think of God.
We must remember God and show our gratitude in how we serve Him and always seek to please Him and put Him first in our lives.
+To the Glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-91734251920697991652014-10-18T11:30:00.003-07:002014-10-18T11:30:27.134-07:00"Do unto others..."+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
The Lord said, “As you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.” We are more accustomed to the version, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a maxim dubbed The Golden Rule since at least the mid-16th century.
It is said that this rule can be found in many of the world’s religions, though frequently encountered in the reverse form of, “Do not do to others what you would not want done to you.” While this is not bad, Christ’s version is clearly better, for it calls us to actively reach out and do the good to others that we might want done to ourselves. In other words, we shouldn’t just “do no harm” to others—though that’s a good start—but we should actively, proactively do good. Furthermore, our Lord went so far at to say that we must do good even to those who do not do good to us! “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” He asked. “Love your enemies, and do good,” He insisted, “and you will be sons of the Most High.”
Unfortunately, a whole lot of people seem to live by another rule: “Do unto others AS they do unto you.” Is this how we live? Are we nice to others as long as they’re nice to us, but turn on those who seem to turn on us? Do we find ways to justify our wrath, adding up all the offenses of the other—not just the latest one—until he or she begins to look like the devil incarnate? Do we ever make a pretense of forgiveness but harbor a resentment inwardly simply that rots in our souls?
Sometimes people do us real harm. Even then we must find a way to forgive, perhaps with the help of intervention. Far more often however the injuries we receive from others are simply wounds to our pride and our oh-so-sensitive egos.
And yes, we can be very sensitive, Being good to us in modern terms seems to mean always agreeing with us in every personal opinion, always supporting us and being sympathetic to us in every situation, always validating our thoughts and feelings with complete empathy, listening carefully and with full support. In other words, always show respect to us, and never, ever slight us in any way.
Quite obviously this is nearly impossible to maintain in the real world, unless we pick our friends very carefully, loving those who love us, and excluding or even blacklisting those who simply don’t make the cut. That’s a hard thing to accomplish successfully in most parishes or anywhere else for that matter!
Obviously as well, this is a far cry from what Christianity teaches us. As Christians, we are not to be so self-centered, so delicate, so sensitive of criticism, of correction, or even of rebuke. We are in fact taught to welcome all reproaches as being beneficial to our souls and instructive to our repentance. We are to understand that we are fallen, together with all our thoughts and opinions, and seek the wisdom of the Church and our elders to guide us, and the experience of normal human interaction and even struggle to bring us growth.
The gospel never promises us that people—even Christian people—will always be good to us, or treat us the way we like. In fact, doesn’t it pretty much warn us that the opposite can and will happen, even in the Church? Most people treat us no better or worse than we treat others. The gospel never tells us to defend ourselves in the face of poor treatment, or that we have any right to be indignant or justify our anger over an offense. Instead it tells us to love people, to be long-suffering, patient, and forgiving.
How quickly we can forget this when someone says something we don’t like, or steps on our toes, or simply isn’t as nice as we think they should be toward us. Suddenly, all Christian sensibility is abandoned and we harden our hearts toward the one that we ought to love and forgive. The reason we do this is not necessarily because of hypocrisy, but more likely because the passion of anger seizes us and we want to vindicate or justify ourselves at the expense of our offender.
Nobody is ever so bold as to say, “I have the right to hate so-and-so because he insulted me!” Instead, we couch our anger in more socially-acceptable terms like, “I’m deeply concerned—and want you all to know—that so-and-so has proven to be very insensitive and doesn’t seem to realize how hurtful he can be.” My, how noble we can make ourselves seem even while we are being terribly petty!
What does our Holy Orthodox faith teach us about such matters? Are we taught to merely disguise our wrath, and attack our offender discretely? Are we taught to pretend to forgive, but warmly nurse a grudge as if we were somehow the Holy Innocent, most wrongly and viciously offended? No. We are taught to blame ourselves and absolve the other person completely. Let me repeat that. We are taught to blame ourselves and absolve the other person completely.
How does this solve the problem? Usually, it solves it entirely. The person who takes offense at others will never know the peace of Christ, who defended Himself against no man. The person who blames himself and never holds resentment against another, who prays “Lord have mercy upon me, and through the prayers of my brother or sister, save me, a sinner,” will gain the peace that places him above all human turmoil. We can never gain peace by defending ourselves, by trying to change people or situations or circumstances to be more to our liking. We can only gain peace by dying to ourselves, and by loving every other human being far more than we love ourselves.
Is this even possible? Yes, it is. The moment we decide to take the very next conflict with another, and instead of defending ourselves, accept it as an opportunity for repentance, we are on our way. Do we truly love others with the love of Christ, or do we love ourselves above Christ and all others? This is never revealed in the good times, but in those difficult times when we must lay aside our hurt or disappointment, and put love with warmth and true compassion to work for our brother or sister who has offended us.
“Love your enemies and do good, and you will be sons of the Most High.”
+To the Glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-24619755831207275252014-08-25T01:01:00.001-07:002014-08-25T01:01:31.655-07:00The Unforgiving Servant, again.+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
We just heard the parable of the Unforgiving Servant who would not release a fellow servant from a small debt, though his master had just released him from a colossal debt of his own. His utter lack of mercy evoked the wrath of his master, who had him thrown in prison until he should pay back every cent. The parable concluded with our Lord saying, “So also shall My heavenly Father do to every one of you, if you do not forgive you brother from your heart.”
The meaning of this parable should be abundantly clear: God has forgiven us completely, so we in return must completely forgive others. Perhaps I could end the homily here and call it a day, but I think there are a few more things that need to be said.
First, when trying to understand this parable we should always take it at its simplest and most obvious interpretation and avoid overthinking it, which can lead to some serious theological problems. A similar passage occurs in Matthew 6, following the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer, at which point Jesus immediately said to His disciples, “For unless you forgive men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.” Taken together these two verses clearly show that to live in the forgiveness of God we must share that forgiveness with others. If however we go beyond that clear and simple meaning and begin to overthink these passages, then we might start imagining God’s forgiveness to be a sort of whim which He can extend or withdraw at any moment. As long as we remain on God’s “good side” and forgive everyone, He will show us mercy, but if we fail to forgive anyone, His wrath will jump on us like ugly on an ape and our forgiveness will be yanked away in a fit of divine rage. I seriously doubt that this is what these verses are trying to teach us about God or His forgiveness.
Our parable clearly showed the master of the Unforgiving Servant as being enraged at him. But remember that this was a parable expressed in human terms with human characters. Our Lord did not necessarily mean it to be an exact representation of God’s disposition. In fact, throughout His ministry Jesus revealed God as much more merciful and long-suffering than this.
We need to understand that the forgiveness of God is a constant, much like the love of God. God always loves, and God always forgives. He cannot do otherwise. But man must choose whether to live in communion with God, His forgiveness, His love, or not. If man chooses not to love, he is not in communion with God, who is love. If man chooses not to forgive, he is not in communion with the God who forgives. So when Jesus says if you do not forgive, neither will you be forgiven, it doesn’t mean that God is going to abruptly change His character and stop loving or forgiving you. It simply means that you have entered into a state of existence in which God’s love and forgiveness and even His very life is rejected by you and can no longer benefit you.
I hope we can see the difference in this. If we fail to see that difference, then we might start thinking that the forgiveness of God is entirely conditional and therefore perhaps ours can be as well. If someone doesn’t show forgiveness or ask forgiveness, then maybe I don’t have to forgive him. If he doesn't love me, then I don’t have to love him. This is all nonsense. But this kind of thinking can happen when we overcomplicate things that don’t need to be. Let’s just keep it simple and live in the forgiveness of God, sharing it with all.
Another thing we need to note is that Jesus made a particular point of saying that you must forgive from your heart. Have you ever noticed that your Savior seems very, very interested in your heart? The Law of Moses was a bit more focused on external things, such as in the commandments to not commit murder or adultery. But Jesus drove that message deeply inward, teaching that bearing hatred toward your brother was equal to murder or that lusting after a woman was the committing of adultery in your heart. He commanded the Pharisees (and through them, all of us) to not just be clean outwardly, but to first clean the inside of the cup (that is to say, the heart) that the outside might be clean also. Further He declared, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
What this means in terms of forgiveness is that it must truly come from the inside, cleansing and freeing the human heart from all lingering resentment and hurt. This is not an easy thing. Until we reach that all-important point in each of our lives at which we decide to internalize our Christian faith and live it from the inside out, we will generally settle for showing an outward forgiveness, while still harboring hard feelings inside. We should not settle for living the appearance of a Christian life, but strive to live it in reality.
We’d like to believe that we forgive all people, but the truth is revealed in the things that come out of our heart. Do we speak ill of the other person in unguarded moments? Do we rejoice when bad things happen to the other or are we angry or jealous when he/she enjoys good things we don’t think that they deserve? These embarrassing moments are among the little tips that show whether our forgiveness is from the heart, or only from our desire to outwardly appear forgiving. But there is more we should consider here. Like God, who is always merciful, whom the scriptures describe humanly as “slow to anger and quick to forgive,” do we strive to create an internal atmosphere that lends itself to quick and natural forgiveness and a certain resistance to anger?
Let me explain what I mean. In the normal course of our daily lives, things happen. People around us often behave less than perfectly, and speak or act in ways that can potentially give us offense. In such cases, are we quick to take offense? “What did you say? Oh, you hurt my pride; you questioned my integrity; you undermined my authority; you made me feel foolish; you violated my boundaries; you showed me a lack of respect, etc. etc. and so forth.” What is our normal response to such grievous offenses? “You need to apologize to me and appease my indignation by begging my forgiveness!”
Oh for goodness sakes! Who do we think we are? Why is it so easy for us to climb on our high horse and act more important than God Almighty? We carelessly offend one another all the time. So what? Why can’t we try to truly be more like God and practice long-suffering and forbearance and mercy? Must we smack down every careless or hurtful word against us like a frenetic game of Whack-A-Mole? Must we treat our closest friends and family like enemies when say or do things we don’t like? Can’t we just show love toward one another and mercy instead of wrath?
The answer to that is no, probably not…unless we strive to create within ourselves an atmosphere of forgiveness. We need to humble ourselves before God and all men. We need to begin thinking of ourselves as the least important of all, and our opinions as unworthy of even being voiced. We need to become slower at speaking or offering correction or even constructive advice to others, and quicker to listen quietly, respectfully, and prayerfully. Without a doubt, we need to cultivate a much higher regard for others and a much lower regard for ourselves. And when other people give us offense, we need to forgive them immediately without fanfare or pretense, and without demanding anything further from them. Just forgive your offender as God forgives you, and love him/her as God loves you both.
The world teaches us how to be self-important; how to be defensive and soundly defeat all who dare challenge us. The world cannot teach us how to be like Christ, meek and lowly of spirit. Only He can teach us that, as we leave behind our vanity and pride, and seek the godly virtues of humility, forbearance, mercy, long-suffering, and love. I pray we would all let Jesus be our Teacher, and learn from Him how to forgive one another and every person from the heart.
+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-68792110257140397982013-09-09T11:18:00.001-07:002013-09-09T11:18:03.219-07:00Judging+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” --John 3:16, no doubt the most famous verse of the bible, and with good reason. This verse combines so many important elements of our Christian faith: the love of God, the giving of His Son for our salvation, the necessity of believing in Him, and the resulting deliverance from death and the gaining of eternal life that such belief brings.
And on the other hand, we can learn almost as much about our Christian faith from what this verse doesn’t say as from what it does. For example, it doesn’t say that God so loved the world that every day He just rocked back and forth in heaven with warm and fuzzy feelings for us. No, every mushy love song ever written may define love as mere feelings, but John 3:16 defines love as action: “For God so loved the world that He gave…” What sort of people would we become if we limited our love to feelings and stopped short of action on behalf of others?
Furthermore, it does not say God so loved the world that He first poured out the fullness of His wrath upon His Son so that His deeply-offended personal sense of justice would be satisfied and He could finally tolerate our presence in His kingdom. Are you kidding me? What kind of monster would such a god be who put strict and unyielding justice above mercy, or wrath before love? Would you even want to serve such a god? What sort of people would we become if we imitated this god?
No, John 3:16 reveals to us the true God. The God who so loved the world that He gave His Son, not demanded for His own purposes, but gave purely for our salvation and eternal life. A God who willingly set aside what was just--and even allowed INjustice to occur--in order for love to triumph. A God who acted to save us at great personal expense when we could not save ourselves. What sort of people might we become if we imitated this God?
As well-known as John 3:16 is, how many folks can recite from memory John 3:17? This little verse standing in the shadow of its big brother has quite a bit to teach us as well. It reads: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” Another word for condemn which is found in some translations is the word judge. Whichever word is used we can see that it was not the purpose or the ministry of Jesus Christ to judge and condemn the world, but purely and simply to save the world.
Now we all know that there will come a Day of Judgement when, according to the scriptures, the books will be opened and all our deeds laid bare. A question we might ask is what are these books of which the prophecies speak? Are there literally dusty books in heaven in which God records our every deed, saving them up for some “Gotcha” moment at the end? (“Rut-roh, I see you drank a cup of tea before liturgy one morning; bad on you!”) According to some of our holy fathers, this is not likely the case. If you think about it, once again, what kind of god would scrutinize our deeds in this way and keep such records as if only looking for reasons to condemn us? Instead, let us consider another possibility suggested to us by these same fathers. Could it be that the books which are opened and laid bare are our very own souls? It is our souls which bear the marks, not of divine score-keeping, but of our own deeds or misdeeds in life. They either reveal, in the beautiful and elegant calligraphy of the Holy Spirit, the fruits of our repentance and obedience to Christ, or else they show forth the coarse marks and ugly stains of the sins we would not allow to be erased.
For this reason, God provides every means in the Church for our sins to be blotted out and overwritten with the sweet image of Christ on every page of our souls. God does not want any person to be taken by surprise on that Day of Judgement but to open our own books now, that is to say, examine our own souls daily, and cooperate with the Spirit to cleanse and purify them.
St. Paul wrote, “If we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged.” I believe this is what the holy apostle is referring to; this need to judge ourselves--our thoughts and words and deeds--every moment, and even to condemn what is wicked in us, that God can correct us and set us right before the final Judgement. Jesus said, I did not come to judge or condemn the world. If we follow Him as we should, neither will we. But at the same time, we will judge ourselves correctly and even condemn our own deeds that our repentance might be made perfect.
You see, there is a right and proper place for judgement in the Christian life. It is never, however, to judge others. We are always to judge ourselves and never one another or any other person in this life. What sort of people would we become if we chose to live this way? I tell you first of all, our parish would be a place of divine and holy peace. There would be no quarreling or striving, no gossiping or scandal, no hurt feelings or pettiness, no taking of sides in issues, no them vs us. The devil could never be able to rear his ugly face among us, spreading conflict or controversy. People would be quick to forgive one another, paying attention to their own repentance while overlooking the sins and failings of others. Love would reign as we would give preference to one another and serve one another, instead of expecting or even demanding that we be recognized or validated. We would always walk in meekness and gentleness of spirit, seeking what is best for the other, while gladly accepting less for ourselves. If there is any lack of any of these good and precious things among us, it is absolutely because we are not judging ourselves rightly, but judging others instead.
When we judge others instead of ourselves, we bring sorrow into the parish, we sow seeds of struggle and pain. When we judge ourselves instead of others, we bring joy and harmony and healing to all. The choice is ours. What sort of people will we become? What sort of parish, and indeed, what sort of families shall we build for ourselves? In what condition shall the books of our souls be when they are opened on that Great and Terrible Day of Judgement? It is here, among one another our brothers and sisters, that such decisions are made and the books are written for all eternity. May God have mercy on us all by helping each of us to judge only ourselves.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-89274858721638604822013-04-29T09:09:00.002-07:002013-04-29T09:09:30.275-07:00Palm Sunday +In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
Today is the glorious Feast known as the Triumphal Entry of our Lord into Jerusalem, or simply, Palm Sunday. Yesterday our Lord Jesus Christ raised His friend Lazarus from the dead as a foreshadowing of the universal resurrection of mankind. Today, He rides the foal of a donkey into Jerusalem amidst the praise of the multitudes who cry out “Hosanna! Blessed is He Who cometh in the Name of the Lord!” The word hosanna means save or savior or possibly even Lord save, and its use indicates that the crowd recognized Jesus as the promised Messiah sent by God to save His people Israel. Unfortunately, the Jews did not understand the nature of that salvation Christ came to bring. Expecting a conquering political hero who would free Israel from Roman rule and oppression, their hopes were utterly dashed when they saw Him arrested and beaten and put to shame before the hated Roman authorities. This was not the sort of Messiah they wanted, and their shouts of praise would soon turn to cries of “Away with Him! Crucify Him! Crucify Him!”
This rejection of Christ was by no means unexpected. It had been foretold by the prophets, and was portrayed even by the mount that Jesus had chosen to ride into Jerusalem. Have you ever wondered why He didn’t choose a horse or a camel or even a full-grown donkey, but instead the foal of a donkey, or in other words a very young animal? The donkey is an animal well-known for its stubbornness and frequent refusal to obey its master’s will and commands. Some of our holy fathers saw in this a portrayal of the nation Israel, which had so long and so often opposed God. Foreknowing the Jews’ final rejection of Him, Christ entered the Holy City on a new animal, young and not yet rebellious, representing the Gentiles, to whom the kingdom of heaven would soon be given.
These two things--the Jews’ false expectations for Messiah which led to their bitter disappointment and rejection of Him, and their stubbornness toward God to the very end--offer much by way of instruction for us today.
First, we must note that it is a trait of fallen humanity, by no means exclusive to the Jews, that we so want what we want in this life we can even become angry with the Almighty God when we don’t get it. Isn’t that true? At the very least, people can grow deeply disappointed with God when things don’t turn out the way they expect or feel they deserve. We can begin to doubt God’s goodness or perhaps even lose our faith if prayers seem to go unanswered and dreams remain unfulfilled. This reaction reveals a dark attitude in the human heart. It’s as if we expect God to be subservient to our earthly desires. God must give us what we want to keep us happy or else suffer our rejection.
The problem here is not with God’s goodness or divine plan but with our expectations, which are often far too low. If we consider Israel once again, we see that all they wanted from God was political independence. God’s desire was to grant them eternal life. The Jews knew the prophecies that Messiah would set the captives free, but they could only think of their present situation with the Romans, not humanity’s far greater captivity to sin, death, and the devil. Our hopes nearly always tend to be focused on the things of this life, and rarely take into consideration that God has something eternal and infinitely better for us.
Following along with this short-sightedness and the disappointment with God it causes is another dark trait of the human heart: rebelliousness. When we allow our hopes to remain fixed on this life and make no sincere effort to raise them any higher, we inevitably find ourselves at war with God. The scripture says that he who loves the world is at enmity with God. A battle of wills takes place in which we might resist our very salvation from this world of sin and death as we fight blindly and desperately to create our own little paradise here and now. Certainly this was the error of ancient Israel, but we might often fall into this as well.
How do we express this rebellion? Well there’s a wide range. Sometimes people just leave the Church to go do as they please. Sometimes people stay in Church but ignore any serious Christianity to do as they please. And then there are others who remain in Church with some desire for salvation, but settle into a kind of listless, foot-dragging, subtle yet persistent resistance of God’s will. Perhaps they refuse to make any real, sustained struggle against their sins to pursue sanctification. Perhaps they neglect prayer. Maybe they miss worship because they’re too busy to come to Church. We might call these traits sloth or weakness, but these terms can disguise the underlying principle that we still want what we want and will fight God with a sort of passive-aggressive rebellion while claiming to be only poor, weak little sheep.
Perhaps we are not always sheep, but sometimes donkeys. If we often claim to be slothful or weak, shouldn’t we take a closer look into this to determine if we could actually do a bit better? Are we simply expending too much energy resisting God; energy that would be better spent on taking up our cross to follow Jesus?
The great historical irony of Palm Sunday is how quickly the people turned from worshipping Christ to crucifying Him. And all this because He did not give them what they expected. Are we any better or more noble? Likely not. Thus our salvation will come from the same thing that saved the many believing Jews who did confess faith in Christ, namely, to accept the will of God however it manifests itself, and abandon our trust in anything of this world to fix it instead on the kingdom to be revealed.
Soon enough we shall all taste of death, and on that day all earthly hopes and dreams will perish with us. But those who have fixed their hope on Jesus Christ will rise again to eternal life. This is the reality that we encounter and experience even now, during Holy Week. In the days to come we will journey with Christ through every event leading up the the Cross and even through death itself, to be raised with Him gloriously on Holy Pascha. Holy Week is not a long, exhausting “passion play” in which we are the actors. It is our Christian reality. As we are joined to Christ through Holy Baptism, His sufferings and death, His resurrection and glorification become ours. This is true all year long, but is especially renewed during Holy Week. Let us therefore not fear dying to ourselves, dying to this world, nor even dying itself. Jesus Christ lives! And we must die to live with Him forever.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-36178535393209765162013-03-20T10:04:00.000-07:002013-03-20T10:04:11.973-07:00Forgiveness Sunday+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
Today is Cheese Fare Sunday, our last day to enjoy wine and cheese before the start of Great Lent. More important than the fasting of lent however, is our need to begin this holy season with the giving and receiving of forgiveness with one another. If the goal of lent is to more completely love God, we cannot hold anger or resentment toward others in our hearts. If our prayers, our fasting, and our almsgiving are all expressions of a desire to love God and our neighbor as ourselves, we must let go of all that is contrary to love lest we defeat all our lenten efforts. Thus, tonight we’ll come together once again for the beautiful Forgiveness Vespers service which includes each of us going around the room to ask forgiveness from one another, and in turn, offering complete forgiveness from the heart.
Among other things, this service reminds us that we are members of the Body of Christ and therefore mystically joined to one another. If any one of us should sin, even in secret, it affects us all. If there is enmity of any sort between brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives, it diminishes us all. We are not individuals, detached and isolated from one another. We are a Body in which the spiritual health of every member is important to the whole. This is why the NT scriptures repeatedly urge us to put aside all anger, resentments, self-importance, indignation, envying, gossip, and every corrupting and divisive thing, and embrace one another at all times with the mercy, love, and forgiveness of Christ.
Even if you can think of no one against whom you’ve sinned or who has sinned against you, you still need to seek forgiveness. For there are sins of commission and omission, and perhaps our most frequent sins are all those good things we leave undone: the prayers we should have offered but didn’t, the kind or comforting word we left unsaid, the promises we broke, the help we might have given but withdrew from, or the ministry or labor that we left to others in the parish to do. These things also reflect a lack of love and a coldness of heart that is best healed by repentance and the humble asking of forgiveness.
Every once-in-awhile I might hear from one person or another that they can’t forgive so-and-so yet because “their issues haven’t been resolved.” Many of us seem to have this idea in our heads that the one all-important prerequisite to forgiveness is “working things out,” by which we usually mean making the other person give us satisfaction by admitting how wrong they were and how deeply they’ve offended us. Let me ask a few simple questions concerning this. Has God ever demanded that of you? Did He insist that you resolve every issue with Him before He would grant you forgiveness? Has He ever required you to acknowledge every single act by which you have offended Him and make you swear on a stack of bibles that you would never do any of them again? Not really, huh?
You see, God operates differently than we tend to. He forgives us out of love, and demands no satisfaction for Himself. His hope is that by granting us unmerited love and forgiveness, we will come around and begin to respond with repentance in order that our communion with Him might be fully restored. We tend to want the repentance and restoration before we will give forgiveness.
There is something that we need to understand about forgiveness that will greatly help us in this regard, namely that Forgiveness and Justice are mutually exclusive. Wherever you have the one, there is a conspicuous absence of the other. Did God demand justice before granting us forgiveness? Not at all, for “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Christ’s death was not to satisfy the Father’s irrevocable sense of justice as the heterodox teach, but was to deliver us from death and allow us to be raised to newness of life by His glorious third-day resurrection. St. Isaac of Syria wrote, “Never say that God is just. If He were just you would be in hell. Rely only on His injustice which is mercy, love, and forgiveness.” Elsewhere this same saint wrote, “Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you.” And again, “Mercy and just judgment existing in a single soul is like a man worshipping God and idols in the same house. Mercy is opposed to just judgment.”
When we therefore demand justice from those who have offended us, even justice in such seemingly innocent guise as a forced apology from the other, we have left the arena of mercy and forgiveness into a realm of demanding more from one another than God demands of us.
This is why the Forgiveness Vespers service is so simple and straightforward. We do not have counseling booths set up outside where people can sit and work out their issues with each another before coming in. We simply come together, worship our merciful God together, and forgive one another as He forgives us. What more is needed in our life together as a fallen and broken people seeking our mutual salvation?
And I will take it a step further. Whenever anyone offends you, strive not to become angry, but to bear the offense gladly as your tiny share in the sufferings of Christ. Hasten to forgive from your heart, blaming yourself for the offense even if you’re certain it was entirely the other person’s fault (Remember, there is no justice where mercy is concerned). Graciously cover the other’s sin, and do not loudly trumpet it about to his shame. Are we not told that love covers a multitude of sins? Pray good things for your offender, for example that God might grant him true peace and joy and further you both in your pursuit of salvation. While apologies are good, and we should always seek to make amends with those we have offended, do not expect the same from your brother, but extend grace and love him even when things are left hanging. If you do these things, the love of God will overflow you, and wash away your sins together with your brother’s as grains of sand in the ocean of divine mercy. This is how we should approach Forgiveness Vespers, and indeed the rest of our lives together.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-13984523645298750312012-09-24T07:08:00.001-07:002012-09-24T07:08:32.252-07:00Decisions, decisions.+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
Every hour of the day we make dozens of decisions which shape and direct our lives. Once in awhile we are faced with big decisions requiring much thought, as they bear the potential to impact our lives for years to come. More often however we deal with a myriad of little decisions to which we may not give much thought at all. We make a lot of daily decisions solely on the basis of how we feel or what we may want at any given moment and often fail to consider the long-term consequences such snap decisions may bring.
Does it really matter if you have oatmeal or leftover pepperoni pizza for breakfast? Well, it does if it’s a fasting day. That little decision to go with the pizza means you’re allowing yourself to be directed by the desires of your flesh while closing a little part of your heart and conscience toward God. Does it really matter if you stay home from vespers to relax or maybe watch a little TV with the family? What if you miss your morning prayers because you spent too much time on the computer before work? It’s the same thing in every case: where’s God in our daily decision-making process? If we train ourselves to follow our desires in every little decision, what makes us think we will suddenly be able to discern the will of God or even have the interest to do so in our so-called big decisions?
The best way to make good big decisions in life is to learn to make good little decisions on a daily basis. This is why Orthodox spirituality calls us to little actions of self-denial every day. Our little choices may not always seem important, and often they call us to inconvenience ourselves, but they truly do set the focus and direction of our lives, determining whether or not we become true followers of Jesus Christ.
This morning’s gospel lesson is a perfect illustration of this. When the exhausted fishermen were instructed by our Lord to let down their nets one more time, Peter was faced with a little decision. He knew there were no fish to be had that day. The Carpenter’s request was not only inconvenient, but downright pointless. You can hear the complaint in his voice as he replied, “Master, we toiled hard all night and caught nothing.” It was a very reasonable objection to a seemingly unreasonable demand. There was no way for Peter to have known what the Lord was about to do, or the complete change of destiny his next “little decision” would bring. “Nevertheless Lord,” he sighed, “At your bidding I will let down the nets one last time.”
Did Peter make the right decision? Absolutely he did! His obedience allowed his eyes to be opened to the holiness and power of Christ, and prepared him and his fellow fishermen to enter into a new life filled with inconvenient and unreasonable requests that would draw them ever nearer to the kingdom of heaven. What if Peter had said no? He would have been within his rights and our Lord would surely not have forced him. But Jesus would have had to move on to find a man who was willing to live by faith and who did not put his own convenience first, above obedience.
I hope we will examine our own decision-making process in light of this important gospel lesson. I’m sure we’ve noticed that Christian Orthodoxy is a very inconvenient religion. Not content with a Sunday-only commitment, it dares to intrude into our daily lives, asking us to pray and fast, to sell our possessions and give to the poor, to come often to the Temple to worship God, to deny ourselves, and even to lay down our lives for one another that we might all live. Rarely are we called to stand before the bloody emperor Hadrian’s court with the decision to confess Christ and die horribly or deny Him and preserve our life a bit longer. But many of the little decisions we make each day play out a very similar choice in microcosm.
“He who seeks to save his life will lose it.” Why would our Lord say this except for the fact that most people, including many Christians, are actively engaged in saving their lives rather than losing them for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s? We very often want Christianity to be entirely on our terms, both in ways and to the degree of our own choosing. Is it too hard to wake up early on Sunday, pay our tithes and offerings, or serve on the parish council? Then I just won’t do it. It’s my life, after all! But once again, where is God in all of this? It is remarkably easy to forget God completely in our little decisions and make Christianity all about my convenience and personal preferences. But didn’t we become Orthodox to get away from that kind of thinking? And is it a very great surprise that we might have brought it along with us?
At some point in our lives we must have realized that the challenge and difficulty of Eastern Orthodoxy promised a Christian life of substance. A kind of madness must have overtaken us to make us think we would enjoy that! Perhaps we came to see that a Christianity in which we make the rules and set the bar would ultimately reduce down to self-worship. And we wanted to become worshippers of God.
The good news is we still have that opportunity. However, we need to see the importance of our daily “little decisions” and the impact they have on our Christianity. To take up our own cross daily and follow Christ is neither reasonable nor convenient, but it is the way to eternal life. If, like Peter, we can overcome ourselves and our objections to say, “Nevertheless Lord, at Your bidding…” we can discover the holiness and power of Christ in our lives and find the courage and resolve to become true followers of our Lord no matter what He may ask of us. His yoke is easy and His burden is light, especially when compared to the much more difficult yoke and heavy burden of our own desires. Let us bear the burden of our Orthodoxy joyously that we might find our life in Christ Jesus our Lord, a life that will endure for eternity.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-75505713417372561782012-08-28T09:13:00.000-07:002012-08-28T09:13:05.149-07:00What Do I Still Lack? +In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
In today’s gospel lesson [Matthew 19:16-26], a man came to Jesus seeking his salvation. Although the encounter doesn’t end well, there is still much to learn from it. We heard that from childhood this man had kept all the commandments of God, and thus it is safe to assume every other requirement of Judaism, faithfully. Because of this, God had been faithful to him, stirring up in his heart a sense that something was still lacking, and leading him to Christ that he might discover what that “something” was.
Can we see the great mercy of God in this? Though we ourselves may be far from perfect, if we are at least faithful to what has been given to us and obedient to what we know, God will also provide us opportunities to find what we may be lacking in the pursuit of our salvation. This is a very good thing, indeed!
In this man’s case (and perhaps in ours as well) what was missing was a spiritual understanding of the divine intent and purpose behind the law and the prophets--or for that matter, our Christian Orthodoxy--which is to lead men into the love of God and one’s neighbor as oneself. Our Lord’s instruction to him to sell all he possessed and distribute to the poor and to follow Him might seem harsh, but it was the exact prescription he needed to discover this love. The problem was that his wealth had insulated him from the needs and struggles of his neighbor, and had also given him a false sense of security and strength that took the place of dependence upon God. He wasn’t necessarily a lover of money like Judas, but in place of the love of God and his neighbor this man loved the comfort, the independence, and the freedom that his wealth provided him. Without his realizing it, wealth had become his idol, the false god he looked to and relied upon for his sense of well-being. And we all know how God feels about idols.
However, as is normally the case with our Lord’s teachings, behind every literal interpretation of a thing, there is often found a spiritual interpretation that hits much closer to home for all of us. In this case, besides literal financial wealth, there are other kinds of wealth that also distance us from the love of neighbor and a steadfast trust in God. Take for example the wealth of ego. Without our realizing it, we can become very dependent upon an inner storehouse of treasures that make us feel strong and independent, robbing us of mercy and love. Among these “false riches” we must surely include the habit of always putting ourselves, our perspectives, our so-called “rights,” and even our feelings, first above all else. These things make communion with God and neighbor impossible, and are among our most valued possessions that we must dump if we are to follow Christ.
Love requires sacrifice. In a marriage, love requires the sacrifice of a self-centered approach that breeds conflict with one’s spouse. Marriage should not be a perpetual battle of wills between two <i>individuals</i> each fighting for his own needs to be fulfilled, his own viewpoint to be respected, his own will to prevail. It is inevitable that these struggles should take place early in a marriage, for we do not surrender our wealth easily, nor do we eagerly make ourselves poor in self-will that we might learn to serve the other in humility. For a marriage to succeed however, we must surrender our self-wealth (our “wealth of self” if you will) and become “poor of self” that we might become rich in love for the other.
The same is true in families, and--guess what?--the exact same is true in parish communities. It is inevitable for conflicts to arise in any parish. However, these conflicts are never born out of our poverty, but always out of our wealth. We have a wealth of opinions and convictions and sensitivities--and also passions--that we have spent a lifetime accumulating within us like a vast savings account. The saints regarded these things as flaws and blemishes upon our humanity that must be purged through long and careful repentance. We tend to regard these things as strengths, and if anything try to cultivate and entrench ourselves in them as characteristics of a strong and independent personality. For this reason we often find ourselves in conflict with our neighbor and in opposition to God, though we seldom see it that way. We only see ourselves as being “right” and thus close the door on yet another God-given opportunity to pursue our salvation by the avenue of meekness and self-denial.
While to some extent a healthy ego can be a good thing, fueled by pride most of us go way overboard and acquire so much “wealth of self” that we can scarcely grasp why it might be a good thing to go the other way and become “poor of self” or what the gospel calls <i>poor in spirit</i>. Jesus not only said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” but He also said, “Learn from Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart”. With many similar teachings and His own wonderful example we can see that Christ has called all of us to embrace the voluntary poverty of self for the sake of gaining the kingdom of heaven.
The person who is poor in spirit will face all the same conflicts and difficulties in life as anyone else, but he will focus first on changing himself rather than on changing the people or circumstances around him. He will not complain about the offenses of others, nor fight for his rights or opinions to be respected. He will accept conflict as revealing his own flaws and will thank God for the opportunity to correct them. This is where the cross becomes real for each and every one of us. Which “riches” are we unwilling to surrender to follow Christ? Which personal opinions are so sacred, which deeply-held convictions are so inviolable that we will not abandon them at the prompting of the Holy Spirit? We aren’t talking about becoming spineless wimps, though at first we might take it that way. What rich man called to forsake his wealth does not take it as the end of life as he knows it? What we are talking about is the abandonment of false riches, the idolatrous “wealth of self,” to gain the true wealth of the love of God and our neighbor as ourself that belongs only to the poor in spirit.
I encourage us to be on our guard lest we walk away sad when Jesus calls us to embrace the voluntary poverty of self. It is difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, even when our riches have nothing to do with money. Our “wealth of self” must be abandoned if we are to inherit the meek and lowly heart of Christ. The cost is great and we are so seldom willing to pay it. Yet the things impossible with men are possible with God. If we will look more to gaining the love of God than to protecting our riches, the impossible will become possible even for us.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-41747532647647898342012-06-25T08:26:00.002-07:002012-06-25T08:26:47.169-07:00Is Righteousness Possible?+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
On this day we commemorate the Nativity of the Forerunner and Baptist John. Our gospel lesson opens with a wonderful description of the Forerunner’s parents, Zacharias and Elizabeth, whom St. Luke tells us were both <i>“righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blamelessly.”</i> This righteous couple was chosen by God to become the parents of a righteous man whom our Lord would later describe as “the greatest of those born of women.” This parallels God’s choice of the pure and righteous virgin Mary to become the birth-giver of His own Son. From these two prominent examples at the very foundation of the New Testament age, we see that righteousness and purity of devotion matters to God and allows Him to bestow even more grace upon His people.
How would you like to be remembered by posterity as a righteous person who served God blamelessly? As attractive as that sounds, I have a feeling that many of us have already decided it’s an impossible dream, and perhaps have formed the conclusion that we will go on forever failing God. Is that gloomy opinion based only on our own experiences, or do we have a theological basis for assuming we can never be righteous?
Many of us have come to Orthodoxy from a different spiritual tradition which insists that human righteousness is impossible, even for Christians. The teaching is that each of us is born into this world with what is described as a “sin nature,” assuring that we must compulsively sin throughout our entire lives, even after being “born again.” Furthermore, it is taught that all of this sinning simply doesn’t matter because God deposits into our spiritual bank account the righteousness of Christ and “looks upon us” as being holy, even if our lives are in fact demolished by sin.
When this teaching is followed to its logical course, it leaves people believing that any Christian effort to live righteously before God is both impossible and unnecessary. If we have a sin nature, why fight it and feel guilty over things we can’t control? If the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us automatically, why try to add to that our own righteousness which obviously is of far lesser value? With such teaching to guide them--or more correctly, misguide them--many Christians find little reason to challenge themselves to live holy lives before God, despite the numerous scriptural examples which show that holiness truly matters.
If we come from this spiritual background, as many of us have, it can sometimes leave us with a lingering confusion over the importance of righteousness in our lives, and even over how much effort we should put into resisting sin and trying to overcome it with the help of God.
Perhaps the first thing we should recognize is that it is not correct to say that we are born into this world with a “sin nature” but rather with a human nature that is fallen and as such is inclined toward sin. There is a big difference between the two. If it is literally our nature to sin, then all the many scripture verses that tell us to stop sinning would be both pointless and cruel. You may as well tell birds not to fly, or rednecks to park their cars on the street instead of on the front lawn. But if we have a human nature which is merely fallen and thus filled with fleshly desires that draw it toward sin, then this is something that can be repaired by God and aided by our repentance.
Listen again to the words of St. Paul from our epistle lesson this morning: <i>“Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; conducting ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”</i> Would this esteemed apostle write such words to a people whose very nature was to sin, who literally had no control over their actions? This is only one of many passages that teach that while we may be inclined toward sin, we are not obligated to sin. It comes down to the idea that we sin not because we have to, but because we choose to, and quite naturally the scriptures instruct us to choose righteousness instead.
Another thing to consider in light of this is that our efforts to live righteously in obedience to the scriptures and to the God who inspired them is not an attempt to undermine or “add to” the salvation provided in Christ. We are not trying to save ourselves through good works.
The clearest example of this is found in our Most Blessed Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary who, although living a pure life before God, was still in need of a Savior as she herself testified in Luke’s gospel, <i>“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. For He has regarded the lowly estate of His maidservant”.</i> Mary understood quite well that she was a fallen human being (in a “lowly estate”) in need of deliverance from death and restoration to God (by her Savior). However she also understood that even fallen human beings can choose for God and live in a manner pleasing to Him. This is a very important fact that many Christians today--perhaps even many of us--have seemingly forgotten.
If Old Testament saints could live righteous and blameless lives before God though still needing Christ, how much more can we who have been baptized into Christ and granted the gift of the Holy Spirit walk in newness of life and in a manner pleasing to God? We have been granted every advantage over the saints of old, as Christ Himself might have meant when He said, “Among men born of women, none is greater than John the Baptist. Yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” If we allow ourselves to be constantly directed by the impulses of the passions and sin without measure, is that the failure of the gifts of God, or simply a manifestation of our own unwillingness to struggle and engage a fight that is difficult?
There is no doubt that holiness is hard, even with the Spirit to guide us and give us life. But we must choose the hard path if we are to allow God to lead us to even greater things. The desires of the flesh are many and always lead us to go easy on ourselves and choose the path of least resistance. We must choose the path of greater resistance, though our fallen nature complains bitterly every step of the way, and our self-pity begs for a softer and easier journey through life.
This is nothing. The complaints of our flesh are nothing. What is something is that we are fashioned in Christ for holiness, created by God to one day shine brighter than the stars of the heavens. We are not doomed to remain forever in sins as if being in Christ meant nothing, as if we were not destined for glory but only for shame. There are many things working against us, but the greatest of all these might just be our own unwillingness to change, to better our way of life, to mature in Christ to the glory of God.
It is God who will cause the growth, who will make us holy, who will cause us to shine brightly. But like the saints of old, we must say yes to God and no to our sins and passions, no matter how great and difficult a struggle this may be. Let us never think that it is too late for posterity to remember us as a righteous people. That is simply a pandering to our self-pity. Let us choose instead to struggle with great fervency, and see what marvelous works God can accomplish in our lives.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-22255769595541670682012-06-12T07:46:00.002-07:002012-06-12T07:49:03.652-07:00Love and ReconciliationTomorrow we begin the Apostles’ Fast in preparation for the Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul which we celebrate in about three weeks. Each year the length of this fast varies from a few weeks to sometimes only a couple of days, depending on how early or late Pascha falls in any given year. Despite the variable nature of the fast, the feast itself is a very important one not only because of the two great apostles that it commemorates, but also because of an additional significance this particular feast has come to hold for Orthodox Christian believers.
There are at least two different icons that portray this feast. In one, the two apostles are shown standing together and upholding a representation of the Church, demonstrating that Peter, the apostle to the Jews, and Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, worked together to found the one Church for all peoples, cultures, and nations. The Christian Church is truly universal, the one true Ark of Salvation which God Himself has constructed for the deliverance of all mankind and the entire world.
A second icon is a bit different. In this one, Peter and Paul are embracing one another and bestowing on each other the holy kiss of Christian brotherhood. Often the halos about their heads are seen intersecting in such a way as to form the image of a heart, representing the two chief Christian virtues of reconciliation and love. As we may know from the holy scriptures, Peter and Paul had a bit of a falling out over Peter’s hypocrisy in suddenly refusing to eat with the Gentiles when the party of the Circumcision showed up. Paul publicly called him on this in front of everyone present and likely caused a bit of hard feelings. Yet from the scriptures we also know that these two men were later reconciled, and in one of his epistles Peter even calls Paul “our beloved brother” and speaks warmly of the wisdom which God had given him to serve the Church.
This example is very encouraging and shows us the Christian path. These two founders of our Church--despite very real and undeniable human failings--allowed the Holy Spirit to work in their lives to bring about reconciliation and the triumph of Christian love. This is the additional significance of this feast, and a call to us to allow the Holy Spirit to also work in the same way in our lives.
When it comes to reconciliation and love, there may be a tendency for us to assume these virtues are already present in our lives simply because we can’t think of anyone we actively hate. This is a mistake. As has been noted many times by our Holy Fathers, the opposite of love is not hate. Just because you don’t hate anyone doesn’t necessarily mean you love anyone either. The true opposite of love is mere indifference. If God had only been indifferent to our plight, we would be left to perish in our sins without any hope of redemption. Instead, His love moved Him to reconcile us and the entire world to Himself through Jesus Christ His Son. True love comes from God and imitates the movement and action of God to reach out, embrace, and reconcile from all alienation the object of love. It is an active force propelling one toward the good of the other through all necessary sacrifice. True Christian love comes to us from the Holy Spirit when we are willing not merely to feel, but to act. As God’s love moves Him to act on our behalf, so the Holy Spirit moves us to action--or tries to--but is often stymied, perhaps not by any hatred on our part, but almost always by our great indifference.
If you look around at the other people in this room, do you find any here that you hate? I would hope not, and would further hope that you would come to your father-confessor and tell him if you did. But when you look around, do you find any here that you are simply indifferent toward, that you neither hate nor love, but regard with no particular interest at all? This is far more likely, and an indication that you are blocking the Holy Spirit from operating fully in your life. Love must begin first in the household of God with your own brothers and sisters in Christ, and from there reach out to the stranger and the coworker and the others we encounter on a daily basis. If we do not love our brother or sister first with an active, sacrificial love, as St. John says, we do not know God, for God is love.
This active, sacrificial love requires that we stretch our thinking beyond ourselves and our own immediate families and include our parish family in our daily concerns. If we pray for our own families, shouldn’t we also pray for our parish family? If we are careful to provide the necessities of life for our own family, shouldn’t we also provide for our parish family with regular financial support? If we think it important to invest “quality time” in our families, shouldn’t we also put in some time at our parish, working together, volunteering for duties, building up ourselves and one another through service? The same is true for those without families. Singles and young marrieds need to think of their parish family and find ways to support and labor in love for the good of all.
This is the first and best way that the Holy Spirit leads us out of the black hole of self-absorption and teaches us to love and be reconciled to others. We need to understand that God has given us the parish and all the people and all the various needs in it as the very means of our growth toward the communion of love in the Holy Trinity, and our salvation. If we fail to see the need to serve one another faithfully, putting the needs of each other over our own as the scriptures instruct, we fail to respond to the Holy Spirit in that which is most needful to us. When we are overzealous to protect our time, our money, our interests alone, we are not allowing the Spirit to lead us into perfect love and reconciliation toward one another, and in a very real way remain isolated from the household of God.
And so, as we enter into this fast for the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, let us first do this together as the family of God, fasting also from any selfish isolation or unwillingness to sacrifice for one another. Let us strive to discover our responsibility toward our larger family, and in so doing serve them in the manner that is pleasing to God and saving to us.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-89219876212551511922012-05-08T13:55:00.003-07:002012-05-08T13:55:50.535-07:00It's going to be OK+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
Christ is risen!
Today is the Fourth Sunday of Pascha. This is our season of great celebration that continues for forty days until the Feast of Ascension. Throughout this time we continue to greet one another joyously with the words, “Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!” while the church remains brightly lit and festive and adorned in white vesture like a bride. In our prayers at home and in the kairon prayers of the clergy before liturgy, “O Heavenly King” and “Holy God” are temporarily replaced with a triple recitation of the Paschal troparion, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!” and this same hymn is sung again and often throughout the entire season. In every way the Church seeks to remind us, as another hymn declares: “This is the day of resurrection! Let us be illumined by the feast! Pascha! The Pascha of the Lord! For from death to life, and from earth to heaven has Christ our God led us! Let us sing the song of victory: Christ is risen from the dead!”
While this wonderful season of celebration may only last forty days, the reality of Pascha lasts forever. It has become in fact the new reality of the cosmos. For, while heaven and earth are passing away and our mortal bodies as well, they shall all follow the path blazed by Christ and live again.
This is the great message the Church is trying to help us understand and embrace: Christ is risen, and death is destroyed! Christ is risen, and the dead are raised! Christ is risen, granting the world eternal life! And to put it in a slightly less traditional but no less important way, Christ is risen, and everything is going to be OK. While that may sound a little trivial, maybe even a little silly, I think it helps to put our daily struggles in a much broader and more correct perspective.
The message of Pascha is not simply “once we die here we get to live there,” implying that Christ was focused exclusively on getting us into heaven. In fact, Christ was focused on our salvation, or the complete healing of our humanity, one aspect of which is our eternal communion with God in His heavenly kingdom. He was not focused merely on opening for us the gates of heaven, but first on perfecting our humanity by assuming it Himself and filling it with His divine life. In His humanity he faced temptations successfully and defeated the devil, so that we might gain that same victory. Many times we succumb to temptations as if we had no power to resist and to please God. We fail to see, or don’t wish to see, that Christ triumphed over sin that we might also do the same. This is also what Pascha means to us. In addition we know that Christ suffered in His humanity, and for what purpose but to redeem all human suffering and grant us great joy because of it. Many times we don’t see the purpose of suffering and think that it is a sign that God has forgotten us or is punishing us unfairly. Suffering is not from God; it is the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of being a fallen and broken people living in a fallen and broken world. But Christ has not forgotten our suffering. He Himself suffered in order to transform our suffering into a wellspring of faith and eternal reward, not unlike that enjoyed by the Holy Martyrs. Each of us would gladly endure a thousand lifetimes of suffering if we only knew the great reward that awaits in heaven for those who endure patiently and with trust. Have we forgotten our Lord’s words, “In this world you will have tribulation, but fear not, for I have overcome the world?”
Even death itself Christ endured for our sakes, in order to convert it from a prison of souls into a gateway to eternal bliss. We will die, but I tell you that I don’t plan to spend a lot of money on my grave-site or coffin because I won’t be using them for very long. We shall all be buried in graves that cannot contain us but which must yield us up on that Great Day of Christ’s return.
What does all this mean except that everything is going to work out and be OK? Just as God guided all the events of Christ’s life and made them work out for good, so He is guiding our lives and every event in them for our greatest good. If we had been with the disciples on that dark sabbath day that Christ lay in the tomb, we might not have grasped that all things were working according to God’s plan or that all things were going to be OK. But His glorious resurrection destroyed that fearful doubt and proved truly that “all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
Each year in this Paschal season the devil seems to vent his frustrations against the faithful, and many of us suffer renewed struggles, illnesses, or temptations. But guess what? It’s going to be OK. It really is! These things do not come upon you by accident or without the foreknowledge of God, and He is going to guide you through them just as He guided His own Son for our sakes and for our salvation. We must not fear the marvelous works of God even if they should take forms we find unpleasant. They are for a purpose, every one of them. Even if our struggles should end in the grave as they one day will for reach of us, we shall not be without the love of God or His guiding hand upon us.
What then shall we fear in this life? The incarnation of Christ, the salvific events of His life, and His ultimate resurrection from the dead prove to us that everything is going to be OK. To quote the closing words of the great Paschal homily of St. John Chrysostom, “O death, where is thy sting? O hades, where is thy victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown! Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is risen, and life reigns! Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the tomb! For Christ, being raised from the dead, has become the First-fruits of them that slept. To Him be glory and might unto ages of ages. Amen.”
Christ is risen!Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-37114324909222200112011-12-18T13:21:00.000-08:002011-12-18T13:21:15.947-08:00Humility Incarnate+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
That tremendous list of names which was just read is St. Matthew’s genealogy of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is read each year on the Sunday before the Nativity of Christ to remind us that the Son of God did not simply drop out of heaven in human form to pass among us as a visitor, but truly became man, assuming our nature and everything that goes with it, including a complete and even somewhat checkered family tree. The message this genealogy brings is not only that Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, the rightful heir of the throne of David, but even more wonderful, that He has condescended in great humility to join our race and unite Himself to each and every one of us, eternally.
I don’t suppose the human mind can quite grasp the humility of such an action. It is perhaps best summed up by the words of the following hymn: “With mystic apprehension of the divine commandment, the bodiless angel quickly appeared in the house of Joseph and said to the unwed Maiden: Lo, He who in His descent didst bow the heavens is housed unchanged and whole in thee; as I behold Him in thy womb, taking on the form of a servant, I marvel and cry out to thee, Hail, O Bride without bridegroom!”
Even the archangel Gabriel is portrayed as being “mystically apprehensive” by the unimaginable thing he is witnessing take place, and almost unable to speak for wonder over it. The great King of kings, the eternal God, has taken on the form of a lowly creature of dust, and shares one nature with those who willfully transgressed His laws and dishonored the glory of His image and despised and killed the holy prophets He sent to correct them. Even the heavens are bowed and nearly shattered at the passage of the Holy One through their midst. Mountains quake before Him and seas are parted at His presence, and yet the uncontainable God is contained within the womb of a young maiden. O wonder of wonders! O incomprehensible mystery! O depths of divine compassion and humility!
Furthermore, when the King comes, is He received in a royal palace and carefully attended to by servants befitting His majesty? Not at all. Instead, He is born in a cave and laid in a manger, surrounded by oxen and donkeys. His royal bed is not feathers but hay; His kingly vesture not silk but swaddling cloths. He enters into His world under the most rude and humble of circumstances, and comes meekly and without complaint to be greeted only by Joseph and Mary.
Any wealthy or great persons who came to Bethlehem that night surely had no problem gaining rooms at the inn. Important people and those with means always seem to find a way to obtain the best. It’s always been that way, but in our day it seems that even those of us who are neither rich nor important still expect to be treated as if we were. We feel entitled to receive a level of comfort in life and can become quite upset when situations fall below our standards, or people fail to rise to our expectations. We have a long way to go to learn the humility of God in order to be content to receive less than we think we deserve or to be more gracious to those around us. How often we forget that we are but dust, and forgetting this important fact become quick to complain or take offense? Would it not be better for us to imitate Christ to willingly accept less and be patient, kind, and forgiving with all?
Doubtless as Christ lay in his little cave not far from the inn, many important people walked past Him on their way to their rooms, unaware of the glory that was just a few feet away. He was hidden from them for one particular reason, namely that they would have had to bow down to enter into His cave, and the haughty do not do such things easily. The shepherds who kept watch at night and who heard the angelic choir singing His praises, these were simple men and not too proud to dirty their knees crawling into the cave, and thus could enter in to behold the God hidden from those “greater men” who passed by.
What this tells us is that the humility of God, though utterly beyond the comprehension of men and of angels, must at some greatly inferior level still be imitated by us, if we are to not pass by our Savior unknowingly but truly find and glorify Him.
Everything in this world militates against such humility, and this is especially so in our country. Even in this sluggish economy, we still enjoy a level of comfort and convenience unprecedented in human history. We have access to a remarkable quality of life and health and recreation and varieties of experiences and foods and pleasures. And once our souls have experienced these delightful things, they do not surrender them easily. Unless the Church compels us to enter into a period of fasting, we would never think of abandoning our tasty foods to live on a miserable diet of rice and beans and pasta. Yet many people on this planet still do not eat even that well. Our “fasting” periods would be considered feasting periods by people in many third world countries. And here’s the thing: how can we possibly enjoy so many benefits and luxuries and conveniences and not have these deeply affect our souls? It doesn’t matter that these things are the norm in our culture, they have never really been the norm for humanity, and they can easily render our souls slothful and inattentive to spiritual things, as well as utterly spoiled and unwilling to struggle.
Even now, during a season in which the Church asks us to simplify our lives and diets and be faithful in our prayers and remember the poor with almsgiving and just generally humble ourselves in preparation for the Nativity of our Savior, we may be so caught up in the Christmas blur of consumerism and travel and home decorating and family and parties that we are simply too busy to pay attention to spiritual things. Should we not stop to ask ourselves if we might be the ones passing by the glory in the cave by being too focused on nearly everything other than Jesus Christ?
Once again, the humility that Christ demonstrates by assuming our lowly humanity in order to raise us to glory with Himself is both incredible and unimaginable. So also is our own lack of humility, as evidenced by the fact that we might pay so little attention to our Lord, or show so little gratitude or devotion to Him in return. It’s not that we are a bad people, but we may be a people simply lacking in Christian humility.
If we are a people used to having what we want, doing things our way, and enjoying the good things that life brings us--in other words, just your average, 21st-century Americans--how does any of this train us to become humble people? We all know how difficult it is for us to pray regularly and faithfully, to pay attention during prayers or during the services, to pay tithes and alms, and to just generally show mercy, kindness, and forgiveness to others. Is it possible that this difficulty is caused by a lack of humility within us? If we were a more humble people, would we find it more natural to pray attentively and with warmth, to give generously to others, and to forgive freely as we ourselves have been forgiven? I think so. The divine humility initiated our salvation, as the Son who existed as God made Himself of no reputation, took the form of a bondservant, and came in the likeness of men. He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross for our sake and for our salvation. If our salvation began with the humility of the Son of God, it surely can only find a place in us if we humble ourselves before Him and put to death our pride.
We strike a blow against pride every time we force ourselves to stand before our icons and pray whenever we don’t feel like it, or come to church when we’d rather not. Whenever we go against our fallen will to pay a tithe or give generous alms, to volunteer for service, to turn away from a temptation or a besetting sin, to struggle against a fleshly passion, to obey the word of God, to forgive an insult, or to right a wrong we’ve done to another--whenever we compel ourselves to do any of these good things, we strike another blow against pride and make a petition to God to grant us the divine gift of humility.
I pray we would never forget the great humility that our Lord eternally reveals through His incarnation. May we not be too proud to follow His example and find our salvation in Him!
+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-89329988442118100602011-09-25T13:36:00.000-07:002011-09-25T13:36:43.079-07:00Inconvenienced by Jesus +In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
From our gospel lesson on this First Sunday of Luke, we heard the story of a miraculous catch that brought the fishermen to faith in Christ. Occurring very early in our Lord’s ministry, this is the miracle that might not have happened if Simon Peter hadn’t been so tolerant of Jesus’ demands. As we heard, the fishermen had returned from a long and fruitless night of work and were finishing up the task of washing and stowing their nets prior to going home, when Jesus approached, asking to use one of their boats as a platform from which to preach to the multitude which had gathered there. These men were no doubt exhausted and really looking forward to a hot meal and a warm bed, but their interest in hearing the Rabbi speak on this day was greater than their love of sleep, and so they welcomed Him aboard and put out a small distance from the shore.
When Jesus had finished speaking, He turned to the bone-weary fishermen and said, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch”. I almost can’t imagine a worse suggestion to make at such a time! These poor men had already bent over backwards to accommodate Jesus, and now instead of simply thanking them and letting them go home as they desired, He was seemingly asking to go on a fishing adventure for His amusement. In his fatigue, Simon Peter blurted out, “Master, we toiled all night and caught nothing!” He quickly regained his composure however, and in a more measured tone concluded, “At Thy word I will let down the nets.” He did the right thing, but you can tell he wasn’t very happy about it!
Jesus appeared to have no idea how greatly He was inconveniencing His hosts or imposing upon their good will. If He had wanted to go fishing, couldn’t He have shown up the night before, or at the very least arrived before they had washed and put away their nets for the day? The fishermen had been kind enough to allow Him the use of their boat, but now it seemed as if He was only wanting to waste their time and energy. How many of us would have tolerated such a pushy request?
I think we are a very gracious people for the most part, but we are also a people with rules. We really don’t like to be prevailed upon, or taken advantage of, and we’re very sensitive to demands on our time. It’s quite possible that we might have gently asked this Rabbi to be reasonable and come back later in the evening when we would be happy to take Him fishing. Wouldn’t that have been a good compromise? By politely offering this, we would have protected ourselves from any further imposition, and at the same time, entirely missed the miracle that would have changed the course of our lives! What a price to pay for refusing to be <i>inconvenienced</i> by Jesus!
Many years ago I had the good fortune to spend considerable time with an elderly English monk by the name of Fr. Lazarus Moore [OBM]. During one of our many conversations which he was kind enough to endure, I put forth the following question: “Father, how can we know the will of God in our lives?” I suppose I had an idea that some basic foreknowledge of God’s will was necessary in order for us to follow it. The answer that Fr. Lazarus provided indicated that such foreknowledge is very seldom needed, provided we are willing to follow a simple guideline. He told me, “When we were in the monastery, they gave us a little rule: whenever somebody asks you to do something for them, make every effort to do it even if you don’t want to, for in this way we often find ourselves doing God’s will instead of our own.”
What a brilliant little rule! How do we know the will of God in our lives? Very often we don’t in great detail, for at least two reasons. One is that we may lack the purity of soul and discernment of spirit to have that proverbial “direct line with God” that one might need for such information. Another major reason is that God simply doesn’t tell us His will ahead of time in every situation. Here’s the thing: He actually withholds this information out of mercy toward us. Consider our gospel lesson for example. Would it have been better for Jesus to tell the fishermen who He was and what He was about to do before making His unusual request? “Look, I am the Son of God, having dominion over the heavens and the earth, and you must obey Me, for I will cause the fishes to rush into your nets in vast numbers.” Such information--though perfectly true--would have been very unkind of our Lord to reveal. It would have changed the situation from one of persuasion to one of coercion, effectively forcing the fishermen to do His will without allowing them the freedom to make their own decision on the basis of their own good will.
God never forces His will on us, which is exactly what He would be doing if He revealed it in lavish detail every day. Instead, He allows us the freedom to discover His will through our being open to the people and situations that He brings into our lives daily. God does not want slaves whose only choice is to obey Him or incur His wrath. He wants us to become a people of open hearts, willing to love and to serve and to go that extra mile with others, even when it is inconvenient for us to do so.
Make no mistake, it is often inconvenient to love and to serve and to be open to the many unplanned and unexpected things that come our way. This is where the conflict with our own personal “rules” is frequently encountered. We do like our day to go a certain predictable way, and we dislike interruptions to our routine or unusual demands by others. As such, we are not generally very open to the will of God intruding into our lives. We like order--I’m afraid mostly our order--and aren’t keen on anything that threatens this. What I’m suggesting here is that anyone who would follow Christ simply cannot afford to live this way. If we insist on life going according to our rules, we will always miss the will of God and the many little miracles that might change the course of our lives, directing them toward heaven.
It would be good for us to adopt the prayer of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow which says in part,<i> “O Lord, grant me to great the coming day in peace. […] Bless my dealings with all who surround me. Teach me to treat all that comes to me throughout the day with peace of soul and with firm conviction that thy will governs all. In all my deeds and words guide my thoughts and feelings. In unforeseen events let me not forget that all are sent by thee.” </i>There is a bit more but this gives us the general idea. The good archbishop reminds us that the will of God is revealed to us every day, but seldom forcefully or directly as if on tablets of stone. More often it is gently revealed through the people and the situations that God allows the day to bring. If our eyes are closed to this revelation, our hearts will likewise be closed to the will of God. We will never see the presence of Christ in any difficult person or inconvenient situation. We will only see the difficulty, and will fight against it.
This is where the brilliance of Fr. Lazarus’ little monastic rule shines through. Whenever someone asks you to do something for them (And we might add, whenever some circumstance or burden is placed upon you) make every effort to do it or see it through <i>even if you don’t want to,</i> for in this way we often find ourselves doing God’s will instead of our own. Notice that this little rule doesn’t require us to possess the insight of a saint, just an open mind and heart, and a willingness to comply more than complain. This is hard enough for us, but no one ever said that being a disciple of Christ would be easy. It is assumed that we must wrestle with our own will a bit in order to follow Christ actively.
If we look through the scriptures we can easily find countless examples of people--from Abraham to Moses to Jonah to Simon Peter himself--who discovered the will of God only by doing what they did not want to do. Why should it be any different for us? Is our life more precious, our routine more sacred that we simply can’t afford to be inconvenienced by Jesus? I would suggest that we can’t afford not to be! This life is simply too short for us to focus all of our attention and energy onto it. We must serve our God while we can that we might find life everlasting in Him.
+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-49744744945755031962011-09-19T06:56:00.000-07:002011-09-19T06:56:23.358-07:00Take Up Your Cross+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
On the Orthodox Church calendar, today is the Sunday after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. From St. Mark’s gospel we heard the familiar call of our Lord, <i>“If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me”</i>. St. Luke’s account adds the word “daily” to indicate that this action of self-denial and of taking up our cross to closely follow after Christ requires our constant attention and devotion. It doesn’t take a saint to realize that our abiding unchristian impulse is to have our own way in all things, to impose our will on people and situations, and to become angry or frustrated when things don’t go exactly as we want them to. This fallen self-will is what we must crucify in order to follow Christ, and it is truly a difficult, daily task.
The way of the cross, of following Christ through voluntary self-denial, is indeed such a difficult way that very few people who call themselves “Christian” actually live it. Entire denominations have been built on the foundation of human self-will, offering the freedom to choose your own doctrine, morality, and whatever else you may prefer. Orthodoxy does not permit this of course, so the most common human response to it is <i>nominalism</i>. We have the true faith; we may not necessarily live it. In one sense this is no better than being a follower of your own do-it-yourself religion, for we can feel that we are completely within the will of God even while we are having nothing to do with Him whatsoever. The more comfortable we are with our daily life and the choices we make, the more comfortable we are with our Christianity, the less likely it is that we are actually living as Orthodox Christian believers and taking up our cross to follow Christ. Comfort and the Cross do not go hand-in-hand and are in fact mutually exclusive.
As fallen human beings, we quite naturally want to have our own way. We prefer being in our comfort-zone, doing what we like, and most especially defending our will and our choices against all who might oppose them. Self-will is the source of all human conflict in the world and certainly in the church as well. We recognize this, but are so adept at justifying our own positions that we almost always feel it is the <i>other person</i> who is at fault and behaving in an unchristian manner. If only those other people wouldn’t be so stubborn and see the wisdom of our opinions about how things should be run around here! The conflicts suffered by the willful are endless. Yet how often do we see that the cure for this is to stop being willful? Rather than challenging ourselves to take up our cross and crucify our self-will at the first sign of conflict with others, isn’t it true that we will try to battle our way through to victory, or failing at this, will settle into a kind of passive-aggressive quiet resentment? Perhaps we think that our cold and stoney silence is a “Christian” response. Our lack of Christian spirit is exposed however the very next moment the matter is brought before us and the conflict resumes again.
The New Testament epistles are filled with passages on Christian unity, since the apostles knew that if the Church cannot find peace, what hope has the world? The advice they give is for each of us to adopt the mind of Christ and set aside our own will to do what is best for others. We cheerfully agree with this rule, but often insist that our will is the absolute best for others. We might even hear ourselves saying, “I’m only thinking of what is best. I’m not just trying to have my own way here”. Yet if that were true, why do we often feel such resentment when our ideas aren’t followed? Why do we feel wounded or withdraw our support when things don’t go the way we want them to?
We should take to heart the words of St. Paul to the Philippians by which he said, <i>“Therefore if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.”</i> Is this not the way of Christ? Don’t those words fill your heart with a sense of peace? Don’t they reflect the other-worldliness that characterizes true Christianity, rather than the strident, have-my-own-way-at-any-cost attitude that so characterizes life in this world?
In the effort to take up our own cross daily to follow Christ, we should at the very least resist the urge to impose our will on others, and fight any inclination to withdraw ourselves from them when we don’t get what we want. We should strive to see every conflict in life not as a contest of wills, but as an opportunity from God to crucify our own self-will in Christian meekness. We should also remember that the cross we are asked to bear is personalized for each of us alone. I cannot resolve my conflicts with others by expecting them to ascend my cross while I continue to do as I please. I must voluntarily crucify myself. I must change, I must repent of that which causes conflict between myself and others. Only when I am firmly nailed to my own cross will the world know peace.
Until we accept this truth, we will constantly repeat the error of trying to make life better by changing the actions and attitudes of the people around us. This will never succeed. You and I must accept the responsibility for our own repentance. The saints teach us that when we finally see ourselves as the source of all conflict, of all troubles, of all suffering and sorrow in others, then we are presented with the opportunity to change all that by changing ourselves. As long as our focus is on changing others, we only increase their suffering and contribute nothing to the redemption of the world. When we begin to change ourselves, we bring the presence and peace of Christ into the world.
It is said that the Elder Paisios was asked his opinion about a certain war that was being waged at the time. The Elder hung his head in sorrow and replied, “It is my fault”. A startled visitor exclaimed, “What? How can you say that this distant war is your fault?” The Elder quickly responded with all sincerity, “If only I were more holy, perhaps this war would not have been fought”. This was a common attitude among the saints, who saw all human conflict as being rooted in their own sins. How different this is from the view of the unenlightened, who see all conflict as being the fault of others and never as their own. Perhaps we can see from this what we need to do to bring Christ into our world.
Whether we are speaking of our place of work, our families, our neighborhood, our parish, or the wide-world itself--and whether they know it or not--everyone is waiting for us to take up our cross and follow Christ. If you’re counting on anyone else to make your world a better place while your cross remains unoccupied, you have a false hope and are actually doing harm to your neighbor. Peace in our families, in our church, in our lives, and in our world actually begins with us choosing the way of the cross and the voluntary canceling out of our self-will that it demands.
You’ll notice that our Lord did not say, “If any man would come after Me, let him assert himself, stand up to others, fight for his rights, and follow Me”. Such actions, while very common in our society, do not represent the way of Christ. We must stop forcing our will upon life, God, and the people around us. We must die to ourselves in order to become alive in Christ. “He who loses his life for My sake shall find it”. If we choose the path of self-cancelation, God does not leave us canceled out, but raises us up to life everlasting. This is the mystery of the Cross and the path of true life.
+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-33022699780993727692011-08-22T12:55:00.000-07:002011-08-22T12:55:48.334-07:00The Difficulty of Devotion+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.<br />
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At first glance, our two scripture lessons this morning [Corinthians 4:9-16, Matthew 17:14-23] seem to have only the slightest connection. From the epistle we heard the pleas of a spiritual father, the great apostle Paul, beseeching his spiritual children in Corinth to lay aside their smug and comfortable lifestyle to become imitators of him even as he, in his voluntary privation and suffering, was an imitator of Christ. In our gospel lesson we see another father, this time pleading with the apostles to heal his demon-possessed son. As it turned out, they were stymied in their attempts and could do nothing for the boy because of a lack of faith on both their part and that of the father himself. Our Lord stepped in to correct the father’s faith and healed his son with a word, and later took His apostles to school on the need to enliven spiritual labors with faith, prayer and fasting.<br />
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If we look closer at these two passages, we may find a connection that runs deeper than just two fathers urgently seeking to help their children. I believe these passages combine to speak to us of our need to engage and live out the Christian life to the fullest degree possible, while revealing the difficulties we face whenever we make such an effort.<br />
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I think if we were to take a poll, most of us would admit that we feel the need to live a “better” Christian life. We might claim a need to pray more, to improve and deepen our understanding of the faith, to be more repentant and less excusing of our sins, and to be generally more focused on Christ than on ourselves every hour of the day. But if we admit this, why do we find it so hard to act on it? Why is it so hard for us to pray, be devoted to Christ, or forsake our sins? When we come to the priests with our sins and the hope that they can heal us, do we find their ministrations to be as powerless as the apostles in this morning’s gospel lesson and our various demons still clinging to us even after confession? Why is it so hard for us to be healed? Could it be that our desire for healing simply isn’t as great as our desire for so many other things in this life?<br />
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What in the world could possibly render us so weak-willed that we would not desire and work for our salvation more than any other thing? Well, the world is a pretty big place and filled with many things that fallen people will tend to love more than God. In addition to this, each of us carries about an entire world within himself, filled with thoughts and inclinations and passionate habits that constantly thwart and grieve the Holy Spirit of God. We are not a simple people by any means, focused only on the kingdom of heaven. We tend to be a people divided in our interests and a little too devoted to the middle-class ethos of living a comfortable life.<br />
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Be assured I’m not picking on us. It seems to me this was the exact same problem St. Paul faced with the believers at Corinth. In the passage we read today he seems to start out praising the Corinthians, telling them that they were wise, they were strong, they were held in high honor among men. How nice! Who among us wouldn’t want to hear ourselves described in this way? Soon however we realize that Paul wasn’t giving them praise but was revealing their fundamental problem. It was because they so valued good standing in the world that they had so little to do with Christ. Paul contrasted the noble and happy Corinthians with himself, telling them, “To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless”. St. Paul was hardly a poster-child for the modern prosperity gospel! On top of this he revealed to the Corinthians a very different attitude than the one commonly held by those in love with this world. He reminded them, “When [we are] reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the off-scouring of all things”. In other words, Paul had adopted the mind of Christ, living out the true gospel in such a way that worldly comfort and good treatment by men meant little to him, but seeking the kingdom of God meant everything.<br />
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We may have more in common with the Corinthians than with their devout spiritual father. We love taking comfort wherever we can find it, surrounding ourselves if at all possible with nice things, lovely experiences, good friends and pleasant social activities. We almost never question whether all this pleasure-taking is beneficial to our souls, or whether it is in fact harmful to them in the long run. The middle-class suburban lifestyle to which many aspire hardly equips a person for any rigorous self-denial in the Christian life. More often it subverts the Christian life to its rules, judging Christianity to be good if it adds to or accommodates our pleasure, but a thing to be avoided if it makes any demands we don’t wish to fulfill.<br />
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Comfort and pleasure are so important to us that we rarely think of anything else. This not only manifests itself in the lifestyle choices we make, but in our basic daily attitudes. If someone hurts us, we hate them. If someone has it better in life than we do, we envy them. If our health or financial well-being are jeopardized, we resent God for allowing it to happen. If anyone offends us in even the most minor way, God help them and the horse they rode in on because we’ll do everything in our power to avenge our pride, or failing that, will be snippy and judgmental for years to come. All of these responses are ultimately rooted in our love of comfort and pleasure, because we want to fully enjoy our present lives in this world and are unwilling to endure anything that might lessen that enjoyment in the slightest degree.<br />
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Is it any wonder then that we find it so difficult to follow the way of Christ? It isn’t that comfort and pleasure are inherently sinful; it’s just that we become so addicted to them that we can’t tolerate anything less. Thus self-denial in any form becomes repugnant to us. Prayer and fasting sound good in theory, but since they reward us with no immediate pleasure, and actually detract from our pleasure, they are habitually set aside. If our sins produce even the most fleeting delight we will keep milking them for all they’re worth. If tithing faithfully conflicts with our having what other people have, can anyone seriously expect us to settle for less? And if there is a need for faithful volunteers in the parish to vacuum carpets and clean toilets, do we forsake such chores because we are “too busy” to sacrifice our valuable time merely to serve others?<br />
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It is so difficult for us to say no to ourselves and deny ourselves any immediate gratification for the sake of God’s eternal kingdom. This is why some sins, like some demons, do not come out of us easily. A life that is almost completely self-absorbed is the most difficult thing to change because it requires us to go against our instinct to please ourselves and do only what we like to do. What selfish person is willing to take upon himself the mind of Christ and say, “I will empty myself, I will settle for less than I deserve, I will become the servant of all”?<br />
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With the help of the Holy Spirit who indwells us, such radical change is possible, but only when we are willing to start paying the price. Are we willing to do what we don’t like to do if all it does is bring us closer to God? Will we come to confession with a renewed desire for change and to actually follow our father-confessor’s counsel? What good does it do to listen to our priest, only to continue to live as we please? Will we strive to be more faithful in prayer and fasting and repentance, even though these things are a struggle for us? Will we invest more in our parish in terms of time, service and money rather than being content to let a handful of faithful people carry the burden alone? These are not fun things, but necessary things. No good parent wishes to raise spoiled, self-indulgent children who can think of no one but themselves. The same is true for our Heavenly Father, who has given us works to do that we might mature into useful, productive Christian people.<br />
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My brothers and sisters, I ask your forgiveness, since I too am a selfish person. Let us not be content to remain as we are. God would set us free from every spiritual force that oppresses us and most especially from enslavement to our own desires. Let us engage the life of devotion to Christ in an ever-increasing way each day. If we give our Christianity the attention it deserves, all of life can become a movement away from preoccupation with the self toward a true communion with one another and the God who loves us.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-28089008202746833132011-07-29T10:06:00.000-07:002011-07-29T10:06:26.707-07:00A Wedding Homily+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen. <br />
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Unless one has been hiding under a particularly remote rock the past few years, he is surely aware of the growing push in our society to reinvent marriage in ways unrecognizable to traditional Christianity. While this trend might seem to have come “out of nowhere,” it is in fact rooted in the deeper confusion and misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of marriage that has gripped our country for at least half a century. Once widely acknowledged to be an authentic sacrament solemnly administered by a church body and deriving both an eternal and salvific purpose from the God who ordained and blessed it, marriage is more commonly seen today as a private legal agreement between any two persons, deriving its legitimacy from the state, and existing solely for the mutual if temporal pleasure of the couple involved.<br />
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Increasingly fuzzy in the American consciousness is any awareness of marriage as the God-effected union of one man and one woman for the purpose of their mutual salvation. Such a view seems very nearly pretentious and even excessively religious to a culture given over to secular pragmatism. In a word, marriage is seldom any longer regarded as being <i>holy</i>. It is less and less understood as being integral to God’s sacred plan for humanity reflected in the very reason He created us as male and female in the first place.<br />
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The Eastern Orthodox Church has long held to the traditional Christian understanding of marriage revealed first and in part in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. According to this, Woman was taken from the side of Man and fashioned by God to be his helpmate, his co-laborer, his wife. Being literally of the same flesh and bone, yet possessing differences complimentary to one another, the Man and the Woman were meant to operate in complete harmony as a reflection of the unity shared by the three Divine Persons of the Godhead. Between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit there exists no conflict of will, no battle for dominance, no petty struggle to be identified or appreciated independently of the other. There exists only the perfect communion of love, and a blessed oneness of purpose and intent and action.<br />
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This is how the Man and the Woman were intended by God to live. As we may know, that budding harmony was tragically interrupted when the Woman exercised her own will quite independently of her husband to heed the Serpent and eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Man exercised his will independently of God to follow suit. The result was that the harmony and communion that once existed between mankind and God was broken, and of particular interest to us today, the harmony and communion that once existed between the Man and the Woman was also shattered. No longer sharing one will and purpose between themselves or with God, men and women have struggled greatly and often against one another in this fallen and broken world we have inherited.<br />
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I say that this is of particular interest to us, because today we are asking for the grace and mercy of God to mend this universal conflict in a small way and with one couple by bringing together and uniting <i>M.</i> and <i>S.</i> in Holy Matrimony. Did you know that the word matrimony is derived originally from the Latin word for mother? This shows that marriage was once seen as an institution for the nurturing and protection of motherhood and child-rearing. It is precisely this definition that is under great assault by certain factions within our society today, but as you might discern from the prayers we have offered during the Orthodox wedding service, it is very much the one we still hold. Everything about this service expresses our deepest beliefs regarding marriage, the roles and duties of the man and the woman within it, the significance of procreation and the rearing of children, and the relationship of the family to the kingdom of heaven and to salvation itself.<br />
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As you can see, <i>M.</i> and <i>S.</i> stand before us wearing crowns placed upon their heads by the priest. This not only signifies that they have been granted the blessing and authority of God to reign as king and queen within their newly-established household, but speaks also of the crowns of glory they will receive from Christ Himself should they fulfill their duties faithfully and with honor. In the Orthodox view, marriage is very much rooted in the pursuit of heaven and the working out of eternal salvation. The man and his wife are each expected to defeat his or her own divisive self-will, and together express and live out the will and purpose of God. They are instructed in moments of conflict to not blame or revile or make efforts to change the other, but to each discover within themselves what must be changed for the sake of harmony. They are to see marriage as a daily opportunity for repentance and the self-correction needed to better reflect Christ within themselves. They are told to exercise authority over themselves and their children as God exercises His authority over creation; not with oppression and domination and self-interest, but with love and nurturing and actions of self-giving for the good of the whole (“For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son”).<br />
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Christian marriage in every way reflects the unity of the Godhead, as well as the union of God and man expressed in the communion between Christ and His Body, the Church. Indeed, in the lesson from Ephesians 5 we just heard read, the husband is commanded to love his wife in the same manner as Christ loves His Church, sacrificing himself for her with an eye toward the day when he shall present her to God holy and without blemish. The wife in turn is commanded to obey her husband and submit to him as the Church does to Christ, an arrangement that does not lead to subjugation or enslavement, but to human freedom in the highest sense.<br />
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Properly understood, Christian marriage is absolutely integral to God’s plan to save humanity. It becomes the means whereby husband and wife confront and defeat every selfish sin within themselves to become one with each other and one with Christ.<br />
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<i>M.</i> and <i>S.</i> have only just now been joined in this salvific union. The great adventure which is the pursuit of their mutual salvation still lies before them. They scarcely know what they are in for! But with the help of God and the support of their parish community they will over time cease to be merely two individuals to become one new creation united in the perfect communion of love and finding heaven as their true and final home. This is the noble and exalted view of holy marriage still held by the Eastern Orthodox Church and the one that from this day forth,<i> M.</i> and <i>S.</i> will have the joy of living out and making real in their new household.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-21604156738918206572011-04-21T14:01:00.000-07:002011-04-21T14:01:34.365-07:00Palm Sunday+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.<br />
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Today is Palm Sunday, also known as the Sunday of the Triumphal Entry of our Lord into Jerusalem. On this day, Jesus Christ rode into the city to receive the accolades of a vast multitude of people who greeted Him as the long-promised Messiah of Israel. The prophet Zechariah had foreseen this event centuries earlier, writing: <i>“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O Daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, [even] a colt, the foal of a donkey.”</i> [Zech. 9:9] Everything was unfolding exactly as the prophet had foretold, and the people seemed ecstatic to receive the King of Israel into their midst, giving every reason to think that Christ’s hour of glory in the midst of His people had finally come.<br />
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But as we know, this crowd’s love for their King was not to last. A mere five days later, many of these same people would be gathered outside the Praetorium on a bitterly cold evening shouting “Crucify Him!” and threatening a riot if Pontius Pilate did not hand Jesus over to the executioners. How is it that the people went from an ecstatic adoration to a murderous rage in less than a week? I guess you could say that Jesus wasn’t the Messiah they were expecting.<br />
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To give a bit of background, all these people had come to Jerusalem, not to see Jesus, but to celebrate the feast of Passover. According to the historian Josephus, it was not uncommon for the population of the city to swell from its normal 12,000 or so to nearly three million each year, as Jews from all over the world came to Jerusalem for this feast. For many of those people it was likely that Passover had become less of a religious holiday and more of a national one, something like our own 4th of July celebration. It was a time for Jews living abroad to come home and celebrate their ancient deliverance from Egypt, and to speak of the coming Messiah who most believed would appear very soon to break the yoke of the Roman Empire which ruled over them at that time. There was much Messianic fervor in the air as the people longed, not for someone who would save them from their sins, but for one who would rise up as a great political hero to mount a rebellion against their oppressors and lead Jewish armies to victory over the Romans and all the nations. When the visiting crowd heard that this Jesus had raised a man named Lazarus from the dead, it thought “Surely such a powerful miracle-worker must be the one sent by God to deliver us!” Thus they hastily cut down palm leaves and rushed out to greet Him as a the conquering king they hoped He would become.<br />
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Had He wanted to, Jesus could have easily become this king the Jews so wanted. The Romans and all nations would have fallen helplessly before His divine power and Christ could have forced His rule into every corner of the earth from His throne in Solomon’s Temple, if that had been His desire. However, Jesus did not come to establish an earthly kingdom relying on force and might, but a heavenly kingdom built upon peace and man’s voluntary restoration to God. His intent was not to be the warrior-king, waving a sword and riding boldly into battle. Instead, He would become the Suffering Servant, raising His cross and marching meekly up to Golgotha to meet His destiny. This was clearly not the Messiah the Jews were expecting. Furthermore, when Jesus allowed Himself to be arrested and humiliated by the despised Romans, it became abundantly clear to them that this was not the hero who had come to restore the national pride of Israel. If anything, He had become a national embarrassment to them. As the soldiers mocked Him and rudely exclaimed, “Hail, King of the Jews!” the Jews themselves felt insulted and humiliated and sought to distance themselves from Jesus, saying: “We have no king but Caesar!” Because of their pride and ignorance of God’s plan, the Jewish people found themselves rejecting their Messiah as an impostor and hardening their hearts against Him. Because of this, they cast aside the Son of God who had come to save them from the curse of sin.<br />
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I wanted us to reflect on these things today not to disparage the ancient Jews, but as always, to aid us in our own repentance and the pursuit of our salvation. The first thing we should note is just how quickly human disposition toward God can change. Isn’t that true? As long as life is humming along well according to our plans, we are happy to praise God and live our little Christian lives. But when unpleasant change comes and we are faced with disappointments, trials, or challenges, we can often find ourselves doubting the goodness of God and His mercy toward us. Perhaps we don’t start screaming for His crucifixion, but we may begin to distance ourselves from God in our hearts, and blame or question Him or otherwise hold Him responsible for making things happen that we don’t like. Like the ancient Jews, our problem here may also be that we too quickly forget the basic spiritual undercurrent to this life and pin our happiness entirely on temporal, passing things that by nature cannot endure.<br />
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How quickly we forget that we are a fallen and broken people living in a fallen and broken world. God allows us to live under these circumstance with all the struggles, temptations, pains, and sorrows inherent to it, in order that we might not mistake this life for paradise and be content with it. From God’s point of view, this brief life is given as a time for us to prepare our souls and make ourselves ready for the true and everlasting life to be revealed. His whole focus is therefore on that life to come. Our whole focus on the other hand is often limited to this life alone, and this is why we are tormented when our hopes and dreams don’t come true, and the paradise we seek to make for ourselves here and now never comes to fruition. We may spend many years trying to find happiness here only to find it all taken away in a moment.<br />
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At such times it is easier to blame God than to correct our own thoughts and reevaluate our whole perspective. It would be far better to ask ourselves what were we thinking in the first place. Did we forget that our flesh is growing weaker day-by-day? Did we imagine that if we had enough money, health, love, or good times that we would live forever in that state and never die? Have we found despair because our biggest dreams in life were never about being pure in heart and knowing God, but about having the ideal family, the nice home, and a financially-secure retirement? If we are driven throughout life by the wrong desires, can we not see that God’s gentle correction--even if unpleasant now--is for our eternal benefit?<br />
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When sorrows come, as they absolutely must to a fallen people living in a fallen world, can we see that these are given as a chance for us to return to God and place our hope in Him alone? Also, don’t we understand that the degree of bliss we will enjoy in heaven is directly proportional to the degree of suffering we endure now with faith? Jesus taught--and the lives of all the saints and martyrs confirm--that we should rejoice when sorrows befall us now, for great is our reward in heaven. Suffering is not a punishment, but a gift of life from the God of life. If we seek only to enjoy unspotted happiness here, we shall not enjoy a life of blessedness there, and that is an unchangable fact.<br />
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The Jews living under Roman oppression sought only one thing, freedom from that oppression to live as they pleased. When Christ did not seem to provide them that, they turned against Him. We are living under the oppression of sin and death and all the sufferings these bring to us and we likewise want them all to go away. If they do not, perhaps we fall into the error of the Jews and reject Jesus ourselves. God could make our sorrows go away, just as Jesus could have been the earthly king that the Jews wanted. But this would not bring salvation. How much better it is for us to accept our struggles, our weakness and pain, and bring the Suffering Servant Jesus Christ that much more into our hearts and lives. In this way we will find peace no matter what befalls us, and the joy of Pascha and our own personal resurrection with Christ will be that much greater in all of us.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-30132283696812725542011-04-05T15:33:00.000-07:002011-04-05T15:34:20.815-07:00St. John Climacus Sunday+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.<br />
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On this Fourth Sunday of Great Lent, the Orthodox Church commemorates St. John Climacus, who was a 6th-century monastic, bishop, and true saint who is best known for his book “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”. This book was originally intended for those involved in monastic endeavors, but over the years was found to be useful for all serious Christians who sought to subdue the sinful passions and purify their love for Jesus Christ. Each of its 30 chapters--called “steps”--encourage the reader to increasingly put away the love of earthly things and continue in an upward climb, as if rung by rung, progressing in both virtue and the love of God, toward a state of spiritual perfection in Christ.<br />
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Sadly, these things seem to describe the Christianity of a distant, bygone era. Today’s Christians do not seem terribly concerned with subduing their sinful passions or attaining virtue and the perfection of love in Christ. On the one hand are the people who insist that God already sees them as perfect because of their faith in Jesus. These deem any effort to progress in holiness as an attempt to “add to” the righteousness of Christ and equate it to the foolishness of the Galatians. On the other hand are the weary Orthodox and perhaps other traditional Christians who may have taken a few weak stabs at correcting themselves but have been overwhelmed by the enormity of the task or the coldness of their hearts toward God. We can easily surrender to a kind of laissez-faire Orthodoxy, which is nothing more than a beaten-down, discouraged cynicism that we can do no better to improve our response to God’s transforming love.<br />
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Compared to the Christianity of long ago, we are living in a time of great spiritual darkness and faintheartedness that often makes even the smallest spiritual effort seem incredibly difficult to us. Things as simple as keeping our little rule of prayer can often overwhelm us and seem infinitely beyond our meager abilities. We don’t know a great deal about being strict with ourselves or of forcing ourselves to do the things that are hard. We loathe spiritual struggle and much too quickly accept the notion that a kind of spiritual mediocrity is the best we can ever hope for in our lives.<br />
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But St. John Climacus understood that man was created for much higher and greater things. We are created to work together with God, in synergy, uniting our will and action to His grace and divine energies to accomplish what we by ourselves alone could never do. There are many places in Scripture where we are specifically told to cooperate with God in this way and to labor diligently and daily to eliminate sin from our lives and progress toward Christian perfection.<br />
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One such place can be found in II Peter chapter one, in a passage that sounds remarkably like a ladder of divine ascent itself. Having just reminded us of our high calling in Christ and the things available to us by His divine power, the apostle continues: “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: for so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” [2 Peter 1:4-11]<br />
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Notice how St. Peter makes it plain that those who remain barren and unfruitful, though they were purged from their previous sins, are not guaranteed salvation as if by “faith alone”. Cooperation with God in the cultivation of the Christian virtues is necessary to make our calling and election sure and for entrance into the kingdom to be granted unto us.<br />
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The subduing of our many earthly passions and the formation of one focused passion for God, along with the growth in virtue that this brings, is the biblical characterization of the true Christian life. As Orthodox Christians, we must seek to embrace what the Scriptures teach and our Holy Tradition echoes concerning the Christian life, which is one of divine ascent from the fallen state in which we now exist to the exalted state God intends for us.<br />
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I think it is important to remember on this Sunday of St. John Climacus that the Church is not suggesting we should all live as monks. You don’t even need to read the Ladder of Divine Ascent if you don’t wish to. But what we do need is to live as Christians, and in so doing, to constantly push ourselves to reach for more of Christ in our lives, setting our affection on heaven above, not on the things of this world.<br />
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Beloved, I know that we can get tired and discouraged. By this point in Great Lent, we often feel very tired and discouraged. Perhaps we have seen more setbacks and failures than progress, and feel that our lent has been--to borrow a lyric from the Moody Blues--”another day’s useless energy spent”. But then again, perhaps we haven’t honestly given lent the full effort it deserves. We may have found it too easy to fall back into old habits: skipping lenten services or dragging in late on Sundays, praying sporadically, fasting incompletely, always keeping God at arm’s length, and making little sustained effort to draw near to Him during this time. We may protest that Orthodoxy is too demanding or sets the bar too high for “ordinary folks” like us. But maybe we’ve simply made ourselves out to be a little too ordinary and have forgotten our high calling in Christ Jesus. God is offering us something of unspeakable value--truly the offer of a lifetime--yet we may be too wedded to the ordinary to accept.<br />
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This is why remembering St. John Climacus and his Ladder of Divine Ascent is beneficial, even for those who’ve never read it and never will. At least when we hear of it in church, it serves as a reminder that our lives are not meant to remain mired in the ordinary. We are called to continually urge our souls upward, despite their great reluctance, and experience the joy of their union with our Sweetest Lord Jesus. This is the purpose of Great Lent. May we seize the precious few days that remain to continue our ascent to glorious Pascha and the bliss that awaits beyond!<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-18075287667224223852011-01-09T11:00:00.000-08:002011-01-09T11:00:01.368-08:00Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.<br />
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Thirty-five years ago, when I read this morning’s excerpt from Matthew [4:12-17] for the very first time, I distinctly remember feeling a bit let down by it. In the previous chapter, I had encountered the exciting character of John the Baptist, who dressed like a wild caveman and went about exhorting and rebuking the people and preaching: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” Now, as I read about the Lord Jesus Christ poised to begin His public ministry, I knew things were really going to ramp up. Here was the greatest preacher in history about to take the world stage, and His very first message to that waiting world was going to be: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”<br />
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<i>Really?</i><br />
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I expected Him to open with something a little more <i>original</i> than that. But my major disappointment with His preaching debut was that He didn’t say so much as a single word about our need to accept Him as personal Lord and Savior and to start reading the bible. I couldn’t see any value in His talking about heaven if He wasn’t going to tell people what it would take to get there! In short, I felt that He had stumbled out of the gate and muffed His first opportunity to make a clear presentation of the message of salvation.<br />
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It took a few more years for me to comprehend that Jesus preached the gospel just fine, thank you very much. It was yours truly who had a few wires loose.<br />
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First off, I had failed to notice in this passage that Jesus wasn’t talking about <i>heaven</i>, He was talking about <i>the kingdom of heaven</i>. In fact, Jesus never really spoke of heaven in an abstract way as people often do today. He most often referred to heaven as a kingdom, implying that it was a realm where the rule and order and life of God was experienced, rather than the rebellion, confusion, and death common to this fallen world. I did know that one day Jesus would reign as king from heaven, but quite honestly, I never gave it that much thought. To me, heaven was the pleasant if somewhat airy-fairy promise of eternal bliss awaiting all true believers in the life to come. Beyond that, heaven didn’t seem to have much to do with this life except to serve as an incentive to get people to accept Christ, and frankly, the fear of hell worked better in that regard. For some reason, more people seem attuned to the idea of receiving eternal punishment from God than eternal reward.<br />
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But when it came to this idea of the kingdom of heaven being truly <i>at hand</i>, as if it were just moments away from being established upon the earth, I could not grasp this at all. Where was this kingdom of heaven if that were true? Some people taught that the reign of Christ was to be experienced in the here-and-now by the application of biblical principles to our lives. This sounded good but I was always painfully aware that we all read and interpreted our bibles differently. I couldn’t see how Jesus could be an effectual king if <i>we</i> were the ones making all the rules. Later I also realized that if the bible was to represent the reign of Christ in this world, He would have to wait an additional 1400 years for the printing press to be invented to really kickstart His kingdom. This was stretching the meaning of the words “at hand” pretty thin!<br />
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One final thought that occurred to me--the most disturbing one of all--was that whenever Christ was to be enthroned as absolute monarch of His kingdom, <i>what if we didn’t like it?</i> Even as an Evangelical Christian myself, I was ashamed of all the pride and egotism prevalent in our movement. We claimed to be a people obedient to the bible, but in practice we made the bible obedient to ourselves. While staunchly defending the inerrancy and supremacy of the bible, we twisted and abused the scriptures to support our pet doctrines and beliefs. I began to suspect that our strident insistence on the authority of the bible was nothing more than a thinly-disguised defense of our own authority and independence. Clearly, we were a people who liked to be in charge.<br />
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How would we fare in the kingdom of heaven where our opinions no longer mattered and the rules were not ours to make up? How would we handle it when we were no longer calling the shots, because a King was made to rule over us with absolute authority? We all imagined that we would enjoy it of course, but how could we possibly know that when there was nothing in the evangelical Christian experience to help prepare us for this? We were learning how to be rulers, not the ruled. We thought our souls were prepared for heaven, but there was no way to know if they were being properly prepared for the kingdom of heaven.<br />
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When Christ said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” He was speaking the literal truth. Ten days after His ascension into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high, He sent the Holy Spirit to establish His Church, the outpost of the kingdom of heaven on earth, and the beginning of His eternal reign over the new creation.<br />
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As an Evangelical, “church” was one more thing that meant very little to me, because here again was something we had reinvented to support our independence. To an Evangelical, church is not the intersection of heaven and earth, the place where a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven is experienced that men might wrestle with the rule and authority of Christ, hopefully to submit. No, church is portrayed as “the great, invisible body of all true believers, regardless of denomination,” a most unbiblical definition, to say the least. We had stripped “church” of all authority and tradition, because these posed a threat to our own authority and traditions. Like the bible, like heaven, and perhaps even like God Himself, we had reinvented church to support our experiences and preferences.<br />
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It may seem that I have painted a fairly bleak picture of my Evangelical past, but in truth I am speaking of humanity itself. Mankind is fallen and broken and spiritually darkened and rebellious. For this reason no one accepts the reign of Christ easily. It is the same for Orthodox Christians as everyone else. This is why Jesus graciously established His Church upon the earth. The Church is man’s first encounter with the kingdom of heaven, the place where we can wrestle with God’s claim of absolute authority over us and learn to put to death our rebellious traits. Besides introducing me to Christ, which was a very good thing, the other benefit I derived from my Evangelical years was the lesson that we simply can’t be trusted to make our own rules. When we are in charge of deciding what is truth, we inevitably reduce it to fit what we want.<br />
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This is a lesson we must not forget as Orthodox Christian believers. The Holy Tradition of faith and life we have inherited in the Church is not ours to lay aside as we please. It is not up to us to make the rules, if we want to prepare ourselves for the kingdom of heaven. We do like to have our own way and do tend to feel that Orthodoxy is awfully demanding. I think we should see that the very thing we are struggling with is our acceptance of the reign of Christ in our lives. This is normal for a fallen and broken people, but Christ must win this struggle if His Church is to be of any eternal value to us. Now is the time for us to bring ourselves under the reign of Jesus Christ, lest we discover too late that we want nothing to do with it.<br />
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Our gracious Lord told us what to do and why we should do it when He said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” The Church is revealed as the beginning of the kingdom of heaven on earth, mankind’s introduction to the reign of Christ, given that we might find peace with God and eternal life when His kingdom comes in fullness at Christ’s second appearing. What a great gift His Church is to our fallen race! Let us not excuse ourselves from the struggle or make things too easy on ourselves in a time that is meant for us to submit to our King, Jesus Christ.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-45322860029834393902011-01-03T11:07:00.000-08:002011-01-03T11:07:16.995-08:00Repentance+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.<br />
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In the year 1949, British author George Orwell imagined a totalitarian regime in the near future of <i>1984</i> which controlled the populace largely through the manipulation of words. In Orwell’s novel, the government had successfully imposed a heavily-altered version of the English language called “Newspeak” in which the original meanings of any words which might prove troubling to the goals of the regime were stripped and replaced with new definitions that encouraged conformity with those goals. Orwell wisely grasped that any political power that can somehow control <i>what words mean</i> will gain complete control over the thoughts and actions of those who use them.<br />
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In our culture, we needn’t look long to find words that have been redefined to bring power to the groups behind the changes. One victim of this trend is the word “discrimination”. Younger people, trained to regard discrimination negatively, may not realize that it was once considered <i>a very good thing</i> to be a discriminating person. It implied that one had cultivated a higher level of wisdom and discernment, as well as the ability to distinguish between the good and the bad in life. In more recent times the word has been altered for use as an accusation of bigotry, racism, or homophobia against any who oppose certain political agendas. The word has been stripped of its original meaning and redefined to become a nasty label used to coerce and intimidate all so-called enemies of “Progress”.<br />
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What is interesting about this is that by losing the traditional meaning of the word <i>discrimination</i>, our society seems close to losing the actual practice of it as well. We are becoming a people who no longer prize true wisdom and godly discernment, and we increasingly struggle to distinguish between good and bad or even basic right and wrong in life. (Is it wrong for men to marry other men? No, we mustn’t ask that. We mustn’t discriminate!) By losing an important word from our vocabulary, is it possible we’ve nearly lost the very essence of what that word describes in the human experience?<br />
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If you’re wondering where I’m headed with this, there is another word--commonly used by Christians and featured prominently in our gospel lesson this morning--that is also in danger of being lost, both in meaning and in practice. That word is repentance.<br />
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From Mark’s gospel we heard that the Forerunner came preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In Acts 2, Peter also exclaimed to the multitude, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins”. Throughout the scriptures, baptism, repentance, and the forgiveness of sins are linked inseparably together. This is because, at least in the traditional understanding of things, baptism is the new birth of water and the Spirit which both washes and renews and begins a new life, the goal of which is to allow the spiritual healing of the believer through the gradual formation of Christ in him, who is Himself the image of perfect humanity, united and filled with God. It is the Holy Spirit who forms Christ in us, but we must cooperate with the Spirit’s work on a daily basis. This cooperation is what we call repentance, which is the the chief action and characteristic of the Christian life. Repentance is our daily, God-given opportunity to participate in all that He has made available in this new life for our transformation and spiritual healing.<br />
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We should note that baptism without an ongoing repentance, does very little good. It is like being born, but never growing up. From the moment of our new birth in Christ we are expected to enter into this life of repentance, a life of continuous movement toward God, that allows us to mature into the fullness of the stature of Christ. Repentance therefore is a very positive action, being the daily movement of the believer toward God, with God Himself helping us every step of the way.<br />
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But there are many Christians today who see repentance in a different way. For some, repentance is the rather negative, guilt-riddled action of constantly apologizing to God for the sins they endlessly commit. To add to this, many are taught that they have something called a sin nature which compels them to sin, meaning they can never truly stop sinning or find change. This is a false teaching, but one so ingrained in the thinking of many believers that they simply give up on resisting sin to claim that Christ forgives all.<br />
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It is not true that we have a sin nature. We have a human nature that is fallen. There’s a big difference between the two! Because our nature is fallen, we have acquired an unnatural propensity or inclination toward sin that is quite strong. But this propensity is contrary to our human nature and not integral to it. The holy fathers even taught that it is entirely against our nature to sin, and this is why sin brings such disastrous consequences to us. People are confusing propensity with nature and thus are being led to believe that they have no choice but to sin, when this is simply not true.<br />
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There is a popular Christian radio program called <i>People to People</i> that even goes so far as to insist that since we have a sin nature that compels us to sin, it is foolish for Christians to continually tell God they’re sorry or ask for His forgiveness. Their contention is that the Christian has already received forgiveness for all sins past, present, and future, so he should just forget about sin and repentance and enjoy the love and acceptance of Christ. It sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?<br />
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Besides the fact that our not having a sin nature negates that whole premise and makes us once against responsible for our actions, the other major flaw in that teaching is the idea that sin is nothing more than a legal infraction already paid for, rather than a terribly destructive force that breaks our communion with God and ruins human lives. If sin is ignored because of some doctrinal gimmick designed to us feel better, the results can only be disastrous.<br />
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There are many strange ideas about repentance, as the word seems to mean different things to different people. But there is only one true meaning to the word, and we must not lose that, lest we also lose the practice and the power of repentance itself. There is no avoiding the fact that repentance is difficult. True repentance allows for no shortcuts or clever gimmicks. It requires that we cooperate with God to wrestle violently against our strong propensity to sin in order that Christ might be formed in us by the power and operation of the Holy Spirit. Repentance is long, hard, and often discouraging work, but it is never our work alone. God is with us to help us every step of the way. Let us not shrink back from the work God calls us--even graciously allows us--to do. Let us embrace continual repentance as the core of our Orthodox Christian life, and by it, draw ever nearer to our God.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-28435118916896349512010-12-11T09:06:00.000-08:002010-12-11T09:06:12.386-08:00The Good Teacher+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen. <br />
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From our gospel lesson this morning [Luke 18:18-27] we heard that a man approached Jesus with a question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” On the surface, this might seem like a wonderful question right at the heart of the Christian message. However, things are not always as they first appear to be. We know that throughout the three years of our Lord’s ministry, many people approached Jesus with requests of one sort or another, but they nearly all pertained to earthly needs: <i>“Lord, grant me my sight,” “Lord, heal my daughter,” “Lord, tell my brother to divide our inheritance with me”.</i> Jesus saw it all, from the plaintive cries of truly hurting people, to the selfish desires of the utterly clueless. By comparison to these, it might seem that the young man in today’s lesson really had his act together. Nevertheless, if we dig a little deeper into the story we find that this man too had some serious misunderstandings regarding the person of Jesus Christ and His message concerning the kingdom of God. This accounts for the rather curious responses which our Lord gave to him, which were intended to help the man connect the dots and come closer to the truth.<br />
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The man first greeted our Lord saying, “Good Teacher”. Immediately Jesus asked him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God”. The heretics who deny Christ’s divinity love to twist this verse to make Jesus say, “Don’t call Me good. Only God is good and I am not God”. But of course that’s nowhere near what He actually said. Jesus did not say “<i>Don’t</i> call Me good” but instead asked the young man to consider, “Why do <i>you</i> call Me good?”<br />
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The goodness of Jesus was obvious to all. Repentant sinners saw His goodness and were attracted to Him. Even His enemies could find no fault in Him. Jesus’ goodness was equal to that of His Father’s. So also was His love, His holiness, His wisdom, and His power. What Jesus sought here was to make this man stop and think about what the source of this undeniable goodness might possibly be. “If you call Me good, and only God is good, then Who do you say that I am?”<br />
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The young man did not quite figure it all out at that moment. But if he was to keep the commandment that Jesus gave to him--sell all that you possess, distribute to the poor, and come, follow Me--he would soon need to put it all together in his heart. No mere rabbi had the authority to ask of this man what Jesus had dared to ask. If this young man was to come around to obedience, he would have to come first to the realization that this Jesus could only be the Son of God who comes forth from the bosom of the Father. If Jesus were truly that, then obedience to Him would be the only acceptable option. I would hope this is our conclusion as well.<br />
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Why did Jesus tell this man to sell all that he possessed and distribute to the poor in order to have treasure in heaven? It is because the young man had a false concept of the kingdom of heaven. The rich naturally want to live forever. This is why they plan carefully for their retirement, stay fit in the gym, and even have plastic surgery or take medications to continue the illusion of youth and vigor for as long as possible. For those who are poor or who have suffered much in this life, the promise of comfort in the life to come is most appealing. But the rich only want to continue enjoying the good things of this life forever. Notice that the young man did not ask, “How can I enter the kingdom of heaven?” or even, “How can I be saved?” but only, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” To a rich young man who had inherited everything else he enjoyed, the thought of sealing this forever by adding eternal life seemed to him like icing on the cake. Although he was not fully aware of this, he very much wanted heaven on his terms, which is a persistent human problem even to this day.<br />
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Jesus had to show this man that such selfish motives would not bring him into the kingdom. He also had to show him that the kingdom was not about earthly riches or pleasures extended forever, but about love and mercy, and the transformation necessary for those who lack such love and mercy. These concepts were likely beyond the capacity of this man to understand just then, so Jesus put it to him in a way that perhaps he <i>could</i> understand.<br />
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The young man was a lover of money, so Jesus told him that if he distributed his goods to the poor, he would gain treasure in heaven. This brought to the table two vital Christian concepts that should never be neglected. The first is that the life we prepare for ourselves in the kingdom of heaven is of far greater importance than any life we make on earth. The second is that whatever wealth we might now possess is not given by God for our own exclusive enjoyment, but also to share with those in need. The uncertainty of financial well-being in this life and the reality of death should be enough to convince us that we can truly possess nothing for very long. The money we have should be used to maintain a house of worship and to care for the poor, and then to meet our own needs. If we live in this order, we will not only loosen our white-knuckle grip on the fleeting things of this life, but will grow in the love and mercy that is found in God.<br />
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This is important to all of us. Often when confronting this lesson in the gospel we like to distance ourselves from it a bit by saying that the Lord didn’t give this commandment to sell all and give to the poor to every potential disciple, but only to this man. We then say it that must have been necessary to this man because he was especially rich or greedy or worldly-minded. We conclude by comforting ourselves that as long as we drop a dollar in the tithe box now and then and bring a few canned goods to the monthly collection for the poor, we fulfilling our religious obligations.<br />
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We should ask ourselves if this explanation isn’t just a little too <i>convenient</i>. If our desire is to hang on to what we have in this world but still be rewarded with heaven, how do we differ in any substantial way from this man? We want to keep all that we have and enjoy even more; so did he. We are fearful of giving generously and suffering want; so was he. We tend to care more about what we have than what our neighbor doesn’t have; so did he. The difference between us is what, exactly? It may be that, like this man, we also want heaven on our terms.<br />
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Some of us are facing real financial struggles in our lives to the point that we may not have much to spare. When we experience such difficulties, it is important to see that even these are from the hand of God for our salvation and to form in us a love of the kingdom to come. If in the midst of poverty we can still force the habit of regularly giving even a little bit with faith and love, we make the declaration that we will not allow circumstances to dictate our obedience to Christ. This is incredibly important, because we can just as easily form the habit of blaming God for our misfortune, and grasping at every penny as if our life and well-being depended on it. If we choose the former, we will grow in faith, in thanksgiving, and in the blessings of God. If we choose the latter, we will shut trust and confidence in God completely out of our lives.<br />
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And just as we have some who cannot give much, we also have many others who could give more, but do not because of financial priorities that do not place the kingdom of heaven first. Jesus taught that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also [Matthew 6:21]. This is an inescapable fact of life. If we do not place the kingdom first in our finances, it will not be first in our hearts no matter how devout we imagine ourselves to be. Giving is irrevocably connected to our devotion to God and our growth toward becoming people of the kingdom. This is not something that we can set aside or place on our own terms.<br />
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Perhaps we are not called to give all that we possess, but we are all called to give. We need to learn to place the kingdom of God first and be faithful stewards of whatever He has entrusted to us. Furthermore, our giving should always be more faith-based than strictly budget-based. When the budget comes first, we will never find the means to give. If we allow faith to lead even in small, faithful steps, we will find that these steps are leading us toward God and toward becoming rich in His kingdom. Giving can seem to us to be such an intensely personal subject, but in fact it is fundamental to the gospel and our Christian faith, and is something that all of us should be participating in as faithfully as possible. May our gracious Lord guide us in this most important Christian duty and lead us all toward becoming cheerful givers, that we might gain treasure in the kingdom of heaven.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-28778337765964389972010-10-27T16:12:00.000-07:002010-10-27T16:12:12.984-07:00The War for Souls+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.<br />
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In this morning’s gospel lesson from Luke [8:11-18], our Lord Jesus traveled by boat to the region of the Gadarenes [Gergesenes] whereupon disembarking, He encountered a man possessed by many demons. It was by no means unusual for Christ to encounter demon-possessed people during His ministry, or even people possessed by multiple demons, as in the case of Mary Magdalene from whom He cast out seven demons. But the man who called himself “Legion” was certainly out of the ordinary, due to the vast multitude of demons that had taken possession of him. In the Roman army a legion could consist of anywhere from 4200 to 5000 men. We don’t know how many demons this poor man had, but clearly his was a terribly extreme case.<br />
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The thing that has always struck me about this passage is that when Jesus asked the man his name, he replied, “My name is Legion”. The point is that the demons had so completely stripped this man of his self-identity that he no longer knew his own name. This is precisely how the demons operate. There goal is to persuade people to forfeit their humanity a piece at a time until they can gain control to overwrite the image of God in men with their own foul and wicked image.<br />
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The various exorcism movies that Hollywood has produced would have us believe that demons just randomly take over innocent people for no particular reason, but this is seldom the case in real life. Most often the people who wind up controlled by demons are those who have in some way cooperated with them, opening the doors to darkness and possession themselves. Man is made to grow and change, but sometimes the change we might make is toward evil.<br />
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We often forget what a marvelous creation the human being is. We so seldom think of ourselves this way, but we truly are the masterpiece, the crowning achievement of all God’s creative actions. <i>“More honorable than the cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim”</i> describes not just our Most Holy Lady Theotokos now, but potentially all human beings who advance in the divine glorification our Creator has made available to us. Of all His creatures, man alone is endowed with the capacity for unlimited growth and change in order that we might continue through all time and eternity to become by grace what God is by nature. We sometimes might imagine that our one and only period of growth takes place when we are children, so that by the time we reach the ripe old age of 25 or whatever we more or less fossilize, making further change impossible. What utter nonsense!<br />
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Let us remember that God made us out of clay, not stone, and clay is infinitely moldable and changeable, until it is hardened by fire. My point is that as long as we have life, we have the capacity to grow toward God and become everything our Creator intended for us to be, if we so choose. The flip side to change and choice is that we can also move away from God, indulging the passions of the fallen flesh to become darker and more evil, essentially inviting the demonic spirits to have much greater influence in our life and perhaps even dominate it, as we saw with the man in our gospel lesson. The choice is ours.<br />
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Many times our choices are influenced by the company we keep and the culture we look to for guidance. The region of the Gadarenes was known for being populated by notoriously non-observant Jews that shared the area with pagan Gentiles who routinely engaged in animal sacrifices to demons. The fact that we find Jewish herdsmen raising swine, and an entire community that came out to beg Jesus to leave after He had healed the demoniac, indicates that these people had drifted pretty far from their ancestral religion. The man who called himself Legion had almost certainly derived his moral compass from this corrupted culture in which he lived. The resulting bad choices he would have made are very likely what allowed him to fall under the influence of demons, leading to his possession.<br />
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This is of particular importance to us since the society in which we live has also grown to become exceedingly corrupt. Sexual immorality, drug use, and human sacrifice--once the dark and forbidden stuff of satanic rituals--is now being repackaged and sold to the general population as hooking up, getting high, and family planning. People who are informed by that culture instead of the culture of the Church often make terrible decisions that bring great loss and suffering to themselves and to others. Many people who were promised the good life of pleasure and freedom by our society are in fact opening the doors to hell in their lives to find only depression, devastation, and further brokenness. Like the man who called himself Legion, many people are winding up naked--that is to say, stripped of spiritual grace and beauty--and dwelling among the tombs--that is to say, living with the dead, their fellow pleasure-seekers--and unable to find any real joy or meaning in life. People are literally losing their humanity and no longer have any idea of what they themselves were created to be: children of God, destined for holiness and eternal life rather than sin and spiritual death.<br />
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Each of us needs to recalibrate our own moral compass by the life and teachings of the Church, and learn to recognize and reject the demonic influences pervading the popular culture of today. Unlike the Holy Spirit, Who is meek, and Who graciously invites our cooperation with God to grow in holiness, the demons are cruel, and forcefully impose their will upon us, assaulting us with evil suggestions from our youth up, crafting the destructive values and worldview they want us to hold, and actively forming an atmosphere of godlessness in society that is increasingly hostile to Christian faith and morality.<br />
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With all that being true, we might wonder why God permits the demons to exist. Why doesn’t He simply gather them all up now and cast them into the abyss so they can no longer torment us? Our Holy Fathers have given us a very clear answer to this question: God allows the demons to exist for our salvation.<br />
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Let’s be honest: we are a fallen and broken people who don’t come to our Heavenly Father quite as often or quite as fervently as we should. We may keep the fasts, come to the services, and do all the things the Church tells us to do, but at the same time can lose sight of the fact that the Christian life is not about meeting God’s expectations, but about meeting God! The purpose of our prayers and everything else the Holy Spirit enables us to do is that we might come into the knowledge of God and be united with Him in everlasting communion. As strange as it seems, God can even use the evil demons to accomplish this goal in our lives. As they are allowed to torment us and accuse us and throw their many temptations in our path, the sorrows they cause can actually drive us, finally and desperately, to turn to God with much greater fervency. The Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos once said that without the devil to tempt us, we would think ourselves to be saints already and would never call upon the Lord to save us. The demons can melt away our complacency, teaching us that all is not well with this world, and help us to at last seek heaven as our only true and abiding home. So yes, even the demons have a purpose in God’s good and benevolent plan.<br />
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It is not our job to defeat the demons; Christ has already accomplished this for us. Our job is to resist them, to break free from their influence, and to flee unto God for salvation. God’s desire is to clothe us in His grace, and restore us to our right mind and full humanity, as He did for the demoniac in today’s gospel lesson. The choice for this is ours to make daily. I pray that we will always make it wisely.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21822203.post-32197283047422933342010-10-27T16:08:00.000-07:002010-10-27T16:08:54.064-07:00A Golden Beginning to Love+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen. <br />
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In today’s gospel lesson (Luke 6:31-36) our Lord declared “And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise”. We are perhaps more familiar with the wording, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. As far as rules of conduct go, this one is golden. It gives us a shining yardstick for measuring our thoughts and actions toward others in such a way that can help lead toward the formation of a more perfect love within us.<br />
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The ancient rabbis had a similar rule, only theirs was expressed in the negative. They taught, “whatever you don’t want men to do to you, do not do to them”. This was a very good rule, but Christ turned it around and made it into something far better. Not only should we not do to men the bad things we would not want done to us, but we should now proactively do for men the good things we might wish them to do for us.<br />
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As much improved as Christ’s version of this “golden rule” is, we might note that it still does not quite embody the absolute perfection of love. In fact, it is rather a large step down from that. The one who has become perfected in love has become like God in that his every thought and action toward others is formed by love and becomes an expression of love, just as we see in God Himself. Such a one needs no outer rule of any sort to guide him, for the perfect rule of love already guides his heart in all things, and is manifested in all his words and deeds.<br />
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But what about us? I would dare say that most of us are not perfected in love just yet. Probably too much of the time we are still guided by our fallen and perverse self-love, and think and act toward others out of selfish instincts rather than out of the utter selflessness that is the essence of God’s love. How miserably and regrettably we can act toward others every day of our lives! And yet, it is to such imperfect and often unloving people as ourselves that our Lord has mercifully offered this little rule to guide us toward something much higher.<br />
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“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Doesn’t the very wording suggest that even this greatly improved rule is still meant for people who are basically rooted in selfishness? In our current state, we might not even know how to love, but each and every one of us certainly does know how we like to be treated by others! The golden rule seemingly capitalizes on this terrible “me first” orientation, teaching us to turn it around and use it to begin putting others first in our lives.<br />
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We might say that the golden rule represents a divine recognition of our brokenness and a remarkable concession to our weakness, coming all the way down to our level and showing us great mercy, while at the same time offering us a tangible path that can lead us ever upward toward the higher levels of healing and perfection and love.<br />
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If our Lord had merely said to us, “Love everybody perfectly,” our boat would be sunk before we left the dock. There’s no question that He wants us to become perfect in love, but how do we grow from being what we are to what we need to become? This is how. In the midst of coming to church, saying your prayers, going to confession to correct yourself, tithing, and fasting, and all else that you are called to do, add this little rule and begin treating others as you would wish to be treated. Start taking little, baby steps toward a better way. It is not perfect; it is not even quite love, really. But it is infinitely better than treating people selfishly as we often do. It may even represent the very best that we can do right now in our present condition. If we will start with this, God will help us, and will even begin forming His love within us. God gives His gifts to those who demonstrate that they want them. If we want love, we must press toward that love in our lives in any way that we can.<br />
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In the ’60’s there was a pop song that declared, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love; that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” Well love is fine, but just imagine how much better our world would be if everyone in it did nothing more than to simply follow the golden rule of treating others as they themselves would be treated. Maybe that wouldn’t be perfect “love, sweet love” but it would still bring an amazing transformation to this world of ours, perhaps making love a much greater possibility.<br />
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Imagine nations no longer exploiting one another or governments their own people. Imagine Big Business with a genuine social conscious, or world religions that didn’t wage “holy wars” against one another. It is almost inconceivable to us how great the results from these changes could be. Perhaps we should simplify that dream a bit and merely imagine what it might be like if ordinary people began treating one another with the kindness they would like to receive. What if everyone worked in their communities or at their jobs with a sincere desire to promote the greatest good for all? No one would ever have to go hungry or live in gang and drug infested ghettos or hate their jobs! What if people drove on our roads and freeways with regard for others? We would have no further need of horns or middle fingers! What if men and women no longer dehumanized and exploited one another for personal or sexual gratification, but learned to treat each other with dignity? Priests would be working full time performing marriages and baptisms, and divorce attorneys and abortion doctors would have to seek new employment!<br />
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Let’s narrow it down even more. What if all of us in this parish truly looked out for one another, caring for one another's needs and the needs of everyone who walked through our doors? No person would ever go neglected and each of us would have rich purpose and a sense of genuine ministry in our lives! So often people feel as if their lives have no meaning, but that is because they are so wrapped up in themselves that they fail to see that service to others is the very thing that gives our lives purpose. What if we decided to stop judging, or gossiping, or focusing on other's imperfections simply because we have enough of our own? Perhaps we would finally be free to find the beauty in others and begin to beautify our own souls as well! What if we all supported our parish and its ministry with prayers and financial offerings, with punctual attendance, and with a cheerful pitching in to help with all our activities? We might find faith and an understanding that it is truly more blessed to give than to receive! What if we made all of our personal or family decisions with the needs of our parish community in mind? We would always choose that which is godly and morally pure, that which would build up our community and make it stronger, and we would never act as selfish “individuals” whose only goal in life is to please themselves.<br />
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As you can see, these things might not be perfect Christian love, but they certainly have the potential to advance us far beyond the personal hell of self-absorption. The more we care for ourselves alone, the more abstract and distant Christianity seems and the love of God becomes. We cannot love Christ if we do not love one another. Yet we often have so very little love for one another compared to the love we have for ourselves. Thus the good Christ gently intrudes into our lives with the suggestion that we begin to treat one another at least as well as we ourselves would like to be treated. It’s a remarkable thought, yet one that’s at least within our meager capabilities even now. It’s like love with training wheels, for those of us who need a little help. What a great mercy God has shown us! Let us take it, act on it, and follow the path toward a more perfect love.<br />
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+To the glory of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Fr. Michael Reaganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02265035749268657422noreply@blogger.com0