Heb. 4: 14-5:6
Mark 8: 34-9:1

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

A nurse escorted a tired, anxious young man to the bed-side of an elderly man. "Your son is here," she whispered to the patient. She had to repeat the words several times because his pain required that he be heavily sedated. With his eyes closed, he reached out his hand and the young man tightly wrapped his fingers around it, squeezing a message of encouragement. The nurse brought a chair next to the bedside. All through the night the young man sat holding the old man’s hand and offering gentle words of hope. The dying man said nothing as he held tightly to his son.

As dawn approached, the patient died. The young man placed the old man’s now lifeless hand on the bed and he went to notify the nurse. She began to offer words of sympathy to the young man, but he interrupted her by asking, “Who was that man?" The startled nurse replied, "I thought he was your father"

"No,” the young man replied, “he wasn’t my father; in fact, I never saw him before in my life." The nurse was shocked. "Then why didn't you say something when I took you to him?" she asked. The young man replied, "I knew he needed his son, and his son just wasn't here. When I realized he was too sick to tell whether or not I was his son, I knew how much he needed for me to be his son."

How many of us so readily call ourselves a Christian, and yet would not have quietly sacrificed our night for that dying old man? As Jesus Christ has shown us, sacrifice is at the heart of being a Christian. Do we here, this morning, give any real thought to the consequences of our following Jesus Christ, or are we simply used to calling ourselves Christians?

Just as Jesus once asked his Disciples, so too he asks each of us: “Who do you say that I am?” This is not a safe question since in it Jesus directly asks whether or not a person is committed to their relationship with him, since it is only from within that relationship that we can know him.

In this morning’s Gospel Christ tells us what the consequences will be of our being in relationship with him: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

There’s no way around it: If we are to be followers of Jesus Christ, we must take up our crosses, just as he has instructed. Jesus was not saying that we should seek out pain needlessly, but that if we truly aspire to be like him then we must be willing to do what he has done…to carry the cross that comes to us, in order to do God’s will.

Fred and Tom were traveling through a pass high in the Himalayan Mountains when they came across a body lying in the snow. They checked for vital signs and discovered that the man was still alive, although barely. Fred prepared to stop and help, but Tom objected, saying, "He’s practically dead already! We’ll lose our own lives if we burden ourselves with him. Let’s go on." But Fred wouldn’t even think of leaving the man to die in the snow, and as he lifted the man up onto his back Tom left without him.

With an exertion made all the greater by the high altitude and snowy conditions, Fred carried the man onward. As he walked, the heat cast off by his body began to warm the man. The man revived and, after a while, both were walking together side by side, holding each other up, and in turn, each giving body heat to the other. Before long they came upon yet another traveler's body lying in the snow. Upon closer inspection, they discovered him to be dead, frozen by the cold. The body was Tom’s. In the end, Fred’s self-denial not only saved the other man, but himself as well.

This idea of self-denial is not a popular concept in a society which views fulfillment of the individual as founded upon possessions. As a result, even we “Christians” may well view self-denial with… not only distaste, but as being unnecessary for our happiness.
The ancients called our problem “Acedia”: an aversion to spiritual things and an undue concern for the external and the worldly. When Christ tells us this morning to “take up” our cross, this injunction flies in the face of all that the culture around us tells us constitutes happiness. There is a danger that we may, in fact, be more cultural than Christian.
What, in the end, really is “happiness”? By way of answering this question, in this morning’s Gospel, Jesus Christ poses another disturbing question to his disciples: “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?... What will a man give in exchange for his soul” According to Jesus Christ, happiness is not found in possessions, which pass away, but in becoming like God the father… and we do that by following Christ’s precepts.

At an afternoon tea for officers and their wives, the commanding general of the base delivered a seemingly endless oration. A young second lieutenant, listening with obvious irritation, grumbled to the woman at his side, "What a pompous and unbearable old windbag that slob is." The woman turned to him, her face red with rage and said, "Lieutenant, do you know who I am?" The startled soldier replied, "No, ma'am." Puffing herself up, the woman said, "I am the wife of the man you just called 'an unbearable old windbag.' " "Indeed," said the young lieutenant, and then asked, "And do you know who I am?" The general’s wife replied, "No, I don't." "Thank God," said the lieutenant as he disappeared into the crowd.

If we call ourselves a Christian, then we cannot simply disappear into the crowd since Christ knows his followers and asks each one: “Who do you say that I am?” The way that we live is our response, and our way of living had better convey that we know what we are talking about when we call ourselves a Christian.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Heb. 11: 24-26, 32-12:2
John 1: 43-51

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!
Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific, fain would I fathom thy nature specific. Loftily poised in the ether capacious, strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.
Are you confused by what I just read? Then let me translate: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.
For the sake of those who hear us, when we speak we should speak clearly so that what we are saying might be understood. This applies to us Christians as much as it does to poetic texts.
In the beginning of this morning’s Gospel reading Jesus Christ says to Philip, “Follow me.” Those of us who follow Christ, as indicated by our calling ourselves Christians, are honor-bound to attest to truth, wherever it may occur, since Christ said of himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the light.”
The event that we commemorate today, the Triumph of Orthodoxy, was such a big deal because it celebrates the triumph of truth over falsehood. The Sunday of Orthodoxy was first instituted in 843, to celebrate the triumph of right belief over the heretical belief that God could not be painted because he is eternal and invisible, and that, therefore, the veneration of icons was tantamount to idol worship.
In reality, however, Icons, or images, were not really the issue; this was not a dispute about “art”. What was the issue was the Orthodox belief that Jesus Christ is God’s own proto-image: that in seeing Jesus Christ we have seen God himself. The decision that the Ecumenical Council came to was that since Christ had a body and “dwelt among us” it was entirely permissible to portray him in images, and that when the images are venerated the respect and honor expressed to them passes through them to the one portrayed… much as happens when we kiss a photo of a dearly beloved departed one. Therefore, the iconoclast heresy was not simply a controversy over religious art, but over the entire meaning of Jesus Christ’s Incarnation and its implication for our salvation.
The essence of heresy is that it is like a masquerader, purporting to be what it is not. A modern-day heresy masquerading as truth is the heresy of relativism, the position that you can believe what you want to believe, and I can believe what I want to believe, and that both beliefs are “true”, even when they conflict. Today’s relativism says that truth is relative and that there is no absolute measure of it.
Translating catchy advertising slogans into Spanish can be a tricky business. When Braniff Airlines beckoned its passengers to "Fly in Leather," what a Spanish speaker heard was that Braniff was urging them to “Fly Naked”. When Eastern Airlines proclaimed that "We Earn Our Wings Daily," the Spanish translation of the slogan evoked a final destination in heaven, following death. General Motors discovered, too late, that "Nova", the name of their new car, literally means "Doesn't go" in Spanish. Coors encouraged its English-speaking customers to "Turn It Loose," but the phrase in Spanish means "Suffer from Diarrhea." Budweiser's "King of Beers" becomes "Queen of Beers" in Spanish because the Spanish word for beer, "cerveza," has a feminine ending.
Let us be careful of what we say to our culture by how we live. A western theologian has said that we may proclaim the whole truth of Orthodoxy and at the same time deface it, that we may give the lie to what Orthodoxy teaches by the way in which we live, showing with our life that Orthodoxy is merely words and not a lived reality. This, then, is something for us to repent of as we enter the second week of Great Lent: Our willingness to “just get along” with our society, to compromise the truth of Christ’s teachings by the manner in which we live.
A study of married couples concluded that, after 8 years, they have nothing more to say to each other. Professor Hans Jurgens asked 5000 German husbands and wives how often they talked to each other. After 2 years of marriage, most of them managed two or three minutes of chat over breakfast, more than 20 minutes over the evening meal and a few more minutes in bed. By the sixth year, that was down to 10 minutes a day. A state of "almost total speechlessness" was reached by the eighth year of marriage.
So, on the other hand… can the way that we live be perceived, by our culture, as a state of almost total speechlessness? Does the way that we live speak of Christ’s truth? No less than those whom we commemorate this morning, we, too, are called to speak the truth to our culture so that it might be nourished and enabled to grow in a correct relationship with God.

Let us, disciples of Jesus Christ, pass on the truth about Jesus Christ by how we live, and let us not be followers of the modern-day heresy of relativism. Let it be able to be said of us Orthodox that we, like Christ, are proto-icons of God…that in seeing us, hearing us, watching us…others see the falsehood of our culture’s heresies, and that through our presence we, like Christ, enable those who walk in darkness to see the One for Whom their hearts yearn.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Heb. 1: 10-2:3
Mark 2: 1-12

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, nad of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Bob was recovering from complicated heart surgery, and every day took a slow and gentle walk around the town for exercise. His wife, Delores, always walked him down the front sidewalk, and as Bob went off she retrieved the day’s mail from the mailbox.

One day, after waving goodbye to her husband, she took the mail inside and opened it. She was informed that her husband had just won 2 million dollars in a sweepstakes that he had entered. Delores was both ecstatic, and then terrified, as she remembered the doctor specifically telling her that under no condition was Bob to be shocked or upset until the surgery had healed.

So Delores called Bob’s best friend, who also happened to be their Pastor. The Pastor told her that he was sure he could break the news to Bob in a way that would not upset him. So by the time Bob got home from his walk Delores and the Pastor were having coffee in the living room. “Pastor Fred, good to see you!” Bob exclaimed as he shook his old friend’s hand and sat down.

The Pastor began, "Bob, I've got a problem and I need your advice." Bob replied, "Sure, Pastor, if I can help, I'll be glad to." The pastor said, “Well, there’s this theoretical situation. What would a person do… oh, say, take you for instance… if all of a sudden you found out that you had won 2 million dollars? What would you do with all that money?" "Oh, that's easy," Bob replied, "I'd start by giving 1 million of it to the church." At that… the Pastor dropped dead.

Now, if anyone here this morning wants to give the church a million dollars, I promise that I won’t drop dead. The point about this little story, however, is not about the money but about a friend’s willingness to help another friend heal.
The 4 friends in this morning’s Gospel story were intent on helping their friend find healing. We all know the basics of the story: 4 friends lower their paralyzed friend into Jesus’ presence; Jesus heals him of his paralysis, and the man gets up and walks away.
St. Mark doesn’t tell us much about the paralytic man in this passage. We don’t really know for sure what kinds of medical treatment he had sought to treat his condition. But one thing that St. Mark makes clear is the healing power of friendship.
Since 1368 this second Sunday of Great Lent has also been dedicated to the memory of St. Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, even though one notices that neither the epistle nor the gospel for this day have any direct bearing on him. This is because the commemoration of Palamas was only introduced in the 14th century, when the liturgical structure for this Second Sunday of Great Lent had already been established along different lines.
St. Gregory Palamas was a Greek theologian and an exponent of that approach to prayer known as Hesychasm. This term means “to be silent” and this approach to prayer concentrates on the proper use of the Jesus prayer, on one’s posture and breathing during prayer. This approach attempted to bring about a union of the mind and the heart of the one employing it. And union of the mind and heart IS what Great Lent is about; it… like friendship, like forgiveness… is about healing.
Years after her experience in a Nazi Germany concentration camp, Corrie ten Boom found herself standing face to face with one of the most cruel and heartless German guards she had ever met in the camps. This man had humiliated and degraded both her and her sister, jeering at them as they stood in the delousing shower. And there he was again, standing before her with an outstretched hand, asking, "Will you forgive me?"
Corrie has written: "I stood there with coldness clutching at my heart, but I know that the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. I prayed, 'Jesus, help me!' Woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me and I experienced an incredible thing. A current seemed to start in my shoulder, raced down into my arm and sprang into our clutched hands. Then this warm reconciliation seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. 'I forgive you, brother,' I cried with my whole heart. For a long moment we grasped each other's hands… him, the former guard, and me, the former prisoner. I have never known the love of God so intensely as I did in that moment!"
When we forgive, two prisoners are set free… the other, and ourselves. Forgiveness is a healing of the distance between offender and the offended, a healing of misunderstanding between friend and friend.
During this coming third week of Great Lent, let us question our unwillingness to be a friend to others, or to even be friendLY to others! Let us wonder at what part the issue of “inconvenience” might play in our un-friendliness. How many times in our life have we, unlike this morning’s 4 friends, failed to “do whatever it takes” for someone simply because embracing inconvenience… was just not convenient?
Let’s face it; we live in a world that thrives on convenience. We have convenience stores, drive through restaurants, and even drive through pharmacies. In Las Vegas they have drive through wedding chapels. We seem to be a nation obsessed with convenience at all costs.

What about us? During our work-week it is not convenient to get up a little earlier each morning so that we can talk with God. It is not convenient to watch a little less mindless drivel on Saturday night so that we CAN get up early enough to come to Sunday Matins. It is not convenient to be the one to clean the Residence toilets.

We should wonder to what extent this issue of “convenience” affects our relationship with God. If we really want to grow in our relationship with God, we are going to have start embracing inconvenience; God knows, the cross was not convenient for Jesus Christ! We are going to have to be willing to tear off a roof or two for others. And let us not kid ourselves: If we are unwilling to sacrifice for others, we can be sure that we are unwilling to sacrifice for God.

Some of the pain that we suffer in our lives is of our own making, stemming from our basic attitude of “unwillingness”. For some of us, that unwillingness has even resulted in interior paralysis.

A man was driving to work one morning when he bumped fenders with another motorist. Both cars stopped, and the woman driving the other car got out to survey the damage. She was distraught, saying, “It’s my fault! Oh no, this is a new car, only two days from the showroom, my husband will kill me!”

Nonetheless, the man insisted they follow standard procedure and exchange information. The woman reached into her glove compartment, and clipped to the registration and insurance was a piece of paper which read: "In case of accident, remember, Honey, it's you I love, and not the car."

There is no denying the healing power of love, of friendship, and of forgiveness. We are now entering the third week of Great Lent, and it seems the right time to ask the question: What are we doing about forgiveness this Great Lent? What are we willing to do about it this next week? God doesn’t ask that we tear off a roof this coming week; all that he asks is that we be willing to be a friend and forgive someone.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Rom 13: 11-14:4
Matt. 6: 14-21

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

A stranger was walking down a residential street and noticed a man struggling with a washing machine at the doorway of his house. When the newcomer volunteered to help, the homeowner was overjoyed, and the two men together began to work and struggle with the bulky appliance. After several minutes of fruitless effort the two stopped and just stared at each other in frustration. They both looked as if they were on the verge of total exhaustion. Finally, when they had caught their breath, the stranger said to the homeowner, "We'll never get this washing machine in there!" To which, the startled homeowner replied, "In? I'm trying to move it out of here!"

Sometimes, we make unintentional mistakes. Sometimes, we, and others, deliberately lash out. Either way, forgiveness of the other is required if relationships are to be restored. This is why the Church offers the sacrament of Confession.
Why is it that when we come to Confession the same old sins are usually on our list time after time? Could it be that there is something about repentance that we are not catching onto?
Last Sunday, Meatfare Sunday, was the last day that we will partake of meat until Pascha. This Sunday, Cheesefare Sunday, is the last day for the consumption of eggs, milk, butter and cheese. At Vespers today the Great Fast begins. But this Sunday has to do with more than just food; this Sunday is also called “Forgiveness Sunday”.

Dr. Victor E. Frankl, survivor of three grim years at Auschwitz and other Nazi prisons, has recorded his observations on life in Hitler's camps: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

One thing that marks us as humans is our ability to choose, to make choices. It is possible that we choose to not forgive others their offenses. Sometimes, though, the offense that we imagine was not real. Sometimes, we take real delight in jumping to conclusions about the supposed injustices done to us, and then savoring the taste of our unwillingness to forgive. There is a certain perverse satisfaction in viewing ourselves as the injured party, and, sometimes, we would rather carry on about how we’ve been wronged than to forgive the injustice.

It is not easy to give up our supposed “right” to be hurt, or our supposed “right” to be angry. But what God forgives, God forgets. To forgive and forget an offense is to be like God, which is the very meaning of Deisis. Which leads us to wonder: Is my unwillingness to forget an injustice a proof of my unwillingness to be like God?

What exactly does it mean to forgive? Fr. Alexander Schmemann once wrote, “The triumph of sin, the main sign of its rule over the world, is division, separation, hatred. Therefore, the first break through this fortress of sin is forgiveness… which is a return to unity, solidarity, love.”

Restoring a relationship to its original status, however, requires more than just our forgiving of the other. We all have made mistakes in our life and hurt others, and need to ask for their forgiveness as well. One way of engendering the suppleness of heart needed to ask for the forgiveness of others… is by fasting.

Fasting and Forgiveness are the external manifestations of a heart invested in becoming like God. As we begin Great Lent this year, let us ask ourselves: Is our heart’s treasure found in remembering offenses committed against us, or in becoming more like God?

After wandering lost for days in a dark, overgrown forest, a man stumbled upon a great red barn. Seeking refuge from the howling winds of a storm that seemed to rage perpetually in the forest, he went inside. The man found a lamp, and lit it and, to his astonishment, he discovered that this was the barn where Satan kept his storehouse of seeds to be sown in human hearts. More curious than fearful, he began to explore the piles and bins of seeds around him. He couldn't help but notice that the containers labeled "seeds of discouragement" far outnumbered any other type of seed. Just then, one of Satan's demons arrived to pick up a fresh supply of seed. The man asked him why there was such an abundance of discouragement seeds. The demon laughed, "Because they are so effective and they take root so quickly!" The man then asked, "Do they grow everywhere?" At this the demon became sullen. He glared at the man and admitted in disgust, "No. They never seem to thrive in the heart of a grateful person."

Maybe we don’t forgive others because we are not truly grateful for what we have been forgiven. Great Lent is about our journey back home to God our father. At Vespers today we will participate in the Rite of Mutual Forgiveness, in which we ask one another’s pardon for our offenses committed during this past year. Why does the Church choose to begin Great Lent this way? The answer is… because there can be no genuine reconciliation with God unless we are at the same time reconciled with one another… and reconciliation begins with forgiveness.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

1 Cor. 8: 8-9:2
Matt. 25: 31-46

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

There was a man who worked on the 4pm to midnight shift, and he always walked home after work. One night the moon was shining so brightly that he decided to take a shortcut through the cemetery, which would save him roughly a half-mile walk. Unaware, as he was walking through the cemetery, that a new, deep grave had just been dug that day, he stumbled down into it. He tried, desperately, to get out of the hole, but, despite all his efforts, he could not climb out. So he decided to just relax and wait until morning when someone would help him out. Suddenly, the town drunk fell into the dark hole. The other man reached out and touched the drunk on the leg, and said, "Friend, you can't get out of here." At that, the drunk practically catapulted out of the hole.

It’s amazing what you can do, given the right motivation. The question posed by today’s Gospel reading is: What motivates us? What priorities do we hold that influence how we live out our life? What is the most important criterion that forms the basis of those priorities?

This morning’s Gospel speaks about priorities and a coming judgment, a judgment where the nature of our eternity will be determined. Jesus speaks about a time when all that we currently value won’t mean a thing. The only thing that will matter is: What is Jesus’ judgment of me and my life? Do I measure up to his Gospel? Am I one of the sheep… or one of the goats?

At first glance, this morning’s Gospel passage seems to suggest that Jesus’ judgment of those on his left was based upon the things that they did for the poor, the implication of this being that Christians are to earn their way to heaven by doing things. But this is a misunderstanding: deeds are not a ticket to heaven… which, in any case, cannot be purchased. What Christ is trying to point out is that the things that we do for others… or don’t do for others… are evidence of what is in the heart, and… as always… it is the heart that Jesus is after.

Our actions spring from our heart, and in the end… despite God’s love for us… we will be held responsible for those actions. When Jesus says that those on his left will not enter heaven because of their lack of kindness to the poor, the sick and the needy, he is really saying that their lack of compassion is evidence of a heart made indifferent by self-centeredness.

Like most of Jesus’ parables, this morning’s Gospel story turns our assumptions upside-down. Most of us think of meeting God some day in the future when in fact, Jesus is saying, God is already here in our midst. This Gospel passage is a reminder that our actions with others are a reflection of the kind of relationship we actually have with God. If we cultivate an ability to ignore those around us, then it is quite likely that we actually do the same to God.
Today is also known as “Meatfare Sunday”, the last day, until Pascha, when the consumption of meat is allowed. This day is called Meatfare because during the week following it a limited fasting… meaning, abstention from meat… is prescribed by the church. With Meatfare Sunday the Church now begins to adjust us to the great effort which she will expect from us seven days later when we officially begin Great Lent. By giving up meat this week, the Church gradually takes us into that effort.
Meat, however, is not really the issue at the heart of this coming spiritual struggle to regain our balance, which is why the Church also calls this Sunday “Judgment Sunday”. The struggle, therefore, is not with meat, but with our ongoing self-centeredness.

A certain organization offered a bounty of $5,000 for wolves captured alive. The offer turned Sam and Jed into fortune hunters. Day and night they scoured the mountains and forests looking for their valuable prey. Exhausted one night, they fell asleep under a tree in an open field. Suddenly, Sam awoke to see that they were surrounded by a pack of a hundred wolves with flaming eyes and bared teeth. Sam nudged his friend and said, "Jed, wake up! We're rich!"
Sometimes, our greed can make us blind even to danger. Great Lent and its emphasis on self-denial offers us an opportunity to seek release from those things that we have allowed, often unconsciously, to make us blind and to hold us captive… and the greatest of these is our love of ourselves. The struggle of the coming Great Lent is the struggle to pry our fingers off of ourselves, and through asceticism, to learn the necessity of opening our arms to others.
We need one another. And if we think that we don’t need others, then this morning’s Gospel makes all too clear that we are also saying that we don’t need God. If any attitude, and way of living, could be said to be in need of changing, this is surely one.

Make no mistake about it: We are tainted by our narcissistic culture:
I was hungry… and you went out to eat. I was imprisoned… and you thanked God that you were not me. I was naked… and you, with your full closet, complained that you had nothing that you wanted to wear. I was sick… and you avoided being contaminated by me. I was homeless… and you installed more locks on your doors. I was lonely… and you told me to just get over it.
What will we do when, on the day of our judgment, God asks us what we did for others? Will our excuse of “I simply didn’t have the time for others” be found acceptable? After hearing this morning’s Gospel reading, I wouldn’t count on it.
It is said that about 200 years ago, the tomb of the great conqueror Charlemagne was opened. The sight the workmen saw was startling. There was the great king’s body, in a sitting position, clothed in the most elaborate of kingly garments, with a scepter in a bony hand. On his knee lay the Holy Scriptures, with a cold, lifeless finger of the other hand pointing to Mark 8:36: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

When we go home to our comfortable lives this afternoon, we might all want to reflect upon Christ’s words in this morning’s Gospel, and ask ourselves: What do I do for others? Do I do anything for others? What will be the outcome for me if I continue thinking and living this way?

We need to take this seriously because, like it or not, the ending of this morning’s Gospel makes clear that there is such a thing as awareness coming too late, and that is what being a goat is all about:
“And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Glory to Jesus Christ!

2 Tim. 3: 10-15
Luke 18: 10-14

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

A minister asked a little boy whether he prayed every day. "No, not every day," replied the little boy. “Well, why not,” asked the minister. In frustration the boy replied, “Because some days I don't WANT anything!"

Aside from chuckling, how many of us are standing here this morning thinking, “I would never think that way about prayer; I’m not like that.” In fact, many of us probably think that there’s nothing really wrong with us. “There’s nothing wrong with me” can be a dangerous thing to say; spiritually, it is probably the worst thing a person could possibly assume.

The verse right before today’s Gospel reading states: “Also, he spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.” This morning’s Gospel parable has, at its heart, a warning for us about the blindness of our assumptions about ourselves.

The Pharisees spoken of in this morning’s Gospel reading were an ancient sect among the Jews known for their diligent observance of the outward matters of the Law. As a result of their public holiness they were thought by all… including themselves… to be righteous.

The Pharisee’s prayer began well enough: “God, I thank thee…” But then his heart revealed its secret agenda when he continued: “… that I am not like other men.” The Pharisee’s great sin is summed up in his assumption, “…I am not like other men,” and it was that assumption that made him blind to how he really was.

A woman in an airport bought a book to read and a package of cookies to eat while she waited for her plane. After she had taken her seat in the terminal and gotten engrossed in her book, she noticed that the man one seat away from her was fumbling to open the package of cookies on the seat between them. She was so shocked that a stranger would eat her cookies that she didn't really know what to do, so she just reached over and took one of the cookies and ate it. The man reached over and took another. So the woman took another… until they were down to one cookie, whereupon the man reached over, broke the cookie in half, and, taking his half, got up and left. As the announcement blared overhead to board and the woman fumed over the audacity of the stranger, she opened her purse to get her ticket… and there was her still-unopened package of cookies.

“Thank you, Lord that I am not like other men!” Assumptions may lead us away from the truth. Even though we may feel repulsed by the attitude and the behavior of the Pharisee, if we are honest with ourselves we will admit that there are more than a few times when our resemblance to him is uncomfortably accurate. This morning’s parable is given to us by the Fathers to point out to us that every one of us, to a greater or a lesser degree, has something of that Pharisee inside of us… at least a touch of self-adulation and self-righteousness which comes at the expense of others.

There is a bumper-sticker which reads: "When I die, I want to go peacefully, and in my sleep, like my grandfather... and not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car!"

The good news is that we don’t have to be perfect in order for God to love us. The bad news is that we often take this as an excuse to not be “good enough”. We must face the fact that we do, indeed, need to repent of assumptions which prevent us from becoming more like God himself. In the end, the Publican who knew his own sinfulness got nearer to God than the Pharisee who could see nothing but what he assumed was his own virtue.

With this Sunday of “the Pharisee and the Publican” we are now on Great Lent’s doorstep. On this day we begin using the Triodion. The emphasis from now until Pascha will be on repentance, on changing our heart’s assumptions about ourselves.
Great Lent is a time to come to see the deluded mindset with which we have become so comfortable over this past year. Jesus Christ shared the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee with us to warn us of the great spiritual danger of thinking too well of ourselves, of cultivating an arrogant self-confidence in our own righteousness, and of the subtle contempt for others that goes along with all this.
A cautious preacher concluded all his sermons with the following statement: "All sinners referred to in my sermon are purely fictitious. Any similarity to members of this congregation, past or present, is strictly coincidental!"
“Thank you, Lord, that I am not like other men!” Let us determine, this morning, that this Great Lent will be about questioning our assumptions. As we prepare to go into Lent, the Church presents us with this Gospel passage this morning by way of trying to get us to think about the change of heart that the Lenten season should help us to accomplish. Therefore, throughout this coming week…this week of the Publican and the Pharisee… let us not assume that we are “not like other men”; instead, let us ask ourselves: What needs changing in me that I, like the Pharisee, do not see?

Glory to Jesus Christ!

1 Tim. 4: 9-15
Luke 19: 1-10

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ is in our midst!

A pious but cranky old lady was greatly annoyed because her neighbors forgot to ask her to go with them on their picnic. On the morning of the event they suddenly realized their affront and sent a little boy over to ask her to come along. "It's too late now," she snapped. "I've already prayed for the rain."

This coming Great Lent, what will we be praying for? Will we pray for God to help us change, or will we tell him to just leave us be? When, in encountering Christ, the Physician of our souls, he tells us that we need to change, do we assume that he is right, or, by way of avoiding change, do we go looking for a second opinion?

Central to the feasts of Christmas, Theophany and the Encounter with Christ in the Temple… is the fact of God’s coming to us so that we might encounter him. And it is in encountering the Holy One that we come to know that we need to change.

In this morning’s Gospel, we hear about another encounter with God…that of Zacchaeus with Jesus…and it is with this Gospel incident that the church alerts us to a change of emphasis from what God has done for us, to… what we must do. From this Sunday of Zacchaeus, until Pascha, all the Sunday Gospels will now have to do with repentance.

Zaccheus was a man who was not well liked in Jericho… or, for that matter, anywhere at any time: Zacchaeus was a tax collector! But he was no ordinary tax collector: he was the Head tax collector for that area. Romans had military control over Israel and used Jews to collect taxes; therefore, by collecting taxes for a foreign power, tax collectors were viewed as traitors to their community… a “sinner” of the worst order, a Jew unworthy to be considered “a son of Abraham”.

Zacchaeus was rich and powerful. Some people would say that he “had it all.” But, apparently, Zacchaeus didn’t think so: some perceived need drove him up that tree in order to encounter Jesus Christ. And in order to meet Christ Zacchaeus had to climb up out of the rut of his ordinary living. This Sunday, and the other 3 Sundays before Great Lent, lead us towards the yearly season of repentance, that season of “Bright Sadness”, that season in which we need to do something about changing those habits which keep us so far from God.

There is a Spanish proverb which says that “habits are first cobwebs, then cables.” In other words… only with effort will we be able to change our habits this coming Great Lent, and we will only do so when, seeing how destructive they are, we come to the conclusion that we have no recourse but to change them.

Since last Pascha we have grown habits, of course… habits of laziness, habits of making excuses for not addressing what we know needs to be addressed, habits justifying why we don’t need to change, why it is my spouse who needs to change and not me.

A woman and her husband interrupted their vacation to go to a dentist. "I want a tooth pulled, the woman said, “and I don't want Novocain because I'm in a big hurry. Just extract the tooth as quickly as possible, and we'll be on our way." The dentist was quite impressed. "You're certainly a courageous woman," he said. "Now which tooth is it?" The woman turned to her husband and said, "Show him your tooth, dear."
Why do we presume that it is others who need to change and not us? We know that we should exercise, and then we excuse our not doing it. We know we should smile at people, and then promptly forget about smiling when someone angers us. We know that we should stop gossiping, but then rush to tell someone the latest news that we have just heard. If we want to repent this Great Lent, at least one of our bad habits must be worked on.
Why have we come here this morning? Was it to be reassured that we are just fine, thank you? If so, then we are in the wrong place. If we think that we are fine the way we are… that very thought proves how wrong we are! This morning’s Gospel reading presents us with a question: Are we, like Zacchaeus, willing to exert ourselves in order to become more like the one who God calls us to be?
A Sunday School teacher asked her class: "Can anyone tell me the story of Adam and Eve?" A little girl put up her hand and said, "First God created Adam. Then God looked at him and said, 'I think I could do better if I tried again.' So then he created Eve!"
“I think I could do better if I tried again”: Let us take that as our motto for this coming Great Lent. Before us stands the tree of Great Lent, which can only be climbed through the asceticism of repentance. If we make excuses for why we should not climb it this year, for why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t participate in the ascetisicms of the season, then neither will we encounter Jesus Christ when he rises at Pascha.

Christ is in our midst!

Eph. 4: 7-13
Matt. 4: 12-17

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ is in our midst!
The longest sermon on record was preached by Clinton Lacy of West Richland, Washington in February of 1955. It took 48 hours and 18 minutes to deliver it. It is small wonder, then, that someone proposed the adoption of a new Beatitude: "Blessed is the preacher whose train of thought has a caboose."
Sometimes someone talks about something that we wish they wouldn’t. It is the same in this morning’s Gospel reading where the prophet Isaiah speaks about death:
“The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and upon those who sat in the region of death light has dawned.”

Each year, the Church chooses this reading for the Sunday following Theophany, originally known as the Feast of Lights. In the early Church, Theophany – the day of Christ’s Baptism – became the day on which pagan converts to Christianity were received into the Church through Baptism. Each newly baptized convert held the baptismal candle during the Divine Liturgy, and since large numbers of people were often baptized on this day, the church became a sea of lights.

Also in this morning’s Gospel reading we hear, “From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”

Only last Wednesday Christ was baptized in the Jordan by John, and already he’s talking about repenting. Have we ever wondered why? As we heard last Sunday, for the Jews baptism was the beginning of a new life. For Jesus Christ, it is repentance that fuels that new life. “Turning around” is what the word “metanoia” (the word for repentance) means, and that turning away from ourselves and back to God is what Jesus’ call to repent is all about.

An agnostic went on a cruise. After dining he took two oranges with him. On his walk about the deck he passed an elderly woman sitting in her deck chair fast asleep. Her hands were open. In a spirit of fun, the agnostic put the two oranges in her outstretched palms. After a few more spins around the deck he came upon the now awake woman, who was happily eating one of the pieces of fruit. With a wry smile, the agnostic said to her, "You seem to be enjoying that orange." The woman replied, "Yes, sir, my Father is very good to me." The agnostic was astonished. "Your father?” he said, “Surely your father can't be still alive!" The old woman replied, "Praise God, he is very much alive." Suspicious, the agnostic asked, "What do you mean?" The old woman explained: “I have been seasick for days now. I was asking God to somehow send me an orange. I suppose I fell asleep while I was praying. When I awoke, I found He had not only sent me one orange but two!" The agnostic was speechless. Later he was converted to Christ.
We cannot fake repentance. In the Gospels, repentance involves not only a changing of the mind, but also a changing of the way in which we live. The way that Jesus sees it, it is not sufficient to want to no longer sin: In order to be truly repentant, we must STOP sinning!
Even while it is true that only I can do the work of my repenting, that repentance needn’t be a lonely affair. The Church is the body of Christ to which we are united through Baptism. We belong to the Church in order to belong to all those who constitute the kingdom which Christ tells us is in our midst. Repentance is a turning around, a turning away from oneself and towards God, so that we can travel in right direction… towards God… with the rest of the church, which IS the kingdom present.
Miracles are all around us; we would see them for what they are were we to stop calling them coincidences and pray for illumination from the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who lives at the heart of the Kingdom.
About the Kingdom, Jesus also said that it is like a mustard seed which, although tiny, grows into a tree so large that the birds of heaven can find shelter in it. On Theophany the light of the Holy Spirit shines upon that kingdom seed that God planted in each of us. What Jesus is saying to us this morning is that we need to turn around and face the Son of Justice in order for that seed to grow… and that turning towards Jesus Christ is what we call repentance.
A man went to see his doctor for advice about being cured of snoring. The doctor asked, "Does your snoring disturb your wife?" The patient replied, "Does it disturb my wife? Why it disturbs the entire congregation."
Rather than wait to be told by others of what we need to repent, let us look around and see for ourselves what needs changing in our lives.

Christ is in our midst!

On Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

2 Tim. 4: 5-8

Mark 1: 1-8

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ is Born!

A woman locked herself out of her car, and a passer-by volunteered to go in search of a wire coat hanger, a standard implement in such cases. He returned shortly and was starting to sculpt the hanger into proper shape to invade the car when suddenly he stopped. With a look of concern he asked, "Are you sure this car is yours?" The woman replied, "Yes, it is… why?" The man answered, "Because I just did seven years for doing this same thing and I don’t want to go back."　

Help, and life, can sometimes take us by surprise. Even the Gospel writers can surprise us; for example, the way in which St. Mark opens his Gospel, which we have just heard. In it, St. Mark makes no mention of the events leading up to Jesus’ birth which Matthew, Luke and John tell us about. There is no mention of the vision of the shepherds, or the wonder and great joy at the birth of a baby boy attended by the mysterious three Magi, bearing precious gifts of gold, frankincense and Myrrh. In St. Mark’s version of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, there is no Christmas story. Instead he immediately introduces us to Jesus’ second cousin, John the Baptizer, and takes us back to the words of that great prophet Isaiah: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.’"

In other words, Mark’s Gospel account begins with a call to repentance, with a call to a new life.

In the time of Jesus and John the Baptist, baptism was a sign of a change of life, of the start of a new life. Converts to Judaism were baptized to show that they were starting a new life in the Jewish faith. Their baptisms by John declared that they wanted to change and to experience a new life.

In his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi wrote that during his student days he read the Gospels seriously and considered converting to Christianity. He believed that in the teachings of Jesus he could find the solution to the caste system that was dividing the people of India. So one Sunday he decided to attend services at a nearby church and talk to the minister about becoming a Christian. When he entered the church, however, the usher refused to give him a seat and suggested that he go worship with his own people. Gandhi left the church and never returned. Later, he commented: "If Christians have caste differences also, I might as well remain a Hindu."

A new life cannot be based upon old assumptions. Do we ask ourselves whether or not we are prejudiced… or do we automatically assume that we are not? Central to repentance is the willingness to ask ourselves questions, sometimes painful questions. Assumptions prevent us from even considering the questions that God sends our way.

After a long, dry sermon, the minister announced that he wished to meet with the church board following the close of the service. The first man to arrive was a stranger. The minister said, "You misunderstood my announcement. This is a meeting of the board." The stranger replied, "Oh, I understood perfectly. If there is anyone here more bored than I am, I'd like to meet him."

One can imagine that the minister was either startled, or chagrined. Many times God uses the unlikeliest people, like John the Baptist, to accomplish His work. He sometimes uses the "ordinary" people who fill our days to speak to us, to call us to change, to call us to repent, to call us to turn away from all that takes us away from God.

This morning’s Gospel reading speaks of John as being and preaching in "the wilderness". Throughout the history of Christian spirituality wilderness has been seen not just as a geographic place, but most importantly, as an interior place or spiritual state. From this point-of-view we may understand "wilderness" to be that place within ourselves in which we engage in struggle.

At the end of a service an old lady waited for the Pastor by the front door of the church. When he came out, she held onto his arm and said, "Oh, Pastor, you’re sermons are so helpful. You do throw such a wonderful light on the Bible. Why, do you know that until this morning’s sermon, I had always thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were man and wife?"　

Maybe we don’t know as much as we think we do, and maybe that is why God sometimes sends others into our wilderness to speak his words to us, words that cause us to struggle. Do we refuse to even consider what others suggest to us about ourselves? If we are serious about the issue of repentance, then preparing a way for the Lord will look like… learning to listen.

Christ is Born!

On Sunday, December 27th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GAA)

Gal. 1: 11-19

Matt. 2: 13-23

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ is Born!

In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin wrote: "There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility."

When pride grows unchecked it turns into arrogance and, finally, a complete lack of regard for others. This is what we see portrayed in this morning’s Gospel reading.

Herod was an authentically vicious person. Caesar Augustus once made the comment that it would be better to be King Herod’s pig than to be his son. Pigs were protected by law; Herod’s family wasn’t. King Herod killed 2 of his own sons by having them strangled. He also killed one of his 10 wives … his favorite wife … because he thought that she had been unfaithful to him… although she hadn’t been. He killed his 18 year old brother-in-law, his uncle and his mother-in-law. So for King Herod, what’s a few dead babies in Bethlehem: When he figured out that the Wise Men had fooled him, this knowledge sent him into one of his characteristic rages, and he gave orders for his troops to ride out to the little town of Bethlehem and put to death all the two-year old boys… his Christmas present to Jesus.

What can we learn from this morning’s Gospel reading as we begin another year? For one thing, don’t be surprised if sometime this next year God takes us out of our "comfort zone" and into our own version of Egypt. Instead of our being angered by God’s changing our life around in this coming year, let us try to view the change as something positive.

A heavy rain had been falling as a man drove down a lonely road. As he rounded a curve, he saw an old farmer surveying the ruins of his barn. The driver stopped his car and asked what had happened.　 "Roof fell in," said the farmer. "Leaked for so many years it finally just rotted through."　 The stranger asked, "Why in the world didn't you fix it before it got that bad?" "Well, sir," replied the farmer, "it just seemed I never did get around to it. When the weather was good, there weren't no need for it, and when it rained, it was too wet to work on!"　

We seem to be able to always come up with what we think are valid reasons for just not getting around to doing what we know we should do. Let this coming new year be different; let any resolutions that we might make for the New Year be the beginning of a year of real repentance in our life, a year of real change on our part. Friday begins a new secular year… another new beginning, a time for setting down our old miseries and leaving them behind. And that is what resolutions, and repentance, are all about: a new beginning.

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln spoke the following words: "We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."

In this coming year let us pray for the slaying of our pride, and for the wisdom to remember to turn to God.

Christ is Born!

On Sunday, December 20th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Heb. 11: 9-10, 17-23, 32-40

Matt. 1: 1-25

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

In ancient Greece it was customary for peddlers who walked the streets with their wares to cry out, "What do you lack?" The idea was to let people know they were in the vicinity, and to also rouse the curiosity of the people. Coming out of their houses they would want to know what the peddler was selling. It might be something that they needed, or simply something they desired.

The ascetical season of Christmas Lent is about getting us to ask ourselves, "What do I lack?" Do we lack a relationship with the One who, in Jesus Christ, has spoken his Word about himself?

In Jesus Christ, God spoke to the world. Despite the majesty of his being, God came among us as an ordinary human being with ordinary human relationships. Even the name that he gave his Son was common and ordinary. In Old Testament times the name "Jesus" could be found everywhere. "Jesus" is the Greek form of Joshua, Jeshua, and Jehoshua… all familiar and common Old Testament names. There were at least five high priests known as Jesus. The writings of the Jewish historian Josephus refers to about twenty people during this time called Jesus. The New Testament speaks of Jesus Justus, the friend of Paul, and the sorcerer of Paphos is called Bar-Jesus. When God chose the name his son would carry, he chose an ordinary name. He chose a name so typical that it would appear two or three times on any class roster of the day.

When God chose to reveal himself to mankind, he did so through a reality that we could recognize… an ordinary human body. The tongue that called forth the dead was a human one. The hand that touched the leper had dirt under its nails. The feet upon which the woman wept were calloused and dusty. And the tears for Lazarus came from a heart as broken as ours. Just as we have all descended from ancestors who went before us, so too did Jesus Christ, as this morning’s Gospel reading makes so clear.

Have we become so jaded that we have lost the ability to see the divine in the ordinary? Have we become so self-reliant that we have lost sight of our need for God?

The term backsliding was popularized in the 1600’s by John Bunyan in his very famous allegory Pilgrim’s Progress. In the story, you may recall, the character of Christian and Hopeful are on their religious pilgrimage. While on the journey they begin to discuss an individual by the name of Temporary. He had started the pilgrimage, but along the way he fell by the wayside, or, as Bunyan worded it, backslid. That term was picked up, particularly, but not exclusively by the Methodists in early America and became a stock phrase. It referred to those once faithful individuals who had lost interest in their Christian pilgrimage.

As we come to the end of this Christmas Lent, let us ask ourselves: Am I a backslider? Just because God does not force us to love him does not mean that we will not be held accountable for not loving him. The question for us to think upon these remaining few days until Christmas is: Even though God made himself approachable and touchable… do we bother to approach him? Do we bother to touch God through prayer? Or is our prayer only limited to the "official" moments when we are here in this church?

During the Battle of the Wilderness in the Civil War, Union general John Sedgwick was inspecting his troops. At one point he came to a parapet, over which he gazed out in the direction of the enemy. His officers suggested that this was unwise, that perhaps he ought to duck while passing the parapet. "Nonsense," snapped the self-confident general. "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--." A moment later Sedgwick fell to the ground, fatally wounded.

Is that us? Are we so sure of being saved that we disregard signs that all is not well within us? Are we so self-confident that we really have no need for God? Have we even used this Christmas Lent to ask ourselves such questions?

This coming Friday’s feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ proves that God is not off at a distance; he is Emmanuel… God-With-Us. He has been faithful to pursuing us, even when we, in our sinful stupidity, have wandered away from him. It is about time that we pursued him.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, December 13th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Col. 3: 4-11

Luke 14: 16-24

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

A man called the church office. "May I help you?" asked the Secretary. "Yes," the man replied, "I’d like to speak to the Head Hog at the trough". The secretary was horrified and said in her best officious voice, "Sir, if you mean our pastor you will have to treat him with a little more respect than that and ask for the ‘Reverend’ or ‘The Pastor.' But certainly you cannot refer to him as the Head Hog at the Trough." The man replied, "I understand. I was calling because I have $10,000 that I was thinking of donating to the building fund." The Secretary said, "Hold on for just a moment… I think the Big Pig just walked in the door."

Given enough motivation, we can find a reason for doing something. So what do our excuses for not doing things really mean? Making excuses is exactly what this morning’s Gospel parable is all about.

In this morning’s Gospel reading we heard that "A certain man gave a great supper and invited many." According to the customs of the time, not one but two invitations for the banquet would have been sent. The first would have given the date, but not the time. The second would have been sent out when the feast was about to be served. But in this morning’s reading we heard that when the time for the second announcement came the invited guests (who all had previously said that they would come) began to offer phony excuses as to why they now would not be attending.

Some years ago, a radio station ran a contest. Disc jockeys invited their listeners to tune in their clock radios. "Just for fun," they said, "when you wake up to the sound of FM-106, call and tell us the first words you spoke when you rolled out of bed. If you're the third caller, you'll win $106." It didn't take long for the contest to grow in enthusiasm. The first morning, a buoyant disc jockey said, "Caller number three, what did you say when you rolled out of bed this morning?" A groggy voice said, "Do I smell coffee burning?" Another day, a sleepy clerical worker said, "Oh no, I'm late for work." Somebody else said her first words were, "Honey, did I put out the dog last night?"

One morning, when the disc jockey said, "Good morning, this is FM-106. You're on the air. What did you say when you rolled out of bed this morning?" the voice on the other end of the line replied with, "You want to know my first words in the morning?" The bubbly DJ said, "Yes, sir! Tell us what you said." The other man replied, "Shema, Israel ... Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might."

There was a moment of on-air embarrassed silence. Then the radio announcer said cheerily, "Sorry, wrong number," and cut to a commercial.

What’s the first thing that we say or do when we wake up in the morning? Is it prayer to God? Or do we have all sorts of excuses for why prayer can wait. "I need my coffee first." "I want to make sure I’m awake and focused before I talk to God." "I was asleep all night, I didn’t even have a chance to sin, so why do I need to talk to God?"

How often do we find ourselves justifying our lack of relationship with God? And how often do we come to believe our own made-up excuses?

Each year, on this second Sunday before Christ’s Nativity, the church tries to wake us up, to help us to make one final attempt to actually repent and change. And before we reply with "I ask you to have me excused" we need to realize that the church is trying to get us to understand that now is the time for us to stop with the excuses and actually get to the work of changing, of repentance.

On this Sunday the church commemorates the Patriarchs, Prophets, all the men and women of the Old Covenant who, instead of making excuses, prepared the way for Christ’s coming, from Adam all the way up to and including John the Baptist. Through the lives of all these people God was sending his invitation informing them of Christ’s coming. And with the Nativity of his son, our Lord, Jesus Christ, just as it says in this morning’s Gospel, God announces, "Come, for all things are now ready."

Helen Keller, so brave and inspiring in her deafness and blindness, once wrote a magazine article entitled: "Three days to see." In that article she outlined what things she would like to see if she were granted just three days of sight. It was a powerful, thought provoking article. On the first day she said she wanted to see friends. Day two she would spend seeing nature. The third day she would spend in her home city of New York watching the busy city in the ordinariness of its workday. She concluded the article with these words: "I who am blind can give one hint to those who see: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you were to be stricken blind."

It is exactly this kind of readiness that is at the heart of repentance. And repentance is possible for us all were we to but stop making excuses for why we do not get around to changing. This morning is the second-to-last call of the ascetical season of Christmas Lent. Are we ready for He-Who-Comes? Are we ready for God to be with us? Do we even have any relationship with him?

We need to ask ourselves whether or not we have stopped with our excuses for why we are still as we have always been. Or will we end this Christmas Lent just as we began it, as just one more season of: "I have bought a piece of ground, and I must go and see it. I ask you to have me excused."

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, December 6th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Eph. 5: 9-19

Luke 17: 12-19

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

A Pastor went to sleep and began dreaming. He dreamed that he died and found himself standing before the pearly gates. As he went to cross the threshold St. Peter stopped him, demanding his credentials. So the Pastor proudly articulated the number of sermons that he had preached, and the number of talks that he had given at banquets. But Saint Peter said no one had heard them in heaven. The discouraged Pastor enumerated his extensive community involvement. He was told they were not recorded. Sorrowfully, the Pastor turned to leave, when Peter asked, "Say, aren’t you the man who fed the sparrows?" "Why, yes," the puzzled Pastor responded, "but what does that have to do with anything?" "Well then," replied St. Peter, "come in: the Master of the sparrows wants to thank you."

In this little tale we are exposed to "the theology of little things"… which posits that it is in the little things of our life that we reveal who we really are. Recently, our nation went through its annual celebration of Thanksgiving Day; this morning’s Gospel reading presents us with the question: Is gratitude, for each of us, a big but singular event, or is it our lifestyle?

In the Gospel reading, we meet 10 men who have leprosy. In Jesus’ day, a diagnosis of leprosy was essentially a death sentence, with the leper being exiled from the community. Not only did a person afflicted with this disease face physical pain and suffering, they also faced the emotional pain of saying good bye to loved ones, friends, and their whole way of life, so that they would not spread the disease to them. If someone who was not a leper came near them, the leprous were required to shout out "unclean, unclean, stay away".

In this morning’s reading Jesus Christ heals all ten lepers; only one, however returns to Christ to offer his thanks, prompting Christ to comment, "Were not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?"

Make no mistake about it: The other nine were happy to have been healed since this allowed them to return to their families and their old way of life. They were happy… but not grateful.

We now live in such a culture of entitlement that we have forgotten to be grateful to God. We act as if everything is owed to us. Even if we tried, we could not be more unlike St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra in Lycia, whose feast we celebrate today. St. Nicholas, from whom we derive our modern-day Santa Claus, was known for his selfless generosity.

In our country and in our materialistic culture, we seem to have forgotten how to be grateful. We are surrounded by blessings, but we moan that it is all not enough. While our cup overflows, we complain that we need a bigger cup. We don’t hesitate to cry out to God for help when we are in need, but do we ever go back and thank him for his blessings… or do we assume that what we have received we were supposed to get? If so, then we are more like this morning’s nine lepers than we might want to admit.

For more than 20 years Professor Edwin R. Keedy of the University of Pennsylvania Law School used to start his first class by putting two figures on the blackboard: the number 4, the number 2. Then he would ask, "What's the solution?"

Inevitably, one student would always call out, "Six." Another would say "Two." Then several would shout out together "Eight!" But the teacher would shake his head in the negative. After a few minutes of puzzled silence, Professor Keedy would point out their collective error saying, "All of you failed to ask the key question: What is the problem? Unless you know what the problem is, you cannot possibly find the answer."

Why should the problem be that Thanksgiving Day is only one day of the year? For us Orthodox Christians, it should be a constant way of being, a deliberate way of life.

Fred worked for years and years in Spokane as a car salesman. One day Fred went into the Hospital for exploratory surgery. The doctors found that he was full of cancer so they sewed him up again and sent him home. He died within a week. After the funeral, someone remarked, "It's interesting that at the funeral no one ever asked how many cars he had sold!"

Today’s Gospel reading asks us: What are our priorities? Does God matter to us? In order to answer these questions, let us leave church today asking ourselves two more:

What kind of leper am I? Am I grateful one, or just another one of the ungrateful nine?

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, November 29th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Eph. 4: 1-6

Luke 13: 10-17

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

We all like to think that on that first Christmas eve we would have been awed by the choirs of angels and all the events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ. But would we have been? Would we have heard the choirs of angels singing, or simply the sounds of barnyard animals shifting around? Would we have understood the hushed silence of the divine presence, or perceived simply the chill of a cold east wind. Would we have understood that Emmanuel, God with us, IS with us… or would we have perceived the night to be just another cold and lonely night out in the hills?

God never reveals himself in a manner in which we are forced to believe; we are always left with options. Thus, one person can say "It’s a miracle", while another one says, "It’s nothing."

Events can be two or more things at once; what they will be for us depends upon how we see them. Sometimes, what looks to us like tragedy turns out to be an occasion of grace. Such was the case of the woman in this morning’s Gospel reading; bent over double by her affliction, it was that very affliction that caused Christ to notice her, and to heal her.

There are, however, many ways of being crippled, and the physical is only one of them. In response to Christ’s healing of the woman the ruler of the synagogue declared with indignation. "There are six days on which men ought to work; therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the Sabbath day". With these words, we come to realize that there are two afflicted people in this reading: The woman, afflicted by what was probably Marie Strumpell disease, and the ruler of the synagogue, who was crippled by a spirit of legalism.

God intended the Sabbath to be a day of rest and worship, but the religious leaders of Jesus’ day had turned this blessing into a burden. Because of their legalistic approach to God’s commands, the religious leaders had developed an elaborate written code of all the actions that were prohibited on the Sabbath, including any type of work. They considered healing to be part of a doctor’s line of work, and practicing one’s vocation on the Sabbath was forbidden. Therefore, according to their religious regulations, Jesus’ healing of the woman was a breaking of the law.

We say to ourselves that WE would have immediately recognized the miracle of the healing that had just occurred. But then… on that first Christmas eve would we have heard angels, or just barnyard shuffling? We presume that we see correctly, that we are not blind, but then… why is it that we refuse to see the miracles that God performs all around us right now? Someone is healed of their chronic, angry attitude, and we wonder "What’s he up to?" Someone’s arrogance is turned into friendliness, and we wonder "What’s the game?" Someone’s negativity becomes hopefulness, and we wait for him to return to being his old negative self. Like the synagogue ruler, we view others with our own set of rigid rules.

The synagogue leader was in bondage to rules. He was so busy being an officially "good" person and keeping all of the rules that he had ceased to be a compassionate and loving person. In God’s great scheme of things people always come before rules… always! Jesus’ actions toward the leader of the synagogue challenge us to ponder our own bondage to rules: How often does the fact that people break a rule that we have set for them limit our ability to love them and treat them with care and respect? In short, the question for us is: How do we view others?

Some years ago, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article by Dr. Paul Ruskin on the "Stages of Aging." In the article, Dr. Ruskin described a case study he had presented to his students when teaching a class in medical school. He described the case study patient under his care like this:

"The patient neither speaks nor comprehends the spoken word. Sometimes she babbles incoherently for hours on end. She is disoriented about person, place, and time. She does, however, respond to her name. I have worked with her for the past six months, but she still shows complete disregard for her physical appearance and makes no effort to assist her own care. She must be fed, bathed, and clothed by others.

Because she has no teeth, her food must be pureed. Her shirt is usually soiled from almost incessant drooling. She does not walk. Her sleep pattern is erratic. Often she wakes in the middle of the night and her screaming awakens others. Most of the time she is friendly and happy, but several times a day she gets quite agitated without apparent cause. Then she wails until someone comes to comfort her."

After presenting the class with this challenging case, Dr. Ruskin then asked his students if any of them would like to volunteer to take care of this person. No one volunteered. Then Dr. Ruskin said, "I’m surprised that none of you offered to help, because she actually is my favorite patient. I get immense pleasure from taking care of her and I am learning so much from her. She has taught me a depth of gratitude I never knew before. She has taught me the spirit of unwavering trust. And she has taught me the power of unconditional love." Then Dr. Ruskin said, "Let me show you her picture." He pulled out the picture and passed it around. It was the photo of his six-month-old baby daughter.

Like the synagogue official in this morning’s Gospel reading, we had already placed the patient into one of our categories. Having a predetermined view of others prevents us from perceiving the miracles that God is doing with them, right here in our midst. It is not only during Great Lent that we are called by the Church to re-examine our inner life and the attitudes that feed it; Christmas Lent is also a time of repentance and reflection, and repentance is about change.

Let us take these next 4 weeks of this Lenten season to sweep the dirt out of our minds, and out of our heart’s cave, so that we might make ourselves presentable for the God Who Comes, for this Emmanuel, this God-with-Us. During the next 4 weeks, let us take to heart Jesus Christ’s words and allow ourselves, and others, to be healed.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Eph. 2: 14-22

Luke 12: 16-21

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Two fellows decided to go into the produce business. They had a small pickup truck, and drove 100 miles into the country, bought fifty-cent watermelons, and then drove back to town and sold them, two for a dollar. By the end of the day one of the men was puzzled by their lack of profit, to which the other one hollered, "I told you we wouldn't make a profit unless we got a bigger truck to hold more melons!"

Sometimes, we don’t seem to catch on to our own stupidity, which is why, in the verse right before the one that opens today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says plainly, "Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses."

This morning’s parable talks about the self-centered accumulation of goods and the god-absent mindset that such an orientation forms. Quite plainly, this Gospel parable is about the sinful mindset of hoarding. When one is possessed by hoarding one expresses the belief that I don’t trust God to take care of me so I’ll look out for myself. How different this mindset is from that of being thankful, which is what our up-coming national holiday of Thanksgiving is all about.

Unfortunately, our national expression of thanksgiving seems to be confined to only one day out of the year. For all the other days our culture teaches us to be greedy, to always be hungry for "more". Someone once asked Andrew Carnegie, a man of immense wealth, "How much money is enough?" To which Andrew replied, "Just a little more than I have." To most modern Americans, greediness is almost a joke. In fact, we… like the rich man in this morning’s parable… believe that it is automatically good to always want more and to acquire more.

So why would Jesus Christ suggest that the desire for "more" be considered disordered? Imagine a shipwrecked sailor on a life raft in the middle of the ocean. His terrible thirst impels him to drink the salt water, but it only makes him thirstier. This causes him to drink even more, which makes him thirstier still. He consumes more and more of the salty water … until, paradoxically, he becomes dehydrated and dies. The Ancient Romans had a proverb which reads: "Possessions are like sea-water; the more a man drinks, the thirstier he becomes’.

There are many impulses that are part and parcel of being a human being, such as hunger, the desire for sex, the need to rest. When these impulses become disordered, we Orthodox refer to them as "passions"; at such times, the desire for hunger becomes gluttony, the desire for sex becomes addiction, the desire for rest becomes laziness and sloth.

It is this "disorderedness" that Christ is addressing this morning. Human impulses become disordered when we allow them to become more important to us than our relationship with God. Like the man in the parable we seem to think that if I want something then there is nothing wrong in my pursuing it. What Christ poses to us this morning is the question: What if "everything that I want" is not what God wants for me?

It has been said that a miser is one who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. This morning’s parable is not actually about "things", but about the miserliness of self-centeredness, and this follows upon last Sunday’s Gospel reading about the Good Samaritan, which was also about the issue of self-centeredness versus other-centeredness.

So, we might ask, how was this morning’s rich man self-centered, since the parable doesn’t say anything about him being wicked, or evil, or unjust? In Christ’s little teaching tale (which is what a parable is for) the man congratulates himself, as if the wind, the rain, and the sun that God sent had nothing to do with his success. You don’t hear him say: "Well, I have so much money now, the Lord has been so good to me, I think I’ll give something to that family down the street who doesn’t have anything." There is no thought of either giving thanks to God for the wind, rain, sun, and crops, or of sharing his bounty with others. His obliviousness to God and to others shows that he has become a hostage to his self-centeredness. And holding us hostage is the work of the passions.

To paraphrase Jesus Christ in this morning’s parable, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Christ’s point this morning is that a life lived without a relationship to God is, ultimately, a life without treasure, no matter how many "things" might be in it.

Friends of George Burns always kidded him about his singing. Burns, a master of self-deprecating humor, decided to take advantage of this and insure his voice for a million dollars. He thought it would be a wonderful publicity stunt. "I was so excited," said Burns, "I couldn't wait to rush down to the insurance company. I took a cassette and a tape recorder with me so the insurance man could hear my voice. It was one of my best numbers, a syncopated version of Yankee Doodle Blues with a yodeling finish. The insurance man listened patiently to the whole thing. He then just looked at me and said, 'Mr. Burns, you should have come to us before you had the accident.'"

Like the man in today’s Gospel reading, we can be so focused upon accumulating that we lose sight of the future accident of our death. Someone once said that he who dies with the most toys wins. But what does he win? Nothing, according to Jesus Christ who points out the foolishness of laying up refrigerators, washing machines, and televisions, and yet being poor in one’s relationship with God.

We have now begun the Nativity Fast… Christmas Lent… a period for reflecting upon our lives and our desires. We are also coming up to our nation’s feast of Thanksgiving this week, the ONE day when our entire nation gives thanks to God for his blessings. This morning’s Gospel reading should cause us to wonder: Does "blessings" mean getting everything that we can lay our hands on? Or, does it mean having enough for what we need.

Years ago, a young mother approached Mother Theresa on Mother’s doorstep and asked for help because the young woman had no warm clothes to cover her 2-year-old son. The woman relates, "Without even thinking, without a moment of hesitation, Mother Theresa took off the blanket that was around herself and put it around my son."

There’s a difference between "having enough" and hoarding. The man in today’s reading was preoccupied with hoarding. Mother Theresa’s life should cause us to wonder: What is "enough"? Does "enough" include everything and anything that I want? And am I so preoccupied with having "enough" that I am not able to be thankful for what I do have, which is, after all, the whole point of Thanksgiving?

Let us use this coming week to question our desires. On Thursday, let us give thanks to God for his merciful generosity in allowing us one more day to come to value him more than any "thing" else.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, November 15th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Eph. 2: 4-10

Luke 10: 25-37

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

One Sunday morning, a surly teenager accompanied his parents to church. On their way out of church, the boy remarked to the minister: "Thanks for the service, Rev. But your sermon was pathetic." His parents were horrified and his mother scolded, "How can you SAY such a thing?! You tell the minister, right now, that you're sorry!" So the teenager turned to the minister and said: "Hey, Rev, I'm SORRY your sermon was so pathetic!"

Sometimes, in focusing on the letter of the law we act more like lawyers than like Christians. In this morning’s Gospel reading Jesus Christ has just such an encounter with a lawyer.

The lawyer at the beginning of this morning’s parable asks, "What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?" In the discussion with Christ about goodness, what the man is actually asking Christ is, "What is the least that I have to do in order to be saved?" When he is told by Jesus that one’s goodness is manifested by loving God and neighbor, the lawyer, in true lawyerly fashion, then asks Jesus, "And who IS my neighbor?" In response to this question, Christ tells the parable that has become known as that of "The Good Samaritan".

In the Gospel according to St. Matthew Jesus is asked the question: "Which is the greatest commandment in the law?" Jesus gave the same answer there as he gave to this morning’s lawyer: Love God. Love your neighbor. Jesus then states that all of the law hangs upon these two commandments. This means that love for God and for our neighbor is what all spiritual practices should produce.

In the cases of the priest and the Levite in this morning’s parable, their supposed "goodness" failed to result in compassion for others, resulting in their viewing the man by the side of the road, and his needs, with indifference. They simply didn’t want to get involved.

Years ago when Johnny Carson was the host of The Tonight Show he interviewed an eight year old boy. The boy was asked to appear because he had rescued two friends in a coalmine outside his hometown in West Virginia. As Johnny questioned the boy, it became apparent to him and the audience that the young man was a Christian. So Johnny asked him if he attended Sunday school. When the boy said he did Johnny inquired, "What are you learning in Sunday school?" "Last week," came the boy’s, "our lesson was about when Jesus went to a wedding and turned water into wine." The audience roared, but Johnny tried to keep a straight face. Then he said, "And what did you learn from that story?" The boy squirmed in his chair. It was apparent he hadn't thought about this. But then he lifted up his face and said, "If you're going to have a wedding, make sure you invite Jesus!"

It was not by magic that Jesus Christ turned water into wine, but by compassion for others. The opposite of compassion is not hatred, but indifference. And it is because too many of Christ’s followers are indifferent and keep crossing the road to avoid others that there is so much misery in this world. We do this even while living in a culture dying from loneliness. When we see someone in need how do we respond? Sometimes we think to ourselves, "I’m already too busy. I don’t have the time."

The Priest and the Levite kept the law and performed all their Temple duties. And yet, they were not made better people because of all that. It is entirely possible that, even though we come to church regularly, we, too, might be neglecting our spiritual life and growth. That life and that growth is contingent upon our keeping Christ’s commandment to "Love one another". Including those "others" with whom we would rather not get involved.

There are times when each of us has a bit of the Priest and the Levite within us, when we just don’t want to get involved. Believing our society’s propaganda that our individual desires are all that matters, we have come to not care about anyone else’s needs. We have stopped being Christians. We have turned away from Christ’s commandment to love one another.

The story is told of a Franciscan friar in Australia assigned to be the guide and assistant to Mother Teresa when she visited New South Wales. Thrilled and excited at the prospect of being so close to this great woman, he dreamed of how much he would learn from her and what they would talk about. But during her visit, and although he was constantly near her, the friar never had the opportunity to say one word to Mother Teresa. There were always other people for her to meet. Finally, her tour was over, and she was due to fly to New Guinea.

In desperation, the friar said to Mother Teresa, "If I pay my own fare to New Guinea, can I sit next to you on the plane so I can talk to you and learn from you?" Mother Teresa looked at him and asked, "You have enough money to pay airfare to New Guinea?" "Yes, Mother!" the friar eagerly replied. Looking him straight in the eye she said, "Then give that money to the poor. You'll learn more from that than anything I can tell you."

Mother Theresa understood what Christ meant when he commanded us to love "our neighbor". In this morning’s Gospel parable Jesus shows us the danger of observing spiritual practices and yet not attaining the end to which they are supposed to lead. There is a great lack of compassion in our world today, as is manifested by our indifference to one another.

A junior high music teacher had just organized a band in her school. The principal was so proud of the music teacher's efforts that, without consulting her, he decided that the band should give a concert for the entire school. The music teacher wasn't so sure her young musicians were ready to give a concert, so she tried to talk the principal out of holding the concert, but to no avail. Just before the concert was ready to begin, as the music teacher stood on the podium, she leaned forward and whispered to her nervous young musicians, "If you're not sure of your part, just pretend to play." And with that, she stepped back, lifted her baton and with a great flourish brought it down. Lo and behold, nothing happened! The band brought forth a resounding silence.

What a terrible condemnation of our lives it will be if, after all of the services we have attended, all of the sermons we have endured, our lives have produced a resounding indifference. Christ ends this morning Gospel reading with these words: "’So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?’ The lawyer said, ‘He who showed mercy on him.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’"

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, November 8th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Gal. 6: 11-18

Luke 8:41-56

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Once there was a man who was such a golf addict that he was neglecting his job. Frequently he would call in sick as an excuse to go play. One morning, after making his usual sick-call to the office, an angel appeared to him and said, "If you play golf today, you will be punished." Confident in his ability to deceive, the man replied, "I've been doing this for years. No one will ever know. I won't be punished."

The angel said no more and the fellow stepped up to the first tee where he promptly whacked the ball 300 yards straight down the middle of the fairway. Since he had never driven the ball more than 200 yards, he couldn't believe it. Yet, there it was. And his luck continued with long drives on every hole and perfect putting. By the ninth hole he was six under par and was playing near-perfect golf. The fellow was walking on air. He wound up with an amazing 61, about 30 strokes under his usual game.

Eager to spread the news of his prowess, he hurried back to the office building. On the way up in the elevator the angel appeared again and said, "So… just who are you going to tell? You were sick, remember? You can’t tell anyone… and that’s your punishment!"

Sometimes, we punish ourselves without even realizing that is what we are doing. So many things happen to us in life that we can come to actually punish ourselves by indulging in the self-pity of thinking ourselves to be powerless in the face of life’s afflictions. This, certainly, was not the mindset of the two people presented to us in this morning’s Gospel reading.

In this morning’s Gospel reading St. Luke presents us with the man Jairus who pleads with Jesus to come and heal his young daughter who is in danger of dying. As Jesus is heading towards Jairus’ home a woman, who had suffered from an ailment for 12 years, who so believes in Jesus’ power to heal her, reaches out as Jesus goes by, touches his garment, and is healed of her long-standing affliction. This woman wasn’t just reaching out with her hand; she was also reaching out with her heart. And that was what caught Jesus’ attention.

Faith is a funny thing: It is entirely God’s gift to us, and entirely up to us to exercise it. And it is precisely when we are in the midst of our afflictions that we find it hardest to do so, to reach out and touch Jesus… or to touch anyone!

We insist on seeing ourselves as powerless, as victims, and with the cry of "It’s not my fault!" we reveal our psychological and spiritual immaturity. Sometimes, we just cannot seem to let go of our misery. At such times it seems easier for us to remain swaddled in our misery than to look outside of ourselves. We humans are perverse in that, sometimes, we are never so happy as when we are making ourselves miserable.

Is it not just the slightest bit possible that we make our own misery by the way that we live? As never before we are connected all around the world through instant messaging, texting, email, cell-phones, etc… and yet, we have never been more disconnected from reality: Not only does the driver almost run over the woman crossing the street because he is on the cell-phone, but the woman herself blindly steps out into oncoming traffic because, while she is walking, she is so absorbed in texting that she is unaware of where her feet are taking her.

Part of our misery arises from our lack of attention, and from our disconnect from reality. Jairus and the woman in this morning’s reading decided to DO something about their misery… and that WAS an expression of their faith.

Despair, pain and fear can sometimes be a prelude to grace, hope and faith. It often is when people find life beyond themselves that they look to someone bigger than themselves. In his hour of extreme need, Jairus came and fell at the feet of Jesus and begged him to come to his house. When the woman in the crowd was tempted to believe there was no further hope, she dared to have faith in Jesus and reached out and touched him.

A man placed a frantic call to the psychiatrist. "Doc," he pleaded, "you've got to help me! The guy next door thinks he's in an opera. He sings day and night at the top of his lungs. It's driving me crazy!" The shrink thought a minute and then replied, "Send him to see me."

A week later, the caller phoned again, sounding much calmer. "Doctor,: he said, "I don't know how you did it, but he's not singing anymore. Did you cure his delusion?" The psychiatrist replied, "Not exactly. I just gave him a much smaller part."

How about if we gave self-pity a much smaller part in our spiritual life? How about if we stopped whining about our afflictions and DID something about them?! And we can begin by taking a moment this afternoon and asking ourselves:

Who are we most like in today’s Gospel reading… one of the crowd who bumps into Jesus, with no intention of Jesus’ making a difference in our life… or like this morning’s woman whose faith in Jesus was greater than her misery, and who reached out and touched him?

God is waiting to help with the healing of our heart’s misery, but we, also, must do our part… and reach out to him.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, November 1st, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Gal. 2: 16-20

Luke 8: 26-39

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

In the fairy tale Alice in Wonderland, Alice has a conversation with the Cheshire Cat in which Alice asks, "Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?" The cat replied, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." To which Alice replied, "I don't much care where." Giving his characteristic grin, the Cheshire cat said, "Then it doesn't matter which way you go."

Could it be that madness such as we see in this morning’s Gospel is the end result of a lack of purpose or direction in one’s life? Is it possible that a lack of direction arises from an impulse within which makes oneself a hostage to a fear of change? And what does this morning’s Gospel reading have to say to us about change?

At first glance, the situation that we encounter in this morning’s Gospel reading may not seem to apply to any of us. After all, none of us here is insane… at least not that I’m aware of. However, if we look at the townspeople instead of the madman, we may have more of a feeling of kinship.

In this morning’s Gospel reading, St. Luke writes: "They (the townspeople) went out to see what had happened, and came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid."

Because of being possessed by their fear, the townspeople told Jesus to go away. It seems that telling people to go away was how the townspeople dealt with what frightened them, as is witnessed by their having driven the madman out of their midst and forcing him to live outside the town.

It seems to be a human impulse to drive away from us what frightens us. But perhaps this is not the best way to deal with what frightens us, for in pushing it away from us we give it power over us. In short, our fears can possess us and hold us hostage.

What possesses each us here this morning? What holds us hostage? Why is it that… despite our Orthodox Theology and Liturgy and pious practices… we still sometimes do not act like the Christians that Jesus Christ calls us to be?

It’s not that we don’t want to BE Christian so much as it is that we sometimes forget how to go about it. For example, we become possessed by resentment which then gives birth to words and actions which are injurious to our spiritual life. Anger, small-mindedness, jealousy and envy… all of these can possess us. And, sometimes, we use these difficult realities within as an excuse for doing nothing about dealing with them.

C.S. Lewis once wrote: "Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way, the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill-tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am."

Excuses; excuses are the reason why we are hostage to what possesses us. Because certain emotions are difficult to deal with, we excuse ourselves from having to deal with them, as if they are, somehow, just part of our moral makeup.

What we sometimes lose sight of, even while going to church, hearing sermons, doing pious things… is the point that Christ made: That it is what comes out of the heart of a person that poisons him. Or rather, that if poison comes out in words and actions, then there was poison in the heart. Or fear in the heart. Or anger. And poison in the heart is something that we CAN do something about! This means that the heart must change, must be leached of its poison: This is what the "repentance" that we speaks so much about during Lenten seasons refers to… this changing of the heart.

So where to start? We can start by, first of all, working at becoming more conscious of what kinds of thoughts I entertain. It is the thoughts that I entertain that are either sweet fruit for our soul or poison for our hearts. We need to take practical steps to remind ourselves to remember that we want to become more aware and to change. In order to remember that we want to remember to watch our thoughts, switch our watch to the other wrist. When we go to look at the time we will be confounded, and perhaps even annoyed, when it is not in its usual place. Aside from irritation by the change, that moment of inconvenience and anger can remind us that we want to work on changing.

One of golf's immortal moments came when a Scotsman demonstrated the new game to President Ulysses Grant. Carefully placing the ball on the tee, the Scotsman took a mighty swing. The club hit the turf and scattered dirt all over the President's beard and surrounding vicinity, while the ball placidly waited on the tee. Again the Scotsman swung, and again he missed. The President waited patiently through six more tries and then quietly stated, "There seems to be a fair amount of exercise in the game, but I fail to see the purpose of the ball."

What a terrible thing it would be if, in the end, as we stand before God, he were to say, "In that you stopped trying to grow once you graduated from school, I fail to see the purpose of your having gone to church." Would our saying, "It’s not my fault, I was possessed" really suffice as a response?

Naturalist Henry David Thoreau is often noted for his statement that most men "live lives of quiet desperation." In an attempt to avoid that kind of existence, he lived alone from 1845 to 1847 in the woods of Walden Pond, Massachusetts. In 1854, he published his experiences in the book Walden. He wrote, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived."

This coming week, let us ask ourselves: "Even though it is not a Lenten season, am I working on changing? And if I am not working on changing, am I living?"

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, October 25th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

Gal. 1: 11-19

Luke 16: 19-31

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

At the commencement exercises for Purdue University's engineering schools, graduates of each school stood en masse to be recognized by the dean of engineering. When the aeronautical-engineering students rose, they launched a swarm of paper airplanes toward the stage, where the university's president and other dignitaries were sitting. After students from all the schools had risen in turn, the president stepped up to the rostrum. Looking at the paper planes covering the stage floor, he remarked, "I'm very glad the agricultural-engineering graduates decided not to throw anything."

What we decide to do… takes us down a certain road; where we end up is the result of our decisions, as can be seen by the two main characters in this morning’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus. This parable really has nothing to do with being rich or poor, but it has everything to do with the attitude and the condition of the heart… which was exactly the message of last Sunday’s parable of the Sower and the seed.

The rich man in this parable, whom Scripture scholars have come to identify as Dives, neither cared about nor even noticed Lazarus at his doorstep. Christ tells us that this man feasted sumptuously "every day", thereby making the point that Dives did not even observe the Sabbath. His indulgent lifestyle was the most important thing to him, even more important than observing the Law of God.

Sarah Winchester was rich. She had inherited twenty million dollars. Plus she had an additional income of one thousand dollars a day. That's a lot of money any day, but it was immense in the late 1800s.

Sarah took her money and moved to San Jose, California. She bought an eight-room farmhouse plus one hundred sixty adjoining acres. She hired sixteen carpenters and put them to work. For the next thirty-eight years, craftsmen labored every day, twenty-four hours a day, to build a mansion.

She instructed that each window had to have thirteen panes, each wall thirteen panels, each closet thirteen hooks, and each chandelier thirteen globes. Corridors snaked randomly, some leading nowhere. One door opened to a blank wall, another to a fifty-foot drop. One set of stairs led to a ceiling that had no door. Trap doors. Secret passageways. Tunnels.

The making of this mysterious mansion only ended when Sarah died. The completed mansion… the mansion alone!!!... sprawled over six acres and had six kitchens, thirteen bathrooms, forty stairways, forty-seven fireplaces, fifty-two skylights, four hundred sixty-seven doors, ten thousand windows, one hundred sixty rooms, and a bell tower. Even though this project consumed the last 38 years of her life… Sarah took none of it with her when she died, much like Dives in this morning’s Gospel.

In this morning’s parable Jesus Christ portrays the rich man as a man consumed with his wealth and, much like Sarah Winchester, his desire to please only himself. Dives’ wealth, however, was not the issue that Christ was addressing; it was the attitude of his heart which was the real focus of Christ’s teaching.

There is a saying which states that God sends no one away empty except those who are full of themselves. What merited Dives’ ending up in Hades was his total lack of concern for anyone besides himself: He was no more interested or aware of Lazarus than he was of God. In the end, his self-centeredness became his prison, his hell.

The parable this morning should give us pause to consider what is important to us, what is the focus for us. This morning’s parable makes the point that, instead of entertaining ourselves, we could… and should!... help those at our own gate. And not treating them cruelly is not sufficient; what is required of us by the God of love is an active kindness and concern for others. In other words, what this parable calls us to is a change of heart about other people.

Wabush, a town in a remote portion of Labrador, Canada, was completely isolated. Eventually, a road was cut through the wilderness to reach it. Wabush now has one road leading into it, and thus, only on one road leading out. If anyone takes the time to travel the unpaved road for six to eight hours to get into Wabush, there is only way to leave Wabush: by turning around.

"Turning around" is what repentance is about. Repentance is fueled by asking ourselves some hard questions… such as: Am I self-indulgent, feasting each day while ignoring a parishioner who is struggling? Is my focus of self-fulfillment at the cost of ignoring the image of God in others? Are my priorities God’s priorities? Do I ever think of my eternal destiny?

Hell is an inescapable reality. The rich man didn’t go there because he was wealthy, and Lazarus didn’t go to heaven because he was poor. Lazarus went to heaven because that’s where God is, the one for whom Lazarus had longed all of his earthly life. Dives didn’t "go to" hell; too late, he found himself where he had always been… separated from God, which is the very definition of "hell".

So why did Jesus Christ teach this morning’s very discomforting parable? This parable was Christ’s way of stressing the fact that the very God who loves us is also the one who respects our decisions. He loves us, he encourages our response, he woos us, he pursues us, he urges us… but he leaves us free to do the same in his regard, or not. And whichever we choose, he will not violate that decision. God never forces us to love him back.

Glory to Jesus Christ

On Sunday, October 18th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

2 Cor. 11: 31-12:9

Luke 8: 5-15

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

The drunken husband snuck up the stairs quietly. He looked in the bathroom mirror and bandaged the bumps and bruises he'd received in a fight earlier that night. He then proceeded to climb into bed, smiling at the thought that he'd pulled one over on his wife. When morning came, he opened his eyes and there stood his wife, who accused him: "You were drunk last night weren't you!" The man replied, "No, honey." But his wife wasn’t buying it and said, "Well, if you weren't, then who put all the band-aids on the bathroom mirror?"

We think that we can get away with not facing up to the truth of ourselves, and yet, in the end, that never works. In this morning’s Gospel Jesus Christ asks us to assess the truth of our heart.

We have all had days when our heart just seemed to want what it wants, leaving us mystified. It is precisely the ground of the heart that Christ is addressing in this morning’s parable of the Sower and the seed.

The first kind of soil that Christ speaks of is that by the wayside. This kind of heart is shallow. The second kind of heart is rock; it is pure hardness and cannot support growth at all. The third kind of heart is filled with the thorns of distractions. And, finally, Christ speaks of the type of heart that is neither hardened, nor shallow, nor choked with unnecessary concerns, and which… as a result… is able to bring forth the harvest of fruit for which it was intended… a heart single-minded in its desire to grow whatever God wants of it. This type of heart keeps facing the Son of God, and as a result, brings forth a harvest of life.

The local sheriff was looking for a deputy, and one of the applicants - who was not known to be the brightest academically, was called in for an interview. "Okay," began the sheriff, "What is 1 and 1?" "Eleven," came the reply. The sheriff thought to himself, "That's not what I meant, but he's right."

Then the sheriff asked, "What two days of the week start with the letter 'T'?" "Today & tomorrow," replied the applicant. The sheriff was again surprised over the answer, one that he had never thought of himself.

"Now, listen carefully, who killed Abraham Lincoln?" asked the sheriff. The job seeker seemed a little surprised, then thought really hard for a minute and finally admitted, "I don't know." The sheriff replied, "Well, why don't you go home and work on that one for a while?" The applicant left and wandered over to his pals who were waiting to hear the results of the interview. He greeted them with a cheery smile, "The job is mine! The interview went great! First day on the job and I'm already working on a murder case!"

Because we just don’t get it, in this morning’s parable Christ himself tells us bluntly that the seed is the word of God. The seed falls upon soil and the type of the soil determines whether, or not, the seed fulfills its purpose. God the Father is the Sower who has cast his Son, His Word, upon our hearts.

Ann Landers once offered the following advice: "Know Yourself. Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful." Knowing oneself is exactly what Jesus Christ is addressing in this morning’s Gospel. In this morning’s parable Jesus Christ tries to get us to understand that when we stand before our Creator we will be judged by whether… or not… the soil of our hearts has produced any fruit, and that is dependant upon our knowing ourselves.

A man was all alone in a hotel room in Canada, in a state of deep depression. He was so depressed that he couldn’t even bring himself to go downstairs to the restaurant to eat. He lay there on a lonely hotel bed far from home wallowing in self-pity, and moaned out loud, "Life isn’t worth living this way, I wish I were dead!"

Suddenly, he panicked, wondering what God would think if he heard him speaking that way. Talking aloud again to the ceiling he said, "God, it’s a joke, isn’t it? Life is nothing but a joke." Suddenly, it occurred to the man that this was the first time that he had talked to God since he was a little boy. He was silent for a moment and then he began to pray. He describes it like this: "I just talked out loud about what a mess my life was in and how tired I was and how much I wanted things to be different in my life. And you know what happened next? In my head I heard a voice say, ‘It doesn’t have to be that way!’

This is exactly what Jesus Christ says this morning to all of us. If the soil of our heart is shallow, or hard, or filled with the thorns of distractions… it doesn’t have to be that way! We can plough up the field of our heart and make it fertile by praying to God, by talking to God, by turning to God: It’s that simple.

When Mother Teresa was passing through a crowd in Detroit a woman remarked, "Her secret is that she is free to be nothing. Therefore, God can use her for anything." Can it be said that the soil of our heart produces such a fruit?

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, October 11th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

2 Cor. 9: 6-11

Luke 7: 11-16

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Two friends bumped into one another on the street corner and one man asked the other man, "How was church last Sunday?" The other man replied, "I don’t know… I was kind of bored. I think I slept through half the sermon." The first man looked shocked and exclaimed, "What?! But you’re the pastor!!!"

This morning Jesus Christ asks each of us: Are you sleeping through your life, or are you awake?

Shortly after Jesus healed the Centurion’s servant he traveled toward the city of Nain where he came across this morning’s widow of Nain who was accompanying her only son’s body to the graveyard. It does not take too much imagination to feel the widow’s pain and loss; it takes perhaps a bit more reflection for us to identify with the dead son on his bier.

Like the son, some of us feel dead inside; or to phrase it another way: Why don’t we feel alive?

A teacher was grading a science test that she had given to her elementary-school class. The subject of the test was "The Human Body," and the first question was: "Name one of the major functions of the skin." One child wrote: "To keep people who look at you from throwing up."

With this morning’s Gospel reading we might ask: What is the purpose of being alive? Why do we feel dead inside? We feel dead inside because we have believed our pop culture’s Gospel of self-centeredness: The Gospel of the Self. That Gospel preaches that I am what matters most in my life. It is a Gospel about rights, about doing whatever I want to do. As a result of our being disciples of this Gospel of the Self, some of us feel locked up within ourselves as if within a tomb. We wonder how to get out of this tomb, how to come alive, how to live. If we look at Jesus Christ this morning, we may see a way.

This morning, we are told that when Jesus saw the widow mourning the loss of her only son, he had compassion on her. Perhaps we don’t feel alive because we don’t exercise compassion? By "compassion" we mean not something we "feel" but something we "do"?

An expert in diamonds happened to be seated on an airplane beside a woman with a huge diamond on her finger. Finally, the man introduced himself and said, "I couldn't help but notice your beautiful diamond. I am an expert in precious stones. Please tell me about that stone." Holding her hand out in front of her and wiggling her fingers so that the massive stone twinkled, she replied, "This is the famous Klopman diamond, one of the largest in the world. But there is a strange curse that comes with it." Now the man was really interested. With bated breath he asked, "What is the curse?" The woman replied, "It's Mr. Klopman."

It is safe to say that Mrs. Klopman felt little compassion for Mr. Klopman. But… this doesn’t mean that she couldn’t still exercise compassion towards him.

To exercise compassion we have to stop staring at our own navel and become concerned about another. Being concerned about others certainly goes against pop culture’s emphasis on the self: self-fulfillment, self-discovery, self-satisfaction. This morning Jesus Christ says to us that it is by the exercise of compassion for others that we both bring them and ourselves back to life.

When he first came to the United States from Russia Yakov Smirnoff was not prepared for the incredible variety of instant products available in American grocery stores. He says, "On my first shopping trip, I saw powdered milk… you just add water, and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice… you just add water, and you get orange juice. And then I saw baby powder, and I thought to myself, "What a country!"

In order to be alive… just add compassion for others.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, October 4th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

2 Cor. 6: 16-7:1

Luke 6: 31-36

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

A large and important company had moved into a new skyscraper and discovered that the builder had not put in enough elevators. Employees were disgruntled because there were long waits for the elevators, especially at both ends of the working day. The company got a wide cross-section of the staff together and asked them to sit down and solve the problem. The task force came up with four possible solutions:

1. Speed up the elevators, or arrange for them to stop at certain floors during rush periods. 2. Stagger working hours to reduce elevator demand at either end of the day. 3. Install mirrors around entrances to all elevators. 4. Drive a new elevator shaft through the building.

The company came to the realization that the real problem was not the elevators, but the people, so they chose the third solution: Install mirrors around entrances to all of the elevators. People became so preoccupied with looking at themselves (or, surreptitiously, at others) that they no longer noticed the wait for the elevator. The problem was not so much the lack of elevators as it was the impatience of the employees.

What might, at first glance, appear to be the cause of a problem may, in the long-run, not be the problem at all. And so it is with forgiveness: The problem is never with the other, the problem is with my unwillingness to forgive the other.

The culture in which live teaches us to value ourselves above all others. And yet, Christ has commanded us to "Love your neighbor as yourself." Too often we take this to mean that we should do no harm to others; doing "no harm", however, is not the same thing as "doing good". And when Christ speaks to us of our "neighbor"… as in all things, he tries to stretch our understanding of who our neighbor is, as we have seen in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In this morning’s Gospel passage, Christ goes even further and specifically defines what goodness towards others should look like: "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?… If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?... Love your enemies, do good."

This morning is not the first time that we have heard this Gospel passage wherein Christ tells us to love our enemies, which he repeatedly links with the love of God. And yet, inside each of us, is the desire to retaliate when we have been hurt by another.

Part of the reason that we find it so hard to love our enemies is because we refuse to forget their offenses. We act as if we have a right to remember the wrongs done to us, and in remembering those wrongs, we find it impossible to forgive. It seems that even after we’ve said, "Lord, I want to forgive that person," our mind keeps replaying what happened. And then all of those hurt feelings and resentments come back and we start dreaming up scenes in which we meet that person. We dream of all the things we might say to them, and all the things they might say to us. And before long, our stomach is in a knot again and forgiveness seems an impossible task.

A woman went to her car dealership in Texas and stated, "My car won't start when I buy pistachio." It seems that on hot summer days she would drive to a certain shop for ice cream to take home. It never failed, she said: the car would always start when she bought chocolate, vanilla or strawberry… but when she bought pistachio, she got stranded.

The manager felt that he had to see this to believe it. He tried a chocolate trip, and the car worked fine. Vanilla or strawberry… no problem. Then came the trip for pistachio and, sure enough, the engine refused to start.

It was an engineering troubleshooter whose insight solved the problem. He observed that chocolate, vanilla and strawberry were pre-packaged flavors, sold right out of the freezer. But take-home orders of pistachio were hand-packed at the shop. The time needed to have the pistachio packed was just enough for the car to develop vapor lock in the summertime Texas heat. The woman wasn't crazy after all: It was true - her car wouldn't start when she bought pistachio!

Some things seem as if they can’t be possible… like forgiving an enemy; at such times Jesus Christ’s call for us to change our mind can seem like a call to do the impossible. Jesus Christ calls us to consider that, perhaps, the "problem" of forgiveness lies, not with the other person, but with me, and with how I view them. The attitude with which we approach others creates the environment for our relationship with them. Perhaps, if we approached others with a proactive sense of forgiveness, instead of as enemies, we might engender in them the hope that God wouldn’t send someone kind to them if they were beyond being saved.

We Christians keep on hoping that there is some way around Christ’s radical demands; we want "goodness" to be something that does not inconvenience us. True to form, this morning Jesus Christ comes to say that goodness takes work, and that it takes stretching the boundaries of the heart. When he speaks about forgiveness he is talking not about something passive, but about something positive. In other words: to forgive others we must DO something for them!

Holiday Inn, when looking for 500 people to fill positions for a new facility, interviewed 5,000 candidates. The hotel managers interviewing these people excluded all candidates who smiled fewer than four times during the interview. This applied to people competing for jobs in all categories. Maybe we don’t forgive because we forget that we should smile? That simply change in behavior alone might begin to thaw out that glacier we call our heart, thereby making it easier for us to forgive. Such a simple thing, and yet such vast moral consequences. Who would have ever thought that forgiveness could look like a smile? Jesus Christ… that’s who!

When Jesus Christ speaks about treating others as we would like to be treated, he is not talking about how this makes us feel… he is talking about the forgiveness that we exercise as a manifestation of our goodness, a forgiveness that can become the healing, and freeing, of the other person.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

2 Cor. 6: 1-10

Luke 5: 1-11

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

The Duke of Gloucester made the following comment at a luncheon meeting in London: "A home-accident survey showed that 90 percent of accidents on staircases involved either the top step or the bottom step. This information was fed into a computer in order to analyze how these accidents could be reduced. The computer's answer was: 'Remove the top and bottom steps.'"

Computers may know the facts, and yet, not see the overall picture. Life is about more than just the facts; God knows this, and sometimes calls us to go beyond the facts and solutions that we know in order to let him take us into the unknown.

In this morning’s reading from the Gospel according to St. Luke, we are told that after the disciples had spent a full night of fruitless fishing Christ called out to Peter and told him, "Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch." Peter immediately countered this command with "But we have toiled all night and caught nothing."

How like Peter we are. God tells us to do something and our first impulse isn’t to obedience, but to telling him why we can’t do what he asks of us.

"We have toiled all night and caught nothing."

In other words, Peter’s first impulse was to explain why he thought that what Christ asked of him was foolishness. The problem for us is that, sometimes, even good people become so used to doing things their own way that they begin to believe that there IS no way other than the one that occurs to them. And yet, at some point God brings each of us to a place where nothing is working like it used to, where nothing is making sense anymore. And this is exactly where we need to be… for at such times God is bringing us to an end of relying upon ourselves, and to the beginning of truly trusting him.

We have the saying, "I'm in deep water," which has a negative connotation, meaning that we are in something over our heads and that we are in danger of drowning. What we sometimes lose sight of in situations where we are not the ones in control is that God is taking us into deeper waters in order to have a deeper relationship with himself, taking us to a place where we are more dependant upon him, which, in turn, may enable us to more clearly realize our need for him.

Doing what God asks of us doesn’t always make sense to us, and… according to our usual way of seeing things… can even appear to be illogical. At such times God is trying to take us from our comfortable shoreline to a deeper place where we will have to cast our trust and faith and find in him the food that our soul really needs.

Returning home one afternoon with her daughter, Kimberley, aged two, Mary pulled into her driveway and stopped to check the mailbox. When she returned to the car, Mary found that Kimberley had pushed the locks down on the doors… and the key was still in the ignition. For an hour Mary tried to explain to Kimberley how to pull up the door handle, but to no avail. She was on the verge of tears: her husband wasn't home, and since they lived in the country, there were no nearby neighbors to help. Mary closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window. Suddenly, Kimberley stood up on the seat and softly tapped on the window. As Mary looked down at her, Kimberly asked softly, "Mommy, do you want me to roll down the window?"

And a little child shall lead them. Sometimes, when we reach for a solution we lose sight of other possible solutions. When God takes us into our deep waters, sometimes, our first impulse is to accuse him of not loving us; otherwise, why would he allow us to experience such stress. But there is another way to look at such situations. Perhaps our "deep water" moments are the only way that God can pry our fingers off of our hearts and get us to realize that his vision of our life is larger than our own.

Why did Peter fail on the first fishing expedition? Surely, it wasn’t that he did not know how or where to fish. These men were experts. They were professional fishermen and knew the ways of fish. Their failure came about because the Lord wanted to teach them a much needed lesson… and that is, that without Him, we can accomplish nothing! In other words, when Jesus is on board, the impossible becomes do-able.

And Peter, James and John got the message: "So when they had brought their boats to land, they forsook all and followed him."

In some of the outlying areas of British Columbia, Canada, farmers have been plagued with wolves killing their livestock. Meetings have been held with farmers, environmentalists and concerned citizens in a move to solve the problem. The majority of the local people favored shooting or poisoning the marauding wolves. At one meeting a woman strode to the microphone, listed her impressive credentials and explained her solution. "Vasectomy is the answer," she said. "Simply trap the wolves humanely, neuter the males and release them." One grizzled old sheep farmer rose to his feet. "Ma'am," he said in a gruff voice, "no disrespect meant, you bein' an expert, but them wolves is killin' my sheep, not makin' love to 'em."

The solutions that we come up with may, from God’s point of view, be no solution at all. We need to consider that someone… oh, say, like God… might know a better way than ourselves. In this morning’s Gospel reading Jesus invites us to walk away from our usual way of thinking and living and, like Peter, James and John, to follow him. We might not have to walk away from a boat as they did, but there is plenty else in our lives that we need to walk away from in order for our relationship with him to deepen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, September 20th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

2 Cor. 4: 6-15

Matt. 22: 35-46

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Pianist Arthur Rubenstein, loquacious in eight languages, once told this story about himself: Some years ago he was assailed by a stubborn case of hoarseness. As the newspapers were full of reports about smoking and cancer, he decided to consult a throat specialist. Rubenstein recounted, "I searched his face for a clue during the 30 minute examination, but it was expressionless. He told me to come back the next day. I went home full of fears, and I didn't sleep that night. The next day there was another long examination and again an ominous silence. Tell me, I exclaimed, I can stand the truth. I've lived a full, rich life: What's wrong with me?!" The physician replied, "You simply talk too much."

Our culture also has a lot to say to us, some of it… from a spiritual point of view… outright lies. Take, for instance, our culture’s relentless promotion of "finding ourselves". Paul Vitz, a psychologist at New York University, has written about our cultural shift towards the "autonomy of the self", or, what he calls, "Self-ism". In his book entitled the Cult of Self-Worship he elaborates on Self-ism… the modern version of the myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his reflection in a pool of water. This narcissism is evident in everything in our culture from advertising to self-help psychology to New Age spirituality.

The basic premise of Self-ism is that it does not allow… and in fact, is even hostile to… social bonds and obligations. Self-ism is all about rights and freedom, and nothing about duties and obligations. Self-ism creates a narcissistic mentality where each person thinks they are some kind of deity. This orientation makes us a nation of 250 million Supreme Beings. WE are the deity whom we worship and we will have no others preferred before ourselves. So, then, what do we make of Christ’s words in this morning’s Gospel reading?

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Loving our neighbor as ourselves is not the same thing as narcissism. We may be tempted to think that because we are called "Christians" Self-ism does not apply to ourselves. But Orthodox Christian Americans are not immune to this insidious spiritual disease.

The Puritan preacher Richard Baxter once wrote a pamphlet in which he lumped the Quakers with "drunkards, swearers, whoremongers, sensual wretches, and other miserable creatures." And then… just in case he had not yet insulted them enough.. he delivered the ultimate insult by insisting that Quakers were no better than "Papists". In reaction to this diatribe, the Quaker leader James Naylor announced that he was compelled "by the Spirit of Jesus Christ" to respond to these harsh accusations. He proceeded to characterize his Puritan opponent as a "Serpent," a "Liar," a "Child of the Devil," a "Cursed Hypocrite," and a "Dumb Dog."

This is hardly an example of what Christ had in mind when he instructed us to love our neighbor. But are we so different? At least Baxtor and Naylor’s antagonism was out in the open; many of us are so caught up in our culture’s lie about pursuing ourselves that we don’t even bother to get involved with others, not even to argue with them! Having been hoodwinked by our culture’s emphasis on Self-ism, we think it is acceptable to be both an Orthodox Christian and to be able to mutter "I don’t want to get involved."

A Trappist monk by the name of Thomas Merton, one of the most-read spiritual writers of the 20th century, speaks of the intimate connection between love of God, healthy love of self, and love for others:

"One of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people."

(From - New Seeds of Contemplation)

Or, as Jesus Christ has said, that one must lose his life in order to gain it.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek once told the story of a young Buddhist monk who sat outside his temple two thousand years ago, hands clasped in prayer. He looked very pious and he chanted 'Amita Buddha' all day. Day after day he intoned these words, believing that he was acquiring grace. One day the head priest of the temple sat next to him and began rubbing a piece of brick against a stone. Day after day he rubbed one against the other. This went on week after week until the young monk could no longer contain his curiosity, and he finally blurted out, "Father, what are you doing?" "I'm trying to make a mirror," said the head priest. "But that's impossible!" said the young monk. "You can't make a mirror from a brick." "True," replied the head priest, "and it is just as impossible for you to acquire grace by doing nothing except chant 'Amita Buddha' all day long."

It is not enough for us to not wish other people ill; we must DO good for them… this is what it looks like to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. And nothing could be further from the heresy of Self-ism. Even God himself does not live in isolation, but rather, in the communion and community that is the Holy Trinity.

How about visiting the ill in the hospital, especially when we don’t even know them? How about leaving anonymous bags of groceries by the front door of someone having a tough time? How about inconveniencing ourselves for others?

Scientific measurements indicate that Continental land masses sit on enormous slabs of rock that slide very slowly at the rate of l to 8 inches per year. America is gradually moving westward, away from Europe, at the rate of 3 inches per year. Our Milky Way galaxy is hurtling through space at 375 miles per second or 1.3 million miles per hour. But that's not all. Within our own galaxy the sun and its solar system are zooming along at 12.4 miles per second (at 43,000 mph) in the direction of the star Vega in the constellation Lyra.

What about us? What are we doing? Are we moving away from ourselves by moving towards others, or are we, good children of our culture that we are, staring at our navel in order to find happiness?

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, September 13th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

1 Cor. 1: 18-24

John 19: 6-11, 13-20, 25-28, 30-35

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Some years ago, two students graduated from the Chicago-Kent College of Law. The highest ranking student in the class was a blind man named Overton and, when he received his honor, he insisted that half the credit should go to his friend, Kaspryzak. They had met one another in school when the armless Mr. Kaspryzak had guided the blind Mr. Overton down a flight of stairs. This acquaintance ripened into friendship. The blind man carried the books which the armless man read aloud in their common study, and thus the individual deficiency of each was compensated for by the other. After their graduation, they planned to practice law together.

Such is an example of embracing one’s cross. The very concept of embracing one’s cross comes from Jesus’ own example on his own cross on that hill called Golgatha.

Around 325 the Emperor Constantine sent his mother, the pious Empress Helen, to Jerusalem to try and find the Cross upon which Christ had been crucified. An elderly Hebrew by the name of Jude indicated to the Empress that the Cross was buried beneath the pagan-temple of Venus. Legend says that the Empress found the hill of Calvary carpeted with Vasiliko, or Basil plants, considered to be the flower of royalty. The word "Vasiliko" means "of the King," since the word "Basileus" in Greek means "King"; so, the plant Vasiliko, or Basil, has become connected to the Precious Cross of the King of Glory, our Lord Jesus Christ.The Empress had the temple demolished and, soon, the Sepulcher of the Lord was uncovered, and not far away from it… three crosses, a plank with the inscription ordered by Pilate, and the four nails which had pierced the Body of the Lord. In order to discern upon which of the three crosses the Savior had been crucified, Makarios, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, alternately touched the crosses to a corpse. When the Cross of the Lord was held against it, the dead one came alive. Having beheld the rising-up of the dead man, everyone was convinced that the Life-Creating Cross had finally been found. Christians, having come in an immense throng to make veneration to the Holy Cross, besought the Patriarch to elevate the Cross, to exalt it, so that everyone there, even afar off, might reverently contemplate it. From this act we get the title of this feast, the Exaltation of the Holy and Life-Giving Cross.

The Emperor Constantine gave orders to raise up in Jerusalem a majestic and spacious church in honor of the Resurrection of Christ, including within itself the Sepulcher of the Lord, and Golgotha. The church was consecrated on 13 September 335. On the following day, 14 September, the festal celebration of the Exaltation of the Venerable and Life-Creating Cross was established.

In the beginning of the Christian church’s history the first Christians had to struggle to break away from how their culture viewed the cross, and to make their own the Apostles view of Christ’s cross. Early on the cross wasn’t the religious symbol that it is today; at that time it still carried the full implication of what it really was… an instrument of torture, degradation, and execution. The early Christians were still concerned with what the Jews in their old synagogue thought of them, and they had to wrestle with the incongruity of Christ’s death on the Cross being at the heart of the good news of his Gospel.

For some of the very early Christians, the Cross, that well-known instrument of torture and declaration that one was a criminal, just did not fit their image of something having gone right. But are we so different? How often do we view the crosses in our life … not as a blessing, but as a burden, and sometimes, even as a punishment? How can one’s own death be understood as "Good News"?

A recent television documentary pointed out that the cheetah survives on the African plains by running down its prey. The big cat can sprint seventy miles per hour. But the cheetah cannot sustain that pace for long. Within its long, sleek body is a disproportionately small heart, which causes the cheetah to tire quickly. Unless the cheetah catches its prey in the first flurry, it must abandon the chase. Sometimes we Christians seem to have the cheetah's approach to our relationship with God and what he asks of us. We take off with great energy, but lacking the heart for sustained effort, we fizzle before we finish. We vow to start faster and run harder, when what we need may be not more speed but more staying power… stamina that comes only from a bigger heart., which comes only from the giving away of the self. In other words, from the embracing of the crosses in our lives.

No matter how the Cross, and our crosses, look to us, the Church stresses the Cross in order to teach us that there is no resurrection, no empty tomb, no new life… without the self-sacrifice that the cross calls for, and that this dying to the self is not an occasion for fear, but for celebration.

There is the story of a little boy whose sister needed a blood transfusion. The doctor explained that she had the same disease the boy had recovered from two years earlier. Her only chance for recovery was a transfusion from someone who had previously conquered the disease. Since the two children had the same rare blood type, the boy was the ideal donor.

"Would you give your blood to Mary?" the doctor asked. Johnny hesitated. His lower lip started to tremble. Then he smiled and said, "Sure, for my sister." Soon the two children were wheeled into the hospital room… Mary, pale and thin, Johnny, robust and healthy. Neither spoke, but when their eyes met, Johnny grinned.

As the nurse inserted the needle into his arm, Johnny's smile faded. He watched the blood flow through the tube. With the ordeal almost over, his voice, slightly shaky, broke the silence as he asked, "Doctor, when do I die?' Only then did the doctor realize why Johnny had hesitated, why his lip had trembled when he'd agreed to donate his blood: The little boy had mistakenly thought that giving his blood to his sister meant the giving up of his own life… and yet, he had been willing to do it.

Today’s celebration is not a mere calling to mind of what Christ did; it is also the Church’s asking us about what we are willing to do. Is the cross in our life merely an ornament hanging on a chain around our neck, or is it our embracing of God’s mysterious will in our lives?

Ted Jackson and his family moved to the seminary so that he could study for the Priesthood. Someone leaving the seminary gave him a car, telling him that it could only be started with a push. As a result, for three years Ted had to make sure to park on hills or he would never get going. When it came time for Ted and his family to leave the seminary he decided to gift the car to another seminarian. Ted explained how it needed to be parked, and the young seminarian yanked the hood of the car up and began looking under the hood. From under the hood he said, "I think that the only trouble is this loose cable." He gave the cable a twist, stepped into the car, pushed the switch, and to Ted’s astonishment, the engine roared to life.

For two years needless trouble had become Ted’s routine. The power was there all the time. Only a loose connection kept Ted from putting that power to work.

It is the same with us, and with the crosses in our lives. When we embrace the cross, instead of trying to avoid it, a connection is made that enables us to transcend ourselves, and… in doing so… to live God’s own life, here and now.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, September 6th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

1 Cor. 16: 13-24

Matt. 21: 33-42

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

The story is told of a new bank president who met with his predecessor and said, "I would like to know what has been the key to your success." The older gentleman looked at him and replied, "Young man, I can sum it up in two words: Good decisions." To that the young man responded, "I thank you immensely for that advice, sir, but how does one come to know which are the good decisions?" "One word, young man," replied the sage. "Experience." "That's all well and good," said the younger, "but how does one get experience?" "Two words," said the elder. "Bad decisions."

We are meant to learn from our mistakes. Unfortunately, our culture tells us that anything that we want to do is okay, and therefore, nothing is either right or wrong.

In this morning’s Gospel reading Jesus speaks of a landowner and the farmers to whom he rented his land. In the beginning, it is the landowner who plants a vineyard, digs a winepress, and builds a watchtower so that the crop can be guarded from thieves. Having created all of this, he then entrusts it to a group of tenant farmers, and goes away. The farmers are to tend to the crop and the land, and when it is time, they are to give the landowner his share of the harvest. But when it is time for the harvest a problem arises: the farmers, no longer content to be the tenants of the vineyard, act as if they have a right to everything.

Year after year we hear this parable, and most probably we identify with the wronged owner. But Jesus did not tell this parable in order to comfort landowners who have been offended; rather, Jesus was giving a warning to those who misuse and abuse what has been entrusted to them.

We are in spiritual danger today and we don’t know it because our culture tells us that we are just fine, that anything that we want to do is fine, and that there is no standard of goodness against which we need to measure ourselves. As a result we do not want to be accountable to anyone but ourselves. We don’t want someone telling us what to do and what kind of people we ought to be, even if that someone is God. Our lives belong to us! So far as our culture is concerned, the whole world belongs to us.

As a result of this mindset we misuse what God has given us. The motto to live by that our culture teaches us is: It is my life and I will do with it as I please. But this is not what Jesus Christ teaches, as we see in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus Christ’s Gospel is about our interconnectedness, and our responsibility to care for one another.

During the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, sentenced a soldier to be shot for his crimes. The execution was to take place at the ringing of the evening curfew bell. However, the bell did not sound. The soldier's fiancé had climbed into the belfry and clung to the great clapper of the bell to prevent it from striking. When she was summoned by Cromwell to account for her actions, she wept as she showed him her bruised and bleeding hands. Cromwell's heart was touched and he said, "Your lover shall live because of your sacrifice. Curfew shall not ring tonight!"

Are we willing to do such things for one another? Are we willing to do anything for others, or is my life only about me? Have we bought into our cultures lie that we should be the center of all that we desire? Let us honestly ask ourselves: If we were the vinedressers in this morning’s Gospel, might not we also have been willing to kill others in order to get what we want?

In this morning’s Epistle to the Corinthians St. Paul says: "Watch, stand fast in the faith, be brave, be strong. Let all that you do be done with love." Like the Corinthians, we live in a culture in which truth is regarded as relative, and where every person’s opinion is considered to be just as valid as anyone else’s. Our culture teaches us to confuse opinions with "truth". We cannot be a Christian and believe this. Only Jesus Christ is the Truth, and his teaching is not "It’s every man for himself!"

Some years ago a series of tornados caused extensive damage in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, resulting in the loss of nearly 100 lives. Prior to one the storms, a man named David Kostka was umpiring a Little League baseball game in Wheatland, Pennsylvania. When he saw the black funnel heading toward the field, he rushed into the stands and grabbed his niece. He pushed her into a nearby ditch and covered her with his body. Then the tornado struck. When the youngster finally looked up, her uncle was gone. He had given his life to the deadly storm in order to save her.

We need to decide whose disciple we are: our culture’s, or Jesus Christ’s.

God has given us his vineyard in order that we might provide for one another, no matter what lies our culture might tell us. Our culture also gives us the impression that there are no consequences to not following Jesus Christ’s command to self-sacrifice. Not so, according to Jesus Christ. Let us listen, once again, to the ending of the parable that he told in this morning’s Gospel reading:

"He will destroy those wicked men miserably, and lease his vineyard to other vinedressers who will render to him the fruits in their seasons."

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, August 30th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

1 Cor. 15: 1-11

Matt. 19: 16-26

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Frank was driving down the street in a sweat because he had an important meeting and couldn’t find a parking space. Looking up towards heaven, he said: "Lord, if you find me a parking spot I promise to attend church every Sunday and I will give up drinking!" All of a sudden, he came upon a parking spot, at which point Frank said, "Never mind Lord, I found one!"

Why is it that we only turn to God when we reach the limits of our own competence? And why is it that as soon as God blesses us we turn away from him and go back to relying on ourselves?

In this morning’s Gospel reading, a rich young man approaches Jesus and asks, "What good thing must I do that I may have eternal life?" Jesus responds by telling him to keep the commandments, to which response the young man replies by stating, "All these things I have kept from my youth."

One can almost taste the self-gratulatory self-righteousness in this statement. There was a comic strip character named Pogo who once stated, "I have met the enemy, and he is us!" In a similar vein, the rich young man’s self-blindness is also "us". Like this morning’s rich young man, we presume that we are better than we actually are. But if we are such morally good people… then why do we gossip? Why do we cheat when no one is looking? Why do we lie when it is less convenient to tell the truth? Why are we jealous of someone else’s sudden good fortune? Being a sinner is more than just external actions; it is an inner orientation.

To the credit of this morning’s rich young man he asked Christ, "What do I still lack?" Most probably, he (as well as ourselves) was expecting Christ to say, "Nothing, my fine young sir, you are perfect just the way that you are." Such an approach, however, is not that of Jesus Christ. In his book, "good enough" is not even good enough.

A man who had spent most of his adult life serving as a missionary in Africa was getting ready to return home to England. An old Bantu man came to say goodbye, and the missionary expounded about the world he was going home to, a place with ships that ran under the water, on the water, and even those that flew above the water. He described English houses with all of their conveniences, such as running water and electric lights. When he finished speaking, the missionary waited for the old Bantu to register amazement and perhaps even a bit of envy. Instead, the old Bantu asked, "Is that all, Sir?" Startled, the missionary stuttered, "Yes, I think it is." Then, very slowly, and very gravely, the old Bantu said, "Well, Sir, you know, that to be better off is not the same as being better."

Are we better than we were last year at this time? Do we bother to ask ourselves each morning, "What do I still lack?" This morning’s question of "What do I still lack?" turns out to be a profound one. In our case, it is not that we think that we’re perfect; none of us would be either so crass or so stupid as to think this. Rather, the problem is that we think we’re not so bad: We don’t rape, we don’t shoplift from Walmart, we haven’t mugged any old ladies this past week. The problem is that with the standard of "I’m not so bad", it becomes impossible for us to perceive that I’m really "not so good". Some things need to be searched for in order to be seen, and when we presume that we are not really a sinful person then we become oblivious to the very real "badness" simmering deep within our hearts, for example… the desire to continue disliking someone, simply because we have disliked them for so long, which we justify by thinking "…and that’s just the way it is".

I’m not making this up. I have actually had people come to Confession who have said that they didn’t know what to confess because they didn’t "do" any sins. Can it be that only external actions constitute sin? Not according to Jesus Christ, who made clear that the origin of our sins and our sinning is rooted within the deep orientation of our heart.

What do we… especially as Americans… lack? What we lack is a heart that is convinced that there is a real and subtle sinfulness that lays hidden deep within our heart and our feelings. In short, what we lack is the conviction that we are, in fact, a sinner.

We have much to learn from recovering alcoholics who, in order to be "recovering", had to accept, at some point, that no matter how many drinks they never drink again, they are, and will always be, an alcoholic. We need to obtain the mindset that convinces us that no matter what sins we do not currently commit, we are, and will remain, basically a sinner because our heart is chronically attracted to the false glitter of sinning. Being convinced that we are a sinner engenders an orientation within us of repentance, the realization that that there are impulses and desires within myself, no matter how blind to them I might be, that require the vigilance of an ongoing repentance on my part.

Unfortunately, we are surrounded by, and immersed in, a culture that preaches a false gospel of our being ok just the way we are. This secular gospel tells us that that we should engage in nothing that makes us feel bad about ourselves. This secular gospel both urges us to distract ourselves from our inner reality, and provides us with the means to do so.

Alexander the Great was not satisfied, even when he had completely subdued the nations. He wept because there were no more worlds to conquer, and he died at an early age in a state of debauchery. Hannibal, who filled three bushels with the gold rings taken from the knights he had slaughtered, committed suicide by swallowing poison. Few noted his passing, and he left this earth completely unmourned. Julius Caesar, 'staining his garments in the blood of one million of his foes,' conquered 800 cities, only to be stabbed by his best friends at the scene of his greatest triumph. Napoleon, the feared conqueror, after being the scourge of Europe, spent his last years in banishment.

What does it matter what our culture tells us constitutes happiness and success when such an approach leaves the heart bereft of true awareness of ourselves? How can we ever hope to know God when we do not even know ourselves?

Let us not presume that we are not like this morning’s rich young man just because we are not rich. Nothing is so satisfying as self-satisfaction, and nothing is so blinding as the presumption that we are not so bad, that "All these things I have kept from my youth."

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

1 Cor. 9: 2-12

Matt. 18: 23-35

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Driving through Texas, a New Yorker collided with a truck carrying a horse. A few months later he tried to collect damages for his injuries. The Insurance lawyer demanded, "How can you now claim to have all these injuries? According to the police report, at the time you said you were not hurt." "Look," replied the New Yorker. "I was lying on the road in a lot of pain, and I heard someone say that the horse had a broken leg. The next thing I know this big Texas Ranger pulls out his gun and shoots the horse. Then, he turns to me and asks, 'Are you okay?' What would you have said?!"

When we are frightened or in pain we sometimes say things that we don’t really mean. When Christ speaks about forgiveness in this morning’s reading, he is really asking us: Do we mean what we say when we say that we forgive someone?

Right before this morning’s parable, Peter legalistically asks Jesus a question: "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" Peter's problem was that he was still thinking in terms of justice and legality, of law… just as we often do when we are hurt… although, were we honest with ourselves, we would admit that it is not a matter of justice that we wish to see accomplished, but one of vengeance. But Jesus' reply was not based on law and justice, but upon the gospel of mercy:

"I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven."

In other words… we must forgive unconditionally.

When we are duplicitous we may think that we have gotten away with something without any cost to us… but this is not so. A person who is duplicitous has to become deliberately deceitful...like a CIA agent or spy. They can't just come home and spill forth the events of the day because they have to think, "What can I safely talk about, and what have I got to keep to myself?" So even when the lies are not discovered, they change the liar. That person goes from being a candid, open human being… to being a secretive, furtive one. We pay a price for everything that we engage in, for good or for ill: Duplicity turns us into a liar; unwillingness to forgive turns us into a hostage of our own hard heart.

A newspaper reporter phoned a story into his editor about an empty truck that had rolled down a hill and smashed into a home. The Editor was unimpressed and said that he didn't want to run the story. The reported replied, "I'm glad you're taking this so calmly. It was your house."

When it is our heart that hurts, it can be very difficult to remember Christ’s injunction to forgive; in fact, at such a time we often don’t want to remember his injunction to forgive! Our trouble is that when we hurt we think we don’t have to forgive. The sting of the offense feels unjust to us, and the worst part of us wants the offender to pay until we feel better.

Sometimes, we carry around a small seed of bitterness and resentment about another, only to find, as we age, that our unwillingness to forgive has turned that seed into a giant tree that we don’t know how to put down. This morning’s parable makes clear that no matter what the other person has done to us we do not have the right to stay mad and hold a grudge.

Let’s face it… most of us know this already. But what we do is to say to ourselves, How much can I indulge in the remembered hurt and still be said to have "forgiven", as I am supposed to? From a spiritual point of view, we cannot be legalistic when it comes to sinning and we cannot be legalistic when it comes to forgiveness.

When James Garfield (later President of the United States) was principal of Hiram College in Ohio, a father asked him if the course of study could be simplified so that his son might be able to go through by a shorter route. "Certainly," Garfield replied. "But it all depends on what you want to make of your boy. When God wants to make an oak tree, He takes a hundred years. When He wants to make a squash he requires only two months."

Yes, it can sometimes be hard to forgive. But in this morning’s Gospel reading Jesus Christ calls us, his disciples, his students… to a higher standard of forgiveness than the old Law. He commands us: No more keeping score! No more dictating terms for forgiveness! No more making the other suffer until we feel better!

Jesus Christ makes clear that forgiving is not about keeping score… it is about wiping the scoreboard clean because forgiveness is not about legalistic justice; according to Jesus Christ, forgiveness is about mercy.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, August 16th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

1 Cor. 4: 9-16

Matt. 17: 14-23

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Once when Bob Hope received a major award he responded, "I don't deserve this… but then, I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either." Many of us have had something happen to us, triggering off the thought: I don’t deserve this. Life has a way of being messy and inconvenient. But, as the saying goes, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. In other words, what matters is what we do with what happens to us, and what we do arises from our faith… or lack thereof.

Hearing St. Matthew’s Gospel reading this morning, we might, at first, think that its focus is about Jesus curing the epileptic boy. The real focus, however, is on faith.

The disciples asked Jesus why they had been unable to help the epileptic boy. Jesus, with his typical straightforwardness, replied: "Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you."

B.M. Launderville has written, "The vine clings to the oak during the fiercest of storms. Although the violence of nature may uproot the oak, twining tendrils still cling to it. If the vine is on the side opposite the wind, the great oak is its protection; if it is on the exposed side, the tempest only presses it closer to the trunk. In some of the storms of life, God intervenes and shelters us; while in others He allows us to be exposed, so that we will be pressed more closely to Him."

This is what Faith is, this tenacious clinging to God no matter what is happening around us. But Faith is not just a concept; faith is the living out of our relationship with God. When Jesus speaks of a lack of faith, what he is addressing is a lack of a relationship with God. Ultimately, Faith is faithfulness to our relationship with God.

Though many of us have seen pictures of a huge eagle's nest high in the branches of a tree or in the crag of a cliff, few of us have gotten a glimpse inside. When a mother eagle builds her nest she starts with thorns, broken branches, sharp rocks, and a number of other items that seem entirely unsuitable for the project. But then she lines the nest with a thick padding of wool, feathers, and fur from animals she has killed, making it soft and comfortable for the eggs. By the time the growing birds reach flying age, the comfort of the nest and the luxury of free meals make them quite reluctant to leave. That's when the mother eagle begins "stirring up the nest." With her strong talons she begins pulling up the thick carpet of fur and feathers, bringing the sharp rocks and branches to the surface. As more of the bedding gets plucked up, the nest becomes more uncomfortable for the young eagles. Eventually, this discomfort prompts the growing eagles to leave their once-comfortable abode and move on to more mature behavior.

When we are in the midst of adversity it can be difficult for us to see adversity as a blessing. But it is often in adversity that we are moved to pray, that we are moved to a deeper relationship with God. In my book, that qualifies as a blessing. But when things become tough, we often lose sight of the fact that our faith (as small as it is) is grown by prayer.

A woman by the name of Billie Wilcox and her husband Frank were living in Pakistan when their six-month-old baby died. An old Punjabi who heard of their grief came to comfort them, and said: "A tragedy like this is similar to being plunged into boiling water. If you are an egg, your affliction will make you hard-boiled and unresponsive. If you are a potato, you will emerge soft and pliable, resilient and adaptable." Billie now says, "It may sound funny to God, but there have been times when I have prayed, ‘O Lord, help me to be a potato.’"

Prayer can take many forms. About prayer, Fr. Florovsky has written: "The true aim of prayer is to enter into conversation with God. It is not restricted to certain hours of the day. A Christian has to feel himself personally in the presence of God. The goal of prayer is precisely to be with God… always."

Ideally, this is what the Fathers speak of when they mention "unceasing prayer"…it is a constant "being with God." And this is precisely the prayer of which Jesus speaks this morning, what we might call "personal" prayer, this never-ending orientation towards God. And personal prayer is something that we each are personally responsible for, no matter the pleasant or unpleasant situations in which we find ourselves.

Once there was an old man who lived in a tiny village. Although poor, he was envied by all, for he owned a beautiful white horse. Even the king coveted his treasure. People offered fabulous prices for the steed, but the old man always refused. "This horse is not a horse to me," he would tell them. "It is a person. How could you sell a person? He is a friend, not a possession. How could you sell a friend?" The man was poor and the temptation was great. But he never sold the horse.

One morning he found that the horse was not in the stable. All of the villagers began to deride him. "You old fool," they scoffed, "we told you that someone would steal your horse. It would have been better to have sold him. You could have gotten whatever price you wanted. Now the horse is gone, and you've been cursed with misfortune." But the old man responded, "Don't speak too quickly. All I know is that the stable is empty, and the horse is gone. The rest I don't know."

The people of the village laughed. They thought that the man was crazy. They had always thought he was a fool; if he wasn't, he would have sold the horse and lived off the money. But instead, he was a poor woodcutter, living hand to mouth in the misery of poverty. Now he had proven that he was, indeed, a fool.

As it turned out, after fifteen days, the horse returned. He hadn't been stolen; he had run away into the forest. Not only had he returned, but he had also brought a dozen wild horses home with him, making the old man a very rich person.

In a strange way, adversity can beget blessings. Let us not be so quick to judge our difficulties as a sign that God has abandoned us. God is "… everywhere present and fillest all things…" so how could he abandon us? In truth the real abandonment occurs on our part when we stop praying because life has become hard. And just because we show up for the Sunday Divine Liturgy does not mean that we are a praying people. This morning, Christ tells us, "If you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." All it takes is a small prayer to grow that seed.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

On Sunday, August 9th, 2009

At St. Mary Magdalene Church

Rincon, GA

(and for the mission in Helena, GA)

1 Cor. 3: 9-17

Matt. 14: 22-34

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Frank went to the bar to have drinks with some friends. When he walked in both ears were heavily bandaged. Sam asked, "What’s the matter with your ears?" Frank replied, "I was sitting in my kitchen, next to the ironing board while Marie pressed my pants. She left the kitchen for a minute and the phone rang, so I answered it. "Hello?" I said and then screamed because I had picked up the iron instead of the phone and held it to my ear." Sam asked, "But what about the other ear?" Frank replied, "The idiot called back."

Life has a way of distressing us. What we do when we are distressed affects our spiritual life and our relationship with Jesus Christ.

In this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus went off by himself to pray, sending his disciples to set out fishing. The Gospel text then states:

"But the boat was now in the middle of the sea, tossed by the waves, for the wind was contrary…Jesus went to them, walking on the sea…They were troubled, saying, ‘It is a ghost! And they cried out for fear." Jesus immediately called to them, saying, "Be of good cheer! It is I; do not be afraid."

Jesus then called Peter to venture out onto the angry sea and walk over it and come to him. Peter starts out, but becomes fearful and panics; he takes his gaze off of Jesus, and then begins to sink.

When we are distressed, we are not so different from Peter. Panic and fear sometimes cause us to do and say things which are not in our best interests. It is exactly at such times that we are tempted to take our focus off of Jesus Christ and place it on ourselves. In the midst of our storms, we sometimes act as if we don’t trust Jesus Christ: We don’t pray, we stop coming to church, we dismiss fasting as irrelevant. In short, we try to solve the pain by ourselves, assuming that God cannot be found within our storm.

To highlight its annual picnic one year, a company rented a racing shell and challenged a rival company to a boat race. The rival company accepted. On the day of the picnic, everyone entered into the spirit of the event. Women wore colorful summer dresses and big, floppy hats. Men wore straw skimmers and white pants. Bands played and banners waved. Finally the race began. To the consternation of the host company, the rival team immediately moved to the front and stayed there for the whole race, winning by 11 lengths.

The management of the host company was embarrassed by its showing and promptly appointed a committee to place responsibility for the failure and to make recommendations for improving the host team's chances in a rematch the following year. The committee appointed several task forces to study various aspects of the race. They met for three months and issued a preliminary report. In essence, the report said that the rival crew had been unfair.

"They had eight people rowing and one coxswain steering and shouting out the beat," the report said. "We had one person rowing and eight coxswains." The chairman of the board thanked the committee and sent it away to study the matter further and make recommendations for the rematch. Four months later the committee came back with a recommendation: "Our guy has to row faster."

Just because we think of a solution to a problem… does not mean that it is the right solution. When we are in a storm of pain and distress, and abandon God, we need to keep our eyes fixed on God and less on our pain and distress.

President Harry Truman could be quite colorful and direct in his speech. Once, when he was speaking at a Grange convention in Kansas City, Mrs. Truman and a woman friend were also in the audience. Truman began his speech with, "I grew up on a farm, and one thing I know… farming means manure, manure, manure, and more manure!" At this, Mrs. Truman's friend whispered to her, "Bess, why on earth don't you get Harry to say ‘fertilizer’ instead of ‘manure’?" Mrs. Truman replied, "Good Lord, Helen, you have no idea how many years it has taken me to get him to say ‘manure’!"

We CAN change! What is required is for us, in the midst of our storm, to remember that we WANT to!

Glory to Jesus Christ!