Lord of the storm

Psalms for the 5th Day
24 25 26 27 28 29

Psalm 29
Hymn to the Lord of the storm

Pay tribute to Yahweh, you sons of God,

tribute to Yahweh of glory and power,

tribute to Yaheweh of the glory of His name,

worship Yahweh in His sacred court.

The voice of Yahweh over the waters!

Yahweh over the multitudinous waters!

The voice of Yahweh in power!

The voice of Yahweh in splendour!

The voice of Yahweh shatters the cedars,

Yahweh shatters the cedars of Lebanon,

making Lebanon leap like a calf,

Sirion like a young wild bull.

The voice of Yahweh sharpens lightning shafts!

The voice of Yahweh sets the wilderness shaking.

Yahweh shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

The voice of Yahweh sets the terebinths shuddering,

stripping the forests bare.

The God of glory thunders.

In His palace everything cries, ‘Glory!’

Yahweh sat enthroned for the Flood,

Yahweh sits enthroned as a king for ever.

Yahweh gives strength to His people,

Yahweh blesses His people with peace.

This psalm is one I love for its majesty and might. The Jerusalem Bible translation of the psalms is rhythmical, and this is an example of one of the best and tightest rhythms, almost rappable, although it doesn't have end rhymes as hip-hop poetry does. This psalm is very special to me, even as poetry, and so I am going to post the original Hebrew, for those who might like to read it.

הָבוּ לַיהוָה, בְּנֵי אֵלִים; הָבוּ לַיהוָה, כָּבוֹד וָעֹז

הָבוּ לַיהוָה, כְּבוֹד שְׁמוֹ; הִשְׁתַּחֲווּ לַיהוָה, בְּהַדְרַת-קֹדֶשׁ

קוֹל יְהוָה, עַל-הַמָּיִם

אֵל-הַכָּבוֹד הִרְעִים; יְהוָה, עַל-מַיִם רַבִּים

קוֹל-יְהוָה בַּכֹּחַ; קוֹל יְהוָה, בֶּהָדָר

קוֹל יְהוָה, שֹׁבֵר אֲרָזִים; וַיְשַׁבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶת-אַרְזֵי הַלְּבָנוֹן

וַיַּרְקִידֵם כְּמוֹ-עֵגֶל; לְבָנוֹן וְשִׂרְיֹן, כְּמוֹ בֶן-רְאֵמִים

קוֹל-יְהוָה חֹצֵב; לַהֲבוֹת אֵשׁ

קוֹל יְהוָה, יָחִיל מִדְבָּ; יָחִיל יְהוָה, מִדְבַּר קָדֵשׁ

קוֹל יְהוָה, יְחוֹלֵל אַיָּלוֹת--ַיֶּחֱשֹׂף יְעָרוֹת

וּבְהֵיכָלוֹ-- כֻּלּוֹ, אֹמֵר כָּבוֹד

יְהוָה, לַמַּבּוּל יָשָׁב; וַיֵּשֶׁב יְהוָה, מֶלֶךְ לְעוֹלָם

יְהוָה--עֹז, לְעַמּוֹ יִתֵּן; יְהוָה, יְבָרֵךְ אֶת-עַמּוֹ בַשָּׁלוֹם

Havú l’Adonáy, b’ney Elím

Havú l’Adonáy kavód va’óz

Havú l’Adonáy k’vod sh’mó

Hishtachavú l’Adonáy b’hadrát kódesh

Kol Adonáy al ha-máyim

Él ha-kavód hir’ím

Adonáy al máyim rabbím

Kol Adonáy bakóach

Kol Adonáy behadár

Kol Adonáy shovér arazím

Vay’shabér Adonáy et ar’zéy ha-Levanón

Vayar’kidém k’mo égel

Levanón v’Siryón k’mo ven re’emím

Kol Adonáy chotsév lahavót eysh

Kol Adonáy yachíl midbár

Yachíl Adonáy midbár Kadésh

Kol Adonáy y’cholél ayalót

Vayechesóf ye’arót

Uv’heykaló kulló omér kavód

Adonáy lammabbúl yasháv

Vayéshev Adonáy mèlech l’olám

Adonáy oz l’ammó yitén

Adonáy y’varéch et ammó bashalóm

No better than the rich young man

It’s 12:37 in the morning of July 5th. The night sky isn’t flashing as much with rockets as it was two hours ago, but the sound of small fireworks still fills the air. It’s another hot, windless night. Soon I will sleep for a few hours, and then up again and start another day, Sunday, so with church service. I have some thoughts.

I notice, when I am posting a new entry on this blog, that there are “followers.” There’s a little icon on the dashboard that says I now have nine people following, that is, subscribing, to Cost of Discipleship. I know what Blogspot means by “followers.” They just mean people who want to advertise that they keep coming back to your blog. There’s an option for me to display this in the sidebar, to acknowledge that these people are “followers,” but I choose not to do this. Why not? Well, I confess that there are taboos in my life, things that I just won’t do, or say. Why not? Well, I have reasons, though many people will disagree with or nor understand them. What reasons?

Just an example. To me, as a word, “follower” is taken captive by Jesus Christ. In relation to anything to do with me personally, “follower” has only one meaning, that is, disciple, because Jesus says, “Follow me.” (Mark 10:21) Also I abide by what holy apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “…we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5) As a human individual I cannot have “followers,” I can only be a “follower,” and only of Jesus Christ. I don’t want to promote myself as one worthy of having followers, and so I have chosen not to use this blog mechanism. Why not blog anonymously? It’s possible. The reason is, my blog is part of my testimony, and one’s testimony can never be detached or anonymous. Jesus says, “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 10:32-33) I may be a sinner, a bad person, or simply an illiterate, but I must do what little good I can, and that is my testimony.

Earlier today I received a joking, or rather mocking, email. Someone made up a parody of the Lord’s prayer, substituting “Obama” for “Our Father” and then changing the words of the prayer to show disapproval of his policies. I did not even finish reading past the first line, but instantly deleted the email, even though it was from a fellow Christian. (The person sending it to me did not write it; he was simply passing on something he thought I would agree with.) As a co-worker once said, “There are some things you just can’t unsee.” Unfortunately I saw too much, enough to know that this was something inadmissible, taboo, something you just don’t do. How a fellow Christian could be insensitive to taking the Word of God, spoken by Jesus Himself, and twist it for an unworthy purpose, to twist it at all, is incredible to me. But then, I feel the same way about bumper stickers with the name of God or Jesus on them, or for that matter, any symbol, even the ΙΧΘΥΣ Fish, being used as a subtle placard of Christian triumphalism. These things are not testimonies, because they are not personal. They are anonymous. Almost no one knows who’s driving that car, and they can’t be stopped to ask “What do you mean?”

Back to followers. I look at them sometimes, especially when a new one shows up, and I make a point of visiting their blog if they have one, to see what it’s about. The latest one was from someone who describes himself as a “gay nudist” Christian, and from looking at his blog, it appears he is a Methodist, and possibly even a clergyman. In the sidebar of his blog were links to gay porn sites. I reviewed a number of his posts (yes, there was a warning statement before I was even allowed to see his blog, that it might contain unsuitable or offensive content), and that is how I discovered he is a Christian. All of the posts I read were well written, mainline Protestant in content, and if I had not first read his profile, I would not have even suspected that he is a homosexual Christian. The topics were none of them to do with sexuality issues. The contrast between his blog post content and the familiarity with the bible and spiritual subjects it demonstrated contrasted sharply with the sidebar contents. Here was an even more extreme disconnect with what I have known and accepted about Christ and about concepts of right and wrong.

That made me think about my own life in Christ, shaped by the Law of Yahweh as Psalm 19 says, “…thus Your servant is formed by them,” and how different it could be from the life in Christ that other Christians lead. I’ve always been aware that there are differences, but I’ve usually considered them to be superficial. Now, I am not so sure. The three examples above are pieces of what is confusing me. It seems as we approach, or rather, as the Day approaches us, that everything that is hidden is being revealed, as Jesus teaches, “…for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.” (Matthew 10:26) The seeds of sin that are planted in all of us are sprouting, growing, flowering and bearing fruit, evil fruit that leads to death. Yet God is faithful, and He is giving increase to the good seed that He has planted in us by His Word and Spirit. That much I am certain of.

One truth that I’ve tried to make part of me is, to always say ‘Yes’ to God, to whatever He places in my path, be it a person, an event, a thing to do or say, and to not resist His will, but to accept whatever it is He is leading me to do. This is not the same thing as saying ‘Yes’ to everything that presents itself to the mind. Discernment is the key here. Never to do or say anything one knows is wrong. The evil one, however, aping the words of Truth, has unleashed the demons in us to fulfill in our flesh all their fantasies, calling them ours. This he does, even on the church steps, even in the church itself, even sometimes at the pulpit and altar.

I see this ad when I use BibleGateway.com. It advertises that the NIV bible now comes in a multitude of versions, adapted to one’s personal situation. I’m sorry to have to say this, but even this is a ploy of the evil one. The Word of God is now tailored to fit us? Whatever happened to the idea that we are tailored to fit the Word of God? This is just the incredible outworking of sin in us, to place ourselves on the Throne, that God Himself may wait on us and our needs (or desires).

So, I aim to say ‘Yes’ to the Lord, whatever He proposes. That’s what I think, what I say, and what I try to do. Yet, part of me is also praying, “but please, not that,” to things and situations I don’t think I can handle. Though I’m a sinner and an unprofitable servant (and I know it), I still want to be able to say I did at least what little I could, and so I say ‘Yes’ to those easy requests that the Lord has made of me, things I can do and still maintain my ‘independence’ and ‘freedom.’ But every so often, as if to show Himself and me how closely or distantly I am following Him, He presents me with a situation that I cannot say ‘Yes’ to without forfeiting who I think I am or pretend to be.

It is at those moments—glory to God—that He gently lets me know that I am no better than the rich young man, and I must cry, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.” And even knowing this, still I follow Him.

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
Mark 10:21

Freedom costs

Psalms for the 4th Day
19 20 21 22 23

Psalm 22
The sufferings and hope of the virtuous man

Elí, Elí, lamá azavtáni, rachók mishu’atí divréy sha’agatí…

My God, my God, why have You deserted me?

How far from saving me, the words I groan!

I call all day, my God, but You never answer,

all night long I call and cannot rest.

Yet, Holy One, You who make your home

in the praises of Israel,

in You our fathers put their trust,

they trusted and You rescued them;

they called to you for help and they were saved,

they never trusted You in vain.

Yet here am I, now more worm than man,

scorn of mankind, jest of the people,

all who see me jeer at me,

they toss their heathen heads and sneer,

‘He relied on Yahweh, let Yahweh save him!

If Yahweh is his friend, let Him rescue him!’

Yet You drew me out of the womb,

You entrusted me to my mother's breasts;

placed on your lap from my birth,

from my mother's womb You have been my God.

Do not stand aside: trouble is near,

I have no one to help me!

A herd of bulls surrounds me,

stong bulls of Bashan close in on me;

their jaws are agape for me,

like lions tearing and roaring.

I am like water draining away,

my bones are all disjointed,

my heart is like wax,

melting inside me;

my palate is drier than a potsherd

and my tongue is stuck to my jaw.

A pack of dogs surrounds me,

a gang of villains closes me in;

they tie me hand and foot

and leave me lying in the dust of death.

I can count every one of my bones,

and there they glare at me, gloating;

they divide my garments among them

and cast lots for my clothes.

Do not stand aside, Yahweh.

O my strength, come quickly to my help;

rescue my soul from the sword,

my dear life from the paw of the dog,

save me from the lion's mouth,

my poor soul from the wild bulls' horns!

Then I shall proclaim Your Name to my brothers,

praise You in full assembly:

you who fear Yahweh, praise Him!

Entire race of Jacob, glorify Him!

Entire race of Israel, revere Him!

For He has not despised

or disdained the poor man in his poverty,

has not hidden His face from him,

but has answered him when he called.

You are the theme of my praise in the Great Assembly,

I perform my vows in the presence of those who fear Him.

The poor will receive as much as they want to eat.

Those who seek Yahweh will praise Him.

Long life to their hearts!

The whole earth, from end to end,

will remember and come back to Yahweh;

all the families of the nations will bow down before Him.

For Yahweh reigns, the ruler of nations!

Before Him all the prosperous of the earth will bow down,

before Him will bow all who go down to the dust.

And my soul will live for Him,

my children will serve Him;

men will proclaim the Lord to generations still to come,

His righteousness to a people yet unborn.

All this He has done.

…Yavó’u v’yagídu tsidkató, l’am nolád ki asáh.

Today is not only the 4th day… it is the 4th of July.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War. They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners, men of means, well-educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags. Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward. Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton. At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt. Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months. John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. Some of us take these liberties so much for granted, but we shouldn't.

So, pause a while, take selah, and silently thank these patriots. It's not too much to ask for the price they paid.

Remember: Freedom is never free.

Is there any need to say more? … These were men who through faith conquered kingdoms, did what is right and earned the promises. They could keep a lion's mouth shut, put out blazing fires and emerge unscathed from battle. They were weak people who were given strength, to be brave in war and drive back foreign invaders. Some came back to their wives from the dead, by resurrection; and others submitted to torture, refusing release so that they would rise again to a better life. Some had to bear being pilloried and flogged, or even chained up in prison. They were stoned or sawn in half, or beheaded; they were homeless, and dressed in the skins of sheep and goats; they were penniless and were given nothing but ill-treatment…

These words from the letter to the Hebrews (ch. 11, vv. 32-37) are referring, of course, to the prophets and saints of old, to Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets. But as I was thinking of the heroic men who signed the Declaration of Independence, I was reminded of this passage.

I had never noticed, also, or made the connexion between our American revolutionary struggle and the psalm that Christ prayed from the cross, which was almost His last prayer to the Father. Most people read the words, ‘Elí, Elí, lamá sabachthaní…’ which Jesus spoke from the cross, the first line of Psalm 22 in Aramaic, and think that it represents somehow Christ's experience of utter abandonment by God, so deep was His self-emptying, His kénosis.

This may be a worthy interpretation. But according to the Jewish religion which Jesus practiced, He was praying the psalm, saying only the first line out loud, and the rest silently, which was how Jews prayed. Who knows if He had enough strength to finish the psalm right to the end. But it was significant that He prayed this psalm, because the psalm itself is a prophecy of the ultimate and eventual surrender of rebel man to his Creator God and Father.

‘The whole earth, from end to end,
will remember and come back to Yahweh;
all the families of the nations will bow down before Him.
For Yahweh reigns, the ruler of nations!’

And one more thing that I noticed. Who do you think these ‘people yet unborn’ are that the psalm prophesies?

‘…men will proclaim the Lord to generations still to come,
His righteousness to a people yet unborn.’

But Christ died on the cross uttering His total trust in the Father, and in the victory that was about to occur, praying…

‘All this He has done.’

“It is finished!”

Happy — Μακάριοι — אשרי

Psalms for the 2nd Day
9 10 11 12 13 14

Psalm 11

The confidence of the virtuous

B’Adonáy chasíti, eych tom’rú l’nafshí, ‘Núdi harchèm tsippór…’

In Yahweh I take shelter.

How can you say to me,

‘Bird, fly back to your mountain:

‘see how the wicked are bending their bows

and fitting their arrows to the string,

ready to shoot the upright from the shadows.

When foundations fall to ruin,

what can the virtuous do?’

Yahweh is in His holy Temple,

Yahweh whose throne is in heaven;

His eyes look down at the world,

His searching gaze scans all mankind.

The virtuous and the wicked are under Yahweh’s scrutiny,

and His soul hates anyone who loves brutality.

He rains coals of fire and brimstone on the wicked,

He serves them a scorching wind to swallow down.

Yahweh is righteous, He loves virtue,

upright men will contemplate His face.

…ki tsaddík Adonáy, ts’dakót ahév, yashár yechezú fanéymo.

μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι …

‘How happy are the poor in spirit:

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Happy the gentle:

they shall have the earth for their heritage.

Happy those who mourn:

they shall be comforted.

Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right:

they shall be satisfied.

Happy the merciful:

they shall have mercy shown them.

Happy the pure in heart:

they shall see God.

Happy the peacemakers:

they shall be called sons of God.

Happy those who are perecuted in the cause of right:

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Happy are you when people abuse you,

and persecute you,

and speak all kinds of calumny against you

on My account.

Rejoice and be glad,

for your reward will be great in heaven.

This is how they persecuted the prophets before you.

Matthew 5:3-12 Jerusalem Bible

Psalm 14

The godless men

Amár navál b‘libbó, ‘Eyn Elohím…’

The fool says in his heart,

‘There is no God!’

Their deeds are corrupt and vile,

there is not one good man left.

Yahweh is looking down from heaven

at the sons of men,

to see if a single one is wise,

if a single one is seeking God.

All have turned aside,

all alike are tainted;

there is not one good man left,

not a single one.

Are they so ignorant, all these evil men

who swallow My people

as though they were eating bread,

and never invoke Yahweh?

They will be struck with fear,

fear without reason,

since God takes the side of the virtuous:

deride as you may the poor man’s hopes,

Yahweh is his shelter.

Who will bring Israel salvation from Zion?

When Yahweh brings His people home,

what joy for Jacob, what happiness for Israel!

…B’shuv Adonáy sh’vut ammó, yagél Ya’akóv, yismách Yisra’él!

Psalms - תהילים

Psalms for the 1st Day
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Psalm 1
The two ways

Ashréy ha-ísh ashér lo halách ba’atzát resha’ím…

Happy the man
who never follows the advice of the wicked,
or loiters on the way that sinners take,
or sits about with scoffers,
but finds his pleasure in the law of Yahweh,
and murmurs His law day and night.

He is like a tree that is planted
by water streams,
yielding its fruit in season,
its leaves never fading;
success attends all he does.

It is nothing like this with the wicked,
nothing like this!

No, these are like chaff
blown away by the wind.

The wicked will not stand firm when Judgment comes,
nor sinners when the virtuous assemble.
For Yahweh takes care of the way the virtuous go,
but the way of the wicked is doomed.

…v’dérech resha’ím tovéd.

My most intense, and tender, connecting with God, is through my Bible, particularly the Psalms. When I lie down on my bed and have my old Jerusalem Bible beside me, and when my eyes see the words printed on the page, any page, and I start reading them, I just get an indescribable something, it's not even really a feeling. It's just a knowing that He is here with me, that the printed words I am reading are from Him directly, with nothing between Him and me except themselves, and even they are Him because they are His Word in the form of verbal icon, just as Jesus is His Word in the form of a Man. That Bible has been with me since I met the Lord, and I haven't parted from it all these years. It is my Rock of safety, the place where I meet God and He touches me, and feeds me.

Praying the Psalms, or even reading them, can seem irrelevant to some people, even to some Christians—they say that they cannot relate to what is contained in them. They see them as only historical documents arising out of specific events.
What has that to do with me?

Though it may be true that we are not bible characters, our lives can be found in the pages of scripture. My life-long love for and relationship with the Psalms had a beginning. It was when living in the world, I started being attacked for following Christ, and in turning to the Psalms I found their contents spoke to my condition and the situations I found myself in. That never stopped but has continued growing to the point where I can say that of all the books of scripture, the Psalms I read, and pray, the most.

The Psalms have this unique characteristic: They are like a revolving door with God. They both convey the prayer of our hearts to Him, and convey His response to our every prayer.

After reading and praying the Psalms for thirty-three years out of my Jerusalem Bible, I finally began reading and praying them from the Tehillim, the Hebrew version of the Psalms. Now, along with my Jerusalem Bible, a copy of the Tehillim rests with me on my prayer couch, and the blessing of reading and understanding the Hebrew cannot be adequately described.

Psalm 4

Evening prayer

B’kar’í anéyni Elohéy tsidkí…

God, guardian of my rights, You answer when I call,

when I am in trouble You come to my relief;

now be good to me and hear my prayer.

You men, why shut your hearts so long,

loving delusions, chasing after lies? Selah.

Know this, Yahweh works wonders for those He loves,
Yahweh hears me when I call to Him.

Tremble: give up sinning,

spend your night in quiet meditation. Selah.

Offer sacrifice in a right spirit,

and trust Yahweh.

“Who will give us sight of happiness?” many say.

Show us the light of Your face turned toward us!

Yahweh, You have given more joy to my heart

than others ever knew, for all their corn and wine.

In peace I lie down, and fall asleep at once,

since You alone, Yahweh, make me rest secure.

…ki attá Adonáy l’vadád lavétach toshivéni.

The utterly unlike

There’s lots of things, even persons, who are, or will soon be seen to be, utterly unlike what we have imagined them to be all our lives.

Firstly, of course, there’s God. Whatever you conceive Him or Her to be, and even if you have memorized and understood everything the bible and all theologians have said about Him, and even read what the pagans have said about Him, you still (I should say, we still) are going to find out that though in everything that really mattered we knew Him quite well, there will be a whole lot about Him that will just take us by surprise—mostly, things that we couldn’t have even begun to know about Him, due to our puny brains and sensory apparatus not having a way to process the information. Ants may know that we’re there, and they may even have a good idea that we’re big, clumsy, slow-moving and dangerous. In everything that really matters to them they know us quite well. They won’t understand why some of us avoid stepping on them. They won’t begin to suspect that we compose and listen to something we call music, even though they may have something analogous to it on a very minor scale. Unfortunately for them, one of us hasn’t been transformed into an ant like themselves, so as to give them a better idea of what those big shadow-casters are that pass over their trails.

Secondly, there’s our own human nature, that which we seem to be while we are alive “in the flesh.” As a young man, I spent many hours observing my body and my spirit in function, long hours lying quiet but wide awake in the night. The result of my observations was a gradually increasing awareness that “I am not that” in reference first to my body, then even to my spirit, even to my mind. Anything that I was able to observe, watch and study, was yet experience outside whatever it is that I am. All these observations and my non-verbal thinking about them only demonstrated to me what holy scripture teaches, “For that which is,” that which exists, the world of things in its essence and with its causes, “is far off,” far removed from the sight of man, “and it is deep, deep; who can discover it?” (Ecclesiastes 7:24) How ironic, that even our very own selves, that we (think we) can know first-hand, should still be beyond our ken! Most of us don’t want to put the label “utterly unlike” on our cache of life experience, but I think that what life really is is utterly unlike our perception. We only know what we need to know and can know, and that’s not much.

Thirdly, or maybe I should say lastly, there’s death. Whatever you conceive it to be, or not be, and even if you’ve had a near death experience, or even been dead and through miracle or modern science been resuscitated, you still can’t come closer to knowing or understanding what it is than the distance separating East from West. My youthful experiments in observation also impinged on death. I used to withdraw my energy from my bodily extremities to experience “this is a hand, not my hand” and even “this is a body, not my body.” I tried to observe what remains when all senses, sight, hearing, touch, and finally even all thought, become inaccessible to a mind. What is left? Locked in a realm of being which cannot exist, yet does, I imagined the body I once inhabited, breathless, unfeeling, unmoving, as a formless numbness, and the existence of the outer world (where life was still going on) as an inaccessible “it,” not a thing or a place, just a nothing that somehow is, and beyond my penetration. That was as close as I came to apprehending death. It was very unlike what my normal mind envisions when I think of death, but it was still not “utterly unlike.”

It is this kind of approach that brings us, I think, to the threshold of at least sensing that what awaits us after this (what we call) life is something and Someone “utterly unlike” everything we have ever seen, heard, felt or thought. It makes even spelling the Name with a capital letter pale as insolence and ignorance before the reality of Him Who Is, and of As It Must Be. Not even speaking of God or of what we know about Him and His plan of salvation as written in His Word, the scriptures, we can still know Him as He reveals Himself to us and through us without our help or our imagination, and knowing Him thus, the “utterly unlike” gradually dawns on us, and of that, no man living can speak.

Socrates and the Sophists

When I am home alone and having some lunch, I am in the habit of turning to an easily laid-open old book that was a textbook from my college days, The Western Heritage of Faith and Reason. After not looking at it for decades, I started reading it again this way since the month of March. It never ceases to amaze me how a secular textbook about philosophy can often say truer things about spiritual, even Christian, life than books that are dedicated to the subject. The passage I am quoting here is not exactly of this sort, but it is still very illuminating. As Qoheleth says, “What was will be again; what has been done will be done again; and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9 JB).

The passage reminds me of modern day conditions so much. I only wish we had someone like Socrates to add to today’s mix. I guess it’s up to each of us to be, perhaps not Socrates, but at least (as Jesus says) “the salt of the earth” (cf. Matthew 5:13), and as Martin Luther commented, “what is the good of salt if it does not bite?” I entitle this excerpt, Socrates and the Sophists.

Some of the Sophists were quick to point out that laws, in the legal sense, were human contrivances, frequently enacted in the interest of influential groups. They were not absolute things which represented absolute values, good for all men at all times. If this was true in the legal sense of the term, it might also apply to moral law. In short, some of the Sophists became complete individualists in their interpretation of laws, legal and moral. What men call justice may be merely a fiction to serve the interests of those in power. Even if there were such things as absolute justice and virtue and goodness, how should we ever be able to determine what they are? A thorough skepticism about man’s ability to answer such questions as these led many of the Sophists to reject any notion of absolute morality. Each man alone was to be the measure of what was and what was not good. Likewise, in metaphysics, each man was to be the measure of what was and what was not real, for why should any one man’s interpretation of such matters be any better than another’s? All this suggests some kind of intellectual and moral anarchy.

The threat to Greek life posed by the Sophists was far-reaching. Had they been content to challenge the metaphysical views of certain of their predecessors, it would not have been serious, for then new views might have been suggested in their place; but the Sophists challenged the very foundation of knowledge, even denying the possibility of knowing truth. When this is done the universe must remain a mystery to man, and, more important still, sincerity, integrity, honor, and all the other virtues that hold human society together are in danger of being undermined. How were these critics of the status quo to be answered? There was one man among the Greeks during the 5th century B.C. who, while not concerned with defending authority itself, was able and willing to attack the Sophists in the intellectual arena. That man was Socrates. He was the first Athenian philosopher of note, and his chief interest was in opposing relativism in ethics.

Like Jesus, Socrates wrote nothing, as far as we know. His personal impact was such that, again as with Jesus, many turned against him in bitter anger and eventually brought him to his death, while many others experienced a kind of “conversion” which made them look to him in memory as the greatest man they had known. He was a strange man, first of all in his personal appearance. He had a snub nose and strangely protruding eyes. His gait was peculiar, being likened to that of a waterfowl. He was compared in appearance to a silenus or a satyr. He always went barefoot. But far more striking than his physical appearance was his personality. In no sense was he an ordinary man, although he did marry and have children. He gave up his family profession of statue-making and spent his time in discussion, regarding it as his divine mission to seek for truth.

…He was admired by other men for his disregard of hardship, his self-control, and his ability to refrain from the use of wine, or, when joining in the drinking, to remain sober. But these personal characteristics are still not the basis of Socrates’ great reputation, even while they helped build it and manage to give some sense of the kind of man he was. More importantly, he has been designated a prophet and rationalist. He called men of his day to inner change, a kind of conversion to righteousness, and so reminds us of the great Hebrew prophets. In addition, he advised all men to follow reason, for it is reason that leads to truth and one must live by truth if he is to live well.

— The Western Heritage of Faith and Reason, pp. 264-267.

Fasting

Fasting is never a form of self-punishment.
Fasting is never a way to build our heavenly bank account.
Fasting is an act of worship, giving back what we always knew
never really belonged to us, so that God can bestow on us
something greater, Himself.
Fasting is an act of hospitality, cleaning out, emptying some organ or attribute of us, so that God can have more room during His visit.
Fasting is always a deliberate spending, even wasting, of our lives
on the slim chance that we might buy the world for God.
Fasting is always an act of abandonment, even of desertion,
of what we thought or have been told was our post or position in life,
in the hope that we will be proven wrong after all,
and find that God alone was right.
Fasting has little to do with food, but we do sometimes forget to eat while we're doing it.

Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is knowing that love has entered the world in the man Jesus Christ, and living in that love no matter where it takes us.

He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.
Matthew 10:37-39 NKJV

Orthodoxy is knowing that faith is not belief, but trust so certain that we know there is no loss with Jesus, and are fearless to do whatever He asks. It is knowing that obedience is love and draws us into the very life of God, where Father, Son and Holy Spirit all live together with us in one house. It is seeing with unveiled faces Him whom the world cannot see even through a veil. Yes, Orthodoxy is knowing that Love has entered the world and remains here among us, as long as we obey His teaching, no matter where it takes us.

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it. If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him." Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, "But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?" Jesus replied, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
John 14:12-23 NIV

Ikon of the Holy Triad

Andrey Rublev's ikon of the Holy Triad

Very soon I will be publishing in a special blog, Ikonostasis, downloadable images of Orthodox ikons that I have been collecting for more than twenty years from the weekly bulletins of my home parish, Aghía Triás (Holy Trinity), now the Greek Orthodox cathedral of Portland, Oregon. There are probably eight hundred ikons in all, of all subjects. This is something I've always meant to do, but now I have a reason: I want new Orthodox nations and interested non-Orthodox to have access to this material, because like the divine liturgy, ikons are the common inheritance of all followers of Jesus.

In this post, I want to publish a bit of commentary on a very special ikon, that of the Holy Trinity, or as the Greek has it, the Holy Triad. There is one depiction of God in Three Persons which has been common in Western art, and has even burrowed its way into Eastern Orthodoxy, but which is not in accord with the mind of the Church, which is in turn the mind of Christ as revealed in scripture. This is the depiction of the Trinity as "an old man and a young man seated on thrones, and a dove in the air between them." Though Western art can portray God in this way, for the Orthodox it is unbiblical and therefore not admissible as an icon. This is not mere fussyness, but faithfulness to the truth, in contrast to human sentiment.

The Russian Orthodox Church (synod of Moscow, 1667) framed the canon regulating the depiction of the Holy Triad in ikonography:

It is most absurd and improper to depict in icons the Lord Sabaoth (that is to say, God the Father) with a grey beard and the Only-Begotten Son in His bosom with a dove between them, because no-one has seen the Father according to His Divinity, and the Father has no flesh, nor was the Son born in the flesh from the Father before the ages. And though David the prophet says, "From the womb before the morning star have I begotten Thee" (Ps.109:3), that birth was not fleshly, but unspeakable and incomprehensible. For Christ Himself says in the holy Gospel, "No man hath seen the Father, save the Son" (cf. John 6:46). And Isaiah the prophet says in his fortieth chapter: "To whom have ye likened the Lord? and with what likeness have ye made a similitude of Him? Has not the artificier of wood made an image, or the goldsmiths, having melted gold, gilt it over, and made it a similitude?" (Isaiah 40:18-19). In like manner the Apostle Paul says (Acts 17:29), "Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art of man's imagination." And John Damascene says: "But furthermore, who can make a similitude of the invisible, incorporeal, uncircumscribed and undepictable God? It is, then, uttermost insanity and impiety to give a form to the Godhead" (Orthodox Faith, 4:16). In like manner St. Gregory the Dialogist prohibits this. For this reason we should only form an understanding in the mind of Sabaoth, which is the Godhead, and of that birth before the ages of the Only-Begotten Son from the Father, but we should never, in any wise depict these in icons, for this, indeed, is impossible. And the Holy Spirit is not in essence a dove, but in essence he is God, and "No man hath seen God", as John the Theologian and Evangelist bears witness (John 1:18) and this is so even though, at the Jordan at Christ's holy Baptism the Holy Spirit appeared in the likeness of a dove. For this reason, it is fitting on this occasion only to depict the Holy Spirit in the likeness of a dove. But in any other place those who have intelligence will not depict the Holy Spirit in the likeness of a dove. For on Mount Tabor, He appeared as a cloud and, at another time, in other ways. Furthermore, Sabaoth is the name not only of the Father, but of the Holy Trinity. According to Dionysios the Areopagite, Lord Sabaoth, translated from the Jewish tongue, means "Lord of Hosts". This Lord of Hosts is the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And although Daniel the prophet says that he beheld the Ancient of Days sitting on a throne, this should not be understood to refer to the Father, but to the Son, Who at His second coming will judge every nation at the dreadful Judgment.

The fact is, many Orthodox churches still retain pictures of the Holy Triad in this unbiblical format, two seated men and a bird. All that this demonstrates is that Orthodoxy makes do with what is available. Many churches were built in a day when authentic ikons were not available, and they have never replaced them.

Always Seeing Him

"…in the midst of the cloudy stormy morning—Bright Day…"

This has to be a song… At least to me these verses written by a young Christian brother in Indonesia resonate within my spirit like holy chant where divine scripture fills every word.

How wonderful it is when our eyes always set on Him and closely follow behind Him!
and by...
always seeing Him, we see the assurance of our faith and the radiant hope glows so brightly,
always seeing Him, we are transformed to be like Himself,
always seeing Him, we are realizing the vanity of earthly wealth
and glory,
always seeing Him, we are convinced that there is no power
nor anything can separate Him from us,
always seeing Him, we come to know that no other Beauty and Power can compare to His,
always seeing Him, we then be enabled to chant
in the midst of the cloudy stormy morning—Bright Day,
always seeing Him, we have the courage to cross the river in the darkest night,
always seeing Him, we are cheerful sheep among the foxes
'cause we trust and know Who is guarding us,
always seeing Him, we come healed, saved and alive,
because He is Risen,
always seeing Him, we encounter Most High God and our beloved neighbor
since He is perfect man and Perfect God,
always seeing Him, we joyfully follow Him through the narrow way
and bearing our lovely crosses go up to Golgotha…

— Yudi Kristanto

And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.
Mark 4:8 KJV

At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children."
Matthew 11:25 NIV

Even now the axe…

An evangelical pastor challenged his congregation's lead team to get re-focused on the things that come out of our mouths. One of the team members writes,

"We’re trying to refrain from all of the following, between now and midnight, Friday:
Sarcasm
Negativity (that is not needed to express a valid point)
Bitterness about another person or a negative circumstance (like someone who does something “stupid” or an electronic device that won't do what you want it to)
Joking around and busting
Talking to someone with malicious intent about someone else
Rolling of the eyes when someone’s name is mentioned."

I was surprised that anyone would try to approach these problems in this way, by using a challenge to exact better behavior.
After all, aren't these Christians?
Aren't these people who should know that it is not in the power of our meager and weak wills to raise ourselves?
Aren't these people who should know that it is by grace that we are saved, by faith, and not by works of the law?

Wait a minute! All they're trying to do is behave more like Christians should. What's wrong with that? And why shouldn't they try?

By all means try. To try to behave in a Christian manner is commendable, but who gets the credit if you succeed?
Divine scripture says through holy apostle Paul, "not by works, lest any man should boast." I don't have to quote scriptures to you.
These are well-known, uncontested truths, or are they?

Back to my question, "who gets the credit if you succeed?"
Not to be a spoil sport or a pessimist, let me assure you that on your own you will not succeed. You may "branch out and flower for a time" as the Psalms say of the wicked, but in the end you will fail. If this were not so, then Christ died in vain. If we could be "good" on our own, then there is no reason for Christ to die for us, no need for His righteousness to cover us.

This is what I wrote to the team member as a comment on his blog (forgive me if I seem to repeat myself):

All of your efforts will come to nothing in the end, unless you submit yourselves to the truth of God's Word, which says, "What comes out of a man is taken from what he puts inside himself."

Practical application—
Rather than try to focus on and cure the symptoms,
go for the root, and axe it.

And how do you do that?

By filling up on the Word of God, not on television;
on the Word of God, not on the internet;
on the Word of God, not on computer games;
on the Word of God, not on newspapers and magazines;
on the Word of God, not on the contents of your iPod;
on the Word of God, not on the latest Christian books;
on the Word of God, not on rumors;
on the Word of God, not on hanging out with your friends.

Do you see a connecting idea in my example of practical application above?

The downfall of the churches as assemblies of God's people, and of the people themselves as individuals, comes from the utter lack of respect for and immersion in the Word of God, i.e., the Holy Bible.

Read the Word of God every day, throughout the day, fill yourselves with it, rather than filling yourselves up on that which cannot last and which divides and slays the spirit.

Remember, it is not just money that Jesus is talking about when He says, "You cannot serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or love the one and treat the other with scorn. You cannot serve both God and Mammon." The bottom line on Mammon is that it is anything that diverts your attention, unlawfully, from the Word of God.

Again I say to you, don't just try to cure the symptoms, strike at the root of worldly attitudes in yourselves by using the axe of the Word of God. Christ has already used it to fell the world tree of death. Now He has given it to you to do the same in yourselves.

"Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees…"

Glory to You, O God, glory to You!

Nobody is listening

There are various reasons for blogging. Originally, mine was to share some experiences with others about witnessing for Christ. Over the three years or so that I’ve been writing on line, my topics have ranged far and wide. The title of my blog came from my favorite spiritual book other than the bible itself, and in a very general sort of way, I have tried to stay with discipleship as a theme.

I confess, though, that I have also used my blog to vent my frustrations with Church. That in itself is enough to get me blacklisted and abandoned by all. Yet I still have a few friends who still visit, and some who even comment from time to time.

I never wanted my blog to be a flag advertising my opinions or to draw attention to myself, and thankfully, at least the latter hasn’t happened. For me, the best effect my blog has had, is that through it I have met many brethren who are faithful followers of Christ. If that’s all it has accomplished, I am satisfied, but I hope that among the anonymous visitors here, some have been helped in some way, and not hindered.

Lastly, I sincerely apologize and ask forgiveness of anyone whom I may have offended.

The question presented itself to me again, why should I blog, why should I express what the Lord has put on my heart to say, since in all likelihood nobody is listening?

One can get that impression from seeing how few comment, but that impression is unreliable. Most people reading blogs don’t comment on them, unless the topics are inflammatory or provocative. I never intended my blog to be such, so why expect lots of comments?
In fact, though my posts are often lengthy, myself I have little patience to read lengthy posts written by others. Hence I try to keep it short. Well, my friends, you have seen the results.

The complaint that nobody is listening should never stop anyone from blogging, or speaking, or doing anything for Christ, if He has supplied you. The fact is, this kind of thinking is the same as that of people who once criticized Brock and me for doing unprofitable work when we went downtown and read the gospels out loud in public.

They said, “what good does that do? Nobody is listening. It doesn’t bring a return.”

This way of thinking is man-centered, results-oriented. It is not for any of us to judge this way, but for God alone. What is ours is to plant the seed and believe on God’s promise to give the increase. If we prevent ourselves from planting seed, whatever form that seeding takes, then we have also kept back part of the money, figuratively speaking, that we received for the sale of our land, as Annas and Sapphira did. Only in our case, it was not mere money, but life itself, that we have withheld—and lives that can be saved by Christ only if those whom He has sent go forth and bring the good news.

I write this to encourage all who have been given the gift of faith coupled with knowledge of the truth of God, personal knowledge not mere book-learning, and joined to the gift of speech, to not withhold themselves from thus testifying, witnessing for Christ, even in so lowly a way as blogging. When God speaks to you, it is not only for yourself. Sometimes it is, but often it is for others. We cannot know what use the Lord has planned for our humble words, spoken or written in Him.

It is a wonder that anyone should hear the Word of God speaking to him, but if he does, how can he hold back from announcing it to others?

Can two walk together, except they be agreed?
Will a lion roar in the forest, when he hath no prey?
Will a young lion cry out of his den, if he have taken nothing?
Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him?
Shall one take up a snare from the earth,
and have taken nothing at all?
Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid?
Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?
Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets. The lion hath roared, who will not fear?
The Lord GOD hath spoken, who can but prophesy?
Amos 3:3-8 KJV

I write as an Orthodox Christian, but what some of you may have suspected is true—I am actually a Baptist, of the same following as John the honorable forerunner. It took a child to teach me that living in my own tomb would only result in me dying there, when the Lord of life had been calling me to come forth and live. Though we are unprofitable servants, unworthy followers of the Lord of all, He has entrusted us with a real mission. Let’s not leave it lying at our feet, but pick it up, and carry it abroad, and speak the Word that He puts in our mouths, write it if He has given us the words, even if nobody is listening.

“Do two men take the road together…?
…the lion roars, who can not be afraid…?”

Just preach Christ

The Orthodox Christian does not proselytize; he evangelizes.
He does not preach Church,
he preaches Christ.
In this he follows His Master, who in the gospels does not seek converts, but seeks that which is lost.

Never do we find that Jesus in His earthly ministry went after people. Never do we see Him arguing a philosophical point to win over an opponent. Never does He proselytize, but He does have words for those who do.

Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι περιάγετε τὴν θάλασσαν καὶ τὴν ξηρὰν ποιῆσαι ἕνα προσήλυτον, καὶ ὅταν γένηται, ποιεῖτε αὐτὸν υἱὸν γεέννης διπλότερον ὑμῶν.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. (Matthew 23:25 NIV)

What do we find instead? Two disciples of a Jewish prophet, John the Forerunner, are directed by him, pointing to Jesus walking by and saying, “That is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29)

What did the two disciples do? They followed after Jesus. Why? Because they believed the word of the prophet. How did they approach Jesus? They asked, “Rabbi, where do you live?” How does Jesus respond? He says, “Come, and see!”

The encounter with the Truth is gentle. There is no compulsion exerted from the outside. Everything is accomplished inwardly. All movement is internal first, in the heart. Then, it is manifested by the feet, running after the Lord.

This is why the Orthodox Christian does not argue semantically to win over an opponent. He does not preach Apollos. He doesn’t preach Paul. He doesn’t preach himself. No, he preaches Christ, and Him crucified, and risen from the dead.

People want to draw us into arguments, wrangling over words, but it is precisely this tactic that the evil one used when he wanted to entrap Christ. To every argument, Jesus responded not with human reason, but with the plain words of scripture.

The Word of God does not need to defend Himself.
He simply is what He is.

In the same way, brethren, all who follow Jesus, all who believe and stand on the Word, who preach, like the angel of the last days, the eternal gospel, just preach Christ, to yourself by submitting all your thoughts to the Word of God, to others by proving on the battlefield of your body that you follow Christ the Victor over sin, and to all those whom the Lord places in your path by your courtesy and generosity, and by always having a spirit of welcome, for men have welcomed angels without knowing it (Hebrews 13:2).

Worship is dangerous

I can't believe that I found this essay, quite by accident, but what the author writes really speaks to me and defines very well how I feel about worship, what I think worship is, in the context of liturgy, or what goes on in church. It is because I feel this way, or rather because I know these things to be true, that I am disappointed with the kinds of things I see going on in my own home parish of Aghía Triás, and in other churches that I have visited, looking for a place to worship. Thank God that in at least some Orthodox churches, the Divine Liturgy still conforms to worship as described in the following essay, which I found here.
(The accompanying images are not from Aghía Triás, but from other Orthodox communities throughout the world.)

Leviticus 10: The prohibition against drinking alcohol prior to divine services (verse 8) immediately follows the tragic account of Nadab and Abihu (verses 1-7), a fact suggesting that these two priests may have been intoxicated when they undertook the unauthorized liturgical rite that cost them their lives.

In any case this latter incident discloses the danger inherent in divine worship. This probably needs to be emphasized, because some of those who drive off to church each Sunday morning seem not to be aware that they are placing their very souls in peril. (Otherwise they would be dressed with modesty and dignity, arrive on time, stay until the service is over, and avoid distraction and gossip while they are in church. Indeed, sometimes the behavior of the clergy up in the sanctuary is even worse.)

Worship, after all, is encounter with God, and God is anything but safe.

Throughout Holy Scripture, therefore, we find the theme of danger with respect to the things of God, particularly the rites and appointments associated with the divine worship. Nowhere in Holy Scripture is worship portrayed as completely safe.

In this sense biblical worship is nearly the opposite of “seeker friendly,” the adjective describing worship along lines dictated by the religious tastes of the uninitiated, worldly, unrepentant, and spiritually immature folks who are likely to drop in at church on Sunday morning.

Those that would draw near to God must resolve to feel uncomfortable (very much like Moses, when he was commanded to take off his shoes at the burning bush), at least until they become accustomed to the discipline of the worship.

The experience of the holiness of the true God is not native to man (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:27-32; Hebrews 12:28-29).

These reflections pertain with special intensity to those charged with the oversight of divine worship, the stewards who safeguard the sacred mysteries (1 Corinthians 4:1-5; 6:9-11; Revelation 22:14-15).

It is instructive to observe that St. Paul warns such men (for Holy Scripture never envisions women in this ministry) especially against the evils attendant on the drinking of alcohol (1 Timothy 3:3; 2 Timothy 4:5).

This is to me what Orthodox worship is—biblical worship—and why I firmly believe that it is the heritage of all followers of Jesus. If we are to worship God in communal assembly at all, it is in the Divine Liturgy, which has been handed over to us as the heritage of the saints. Anything else that we do "at church" can take any number of forms as needed, and as really necessary (not just to make pious busy-work). But worship is something that God thought was important enough to lay out for us, at first in the Torah for His original hereditary people Yisrael, and then with the coming of His Son, in the Divine Liturgy of the new Israel, the Church. That is one thing that "Orthodox" means—straight worship—and there it stands as it has stood for centuries.

Jesus, Uninterrupted

It’s strange how once people have decided that they have pigeonholed you, they then proceed to build a relationship on the phantom they have created, with what is merely a figment of their imagination. So it is with my boss, whom I have known and worked with since I was twenty-nine years old and he was twenty-five. It’s a wonder that people can know someone for decades, and yet not even begin to know them. I hope I know him better than he knows me. He certainly has given me the opportunity to see his actions and hear his opinions these nearly thirty years. When you're the boss, you think you can say anything. But when you know Who is really in charge, you dare to say anything (that He gives you to say).

Unbelievers and skeptics abound, and as scripture says, some of them are "like shooting stars bound for an eternity of black darkness" (Jude, 1:13 Jerusalem Bible). That sounds like the description of a comet that makes its turn around the sun from outer space and then heads back out to the deeps, never to be seen again. Who says the ancients didn't understand a thing or two about natural science?

Some of these are caught between unbelief and the itch to believe, calling themselves agnostics. That's my boss, for you. Like a comet with a very long elliptical orbit, he comes close and wanders far in wanting to know the truth, but it seems he never dares more than take a brief peek.

Often he's on his way to the outer darkness, but he still wants the approval of idiots like me, a detestable but economically viable Christian, and so he tries to reconnect on what he thinks is some commonality between us. Usually it's some book he's been reading about history, anthropology, or religion. He thinks those are my interests. That's the pigeonholing I mentioned earlier. I oblige him, and listen to his banter with as much interest and sympathy as I can muster. You never know where the Lord is going to open a door…

Lately, he's been reading the book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them), a book by Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On a couple of occasions he has kept me on after a meeting, to tell me all the interesting things he's finding out about the origins of Christianity in this book—things he's always suspected were true, but now he thinks he has the evidence. Being a moral person, of course he considers it his duty to share these discoveries with me, a benighted Orthodox—in some ways the best, in other ways the worst kind of Christian.

I've taken a look, not at the book itself, but at the Wikipedia article about it, linked above under the book's title. I've also found some interesting book reviews, like the one from which I'd like to quote this brief passage.

In a series of dramatic revelations for the ignorant (the very definition of a hardcover best-seller, I’d say), Ehrman notes that there have been a lot of changes to the Bible in the past 2,000 years. I don't want to come between Mr. Ehrman and his payday, but this point has been made much more eloquently by, among others, Benson Bobrick in his wonderful Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. [This book] has much of the same information as Misquoting Jesus, minus the idiocy.

—Alex Beam, “The new profits of Christianity”, The Boston Globe, April 12, 2006.

Now, I would never call my boss ignorant, but this reviewer does call a spade a spade when he describes at least some readers of this book in those terms, as he points out that little if anything new was presented in Jesus, Interrupted that hasn't already been presented to public scrutiny elsewhere.

My response to the claims put forward by my boss about what went on in the early Church falls into two categories: Some things he has read are correct, other things he has read are disastrously wrong. The author of the book he's reading is not above suspicion of slanted historiography. But this is too complex an idea for one, who wants to believe the unbelievable, to digest. On moral issues of his choice, he asserts there is a lot of gray area. On speculative issues like this, gray is not a possibility; everything is either black or white, all true or all false.

What a bother it all is! As scripture says, "be warned that writing books involves endless hard work," (Ecclesiastes 12:12), and this, as everything else, says the wise author "is vanity" (ibid., 1:2).

Why is this? Because, as the same author says, "there is nothing new under the sun. Take anything of which it may be said, 'Look now, this is new.' Already, long before our time, it existed. Only no memory remains…" (ibid., 1:9-11).

Now, this is all I have to say about the book, even the very idea of, Jesus, Interrupted—as if such a thing were even possible! What I do assert, however, is a completely different proposition.

Jesus, uninterrupted.

Do I have to write a book to prove this proposition?
I think not. It's already been amply documented in The Book I Didn't Write, A History of the Life of the Most Active Man the World Has Ever Seen, From Its Beginning to Its End. How's that for a title?
It reminds me of the title of a book I have in my personal library written by the great non-conformist Greek Orthodox philosopher Apóstolos Makrákis, Triluminal Science, Surveying the Universe and Explaining Everything (ISBN 9780938366188). Not too pretentious, eh?

Seriously, how futile the attempt to refute in one short book what is written abroad in the history of the world, the real world in which lives the real Christ in His real Church, an uninterrupted life, both of the Risen Christ (it's not just a slogan, cf. John chs. 20-21), and of the Everlasting Gospel (cf. Revelation 14:6) in the Church against which the gates of hell will not prevail (cf. Matthew 16:18). We are not here talking about the claims of Roman Catholicism, nor of any other mimic of the Truth, but rather of That "which has existed from the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word, Who is Life…" (1 John 1:1 Jerusalem Bible).

Yes, this and no other, is the reality:
Jesus, uninterrupted.

The audacity of love

Bishop Theophan the Recluse used to say that praying only with words written by another is like trying to talk in a foreign language using only textbook dialogues. Like many other church fathers, he said that we must look for our own words in order to pray. I suppose that this is truly possible for us (if we dismiss artificially invented prayers of our own) only in moments of desperate need, real anguish, either for ourselves or for others. In such moments we do not "recite" prayers, we simply cry out to God, "Lord! Please come to him and comfort him!" The audacity of prayer is born only in the audacity of love.

Abba Makarios said, "Love gives birth to prayer."

—Sergei Fudel, Light in the Darkness, p. 50.

Worship the Father in Spirit and Truth

In His conversation with the woman of Samaria, whom the Greeks name Photiní, the enlightened, our Lord Jesus Christ revealed what is important, or rather, what is more than important—what is essential—to the Father as regards worship.

When the Lord demonstrated to Photiní that He knew everything about her, she quickly and abruptly tried to change the subject, to draw attention away from her sins, and thought to start up a philosophical discussion with him.

“Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, while you say that Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship.” The Samaritans had an alternate temple on Mount Gerizim to rival the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. There can be only One temple.

She may have diverted attention from an issue that loomed large in her consciousness to one that seemed trivial in comparison, but in so doing she opened a door for Jesus to address an issue far greater than her personal sin.

“Believe Me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know; for salvation comes from the Jews.

“But the hour will come—in fact, it is here already—when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth: that is the kind of worshipper the Father wants. God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth.”

Here is Jesus, Y’hoshua ben Yossef, whom some called Rabbi, Himself a practicing Jew who honored the temple, calling it His Father’s House, who paid the temple tax, who instructed those whom He healed to follow the regulations outlined in Torah for their restitution to normal Jewish life…

Here is Jesus, a Jew, and many even think a Jew of the Pharisee denomination, talking to a mixed up woman of a mixed up, unorthodox sect, the Samaritans, who could not even get the Torah written correctly and had superstitious beliefs…

Here is Jesus, telling us that whether we worship with the Orthodox, or whether we worship with the non-Orthodox, that does not matter to God, His Father, to whom only one kind of worshipper is acceptable.

“…true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth: that is the kind of worshipper the Father wants. God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth.”

This kind of worshipper apparently is not qualified by the location of worship, nor by the institutional aspect of it, “neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem,” and yet one thing remains certain, “we worship what we do know; for salvation comes from the Jews.”

What is this worship that our Lord is talking about? What does it mean to worship in spirit and in truth? There are many hints of it in the holy and divine scriptures. It is not for me to tell anyone what it is, but to point to where it can be found.

One place to start is with holy apostle Paul, who writes, “the God I worship spiritually by preaching the Good News of His Son…” (Romans 1:9 Jerusalem Bible) You see, worship is not just standing in a temple. Worship is also “preaching the Good News” of Jesus, who alone is the living One, and to believe in Whom is the very best work.

That, my friends and brethren,
is a good place to start on the road to find out.

The purpose of all doctrine

There is an excellent and brief post on Fr Stephen's blog Glory to God for All Things. It underscores the importance that the experience of God has for the Christian. I will explain no further, but only provide a short quotation which spoke volumes to me, and leave it to you, dear brethren, to continue if you wish and read his whole thought, called We Have Seen. This, I testify again, is true Orthodoxy. This is what is waiting for all followers of Jesus, if they have not yet reached it.

The safeguarding of saving knowledge (true participation in the life of God) is the purpose of all doctrine. Every dogmatic statement of the Church has as its sole purpose the safeguarding of true participation in the life of God. Dogma is not an argument over ideas, but a statement that guards the Apostolic witness (which is living and true).

There is also a wonderful story from the Desert Fathers at the end of his post which I will not spoil by retelling it—it too is short, to the point, and memorable, and will no doubt join your personal library of anecdotes. I would call this story The Rabbit Chase.

Two uniques, and a third

Not sure of how this post is going to end up, but fairly certain of three things I want to say, hopefully I won’t reveal too little or too much. There are two absolute uniques in my life, and many more that are not quite absolute, but almost. Unique is the person of Jesus Christ, as the Son of God in the Holy Triad, as living Truth, Teacher, and Savior. Unique is the Bible as the only expression of the Word of God on earth. There are my two absolute uniques, from which I cannot budge. Of course, in a mystery, they are really One unique.

From the time of my adolescence, I was driven to find or make something that was unique, that was true, that could save me. Though I am Greek by faith and even by culture, my family is Polish on both sides, and at least nominally Roman Catholic. I am the only Orthodox member of it.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family with an obsessively religious mother (who nevertheless did not believe in the Catholic church and never attended until she did in her casket at death), and a philosophically leaning non-religious father. His mother tried to make a Catholic out of him, but his skepticism about churchly things was the result of being snagged by the ear and pulled out of a private pew at Saint Hedwig’s parish in Chicago by a priest. He made his mother join a different parish, because he would never set foot in that church again.

We had a bible in the house, a King James version in a dusty, beige cloth cover. The pages were yellow and brittle, the font in two columns too small to read, and the language too archaic to understand. I knew there was something special about this book, but I never saw anyone reading it, or even try to, until I picked it up and tried. Discouraged as a child, I picked it up later and started studying it when I entered high school. It was still mostly unintelligible, but by then I knew I had to have something unique and powerful that I could believe in. I worked my way through Genesis to Proverbs, then skipped over to the Gospels.

In the ninth grade, I began copying sayings from that bible that made sense to me into a notebook, numbered them, and began writing, or at least gathering, my first “scriptures.” At that point, I didn’t think of the bible as unique, but as one of many sources from which I could draw saving knowledge. This mistake came from the fact that my family stopped going to church when I was 8 years old, and from that point on, I was on my own, with whatever tidbits of Polish catholic piety I had absorbed. Truth seemed to be wherever I could find it. Church was a mysterious, dark and fragrant place lodged in my memory.

Little by little the notebook grew, but after doing this for awhile, I gave it up. It was obvious to me that my “scripture” was just a notebook of ideals that I wasn’t able to live up to. I started delving into non-Christian religions and the occult, reading my way through the explosion of New Age literature that was emerging in the 1960’s. There wasn’t an area I didn’t explore. I even bought and read a paperback of the Satanic Bible by LaVey. “What trash!” I thought at the time. I never fell for it, but I was curious. Still, my older sister and my mother believed in the supernatural and E.S.P., and both claimed to have such gifts. I cautiously followed along, sometimes witnessing unexplainable things.

In college, I came into contact with Christian students and for the first time met people of my own age who believed in Jesus in a way I hadn’t encountered before. They seemed to think of Him as a unique person, one like no other. They also not only read the bible but had copies of it in modern English. I didn’t know such people or things existed. To me, Christ was a statue in my grandmother’s living room, His presence or protection over me was a plastic image of the Sacred Heart that had glow-in-the-dark rays coming out of it and hung on the wall above the light switch in my bedroom since I was a little boy. Of course, there was Blessed Mother, who was also a statue. The statues of Jesus and His Mother always had their hearts showing.

I still needed a guide, something that would save me, because now I knew that couldn’t be a person. In college and from reading New Age books, I had found out that Jesus was a good moral teacher, and that everybody was potentially, if not already, God. We were all just little gods trying to find our way back to being the big God. I couldn’t quite figure out what was to happen to us, though, when we got there. Would we really be merged into Him like a drop of water falls into the sea and disappears? Somehow, this thought seemed a bit too simple.

When you don’t recognize anything or anyone as unique,
my goodness, have you got a problem!

In college, and I won’t go into detail, I started writing again, and fadged up a book of “scriptures” far more original and sensational than my little notebook ever was. At the same time, though, I bought my first modern English bible, the New English Bible, and began reading it, starting with the Psalms. After a short time, I bought my first copy of the Jerusalem Bible, and that was the beginning of my conversion to Christ. Starting with the Old Testament, with Genesis, I met in literary form, a new Being, Yahweh, who began following me everywhere and making me see things in a new way. I was sure that He was a unique being, as well as a unique person. It wasn’t long before I was sure that the bible was also something unique.

I’ve given my testimony as to how I came to Christ in other places, so I won’t repeat it here, but my meditations this morning showed me all that I have just written in a flash, and how important, how crucial, it is to know that there are two uniques, Christ as the Only Begotten Son of God, and the Bible as the expression in human language of Who He is. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not leaving out God the Father, or God the Holy Spirit. When we speak of Jesus Christ being unique, we are also speaking of the Father and the Holy Spirit as well, since in essence, in being, the three are One, the Holy Triad. As Christ said, “If you have seen Me you have seen the Father,” and “I will send you another Comforter, who will tell you of Me.”

There, the two uniques, but what of a third? Well, to tell you the truth, there’s more than a third. There’s billions. Those uniques are you and me, and all our fellow creatures who have been created to know, to love and to praise God, as scripture says, “Let all that have breath, praise the Lord.” Made in the image and likeness of the One God, who is unique, more One than even a mathematical unity can express, how can we also, each of us, not be like our Maker? We also are unique. It is understanding this, that you and I are as unique as God is, and that Jesus Christ died for each of us as though we were the only man or woman on earth, that provides the answer for the question of our personal existence. Why are we here?

“You are here,” He responds, “because I am.”

Look for the good

These are sayings of a Serbian bishop which resonate in my heart, as they reflect the truths by which I have tried to live my life in Christ. They define for me what true Orthodoxy essentially is, not a doctrinal formulation or a rudder full of rubrics, but living in such a way that reveals Christ in you to others, and Christ in others to you.

Stop looking for that which is bad in your neighbors but rather find and love that which is good in them and you will save both them and yourselves.

You will save them since every man already believes in his own goodness, everyone likes and wants to be good, everyone feels that eternal and divine calling to perfection. One should, therefore, support others in this: believe in them and help them develop that which is good, which abides in them and which they ultimately respect in themselves, that they develop that inner goodness, that it be strengthened and that it bring them victory over evil… For, it is only that which is good in man that can be loved and it is only in love that one can live.

It is with this teaching that the Apostles set out into the world on this day [Pentecost].

—Bishop Hrizostom (Vojinović)

To read the whole from which these excerpts are taken, visit Fr Milovan's blog Again and Again, and read the post entitled Good in Every Man.

For readers not familiar with Orthodox language, when we say "you will save them" this does not mean that we personally save them—as a matter of fact we know that only Christ can save anyone—but we only do what we see Him doing: We try to love others as He does, and so help them to lay down their defenses, so He can save them.

Testimony of a young man

I was reading some old posts on the blog of my closest friend and found this testimony which touches me now as deeply as it did when I first read it over three years ago. As I am empty of anything of my own to post here, I'd like to share this with readers of my blog who may not have been with us then, in the hope that they will be encouraged by it as much as I am.

God’s inerrant, truthful Word is always relevant. If it isn’t, then it cannot be the eternal Word that will endure even though heaven and earth pass away. And therefore, we would all be fools for believing and living in it accordingly. Let God be true and every man a liar.

My Father in heaven has placed in me a hunger and love for His Word. It is not of me, but of Him, and I give Him the glory. How can I not share it, then, with all those around me? Does that mean I go about with it erupting from me at every moment and passing day? No, but I do desire that more and more—to be able to speak powerfully and passionately at anytime I’m asked about the hope I have.

Now, back to ‘relevance’.
I do not see the words ‘relevant’ or ‘relevance’ in any passage of scripture. But what I do see is…

Enoch walking faithfully beside God after the birth of his son Methuselah and then, after living 365 years, being taken away by God.

What I see is Noah building an Ark in the middle of the desert while scoffers look on, mocking him and his preaching, but yet who is saved from judgment in the end, because he obeyed everything God commanded him.

I see Abraham being told by God to sacrifice the very son that is to bring forth the sons of Abraham.

I see Moses and Aaron, two ordinary men, confronting the Ruler of Egypt 10 times, and finally bringing about the exodus of the Jews.

I see Joshua obeying the command of Yahweh by marching around the city of Jericho a total of 13 times in 7 days and, by that obedience, bringing down the city wall.

I see Samson, who was rebuked by his parents for going to the uncircumcised Philistines to get a wife, yet it was from Yahweh that this came about, because Yahweh sought an occasion to confront the Philistines who ruled over Israel.

I see a child named David shaming all the soldiers of Israel by smiting a Philistine giant.

I see Elijah the Tishbite, last prophet of Israel, confronting 450 prophets of Baal because his God was the true God of Israel. I see Elijah also being taken up into a whirlwind by a chariot of fire.

I see Josiah, one of Judah’s most favored kings, coming to the throne at the age of 8, and in 31 years of reigning, extensively reforming Judah.

I see Daniel sealing up vision and prophecy because it dealt with the times of the end.

I see Ezekiel, unashamedly lying on both of his sides, bound with ropes from Yahweh Himself, for a total of 430 days, bearing the sin of Israel and Judah as a sign to them.

I see John the Baptist, clothed in animal’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey, as he preached the one, simple message of repentance to Israel.

I see the Apostle Paul being bound with his own belt by the prophet Agabus, who said through the Spirit, ‘In this way the Jews of Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles’, and yet Paul was not persuaded by the brethren to remain in Cæsarea, though they pleaded, but he went courageously on, knowing what he had to face.

I see John the Revelator imprisoned on the isle of Patmos because of the testimony of Jesus that he maintained, yet from this imprisonment, he was given a vision and prophecy that was not to be sealed, because the time was near and is even nearer now.

In that prophecy I see also the two future witnesses who are given power to prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth, and who devour their enemies with fire from their mouths.

And most importantly, I see the God of Heaven sending His willing Son, the King of Kings, down to a broken, helpless earth to be born in a manger, living a servant’s life and dying a thief’s death on a cross with no one, absolutely no one, knowing that during that execution on the tree He was being judged guilty for all mankind’s sin by His Father, and so by paying the debt, reconciling the created world to the Father.

I see Him descending to She‘ol and preaching to the captives, and taking all the above-mentioned, and more, up to heaven from paradise, opening the way by pouring out His blood fully on the mercy seat.

And the greatest thing I see is after three days this same ‘one like a son of man’, rising from the rich man’s tomb, with death conquered and Hades bound, glorified in a body that is an exemplar of the bodies that we ourselves will put on at the last trumpet.

Now let me ask you a ridiculous question. Is any of this relevant?

Okay, whatever your response was, this is what I feel when I hear of the church saying we want to be ‘relevant’ in our day.

We are relevant!
We have the only saving message that has any relevance to this arid, loathsome world!

As you can see, this gets my Cherokee/Irish blood boiling, but it is a chance for my brothers and sisters at Village Baptist to hone their patience with me and to show the love and forgiveness of Christ.

Some will say, undoubtedly, that my brow is headstrong, that I do not understand the word relevant and that I need to learn how to contextualize the gospel so that it synchronizes with culture.

Someone else will say that I’m just another KJV bible-thumping Fundamentalist. Well, I used to don a ‘reverse mullet’, trench-coat and ripped jeans (before the style came back) and listened devotedly to NIN (the industrial band, Nine Inch Nails, for you that are not culturally relevant).

My translation of choice is NIV, and my bible itself has been blanketed in layers of duct tape because it keeps wanting to fall apart on me. Perhaps that bible reflects the state of the soul of its owner, before the binding hands of Jesus descended and took hold of his heart, piercing it with the same nails that bled His hands.

What am I getting at?
I’ve been changed, my friends. My conscience will not let me go back to that world that I was once imprisoned in, a world where the only escape I saw was the great escape of ending my life, attempting to erase the maze of confusion, the lies of the world and Satan, and the sinful path I led as the Prodigal of Prodigals, with the whore Jezebel running with me bare, hand-in-hand, to our destruction.

That was the culture I was in. It dogs my steps to this day, that old shade Brock does, but the new created being, ******* (I don’t know his name yet, not till I see the Prince of Peace face to face and He writes it on a white stone, given only to me) is restored to new, day by day.

Another person’s past always looks better than the one that is deemed yours.

This is getting long and I knew it would, so I’m breaking it up in parts. But I want to end with this:

We, all of us who have been born of the Blood, are of a different world now.
We are, and have, the first-fruits of the Spirit and the Kingdom, a down payment, so to speak.
We are some type of metamorphosis, yes, until we take up that imperishable body, but we have been called out of this ‘world’ to be born into the Kingdom of Spirit and Truth.
Let us worship there.
Let us live there.
Let us fellowship there.

Let us take the Salt of that Kingdom and dash it on the dry tongues of men so that they will come thirsting for more.
Let us take the Light of that Kingdom, and as we hug it, yes, let us flash it, even hold it forth as a beacon where our steps sound the Good News and send up dust of this world where darkness resides…

New Orthodox nations

“But when the Son of Man comes, will He find any faith on earth?”
Luke 18:8 Jerusalem Bible

I used to have a small sign pinned up in a hidden spot above my desk at work where only I could see it. It read, “Don’t give offense. Don’t take offense. Forgive everybody everything right away.”

This saying just came to me as I was doing my work helping to start a new company. My boss was a friendly tyrant, and I had accepted his offer to employ me again (I had worked for him before) on his solemn promise that he would behave himself this time round. Well, fifteen years have passed and I am still working for him, but he has had many slips in keeping that promise. Perhaps that’s why the Lord prepared me for what was to come by teaching me that saying.

Don’t give offense.
Don’t take offense.
Forgive everybody everything right away.

Just as my boss didn’t live up to his promise to behave, I also haven’t lived up to the standard set before me in this saying. We both have missed the mark. The good thing is, for me the saying still holds true, and I still practice it. It is a worthy saying.

Where did it ultimately come from?
Well, I think it’s a distillation of the teaching of Jesus on how we should act towards others. It is an aspect of right action, orthopraxía as we call it in Greek. It’s quite useless to pretend to be a Christian or especially an Orthodox disciple of Christ if right action (orthopraxía) doesn’t accompany right worship and right thinking (both contained in the term orthodoxía).

“Therefore, everyone who listens to these words of Mine and acts on them will be like a sensible man who built his house on rock. Rain came down, floods rose, gales blew and hurled themselves against that house, and it did not fall: it was founded on rock. But everyone who listens to these words of Mine and does not act on them will be like a stupid man who built his house on sand. Rain came down, floods rose, gales blew and struck that house, and it fell; and what a fall it had!”
Matthew 7:24-27 Jerusalem Bible

We live in a time period in which it is both easier than ever and harder than ever to live the Orthodox life, especially in what are traditionally non-Orthodox countries. I address this post to the brethren who belong to new Orthodox nations like East and West Africa, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and, yes, America too.

The traditional Orthodox nations, the Middle East, Greece and the Balkans, the Ukraine and Russia, have a long history, worthy of both praise and blame in the way they have lived and preserved their Orthodox faith. I needn’t go into detail on what is blameworthy, and to do so would only draw down on me the righteous indignation of those who see the Orthodox world as faultless and flawless.

We already know what is praiseworthy, because we have become the blessed recipients of the faith “once delivered to the saints” which they have handed over to us in these new lands. We have much to thank them for, and because of the love and respect we owe them, it is not for us to look backward and criticise. It is for us to make sure that what we have received is believed and lived in spirit and in truth, and that is my object, to draw attention to our position, and our responsibility.

What is this position? And what is this responsibility?
Our position—We are a minority population of ancient Christians dispersed throughout a modern (as they put it) post-Christian world.
Our responsibility—We have to live the life of faith and not just believe or agree with a set of doctrines.

Orthodoxy is the apostolic faith in an apostate age.
So what do we do?

The answer to this question is found in the words of Jesus quoted above, “…everyone who listens to these words of Mine and acts on them will be like a sensible man who built his house on rock…”

And there is more.
Unlike people in former ages, we can read, and we also have the divine and holy scriptures to instruct and direct us. That’s what I meant when I wrote, it is easier than ever to live the Orthodox life. With these riches within our grasp, how can we let ourselves live in spiritual poverty? Must we wait for some calamity to sober us and make us come to our senses, that is, to become sensible people?
I hope not.

Now then, how is it harder than ever to live the Orthodox life, especially in what are traditionally non-Orthodox countries?

The temptation to hide our faith for political correctness, in order to get ahead, is very strong.
I marvel in my own Greek Orthodox community, how parents let their children slide so easily into the worldly life, the Christless life, and even encourage them to do so, thinking they are doing them a favor, helping them to be successful.

I marvel that they have forgotten what 400 years of Tourkokratía almost did to Greece, and that they do not recognize that we are living in America under the same Tourkokratía under other names. (By the way, revisionist historians are now saying that the 400 years of Turkish rule over the Greeks and other Christians was not all that bad, as this article demonstrates.)

For us Christians of the new Orthodox nations, Africans, Indonesians, East Asians and Americans, there is little or no bad blood or historical baggage coming to us as we unite ourselves to the ancient Church. We are not involved in nationalistic and sectarian antagonisms, but we can allow ourselves to be sucked into religious ghettos (or turned into religious museums) if we are not really following Jesus Christ.

Our opportunity to share the authentic good news—
Jesus Christ risen from the dead—
is immense, but only if we listen to His words and act on them,
as the Lord Himself teaches.

This is not advice.
This is not optional.
He is the Truth, the Way, and the Life.
This is Orthodoxy.

A good shepherd

I have nothing of my own to say or write, but I would like to share this story about Elder Porphyrios (may his memory be eternal).
I found this on Maria Morrell's blog and you can read the entire online book, Elder Porphyrios: Testimonies and Experiences, or just the chapter from which this excerpt was taken, Elder Porphyrios' conversations with Cypriots, at this link. Many people go seeking Orthodoxy or are drawn to it for the wrong reasons. This story shows, if we are willing to see, what the nature of true Orthodoxy is: not antiquity, ceremony, and dogmatic precision (though these are there), but love. Not our love for God, but His love for us, which He reveals through His servants who follow closely behind the Master. Now, the story…

It was a very beautiful spring afternoon. We reached Oropos with the usual manifest worry as to whether Elder Porphyrios was there, whether or not he was sick, if he would speak to us, if he was too tired from the many visitors on that day, etc.. We had these uneasy feelings every time we set off to visit him.

Arriving there, we found ourselves before a most unexpected scene. Glory to God! Elder Porphyrios was there. He was not in bed, but up and about. He was in good health. He was in a field (right next to the Convent that he later built), overseeing scores of people who had gone there voluntarily to plant different things in the field.
The scene was indescribably picturesque and biblical. The 'good shepherd' in the midst of his 'rational sheep'. The instructor of souls even demonstrating how tomatoes should be planted. So that everything would be as it should be, perfect.

Naturally, we didn't even consider approaching him to kiss his hand and to receive his blessing.

We stopped the car a good distance away from the area where the large number of people were working. We remained in the car and we tried to console one another and each person was saying: "It doesn't matter, nature is so pretty here and the afternoon is so beautiful. Let's enjoy it at least."

Half an hour went by, and I felt the need to get out of the car and take a little walk in the forest nearby. I was so grieved because I would not talk to the Elder that I wanted to be alone and maybe to cry a little. I wanted to speak with him so much and to get his advice about the enormous problems that then burdened me. Besides, I went to Greece only once or twice a year. Who knows how many months would go by before I would see him.

As I was walking the length of the forest, my friends who had taken me there in their car came running towards me. "Come on," they said to me, "the Elder is calling for you." "Me?" "Yes, he said to go up to him, he wants you." "You're joking?"

We had not told anyone that we were there. We didn't even speak to anyone from the time we arrived and parked the car here. No one took any notice of us because they were all so busy, and we were far away from them. The only way they could see us was with a telescope.

They practically dragged me to the Elder. I couldn't believe that Elder Porphyrios saw me. More importantly, he saw what was happening in my soul at that time.

I approached him. I kissed his hand, and he made me sit down next to him. He kept me near him for about an hour. He and I were talking while all the others around us were digging the ground and planting. This was happening to such an extent that I felt it was improper for me to receive preferential treatment. The others were killing themselves working and I was enjoying the seat of honour next to the Elder without my offering any help.

At that time I knew very little about Christ and I studied the New Testament very little. Only later, when I had been taught by Elder Porphyrios to study the New Testament and the Fathers of the Orthodox Faith, did I understand the meaning of his actions that day, "...and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out" (John 10:3).

The Gospel according to St. Luke gave me the answer, "Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured saying, This man receives sinners and eats with them.' So He spoke this parable to them saying, 'What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he finds it, he lays it on his shoulders rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost! I say to you likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance" (Luke 15:1-7).

The Light

A short but very excellent post, Over time [and not overnight] by our new brother in Indonesia, Yudhie, includes some very good thinking about sharing Christ with others, that is, about evangelism. He concluded his essay with a quote of Abba Barsanuphios which I posted as Sow in Hope. His words reminded me also of a saying of Abba Porphyrios which I posted as The secret of true evangelism. All these posts share in the same spirit, that which motivates us to witness Christ to our unbelieving neighbors.

As it so happened, right after reading Yudhie's post, I picked up my copy of Jesus Freaks II—Revolutionaries by dc Talk to read, and inside as a bookmark I found an old Christian comic that I really liked and saved. It also is about sharing the good news with others. I decided to scan the comic and post it here, in case any of my readers would like a copy. The seven frames of the comic can be downloaded to your computer by left clicking the mouse button to enlarge to image, and then right clicking and selecting "Save Picture As."
Here it is…

The crown of scripture

A Christian brother wrote,

I’m not saying we should stop new believers from reading the bible itself. But we’re so blessed to live in age when there are so many amazing resources available. We should certainly be discerning in what we choose. But it seems like we want people to use a microscope to analyze God’s word in tiny details when it’s equally important to give them a telescope to see the grand, vast, picture.

It's certainly wrong to study the bible as one studies a specimen under the microscope, except perhaps for bible scholars (if there really is such a thing). It's equally wrong to pretend to give people "the big picture" by not making them study at all but instead by entertaining them. Both these approaches to the written Word of God are ways to escape the main function of scripture, and that is, to bring us face to face with our sin, and with our Saviour.

We say we study the bible, but actually the bible is studying us. We may think we are rightly dividing the Word of God, but actually the Word of God is rightly dividing us. That is, if we let Him. (Jesus is the Word of God. The bible is His icon.) Rightly dividing us from our sin, from the world and all its pomp, and from the power of the evil one.

Back to the brother's statement that "we’re so blessed to live in age when there are so many amazing resources available," it's precisely this mistaken attitude about the technological "resources" available to us that has changed Christianity from a living faith and close walk with the Lord to a kind of dinner theatre about such a faith and walk.

We have become detached from the Word of God like a doomed fetus becomes detached from the uterus and then dies, which the mother may not discover for days, but which can kill her as well if it is not discovered in time. That mother is the Church, that fetus is the believers who do not live in the Word but only "watch a movie" about it and think they've "got it."

To live in the Word of God is to make the holy and God-breathed scriptures, the bible, our daily bread, our constant companion, our very home.

This means never being without it, physically, when possible, even if it's only a slim New Testament and Psalms tucked into a pocket.

This means rising in the morning with the Word on our lips, praying and thanking the Lord in the words of psalms and prophecies, not just five times a day as Muslims do, but all through the day (and night).

This means turning not to vain and sometimes vile entertainments (making excuses for the profanity in them), but turning to the bible for refreshment, for relaxation, for recreation.

No, you can play sports, go on hikes, collect stamps, read novels, write poetry, play the guitar, have an electric train set, or even a speedboat… but what’s on your mind, really?

I am not different from the rest. I often have to yank my attention back to where it belongs, visit the mansion that Christ my Lord and Saviour has prepared for me in His Father’s house. What? You thought He was talking about the heavenly mansion? Well, yes, of course, that one too. But the study of and meditation on the inspired words of the divine and holy scriptures, that is like a foyer leading into the heavenly mansion, and a foyer is part of the house, isn't it?

Paradox upon paradox, that the churches that claim most strongly to be centered on the bible have the most trouble cleaving to it, but find ever more numerous by-paths and supposed short-cuts to keep them off the One True Highway to Heaven—the Word of God.

Who is Max Lucado? A better question is, why is Max Lucado? And why all these dozens of “Christian” authors and their books? Isn’t the Word of God in the form of the bible enough for us? Isn’t the Holy Spirit here with us to help us understand it? But how can we hope to be disciples of the Lord, if we do not stay constantly at His side?
And how do we do this?

By “never letting the sacred volume out of our hand” as Jerome says.

Instead of expanding your facilities and upgrading your film stash and other technological enhancements, get back to the bible, teaching it, studying it, learning it by heart, worshipping with it, praying it, prophesying with it, evangelizing with it, healing with it, feeding on it and living in it.

There is no other divine scripture on earth, no other literature whose sum is greater than the total of its parts, no other book so alive that it doesn’t need to be enhanced with movies and computer games.

And we think that we can do better than the living God who provided this crown for us?

How to live on nothing

In the beginning…

We lived life very simply, in a spirit of voluntary poverty that was almost unconscious, though of course we knew what we were doing. That was in the late 1960’s and the first half or so of the 1970’s. This way of life came directly from reading the bible—the psalms, the prophets, the gospels, the epistles, the acts of the apostles. We had no one to teach us, and we didn’t really understand how the Holy Spirit works in us yet, but He was at work just the same, doing what He always does, not drawing attention to Himself, but pointing us to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.

After living alone with the bible for about three years, we finally stepped forward and did the scary thing—we joined a church. It was the Episcopal Church in the last days of its orthodoxy. Deaconess Noel was a gentle spirit who was testing her new vocation with the charm of anxious young womanhood emerging from the simplicity of her girlhood faith. Later, she would move on and be ordained a priest, after the Episcopalians fell under the spell of the spirit of the age. Father Neville (who used to say, “if you can remember the devil, you can remember Father Neville”) was the last generation of those old country Oregon pastors who knew more jokes than gospel but wasn’t worried because “our Grandfather in heaven” only wants us to have a good day and be happy, after all. God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world. Again, simplicity, but of a different kind.

We lived very simply, and with only one son at first, led a beautiful, quiet life. Our house was a small, dilapidated old farmhouse on a quarter acre of land on the edge of town. People used to ride horses down the streets sometimes. On our little quarter-acre we had an ancient cherry tree, a huge, spreading walnut tree, three hazelnut trees, a plum tree, a pear tree, two apples, a peach and an apricot tree, blueberry, red currant and elderberry bushes, and about fifty ancient rose bushes—all producing food that we harvested, stored, and fed on, all for no cost. We had an unsuccessful asparagus plantation and of course a vegetable garden. For juice, we went down to the communal blackberry grove and harvested luscious fruit that we converted into juice in a blender, straining the seeds out. In those days, I even tried my hand at winemaking, and made some wonderful plum, pear and blackberry wines. What we couldn’t grow and harvest on our quarter-acre, we bought. That wasn’t much.

I had a book back then (I still have it to this day) called How to Live on Nothing. The cover shows a young, longhaired man with his wife and children in a wooded setting. That picture could’ve been my little family. I bought that book when I was a poor, starving student, and I read it here and there, but to this day have never actually read it through. Perhaps it wasn’t that kind of book. Anyway, even without reading it, we were actually living a life in the way it described, or very close to it. How to live on nothing? Well, not absolutely nothing, but very close. This didn’t last, however.

The beginning of the end came when we were given a used color television set, our share of the inheritance of my wife’s father when he passed away. I had always resisted having a television in the house, but that day arrived when I was forced to capitulate. That started a whole series of capitulations on my part, out of love and sympathy for the “needs” of others, which gradually transformed our simple, self-sufficient lifestyle in ways I could never have imagined. I felt like Peter, to whom Jesus said, “when you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked, but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will put a belt round you and take you where you would rather not go” (John 21:18 JB). And go I must, and the simple, straight words of the truth we read in scripture, overlaid with the world’s demands, were almost choked to death in me. Yet here I am, having survived my middle years, and ready again to live the life of discipleship, ready and willing again to live on nothing.

What is this nothing? The paradox is that it’s the opposite of what people usually mean by nothing, that is, nihilism. Even “nothing” in the scriptures usually means this kind of lifeless, deadening unreality, or its agents, elilim as the Hebrews call them. When I think of how to live on nothing, that’s not what I’m thinking of. Certainly, in the book of that title, the theme is how to live in a moneyless way, making use of resources that are free, costless. That is part of it, of course. But what I think of when I hear the phrase how to live on nothing is something different.

To live with oneself and with others, giving away for free all those good things that we have received for free from the Lord. “You received without charge, give without charge” (Matthew 10:8 JB). It costs us nothing to have a welcoming and friendly spirit, to meet everyone and to treat everyone as if they were in fact Christ coming to us. It costs us little or nothing to help others when we see that they need it but are ashamed to ask. It costs us nothing to graciously withdraw our hand when we see our interference would cause more harm than good. It is free to let another go ahead of us, or to have the last piece of anything, even if we must sometimes go without, because what we receive in the action of not receiving for ourselves outweighs all earthly benefits, letting us have a foretaste of the heavenly kingdom.

When I consider how hard people work at trying to be successful, how much they slave and deny themselves wrongly for the accumulation of wealth, not gathering for others, but for show, and how they will quickly lose everything in a heartbeat, or the lack thereof, having no time for acts of kindness, not knowing the joy of welcoming others into their homes and lives, it’s a wonder to me how strong people can make themselves against the opening of the door that Christ is knocking at. But the words of scripture are always true, and we fulfill them all, whether we live for God or apart from Him.

How to live on nothing? I never think of it, it just happens when I’m not looking. Never has poverty felt so rich, when we give away that which the world despises yet which can purchase the whole world for God, if we only dare spend it.

What would Jesus do? again…

You can stop reading now, if you like, as what I am about to say is nothing new. I've said it and written it many times in my own blog and in comments all over the Christianide blogosphere.

WWJD?…
What would Jesus do? …is not a question that can be asked, only one that can be axed.
It's like asking what Jesus would have done with the rest of His earthly life, if He hadn’t been crucified or, even more silly, what He would have done on earth had He not ascended to the Father. That’s like asking what would a man do if he could have a baby.

A question doesn’t earn the distinction of having meaning or deserving an answer, unless it is asking something about what is. What could be, what might be, what should be, all that is the stuff of fantasy. It's by wasting their time and efforts on fantasies of this ilk that many evangelical Christians find their churches drifting farther and farther from the Truth, despite their historic formularies.

“It’s not hearing the commandments, but keeping them,” that matters, that makes the essential difference between the follower of Jesus and the follower of religion. One follows Someone who is confessedly still Alive and Present. The other follows someone who has been written up and has now entered the realm of a historical personage that can be speculated about. Do you see my point?

To put the reality in the same frame of reference as the fantasy, we would have to ask, “What does Jesus do?” and in fact that is what I do ask myself and others, every day, over and over again.

How many times must I say this? “Jesus Christ is alive, and He is still the most active Person in the history of the world.”

No one and nothing can hold a candle to Jesus:
He is the Light of the world, and stranger than our gut will let us believe, by His own word, He has said of us,
“You are the Light of the world.”

What do you think He means by that? No, no, listen carefully—I didn’t ask, “What do you think He meant by that?” but “What do you think He means by that?” Jesus is not just in the past and in heaven.

Unfortunately for us lazy bones, He’s walking around here in this cemetery we call “earth” and speaking to the bones as holy prophet Ezekiel spoke in a type, “Put on flesh!”

What’s even worse for us, He starts with that part of the cemetery called “the Church.” And what do we do?

We lie there asking each other “What would Jesus do?” when He’s come right among us calling out as He did once to Lazarus and does now every day to each of us, “Come forth!” and as He did through an earlier Son of Man, “Dry bones, hear the word of YHWH. The Lord YHWH says this to these bones: I am now going to make the breath, ha-ruach, the spirit, enter you, and you will live…”

“What would Jesus do?” gives the lie to the resurrection of the Lord, on the basis that since He ascended and is no longer among us in His earthly body, we can talk about Him as though He were absent.
It seems that more Christians believe that the Lord is absent than those who believe He is present. Perhaps it’s not their fault, perhaps they’re just being humble and meek, afraid of offending the Lord, or someone, if they were too perky, and had the gall to think, speak, act and live as though what Jesus said about them were really true, “You are the salt of the earth,” and “You are the light of the world.”

Heaven forbid! Christ was talking about the saints! Now, where was I, oh yes, I was just asking myself, “What would Jesus do?”

Of the Word, co-eternal

To the Word, coeternal with the Father and the Spirit,
born of the Virgin for our salvation,
let us, the faithful, give praise and worship.
For he willed to be lifted up on the cross in the flesh,
to suffer death and raise the dead
by his glorious resurrection.
—Ton Synanarchon Logon, Resurrectional Apolytikion, Tone 5

First of all, the bible is not technically God’s Word. Christ, the Divine Logos, is God’s Word. That’s what Logos means, as everyone knows.

Second, the bible is the written icon (or image) of the Word of God. It no more fell out of the sky from God’s lips than did Jesus. Jesus had to be born into the human world as a man through a woman’s body. The bible had to enter the human mind as a body of literature written by a multitude of seers. You already know this too. I’m just organizing the thoughts.

Third, every limitation voluntarily accepted by the Christ when He incarnated as a man is applicable in its own frame of reference to the written icon of the Word of God. Both suffer a diminution or reduction in the process of being translated from heaven to earth. In neither case does this veiling of glory diminish or dilute the absolute Truth of the Word of God in any way.

Fourth, the bible is infallible in its unity and infallible in its parts, but the application of this infallibility always depends on the intervention of the Holy Spirit, who alone knows how, when and where to apply it. Without the intervention of the Holy Spirit, the bible cannot be known as infallible, indeed cannot be known at all for what it is.
A medicine may be infallibly effective, but if it is not applied or ingested in the right way, at the right time, and in the right place, it can have even the opposite effect, possibly becoming lethal. Only the physician knows how to apply it in every case.

The Holy Spirit lives in the Church,
and the Church lives in the Word of God.

At this point, we introduce the concept of the use of proof texts and the like, which can be applied in sometimes disastrous ways by persons who have not ingested the whole of scripture by constantly and daily feeding upon it without mixing it, but who rather begin to teach their partial understandings (some of which may be wholly true, others wholly false) without being first built upon the sure foundation of faith. It is not how educated and learned one is that qualifies one for understanding and interpreting the written icon of the Word, nor is chronological age a criterion. Spiritual maturity rather than chronological age, practical application, even incarnation, of the scripture’s tenets rather than academic prowess or a prodigious memory, these are what put a man in the place where the Word of God can employ him as an agent of divine Truth.

Remember who the Word of God is, and do not trifle with the arguing spirits. Rather apply yourself to knowing and living the Word, who is alive and active, and in so doing demonstrate on the battlefield of your own body the victory of Christ, who is Truth come unto His own in you, and by thus receiving Him, receive also the power to become the son or daughter of the Most High.

Anger and forgiveness

I have been angry—at myself, at other people, at situations—and sometimes I have acted out the anger in emotional outbursts, foolish words, hurtful words. Strangely, I have never experienced what I have heard from others, anger at God. Maybe it’s because of my upbringing—I don’t know—but He could never be an object of my anger, because He always ends up being the only comforting bosom to which I can flee when everyone and all else fails me.

What has angered me most in the past was false accusation, whether it was explicit or concealed under sarcasm directed against me, such as being made to feel inferior or stupid by someone whom I really care about, when I’m only trying to help them. The other person may have a weakness in a certain area, so you usually skirt by and stay clear of such situations to avoid displays of this weakness. Sometimes you have to take a risk, though, and see if they’ve learned to overcome it, or if they at least can show some patience with you. You take the risk, but sometimes you lose. You know that they were just tired, frustrated, or unhappy with things, as anyone can be, and so you just withdraw without any reaction. You still feel hurt, but then reason kicks in and reminds you that they meant you no harm. You know that the incident, and all the pain, will be swallowed up by just saying “Yes” to whatever the Lord asks you to do next.

Apologizing for expressions of anger, whether they arose out of righteous indignation or emotional weakness, is a given; yet, you may find yourself having to live with people who still have not learned how to say “excuse me” honestly.

I thought, in my family life for example, that by always being ready to apologize, not just for anger, but for anything for which an apology might be due, and by actually apologizing, even when I believed I was “in the right” in order to defuse a situation—I thought this example would have a good effect. I was wrong. My way of dealing with confrontation was seen as a form of cowardice and weakness. That disappointed me because, again, it was a kind of false accusation against me, and I thought ‘my behavior all these years has been misinterpreted.’ When I found out what they actually thought about me, I was hurt, and even angry, but there was nothing to be gained by resentment. It’s still always better to forgive than to deceive.

So I still believe that to apologize for oneself and for others comes not from weakness, but from strength, and also from love. It doesn’t matter what other people, even our loved ones, think of us, because we know that we answer to a higher Authority.

“Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and any one who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…” (Matthew 10:37)

I could not have done, nor can I do anything, different from what I did and continue to do, to always be ready to make peace and admit my fault, even to cover up another person’s sin, and if I do become angry, to lay that anger at the feet of the One whom I follow, not out of a sense of duty, but out of love and gratitude for His forgiveness.

There is no better word than to always follow Jesus and imitate Him to the best of your ability at every age and in every situation, and if it pleases God that your friends and family members respect you for it, and even follow your example, then praise God; and if they misinterpret your motives and your actions, and even if they reject you, then praise God, and do not stop following the Master. He is always there for us, always faithful to welcome us into His presence and, ultimately, into His Kingdom.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Let us be debtors, then…

The Church as it has existed at least from the times of the late Roman Empire under Constantine has manifested on earth both as “a mystery with structure” and a “structure with mystery.” She seems to fluctuate between these two poles, which are inversions of each other.

A mystery with structure—that is, a mystery (the presence of God among us and all that it produces) with structure (visible activity, real estate, hierarchy, dogmatic decrees)—this is the pole that reflects the Lord’s teaching, “Set your hearts on God’s kingdom first and His righteousness, and all these other things will be added as well.” (Matthew 6:33, paraphrased)

A structure with mystery—that is, a structure (professionalism and legalism among us and all that it produces) with mystery (clergy privilege, laity subjection, sanctimonious activity and false religion)—this is the pole that reflects the Lord’s warning, “I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber.” (John 10:1 NIV, see also the rest of the passage, John 10:1-10)

This morning I found an excellent quotation from an Orthodox Church father, one who knows what he is talking about, and this is what prompted my thoughts above.

A man who takes pride in natural abilities—I mean cleverness, the ability to learn, skill in reading, good diction, quick grasp, and all such skills as we possess without having to work for them—this man, I say, will never receive blessings in heaven, since the man who is unfaithful in little is unfaithful and vainglorious in much.

And there are men who wear out their bodies to no purpose in the pursuit of total dispassion, heavenly treasures, miracle working, and prophetic ability, and the poor fools do not realize that humility, not hard work, is the mother of such things. The man who seeks a quid pro quo from God builds on uncertainty, whereas the man who considers himself a debtor will receive sudden and unexpected riches.

—John Klímakos

I think that what John of the Ladder (Klímakos) is talking about applies particularly to those who seek to serve Christ in the Church as ordained ministers. It goes without saying that the same observations apply to all of us, but in the case of the clergy, it has far more critical significance. His first paragraph reminds me of some Orthodox clergy, and his second paragraph reminds me of the faith healer type Pentecostals you see on television. The first group are so often carried away by the eloquence and seeming relevance of their own words, that they imagine themselves “lords of the whole world.” The second group reaches the same conclusion about themselves, based on the efficacy of their miracle-working powers.

Those who are called to serve the people of God as shepherds must have only one purpose, to follow their Lord and Master Jesus Christ, and to tend His flock as they see Him tending it. Or, as John of the Ladder so aptly put it in a biblical metaphor, “the man who considers himself a debtor will receive sudden and unexpected riches,” that is, he not only plants the seed of salvation in the hearts of the people, but he is thereby assured of his own salvation as well.

A man ought to be very solicitous as to his salvation, for if the whole world were full of men even up to the clouds, if that were possible, and among all these none was to be saved but only one, yet each should follow up his grace so that he might be that one, for to lose heaven is not to lose a shoestring. But woe to us! There is one who giveth and there is none who receiveth.

—Brother Giles of Assisi

The ways of the Affectionate

I cannot pass these words by without leaving at least a trace of them for visitors to my blog. They are from a homily posted by Fr Milovan on his blog Again and Again. To read the entire homily, click here. In the excerpt below, I have made a few corrections to spelling and grammar. Otherwise, it is presented here as it is (italics added).

…If He is the beauty that is within you, then He must have passed by your world. He set it alive within you and through you. The world has no existence without you, it does not exist apart from you. The world is your quadrant and you are its playground. Your world is printed, in its magnitude, on the face of God. Since this world is His creation, it will remain forever after He has baptized it, in the Last Day, in His global and eternal Light. It shall remain united in its matter, mind and light all together.
The world will become your Lord’s vestment upon the Second Coming of Christ.

Starting from this vision, Christianity is then knit into history and rooted in eternity at the same time, global and covering the universe with light; Christianity is responsible in time but free from its bondage. It is present in matter and motivates this matter with the motion of the spirit. That is why Christianity does not withraw from the flow of time just for the sake of a “romantic” eternity, nor does it passively stand like a viewer watching the course of events as if it were independent of human beings.

The believer doesn’t escape to a desert—not even if it became his hermitage—for he will have the whole world in his heart and prayers. Someone of us may seek solitude for peace and tranquility’s sake, but he has never deserted. His profoundness will become deeper as he stands in the divine presence.

The world is entirely included in Christ’s salvation plan.
Everything in the world is His dearly beloved with the exception of sin. Everything in it is attracted to heaven. Our mind is attracted towards heaven as far as this mind is awake, loving and hugging existence. But never in a way that we shall detest all the good in our world, not in a way that we should become indifferent to the construction, improvement and organizing of the world.

We can never say that this world ascends through its own powers, nor does this world progress automatically towards the better.
But we do preach that God elevates humans, surrounding them with His loving care.

The world is elevated and does not ascend by itself.
It struggles, and God accepts it and pulls it up to Himself. He, who is sitting up on high in His Bright Body, opens up and embraces him who is longing for Him.

After the Ascension of Christ, tomorrow the universe, in its turn, will be received up. These are the ways of the Affectionate.

—Metropolitan George (Khodr) of Mount Lebanon

Unfinished mystery

Aνάληψις – Análipsis – Ascent [to the Father]

“Why are you men from Galilee standing here looking into the sky? Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven, this same Jesus will come back in the same way you have seen Him go there.”
Acts 1:11 Jerusalem Bible

The people of Yisrael, believing the words of their nevi’im, the prophets, held to the view that Moshiach, the messiah, existed and would be manifested as two distinct individuals, named by them Moshiach ben Yossef, and Moshiach ben David. It did not occur to them that these two types of messiah might be the same person. They didn’t think so then, they don’t think so now.

According to a modern rabbi, “Jewish tradition speaks of two redeemers, each one called Moshiach. Both are involved in ushering in the Messianic era. They are Moshiach ben David and Moshiach ben Yossef. The term Moshiach unqualified always refers to Moshiach ben David of the tribe of Judah. He is the actual (final) redeemer who shall rule in the Messianic age. Moshiach ben Yossef of the tribe of Ephraim will come first, before the final redeemer, and later will serve as his viceroy. The essential task of Moshiach ben Yossef is to act as precursor to Moshiach ben David: He will prepare the world for the coming of the final redeemer.”

That is modern Jewish thinking about the messiah, Him whom we know as Christ, who is Jesus son of Joseph, of Nazareth. At the time when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea, these views about Moshiach were not yet fully formed. As for myself, I am no sage, not one learned in Torah and the traditions of Yisrael, and I do not presume to teach, but only to report what I have heard, and that is, that the taking up of Jesus in power to sit at the right hand of His Father is an unfinished mystery. Even a child knows this, “what goes up must come down.”

If we believe that He is risen from the dead, that He lives forever, that He has been taken up and is interceding for us to the Father, then we also must believe that He “will come back in the same way” that He was taken up.

At the time the Holy One appeared, the Jews believed in two messiahs.

Messiah son of Joseph was the suffering servant as holy prophet Isaiah foresaw. He would be born of woman, of the tribe of Ephraim, born in a known place. They would know where He came from. He would come to teach, to suffer and to die for the sins of many. He would not come to inaugurate the subjugation of the whole world to Israel.

Messiah son of David was the mighty conqueror, as holy prophet David the king foresaw and sang about in his psalms. He would not be born of woman, but was nevertheless called the son of David. They would not know where He came from, because He would come with the armies of heaven, with the host of Yahweh. He would not come to teach or to suffer, and He would not die. He would come to initiate the supremacy of Israel and of Jerusalem. He would be the King of the world, forever and ever.

Two messiahs, and which one would the people have?
Being in subjection to their Roman overlords, could they be expected to want Moshiach ben Yossef to appear?

As one of them answered “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” when he was told, “We have found the One Moses wrote about in the Law, the One about whom the prophets wrote: He is Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth!” so was the expectation of most of the Jews of that time.

They wanted not the suffering servant; they had suffered enough! Maybe, some of them thought, they were themselves collectively Moshiach ben Yossef. They didn’t want someone ordinary, born of woman like everyone else, and like everyone else, born to suffer and to die. No, they wanted the conqueror, born of no woman, therefore undying, the hero of whom David wrote,

“He has told me, ‘B’ni atta… You are my Son, today I have become your Father. Ask, and I will give you the nations for your heritage, the end of the earth for your domain.’”

But no, things did not happen as the Jews desired. Not Messiah son of David, the unborn, from heaven, ever-living, ever-reigning, came or could come, not before Messiah son of Joseph. No one is stronger than God. No one can alter His plans. No one can know them, unless He reveal them.

What of today? Does anyone, Jew or gentile, want the Messiah son of David to appear? A handful of religious fanatics, maybe, some Jewish, some Christian, and maybe some wild-eyed Muslims who have transferred the attributes of Messiah son of David to a mythical being whom they call the Mahdi or the Tenth Imam.

No, the world doesn’t want someone like Moshiach ben David to appear.

Why? Well, to put it bluntly, His coming would spoil all their plans, would just trash all the good things they have in store for mankind, as their unofficial anthem declares… “Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace...”

No, what the world wants now, if it must have a messiah of some sort, is someone like Moshiach ben Yossef, someone born of woman like everyone else, someone whom they know where he comes from, who will be longsuffering, patient and (especially) tolerant.

No, he needn’t die for anyone, of course. That would be barbaric.
But we could let him be the figurehead, the symbol of all the we have accomplished, the lord of our tower that reaches up to heaven…

Yet here we have this unfinished mystery, the mystírion of the análipsis of the Christ, which many mouth as true, yet live their lives as if He did not really die for them, did not really rise from the dead, and did not really ascend to the Father.

How should we live if we really believed all these mysteries?
If we really believed in the unfinished mystery of our redemption?
If we really believed that “He shall come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead, Whose Kingdom shall have no end?”

Aνάληψις - Análipsis

Although Mark closes his gospel with a brief mention of it, Luke reports it twice, once in greater detail, writing to Theóphilos both times. Perhaps Theóphilos was intrigued with what he read in the evangélion and wanted to know more, so Luke obliged him in the opening words of his book of the acts of the apostles, the práxeis.

It was angels, not men, who gave its name to this other most hidden mystírion of the Lord Jesus, when they said to the disciples who were looking up in awe, “Why are you men from Galilee standing here looking into the sky? Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven, οὗτος ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὁ ἀναληφθεὶς ἀφ’ὑμῶν εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν,
this same Jesus will come back in the same way you have seen Him go there.”

ὁ ἀναληφθεὶς—o analiphtheís, he who has been taken up—the source of the name of this mystery—ἡ ἀνάληψις—i análipsis, the Ascension.

“Will wonders never cease?” was probably the cynical retort of unbelievers when the holy apostles and the Lord’s mother came running back into town with the news. Wasn’t it enough that these dreamers, racked with grief, had made up the tale of the rising from the dead of the imposter? Now this!

The words of the Son of Man had circumcised the ears of those who would listen, preparing them for the blood atonement that He was to suffer and offer to His heavenly Father, sprinkling them with it, as Moses had sanctified the children of Yisrael in the wilderness, only this time, not figuratively, but in spirit and truth.

The deeds of the Son of Man had unthroned the worthy in their own eyes and restored to favor in the eyes of His Father those of low estate, those the others called unworthy, people like His own mother and brothers.

No, O world of men! Neither His rising from the dead nor this, His ascent into heaven to be seated at the right hand of Divine Majesty, are lies. Christ is risen from the dead, not merely was raised, but is risen, He who speaks to us now and always, who was, who is, and who is to come, the Pantokrátor, He who was dead but is alive, and alive forever.

“Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven, this same Jesus will come back in the same way you have seen Him go there,” just as the angels told us.

His ascent to the Father did not inaugurate an absence, but a hidden presence—hidden from the eyes of the world, but revealed to all who trust in Him as an abiding presence, to all who believe His word,

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.
Go therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptise them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you.
And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.”

But dust and ashes

“Nevertheless as coming the tokens, behold, the days shall come, that they which dwell upon earth shall be taken in a great number, and the way of truth shall be hidden, and the land shall be barren of faith. But iniquity shall be increased above that which you now see, or that you have heard long ago. And the land, that you now see to have root, you shall see wasted suddenly. But if the most High grant you to live, you shall see after the third trumpet that the sun shall suddenly shine again in the night, and the moon thrice in the day: And blood shall drop out of wood, and the stone shall give his voice, and the people shall be troubled: And even he shall rule, whom they look not for that dwell upon the earth, and the fowls shall take their flight away together: And the Dead Sea shall cast out fish, and make a noise in the night, which many have not known: but they shall all hear the voice thereof. There shall be a confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstruous women shall bring forth monsters: And salt waters shall be found in the sweet, and all friends shall destroy one another; then shall wit hide itself, and understanding withdraw itself into his secret chamber, And shall be sought of many, and yet not be found: then shall unrighteousness and incontinency be multiplied upon earth. One land also shall ask another, and say, ‘Is righteousness that makes a man righteous gone through you?’ And it shall say, ‘No.’ At the same time shall men hope, but nothing obtain: they shall labour, but their ways shall not prosper. To show you such tokens I have permission; and if you will pray again, and weep as now, and fast even days, you shall hear yet greater things.”
2 Esdras 5:1-13 (Apocrypha)

And the angel took me along the road in my dream, and there on the side of the road was a little pile of muck, of mud mixed with ashes, and I asked, "What is that?" And the angel answering, replied, "That is the true appearance of one who calls himself Romanos, who is planted like dung on the side of the road." At his saying of those words, I awoke with the plea on my lips, "Lord, forgive me, for I am but dust and ashes."

I remembered, and I went to find this prayer in my bible.
It was at Genesis 18:27.

Then Abraham answered and said, “Indeed now, I who am but dust and ashes have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord…

And I remembered my dream, and I saw the reality: without the Lord, I am nothing, and less than nothing, but as He breathed life into the clay image He had fashioned and brought forth Adam, so has He in His mercy brought me forth, and that is not to be despised.
And I read on.

Suppose there were five less than the fifty righteous; would You destroy all of the city for lack of five?” So He said, “If I find there forty-five, I will not destroy it.”

And I realised, if His mercy has been granted to me, who am but dust and ashes, for what purpose was His mercy granted, if not for me to intercede for sinners, to ask for the mercy He showed me to be shown them, which is no more than "the law and the prophets," as the Lord has spoken.

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus said to him, “ ‘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.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 20:36-40

Reading between the lines

This afternoon it just occurred to me that I learn more from other people and more about them by listening closely to what they don’t say rather than by listening to what they do. Of course, I don’t mean that that’s my starting point, or that I learn by listening to them when they’re not speaking at all—that would be absurd. They have to speak, or write, and it’s by hearing or reading their words that I also learn from what they don’t express. I suppose that’s the plain meaning of “reading between the lines,” and so I’m not claiming to have received some kind of revelation. But I just now realized how much of my thinking about other people and the world around me comes from this kind of listening, and I wonder if the same is true of me, that people learn more from me and about me in the same way.

It seems to me that real life is actually lived “between the lines” of our visible existence. That’s where we are, that’s where the Lord is, and that’s where we meet Him, and that place we carry about with us as we move through the world.

Could it be that this is why we feel at home nowhere
and yet can be happy everywhere?
Is it because the Lord our God is with us
in a manner that cannot be taken away?

Glory to You, O God, glory to You!

Getting decorated

Scenario. A young professional woman, an engineer, works overseas for two or three years to “get her feet wet,” really wet, after graduating from school. She is a Christian. She’s been brought up that way by church-going parents. She is a product of white, mainline Protestant America, did all the right things, and made a career for herself that she can fall back on when, after marriage and the kids past infancy, she can work again at a job that she likes and that pays well.

Her time at the foreign firm is up, and it’s time to head home to America, the bread basket of the world, where along with wheat, broad evangelical piety is also the export. While she was working, she must have made an impression on the people she worked with and got to know. Aware of it or not, they’ve been watching her round the clock, taking stock of her every word, every move.

They noticed when she went along with them to a pub and socialized. They saw her gathering herself up on the weekends to go to church services. They didn’t go, of course, but she went, to hang out with those religious folks that they liked to keep at arm’s length. But that was okay with them, as long as she didn’t ask them to go too, because she knew how to drink a hearty ale with the best of them.

Now it was time to bid farewell, and they presented her with a gold cross on a necklace as a going away gift. Very nice of them, that they appreciated her and wanted her to know just how much. It was no mere trinket, and besides, it let her know what they thought of her, and her religion. They were right to think she’d like it—probably something she wanted to get herself, but never did.
They noticed her neck was bare.

People have many ways of keeping, not sin but, God at arm’s length. The usual way is by ignoring Him, but if pushed they might push back. They even have figured out ways to bribe Him to stay out of their lives. They do “good deeds” and become “good deed doers.” They run marathons to raise money for breast cancer research. They buy Girl Scout cookies, so girls can go on outings together. They volunteer for “Meals on Wheels” and deliver canned goods to the Food Bank.

People even have ways to reward God for staying out of their lives. One of the ways is by patronizing His devotees. It always amazes me how lavish is the Portland community’s praise of the Greek Festival hosted every year by my church, Aghía Triás. They just love us, and they reward us by spending tens of thousands of dollars at the festival every year. As for them, they love us because we keep our mouths shut about Jesus. As for us, we think we deserve their support for, after all, we are Christ’s people, and our Church, the light of the world.

So her co-workers gave a gold cross on a chain to decorate her for keeping out of their lives, and staying in her own. Christians are welcome as long as they’re not blabbing about God, constantly disrupting the lives and comfort of the people around them.

It goes even deeper. If you let your following of Christ, not your religion, direct you in your day-to-day affairs at home, at school, or in the workplace, even without speaking the Word of God to anyone, people will notice, and they may even reward you like they rewarded the young lady in the story—or they may give you the hatchet, as they have to many friends of mine, and even to me. You just never know what the world’s denizens will do with you.
But either way, they’re still holding you, and ultimately Christ, at arm’s length, so as not to be infected by your disease, pleased to wish you farewell, before they lose any more madmen to sanity, or swine to drowning.

So those who fed the swine fled, and they told it in the city and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that had happened. Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. And those who saw it told them how it happened to him who had been demon-possessed, and about the swine. Then they began to plead with Him to depart from their region.
Mark 5:14-17

Extra-terrestrial visitors?

It's about time that some extra-terrestrial visitors took a peek at my unworthy blog!

I was surprised just now to see that my 91st different country showed up yesterday, flag and country unknown because they came through a satellite provider. Right clicking on Unknown - Satellite Provider brought up this inset image of what looks like an Orthodox icon-decorated passageway in a vessel or ship of some kind, maybe an orbiting space craft?

I was thrilled to see that even extra-terrestrials, owned by no flag, are now visiting my humble blog!
Left-click the image to zoom for a closeup.

My message to them, if they visit again…

Dear Orthodox space voyagers,
If you happen to have a spare bunk in your ship, I would be very happy to join you as you go carrying the good news of Jesus Christ risen from the dead to other worlds. I don't eat much, and I'm quite adaptable to any diet. I speak, read and understand several earth languages, and I'm eager to learn more, especially Old Solar, if that is still the prevalent koiné of the universe. Perhaps you could use a cabin boy? My physical body is only 58 earth years old, and I workout on a bowflex, so I can still hop to any task.

I'll be watching for you and, as I said, I would be pleased to join your team, as there is nothing better or more rewarding in this life than to serve the Lord—my feet are ready and shod with the preparation of the gospel. My only caveat is, if the Lord Himself should return before you pick me up, He's actually my First Choice, and He's due to arrive on earth any day now, as scripture says, "for the Time is close." (Revelation 1:3)

ἁ ρ π α γ η σ ό μ ε θ α—ἐ ν—ν ε φ έ λ α ι ς

Under construction

It was a wonderful thing for me to experience, little by little, the construction of a new Orthodox church in my city a few years back.

For many years, during the pan-Orthodox season of Sarakostí, my family and I would visit Saint George's Antiochian Orthodox Christian church for mid-week service and the free supper afterwards. The service was on the main floor of their tiny Protestant missionary meeting hall, and the supper was served in the equally tiny church basement, where the tables were fitted so snuggly that the experience of being enveloped by an almost suffocating love followed us wherever we went. It was wonderful!

Finally, though, the congregation finally took the risky step of faith to build a new and authentic Orthodox temple on some land on the east edge of town. I used to drive past the building site on a regular basis to see how the construction was progressing.

Then, the temple was "finished" being built. At least it had the shell completed, the windows put in, and the most essential interior parts in place, the iconostasis, the baptismal font. The congregation "took possession" and worship of the Lord began. The walls and pillars and ceiling were pure white, no icons anywhere except on the iconostasis and a few other places, small icons hanging in their frames. I used to bring people to Saint George's and tell them, "We are privileged to see a baby Orthodox church, just fresh and new in its white garments. Soon, the icons will begin to be painted on the walls and ceiling. But now, we see what a new-born temple looks like. Before long, generations of pious Christians will fill these white walls with images of the Lord and His saints. Remember how it all began."

That was some years ago. When you enter the temple now, it is beautiful to see how the walls have filled up with icons of the resurrection, the baptism of Christ, and the platytera "wider than the heavens" icon of Mary with Jesus in her lap. It is no longer a baby Orthodox church; it's growing up. There will be more years to fill the still empty walls here and there, but now the church just feels "new", not "newborn." I wish I had photos to share in this post of the church under construction, but I don't. So, I have used some images found on the internet of a new church under construction in Serbia.

This post is not really about a church under construction. It is about a soul under construction, an Orthodox soul. Rarely are we in a position to view the workings of God on the soul of a person being drawn to Christ and mentored by Him, but the internet window of blogging allows us sometimes to view a soul under construction. (Actually all of us are souls under construction, and our blogs reveal this!)

I invite you, brethren, to visit the blog of a new brother whom I have met through the internet, and you will read there things that will make you give glory to God, "who alone does marvels." Christ our God is drawing together His flock from all corners of the earth, so let us praise Him. Christ is risen! Christ is in our midst!

The Witness

God is one, and God is sovereign. No one can dispute that. On that everyone who even thinks about God can agree. Those who know God as well as think about Him can add even more details. God is forgiving. God is merciful. Those who follow God as well as know Him can add yet more. God is among us. God has pitched His tent among us. God is love.

What kind of witnesses are we? Do we witness for the God we think about? Or about the God we know? Or about the God we follow? What? Am I being presumptuous in assuming that all of us witness? Some of us don’t think it’s proper to witness, to “get in other people’s faces about religion” because that’s a private matter? Well, I’m afraid I have to disagree on two counts: All of us do witness, and religion is not a private matter.

What do I mean by saying “all of us do witness”?

You can’t hide what’s inside you, as hard as you try, whether what you have inside is clean or dirty, wise or foolish, faithful or careless, whether you are full or empty. Hence, if you don’t believe in God, it shows, and if you do believe, it also shows.

But what is that belief?
An intellectual assent to mere ideas?
A fussy following of traditions?
A braggadocious and cynical otherworldliness?
Or is it, hopefully, based on what the scriptures refer to as faith, that is, trust in the living God?
If your belief is that, it cannot be like any of the other types of “belief” I just mentioned.

We witness all the time whether we speak or keep silence. It’s evident in the flow of our daily life and activity, the way we interact with others, whether they are Christians or not, Jews or not, Muslims or not, Hindus or not, Buddhists or not. Do we treat all of them with the same respect, whether they are of our fold or not?

Why did I include these other groups, even though I am a Christian? Do I think all paths are the same?

No, there may be many paths, but there is only one Way, and that is Jesus. Out of respect for those who seek the God that is the One, the Living, who revealed Himself to the prophets of Israel and finally and fully only in Jesus the Christ. Out of trust in the words of my Master that “he who seeks shall find,” and hoping that they who seek are doing just that, and not merely play acting.

So, we all witness, whether we intend to or not. As for religion being a private matter, I recant. I was wrong. Religion is a private matter, as private as our fantasies. Religion is what we make God out to be when we do not seek Him with our whole heart. Religion is that net we make in which we hope in vain to capture the big Fish, for He cannot be captured, though He can capture us. Religion is being satisfied with approaching God through a veil, so we don’t have to see His face or hear His voice.

Yes, religion is a private matter.

But as for Jesus, He came to His own, and His own received Him not.

Why? Because they were out fishing for God with their nets, half-knowing He could not be caught. They were satisfied to let one man approach the Holy One by passing through the veil, so they did not have to. They would rather say to themselves, “Love the Lord with all your heart…” because they knew it was safe to do so, because they knew He was somewhere “up there,” because they didn’t really believe in the prophet, who called Him, “God among us,” Immanu-El.

I was just thinking what it will look like someday when a young man in love with God, the One, the Living, Him who is among us, is ready to go out and, following Jesus, gather His lambs from among the people who walk in the darkness of al-Islam. His witness will come out of a heart that does not just think about God, does not just know Him, but actually follows Him step by step. He will be like the Pied Piper who, after luring the rats of Hamelin to their deaths in the river, then led the children of the unrepentant and stingy townspeople through the Gateway into the Mountain, to Paradise.

We know that Mountain. It is called Golgotha, and we know where that Gateway leads.

Again and again…

…because the truth never changes.

All praise for every good thing belongs to God alone, because it is Only He that prepares us for every good work and gives us the means to do the work.

If my actions and love for anyone can teach any lesson, it should be this: The Kingdom of God has already begun, even here on earth while we are alive and waiting for Jesus to come in glory.

The proof that we are the Church, His Body, is that He is among us even now, as the Risen Christ, and if we believe this, we will see Him walking among us and hear His voice speaking. Then, all we have to do is follow Him every day, and do the work we see Him doing, and speak the words we hear Him speak.

This seems like a mystery, but really, it is also quite practical.
Holy apostle Paul says that the mystery is Christ among us, that gives us the strength to do every good work.
We are still the Early Christians, and we can keep living as they lived, even now.

Love one another as I have loved you, says the Lord Jesus, and no greater love is there but for a man to lay down his life for his friends. Jesus is not asking us to lay down our lives and die for Him, not yet anyway, but we can at least be kind to one another, and help each other whenever we can.

If God provides the means, we do the work. If He withdraws the means, then we stop working, and wait for Him to move again, and wherever He goes, we follow.

No worry, no anxiety.

Why? Because it is not we who are working, giving, suffering, loving, being patient, being generous, being helpful, no, it is not us, but Christ in us.

Again, as holy apostle Paul calls it, the mystery of Christ among you. So, it is not I, but Christ living in me.

You are called to this very same kind of life, but it is not your job to try to make yourself into what you think God wants. All you have to do is follow closely behind Him, and you will begin to change into His image, as you do what you see Him doing. It is the easiest thing in the world to do.

That's why Jesus says, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:25-26, 28-30 NIV)

Yes, and pray for Romanos the sinner.

The Source

We all have this experience. There is something that we could do, something that we think we really want to do, something we’ve never done before but thought about, that we know, if we did it, something would change irreversibly forever.

In most cases, these are probably good things, but sometimes they are things that are not good (we know they deviate from the true north of our moral compass), but in either case, if we did them, we know for sure that something would change irreversibly forever.

The moment of decision and the moment of action are usually so close, when we choose to act, that we can almost justifiably look back and say, “it was done in a fit of passion,” and thereby try to alleviate the blame, if the act was an bad one, or if it seemed good at the time but later produced bad fruits.

On a micro scale, this process of choice-decision-act is happening to us all the time, and we scarcely notice the effects. As the scale of cause and effect increases, we become more aware of the intentionalism and realism of the process. At the top of the scale, though few are aware of it, there is going to be one action which, if we take it, will change one thing irreversibly forever, and catastrophically.

The irony of this one action is that, in the desiring of it resides the source of all the moral energy that we have, all the energy that is in us for good, to achieve good things, to desire good acts, ultimately to do the one truly good act, to believe in God and in Jesus Christ whom He has sent. To refrain from committing this one act makes all other acts possible; to commit it, renders all other acts useless.

For all its other meanings, the account in Genesis 2 and 3 has this meaning. Our first parents Adam and Eve were given as food the fruit of every tree in the garden of paradise which God created, except for the fruit of one of two very special trees.

The tree of life, whose fruit they were permitted, of all the other trees in the garden, not only nourished them physically, but also spiritually—by eating the fruit of this tree, they would never die. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, its twin in being specially created, was the only tree in paradise the fruit of which was absolutely forbidden to them as food. They must not eat of its fruit. They could see it, they might touch it (though they probably dare not), but of its fruit they must not eat.

Though they might desire it, with or without the help of the tempter, they must not eat of it, else they would die. Something would change irreversibly forever. It was in the desiring of it, while not partaking of it—in the single-hearted obedience to the word spoken in their ears by their Creator—that resided the source of all the moral energy that they had, all the energy that was in them for good.

That was how He had created them. Nothing He created was meaningless or just for show. No word of His spoken to them, or to us, at any time, has ever been only to dominate us or to rule over us, to show us who is in charge. He does not need to do that. We know who we are, who He is, instinctively, just as we instinctively know wrong from right, darkness from light. We are not blind.

No, He created Adam and Eve this way, and paradise with its two special trees, and spoke the one commandment, to reveal to them and to us how reality works, and what our part in reality is. It’s not merely a story, but the revelation of the nature of all that is, against the learning of all that is not.

In the children’s book by C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, there is a parallel story that alludes to this very same idea, that which I am trying to describe here. There is no need to recount the story from this book, but perhaps to quote a short poem from it will add some hint of meaning that I have may have missed.

Come in by the gold gates or not at all.
Take of my fruit for others or forbear,
for those who steal or those who climb my wall
shall find their heart’s desire, and find despair.

* * *

“…the source of all the moral energy that they had, all the energy that was in them for good,” I wrote a few paragraphs above. What brought on all the foregoing thoughts, culminating in this line, was an experience I had last Saturday.

I accompanied my best friend to a presentation at a local college of therapeutic massage, open to the public to introduce potential students to the institution and its curriculum. We had a suspicion that, this being the West Coast, there might be a lot of “New Age” influences at this college. What we weren’t prepared for was the fact that we were the only two males in the audience of about four times as many females (the group wasn’t large). Needless to say, the presentation was very feminist oriented. All but one of the women in the audience seemed to be the typical Oregonian goddess-worshipper type, and the one who wasn’t was from Washington state. One of the presenters was a current female student who was quite outspoken in flattering the college and flaunting her special relationship with a Tibetan shaman who was teaching her some nameless discipline. One of the young women in the audience was persistent in wanting to know who this was, and the student told her to get her phone number from the registrar (who was in the room) so she could get her “connected.” I wasn’t really surprised by any of this, once I realised into what a coven we had fallen. The only other man in the room was the main presenter, who was emasculated after years of catering to this kind of student clientele.

At one point in the presentation (which we surmised was supposed to be a sample simulation of the kind of instruction and philosophy available at the school), we were paired up, and each had a turn at being a practitioner and a client. The room was darkened, except for two dim, floor lamps. The presenter guided us “practitioners” in getting into the right frame of mind to “connect” with our “clients.” Unfortunately I can’t quote exactly what he said, but the drift of it was something like this.

Focus on that which is your energy source, that force inside you that is for good, for wholeness, whatever it is, maybe it’s your love for nature, or music, or the fun times you have with your kids, whatever it is that is the source of your personal power to act. Now, let that source of power release energy into your body, let it descend into your hands. When you feel the energy in your hands, place your hands above your client’s shoulders but do not touch them. Let that energy descend to your client and when you feel it connecting, let your hands drop down onto your client’s shoulders. Let that energy speak “gratitude” to your client. Let your hands let the client know how grateful you are for them being there… on and on the presenter spoke almost as an incantation. Then after two or three minutes of this, he told us to begin withdrawing our energy back into ourselves and to disconnect from the client. Then when the energy was pulled back into its mysterious source, we should raise our hands off our clients and totally withdraw. Afterwards we were told to exchange with our clients what each of us felt during the experience.

When it was my turn to be the “practitioner” and heard the presenter’s instructions, I was startled, and tried to translate them into my reality in Christ, who is the only source of power, though not of personal power in the way he seemed to be implying. Luckily, my “client” was my best friend, and we are already “connected” in the only way possible, by sharing in the same mind of Christ. Instinctively, I knew what the presenter was trying to have happen, because it’s what happens when a Christian truly ministers to another human being. The problem was, as usual in the world, the right and real way of doing what he was trying to do, he would not even consider. Instead of turning to Christ, whom he doesn’t accept, he substitutes “whatever it is that is the source of your personal power to act,” that is, anything but Christ. Of course, if he were to actually ask what our “source” was, and we told him, “Christ,” political correctness would have forced him to patronize us with some neutral words of appreciation, and then hurry on to a less dangerous topic.

My friend and I concluded afterward that this was just how things are out here, and that if a person wants to learn this practice and be certified, he has to endure the “New Age” and feminist environment that has captured it. As for being the only men present, we were ourselves and spoke and acted as men and not as emasculates, and this was an obvious irritation to some in the audience. Had they known we were followers of “that Man,” their scorn for us would probably have reached a flashing point.

This post probably seems like two separate posts, but really it isn’t. Both parts of it are about the mystery and the problem of what empowers us for good as human beings.

Well, of course I know the simple, pat answer from most Christians would simply be “God” or “Christ” empowers us, but that’s the obvious answer. I wanted to know how does He empower us?
What is the spiritual mechanism of this empowerment?

I believe this mechanism to be our deepest desire, not what we admit to others or even to ourselves is our deepest desire, for that is often the answer that’s expected. Instead, it’s the deepest desire which may not seem to have a direct bearing on “religion” or even on “spirituality,” and yet it is the thing we were born desiring.
It is the thing we were born desiring but know, by the light of Christ when we accept Him, that it is impossible to obtain in this life without forfeiting Him.

This seems so unfair when we first encounter it in all its dreadful majesty. We are not forbidden to desire, but we are to obey the one commandment that prevents its fulfillment, and by that obedience become instruments of God in this world, and finally fit rulers of the next.

The ban will be lifted. The Throne of God and of the Lamb will be in its place in the City; His servants will worship Him, they will see Him face to face, and His Name will be written on their foreheads. It will never be night again and they will not need lamplight or sunlight, because the Lord God will be shining on them. They will reign for ever and ever.
Revelation 22:3-5 Jerusalem Bible

The case of Fr Mattaos Wahba

I wrote about martyrdom some time ago in a post entitled Martyrdom, in which I compared Christian and Muslim views about it. Essentially, Christians suffer martyrdom, and Muslims commit it.
If you do a search for martyrdom in my blog, you will come up with a large number of topics about it.

"Why is this? I thought this blog was not a political blog," some may say. My response is, "No, this is not a political blog. Martyrdom is not about the violation of basic human rights, as many think. For a Christian, martyrdom is just the cost of discipleship that must often be paid by those of us living in a hostile environment—fascist, communist, islamic."

Thus, as the cost of discipleship is the focus of my blog, as well as the English title of a book written originally in German as Nachfolgung by the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I sometimes find it impossible not to post on actual instances of martyrdom.
This is not a political blog, but it is a blog dedicated to encouraging followers of Jesus Christ to do just that, to follow Him, and not to compromise. It is also meant to be a word of encouragement to those living in hostile environments, to not give up, but pray and wait for your chance to escape—because our good and loving God will provide an escape—but do we dare take it?

NOTE: My sincere apologies to anyone who viewed the link to the original article on Infidel Bloggers Alliance and was subjected to inappropriate imagery in the side panel of that blog. My mistake! I thought that by linking only to the single post, only that post would appear. Unfortunately it appeared inside the IBA frame, which I would NOT want any of my visitors to have to look at. Again, my sincere apologies to all! Forgive me, brethren!

Today I read the story of an Egyptian (Coptic) Orthodox priest who is being wrongfully imprisoned in Egypt. This martyr has not been put to death, but he is being imprisoned wrongfully. If there is anything you can do to contribute to his release, by prayer, by writing in protest, whatever God leads you to do, then do it. Here is the story…

Father Mattaos did not commit a crime.
He is paying a price for being a faithful Christian in Egypt's present-day policy of denying religious freedom.

GEZA, Egypt (Christian Newswire) - Father Mattaos Wahba, is the priest of Archangel Michael Church at Kerdasa, Geza, Egypt. He is a pious man of God who encourages his congregation with Jesus' message of loving one's enemy, blessing those who curse you; doing good to those who hate you; and praying for those who despitefully use and persecute you. (Mathew 5:44) Fr. Mattaos is a model Egyptian citizen that has not ever committed a crime or seen the inside of a prison other than in the context of ministering to inmates.

Recently Father Mattaos' life abruptly changed overnight. He was arrested, charged and tried for aiding a young Muslim woman in getting an ID card that had falsified data indicating her religion as Christian rather than Muslim. The ID card was said to enable her to marry a Christian man and to flee the country. On October, 2008, the court found him guilty and sentenced him to 5 years at hard labor.

However, the facts dictate entirely a different story. The young woman, named Reham Abdel Aziz Rady, was born to a Muslim family. She converted to Christianity and underwent unbearable degrees of torturous harassments from her family and Egypt's Secret Police. She was subsequently released from custody without an ID card. Such prevents her rightful privileges of citizenship. She cannot get employment, rent living quarter, apply for a passport; much less apply for a marriage license.

Even, if she still possessed her old Muslim ID, it would prevent her from marrying a Christian. There is no legal way to change the religion of a Muslim in an ID card.

In 2004, a well-intentioned person attempted to help her. They allowed Reham to use an ID card belonging to a recently deceased young Christian woman of approximately the same age, named Mariam Nabil. Two years later, Reham, now called Mariam, and a Christian man fell in love and decided to marry. The couple contacted Fr. Mattaos to conduct the marriage ceremonies. The priest knew nothing of the false ID and Mariam's former Muslim background. In good faith he conducted the ceremony and the newly wed couple fled the country.

On April 24, 2009, Mariam appeared with Brother Rasheed on the popular Arabic Al Hayat TV program "A Daring Question". She testified, "Father Mattaos did not have any role in getting my ID card. I did not know him then, as this took place in 2004 and I got married in 2006." Mariam added, "I have the right to have an ID card that reflects my true religious affiliation. The Egyptian government does not give Muslims who convert to Christianity a legal alternative to get these papers. Had I been a Christian who wanted to convert to Islam, I would have had all the help I needed. But, because I am leaving Islam they put hurdles in my way."

Father Mattaos did not commit a crime. He does not deserve to be imprisoned. He is paying a price of Egypt's present-day policy of denying religious freedom. Ironically, their policy is against the Egyptian constitution and standard human rights laws to which Egypt is a signatory. Make no mistake about it. Father Mattaos' imprisonment is designed to send a message to Coptic Egyptian priests and Protestant pastors: The Egyptian government will deal harshly with any clergyman who is suspected in aiding Muslims converting to Christianity.

We call upon officials in the US State Department; Human Rights organizations; the global community of Christian believers; and all freedom loving people to join us in our outcry. We urge you to contact the Egyptian Embassy demanding the immediate release of Father Mattaos. Insist in strong tones that every Egyptian citizen be granted the basic human right to follow the religion of his/her choice.

EMBASSY OF THE ARAB REPUBLIC OF EGYPT
3521 International Ct. NW Washington DC 20008
TEL: 202.895.5400 FAX: 202.244.4319
E-mail: Embassy@egyptembassy.net

Here is one more article, from the U. S. Copts Association that gives an insider's view of the situation. (Don't worry, no offensive images!)

The power of the Word

The following story is taken from the life of Abba Arsenios, the great desert father, which was borrowed from its original source and posted by a Christian brother in Indonesia, whom I have recently met, on his wonderful blog Heart Beat.
The text I have copied from the source but edited to correct the English grammar. The image I am borrowing from Yudi's blog because I think it is very apt.

This is what Abba Arsenios says about God's Word…

A monk complained to St. Arsenius that while reading Holy Scripture he did not feel, neither the power of the words read, nor gentleness in his heart.

To that the great saint replied to him:

"My child, just read! I heard that the sorcerers of serpents, when they cast a spell upon the serpents, the sorcerers are uttering the words, which they themselves do not understand, but the serpents hearing the spoken words sense their power and become tamed. And so, with us, when we continually hold in our mouths the words of Holy Scripture, but even though we do not feel the power of the words, evil spirits tremble and flee, for they are unable to endure the words of the Holy Spirit."

My child, just read! The Holy Spirit Who, through inspired men, wrote these divine words, will hear, will understand, and will hasten to your assistance; and the demons will understand, will sense, and will flee from you. That is, He Whom you invoke for assistance will understand, and those whom you wish to drive away from yourself will understand. And both goals will be achieved.

But wait, there is more…

First, we know that we are not our own, we do not own ourselves, we did not create ourselves. We owe our existence to our parents, yes, but even more to God.

Second, we are also not our own because by being born into this world, we along with Adam and Eve have sold ourselves as slaves to sin and death.

But wait, there is more.
God who created us is the Father of Jesus, His Only-Begotten Son. This Son of God became a human being, a man, and remained God. By His death on the Cross, and by His resurrection, He has paid the price for us, and now we are no longer the property of sin and death, but the property of God.

The Word of God says about us, "You were bought at a price. Do not become the slaves of other men!"

But wait, there is still more.
Not only did the Son of God purchase us for Himself by His blood, being the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, but He has also adopted us into His family. We are now His brothers, we are the children of God, and we can now call God "our Father."

The Word of God says, "To everyone who accepts Jesus, He gives power to become the children of God."

So we are not our own property, yet the One who does own us has changed us from mere property, mere slaves, into His own children.

Being now His children, we are his heirs, we inherit His Kingdom as one of His own family.

Knowing the truth of all these things, let us give ourselves back to Him every day, Who is our good and loving God, Who has transformed slavery into freedom, and death into life.

***

I learned this lesson, "You were bought at a price. Do not become the slaves of other men!" from my mother, Irene, who never stopped telling us this at every opportunity. She reposed in 1986.

Today, May 5, is the commemoration of Irene the Great Martyr, her nameday saint. May 5 is also the day that I crossed the border into Canada in 1972, at age 21, thinking to start a new life in that country. After passing the inspection, and being issued a temporary landed immigrant card at North Portal, Saskatchewan, I pointed my little car northwest and started the second leg of my journey, which was to take me to Edmonton, across a boundless flat prairie, the sun shining brightly, and the car radio playing Cat Stevens' song Morning Has Broken…

A childlike religion

It's not often that I get to tell people about Orthodoxy, because we don't promote it: we usually wait to be asked. If someone wants to know about it so bad that they have to ask, then it's worth telling them, I think. For me, this happens mainly during the Greek Festival on the first weekend of October at Aghía Triás, my church. I have been standing watch in the church for the last probably twenty years—I don't think I've missed a single year—not bragging, I just like to do it. I am a doorkeeper of the Lord's temple, that's my job, 24/7. At festival time, it takes on a literal meaning.

What brought some thoughts to mind was reading an excellent post at Fr Milovan's blog, Again and Again, which I think is very pivotal, both to the significance of his blog's title, and to the Orthodox faith in general. I won't spoil it this time by copying whole swatches out of his post, Our Father Is Younger Than We, but I want to invite you to read it, by clicking on the linked title. What makes it intriguing starts with the title. The Father he's referring to is not a priest or someone's dad; it is God Himself, our Father. How can our Father be younger than we?
Read the post and find out!

I just love what Fr Milovan has to say. This is the Orthodoxy that I adhere to. Everything about it is paradox and irony. People ask, "How can you stand for so long in those services? They're hours long!" and "How do you put up with all that repetition?" and "Why do people seem to be crossing themselves all over the place, and not just once, but three times?" The list of questions goes on, interminably. While I'm on duty, the Lord gives me infinite patience in dealing with them all—and their questions, what's more ironic, are just as long and repetitive and spontaneously ceremonial to me as our Orthodoxy seems to them.
It's a perfect match!

The mystery of Orthodoxy is not what most people think. It's not arcane and secret doctrines or impossibly complex ("byzantine") theological dogmas. It's not the apparent rigidity of ceremonial which, for unsympathetic (or too grown-up) outsiders, seems empty and meaningless. It's not even (what appears to some as) the pomp and fussyness of worship, which combined with the Oriental chanting and the fragrant frankincense smoke filling the sanctuary, creates an almost psychedelic experience (a living, moving three-dimensional hieroglyphic, it's been called).

No, the mystery of Orthodoxy is that, underneath what the eye can see, lies a childlike religion, startling in its simplicity, a following of Jesus in the world, almost incognito. What the five senses perceive in the encounter with Orthodox Christianity in its traditions, is the luxuriant, redundant joy of the childlike heart exulting ceaselessly and seamlessly in the Presence of God. What some experience as "too much" from an adult point of view, others receive gladly and can't seem to get enough of.

That's one reason, I think, why Orthodoxy isn't for everyone. It takes a child's heart, simple enough to trust that the Father is so totally caring and careful, that it doesn't just believe, it knows that nothing happens without Him knowing, and therefore, all will be well. That's also one reason why we immerse our young in every aspect of the faith, even giving communion to unknowing infants. It is this foundation that every Orthodox can fall back on, rebuilding, if need be, after suffering the damage that the world is sure to inflict.

A childlike religion, lighting candles and standing them up in sandboxes in the church, bringing flowers, even the most humble, and leaving them in front of the icons as a love gift, taking part in dozens of small ceremonies—not very different in some ways from Judaism, another childlike religion—and always asking questions, and full of wonder at the Presence of God. None of us ever really leaves our childhood behind, but not all of us will admit it. But it is to such as these that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs.

"Suffer the little children to come unto Me…" is a much wider invitation than most people realize, and that too is the invitation of true Orthodoxy, wherever it exists.

Knowing God

I have a saying that goes something like this, "in this world it should be not who you know, but what you know, that gives you the advantage; in the world to come it is not what you know, but Who, that saves you." I don't think this saying is anything special, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to think or say things this way. As a matter of fact, others have thought and said (or written) far better words than mine, and I acknowledge my debt to them. But above all is the Lord, who alone gives us utterance of those things that please Him. To Him be the glory.

Fr Stephen has another excellent short post on his blog that spoke mightily to me, and I want to share it.

He calls his post What Matters—Still True, but I call it Knowing God. Here's an excerpt that I especially liked. To read the entire post, just go back and click on the hyperlinked title above. Now, read this…

It matters that we know God because knowledge of God is life itself. “This is eternal life,” Jesus said, “to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.”

The Orthodox way of life is only about knowing God. Everything we do, whether it is prayer, communion, confession, forgiveness, fasting - all of it is about knowing God. If it is about something else, then it is delusion and a distraction from our life’s only purpose.

Yes, a new law of existence

…strictly speaking, those who have accepted baptism, and kept the grace of baptism, should not die even a physical death; they die ‘by economy’, by a special dispensation, says St. Maximus the Confessor, the greatest theologian of our Church. They die by a special dispensation, so that the same judgment of Christ might be repeated in them, that death also be put to shame in them - as unjust…. And in those faithful, who keep the grace of baptism and are continually fed by the Body and Blood of Christ, the same judgment takes place in that occurred in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Every time we perform a commandment, every time we participate worthily in the Body and Blood of Christ, we abolish death in us, we make death unjust…. Through Christ a new law of existence was inaugurated. What begins with an unjust death, or even with unjust suffering that leads to death, has glory, says St. Peter (cf. 1 Peter 4:13), and leads to life…. This is the new law, which the Lord established by His voluntary Passion, Cross and Resurrection.

—From The Enlargement of the Heart: ‘Be ye also enlarged’ (2 Corinthians 6:13) in the Theology of Saint Silouan the Athonite and Elder Sophrony of Essex by Archimandrite Zacharias Zachariou (South Canaan, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2006), pp. 238-241.

No one, but a mentally ill person, wants persecution, wants others to persecute him, seeks it with single-hearted passion, goes out of his way to put himself into situations that he knows will arouse the world system to persecute him, so he can glory in suffering for Christ, or for whomever or whatever it is he follows—no one but a mentally ill person, or maybe a “fool for Christ” (and maybe there isn’t a real difference between the two; maybe God just uses us in the condition He finds us at our call, electing not to heal us just there and then, but letting the result of sin condemn itself in us, in our diseases).

The hope of the Christian, the expectation, is that by following Christ in fellowship with other followers of His, we can live our lives “in peace and quietness” and reap the earthly as well as the spiritual benefits of the Kingdom of God. In modern terms, live an abundant life, grow up, marry, raise a family of God-believing children, prosper reasonably, be spared more than our share of calamities. In modern terms again, we hope to claim the promises we find in scripture or which our pastors in Christ have taught us are there. That seems to be the hope and expectation of the average church-going Christian, anyway, our inheritance as heirs of emperor Constantine’s “peace of the Church,” whether we know it or not.

The problem with this rosy picture is that the “peace of the Church” is rapidly vanishing before our eyes (which in most cases are looking the other way). Where many of us live it is already entirely gone, except in worn-out ceremonial.

The peace of the Church meant that Christians were the protected class, the privileged citizens not only of the heavenly kingdom but also of the kingdoms of this world. The Church seems to have jumped ahead in prophetic terms and seized upon the words written down by John the Revelator, that “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ” (Revelation 11:15), but was it justified in doing this, or is its claim rather premature? The rest of the cited verse says, “and He will reign for ever and ever.”

There is no question in my mind that these words of holy and divine scripture are true and to be literally fulfilled; the question is when—the Church has acted, in the past, as though they were fulfilled already, yet as the vestiges of Christian cultural hegemony sink below the horizon, we see that perhaps something else is indicated by them.

Ever since I stole the quotation placed at the head of this post from another blog, the words have not let me go, but have driven deeper into my soul. There is great meaning in them for the Body of Christ today, and though they are written by an Orthodox ascetic, they are applicable to everyone who confesses Christ.

What has taken hold of me is the idea that by the close and persistent following of Jesus in this world, we will draw down upon us persecutions—Christ Himself tells us so, “who will not be repaid a hundred times over…not without persecutions” (Mark 10:30), and “if they persecuted Me, they will persecute you too” (John 15:20). Especially telling in this regard is what Christ said later in the same discourse, Himself quoting scripture, “They hated Me for no reason” (John 15:25 citing Psalm 35:19). As holy apostle Paul writes, “since they refused to see it was rational to acknowledge God, God has left them to their own irrational ideas and monstrous behavior” (Romans 1:28).

This is what we, brethren, have to deal with, at the present time. With Jesus we have to go to Jerusalem, “to suffer grievously, to be rejected…to be put to death and after three days to rise again,” and to any voice that tries to convince us otherwise—that we should do our utmost to preserve ourselves in our Christian “bubble”—we have to with boldness say, “Get behind me, Satan! Because the way you think is not God’s way, but man’s!” (cf. Mark 8:31-33).

Why? Because the Lord speaks to us from the scriptures, and His Word is always true, “For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:35).

Life, yes, this could mean physical life, but it can mean a lot of other things as well—lifestyle, livelihood, health, wealth, and the pursuit of happiness, “the American dream.” It’s whatever it is that makes us feel, safe, secure, at ease, at home with ourselves. It’s what we always wanted and hoped we could have in this world. And we were so close to having it, but then…

The choice was put before us, to witness to the Truth, or to keep quiet, for fear of reprisal.

A news story says that a law was just passed. The header reads: House agrees to muzzle pastors with ‘hate crimes’ plan.

Apparently this is a move towards making it illegal for Christians, or others, to say, teach or do anything that would offend the gay community. The article warns us, “In Sweden, for example, a minister who preached out of Leviticus was sentenced to 30 days in jail,” and “In Philadelphia several years ago a 73-year-old grandmother was jailed for trying to share Christian tracts with people at a homosexual festival.”

And this is bad? If the reports are true, the minister and the grandmother were just fulfilling the words of Jesus. They knew what the consequences would be, but that didn’t stop them. What could they expect but that “the same judgment of Christ might be repeated in them, that death also be put to shame in them - as unjust,” as Maximos the Confessor wrote, quoted above.

Let the world legislate against the Truth. That makes it all the more visible when the Truth appears in the form of its witnesses. Can the Christ-bearers escape the judgment that Christ Himself chose not to escape? No, and neither do we choose to escape.

Our choice is to follow Jesus, and to say and do what we see Him saying and doing, come what may. This is the outworking of a new law of existence in us, and the only way to hold out to a lost world the offer of salvation, an offer which it really can accept, or really can reject, deliberately and not with excuses.

As archimandrite Zacharias wrote, “What begins with an unjust death, or even with unjust suffering that leads to death, has glory, says St. Peter (cf. 1 Peter 4:13), and leads to life…. This is the new law, which the Lord established by His voluntary Passion, Cross and Resurrection.”

Yes, a new law of existence, and it leads to life.

Only three years

Sometimes looking back on my life, searching for those moments of real happiness, it seems that the longer I look, the shorter and fewer those times become. Maybe in a lifetime of fifty or sixty years, one might find only five or six years when the memory shows times of pure happiness, and not all connected either, but scattered about. This kind of pondering leads nowhere and belies the fact that one is happy right now, else there could be no leisure for such plundering of the vanished past. What’s more, everything looks and feels different in retrospect. We find that looking back seldom recovers the truth. In this body of sin, memory like everything else doesn’t work right, but always partakes of that fatal flaw that taints everything on this side of the resurrection. But on the other side of the resurrection, it’s a different story, literally.

Thinking back to my own youth, I remember how I spent four years of my life in training to become a traditional furniture maker under an old Norse-American cabinetmaker. This man was 32 years my senior, and I was his last apprentice. He grew up on a farm in the borders of Minnesota and North Dakota, one of twelve brothers (there was also one sister). His family was swept up in the pentecostal revivals of the 1920’s and 30’s, and he told me many stories of tent meetings and other experiences in his early life.

I was a new Christian, just having accepted the Lord at the age of 24 just six months before hiring on at the Sterling Furniture Company in Portland. I had prayed, while still living in Corvallis, to be led to a workplace where there would be at least one other Christian.
In short order, the prayer was answered.

The four years I spent with this elder were hard but happy years. Along with his teaching and example in the crafting of wood, without intending it, he passed on to me the legacy of his life in Christ, and little did he know (or perhaps he was aware) that I followed his every move so as to make it my own, my soul being stamped, like communion bread, with the cross of Christ. I was not a pentecostal, yet there was never a difference between us. Knowing about the ancient faith, he would sometimes say to me, when I had done something that especially pleased him, “May the saints bless you!” For my part, it never occurred to me to think of him and his faith as different from my own. Certainly not. How could I judge him? In my eyes he was perfect, what a Christian man should be. I wanted to emulate him in every way.

Only four years with this man shaped the rest of my life to this very day. And we wonder sometimes, what effect our own lives have on the people around us. To be a Christ-bearer in the world, what possibilities, if only we live in the light of the risen Christ! In only a moment, Christ in us can change the world, forever.


Then, there is the reason behind this all. The reason being the divine Word, through whom the world was made, and in whom we live and move and have our being. Though He is God, He entered into our time and assumed our flesh, living secretly, that is, unknown to the world, just as we live. No one will remember us after we’ve left this world, at least not for long, but the world remembers Him.
The world doesn’t remember Him for anything He did in the first thirty years of His earthly life, or at least not much, but for what He did in the last three.

Only three years was all it took for the world to remember Him, and not only to remember Him, but to be changed forever. No other time period in all of human history has had as great and lasting an impact on the rest of time as those three years. Yet, at the time they were happening, very few noticed those years at all, in terms of the world’s population. Only a few thousand people at most, and in a land which, though it has become the center of the world’s attention from time to time, is still just a small spit of rocky soil between empires.

Only three years of one man’s life, and billions of other men’s lives are changed forever, even the lives of those who don’t know Him, who don’t ask themselves the question, “Who is that man?” If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is, and only one could have that power, the Lord Almighty, who is alive and present with us at this very moment, the risen Christ.

Three challenging and comforting thoughts

I receive short, weekly messages from an evangelical church in India, written by a pastor of incredible insight. Sometimes the message is so good I just have to share it. This is the second time I've posted one of his messages on my blog. Most of what he says applies universally. His second point is very much like what Mother Gavrilía says in her biography Ascetic of Love, and that doesn't surprise me, as she spent a good part of her life in India. God is at work, winnowing the wheat from the chaff on every threshing floor, in India no less than anywhere else. Δοξα τω Θεω!

Three Challenging And Comforting Thoughts

by Zac Poonen

1. God delights in honest people

"If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another" (1 John 1:9). To walk in the light means first of all that we hide nothing from God. We tell Him everything, exactly as it is. I am convinced that the first step towards God is honesty. God detests those who are insincere. Jesus spoke against hypocrites more than He spoke against anyone else. God does not ask us to be holy or perfect first of all, but to be honest. This is the starting point of true holiness. And from this spring flows everything else. And if there is one thing that is really easy for anyone of us to do, it is to be honest. So, confess sin immediately to God. Don't call sinful thoughts by "decent" names. Don't say "I was only admiring the beauty of God's creation" when actually you lusted adulterously with your eyes. Don't call "anger" as "righteous indignation." You will never get victory over sin if you are dishonest.

And don't ever call "sin", "a mistake", because Jesus' blood can cleanse you from all your sins, but not from your mistakes!!
He does not cleanse dishonest people. There is hope only for honest people. "He who covers his sin will never prosper" (Proverbs 28:13). Why did Jesus say that there was more hope for prostitutes and for thieves to enter God's kingdom than for religious leaders? Because prostitutes and thieves make no pretence of being holy (cf. Matthew 21:31).

Many young people are turned away from churches because church members give them the impression that they themselves have no struggles. And so those young people think, "That holy bunch of people will never understand our problems!!" If this true of us, then we are unlike Christ Who drew sinners to Himself.

2. God works all things for our good

"Who can harm you if you prove zealous for what is good?" (1 Peter 3:13). God is so powerful that He makes ALL THINGS work together for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose—that is, for those who have no ambition on earth outside of His will for their lives (cf. Romans 8:28). One who has selfish ambitions cannot claim this promise. But if we accept the will of God totally, we can claim this promise every minute of our life on earth. Nothing can harm us. Everything that others do to us—good or evil, accidental or deliberate—will go through the filter of Romans 8:28 and will come through working for our very best—conforming us each time a little more to the likeness of Christ (cf. Romans 8:29)—which is the good that God has planned for us. This filter works perfectly every single time for those who fulfil the conditions listed in this verse.

Further, 1 Peter 3:13 tells us that no one can harm us if we are "zealous for what is good". Unfortunately, this is not as well known a verse as Romans 8:28 is. But we must popularise it now. However, this promise too is applicable only to those who are zealous to keep their hearts good towards all people. It will be impossible for any demon or human being to harm such a believer.

So whenever any Christian complains that others have harmed him, he is indirectly admitting that he does not love God, is not called according to God's purpose, and has not been zealous for what is good. Otherwise, whatever those others did to him would have only worked for his good, and then he would not have had any complaints at all. Actually, the only one who can harm you is you yourself—by your unfaithfulness and your wrong attitudes to others. I can honestly say that no one has ever succeeded in harming me in my entire life. Many have tried to do so, but EVERYTHING they did only worked for my very best and for the good of my ministry. So I can praise God for those people too. Those who have opposed me have been mostly so-called "believers" who have not understood God's ways. I am giving you my testimony only to encourage you to believe that this can be your testimony too, always.

3. God detests all that this world considers great

"That which men esteem highly is detestable in God's sight" (Luke 16:15). The things that are considered great in the world, not only have no value in God's eyes, but are actually an abomination to Him. Since all worldly honour is an abomination to God, it must be an abomination to us too. Money is something that everyone on earth considers valuable. But God says that those who love money and long to get rich will suffer the following eight consequences sooner or later (cf. 1 Timothy 6:9, 10):

(a) they will fall into temptation,

(b) they will fall into a trap,

(c) they will fall into foolish desires,

(d) they will fall into harmful desires,

(e) they will plunge into ruin,

(f) they will plunge into destruction,

(g) they will wander away from the faith, and

(h) they will pierce themselves with many a pang.

I have seen this happen again and again to believers everywhere.

One of the main reasons why a prophetic word from the Lord is hardly ever heard these days in our land, is because most preachers are lovers of money. Jesus said that the true riches (the prophetic word being one of them) would not begiven by God to those who were unfaithful with money (cf. Luke 16:11). This is why we hear so many boring sermons and so many boring testimonies in church meetings and conferences.

His banner over us

Nothing we do, however good or well-intentioned, is completely free of the will of our flesh. Yet if we did nothing at all, Christ could not work through us, since He has made us witnesses of His resurrection to the ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8, 22).

Though we work as hard and as faithfully as we can, He still instructs us to say at the end of each day, that we are unworthy servants who have only done what was given us to do (cf. Luke 17:10), and not only to say it, but know it.

Jesus is with us, and He is so close to us as we walk with Him that His shadow over us heals us of our iniquities great or small. If only we can manage to stay close to Him and not wander off on the paths of our own imaginings, we will remain safe.

With the eternal Word speaking to His Father on our behalf, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” we can have no better assurance of our eternal salvation or better proof of His banner over us from day to day.

And His banner over us is love. (cf. Song of Solomon 2:4)

A runner's prayer

Psalms for the 24th Day
116 117 118 119 ד ג ב א

ד

Down in the dust I lie prostrate:

revive me as Your Word has guaranteed.

I admitted my behavior, You answered me,

now teach me Your statutes.

Explain to me how to keep Your precepts,

that I may meditate on Your marvels.

I am sleepless with grief:

raise me as Your Word has guaranteed.

Turn me from the path of delusion,

grant me the grace of Your Law.

I have chosen the way of fidelity,

I have set my heart on Your rulings.

I cling to Your decrees:

Yahweh, do not disappoint me.

I run the way of Your commandments,

since You have set me free.

Psalm 119:25-32 Jerusalem Bible

Living in Goshen

There certainly is a cost of discipleship to Jesus Christ. Recently this was made very evident when in the Miss America pageant, a beautiful finalist, Miss California, was asked the question she feared most, what she thought of the legalization of gay “marriage.” I don’t watch television, and what I know of this incident comes from my monitoring the internet, so there may be parts of the story I am not aware of. I did see, however, that one of the judges in this beauty contest was an openly and militantly gay celebrity (although I’d never heard of him before, living in my cave as I do). What was most disturbing was what this gay man said and did after the pageant to vilify and mock this young woman who, for the whole world to see, testified to the truth that men keep imprisoned in their wickedness (Romans 1:18 JB). Anyone who saw or even heard of what he said and did to dishonor this brave young woman should be able to tell that there is something very wrong here. Yet the world looks the other way, and sides with the man of sin.

Christians are portrayed in the media, and now increasingly in the public school system and other community institutions, as potential perpetrators of hate crimes. There are laws either already on the books or being considered in many places to make it a hate crime for a Christian minister to teach that homosexuality is a sin. In the work place it is already grounds for termination to let anyone know that one thinks that homosexuality is wrong. So people keep quiet. But it’s obvious and irrefutable to all, even to gays themselves, that homosexuality is wrong, that it’s at least a perversion or disorder, if not a sin—obvious and irrefutable, that is, if they haven’t been educated from youth up, that it’s an acceptable, alternative life style. The opposite of straight is not really gay, as people are forced to mouth, but bent.

So Christians are reduced in the public eye to being one issue or maybe two issue fanatics and anti-social troublemakers. We all hate gays, it is said, because our God does. That’s the one issue characterization. To others, we also all hate women and want to deprive them of their reproductive rights (we should perhaps call it deproductive rights since it’s all about women being able to kill their unborn babies on demand, so they can have as much sex as they want, conveniently). This opinion is so shallow and unsupportable, that it doesn’t even deserve refutation. It’s in the same league with the popular charge against us in Roman times, that we were cannibals (they eat the body and blood of their god) and that we were promiscuous (too much physical contact, worshipping in dark and secret places). All this proves that people really are sheep, and that our weak human nature makes it easy to lead us astray.

The truth is, of course, that we hate homosexuality, and that’s because our God does. The truth is also that most of humanity from the beginning until now has hated homosexuality, and in no human society has it ever been regarded as equal to the natural use of sex—not by the Greeks (with their philosophical pedophilia), not by the Romans (with their imperial sexual caprice), not by the Hindus (with their mythical sexuality), not by primitive peoples (with their occasional sexually ambiguous shamans). Can you imagine any parents proudly displaying on the mantlepiece the wedding portrait of their son and his husband? Or of their daughter and her co-bride? No parent ever hopes their child will grow up to marry a person of the same sex. Why not? Because everyone knows, it’s just wrong.

Believe it or not, this post is not really about the homosexual rights agenda. That is something that has been going on now for some time and will continue to do so, whether I or anyone opposes it. I could just as well have used the abortion rights agenda as the example. What this post is about is the cost of discipleship, what price we have to pay if we insist on following Jesus, on keeping His commandments (which beyond His command to love one another also includes the moral law), in this increasingly decadent world. Like the Maccabees that I wrote about in a recent post, the faithful disciple of Jesus Christ, whether in church or out, has no desire but to serve the Lord and to love Him with all our mind, heart and strength.

Even if all the nations that live under the rule of the king obey him, and have chosen to do his commandments, departing each one from the religion of his fathers, yet I and my sons and my brothers will live by the covenant of our fathers. Far be it from us to desert the law and the ordinances. We will not obey the king's words by turning aside from our religion to the right hand or to the left.
1 Maccabees 2:19-22

We have ample testimony from the scriptures as to what will happen to us, if we persist in our fanatical adherence to our Living God, who is the one and only Truth. Though the worldly powers think we are unreasonable, it is they who are really unreasonable. We are always ready to talk it out, so long as both parties agree to adhere to objective truth; our adversaries, however, accept no objective truth, and therefore argument to them becomes not a way to reach the truth (because it does not exist), but to achieve their ends. We may be accused of holy unreason, but they are enslaved to unholy reason. The first is true Reason, rooted in the Word of God; the second is the apparition of a moment’s perverse desire. The first is without end; the second will be shrugged off like the phantoms of a morning dream (cf. Psalm 73:20 JB) at the coming of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

We have been living in Goshen all these years. Haven’t we noticed?

At first, living in the land of Goshen was a privileged life, reserved by the worldly power for those who were the kin of Joseph. Later, a new power arose that knew nothing of Joseph, and those living in the land of Goshen were dealt a different lot, a life made harsh with forced labor and containment. This continued until the Deliverer was sent, who after many plagues led them out into the wilderness, and thence into the Land of Promise.

The risen Christ

It’s nice, isn’t it, when the weather is just right for the season or for a special holiday?

Pascha, that is the feast of Christ’s resurrection for the Orthodox Christian, fell a week later than Easter, and last Sunday was the first real day of the warm side of spring, almost summery, here in Oregon. The light was intensely bright and has continued to be ever since. The cherry tree outside my window on the east side of the house finally bloomed victoriously, two weeks later than all the others on the west side where the warm afternoon and evening sun burst open the blossoms earlier.

People get the idea that Easter time, the season of resurrection, should be all flowery and cheerful, with nature coming back to life and all. It seems to make the idea of Christ’s coming back to life more meaningful, in fact, it seems to push out almost any other meaning His resurrection can have, for some people. Hence, the fascination for floral arrangements, colored eggs, baby chicks and bunnies. But it’s really just a coincidence of nature, an instance of God’s ikonomía, His plan of salvation, interacting with the created world. In the southern hemisphere, the world is descending into autumn at Pascha, not ascending to spring.

That’s really alright. Christ is not a “dying and rising god” whose myth tries to infuse meaning into the annual cycle of vegetation. That’s the function of the baalim and elilim, the divine “nothings,” Osiris, Tammuz, and Adonis. No, Christ is nothing like them. For one, He lived as a real man in a country and time we know with reliable certainty. Not only that, but the stories about Him are not folk tales and myths full of imaginary exploits. He really did do the things the bible says He did. Moreover, His dying and rising again to life, though it seems at shallow glance to be just another example of the dying and rising gods of folklore, also really did happen, and it’s attested to by a multitude of witnesses who agree in all but minor details. That’s the history lesson part of it…

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not even mere history, though it’s rooted there. It’s not even a “one point in time” event, but rather an opening out of time into another realm of being, one that unlike the myths is not just a story to be retold or reenacted, but a reality in which a man can live even to this very day. Why is that? Because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, death has no hold on Him, and He dies no more, and neither does anyone who believes and lives in Him. “I am the resurrection and the life…”

Back to the weather. Yes, it’s glorious. The winds are warm and the sun seems supernaturally bright, yet with a kind of brightness that opens our eyes even wider and permits us to see what we couldn’t see as well before. It’s no mere word play that the week following Pascha should be called “Bright Week.” Nature may be cooperating this year and providing a natural metaphor to accompany the real brightness—that of the Son of God, the Light of the world, who was dead and is Alive—but it is that other radiance that is the effect of Pascha. It opens our spiritual eyes to see ourselves and the world around us as we really are.

Knowing thus the Lord in His resurrection, and walking in this unwaning brightness, how is it that we can still sin?

We learn that we do not sin less because we don’t want to sin more, but because we can’t sin more. We would sin more if we could, but Christ has removed our sins as far from us as the East is from the West. When we are weak, He strengthens us and so arranges circumstances that we can find an escape from occasions of sin, if we want to. In fact, He makes it hard for us to sin, so when we do, we can see by the brightness of His resurrection the truth about ourselves, and turn to Him asking for mercy.

Christ is the faithful, the true. We can know this not by mere hearsay, but because He has treated us with such kindness by remaining with us to this very hour, just as He promised.

“And lo, I am with you, even unto the end of the world…”

This is the risen Christ, who was, who is, and who is to come, the Pantokrator.

Now, real Time begins

Check out Fr Stephen's excellent post, Relative to Pascha. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts…

…we must be “adjusted” to fit Pascha.

The simple reason is that everything that exists does so only in relation to this event. This is Creation. This is salvation. This is purification and deification. Everything we want and everything we are must find its basis in Pascha or it will find no basis at all (utimately).
We are told in Scripture that the “Lamb was slain from the foundation of the earth” (Revelation 13:8). What takes place at Pascha is more than a resurrection that holds out promise to the human race for everlasting life. When viewed in such a manner, humanity becomes the center and the meaning of Pascha. Rather we are told that creation itself is groaning for this very thing.

Pascha, in its eternal consideration, is simply older than all creation (cf. Rev. 13:8). It underlines the fact that “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten son…” The Son was given before ever Adam and Eve drew their first breath.

Thus when we encounter Pascha in our own day and age, it is not simply a piece of ancient Church ceremony. We stand as witnesses to the foundation of the earth. Time does not exist for us in Pascha, or rather, time begins in Pascha.

Holy unreason

I picked up my Jerusalem Bible and began to read again the 1st book of Maccabees, just because I like to read history sometimes. I’ve read this book a dozen times or more cover to cover. It’s the book that underlies the Jewish feast of Chanukah.

What struck me today, and what always strikes me when reading the history of God’s people, whether Jews or Christians, when they are under attack by their enemies, is how reasonable, sometimes, their enemies try to be in attempting to convince them to submit to their overlordship.

True, when it’s an invading enemy like the Seleucids, the successors to Alexander the Great, who subjected the ancient Near East to Greek rule, they start out with quite violent and merciless attacks. That’s stage one, and its method is to break resistance and dishearten the victim people by an extreme show of force and cruelty. After the political conquest, though, they have to somehow keep it, and to do that they have to win over the vanquished.

Antiochus Epiphanes, like the modern statesmen of today, wanted to establish peace and order under his iron-clad rule, and his method, stage two, was to make all the nations he conquered give up their ancient culture and religion, and adopt his—Hellenism. For all the nations, this wasn’t a problem: just add a new layer of pagan gods and ceremonies to what they already had. For the Jews, it was another matter. They were the worshippers of a single God, the only God, Yahweh, and they had a Law from Him they must obey. Though some Jews complied with the king’s command, many did not.

As the king’s representatives visited each village, they came to Modein where the family of Mattathias Maccabaeus had taken refuge after the conquest and desecration of Jerusalem. They were addressed by the king’s officer in friendly terms and promised special status and an increase of wealth, if they only would come forward and make the official sacrifice, to show that they obeyed the king’s new “one empire, one people, one religion” edict. Mattathias refused, and while he was refusing, a Jew stepped forward to take his place at the pagan altar to offer the sacrifice. Filled with zeal for the Law and in righteous indignation, Mattathias threw himself on the Jew and killed him on the spot, then turned and killed the king’s representative. That was the beginning of what is now called the Maccabaean Revolt.

But really, how unreasonable of Mattathias and his five sons and their followers not to comply with the king’s decree! The king wasn’t asking for much, just a token performance of a pagan ceremony to show that they accepted their new rulers and agreed to shed their out-dated, fussy religion. The rewards offered were great, amounting to prestige and success as members of a new elite, the “friends of the king.” How unreasonable of them!

This is not my feeling, of course, but the sentiment of those who saw no harm in going along with what was apparently the “wave of the future.” It would bring Israel a lot of benefits to become part of a world government that stretched from Egypt all the way to the frontier of India. Think of all that they would forfeit by resisting! Why couldn’t they just be “nice” Jews and cooperate like the others?

I notice this same pattern when I read the stories of the Christian martyrs. They are so much closer to us in time and culture. There are reports that have come down to us that read like today’s newspapers. The Romans weren’t all that bad. Except for mob violence against Christians, the authorities always tried to do all in their power to make it easy and attractive for a Christian to show allegiance (or worship) to Caesar, who represented the Roman one world government—in fact, when reading the dialogs, one is impressed by the fact that in most cases, the Romans were being as reasonable as they could be; it is the Christians who seem stubborn and unreasonable.

Drawing even closer to our own times, we have seen the same thing happening in the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, with Turkish judges trying their best to get a Christian off the hook and live, rather than die because of his stupid insistence, “I was born a Christian, and I will die a Christian.” How unreasonable! The Turks really had to exert a lot of patience with these “new martyrs of the Turkish yoke.” Some caved in to the friendly persuasion, but many didn’t. That’s why there are still countries like Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia even today. If it weren’t for their holy unreason, they would all have become part of the mass of Islamic states that now fills the Near and Middle East.

Knowing a little bit of history like this helps as we face the next surge of that “Prince of Persia” (it really all started with Nimrod, and continued through tyrants like Xerxes) who wants to make us all one under his authority. All we have to do is give in, just a little.

We are not alone, brethren. From the time of the three hundred Spartans, to the Maccabees, to the Christian martyrs through the last two thousand years, we are in good company as we face the age old enemy, the shape- and name-shifter, as he again amasses his millions with their sky-darkening cloud of arrows aimed at us.
Let us stand firm, as we approach the Day. Our redemption is always close at hand. Our God is faithful, and true. Let us continue in our holy unreason till He returns.

Free will

Something that the Father did not deny us, He could not deny His only-begotten Son, and that is free will. Christ was not secretly arrested, falsely accused and unjustly tried as if He could not have saved Himself, but He went freely and voluntarily to His life-giving death. He permitted Himself to be captured and killed—even secular text books are forced to describe it in these terms—of His own free will, and following Him we still have free will also.

Though we call ourselves His bondsmen and servants, He calls us His friends, and even more than that, He gives us power to become children of His Father.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.
John 15:12-17 ESV
The verse in blue is written on the gospel book held by Christ in the icon above.

…to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
John 1:12-13 ESV

A new law of existence

The following was stolen in its entirety from Fr Milovan's worthy blog, Again and Again, which you should visit anyway, in which case I wouldn't have to steal quite as much…
(I'm shameless! I even stole the icon!)

…strictly speaking, those who have accepted baptism, and kept the grace of baptism, should not die even a physical death; they die ‘by economy’, by a special dispensation, says St. Maximus the Confessor, the greatest theologian of our Church. They die by a special dispensation, so that the same judgment of Christ might be repeated in them, that death also be put to shame in them - as unjust…. And in those faithful, who keep the grace of baptism and are continually fed by the Body and Blood of Christ, the same judgment takes place in that occurred in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Every time we perform a commandment, every time we participate worthily in the Body and Blood of Christ, we abolish death in us, we make death unjust…. Through Christ a new law of existence was inaugurated. What begins with an unjust death, or even with unjust suffering that leads to death, has glory, says St. Peter (cf. 1 Peter 4:13), and leads to life…. This is the new law, which the Lord established by His voluntary Passion, Cross and Resurrection.

—From The Enlargement of the Heart: ‘Be ye also enlarged’ (2 Corinthians 6:13) in the Theology of Saint Silouan the Athonite and Elder Sophrony of Essex by Archimandrite Zacharias Zachariou (South Canaan, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2006), pp. 238-241.

A Christian asks himself

How can I be living my life as though the resurrection didn’t really happen?
I say, “Christos anesti” with my lips, but what do I say with my heart?
What do I say with my life?

What is belief?
Is it just the mental agreement that a statement is true without experiencing the truth it expresses?

Can I live my life in the resurrection of Jesus while living it as though He did not die on the cross, and die on the cross for me?
I can humbly bow and cross myself with my body and kiss His image, but what worship does my spirit offer?

But the hour will come—in fact it is here already—when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; that is the kind of worshipper the Father wants.
John 4:23 JB

Can I believe in the resurrection without believing in the Lord’s death?
How can I believe in the Lord’s death without experiencing it?
Can I believe in it by attending the services, or reading the bible, or is there more to believing than being a “good Christian”?
And what is a good Christian?

Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.
Matthew 16:24-25 JB

“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
—Jim Elliot, Martyr of Ecuador

Can’t I be a follower of Jesus without dying?
Isn’t all the talk about being buried with Christ in my baptism just a metaphor?
But if it is, what is there to do?

Back to my original question, why am I living as though the resurrection didn’t really happen?
Is it really because I don’t believe in the death of Christ and in the power of His life-giving cross?
What is this “power” of the cross?

All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death.
Philippians 3:10 JB

Living as though the death of the Lord did happen will give you the power to live your life as though the resurrection did happen.
There is not one without the other.

You cannot live as though Jesus Christ died on the cross,
and still lie, steal and kill.
You cannot live as though He died for you,
and still treat others with disrespect.
You cannot live as though He endured temptation,
and still fornicate, alone or with another.
You cannot live as though He said from the cross,
‘Father, forgive them,’
and still hold grudges, envy the good fortune of others,
and judge your neighbor.
You cannot live as though He endured being stripped naked
and beaten,
and still look the other way and wink at wickedness,
and let the innocent be slaughtered.

You must give up your old way of life; you must put aside your old self, which gets corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution, so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.
Ephesians 4:22-24 JB

“Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: My own will shall become yours.’…”
—C. S. Lewis

So, this is the way to live a resurrected life, to live as though the resurrection of Christ really happened, to know that it happened, not just to say I believe in it:
To live a dying life, to let Christ nail not only my sins, but also my very self, what I think is me, what I think I want, to the cross.

…the thing that is sown is perishable but what is raised is imperishable; the thing that is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious; the thing that is sown is weak but what is raised is powerful; when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised, it embodies the spirit.
1 Corinthians 15:42-44 JB

If we have died with him, then we shall live with him.
2 Timothy 2:11 JB

Lord, let me live as though You really rose from the dead, by living as though You really died for me.

Already dead

It is the Day of Resurrection!
Let us be radiant, O people!
It is the Passover, the Passover of the Lord!
From death to life, and from earth to heaven
Christ our God has passed us
who sing the hymn of victory—

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling death by death,
And bestowing life
To those in the tombs.

…when they came to Jesus and saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out.
John 19:33-34 NASB

A man who is alive hears, sees and experiences things in one way, and a man who is already dead hears, sees and experiences things in another.

The robbers were burly men, hardy from their lives of hardship, and could withstand much abuse, having bodies that dealt out harsh punishments to their victims, they were also trained to receive harsh punishments. Hence, though nailed to their crosses, they did not die very quickly. The evening of the holy Day was approaching, and they had to be dead before sundown, so as not to cause any further defilement. Their legs had to be mashed with mallets to hasten their dying. Even so, they outlasted the Lord who was nailed to the stake between them.

The young rabbi, though a carpenter, had a body delicate in comparison to theirs. Why He died so quickly, whether it was because His scourging and the pressing down into the flesh of His skull the circlet of thorny twigs had caused Him to shed more of His blood than the robbers had, or whether the gentleness of His physique were enough, is unknown. So quickly did He die, that Pilate was amazed. He sent a message to the guards, “Just make sure he’s really dead…”

Those who don’t die quickly have their legs broken. They feel it. It’s excruciating, literally, it crosses them out. They’re finished, and fast, but they still feel the pain, and they don’t die willingly, but by force.

Him who dies quickly, the world is aghast at.
It can’t believe he gave up so easily, and got off so lightly. It can’t really believe he’s dead, so even though he is already dead, it has to make sure. A lance is thrust into his side. He doesn’t feel it, because he is already dead. What exudes from the puncture—it can’t be called a wound anymore, because he is now beyond all suffering; it’s just a gash in the side of a corpse—is not a fountain of live blood gushing out, but a mixture now of blood and water that is at rest, and only the relief of pressure causes it to spurt a little and then pour out in a steady stream onto the rocky soil.

…You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil,
my cup overflows.
Psalm 23: 5 NIV

What table in the presence of my enemies? What anointing, Lord, and what cup to drink that overflows? The same table upon which You were offered up? The same anointing of sweat and blood mingled that ran down…

…like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down upon the collar of his robes?
Psalm 133:2 NIV

Yes, Lord, this death is as it is written,

It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.
Psalm 133:3 NIV

A man who is alive hears, sees and experiences things in one way, and a man who is already dead hears, sees and experiences things in another.

Lord, let me be the second kind of man, that doesn’t feel the spear thrust into his side because, like You, he is already dead. Let me, like You, trample death by death that, with You, I may also bring life to those in the tombs.

It is the Day of Resurrection!
Let us then make ourselves
resplendent for the festival
and embrace one another.
Let us say, brethren,
even to those who do not love us:
“Let all be forgiven in the Resurrection,”
and so exclaim—

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling death by death,
And bestowing life
To those in the tombs.

How God uses madmen

A true story, retold. What would you do if faced with this situation?

Sergios was a madman. One would like to be able to say that he was a “fool for Christ,” but there were just too many things that made one uncomfortable about him, things he did and said, to classify him as one of God’s special lambs. Yet, as we shall see, by those same signs he could be called a fool for Christ, or a madman—one could just never be sure, and that always unhinged us when having to deal with him one on one.

Sergios always lived a few miles outside the village. In his youth he had been a concrete worker, but after four years of marriage, his wife suddenly left him, taking their two young children, for a succession of lovers. Whenever she found someone who didn’t want the children, she would bring them back to Sergios. When she changed lovers, or was alone, she would return and take them back. Perhaps it was this that drove him mad, or made him a fool, for he never divorced her and was always there for them.

Nobody knew how Sergios lived, for he rarely worked. He had a bicycle that got him where he wanted to go, though with the state of the country roads, he had to carry a hand-pump with him at all times, because he was always getting flats. His almost daily routine was to ride his bicycle into the village to assist at daily liturgies. He was usually so regular that the father just expected him, and whenever he attended, he was to be found in the altar, helping by making sure the details “behind the ikonostasis” were carried out.

The villagers got used to Sergios and his strange ways, seeing him ride his rickety old bike down the road, dressed immaculately, even down to wearing a jacket, waistcoat and tie, on hot days, or in the rain, on his way to serve at church, sometimes stopping every half mile to pump up his tires. When we didn’t see him for awhile, we would get worried about him, because even at a young age, he had been diagnosed with some kind of heart problem, though due to his poverty, he never did anything about it.

When we hadn’t seen him for a few days, one of us would drive out to where he was living, and knock on his door to make sure he was well. Sometimes there was no answer and the lights were out, so we were sure he was away on one of his mysterious errands perhaps to another village. Other times, we would find him asleep on an old sofa at a time of day when most people are up and about. Once or twice I myself found that I was interrupting him at a very special moment.

Sergios came to the door with his large black bible open in his hands and welcomed me into his hovel. “I was just praying and having communion. Would you like to join me?” The first time that happened, I was taken aback, but then remembering his ways, I responded, “Can I just come in and pray quietly?” because on that occasion I had come with a specific purpose in mind, though I can’t remember what it was. Perhaps I was bringing him something—he was always reluctant to receive “charity” and we usually had to trick him into receiving it.

On the top of a wobbly old bookcase full of Greek bibles and prayer books mingled with small packing boxes and stacks of magazines, Sergios had set up a likeness to the altar at church, with a plate with some chunks of bread and a cup with some kind of dark juice, a ceramic pot in which incense was burning, and a few glass lampadas burning votive candles. He went back to standing in front of this and continued, mingling prayers from the liturgy with his own prayers, switching between church Greek and the vernacular.

Finally, he turned to me and asked, “Are you sure you won’t break bread with me?” And I said, “No, not this time. Maybe when I visit you next time,” lying to him and humoring him, not knowing what else to do. So he concluded his prayers, and then we talked and I accomplished whatever it was I came for that time. As usual, before I left, we prayed together for each other’s welfare and health and the mercy of God on our sins, and I left.

It was obvious to anyone who engaged in conversation with Sergios, even after five minutes of talk, that there was something not quite right with him. After fifteen minutes, if the talk were on a religious topic, it was obvious that he was ignorant of the teachings of the Church and possibly a heretic. After half an hour, if we had the patience to learn how to dialog with him, we were certain that he wasn’t a heretic, only unlearned and simple, but very stubborn, creating for himself a whole series of taboos based on his reading of a bible verse.

For example, for years he would not eat or drink anything containing grapes or raisins. This was from something he read about Nazirites. Another taboo he had was not calling the priest “father,” because of Christ’s saying “Call no man on earth father…” These taboos, however, were not permanent. Sometimes he would hear something in the liturgy, or read a bible verse in another frame of mind, and he would get it right. We knew it was pointless to argue with him.

One year during Holy Week, Sergios was having a horrible time with his bicycle—both tires continually going flat, then some mechanical part broke—and so we made a point of stopping at his place to bring him with us to the services. Then, on Holy Saturday, one of the wealthy villagers presented him with a new bicycle—not brand new, but as good as new—and he accepted it, just as he accepted our offers to bring him to church that week. He seemed to be softening towards our desire to help him.

Not knowing about the new bike, I went over to fetch him to the vigil of Pascha, as we had arranged that, because it was a very late service lasting till 3 in the morning, he would accept a ride there and back. He was, however, not feeling well, and decided not to go. He had already received the communion at the Holy Saturday morning liturgy, as to the rule to receive communion during Pascha, so to miss the Resurrection service, was not a serious matter.

The service was very long, and I remember that I was very, very tired. Coming home that night just before dawn, I was in no mood to break the fast but went straight to bed. At about 9 in the morning, I heard a persistent knocking at my door, and so I threw on my work pants and went to the door bare-chested. It was a very bright, sunny morning of Pascha, and standing there at my door, one hand steadying his new bicycle, the other clutching a small sack, was Sergios. My eyes were hardly able to open. I felt like an old bear awakened from hibernation a month early.

Opening the door, I came out to greet Sergios, and asked him how he was feeling today—though I needn’t have asked: he was as beaming and bright as the morning. He said he was well, and showed me his new bicycle. He was dressed in his best, and I asked him if he was on his way to church, and what time it was, because I knew that the Agapé vespers was not going to start for another two hours. He said he was going to church, but that he wanted to stop and have communion with an Orthodox brother before going to the service, because it was only a vespers. In the sack was a bagel and a small bottle of grape juice.

What to do? The fathers and the bible both teach that whenever two brethren break bread together, Christ is in their midst. I know that this is true and have done the same many times. Then, there is the word of Christ in His institution of the Eucharist, which we follow when we gather at the church, and only the priest prays for us all the prayers that call down the Holy Spirit “on these gifts here presented” so that we can break the bread and drink the cup that memorializes Christ’s sacrifice till He comes again, and in so doing, partake of holy communion.

Here was this man full of joy and in simplicity coming to my door and inviting me to break bread and receive the risen Christ. Would he simply sit down with me at table, say a prayer or two as before meals, and then share some food and drink? Or would he assume the role of a priest and consecrate a bagel and some grape juice under my roof, as I’d seen him do at home? In my suddenly awakened state, I felt lost in a forest of conflicting dreams, all of which were true, yet none of which could co-exist in a mind not given over to madness.

Sergios sensed in my hesitation my reluctance to fulfill his request and covered it over with, “It’s too early for you, I can see that!” and got himself ready to mount his bicycle.

“If you want to break bread with an Orthodox brother, there will be many at the church this morning, but oh, my head hurts! I’m going back to bed, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Christos anesti!” I said, as Sergios rode off towards the church, casting an “Alithos anesti” over his shoulder at me with a smile.

Old Testament Gospel

Psalms for the 18th Day
90 91 92 93 94

Psalm 91

God's protection

If you live in the shelter of Elyon

and make your home in the shadow of Shaddai,

you can say to Yahweh, ‘My refuge, my fortress,

my God in whom I trust!’

He rescues you from the snares

of fowlers hoping to destroy you;

he covers you with his feathers,

and you find shelter underneath his wings.

You need not fear the terrors of night,

the arrow that flies in the daytime,

the plague that stalks in the dark,

the scourge that wreaks havoc in broad daylight.

Though a thousand fall at your side,

ten thousand at your right hand,

you yourself will remain unscathed,

with his faithfulness for shield and buckler.

You have only to look around

to see how the wicked are repaid,

you who can say, ‘Yahweh my refuge’,

and make Elyon your fortress.

No disaster can overtake you,

no plague come near your tent:

he will put you in his angels’ charge

to guard you wherever you go.

They will support you on their hands

in case you hurt your foot against a stone;

you will tread on lion and adder,

trample on savage lions and dragons.

‘I rescue all who cling to me,

I protect whoever knows my name,

I answer everyone who invokes me,

I am with them when they are in trouble;

I bring them safety and honor,

I give them life, long and full,

and show them how I can save.’

This is the God, the Father whom Jesus our Lord trusted with such certainty that he was willing to take every promise with Him to the Cross, so that we too, believing in His name, can go boldly forward into whatever adventure Yahweh sends us.

No empty ritual

Here I go stealing again! And on Great and Holy Friday to boot! But reading Fr Stephen's excellent post this afternoon, I couldn't help flying the flag of my admiration for at least one part of it. So, like the wise thief whom Christ let steal paradise in a single moment,
I hope to be forgiven for stealing this bit of wisdom, and sharing it out to you, my brethren and co-thieves of paradise…

I have heard the phrase “empty ritual” so many times in my life that I know I confront a cliche when I hear it. The speaker has put no great thought into his/her words. Nor do they understand the most basic gifts of God. Worse still, there is an anti-Semitic component to this phrase. The Old Testament, filled with instructions for the ritual of the Temple, is seen as somehow inferior (by nature) to what is imagined to be a “spiritual” approach in the New Testament. Though the first Passover in historical terms (in Christian understanding) was but a shadow of the eternal Pascha of Christ - the feasts are both quite physical in form. One eats the meat of a lamb in a ritual manner; the other eats the Body and Blood of God in a ritual manner.

For those who think of ritual as “empty ritual,” the argument is with God, not with me. He gave us these forms.

Liturgical actions are not to be done mindlessly, but with deep care and concern. Mishandling the Body and Blood of Christ can get an Orthodox priest deposed from his priesthood, or, at least, suspended for a time as a disciplinary measure. It is a most serious matter. In the same way, the laity is not to approach Christ’s Body and Blood in a nonchalant manner.

The “ritual” aspects carry no inherent value, but instead a discipline and a respect, lest we treat holy things in an unholy manner. Those who despise the outward forms of this great gift are gnostics who are despising Christ’s gift to us. There can be no “drive-through” communions, or lunch bag communions (I’ve heard of both). These are ignorant blasphemies on the part of a people who have been taught that physical things do not matter, only the spiritual. As a result they do not know the spiritual things of God, only thoughts about spiritual things.

Take, eat. It is a simple commandment. But it gives us what had once been forbidden. It teaches us as well how grace is generally received. It comes to us in cup and spoon, in oil and water, in smoke and fragrance. In the bowing of the head or the prostration of our bodies. It comes to us in our words of forgiveness for another and in the daily rituals of kindness we perform for one another.

God has not made the acquisition of His Life hard for us - unless you despise the simplicity of His method. Those who do may go with Naaman and enjoy the beauty of the rivers in Syria. But do not expect to be healed on your own terms.

Hard to accept, but true

The following is a short message by pastor Zac Poonen, of Christian Fellowship Church in Bangalore, India that I received in my email this morning. This is a lesson that I have learned in my life, and one that was reluctantly learned, something hard to accept but true. As we grow older chronologically, it is harder to hide behind our carnal façades, and if we finally let the Lord have His way with us, well, maybe we'll finally begin to understand who it is we really are, as Moses did. Here's pastor Zac's message…

Learn to Value Divine Wisdom

Moses was a man who got a certificate of approval from God. God said concerning him, "My servant Moses is faithful inall My household" (Numbers 12:7). It was recorded of Moses at his death that, "since then no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deuteronomy 34:10).

It was not through Moses's first forty years of training in the palace and the military academies of Egypt that he became a spiritual leader. No. It was through God breaking the strength of his 'Self', when Moses spent the next forty years looking after sheep in the wilderness.

At the age of eighty, with his confidence in his own abilities shattered, Moses could lean upon God and become the deliverer of God's people.

In the construction of the tabernacle in the wilderness, we read one phrase repeated eighteen times in Exodus chapters 39 and 40 - the phrase, "just as the Lord had commanded Moses". The pattern of the tabernacle given by the Lord was a very simple and modest-looking affair. It was a far cry from the fantastic pyramids that Moses had seen built in Egypt.

If Moses had been given the plan of the tabernacle at the age of 40, when the strength of his 'Self' was in full bloom, he would certainly have modified it and made it look more attractive. But at the age of 80, Self had so died out, that he did exactly as the Lord commanded him. And that is what brought the glory of the Lord into the tabernacle.

Our human wisdom has to be dethroned if we are to obtain Divine wisdom.

The Bible says, "If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become foolish that he may become wise."
(1 Corinthians 3:18).

God could approve of Moses only when the chaff of the wisdom of Egypt had been thrashed out of him.

The apostle Paul had studied for three years at the feet of Gamaliel, the great professor of theology at the Jerusalem Bible school. That's why he had to spend three years after his conversion, in the wilderness of Arabia to have the wisdom of Gamaliel removed from his system and replaced with Divine wisdom. Paul refers to this period in Galatians 1:17,18: "I went away to Arabia… Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem."

Only then could Paul become a servant of the Lord.

The dethroning of human cleverness is fundamental for anyone who would serve the Lord. Yet there are few who learn this lesson fully.

God tested Moses when he made the tabernacle to see whether he would make it exactly according to the pattern that he had received on the mount. The glory of the Lord coming on that tabernacle was the visible indication of God's satisfaction with Moses' work.

How is it with us in what we do and build for the Lord? Is it exactly according to the pattern found in the Scriptures? Or have we modified it with some of the wisdom of this world? If so, then that must certainly be one reason why the glory of the Lord is not found in our lives.

Ichabod, or the Reverse Pinocchio Effect

Here is another worthless blog post from Romanós the sinner.
Pray for me, brethren.

Somewhere I’ve read (and it may have been in C. S. Lewis) that we are always to be found either arising out of (and repenting of) sin, or hastening into it. As for me, I am at this moment repenting of sin, but I can be no more tired of repenting than I am of being human, because to be a man is to be somehow trapped into a body of death, as holy apostle Paul says, and with him I echo, “who will deliver me from it?” and “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ,” who has mercifully hidden from us most of our sins, and who has ultimately nailed them to the Cross in His own body.

Being an Orthodox Christian, and not in name only, but by choice and by entering into the life of struggle, is really a great blessing, though it costs very dear. The cycles of the Church year are not for nothing, and not for show or adornment, as think some Evangelicals who like to borrow this and that from our “tradition,” to make their own worship more interesting. I was accused once by a well-known Pentecostal woman “evangelist” of being a religious tourist, from the pulpit, when she noticed me and my fifth grade Sunday School class, strangers in the congregation that we both were visiting, she as a guest speaker, we simply as guests.
"Foolishness!" I said to myself, but kept mum, and hoped my students didn’t hear.

But being an Orthodox Christian means that you willingly let the Lord take you apart piece by piece and then reassemble you, very much like surgery while awake and at times (it may seem) without anesthetic. Only later, after each operation, do we look back and say, “No, it wasn’t that bad!” and then notice that another part of us has ceased being wooden and is now real flesh. This process, though, familiarizes us with our sins and with the nature of sin generally as it exists in other people, both Christians and unbelievers, to the extent that after many years of this surgery, we can often instantly tell what sin another person is struggling with, or giving in to. Neither clairvoyance nor magic, not practiced intentionally but permitted sometimes to us as discernment for the ministry of empathy, the Lord opens our eyes when and as He wills. He often takes us by surprise.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
Ezekiel 36:26 KJV

Last night was Good Friday according to the Western calendar, and it came to me that I should attend the evening service at the Anglican parish where I started my Christian life while on the way back to Orthodoxy. It was at this church that over twenty years ago I was a lay minister, leading the Friday weekly vespers service, and doing impromptu street witnessing and ministry out of it in the local inner city neighborhood. I have gone back there on a very few occasions during the last two decades and have noticed, sadly, a diminishing of both the congregation and the spiritual climate there.

What met my senses, even knowing this, I was quite unprepared for. The church was barely a quarter full (in former days, this service was packed, sometimes with extra chairs brought in). Looking around, I saw not a single person I knew. The choir loft was full, as I noticed eventually. "Hmm, so about half the congregation is in the choir," I thought to myself. What I had heard from one of the brethren whose mother still attends there proved to be quite true, the congregation no longer sings; the choir takes over.

As I gradually began to remember the service, which I still have for the most part memorized, and joined in spiritually, I tried to pray and worship. The first part of the service is a sung version of the Passion. I couldn’t pray during that part, of course, but listened prayerfully. Stiff, very stiff and formal, and the choir making the responses, too loud, too operatic. Later I was to discover that the choir was indeed polished, so perfect and so loud that when they were singing, I could do nothing but listen as at a concert. Chanting and singing in church, whether Orthodox or Western, if it is too poor or careless, or if it is too loud and too perfect, it disturbs my ability to pray and worship. Simple, unadorned signing from hearts of faith, that’s what my spirit responds to.

When it came to the prayers, they were intoned beautifully and perfectly, but without any hint of human warmth, almost as if done on a voice synthesizer. Nonetheless, I joined in the prayer, prayed and said my amen’s. “Whatever it looks like, and even whatever it is they think they’re doing,” I said to myself, “it’s still prayer, and that’s my intention.”

What bothered me most about this service was that everything about the clergy costume and their liturgical movement was unremittingly mechanical and perfect, as if they were not human beings at all, but wooden statues with jointed limbs that followed prescribed paths along steel tracks hidden in the floor. Every one of them, from the oldest white hair, to the youngest pony tailed and ear ringed, displayed faces as static as carved wooden masks. When not carrying something, their hands were all held rigidly before them, together and pointed up and a little out. Their steps were mincing and hidden beneath their priestly robes or black cassocks and white lace tops, as they performed their choreography—though I hesitate to use that word, as it was nothing like a dance. Watching them put into mind those carved wooden clocks with mechanical figures that come in and out with predictable regularity.

"Ichabod" kept coming to my mind, as what I was experiencing compared itself to my memory of how this church was when I attended there. Though the rudiments and rubrics of the service were of course the same back then and carried out with a perfectionism that would astonish the Orthodox (whose worship, though elaborate, is not perfectionist at all), there was a quietness and awe, and an environment of sensible faith and sympathy, and even a hint of humor, that permeated the place. There was no remnant of that now, as far as I could see. Just a little group of worshipful spectators watching a bunch of purply-clad marionettes scurrying around on their mysterious, little wooden feet.

"The reverse Pinocchio effect," I mused. "In the fairy tale, a wooden marionette eventually is transformed into a real boy. In this place, it looks like the opposite has happened. Is that what Christ came to bring, in His life, His life-giving death on the Cross, and His glorious third-day resurrection? Did He come to make us less human and more like the statues that are mounted across the top of the rood screen?"

No, of course not. He came to give us life, and that in abundance, and to transform us from being merely human to something more, not something less, to become sons and daughters of His Father, our Father in heaven.

I looked up at the majestic icon of the Ascension of Christ that completely fills the wall above the main altar (where in an Orthodox church would be the image of the Theotokos with Christ in her lap). As I have done many times in the past, I prayed to the Lord while gazing up at that huge painting. Strangely, I don’t usually pray with my eyes open before icons, but I have always felt different about this one, and always pray looking up, eyes open. “Lord, descend on this house of worship and restore it to the glory it had before, when You filled it with Your glory!” And the rest is between me and the Lord, but our God is faithful, and He will accomplish His purposes in us.

At the end of the service, the clergy and acolytes, taking all the holy things with them, filed out the side door and disappeared, and the lights suddenly went out. I knew this would happen, of course, and I lingered as long as I could in the dark church, praying and remembering to the Lord the great things He had done for me and my friends in this place. And the wonderful chant came to mind, that always seemed the “motto” of this special church…

Oh, how dreadful is this place,
this is the house of God and gate of heaven,
and men shall call it
the palace of God.

To the brethren who are celebrating the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ this Lord’s Day,

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

Rescued by wedding guests

Whenever I return to a stint of reading the early fathers, that is, those before and just after the peace of the Church wrought by Constantine, I’m always struck by their modernity and the freshness that leaps out at me as I read. It makes me wonder just what “modern” means.

I’ve read somewhere that the beginning of “modern” times occurred in different centuries in different places. Some say in Europe they began in AD 1300 with Dante, others that Francis of Assisi is the first “modern” man in the West: it all depends on when the writer thinks the medieval age ended. In the Far East, modern times are said to have begun during the Northern Sung dynasty, around the year AD 1000, and the criteria are such things as the appearance of printing, paper money, and machinery.

In my view, what I mean as “modern” has to do with machinery definitely, but even more with the frank and unafraid willingness to question everything to get at the root of truth. This is something that I think we lost during the “Church Age” in the West, when other priorities were substituted for it. The religiosity of medieval Christianity did not even make room for real questions to be asked, hence, the stagnation that took centuries to overcome.

Back to my topic, the written testimonies of the early Christians.

Eusebius’ History of the Church was my leisure reading matter this morning. His text reads as fluently and frankly as if it were written just yesterday, and the events he recounts are both easy to picture and believe as accurate. What a far cry from the miracle stories of Christian piety, always avid to believe anything as long as it’s monstrous—like Nicholas of Myra reassembling and revivifying the bodies of some boys who were hacked to pieces and then hidden in some barrels of pickles, or was it wine?
Golly, the stuff of nightmares!

I read for a long while about the Church Father Origen of Alexandria who escaped being canonized as Saint Origen for some of his eccentricities of belief or at least of expression. One of his funnier speculations was that our resurrection bodies would be perfect spheres, but he also speculated on pre-existence of the soul and other ideas bordering on pagan philosophy. This speculation, in spite of his sufferings in the Decian persecution, earned him the indignity of being a suspect of heresy. Looking at him through the “modern” approach that one finds in Eusebius’ history, I’d say that Origen deserves better from his “carping critics” as Eusebius calls them. I guess Origen will just have to be classed with Martin Luther, who also falls under the axe of true piety, as he cries out, “Let the saints canonize themselves!”

Now, for the real topic, a story that I found both exciting and interesting, written in History of the Church, Book 6, Chapter 40, entitled What happened to Dionysius. The account itself was written in a letter by Dionysius, and it is quoted in the book.

I speak as in the presence of God, who knows whether I am lying. I did not act on my own judgement or without God when I made my escape; but even before that, when Decius announced his persecution, Sabinus then and there dispatched a frumentarius to hunt me out, and I stayed at home for four days waiting for him to arrive. But though he went round searching every spot—roads, rivers, fields—where he guessed I was hiding or walking, he was smitten with blindness and did not find the house; he never imagined that when an object of persecution I should stay at home! It was only after four days, when God commanded me to go elsewhere, and by a miracle made it possible, that I set out along with the boys and many of the brethren. That this was indeed a work of divine providence was proved by what followed, when perhaps we were of use to some.

Let me interject two observations:
Dionysius tells, almost casually as if it were nothing remarkable, that God commanded him to go elsewhere. These early Christians like us had, and knew they had, direct access to God, without having to resort to a chain of command as later develops in the Church, eventually making it unimaginable in the Dark Ages that anyone but a perfect saint could actually talk to God and get His personal attention, as does Dionysius. This, to