Has the smoke cleared?

It’s a strange thing, at times almost beautiful though amidst a scene of desolation, the peace that descends in all quietude on the place where once a great house stood that has gone up in flames during the night, leaving whisps of smoke curling to a soft morning breeze and, underfoot, littered invisibly among charred, fallen timbers, glowing embers.
Or as Job, having finally fallen asleep where he lay alone in the ash pit scraping his sores, abandoned there by his faithless wife who had mocked him, “Why persist in your blamelessness? Curse God, and die!” is suddenly awakened in the dark night by the almost inaudible voices of argumentation going on somewhere in the blackness above him between his advocate YHWH and his antagonist, one claiming to be a son (or could it have been a daughter) of God, “No! He only serves You because You supply all his needs! Desert him, and see how he will curse You to Your face!”

What must be fulfilled will be fulfilled.
The fruit of pride, rebellion and apostasy remains on the tree a little longer. Then, without warning, for not having been harvested its loathesome weight bows the tree down until finally it splits, exposing light, living wood within the fissured bark of the ravaged trunk and branches. The tree will be cut down, savagely, by a relentless axe, neither the evil fruits nor the pain of wrath will be remembered henceforth. Only the fresh, hopeful sprigs arising from the otherwise barren stump will bear witness to what could have been, will follow the sun in its course, as He draws them up to Himself.

Saviour of fugitives, Christ our God, have mercy on us!

Suffering Church

An anonymous testimony of an Orthodox woman, concerning her family’s struggle in Christ…

Individuals can make a cult out of anything. As I struggle over my issues regarding my daughter and Islam, I see that what attracts her to it is the simplicity… “Five Pillars,” all confusion taken away, she just does what she's told… the tradition and discipline.

But we had aspects of that in Orthodoxy, and there were whole groups who had a group response to Orthodoxy, and their own “House Rules.” I see it as a kind of living suicide, giving up oneself, giving up… a self-centered kind of irresponsible self-emptying, the ultimate Gnosticism and faithlessness. She experiences it as “The Answer” and doesn't see the pattern of the ultimate answers she's picked before to fill her emptiness. There is an Answer presented that is so tempting to many tired despairing people, giving up, going to Koresh or whatever such answer is offered… giving power over yourself to another. Relax, everything is done.
“Magic pills.”

We abdicate thought and responsibility, compartmentalizing our participation in the church to liturgy and obedience which can become liturgical idolatry and blindness. But the image of the Body and community is not esoteric—it is didactic.

The eye has a job, the feet, the hands, all together in unity. There's diversity in the body. There's diversity in us. The principle to unity is freedom… not the Borg type, “You will be assimilated'.” As my daughter takes intoxicating, heady comfort in seeing hundreds on weekdays, mid-days, uniformed new friends praying, hind quarters high, heads low in sharp unison during the day (ridiculing our non-existent feeble presence on weekdays in church), she feels this makes it Real, really Real.

I am horrified at that and see extreme loss of freedom, loss of diversity, homogenization of the wonders of creation, like girls having plastic surgery aiming for the same ideals, politicians eyeing Global My Way Takeovers.

I see psyches stuffing feelings, pain, shame, struggles, hopes and curiosities to fit in, a kind of living dead. It may be that the Muslims are all compartmentalized, and that is their version of shallow churching… the uniforms, the choreography, the rules. And they act out… hopefully in healthy ways, if they have healthy venues to celebrate and commune with God. But as with any rigid association, often the only outlets must be secret, must be dark, and often allow expression in darkness to only the darkness.

Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos talked about and evidenced in Illness and Cure of the Soul, the groups he held every week for his spiritual children. They would talk of struggles, hagiography. I didn't take him for a homilist during these groups, but a father talking with his kids, and everyone together… a microcosm of the Body of Christ, helping each other along to greater gnosis and towards transfiguration.

I don't see that happening in America. Parishes focus on administration and financial priorities and on “putting the show on” every Sunday. Community life becomes coffee hour and volunteer projects like festivals which are again administrative and financial. There is rare, little constancy in parishes, save the demigods that rule, and it’s not unlike “serial fathers,” where the kids psychologically become fixated neurotics.

Our witness as the Church is feeble in America. How would a parish priest or lay community begin group therapy? It would be a novelty for a while, perhaps supported by hierarchs from time to time, second to administrative and financial priorities. But eventually, ego assaults the priest, envy assaults others, divisiveness erodes the work, and a new priest comes in, breaking the frame, and water seeks its own level. If it works, it very often is because of the tendency in people to transform the experience into a cult. Even positive or benign groups… work, A.A. N.A. types, social service ...

For me, my family, overcoming the pain of isolation, has to begin with the prayer at home and the group is the family and friends. Pray for us. In Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God.

Martyrs under the same sword

Till we’re ready to be martyrs next to each other,

under the same sword, no real unity is possible.

I don't know if this line which I read in a comment left on Fr Milovan's blog post Catholics Through and Through was intended to say what it says to me or not, but to me it expresses this very fundamental truth:

It is in our common witness (μαρτυρία), and in our common readiness to lay down our lives “for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (cf. Revelation 1:2, 1:9, 8:9, 20:4), that we express our unity in Christ, not through any hobnobbing of church dignitaries, or by any convenient ecumenical declarations, all of which are pure poppycock.

In history we have seen examples of this in the bodily martyrdom of Christians of all denominations in the Nazi death camps during World War II, and in the Soviet gulags (even though the majority were Orthodox Christians, a few weren't). For those who were “martyrs next to each other, under the same sword,” real unity was possible, and not merely possible, it simply was.

I recall a scene in the film The Hiding Place, where Corrie and Betsie Ten Boom, evangelical Christian sisters imprisoned in Ravensbrück, huddled in common prayer with Catholic women and a Greek Orthodox girl who crossed herself and recited the Πάτερ ἡμῶν (Our Father), as other women devoid of faith or just too desperate, looked on uncomprehending. Unity in Christ? How could there not be, since all were “martyrs next to each other, under the same sword.”

My hope is only that we are granted God's grace when it comes our turn to suffer for His Word and the testimony of Jesus, together, and finally recognize our brotherhood in Christ, which was ours in Him all along, in the only unity that is possible.

It just doesn't let up!

Continuing thoughts presented in the posts The Border, Fearless and True Man, let me share with you this straight teaching from Abouna Matta el-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor, a contemporary desert father, 1919-2006), found in his pamphlet Spiritual Economy…

The gauge of faith's exactitude, appropriateness, and even its orthodoxy is manifest in man's readiness to reject the whole of earthly life, and with that to relinquish all its comfort and false glory if it conflicts with even the least of Christ's commandments.

Ever and always, your whole life long the devil will pressure you with all possible guile to ease up in your adherence to Truth in order to maintain your worldly or social status. He will alarm you and confuse you so that you might relinquish Christ's commandment in order to attain an opportunity for pomp, authority, and outward glory. Thus the Gospel, and along with it Christ, become victims along the path of your utilization and exploitation of chances for gain, comfort, and transient glory. And yet every time an opportunity to betray faithfulness and truth is presented to you, Christ will cast upon you a piercing gaze such as the look He gave to Peter at the time of his denial, a look that will pierce your conscience and the very depths of your being, so that you will perchance turn away from what you have resolved to do.

This is the measure of free faith, and blessed is he who chooses loss, weariness, contempt, illness, or even death instead of relinquishing his fidelity to God. For if he dares to choose this, then he will receive strength that will compensate all loss—a strength he had never known or expected, that strength which we call grace, which means "the gratuitous omnipotence of God," and which is so tightly bound to faith: "For by grace you have been saved through faith." (Ephesians 2:8) It is not just any faith, but rather the faith of one who is bold and defiant of death. This omnipotence makes hard things easy for you, and elevates your flesh and senses above the needs of nature; thus it is that man prays without fatigue, fasts without wasting away, serves without flagging, loves without ceasing…

These my teachers

It seems to me that I was still living in Edmonton, Alberta, just newly married, still following the ways of the world, and of worldly wisdom, evading the Lord's voice, which was daily becoming more and more recognizable to me, while still hoping for some "alternate Beauty" that gave birth to all being—anything and anybody but the God of Israel—groping for any truth that would still let me be Me.

My latest fascination was with popular Zen, with its entertaining stories of the Zen masters and their riddles to enlightenment, called 公案 kōans, questions they posed which defied rational answer and sought to find resolution in the human intuition. I thought things like this were really profound, "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?" I can hardly believe I was enthralled by such things, even at the age of 22. At least they didn't keep me captivated for long.

A young man needs a mentor, and I still hadn't found one. My old college philosophy and religion prof, Doc Dana, was the closest I'd had so far in my young adult life. I'd loved the man, at least thirty years my senior, and hung on his words though not always understanding them. He wasn't an eloquent speaker, or a forceful speaker. He got his points across with a strange kind of gentleness and with such a twinkle in his eyes that I never even noticed till my third year at his lectures that he had a withered hand, right or left I can't remember. Since leaving college, emigrating to Canada to join a commune, and then having been ejected from it after hardly six months, I got married and tried to live "on the outside," as we used to call it, or "in the world." (New Age communes were and are especially dualistic, matter vs. spirit, like the ancient Gnostics.)

Anyway, I remember myself walking down a broad street and coming to an old used book shop at the corner. I had some time to kill, and in those days I was a fervent book-aholic, so I meandered inside. I always went straight for the "Philosophy / Religion" section, and that day, for some reason my eyes and hand went straight to a little paperback with The Desert Fathers on the spine. I pulled it out, and my eyes fell on the passage I am going to quote. Something told me, "This is the beginning and the end," and I quickly checked my pocket to see if I had the sixty cents it would cost me. I did, I bought the book, and then walked the rest of the way home, reading like there was no tomorrow.

The Desert Fathers became my teachers, easing me out of my New Age arrogance and getting me ready to meet their Lord, who would soon be mine. What I read in this passage and in the rest of the book never left me. Without me consciously choosing, I began to emulate what I read there, attitudes and practices. The authentic profound had discovered itself to me, and my conversion to Christ had begun. These my teachers succeeded Doc Dana, building on the foundation that he so gently and lovingly laid, that old Presbyterian minister. May his memory be eternal.

Now, from The Desert Fathers, pp. 67-68…

So we came to Nitria; the place most famous among all the monasteries of Egypt, about thirty-seven miles distant from Alexandria, and named after the neighbouring town in which nitre is collected, as though in the providence of God it was foreseen that in these parts the sins of men would be washed and utterly effaced, even as stains by nitre are cleansed. In this place there are about fifty (or not many less) habitations, set near together and under one father, in some of which many brethren live together, in some a few, in some a brother lives alone: but though they be divided in their dwelling, yet do they abide bound and inseparable in spirit and faith and loving-kindness.

So then, as we were drawing near the place, as soon as they knew that strange brethren were coming, straightway they poured out like a swarm of bees, each from his cell, and ran to meet us, joyous and eager, the most part carrying pitchers of water and bread, because the Prophet rebuking certain folk had said, "Ye came not forth to meet the children of Israel with bread and water." And after they had welcomed us, they brought us first with psalms to the church and washed our feet, and one by one dried them with the linen that girded them, as if to disperse the weariness of the road, and in very act to purge the stains of mortal life in the traditional mystery.

But of their humanity, their courtesy, their loving-kindness, what am I to say, when each man of them would have brought us into his own cell, not only to fulfill the due of hospitality, but still more out of humbleness, wherein they are indeed masters, and from gentleness and its kindred qualities which are learned among them with diverse grace but one and the same doctrine, as if they had come apart from the world for this same end. Nowhere have I seen love so in flower, nowhere so quick compassion, or hospitality so eager. And nowhere have I seen such meditation upon Holy Writ or understanding of it, or such discipline of sacred learning: wellnigh might you judge each one of them a doctor in the wisdom of God.

These my teachers were, and are, in Christ. Their way of life is not far from us, if we would take hold of the same Word of God that they held on to, and simply understand it, and live it, as it is. My home and your home, our home, a monastery to God, where He alone is Lord, and where is welcome anyone who knocks.

Brethren, let us love one another.

Cut off for me and you

Today I have been handing over to you not my own thoughts but those of others that have affected and edified me, and since good things come in threes, here is the third, a poem written by a Christian brother in south India. He calls himself "the Postman" and writes anonymously, but I am also slightly acquainted with him personally and know his identity. Some of you also write Christian poetry or, perhaps I should say, poetry in Christ, as I think there is a difference. That's why I am bringing this to your attention, so you can also discover another who expresses his faith in Christ this way and share his gift.

He begins by quoting the Word verse by verse (John 15:1-8), then he writes his poem, Cut off for me and you, and then he concludes by quoting the Word, again verse by verse (Isaiah 53:1-12). Go back and click on the linked title to read the whole poem.
I think you will be edified.

This is how his poem affected me. I wrote…

Beautiful poetry budding forth from the live wood of the Word. Especially poignant, for me, the last four lines…

There when He was cut off
Pierced for my sin
There my salvation flowed out
There I was grafted in.

Those four short lines encapsulate in lucid metaphor drawn straight from the spring of scripture the mystery of salvation.
I thank you and salute you, brother, for sharing this gift from the Most High with us.

What God wants

I was startled this morning to find this post in the "least read" lineup on my son Jacob's blog. It is a long post, and more candid than most people would dare to put in print, about personal happiness and the struggle to find it.

The premise is, "What God wants is tied to what I give, and not to what I want."

It took me awhile to understand what he is getting at, and I kept thinking I saw it, and then as I read a little further, what I thought I saw would dissipate, sort of like tracking a deer in the forest. Eventually, near the end of the post, I came to another statement that was like having that deer right in my sights,

"there are so many scriptures that have been interpreted to state that loving God is wanting what He wants… but it is actually giving like He gives."

Perhaps my blog post should be renamed "Loving God," because that is where Jacob's ended up.
What Jacob has written may not be for everyone, but if you feel adventurous, you can read the whole post here.

We've been given so much…

…and yet we give so little!

True Man

True man is he who doesn’t want to live long in this world. He wants to give his testimony and return as soon as possible, return home to Christ. He isn’t concerned about living a long life; he only wants to live on earth as long as his Lord wants him to live. Why? Because he is already living with Christ in His kingdom. He knows it with perfect certainty. He is redeemed, delivered from every desire and ambition that snares men and chains them to this world, and he is impatient to be free of this body of death, because he no longer lets it use him to sin. He is already living in heaven with Christ; all he wants is to be living there completely. If he must continue living in this world, he knows it’s only to do here what Christ wants him to do, to do what he sees Jesus doing in this world. He wants only to follow Jesus who, though living visibly in heaven, is alive invisibly on earth. And so, true man lives invisibly in heaven while he is living visibly on earth, following Jesus.

True man lives in the Word of God, and that Word is everything to him, and it makes him a child of the Kingdom, it makes him a disciple of Jesus. And Jesus and the Father come and live with him there, making him one of them by giving him the Spirit to live inside him. The Word of God is everything to him, it is his home, his food, his covering, his companion, his teacher, his protection, his inheritance. He is never without it, whether the Book is in his hand or not. The Word of God becomes his words, becomes his thoughts, becomes his actions. It is his strength, it guards his purity, it is his defense against all the lures and snares of the enemy. The Word of God proves His unalterable faithfulness to him and in him, and makes him faithful to God. The Word of God never leaves him, never leaves him alone, becomes a hedge around him, and makes him a hedge around the Kingdom in which he lives with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

True man is the implacable foe of the evil one, and doesn’t yield for a moment even an inch of territory, because the Word of God lives in him, and he lives in the Word. That is his world, and that world is the Kingdom. His citizenship is there while in the body he lives here. He is an unregistered alien in this world, which either shuns him as it goes along with its trifling affairs, pretending not to see him, or when it can’t help but see him, he is seen as a threat, he is seen as dangerous, and he is opposed with every injustice that can be brought against him in the name of the world’s justice. Because he obeys another Law, fulfills another commandment, that of His Lord, he falls under the condemnation of the laws of men and suffers with His Lord, who is put to death every day by the world. This too is an earthly evidence of his heavenly citizenship. He has nowhere to lay his head, no place in this world where he is comfortable, seeing that everywhere is under the dominion of the evil one, and with Jesus he is turned away at every inn, turned away because he is a God-bearer.

True man is too strong for the men who seek their home and their security on earth, and so he finds no friends among them. His strength is not from himself. He seems to wear his strength effortlessly, while others who claim to be strong or who try to be, make excuses for their weakness. But his strength is not from himself, it is from Christ who lives with him and who supplies him from His armory. His eye looks stern and unfriendly to men who have eyes only for the world, because his eye is single, and it looks always upon heaven, and from heaven where he already is living with Christ. His strength is from his Lord, and it shows in his walk and in his stance, in his speech and in his silence, in what he does and in what he does not do. All of this is a threat to other men who seek their strength only in things of this world, in things man-made, in what will not endure.

True man is in the world, but not of it. Why? Because he lives already in the Kingdom of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He lives there and he knows it. He has his proof of citizenship in the Word that never leaves him. He has his passport ready and can come and go through a door that to him is never shut between worlds, a door which, if he chooses to shut it, no one can open, and if he chooses to open, no one can close. He has been given this kind of authority because he can be trusted. Why can he be trusted? Because he has proven himself faithful to his charge, because he renews his faithfulness every day in the presence of his Father, by following the Son of God, by doing only what he sees Him doing. He has already been given the crown of life, because he is willing to lay down his life in this world, because of the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

Brothers, this is our call in Jesus Christ. This is the guarantee of our salvation. This is the life that has no end. This is the treasure hidden in the field that a man finds and then sells all that he has to purchase the field. This is the true man that has been recreated in the image of the Holy Triad who said, “Let us make man in Our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters…”

Brothers, this is true man.

Fearless

This is a building block of my spiritual economy that was just added last week, and though I didn’t intend to write about it, something is nagging me to do so, and so here it is. Perhaps there are others out there who are facing difficult circumstances that this might help.

A man who is fearless, who is afraid of nothing, cannot be defeated. Why? Because he knows that he has nothing to lose. That brought to mind the saying, “There’s no loss with Jesus,” which has been another one of the building blocks of my spiritual economy for a long time. I could see that the two ideas were reflections of each other.

Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

—Martin Luther

The natural man is ruled by his fears. We can see the truth of this especially at present, as our world is coming down piece by piece over the world financial crisis. Looking back, this is probably one of the greatest sins I personally have been guilty of, not acting (for the Lord) because of my fears. When I had my talk with the Lord that night in my arbor four years ago on Yom Kippur, the greatest change in my life that I committed to was this, that I would no longer let fear prevent me from doing anything that the Lord commanded me, regardless of the consequences. Now, Brock was handing over to me a word that expresses this change, “the reason that we are a threat to the world is because we are fearless.”

So, fearlessness also must be an attribute of the follower of Jesus. This is something I’ve known, even something I deliberately committed to, and yet never articulated this way before. You need a word like this to be a flag you can see on the battlefield in the heat of struggle, and now I have one. Fearless.

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Matthew 10:28 NIV

God is our shelter, our strength,
ever present in time of trouble,
so we shall not be afraid when the earth gives way,
when the mountains tumble into the depths of the sea,
and its waters roar and seethe,
the mountains tottering as they heave.
Yahweh Sabaoth is on our side,
our citadel the God of Jacob.
Psalm 46:1-3 JB
quoted from memory

Mountains tumbling into the sea, and waters roaring and seething, I have not yet seen, but what has come against me, what has been thrown into my path to discourage and even destroy me, that I have seen. But my friend’s word, which he handed over to me from what the Lord has given him, speaks the truth…

Do not be afraid, it is I.
Matthew 14:27

Brothers of the Revelator

It is precisely where the Church exists in an openly hostile environment that it truly lives. Yet in every environment there are still individual followers of Jesus, or sometimes small pockets of them, both in church and out of church, whom the world hates and despoils, knowing Whose they are. And these one or two, two or three, are usually associated with an extended group who do not know their struggles (yet) but who stay near them and support them in various ways. Some of these, as they wake up, get pulled into the arena with the others already there, where the witness of Christ is undefeatable, right up to their physical deaths. These are those who with John the Revelator can be called συγκοινωνοι εν τη θλιψει (synkinoní en ti thlípsei > Greek, “companions in suffering”)… “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” (Revelation 1:9 NIV) Do you see the churches full of these? How would you know them if you met them there? Are you one of them yourself?

Exiled to the isle of Patmos, that’s John the Revelator and those who, like him, are “brothers and fellow partakers (συγκοινωνοι) in the tribulation and kingdom and perseverance which are in Jesus.”

Inclusive

This is a loaded word as ambiguously dangerous as a loaded gun. Recently a pastoral message published in Ðýnamis, the newsletter of my community Aghía Triás in Portland, as well as numerous homilies preached in our midst, have directly or indirectly promoted the “inclusive,” particularly inclusive language and clerical order in the Church. If this were happening in an environment where the world system was dead set against it, I might suspect the Holy Spirit of trying to dawn on us a forgotten or repressed essential truth. What we find instead is that the world culturally engulfing us is askew with insistence on ungendering itself and everything in its path, and though ungendering is its stated aim, the result of its programme is something quite different, the inversion of reality. Unfortunately, this inversion is not of the kind that the Word of God describes when it says, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also… asserting that there is another king, one Jesus!” (Acts 17:6-7)

Inclusive language is increasingly used in biblical and liturgical translation to eliminate the exclusive preponderance of masculine pronouns and common plurals that appear as masculine. There’s a far more serious issue at stake here than whether God is masculine or feminine, a theological one, which is being battered to pieces and left for dead. That issue is the mystery of gender.

Very deep inroads have been made by unassailable feminism in the world culture and now also in the mind of the Church, twisting and altering language to empty it of unwanted meanings. Why unwanted? Because they originate in the language used by the Word of God, which is now being criticized as the product of a patriarchal age. In other words, the Bible is slanted because men wrote it, and men want to be in control. Supposedly, that’s why even God is referred to in masculine terms.

When I address a man or woman in Christ, I address them as brother or sister. When I address a mixed group, I address them as brothers or brethren, never as brothers and sisters, which is the politically correct way of talking. Why don’t I conform? Because I speak the language that I find in the Word of God, where brothers includes sisters.

The current trend in Orthodoxy is to talk about the church fathers as our fathers and mothers instead of just our fathers. This is evident when you hear a priest end a service saying the prayer, “Through the prayers of our holy fathers and mothers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us and save us.” The service book does not read this way. It has only, “Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus…” Why do some priests and deacons change the service book texts? Are they ashamed of our holy faith? Whom are they trying to appease? Fathers includes mothers, just as brothers includes sisters.

Back to the mystery of gender.

In the book of Genesis, “God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image… and let them be masters…’ God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:26-27 JB) That’s in the first account of the creation. In the second account occurs a more detailed description. “Yahweh God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then He breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7) Then, later “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate.” (Genesis 2:18)

Where did the helpmate come from? Was it made from the soil as was the man? No, but it was somehow taken out of the man. “So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep. And while he slept, He took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh. Yahweh God built the rib He had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man.” (Genesis 2:21-22)

The two are parallel accounts of the mystery of gender in the human species. Man, the masculine, is created in the ordinary way. But hidden within himself is the woman, who is brought into being, extracted from the man, by God’s act. Man, when first created, included woman. That is what is revealed in the first creation account. Man is created, he is created in the image of God, and then “male and female” are differentiated. But it is in the man that the woman first exists, hidden until God’s act reveals her presence. (I prefer the Orthodox icon representation of this act to the version by mystic painter William Blake, shown above.)

This is a mystery.
Man includes woman, without confusion, consubstantially.
There never was a time when man existed without woman.

Does the language sound vaguely familiar? It should, because man is made in the image of God. And of God we know, He is One, though in Him are included three divine Persons, without confusion, consubtantially. There never was a time when the Father existed and the Son and the Holy Spirit didn’t, though the Father is the principal source of both. In like manner is man the principal source of woman.

Later, holy apostle Paul used the same analogy with respect to Jesus Christ the divine Bridegroom and the Church the divine Bride, and also in respect to human marriage. All of the apostolic teachings about the relationship between man and woman, in marriage as well as in the Church, are based on this same analogy:
Adam includes Eve.
Man includes woman.
Christ includes the Church.
Hence, brothers includes sisters, fathers includes mothers.

Adam was put to sleep and Eve was extracted from his side.
Christ was nailed to the cross
and the Church was extracted from His side.
Again, mystery.
And mystery, that point in kairós (acceptable time)
where God enters our world and decisively acts.

This is the real meaning of inclusive, that through God’s act, man includes woman. There’s no justification to correct the Bible or the mind of the Church.

In so seemingly insignificant a detail as God’s choice of gendered words, one of the key mysteries of existence is revealed. And just as a minute alteration to any of the physical constants (i.e., gravity, magnetism, etc.) would render the structure of the natural world “formless and void,” so does the mindless change of any of God’s words diminish our knowledge of the truth.

Religion is a sickness…

…and Christ is the Cure


A fellow blogger wrote in an excellent article today the following…

"To be honest, I'm tired of being religious. It's exhausting, isn't it? All this moral striving, and for what? Religion as a series of habits and rituals can be a pointless venture.

"If it doesn't lead to Life, then it must lead to Death, no matter how "nice" or "good" it looks. And if we get caught up in defining "right and wrong" by our own moral striving, then we miss the boat. One can't live a good life by simply avoiding the darkness. Rather, Jesus tells us to abide in him, the Light (John 15:4).

"So, I am learning to be done with this frivolous game of people-pleasing and hiding my own brokenness."

And I saluted him with… Axios! You have found the right way.

It is on this basis that I describe myself as a non-religious Christian. The second paragraph quoted above, "If it doesn't lead to life…" reminds me of the line in The Matrix where Morpheus tells Neo about the matrix, that it permeates everything, it's there with you even "in church."

The way of religion as you describe, that exhausting way of moral striving, habitual behaviors and the performance of rituals, yes, these do indeed constitute "religion," the classic definition of which is, man's attempt to win justification by his own efforts. This was the pre-existing (religious) condition that Christ was born into, and which He abolished by His death on the cross, His resurrection from the dead, and His ascending to the Father.

Abolished.
Christ was and is the end of religion for those who follow Him.

Does this mean that we stop "going to church," stop praying, stop doing "good deeds" and so on? Heaven forbid! Unless and only if we have been doing these things to appease God.

The love which God the Father has lavished on us through the sacrifice of His Son and all that proceeds from it, when we receive that, we cannot help but pass that love on to the world around us in our fulfillment of the commandments.

What commandments?
Well, the two great ones, to begin with: Love the Lord with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul and all your strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Do we gain heaven by this?
Not at all.

Does it exhaust us to follow these commandments?
No, because love never gets tired.

Why not? Because it is not we who do the work, it is Christ in us.

Is this striving for moral perfection?
No, again because we are not doing the work, it flows from us as springs of living water, but it does purify, not only us but others around us. This is why the following of Jesus, even within the context of institutional Christianity, need not be religious, indeed must not be, else it is what you describe at the beginning of your article, "To be honest, I'm tired of being religious…"

Religion is a sickness, and Christ is the cure.

Aghía Sophía - Holy Wisdom

I've never seen a picture or painting of the great church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople (Istanbul) showing it as an Orthodox church. All the pictures I've ever seen always show it as a mosque, or in its present state, a museum in which the vestiges of its Christian use are shown alongside more prominent evidences of its use as a mosque.
Fr Joseph Honeycutt posted the image I am reproducing here on his blog OrthoDixie. Click on the link to visit his blog. I have nothing to say, except to thank Fr Joseph for locating this picture and sharing it with us.

The image gets larger if you click on it. Then you can right click on the larger image and save it to your computer like I did.

Paradoxy

"What comes into our minds when we think about God
is the most important thing about us."
— Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897-1963)

C. S. Lewis’ book Pilgrim’s Regress has as a motif the idea that a man sets out from Puritania to find an island in the West instead of accepting the Landlord’s castle high up on the Eastern mountains, and he ends up getting turned around in his journey, retracing his steps home. Yet, because his perspective has changed, the “road in” is very, very narrow and looks unimaginably different than it did when he thought it was the “way out.” It seems to be a paradox that what he was afraid of and what he desired were one and the same. Reminds me of a line in Cat Stevens' song Sitting…

Life is like a maze of doors, and they all
Open from the side you're on
Just keep on pushing hard, boy, try as you may
You're going to wind up where you started from

Eastern Orthodox Christianity as a faith community is so comfortable with paradox, that perhaps of all its features, that is the one which sets it apart the most from other Christianities. Our faith is very much the same as that of evangelicals, but we don’t spend nearly as much time debating and arguing fine points (theologoumena, though some of us do), and we have no “infallible head” to shut us down in our deliberations as do Roman Catholics: Paradox shuts us down.

Paradoxy. Orthodoxy.
These are words that I find have wider and more comprehensive meaning in actual practice than the Church gives them.

Though the institutional Church defines, guards and maintains orthodoxy, paradoxy (have I coined a new word?) needs no definition, but grows out of the shared experience of the saints (all followers of Jesus) in Christ.

Orthodoxy may mean “straight thinking [about God]” or “correct glorification [of God]”, but both are rooted in the Word of God, which in all essentials is perfect and complete.

Paradoxy may mean “beyond thinking” or “beyond glorification,” that is, where we find ourselves when we practice and contemplate the roots of our being: What does it mean to be 'born again'?
What does it mean to 'accept Christ'? How do people enter into a 'saving knowledge' of Christ? What does evangelism 'do', and how does it do it? Since there is only one Mediator between God and man, the God-Man Jesus Christ, what is 'happening' to us in our individual and in our corporate human natures through this Mediator? When does it start, and how much is ours (if any), and how much His? These are questions to which dogma cannot fully respond, which only one living a theological life can hope to answer. What is a theological life? A life of unremitting struggle.

C. S. Lewis once asked the question, "Is theology poetry?" and I, asking the same question, am reminded of the lyrics of yet another song, Queen of Love, this time by The Incredible String Band…

How shall I say where I end, or where you begin?
How shall I say, what shall I play,
shall it be you or the wild wind?
As Pan with the unsane eyes, or with the wild horns,
or when I am crowned with a paper crown,
or with the crown of thorns.

Paradoxy is the flip-side of Orthodoxy.
It can no more be split from it than can Christ the Bridegroom be split from His Bride, whom the Father pulled from the wound opened in His side when He slept the sleep of death on the cross.
“This is the faith of the Fathers, this is the faith of the Orthodox, this is the faith that sustains the whole world,” we shout from the church steps on the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

What am I trying to say? I'm not sure that I know myself, except that I somehow want to testify that there is so much more to the mystery of faith than most of us realize, and that I want to spend the rest of my life “on the road to find out.”

What does Jesus do?

From a comment I wrote to a young Christian writer and video man…

Yes, that was a nicely assembled Christian parody of the election-illogical hype that we've been subjected to for the last many months. I completely get your point, I think, and your video was fun to watch. Problem is, even though what you're saying in it is true, it's only going to be true for the already saved, so that's your audience.
As for the others, they will only scoff.

America, no less than most of the "civilised" world, has had enough of Christianity. Either they're following it in a state that verges on apathy, boredom or worse, or they're not following it because they "know" all about it and/or about its "founder."

I think and I believe that the right approach for the time and place we find ourselves in is to follow Jesus as He walks in today's world, imitating Him, doing what we see Him doing.

He doesn't make use of technology, drama, music, tattoos, piercings (yes, that's right!), cultural relevance, inclusive language, or any contemporary evangelistic gimmicks. He doesn't pass out free bottles of spring water, or condoms, or tracts, or Chick comics. He doesn't set Himself up as this or that deliverance ministry. He doesn't take up collections or plead for offerings.

He is in the world today as He was two thousand years ago, simply as the Word of God. All He needs from us is our willingness to use our voices.

For what? To sing? To preach? No, not yet.

To witness, to give testimony? Well, maybe, but not at first, not before Him.

What, then? Simply to give our voices to the reading aloud of His Word out there in the world where people can hear it, without commenting on it, without preaching it, without prophesying it, without charging for it, without protecting it, without shortening it. Reading it just as it is, in a language that anyone who passes by can hear and understand, if they pause to listen.

And if they do, what is drawing them, or who? Is it us, the readers? No, it is the Word of God Himself who draws them. It is Jesus. They can't see Him, yet they can hear Him, and faith, as we know, comes by hearing. And hearing by the Word of God.

Brother, I understand you are a communicator, that you believe you have the gift of writing. I do not doubt it or dispute it. At this point, I only say, based on this short video, do not let the media you are using sculpt the shape of your call. Be sure that the gift God gives you in following Him depends on nothing and no one but Himself and you, without so much as a pencil and paper, let alone video equipment and software. The Word of God is the only sculptor of the Christian's call. Let your testimony be pure, unmixed wine that "runs on the lips of those who sleep" (Song of Solomon 7:10 JB) to awaken them to the Truth. Don’t let the world drag you into its net, while you, the willing fish, think you’re catching it. Instead, draw the world into His net, like the holy apostles did, who were fishers of men.

What is His net? It is the Word of God.
Who taught them to fish like that? It was the Holy Spirit.

Always give precedence to the Word, then your writing, following in its wake, will open doors to the Father. And He is faithful.

If we wait for Him at all

We know that the institutional church in all of its manifestations is "a city set upon a hill that cannot be hid," and so anyone passing by can look at it in the glory or in the humiliation of its past and present condition.

It takes as much faith to believe that what we are seeing as the Church is the Body of Christ as it does to look upon the man Jesus of Nazareth and believe that He is God, the Almighty. Yet He is, and so where does it leave us with regard to the Church?

Mocked, derided, stripped, scarred, gashed, sundered and pierced, the Body of Christ suffers with Jesus throughout all ages till the end of time and His return. Where we stand, what our response must be to His question, "And who do you say I am?" will also show us where we stand with regard to the Church.

Though we see her faults, we also see and participate in her faith, and if we wait for Him at all, we must wait with her, His Bride.

Not to be disqualified

Paul’s letter to the Colossians was where the Bible opened itself for me to read this morning, and so I read the entire book, as I’m used to doing. Usually, I read the Jerusalem Bible, as that is the version that brought me to Christ, and I’ve never given it up. Today, however, I picked up the New English Bible, which is the other version I started reading during my college days, and for which I’ve never lost my respect—to me it still represents a fairly high literary standard—because I like to vary the versions to gain new insights. Colossians has always been one of my favorite books.

I pray while I read, and I involuntarily review many λογισμοι (logismí > Greek, “thoughts”) going through my mind, all at the same time, comparing them to what the word is saying. I am struggling, now as always, with the visible form of the Church, and with the institutional strictures, what I call “religious profiling,” that throw obstacles in the path of faithful Christians, and keep others in decadent captivity. This passage spoke to my struggles.

You are not to be disqualified by the decision of people who go in for self-mortification and angel-worship, and try to enter into some vision of their own. Such people, bursting with the futile conceit of worldly minds, lose hold upon the Head; yet it is from the Head that the whole body, with all its joints and ligaments, receives its supplies, and thus knit together grows according to God’s design.

Did you not die with Christ and pass beyond reach of the elemental spirits of the universe? Then why behave as though you were still living the life of the world? Why let people dictate to you: ‘Do not handle this, do not taste that, do not touch the other’—all of them things that must perish as soon as they are used? That is to follow merely human injunctions and teaching. True, it has an air of wisdom, with its forced piety, its self-mortification, and its severity to the body; but it is of no use at all in combatting sensuality.

Colossians 2:18-23 New English Bible

The cost of indifference

Not being able to really sleep at all because of a wretched case of something like bronchitis, I was up and down all night, and now, as dawn has arrived, I took a bit of food, and picked up a little book that is always at hand, Pensées by Blaise Pascal. Where I opened it at random and started reading was a passage that represented the thought process of a man indifferent to God, and what Pascal had to say about him. This is Pascal at his densest—what I mean is, it's hard to read him because he says more than the words say on the surface, and it's all so true. This French philosopher doesn't quote scripture in this passage, which is unusual, as his Pensées is a treasure trove of biblical texts and rambling thoughts about them. But a true disciple of Jesus he was, and was found at his death to have been carrying his handwritten testimony of his saving encounter with Christ sewn into the lining of the jacket he always wore. I can relate to that.

Here is the passage, which I would call, the cost of indifference. People haven't changed much in three hundred years. Do you know anyone who could be saying this today? I do.

‘I do not know who put me in the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am terribly ignorant about everything. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything, and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else.

‘I see the terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in, and I find myself attached to one corner of this vast expanse without knowing why I have been put in this place rather than that, or why the brief span of life allotted to me should be assigned to one moment rather than another of all the eternity which went before me and all that which will come after me. I see only infinity on every side, hemming me in like an atom or like the shadow of a fleeting instant. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least about is this very death which I cannot evade.

‘Just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, but I do not know which of these two states is to be my eternal lot. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And my conclusion from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of seeking what is to happen to me. Perhaps I might find some enlightenment in my doubts, but I do not want to take the trouble, nor take a step to look for it: and afterwards, as I sneer at those who are striving to this end—whatever certainty they have should arouse despair rather than vanity—I will go without fear or foresight to face so momentous an event, and allow myself to be carried off limply to my death, uncertain of my future state for all eternity.’

Who would wish to have as a friend a man who argued like that? Who would choose him from among others as a confidant in his affairs? Who would resort to him in adversity? To what use in life could he possibly be turned?

It is truly glorious for religion to have such unreasonable men as enemies: their opposition represents so small a danger that it serves on the contrary to establish the truths of religion. For the Christian faith consists almost wholly in establishing these two things: The corruption of nature and the redemption of Christ. Now, I maintain that, if they do not serve to prove the truth of the redemption by the sanctity of their conduct, they do at least admirably serve to prove the corruption of nature by such unnatural sentiments.

Nothing is so important to man as his state: nothing more fearful than eternity. Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature. With everything else they are quite different; they fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honor is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels no anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest.

The Prodigal God?

Minus the question mark, this is actually the title of a book by contemporary Christian author, Timothy Keller.
As many of my friends know, I read few books compared to most people, instead keeping my nose in the Book.
I know that I sometimes come across as rather hard on the prolific output of modern Christian authors to some people in Christian Blogoslavia, and I don't deny there will always be some good books "out there" for some people, but the fascination for these books is all out of proportion to their practical value, and just provide an opportunity to waste time like the ancient Athenians who "…would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new." (Acts 17:21) This text from Acts describes the Christian spiritual elite of today, always eager for "telling or hearing something new."

Back to The Prodigal God. Hmm, well, that's an interesting title, and the book (I gather) is about "attracting the irreligious," which is also the title of a blog where this book was discussed earlier this month. Now, not this book, but the ideas it talks about, interested me, and got me to thinking about them. Starting with a quote from this book, here are some of those thoughts…

"The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did."

—Tim Keller in The Prodigal God, pp. 14-15.

It's pretty easy to see that our Christian witness both as preachers and congregations doesn't have anything much to attract the world's attention, but I don't think that it necessarily means that we're not declaring the same message that Jesus did.

Though the Bible says that Jesus was followed around by multitudes of people, we don't know exactly how many in most cases, and the overall population of Palestine was probably what, three million or even more at the time of Christ, yet I doubt His audiences were anything as large as the following that most modern evangelists and church leaders have. On a percentage basis, Christ's message probably didn't attract more than 5 or 10 percent of the total population of Palestine. Most of Christ's authentic followers are even named in the New Testament. Just because Jesus was followed by "crowds" doesn't mean that they were even attracted to Him for the right reasons. Notice, there were only about 120 disciples immediately after Christ's ascension. It wasn't until the day of Pentecost that 3000 were added, all in a single day.

What we see in America and other modern cultures is a population that by and large functions out of religious habit, or out of irreligious habit. Most of us are educated enough to know who Jesus is and what the claims of Christianity are, and we just don't need it. I have known people who are very intelligent and yet joined groups like the Mormons because their system "works," that is, because it helps create successful (I won't say healthy) family life, even though they did not believe the mythology or any of the doctrines behind it! They just go thru the motions. Since it is impossible to know what is really true, they grabbed what simply "works." In the same way, our sophisticated but spiritually dead neighbors can afford to be indifferent, and actually slightly hostile or contemptuous, to Christ, because they've "made it." As an old issue of Zapped Comix (pictured above) put it, "Who needs God? I'm independently wealthy!"

Churches are stuck at all different places.

Some churches function as though they're still in a Christian world—in fact, whether or not they admit it, I think that's what most Christian churches do. They are usually houses of worship surrounded by unbelieving neighborhoods that they never even attempt to evangelize, and most of their members live elsewhere. This, I think, is a remnant of "Christian world" mentality. All the territory has been claimed, so there's no need to go out on forays into the hinterlands anymore. But the reality is, it just ain't so.

Still, can you imagine your church, pastor or preacher and congregation, engaging in the evangelization of the neighborhood around your house of worship? How would you do it? The neighbors aren't primitive barbarians living in the forest, to whom you can bring the light of the gospel to teach them not to keep killing each other and stealing each other's wives, or material improvements to alleviate their low standard of living. No, for most of us, the neighbors are pretty affluent and either belong to a church out of habit, or take Sunday morning walks with their significant others, their families, their pets—or just sit in the sun room with a cup of coffee, a sweet, and the newspaper, until they fall asleep. After all, Sunday is supposed to be a "day of rest"!

Even those of us whose house of worship is in a working class or poor neighborhood, what would it cost us as congregations and as individuals to evangelize our unsaved neighbors? Here, we really could do some good, we might find souls that need help, but the help might be too costly for us to deal with. And then, the resistance when it occurred might not be very polite.

Our world is in some ways very different from the world that Jesus and the first generation of disciples lived in. For one, they lived in an age when if you could convince a man of something, he would give in. Nowadays, you can convince a man, but he won't give in. If he loses the debate, he protects himself from being convinced by saying, "It's just your opinion." Our education system has failed us miserably, by taking away the certainty that there is a real right and real wrong, not only in morality, but in almost every other field, sometimes even in science.

I think the Church (now I'm using capital C, meaning all of us) has to realise that its responsibility is not to save the world, but to make disciples of all nations, starting with ourselves, and that making disciples cannot mean that we force our neighbors to be disciples. If it turns out that where we live, our honest efforts to share the good news with those around us is met with disinterest or hostility, so be it. But if it turns out that the good news is given a hearing and is accepted by some, but at a price, we have to be content to share what we have with them.

Finally, we have to realize that the populations around us are not static, but that there is a rate of turnover. That means, we don't just try to evangelize for a year and then give up. The work of sharing the good news goes on 24/7 because it is the responsibility of every member of the Body of Christ. There is no one who cannot share the good news with at least one person, acquaintance or stranger, every day. The sharing needn't be an overt or verbal testimony. It can be so much as a smile or a kind word outwardly, and a prayer "Lord, give the increase" inwardly. Since it is all the Lord's work, not ours, we needn't trouble ourselves either about the visible results. This is where, I think, we run into trouble the most, and to no avail.