Deals with the Divine.

Homily 581 – 36 APE
Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, Ames, Iowa
February 11, 2024
Epistle – (280-ctr) 1 Timothy 1:15-17
Gospel – (62) Matthew 15:21-28

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

This Canaanite Woman – not a Jew, a gentile, not able to participate in the Temple, or any of the Jewish rituals – this woman is a brave figure.  She has, what they say in Yiddish, chutzpah.

Here she was, a minority, a foreigner in the land of Judea, the land of the Jews, and yet she had the audacity to approach Christ.  She knew she wasn’t worthy of Him, at least by the definitions of the day.  She was a woman, and not a Jew.  Two strikes.

She pestered the disciples of Jesus, trying to get the attention of Jesus.

And from that pestering, and from her humility, characterizing herself as a dog, she got what she was after.  From this event, there are two things I want to think about.

First, she didn’t pretend she was worthy.  She didn’t present Christ with a resume of good works, or religious achievements.  She didn’t say that she tithed or prayed three times a day, or fasted when she was supposed to fast.

None of the things that the Jews thought were necessary to receive a blessing from God.

We tend to do that.  We tend to say, Look, God, look at what I’m doing – or, more likely, we make promises about what we will do.  We bargain with God.  And depending on how important the thing is to us, we offer something that we believe to be equally impressive to God.

We beg for our lives and promise God that if we survive, we will never miss church again, or we will become a monastic, or we will become a missionary and tell everyone about the miracle.

Or maybe we want a job, and we’ll offer something lesser, like promising to say our prayers every morning and night.

Maybe we are suffering, and we tell God that if he will remove our suffering, and heal us, we will do something significant for Him.  We’ll donate everything we own to the Church.  Interesting thing about those promises – we don’t generally keep them, do we?  We don’t see people lining up to join the monasteries, or emptying their bank accounts.  We barely have people agreeing to avoid sin.

The wonderful aspect of this witness on behalf of this woman was that it shows us none of those things are necessary – even though they are what we are supposed to do anyway.

The woman shows us that we depend not on ourselves, our actions, our behaviors to receive healing from God.  Quite the opposite.  We rely completely on God’s mercy for us.  St. Paul reinforces this idea in the letter to Timothy which we read earlier.  Jesus came into the world to save sinners.  And he called himself the first of sinners.

In the underlying language, it is really stressing the reality of sin, to the point of implying St. Paul is the only sinner.  And that isn’t false humility.

Paul recognizes what so few of us do.  Regardless of our actions, nothing will remove our sin from us.  Nothing.  We have to repent.  Paul tells us that this is to reveal Christ’s patience with us – never ending, never exhaustible patience.  Patience for what?

Our repentance.  Our humility.  Our recognition that we can’t change anything, and we have to rely on the Creator to take our effort and change us.

This is what the woman states to Christ.  Even the dogs, she says, get to eat the scraps from the master’s table.  And Christ says that this statement, by itself, demonstrates her faith.  So it describes faith to us. 

Faith is, first and foremost, not just mental assent to a set of facts about and untested or unproven ideas.  It is the altering of our life’s trajectory because they are true.  She doesn’t say, “I believe.” But rather she tells us the implications of her belief in reality – both who she is, and who Christ is.  It is really quite dramatic.

So, our actions do not earn anything for us.  Period.  Our repentance doesn’t earn anything for us.  Repentance for a Christian should be as necessary as oxygen or heartbeat.  It is what brings us life.  Not a reward.

So, the second point is that the Canaanite Woman wasn’t asking for herself.  It was about her daughter, tormented.  Innocent.  Nothing quite so horrifying to us as the suffering of children.

And in God’s eyes, we are all His Children.  The way we feel about our own children, or the children around us, is the same that God feels about us – even the ancient like me.

Jesus told God He’d rather not die, but would if God deemed it necessary.  I’m equally confident that this woman, and many of us, would prefer not to debase and humiliate ourselves, but would if God deemed it necessary.

And He does.  He totally does.  Why?  Because as the Canaanite woman demonstrates, we are made to love.  Not ourselves, but God, and the things and beings that God created.

Why can’t we love ourselves?  It’s a good question.  On some level, loving ourselves isn’t really love.  If we can call it selfishness, should we call it at the same time love?  How can selfishness and love exist together?

We need to rethink what love is.  Love is what St. Paul describes in his first letter to the Corinthians.  Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

Don’t just hear, listen!

Homily 576 – 31 APE
Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, Ames, Iowa
January 7, 2023
Epistle – (224-ctr) – Ephesians 4:7-13 and( 42) – Acts 19:1-8
Gospel – (8) – Matthew 4:12-17 and (3) – John 1:29-34

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

In listening to the Old Testament readings for the Vespers liturgy of Theophany I had my own epiphany of sorts – weak pun intended.

The Third reading, from Exodus, has this passage:

There God laid down for him statutes and judgments and he tested him there and said, “If you listen to the voice of the Lord, your God, and do what is well-pleasing before him, heed his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not bring on you any of the diseases that I brought on the Egyptians. For I am the Lord who heals you”.

If you listen – listen – to the voice of the Lord.  Not just hear, but listen.  Hearing can go in one ear and out the other, but listening is putting what is heard into action – taking it to heart.

This is what Jesus may mean when He said, “He who has ears to hear, should hear.”  Maybe that would be appropriately translated, “He who has ears to hear, should listen.”

We all hear so much in our day.  Many of us keep a lot of noise going on the background of our lives.  A radio station or streaming service, perhaps, maybe we listen to podcasts, or we just have the hearing of conversations going on around us.

I have a particularly difficult time in noisy environments.  I have difficulty in focusing on one conversation when other conversations are going on around me.

So, what we end up doing is hearing a lot, but not listening to any of it.  It becomes to us as noise.  It doesn’t communicate anything.

I doubt seriously Christ or the people of that day struggled with that scenario.  They didn’t have the noisemakers which are so ubiquitous in our world today.  Yet, they could still hear, without listening.  And that is what Christ warned us against.

Don’t just hear – listen.  The first tasks of Christians, especially in the evangelical traditions I grew up in, was always thought to be telling – speaking – to others about Christ and about our faith.  Witnessing to what Christ has done for us.

There is a role for that, certainly, but not before listening.  We have to listen, spend time listening, and trying to understand, before beginning to proclaim to the world the thoughts and interpretations we have developed.

We have to listen, and compare with the interpretations of others throughout history and indeed throughout the world.  This is the sacred role that Holy Tradition plays in our Christian life.  It is said that Holy Tradition is listening to the voices of Christians throughout time.

Listening is our first job as Christians.  Learning, not teaching.  Most of you know my son just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Education, and also English.  That means he first spends the time learning both subject matter and teaching skills before presuming to teach others.

Christianity is the same way, although in many cases today we ignore that.  I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen and heard on podcasts, videos, in print, and on streaming services that have begun teaching, when the chrism is not yet dry.  They haven’t listened yet.  They have heard – they have responded – but they haven’t really listened.

When St. Paul was converted, it appears from the scripture that he immediately went out and started preaching.  But that isn’t the case at all.  Paul was converted, and certainly preached his experience.

But he preached doctrine only after a three-year stint in Arabia and in Damascus, according to his Epistle to the Galatians.  And only then, he went to the Apostles themselves to complete his learning.

After that, he began his missionary journey.

Of the people Christ instructed to “Go and tell” they were the people He had healed of a physical malformation or a case of casting out a demon.  What those people were telling were their own experience, not instructing others in doctrine or dogma or ascetical practices.

The risks of teaching before listening are immense.  The risk of coming to a conclusion before listening are immense.  Another of the Old Testament readings for Theophany tells the account of the Governor of the King of the Assyrians, who visited the prophet Elisha.  This governor had leprosy, and Elisha told him to go was in the Jordan River seven times.

The governor, in his pride and arrogance, got angry – that wasn’t the answer he wanted.  He wanted Elisha to come out and lay hands on him and heal him.  That was how it – quote – “should be done”.  In his mind they had better rivers in Assyria, anyway.

Then his servants went to him and spoke some sensible words.  Instead of being angry, why not listen?  Why not try what the prophet says?  And the king listened.  And the king was cleansed.

How many of us approach the message of Christ, the message of the Church, with preconceived notions about what is right and wrong and expected?  Where did that preconceived notion originate?

Most of the time, it originates either with the world, or a false prophet.  We can see it all around us today even, with all the so-called prophet interpreting the prophecies, saying this has to happen before Christ can return or that must take place to allow Christ to return.  None of it is worthy even of hearing.

The Church offers us the Truth.  Be it through Scripture, or through the words of those considered elders and holy persons of the Church, or through the services and readings, the Church communicates to us Truth.

It is then up to us to not just hear – but to listen.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

The humiliation of incarnation.

Homily 575 – Theophany
Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, Ames, Iowa
January 6, 2023

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

Note:  This homily was delivered extemporaneously, and is transcribed with light editing.

Today we’ve come to the baptism of Christ. We also see in the gospel reading for today why in the West the feast is not called Theophany but Epiphany.

The word basically means the same thing.  It’s a revelation to or revelation of something.  With me, Theophany is a revelation of God and Epiphany would mean that’s a revelation to us – our revelation. We are the one to have an Epiphany.

And so when we look at that, what we’re seeing here is not just the importance of Christ’s obedience to God to be baptized. John’s obedience to Christ that he be the one to baptize Him.

We see the revelation of the entirety of everything in this one feast which is WHY this feast was the most important feast other than Pascha in the ancient times. We see the revelation of Everything, that is we see God the Father telling us that this Jesus Christ is His Son, the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity.

We see the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove. We see Christ’s obedience and we also see all these things that are coming in to plan. Sometimes it’s good to remember these things that happen because when these things happen, they remind us that what we see and what we feel and what we contact in the world is not what God created it to be.

What we see is a world that’s fallen. What we see is a world that is crumbling. We see a world that is subject to corruption.

What does that mean subject to corruption? It means it doesn’t have life. It is in the process of dying and decaying. So whenever you hear or see someone in the world say “Well this is the way God made it”, no far from it! This is not what God made. God, yes, made it but God made it unfallen. We made it fall.

We are the one who brought the world – the creation, the cosmos – into this decaying, dead process. And we did that because of our own ego.

I think about in my own life and times – unemployed or underemployed or how do you want to look at it – and I thought – and I confess that many times I would think to myself, I would apply for that job, but that job is beneath me you know?

I don’t want to be a custodian. I mean my father-in-law was and he found joy and peace in being a custodian, and he took care of his family. I had no right and no reason to be able to say that job is beneath me. I’m thinking, “I’m a college-educated guy! I’ve got licenses and professional reputations and all this other stuff!”

That’s my confession but now take that, and think about Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God enthroned at the right hand of God from all eternity. The one through whom God made all of this – Creation –and the will of the Father was that Christ come here and not just be God in this world, but to be incarnate. To become part of creation. To become a human.

How beneath him was that? We look at the circumstances around his birth, unwedded mother – betrothed but unwedded – in Bethlehem, with no place to stay. He was homeless. He was born in a stable with animals. He was laid for his first bed as incarnate God on this planet, he was laid in a manger.

It’s sure the icons that we see of the nativity tell us that revealed to us that even in that moment, when he was wrapped in swallowing clothes, that was foretelling of his death and burial.

You will see him in the icons of the nativity, wrapped in burial clothes and lying in a manger that ostensibly looks very much like a tomb, a coffin.

From the very beginning we see what Christ was doing. Christ never owned anything other than the clothes on his back. He didn’t have a job. He didn’t have means to support himself.

When He came to John, John recognized what was happening, and Jesus was then treated like the person He was – the Son of God – and yet still in that treatment he was given, He offered humility.

He said, “No John you have to baptize me because this is the Will of God.”

So as we go through our days on this sojourn in this place, remember who we are as sons and daughters of God, as members of the Kingdom of Heaven.

But also remember that we imitate our Lord in everything that we do. That we serve others in every way that we can, just as Christ washed the feet of the apostles.

How humbling has Christ ascended the cross and sacrificed his own ego in the garden of Eden? In the garden of Gethsemane, the new Eden. We remember these things and we imitate these things and we no longer think these things are beneath me. Rather we think this is what Jesus would have done.

He would have served. He would have found, even sought out, the unlovable – the ones who are dismissed by society. Those who are even dismissed by the rest of the Christian world.

Those are the people that Christ would have looked for and would have served.

And I encourage us to do the same because, beloved, when we find that humility, when we’re able to offer ourselves to others with abandon, with freedom, the same freedom that Christ had:  that’s when we find the essence of who we are.

That’s when we find the joy of living in the Kingdom, and that’s where we find eternal life

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.