Holy Prophet Amos

Sermon 3rd Sunday after Pentecost — Amos

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST !!! 

Today we celebrate the Holy Prophet Amos. Amos came from Judah, but he proclaimed his prophesy to Israel (the northern kingdom). Jeroboam II, and his father before him, had conquered much of the neighbouring territories, including parts of the kingdom of Judah, and initiated a time of relative peace and prosperity. He was not careful with his conquering and the pagan practices of those lands he conquered began to influence the people of Israel. Israel, like us today enjoyed relative prosperity, and relative ease . . . but it was a prosperity that only some enjoyed, a prosperity that was built on the backs of the poor. There was a great disparity between the rich and the poor, bribes being paid to pervert justice, cheating in business.  

He confronted the people and the king about their unjust behaviour. He was not an “official prophet” and the official prophet took offense at Amos and his words of repentance, and told Amos to go back to Judah. And so he went back to Judah and wrote down his prophecy, becoming the first of the written prophets. But before he left, he told the king of Israel and his professional prophet that Israel would be wiped out. 

In Israel the rich used their riches to take advantage of the poor. Mighty and wealthy people behaved the way they wanted to, and the poor just had to get in line and take what was dished out to them. This inequity Amos denounced. . . . Jeraboam II’s father set up altars for the recently conquered to their gods. Amos decried the cult of prostitution that became a metaphor for Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. The religions of the neighbouring people did not care for the poor and the afflicted the way the religion of Israel’s God demanded. People treated the poor badly and still pretended to worship God on the Sabbath. 

Amos’ famous lines have been oft quoted, about how worship of God means nothing if one behaves unjustly towards the poor: “You turn judgement into wormwood and leave off righteousness in the earth. . .  I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.. . . . But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” He was saying that if we have no justice in how we treat one another then it makes our worship of God meaningless. And because they did not turn from their evil ways, God allowed them to be obliterated. Within 30 years, Israel was no more a nation. 

Amos starts his book of prophesy by reminding the neighbouring countries that they are not exempt from God’s demands that they behave justly. We must look at our nation, and how we live in relative ease, and also how the rich live off of the misery of the poor. The words of Amos 2600 years ago still apply to us. If we allow the poor to be afflicted and do nothing to help them, we too could be obliterated as a nation. 

In today’s Gospel Jesus tells us about our darkness. He warns us that if we think our darkness is really light, then our self deception increases the darkness. . . . And when we are in darkness, we are really bad judges of what is darkness and what is light. . . . . . and . . . most of us have some degree of darkness in our mind — our νοῦς — that part of us — our mind that intuitively can see God’s glory, once we bring our darkness to God and let Him heal it. 

A man cannot serve two masters, for he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. 

What good is any of our external finery if we are blind? What can we see of it? How can we take pleasure in it?

Jesus says we cannot serve two masters. We must serve God, or be enslaved by our passions. Jesus particularly singles out greed and how it enslaves us to wealth. For the anxiety that comes from worry over wealth, wounds our vital parts. 

St. Paul tells us to “Rejoice in our sufferings.” Our world has a hard time hearing that our sufferings can work for our healing. But this is what a physician does: he or she prescribes medicine, or surgery, or exercise or diet that may not be comfortable and may make part of us suffer. Rejoicing is hard, sometimes; it requires us to look at our sufferings in a different way than our culture does. 

Instead, our world tells us to care about status, material things, stuff — rather than the health of our own soul, or even the health of the world at large. Our culture encourages us to be selfish, to please ourselves, to look at what serves ourselves — but that is destructive both of ourselves and those who are wounded by our selfishness. 

The Christianity-ish-ness of our culture likes to pretend that we CAN serve two masters; so, when our culture runs at odds with God, we are told that it is somehow “OK”. And there are many who will justify why it is “OK”.  But it is not OK. What is an abomination to God is always an abomination to God, regardless of whether it moves someone’s agenda forward or not.

How do we live the Kingdom of God in this Mammon loving world? — we love; we live in a healing way for ourselves and those we encounter; we Live the presence of God, in us, in those we meet —  Putting aside hate, fear, and anxiety. We see other people as created in the Image of God, and our way of treating others is how we treat God. 

We are anxious about much. Jesus doesn’t say “don’t concern yourself with the bodies needs.” For, as St. John Chrysostom said: Though the soul needs no food, it cannot endure to remain in the body unless the body is fed.” But there is much about our body that we cannot control; how tall we are, how long we live, whether we go bald or not, what sickness we may have to endure. Yet Orthodoxy teaches us to make the body serve the mind, spirit, and soul, and not the other way around. This is why we have a fast right now. 

Yet in spite of what we must endure in this life, Jesus tells us to seek His Kingdom first, above all. This is why we are here. This service is about the Kingdom of God. When I invoke the Kingdom at the beginning of the service, the Kingdom comes to us for this moment. For the duration of this service we stand in Eternity. We worship with the angels. When we leave this service, the challenge is to bring that touch of Eternity into our everyday lives, to our work life, our family life, our playing in life. . . to actively live the grace of God . . . the grace that changes us

To Him whose grace that is, be all Glory honour and worship; now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen. 

All Saints

Sunday of All Saints

 

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

CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST !!

   Today is the Sunday of All Saints — ALL Saints, whether known or unknown. We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. Today’s Gospel starts with Jesus telling us that if we acknowledge Him, He will acknowledge us; if we deny Him, He will deny us. 

How do we acknowledge or deny Jesus before men? Sometimes we see this as a manipulative meme on social media to get us to copy and past someone else’s post. How do we acknowledge Christ? We must do so with our heart, mind, words, and deeds. For if we only think about God, but do nothing about what we think, then we are engaging in mental manipulation. If we do nothing about our thoughts about God, it means nothing that we think of God. This is the trap of the “spiritual but not religious”. I understand why some must say that — some have been traumatized by religious people; but it has become the number one cop-out (yes, I’m old enough to say “cop out”) The number one cop-out for not following God. We must acknowledge Christ in deeds, words, mind and heart. We cannot leave part of that out without turning our faith into an obscure meaningless mental exercise. 

   And how do we put our thoughts into action? We must realize that everyone is our neighbour, even those who we find annoying. Every human is created in God’s Image — how we treat them is how we treat God. St. Maria Skobtsova of Paris said: At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked if I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick and the prisoners. 

   Jesus tells us that He has come not to bring peace but a sword. How do we understand this when so many other places He has said “Peace”?

   What is this Peace that Jesus brings us? It is not like what the world offers. We Orthodox, above all, are rightfully wary of making a peace that betrays our faith. This is not the peace that Jesus offers us; yet it is often the peace the world offers. And such is a peace that Jeremiah warns us against: “They have healed the wounds of my people lightly, saying: ‘Peace, peace’ And there is no peace. Were they ashamed to commit their sin? No, not ashamed at all; they did not know how to blush.” Such a peace puts a band-aid over a gushing wound and ignores it for as long as it can until it erupts. Then we wonder, “What happened?”

   Christ offers us a peace that heals our soul and body and mind and heart. How can we have peace if disease ravages our body, our soul? Yet what our culture offers us often is full of noise and disquietness, and disease. 

   Peace — We hear among our society that we should respect peace above our faith. “Don’t make audacious claims for Christ.” To them it is better to get along. And we also see the actions of some who claim to be of faith, but their actions reveal envy, jealousy, strife, anger. They seek to use religion to justify greed, murder, slander, lies and ultimately IDOLATRY. But that some abuse religion doesn’t mean that our faith must be watered down to accommodate the fears of others. Peace with righteousness is a good thing. Being at Peace with evil is a horrible thing. We regularly see people insisting on peace with a system of bigotry, racism, and inhumanity. There are many things that are going on in our society today that are an abomination: things like abortion, the traumatizing the children of immigrants, the deliberate making of the lives of the poor more difficult, the cold blooded murder of people of colour.  . . These are the sorts of things that the Kingdom of God overturns. These are the things that Jesus tells us He has come to address. We cannot make peace with the evils of our society in order to “get along”. 

   Our loyalty to God must come before our loyalty to jobs, friends, even to family. God created us. God is saving us. Our friends and family can be part of that, or they can stand against it. 

   This is the choice that the saints made time and time again. They chose Christ over getting along. They chose Christ over their own family. They chose Christ over the temporal gains of greed and the other passions. They chose Christ over monetizing their own Life. We are invited by our culture to monetize our life, to chose the right career path, to accumulate the right stuff. It is slavery. We cannot allow this — we must not let anything come before Christ. The millions of new-Martyrs of Russia would not betray the Faith to a godless government. The betrayals our culture asks of us are much more subtle. 

   This is the choice that the saints of the Old Testament made without even being able to see the result of the promise —  as the epistle said “of whom the world was not worthy”, Yet without us, their witness is not complete. In the reading last night from Isaiah, God invites us to be His witnesses. In Christ, the promise they hoped for comes to fruition. This is the choice that a disciple of Christ makes. 

   As we celebrate ALL the saints today, whether known or unknown, yet known unto God, God calls us to become saints, to become holy ones. You; me; all of us: God calls us to follow Him and become His saints — become more than we are comfortable with — become the humans that God created us to be. 

   And there is a sense that we owe it to the Church and to the world to strive to be saints. Our faith came to these parts through the work of God’s saints: St. Herman of Alaska, St. Innocent of Moscow (our patron), St. Sebastian of Jackson, who was the founding priest of many parishes in the Pacific NorthWest (who is our spiritual great-grandfather), St. Tikhon of Moscow who laboured in this vineyard before he went back to become Patriarch during the beginning of the Soviet era in Russia, St. John of Shanghai and San Fransisco who reposed at the Cathedral in Seattle escorting the Kursk Root Icon from that very place in Russia that has blessed our mission so richly. These saints brought us the Holy Orthodox faith.  We owe it to them, and to our children to work to plant the cross here in Kitsap County, and in our own hearts. 

To Him be all glory honour and worship, now and ever and unto ages of ages. 

Who is my neighbour?

Sermon on the event of National Chaos

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 

C Праздником

   Today is the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, and the Sunday after the Ascension into Heaven of our Lord. I had intended to mention the importance of that First Council. And it is important: what they accomplished, how they accomplished it, how they stood up for the Faith once delivered — how they humbled themselves and asked not “What do you think?” But rather “What were you taught?”

   And I also intended to mention the crucial significance of the Ascension, how it completes the Incarnation, how Christ brings our humanity, sanctified, as a gift to His Father, creating for us a path to the Kingdom of Heaven, how He finishes His undoing of Adam’s sin. . . . and more of our Holy Paradox to revel in. 

   And much has happened this week. We are gathered here for the first Public Service since the “Stay At Home” order. This week we reached 100,000 deaths due to this pandemic. Some of them have been Orthodox Clergy: Archbishop Pimen, Bishop Benjamin of Zheleznogorsk died in the hospital in Kursk, ProtoPresbyter Paul and early in this pandemic ProtoDeacon Alexander in Las Vegas. While we enjoy having a public service this week we must remember those whom this disease has taken from us, and pray for them. Even though in this county we are entering Phase II, I fear that we shall see a spike soon in other places because of other things that are happening. 

   We cannot ignore the pain and unrest that is bubbling up in some places of our nation, and raging in others. We have seen privilege used to attack others this week, and we have seen a man murdered with impunity. People are angry, and rightly so. Yet the evil one often does not care if our anger is righteous or not, he can use it. And there are humans also who want to exploit our anger for their own twisted purposes. Like a forest that has been dried out by hot weather and not enough rain over time, all it takes is for someone to ignite the fire, and watch it take off. This is true today, and it was true in Jesus’ day. 

The events of our day cause us to pause and question: “Who is my neighbour?”

   One day a lawyer came to Jesus and asked Him what the greatest commandment was. Jesus throws the question back at him. The lawyer says the Sh’ma: Thou shalt love the Lord the God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. And the second: Love thy neighbour as thyself.  But the lawyer wants to justify himself and asks “Who is my neighbour?” He thinks that most of the people he meets are not his neighbour, and that he owes them nothing, that they are people that he can freely despise and hate.

Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Remember that in Jesus’ day the Samaritans were despised by Jews. 

We in the Orthodox Church take a number of approaches to this parable. 

   “We meet all sorts of people along the Jericho Road, and some of them are victims whose only claim is that they have need. Along the Jericho Road we meet people who think that life is what they can take and what they can exact, what they can demand from us or from others. We also meet along the way people who feel that religion is one thing and the cries of humanity are another.” (Rev. Henry Durham) We must admit that in certain ways, we are all of those people. 

   We are asked, by the Church, to look deeper and consider ourselves the man who fell among thieves, and Christ as the Samaritan Who comes to save us from death. We have visited wounds upon ourselves: “I am the man who fell among thieves, even my own thoughts; they have covered all my body with wounds, and I lie beaten and bruised. But come to me, O Christ my Saviour and heal me.” In some ways we are our own worst enemy. Our thoughts and passions have beaten us up and robbed us. Yet Christ comes to heal our self-inflicted wounds and to bind them up and to heal them. I would be an irresponsible priest if I did not mention this aspect. Sometimes it is we who are in need of mercy. 

   Jesus asks us, through this parable: Who is our neighbour? And we must look around us at the other people. Just as this lawyer wants to limit “who is my neighbour?”  . . . just as the priest and the levite both wanted to limit, “who is my neighbour?”  . . . so we often want to do the same. The final point of this parable is that the one who is merciful is the neighbour. Sometimes our neighbor’s wounds are obvious; sometimes it is hard to see another’s wound through their hate. We must be the one who has mercy. 

Who is our neighbour?

   Our neighbour is everyone. And in this day of internet and global communications, our neighbour may well be in another state or on another continent. We must be the one who has mercy. We must be the one who listens, who hears, who gives space for others who hide their wounds. 

   And it is easy to let our ears go deaf to Jesus’ call to be merciful when there are so many others out there wounding and leaving for dead. We see how senselessly people are despised for no reason other than they don’t look like us or don’t talk like us. It is easy to despise others. And today it is easy to despise those who do not even try to hide that they despise others. But this is not the Christian way. 

   Jesus said to the lawyer and to us: “go thou and do likewise.” Go and be merciful the same way this despised man was merciful in His parable. We, with the lawyer, still keep searching — trying to justify in our minds, finding ways in which others are not our neighbour. 

May the Lord God have mercy on us all.