 Christ is in our midst! We are pleased to offer the following services via Zoom for Holy Week:
4/23/21 -- Lazarus Saturday Compline (7 PM PT) 4/24/21 -- Lazarus Saturday Typika (Orthros 8 AM, Typika 9 AM PT) 4/24/21 -- Palm Sunday Vespers (5 PM PT) 4/25/21 -- Palm Sunday Typika (Orthros 9 AM, Typika 10 AM PT) 4/25/21 -- Holy Monday Bridegroom Matins (7 PM PT) 4/28/21 -- Holy Thursday Bridegroom Matins (8:30 PM PT) 4/29/21 -- Passion Gospels Service (6 PM PT) 4/30/21 -- Apokathelosis (Removal from the Cross)(3 PM PT) 4/30/21 -- Lamentations Service (8:30 PM PT) 5/1/21 -- Anastasis and Typika (Pascha Vigil) (11 PM PT) 5/2 -- Agape Vespers (3 PM PT)
0 Comments
 bulletin_4_18_21_--_st._mary_of_egypt_sunday.docx
In today's gospel, we hear Jesus predicting for a third time his life giving Passion, and we begin to learn and feel the weight of what it really means to be baptized into his death, that we may rise with him in his third-day resurrection. James and John, yearning for the coming glory, make a mistake that is common to many of us to make. They make the mistake of assuming that the Kingdom of God, which is wholeness, life, peace, love and justice, can be brought about through the broken methods of acquiring power that hold sway in this fallen world. They assume that the Kingdom is a military kingdom, where God's throne will be flanked by appointed human warriors. They assume, as Jesus points out, that they will be expected to lord it over their enemies as conquering tyrants. That this is the way to be whole. Christ gently but solemnly reminds them that to truly be great in the Kingdom of peace and life is to play by different rules. To be willing to lay down your life so that your neighbor may be whole. This is the transfiguring power that topples empires. St Mary of Egypt, whom we honor today, initially made the same mistake as the apostles. Unlike James and John, who did not understand until after Christ had already been through his passion, Mary dedicated her life to the Kingdom of God. Prior to her monastic calling, St. Mary was known for her sexual liaisons with many men, some of them clergy, pilgrims, perhaps even bishops. In order to see the beauty of her story, however, it's worth noting a few things. First, to our knowledge, Mary was not a sex worker. She was not forced into her sexual practice by poverty, nor did this appear to be her trade. The attitudes of the Church towards sex workers across time have often been harmful, but there is also a through-line which recognizes that sex work is work, and is intertwined with the same systems of economic need we see in modern capitalism. Second, Fr Basil, a colleague of mine, insightfully pointed out to me that sex in and of itself was not St. Mary's sin or passion. There are married saints, there are celibate saints. Doubtless there are saints who experienced sexual intimacy in ways we are not aware of. Rather, St. Mary's passion, it can be argued, was the use of sex as a kind of tool for revenge against those whom she held in disdain. As Christ himself says, what goes into a person does not make them unclean. Having sex does not change someone's purity or worth in the eyes of God. Indeed, we now understand that sex can be a way towards mutual self-sacrifice, unity and Christlike love for our partners. But it can also be used for leverage over someone, or to try and discredit them in the eyes of their community, particularly in St. Mary's day when celibacy was held as the ideal state. In seeking power through sexual force, Mary made the same mistake as James and John: thinking that power is all about what I can take or hold over someone, rather than the power of God to resist tyranny and make us whole. Fortunately, St. Mary learned far better than the apostles the lesson that Christ tried to teach. In her story, we see an example of forbearance, humility and love for God's creation which is instructive for people of all genders, not just women. After she took a ship to Jerusalem, something drew her to approach the sepulcher of our Lord. She was stopped by an invisible force. She was stopped by the Theotokos, a woman who also understood God's way of subversive power. Many have mistakenly read this encounter as St. Mary's impurity versus the bodily or sexual purity of the Theotokos. But I think this does a disservice to both women. After all, the Mother of God was famous for her canticle of equalizing divine justice: "He put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he sent away empty." Perhaps Mary was saying to Mary, "Let go of your desire to be mighty, and drink the cup my Son drank, and you will find life and strength at his tomb." Indeed, these words parallel the voice of God which did speak to St. Mary: "Cross the Jordan, and you will find rest." Mary followed the example of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and went to the wilderness, to seek the love of God and to wait upon God's restoring power. Unlike James and John, she did not ask for fame or glory, but for rest, peace and wholeness. In so doing, she relinquished whatever claim she had on her suitors and devoted her life to the work of prayer for the world and "keeping vigil for the salvation of all," as St. Isaac the Syrian says. St. Mary spent the rest of her life in this posture of prayer and deep searching after God. At the end of her life, she received the Eucharist from a wandering priest named Zosima. And then she did indeed find her rest. By this time, she was living the life of the Kingdom of God in the flesh, and the cosmos lived in harmony with her. When she died, a lion came out of the inner desert, weeping and roaring, and lovingly prepared her grave. So tender is the saints' love for creation, so healing are their prayers that all the natural world expresses the love of the coming Kingdom of God. At our best, we can live and pray like that, by God's grace and with God's help. As we approach the passion of our Lord, may we look deep within ourselves and consider whether we are holding on to any grudge, any power, any source of oppression against our neighbor. May we practice true repentance and give the best of ourselves to God and to our neighbor. And may we continue to pray in love and true eros for all creation, that with the world we may participate in the baptism of his death, and be raised to life in his triumph over death. Amen.  Beloved Friends and Parishioners,
I wanted to take a slight detour from our usual news and bulletin updates to share an encouraging witness of a holy woman we’ve been studying in my church history class in seminary. Her name is Pandita Ramabai, and she was a Christian local missionary in India who converted to the faith from a Hindu background. Though not an Orthodox Christian, her story has valuable insights for us, and our convictions as Christian universalists allow us to receive the witness of non-Orthodox saints as instructive in a way that our siblings in the global Orthodox churches may not. Ramabai was born to a progressive Hindu family in India in 1858. Unusual for her time, she was encouraged by her father to study the scriptures of the Hindu religion, something women were not traditionally allowed to do. In continuing her education, she went to study abroad in England and encountered Christianity through an Anglican missionary order. She was deeply moved by the idea of all people having access to God through Christ regardless of sex, caste or social background, a belief which was in contrast with the Hinduism of her time. She was baptized in 1883. Inspired by the work of the Anglicans among sex workers in England, she later returned to India and started a mission for the education and job placement for girls and women, called the Mukti Mission. She continued to teach and write about her Christian faith through the rest of her life. The global missions movement has a mixed legacy, including the smuggling of colonialism into Christian faith. However, I want to highlight Ramabai’s faithful witness as an example of indigenous practice of the gospel, one that we as Orthodox Christians of a Christian universalist stripe can learn from. First, it is worth noting that Ramabai’s conversion to Christianity came about through a deep understanding of her own spiritual and cultural heritage, both the good and the harmful. From a study of the Hindu scriptures, she was compelled by the Hindu spiritual ideal of moksha, or liberation. She yearned to pursue that full freedom, and yet from her deep knowledge of Hinduism, she also knew that this was not believed to be a possibility for women. Her desire for truth and freedom, cultivated from within her own religious sensibilities, led her to Christ. Many would-be converts to Orthodoxy feel a pressure to jettison all measures of “Western culture” and adopt a new context. While the Orthodox faith is a woven garment that must be worn and understood as an integrated whole, Ramabai’s witness is harmonious with the Orthodox practice of inculturating the gospel anew in each context. In order for American Orthodox Christians to understand their faith, we must come to a deep knowledge of our own mixed cultural heritages just as she did. We must learn both the faith we confess and the stories of our own families, communities, ethnicities and ideological traditions, in order to discern where Christ is calling each of us as members of his Body. Second, Ramabai’s deeply held convictions was that salvation and liberation are open to all in Christ, regardless of their background. She joyously proclaimed that “no caste, no sex, no work, and no man was to be depended on to get this everlasting life, but God gave it freely to anyone and everyone who believed on His Son”. As members of the Universalist Orthodox Church, we hold that God in Christ will one day reconcile all beings to himself. And yet, how often do we have such an openness as Pandita Ramabai did to the surprising vastness of God’s love? Are there people whom we might not expect who even now God is drawing to be in fellowship with us? People who do not yet confess Christ, people we may not know or fully trust, people we may see as our enemies? Her posture of openness and dependence on Christ to work out the salvation of his people is one we can emulate, when in humble faith we throw open our doors to welcome the stranger with an appreciation for their unique personhood and the stories they carry. Finally, Pandita Ramabai’s method of evangelism is instructive for us. When she opened the Mukti Mission, she did not require the women who benefited from its services to confess Christian faith. She made the Bible available along with other religious books, and spoke openly and warmly about the love of God and its impact on her life when the opportunity arose. As a result, many of her students came to Christian faith on their own, moved by her service, testimony and faithful witness to the liberation promised by God in Christ. Orthodox parishes in the Americas have often taken a similar centripetal approach to missions due in part to our small percentage of the American religious landscape. But in the midst of a crumbling edifice of American white supremacist conservative Christianity which threatens the public image of all American churches, many Orthodox churches have either remained in a kind of stasis of survival, or have made unholy alliances with conservative Protestant pundits out of a shared fear of annihilation. What if, instead, we followed Ramabai’s example, and lived in humble, vocal witness to the deifying grace of God poured out on all flesh? We can speak with the wisdom of the saints, the Church fathers and mothers who have come before us, and live the life in Christ for the flourishing of our neighbors. We can speak with joy and hope, not coercing or retreating in fear, but simply living with openness in the joy of the resurrection. Like St. Nicholas Kavasilas, we can live eucharistically, and name the presence of God’s grace in our experiences and in the goodness of the world around us and its people. Like Pandita Ramabai, we can speak of the ways that Christ comes to save you and me, a salvation that is not just cognitive, but existential and incarnate. When we live the gospel in this way, we may indeed bring water to many thirsty ones; indeed, this will be the Living Water of God’s love, just as our patron St. Photini received from Christ all those years ago. Blessed Lent, Sdn. Micah Lazarus  bulletin_4_11_21_--_st._john_klimakos_sunday.docx
As we pass into the latter half of Lent, we come to the feast of St. John Klimakos, or St. John of the Ladder, so named for his treatise on asceticism, "The Ladder of Divine Ascent." St John is invested in revealing a way by which human beings can attain to what the Fathers and Mothers call "the angelic life". It is ironic, yet perhaps fitting, that on the feast of a man who conversed with the angels, we see the power of our Lord in today's gospel employed against the demons. Jesus confronts the supernatural as a man brings his son who is possessed by a spirit for healing. Many Christians may be led to over-emphasize the idea of spiritual warfare, looking around every corner of God's grace-filled creation for demonic presence. Others may under-emphasize the meaning of spiritual warfare, suggesting that these stories of Christ's triumphant victory over evil are merely a reflection of first century cosmology with nothing to teach us. I invite us to pause for a moment, and to truly sit with the suffering of the boy and his father, as Christ did. "Since he was a child, the spirit has often thrown him into fire and water, to destroy him;" We may not have experienced a case of demon possession, but how many of us have been thrown into fire and water by any number of circumstances? By oppression from the powerful? By hard times? By others acting out their hatred on us? By internalized fears and angers bringing us to self-loathing? By loss, by grief? We might add any number of forces to this list. And perhaps, like the boy and his father, we are at a loss for how we might be set free. The boy's father reaches out and says to Jesus, "I believe! Help my unbelief." St. Mark's witness to the gospel often casts faith in this light, as a kind of desperate courage, of reaching out when you have no other options. You aren't sure whether change is possible, but you reach out nonetheless and that in itself is a kind of faith. St John Cassian, another monastic, says that true dependence on God is when we are willing to ask to be given faith at all. Jesus, as the Son of God and God himself, delivers the boy from his suffering. It is through the power of God's love and life for us that we are delivered from anything that might seek to destroy us. Jesus, as the Author of Life, the Author of that power, manifests it with boldness for the liberation of his beloved child. And so like the father of the boy, we may say, "I want to believe! I want to have that kind of faith. How do I do it?" The apostles asked the same question. They questioned Jesus, "Why couldn't we remove the demon?" Surely they as Jesus' chosen should be powerful enough. But Jesus tells them, "This kind can only be driven out through prayer and fasting." And so we come to St. John Klimakos, who teaches us about the tools of our Lord, the tools for a life which takes us through suffering and into healing, wholeness, and life. With some fear and trembling, I want to offer a brief excerpt from St. John's account of the monastic life. Keep in mind that this course is intended for monks, but the spiritual principles may give us some insight into Jesus' words. St John tells a story of some ascetics: "Some punished themselves in the blazing sun, others tortured themselves in the cold, while others, again, drank only as much water as would keep them from dying of thirst. [...] These were the shouts and cries they raised up to the Lord [...] "Just show the light of Your face and we will be saved." Another would say: "Give light to those sitting humbly in darkness and in the shadow of death." [...] It seemed to me that those who have fallen and are penitent are more blessed than those who have never fallen, because through having fallen, they have pulled themselves up by a sure resurrection." When we go through suffering, or when we cause harm to ourselves or one another through our sins, we will overcome by our dependence on God's love and our practice of discipleship in proportion to our spiritual maturity. Certainly, most of us would not benefit spiritually from heat stroke or frostbite. Fr. Lev Gillet reminds us that "Asceticism has neither sense nor value if it is not an expression of love." But there is a truth to St. John's words, both that our human suffering often feels like death, and that we can overcome seemingly insurmountable suffering if we keep our eyes fixed on Christ and reach out in love to Him who is the source of our life. No ideology, no violence, no authority, no natural or supernatural power, can destroy us, because we belong to Christ who gives us abundant life both now and forever. Indeed, Jesus himself predicts at the end of our gospel that even he must go through suffering and death. But that this death will not destroy him. And because of his death and resurrection, neither will our death destroy us. St John's text goes through thirty steps by which devoted ascetics may attain the angelic life. In other words, he shows us one way by which we might receive not just survival of our suffering, but a new and radiant way of being in the world, which is itself a first fruit of the Kingdom and eternal life. While his text is a wonderful spiritual resource for someone to work through with the guidance of a spiritual elder, many laity not called to monasticism might find it helpful to hear the words of St. Nicholas Kavasilas, who lived almost a thousand years after St. John. St. Nicholas speaks with the same spiritual wisdom about what this new life in Christ can bring to us: "One need not undertake extremes of asceticism, or eat unaccustomed food, or change one's dress, or ruin one's health, or attempt any extraordinary feat. We remove our life from this visible world into the unseen world by changing not our place but our life in all its aspects. It was He who came down to earth and retrieved the image and lifted it up ... He made us heavenly beings and established us in a heavenly life, not by leading us up to heaven but by bending heaven and bringing it down to us." May we take comfort in Christ's saving power, may we stand beside our fellow children of God and serve them in love, and may we run with renewed vigor to complete the fast and arrive at the glorious resurrection of our Lord, by which we also rise to the fullness of eternal life. Amen.  bulletin_--_sunday_of_the_cross__4_4_21_.docx
Christ is in our midst! Today is the mid-point of the fast. We are halfway through our journey towards the cross and the resurrection of our Lord. Fittingly, the Church has placed this feast, the Sunday of the Cross, at the exact right moment in the fast to remind us of our goal. When we may be losing steam, we are called to remember the power of the cross, both its glory and its cost. In the holy gospel, Christ lays down a similar invitation to his followers. "Whoever would be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me." The calling is high, and the stakes are radical. Yet for those who persevere in discipleship, Jesus promises a fitting and deeply holistic reward. "Some of you will not taste death before you see the Kingdom of God come with great power." The stakes are indeed high. "Take up the cross" is not a sentimental idea. It is possible, easy even, to over-etherealize this teaching. We can make it about fasting harder, or adding on feats of ascetic discipline, or trying to grin and bear in the face of suffering. Any of these things might be valid tools on our journey towards the Kingdom, but the witness of the saints who were willing to lay down their lives shows us that these tools are only useful when they are rooted in true discipleship. We must consider how to live our lives oriented towards the Kingdom, in such a way that the powers and principalities of this world are shaken by the light of Christ within us, in such a way that our neighbors who don't have the luxury of avoiding suffering are liberated and rise with us. St John Chrysostom points out that "it may happen that a man may suffer and yet not follow Christ, that is, when he does not suffer for Christ’s sake; for he follows Christ, who walks after Him, and conforms himself to His death, despising those principalities and powers under whose power, before the coming of Christ, he committed sin." Jesus' followers must have been shocked that they were being expected to follow him even to the possible consequence of execution by the state. How can we live the gospel, live an embodied love for God and for our neighbor? How can we act with love and justice on behalf of those who suffer under the weight of oppression, who don't have the luxury of choosing not to resist the violence of sinful systems? Christ warns us that whoever tries to save, to guard their life will ultimately lose it. We may still be breathing, acting, going about our daily life. But something deeper, our true vitality, is missing. We play it safe, and so we begin to isolate and separate ourselves from the love of God that animates us and binds us to one another. But when we live open-heartedly, praying for and laying our lives on the line for one another and for God, when we give freely of our time, our privilege and our person for the sake of the Kingdom, we will receive nothing less than eternal life, and the very Kingdom of God arriving in our hearts. As we continue the fast and our journey towards the resurrection, let us remember the cross. May the precious and life-giving cross of our Lord, the call to discipleship, encourage us to give freely and joyfully of ourselves for the wellbeing of all. And may our yearning towards the resurrection remind us of the coming Kingdom which is already arriving, the Kingdom where sorrow, suffering, and the grave itself are overcome by the power of our Lord. I leave you, beloved, with an exhortation from Fr. Lev Gillet: "The gospel brings us the very serious and urgent words of the Master: whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." Am I ready to follow Jesus, bearing my cross? (Not the cross that I may choose, but the one he himself places on my shoulders). Am I ready to accept all the trials or sufferings which may come to me as sharing in the cross of the Saviour? When, in due course, it is my turn to come and place a kiss on the cross which is displayed in the middle of the church, will my kiss be that of an unrepentant sinner, that of Judas, or will it be a gesture which is respectful and superficial but changes nothing in my life, or will it be a sign of adoration, of faith, of tenderness which will be binding unto my whole life? 'Verily, I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the Kingdom of God coming with power.' This does not imply the second and glorious coming of Christ at the end of the world. It means the coming of Christ with the power inaugurated by Pentecost, which the first generation of Christians was about to witness. But It also means an invisible, unspectacular, coming of the Kingdom in fervent and believing hearts. Oh, that this might be my destiny, and that before I die, the Kingdom of Jesus will have taken possession of my soul!" +In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
RSS Feed