 bulletin_5_30_21_--_sunday_of_the_samaritan_woman.docx
Midway between Pascha and the Ascension of our Lord, we commemorate the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman. As St. Photini the Samaritan Woman is also our parish patron, this is a time especially for us to reflect on her encounter with Christ.
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Spiritual Reflection -- John Wimber, St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox-Evangelical Ecumenism5/24/2021  Continuing in our series on ecumenical church history, I want to reflect on the often fraught relationship between Orthodoxy and evangelicalism in American modernity. Speaking myself as a convert from evangelicalism, there are many things I could say. However, I want to approach this reflection from the angle not of politics or doctrine per se, but of piety. In order to do so, let us consider the work of John Wimber and the Vineyard movement. Wimber was a Quaker who later helped found a community of churches in the charismatic movements of the 1960s and 70s. Wimber’s church emphasized a variety of “signs and wonders,” including the possibility of faith healing, speaking in tongues, and other gifts of the Holy Spirit. Key to Wimber’s piety was the idea that these gifts were not tied to a “Second blessing” or separate baptism of the Holy Spirit, but were “the stuff” that Christians were empowered to do and also signs of ongoing communion with God. Wimber’s ministry also reached out to the poor, to recovering drug addicts and others in vulnerable social situations. In interviews, Wimber spoke with a gentleness, an openness to the Holy Spirit but also a willingness to admit that he could neither control nor be certain of how God might manifest in a particular church community’s common life.
Wimber was not Orthodox. However, unlike some of the other charismatics and Pentecostals of his time, he lived out an understanding of divine grace that is broadly compatible with many Orthodox mystics and their experience of God’s energies operating on the human heart. The Orthodox faith has never denied the possibility of charismata in the lives of the saints. Many renowned monastics were said to possess the gift of prophecy, healing touch, or even the power to be in two places at once. Where we differ from some Pentecostals, however, is in our assertion that these extraordinary manifestations of God’s grace are not to be seen as necessary in order to prove our right relationship with God. Wimber understood this, and placed his community’s experience of charismata as one manifestation among many of God’s love and grace present in the midst of the ekklesia. In addition to extraordinary spiritual gifts, Orthodox Christians encounter God’s outpouring grace in myriad ways. Through the Eucharist and other sacraments. Through making the sign of the cross in worship. Through moments where our hymns bring us to an encounter with the Living God and we are moved to tears or to prostrations in the appropriate season. In distinction to our Roman Catholic brethren, our Divine Liturgy is less an orderly ceremony (though it is ordered) and more a continuous flow of sound and prayer. Our common anamnesis of Christ in the Eucharist keeps us in spiritual unity of will and purpose, but each believer displays their own small gestures of piety in harmony with this goal, and each experiences the Liturgy differently. Wimber, in his own context, understood this. Some of his parishioners would shake, be “slain in the Spirit.” Some would laugh or cry, some would simply raise their hands and sing out to God, or any number of other expressions. Wimber didn’t value any one expression as more holy than the others. Instead, he understood from his context what Orthodoxy also teaches: that faith is a journey to the heart, where God comes to dwell in the human heart and we come to dwell in the heart of God. How, then, does Wimber help us understand our relationship to evangelicalism? It’s clear that any expression of heart-centered piety, any response to divine grace, can be manipulated. Prosperity gospel preachers promise health and wealth to the highest bidder. Televangelists claim miraculous healings to swell the size of their audience and prey upon the weak and vulnerable. Fundamentalist Christians with a Pentecostal leaning try to “exorcise” their LGBTQ+ brethren, blaspheming against the icon of Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit which dwells in God’s queer children as surely as in God’s straight children. Yet Wimber is one of many faithful Christians throughout the life of the Church who sought to feel the grace of God in humble gratitude. He rejoiced in the diverse ways God shows up in the life of Christ’s followers, yet he never sought to control, limit, or make a weapon out of God’s grace. Despite the often checkered history of evangelicalism and its predecessors, Wimber was not the first in the pietistic Protestant traditions to live this faith. One is reminded of the holiness and independent churches of Appalachia, who from the 1800s to the present practice a humble, heart-centered piety, and a theology of surprising and winsome grace that a St. Gregory Palamas or a St Symeon the New Theologian might well recognize. Our differences in liturgy, theology and doctrine exist, to be sure. Yet in the mystery of God’s grace, at times our prayers and our enthusiasm for our common Lord begin to converge. As I’ve mentioned before, Orthodoxy in America has had a complex relationship to evangelicalism. Evangelicals have come to Orthodoxy for both wholesome and less than wholesome reasons. Some, not unlike Wimber, are warm-hearted people who want to draw closer to Christ by coming to know him in the Liturgy and the faith of the early Church. Others are legalists who imagine that Orthodoxy is some sort of rigid citadel where they can flee from the need for Christian love in the modern world, and stop their ears against the voice of Christ calling out to them in the voice of the marginalized. Many are somewhere in between. In their efforts to maintain their distinctive witness in the face of real cultural assimilation from the American hegemonic machine, it is a regrettable fact that many Orthodox churches have all too readily allied themselves with fundamentalists than with pietists. The process of ecumenical dialogue and partnership is a messy one. None of us, whether cradle or convert, are immune to sins of arrogance, fear, or legalism. But as we seek to repent of our sins and seek theosis, perhaps we can see examples in the shining lights of charismatic Orthodox saints. And as we seek to find our true partners from more evangelical churches, co-laborers in proclaiming the gospel of Christ, perhaps we might look for people who have the gentleness, joy, enthusiasm and love of a man like John Wimber.  sunday_of_the_myrrh-bearers.docx
Christ is risen! Today we celebrate the women who came and witnessed to the resurrection of Christ.  st_thomas_sunday.docx
Christ is risen! Christos anesti! So much has been written and said about the relative faithfulness or faithlessness of the apostle Thomas that it seems there is not much new ground to cover. Nonetheless, trusting in the power of the Spirit to present Christ to us through the Scriptures, let us briefly reflect on this rich narrative. As the disciples are meeting in secret, Jesus comes to be with them. He comes to offer them peace in the midst of bewilderment, joy in the midst of grief, and courage in the midst of fear. He breathes on them, and invites them to receive the Holy Spirit, and the authority from him to forgive sins, an authority which we as the Church continue to hold in trust from our Lord, practicing radical repentance and forgiveness before one another for the betterment of our world. Thomas desires proof. It is worth noting that he is not the only one who did not believe before seeing. None of the Apostles, save perhaps St. John, were faithful through the cross. Christ himself knew that they would be overwhelmed by their sorrow, and he did not hold this against them. Instead, he showed himself tangibly and truly, he made a gift of his presence in their midst, a gift which showed them the resurrection in its fulness. Thomas, too, desires this gift. It is also worth noting that, when Jesus appears a second time, we don't know whether Thomas actually did choose to touch Jesus. Jesus invites him to do so, but Thomas physical response is not recorded by the evangelist. What is recorded is Thomas making a profound confession of faith. "My Lord and my God." Only in a few other places in the gospels do any of the Apostles proclaim Christ as both Lord and God. One can almost see the parallels to St. Peter's proclamation, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Thomas' faith was restored and deepened by an encounter with Christ. In our own lives, we encounter Christ in one another, and especially in the poor and downtrodden. Those who bear in the body the wounds of our society's evil are those whom we can recognize Christ's wounds most powerfully in. We are invited, like Thomas, to recognize our Lord in one another, to touch where touching is warranted and welcome, and most importantly to proclaim with joy, faith, hope and love the truth that Christ is risen and dwells in each beloved child of God. Christ is risen!  Beloved Friends and Parishioners,
Christ is risen! Continuing in the vein of spiritual reflections on material from my seminary studies, I wanted to take some time to reflect on certain legacies of the ecumenical movement of the mid 20th century, and how its impact may resonate with our community today. Ecumenism is often a “hot button” topic among Orthodox, particularly the canonical churches but also among us extra-canonical Orthodox churches. Despite this contentious reality, Orthodox participation in the World Council of Churches and other related gatherings has been nothing short of a work of the Holy Spirit. Orthodox Christianity offered an infusion of new life into the liturgical and theological life of many other churches at these gatherings, and our beloved Orthodox forebears (some of whom are still active in the ecumenical movement) received much insight on how to apply the timeless truths of our faith to the needs of the children of God in modernity and postmodernity. In particular, I want to focus on the brilliant document entitled “Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry” which was produced by the Faith and Order conference. This document wisely forges an ecumenical consensus, centered especially around the faith of the first four centuries of the undivided Church. It sums up very neatly and precisely the particulars of our common catholic faith, while also not avoiding the extensive commentary necessary to name our remaining differences and potential obstacles to unity. Reading this document as an Orthodox Christian convert from evangelicalism, I was encouraged to see that I could read with both my past faith and my present faith in mind and the language was still true and expressive of a robust Christian faith. This is true ecumenical consensus. Though the WCC has never claimed the ancient authority of the ecumenical councils, it has nonetheless affirmed at the very least a common faith and practice among many Christians of diverse traditions. It affirms the necessity of baptism for entry into faith, in the name of the Holy Trinity. It elucidates an order for celebrating Eucharist which contains all the key elements of the Divine Liturgy (Thanksgiving to the Father, words of institution from our Lord Jesus Christ, invocation of the Holy Spirit to be poured out on the gifts presented, etc.). Finally, in the chapters on Ministry, it offers a brief but potent meditation on apostolic succession, apostolic tradition, and what it means to hold fast to the faith we have received in the present. It is this meditation in particular that I want to unpack. “Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry” notes that “ The primary manifestation of apostolic succession is to be found in the apostolic tradition of the Church as a whole. The succession is an expression of the permanence and, therefore, of the continuity of Christ’s own mission in which the Church participates. [...] Where churches see little importance in orderly transmission, they should ask themselves whether they have not to change their conception of continuity in the apostolic tradition. On the other hand, where the ordained ministry does not adequately serve the proclamation of the apostolic faith, churches must ask themselves whether their ministerial structures are not in need of reform.” Orthodox Christianity in the present rightly places emphasis on the faithful reception of the apostolic succession by our bishops. However, there is, I feel, an instrumentalism of the apostolic succession lines which has regrettably at times prevailed among many of the canonical Orthodox churches, as well as many of the independent Catholic and sacramental churches whose origins are similar to ours. While it is important to maintain the apostolic authority passed down from bishop to bishop, that authority means little unless it is used to live out the apostolic faith, the core kerygma of the Gospel that Christ entrusted his Apostles with keeping and cultivating abroad. Canonical Orthodox churches will say that a community like the Universalist Orthodox Church is unorthodox because our lines of succession contain bishops who fell out of communion with much of the global Orthodox world. It is regrettable that certain bad faith actors misused their ordination for their own ends. But this does not taint the transmission itself, and our community is deeply invested in holding to the apostolic tradition just as much as we are in preserving the apostolic succession. We are an Orthodox church for all of God’s children, but we are unabashedly Orthodox. Even within the larger Orthodox communions, there are gaps and breaks in unity. Russia and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Old Calendarists, etc. We take no joy or schaudenfreude in these ruptures, but I point them out to name that it is the job of all of us to hold to the apostolic faith as best we can and to pray for unity with one another, however we come by our successions. On the other end of the ecclesial spectrum, many independent Catholic churches are deeply invested in maintaining the integrity of their lines, to the point when the list of who succeeded from whom becomes almost more important than a robust witness to the apostolic faith itself. In some ways, our Orthodox ecclesiology which allows for a multitude of jurisdictions expressing one faith in many places may safeguard us from this mistake. At the same time, we must be careful to remember that the apostolic succession is not a pedigree. The Holy Spirit confirms, re-invigorates and revitalizes our faith when we come together as the Eucharistic assembly, the Body of Christ. We will continue to pray faithfully in the traditions of our forebears the Apostles, to reach out in a spirit of fellowship to those canonical Orthodox who will be in conversation with us, and to echo our Lord’s blessed prayer “that they all might be one.” -Sdn. Micah Lazarus. |
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