 +In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Christ is in our midst! He is, and ever shall be.
Last week we encountered the saving power of the holy cross. Today, we continue our journey into the mystery of the Tree of Life by listening to the words of St. John, the beloved evangelist and apostle. It is hard to know what to say of St. John that hasn't already been said eloquently by the gospels and by the evangelist himself. Nonetheless, with God's help I will try. Much speculation has gone into the meaning of John's title as the "beloved disciple." It is beyond our capacity this side of the Kingdom to know the exact nature of the love between Christ and John. But it seems more than fair to say it was a deep and abiding love, a love which emanated from Christ and contains all other loves; familial, friendly and partnered, queer and non-queer, spiritual-material all at once. Such a love is all encompassing because Christ's love for his beloveds is all encompassing. As God in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ touches and transfigures every kind of love, filling it with his light, his warmth, his tenderness. He knew that John was one who, somehow, understood this love. And so he calls upon St. John to fulfill the love that Christ's own mission prevented him from giving. To be for all, our Lord could not be only for the Theotokos. He could not always give to her the actionable love that a son might give to honor his mother. And yet as God and as human, his love for her never wavered. As he stands dying on the cross, he gives his beloved, St. John, to the Theotokos. "Behold your son." "Behold your mother." Chrysostom writes that Christ honored both John and Mary in this way. Even in his own suffering, he planted a seed of love between his family members, a love which would blossom into new life. This life is both tangible and intangible. It is tangible in that John provided materially for Mary, and Mary as matriarch of the Church continued to mentor John. It is intangible, in that the two formed a bond of love that was inseparable, and that love sustained them, no matter how far apart they were drawn by circumstance. In this gift of our Lord we see the tender eros of God, the power of love-for-life that God implants in each of us through Christ, and kindles by the grace of the Holy Spirit. This love is not merely sentimental. In our world of scarcity, the drive towards life is often obscured by scarcity mentality and the drive towards self-protection. We can be swept up in the fear of not having enough or not being enough. But the love of God has the power to sweep through those barricades like a mighty rushing river breaks a dam. In Christ, we are empowered by his grace to not just preserve our own life, but to see our life as intertwined with the lives of all God's beloved children. Our drive towards life becomes a drive towards life-for-love's-sake. This, beloved, is the eros, the revitalizing love of God. This kind of love creates communities. Partners, to be sure, but also fellowships, parishes, coalitions, families, and all manner of other communities. In Christ, our willingness to give is multiplied. We are not called to simply self-sacrifice, to trade our extinction for another's existence. We are people of the resurrection. We are called to share life and love with one another, and to ensure that no one's life subsists on the scarcity and death of another. Love does not abide oppression. Love is a leveler, a dignifier, an enricher and a mutual force of God's grace bringing us into inextricable community. Even these words about it fall short of the glory of God's love, a love which burns brightly within us and awakens in us the fullness of life. The all-encompassing mystery of love was St. John's life's work to illuminate for us. In his gospel, we see more encounters with named beloveds of Christ than in any other gospel. In his epistle, we see a treatise on how love can make us whole, and how our love between God, neighbor and self brings us to the heights of theosis, and the deepest divinized communion with our one greatest beloved, our creator and God. St John was one of the few apostles to repose in peace, and not to experience the martyrdom of blood. Perhaps this was some small fulfillment of the possibility Jesus expressed to Peter about John: "If I want him to remain until I come again, what is that to you?" Or perhaps it was a fulfillment of the tender promise made to John at the cross. You, o John, will live to see your mother grow old and repose in peace. You, o Mary, will see your son repose in peace and receive him into my arms. Perhaps it seemed fitting for the beloved disciple to show us believers in the ages to come that there is no fear in love, but that perfect love casts out fear. In a world so often full of death and tragedy, we can take comfort in these small in-breakings of God's peace, God's tender love which wakens new life in the face of death. And we can love boldly, love tenderly, love fiercely and with the deepest affection for one another, into the day when we rise again into the fullness of God's love, which knows no ending and breaks forth like the dawn. Amen.
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 +++ Service Announcement +++
"Save, o Lord, Your people, and bless Your inheritance!" We are excited to announce that we will be holding our first in-person service since the Covid-19 pandemic began. We will host a Divine Liturgy at 3 PM on Tuesday the 14th for the Feast of the Holy Cross. All are welcome to attend! For details on how to participate, see below: Location: Harrington Chapel, University Congregational United Church of Christ -- 4515 16th Ave NE Seattle, WA 98105 Details: Please wear a mask and be prepared to sign in at the door. All participants will be masked for the duration of the service except when receiving Holy Communion. A separate spoon will be used for each guest, with the priest communing last. The chalice set will be sanitized before and after Liturgy. If you need help getting in the building, message our page or call 720-273-2469. Parking is available in Lots A and C on a first-come first-serve basis.  +In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Christ is in our midst! He is and ever shall be. Today, we prepare ourselves to encounter the saving power of the holy cross. Since we will gather again on Tuesday for the feast, now seems as good a time as any to explain a bit about why we venerate the cross, using this gospel as explanation. A few years ago, I had the privilege of going to Jerusalem. While I was there, I visited the Monastery of the Cross. This monastery is so named because it contained the sacred grove where, according to tradition, there was a tree whose wood was destined to become the cross of Christ. I bring this up because it is important to remember how the cross for us is a symbol of life, and of the passage from death to life. When we venerate it, we venerate Christ’s life-giving Passion. By dying, Christ changed death to peaceful, conscious rest in the presence of God, and prepared the way for the destruction of death itself in the resurrection. Our Lord speaks of this coming reality in today’s gospel. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up. Many of you may recall the story of the serpent. The Israelites are tempted to go back to the simplicity of slavery in Egypt. Paradoxically, God sends a trial their way in the form of fiery serpents. But God also provides a remedy. God tells Moses to build a bronze serpent, and place it high on a pole, that when the afflicted Israelites bitten by serpents looked upon the bronze snake, they would be healed. In this, God does not promise a lack of trials. The serpents still come. They bite. But God does promise that the trial need not be fatal. God protects the Israelites from death. I am reminded of the words of our Lord, “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart, for I have overcome the world.” An important facet of this ritual is that it is the choice to look upon the serpent as an act of faith in God that makes it efficacious. God warned the Israelites against idolatry. But this serpent is a tangible and paradoxical anchor point for faith in God. To show that God can save God’s people through the very source of their pain and suffering. The cross points to this same reality, in a more profound way. In the ancient days, God used a serpent to heal God’s people from the serpent bite. In the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, God used a cross, the most shameful and painful method of state execution the Romans could muster, to save all humanity from death itself. By rejoicing in the gentle and life-giving aspects of the cross, we take the focus away from the totalizing power of violence and oppression, and fix our gaze upon the power and love of God to overcome it. The cross becomes the tree of life. The place of the skull becomes Paradise. As Orthodox Christians, we have the powerful source of hope that God has entered into our deepest suffering and transformed it. That our suffering, no matter how great, can never extinguish us completely. And so we look upon the cross. We don’t worship the wood, but we worship and we honor Christ’s passion. We look in awe upon the tool of death which has become a source of life, and we rejoice in God’s power to defeat the greatest demons of empire, hatred and violence. This focus keeps us humble. It is possible to mistakenly worship or instrumentalize the cross. This is not a new problem. Many years after Moses, certain factions among the Israelites began to worship the bronze serpent. It became known as Nehushtan. What was meant to be an aid to faith in God became in itself a deity. But it was not faith towards the object’s power that caused this. After all, God told them to behold the serpent and be healed. It is only when it became an instrument in itself, apart from the love and power of God, that there were problems. Unfortunately, many Christians do a similar thing with the cross. For those who say that God is an angry God, taking out God’s anger against humanity on Jesus through the cross, The cross remains an instrument of violence and an idol. The violence is simply transferred from the human realm of the Roman Empire to the divine realm of God’s wrath. The cross becomes an idol which eats our sins by breaking the body of God. Others see the cross as a validation of suffering. If we just suffer enough, if we just make our suffering close enough to Christ’s suffering, God will love us. In this case, the cross becomes an instrument of pain and suffering for suffering’s sake. Most of us who are marginalized or know people in marginalized communities know that when pain itself is worshiped as a god, the powerful can abuse others and say it’s for their own good. We may and often do encounter God in the midst of our suffering, but suffering itself is not what makes us holy. Even the martyrs were not spiritual masochists, seeking out pain. They simply lived boldly for Christ and were unafraid of the consequences. In the days of ancient Israel, God instituted sacrifices to reconcile and atone for the sins of the people. Contrary to what many Christians assume, these sacrifices were not the demand of an angry God seeking to take out his anger on animals instead of humans. Rather, they operated on an ancient spirituality of renewing life against the powers of death. Sin and death are intertwined. Sin leads us to fragmentation, isolation, alienation. The death of our physical bodies is just the most potent manifestation of this phenomenon. Blood was seen as a symbol not of death, but of life, for the blood that flows in our veins carries life to our bodies. When animal sacrifices were made, the life giving blood was offered up and the flesh was usually given back to the community in the form of a meal, nourishing physical life and restoring the life of holiness. Christ did not have to die on a cross. Being God in the flesh, his death would have transmitted the power of God into the human experience of death regardless of how he died. But by dying on a cross, Christ took the most hateful symbol of human violence and evil at the time and used it to turn the cosmic tide from death to life. It was a show of God’s glory and love, that there is no evil which can triumph over the resurrection and life God gives to all God’s children. The Byzantine Empire’s decision to use the cross as a sign of mortal earthly conquest is a misapplication of its meaning, but this does not taint the power of the cross, and the saving love of our Lord who was crucified upon it. And so we venerate the cross, and we praise and glorify Christ’s resurrection. May we always stand with Christ for new life in the midst of systems of death. May we lay down our swords and take up the cross and follow Him. And may we always remember that in our deepest suffering, Christ is changing death to life before our very eyes. Amen
 +In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christ is in our midst! Today our Lord provides a parable of forgiveness and gratitude. It is simple, in many ways very appealing. Yet it is a hard saying for some, for reasons which are very understandable. Here and there throughout the Lord's parables, we are given glimpses not only of the Kingdom of God, but of the judgment it entails. The idea of judgment has often been twisted in our current context after centuries of misuse. We may think of judgment as condemnation, and of that condemnation as the condemnation of an unjust hypocrite or malicious actor. It is reductive to simply say that "God is the only just judge" and go on with it. It might be more helpful to say that God is justice, a justice which enfolds within its grasp mercy, righteousness and love. The Kingdom of God is like a king who forgives a three billion dollar debt. That's not an exact estimate, but given that a talent was worth around 20 years of daily wages, we can rightly imagine that this is a staggering debt. Yet we must be careful not to only imagine this forgivenss as the withholding of wrath. St. John Chrysostom and St Theophylact of Ochrid remind us that God gives us everything that we have. Life, breath, a world to live in, our virtues and strengths, and the fullness of divine grace to make us truly "gods, and children of the Most High". The debt is beyond the capacity of any one worker to repay not because the master is harsh or the servant lazy, but because it represents the very ground of our being, the divine dispensation by which our existence is even possible. God gives us everything. And the Kingdom of God runs on this gift economy. As Christ says elsewhere in the Gospel, "freely you have received, now freely give." The judgment, the discernment of God which reveals the full truth of who we were, are, and are becoming, shows us our generosity of spirit, or lack thereof. We give and forgive freely, not to repay the debt of our life, but as an expression of gratitude for all God has done and continues to do for us. As an expression of tenderness and love for the ones God places in our lives, whether by our choice or by circumstance. We do not always live out of this mindset of gratitude. Often we fail to do so. Yet God continues to forgive us our sins. Negative consequences only arise when we fail to recognize that our fellow human beings are deserving of the same gift from us as we receive from God. In truth, we are all image-bearers. To hold grudges against our fellow humanity is to hold a grudge against God within them, and this is an act of ingratitude in the face of all that God does for us. This mindset of magnanimous forgiveness may come naturally enough to many of us. It's not hard to see how we should be merciful as God is merciful, and we should act as people who have received so much, and not hold grudges and debts against our neighbor. But what are we to do when our neighbor does something that seems unforgiveable? What are we to do when the debt they "incur" against us is not a $5000 debt, but a $100,000 debt? Again, this is a rough estimate. We must understand a few things. First, we must not let perfect be the enemy of good. Many well-meaning church people have a polarized idea of forgivenss. Either we completely relinquish our woundedness and forget what they did to us, or we hold tightly onto it and let it take over and ruin our lives. No middle ground. And this dichotomy prevents many well-meaning people from taking the first steps towards forgiveness. It is important to remember that this parable is a parable about the Kingdom of God. It is a blueprint to strive towards, and it is a revelation of the new reality that is breaking into our everyday lives. But we know that the Kingdom of God is still being born in this world of sorrow and suffering. And if we sometimes fail in our efforts to completely and wholeheartedly forgive, this doesn't mean our efforts were in vain. It may take time to heal. The healing may not be completed in this lifetime. But we can always lean in to the birth pangs of the new creation. We can do the next good thing, and take the next step towards forgiveness and reconciliation. St Isaac the Syrian says, "If you cannot be merciful, at least speak as though you are a sinner. If you are not a peacemaker, at least do not be a troublemaker. If you are not victorious, do not exalt yourself over the vanquished. If you cannot close the mouth of a man who disparages his companions, at least refrain from joining him in this." The wisdom of this saint reminds us that we can begin with small steps. It can be as simple as praying for those who have wronged us. If we cannot form the words ourselves, we might ask a beloved saint to pray for them, or to modify the words of our Lord, "Forgive them, Lord, even if I can't". When we begin to rise above the desire for revenge, we can work more wholeheartedly for true restorative justice. When we are willing to forgive our neighbor, we can live with a greater gratitude for one another and deeper love and communion with God. May we see all around us the good gifts of our Father in Heaven. May we know ourselves, our sins and virtues, and seek repentance and renewal. And may we always see the face of God shining in our neighbor, no matter how obscured, and in forgiving them day by day, receive the Kingdom. Amen. |
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