The Triumph of Orthodoxy

Sunday March 24
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is the Sunday of Orthodoxy. It is also called the Triumph of Orthodoxy because of the historical connection with the event that happened in the year 842 on this first Sunday in Lent, in Constantinople.  At this event a great procession with icons marked the end of the iconoclastic persecutions which had lasted intermittently for over one hundred years.  Orthodoxy, however, does not revel in superficial triumphalism.  The church is intensely aware that every victory, every triumph happens through the Cross.  That means blood, sweat and tears.  
 
What does it mean for the church to retain the icon? It was a final act in the drama of the period of the great councils which lasted from 325 AD to 787, the first of the seven ecumenical councils. These councils defended and upheld the Orthodox faith, as the proper understanding of the New Testament revelation. 
 
Our faith is very simple and at the same time, very practical. It is not airy-fairy! Our faith can be expressed in one gesture: in the sign of the cross. This action speaks volumes.  It speaks of the triune God sending one of the Holy Trinity, the person of the Son, to take on the fullness of humanity; the Son, the Word of God, took on human nature to save us through the cross and resurrection. We use the icon because we believe the apostles who saw Him, the Son of God, with their own eyes as we heard in the Gospel reading today. (John 1:43-51). Phillip says to his friend Nathaniel: Come and see.  The invisible became visible.  God chose to enter the created world in a tangible way.  That means people touched him, He touched people, He Healed them, He suffered, He died, and He rose from the dead for us.  He promised His disciples that He would never leave the church, or them.  He connects to us in prayer, the sacraments and especially the Eucharist.  It is all real, not an abstract ideology.
 
I want to share something with you.  Yesterday I baptized a baby.  The godfather came to me afterwards and said,” I really believe.  When I was a boy (he was a man in his mid 30s) – I served in the altar. And there were other altar boys there and it was the day of Pentecost.  We were serving the Eucharist.  Towards the end of the Eucharistic canon, all of us altar boys saw something amazing happen.  There was a lot of smoke from the incense and suddenly all the smoke came together above the priest.  He didn’t see it because he was looking at the holy gifts.  This smoke then turned into a bright shining crown. The boys cried out, “Father, Father look”! He looked up and this crown started to lift until it disappeared”.  
 
It was the presence of the King, there at the Eucharist.  He is always here!  These tangible things sometimes happen to help people believe. In last night’s gospel reading from John, one of the eleven matins resurrection readings, we heard the Lord telling Thomas: Thomas, you believe because you saw me, but more blessed are those who did not see but believed. The faith of the apostolic church is a heart burning with the fire of the love for Christ. In another resurrection matins reading, we hear the words of Luke and Cleopas, two of the seventy apostles:  Did not our heart burn within us when He spoke to us along the way?    Let us use these precious days of Lent to prepare our hearts to receive the holy fire of the resurrection so that our hearts burn and we can say, as we sing each Sunday and at Easter,  Having seen the resurrection of Christ…
 This is our journey now in Lent.  It is a journey of our whole life too.   
 
Sunday March 17
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today is Forgiveness Sunday. We are preparing to embark on the lenten journey to the Resurrection. Tonight, at the end of Vespers, we are going to sing the stichera (verses) of the Resurrection, of Pascha, ahead of this journey; it is a Christian tradition to ask each other’s forgiveness and for prayers before any journey.
 
Today the church also remembers Adam, his fall and his expulsion from Paradise.  He was expelled not because he broke some arbitrary rule but because he destroyed the communion of love with God.  He failed to respond to God’s call to his conscience to ask forgiveness and come back to the loving relationship with God.  Instead of asking for forgiveness, he blamed Eve and even God for giving her to him. He tried to say it was somebody else’s fault, not his! 
 
Variants of the Genesis story can be found in many religious traditions.  It speaks to a deep level, an archetypal level in our souls and consciousness.  The story of the fall is the beginning of human history.  It is humanity’s journey towards Christ, and through Christ, to our own resurrection.  Lent is an image of the whole history of humanity and our personal journey to Christ.  One of the archetypes is the story of Exodus, where Moses and the Israelites journeyed to the promised land over a period of forty years.  An even more powerful image is Christ’s forty day fast. Lent reflects that.  Christ teaches us how to defeat the three temptations of the devil which Adam failed. 
 
How was it possible for Adam to be defeated so badly that he even failed to realise that all he needed to say to God was “Forgive me”.  He had no reason to be filled with fear. His only prior knowledge of God was as a loving father.  Why is he then suddenly filled with fear of God?  It was because he lost that sense of communion of love.  God, his wife Eve, all of nature and everything in the world, became objects to him.  He became the subject of his own universe, seeing everything and everyone else as an object, as the “other”.  
 
The 20th century French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre says that hell is the “other”. That is, of course, the case when there is the loss of loving communion.  Hell is the inability to love. The communion of love is restored through forgiveness and Christ takes the initiative.  He offers forgiveness.  If we forgive the other, we then turn our neighbour from an enemy to becoming our brother or sister.  In beginning our Lenten journey tonight, we will sing these paschal stichera:  Let us say Brethren – also Sisters of course! – even to them that hate us. Let us forgive all things on the Resurrection and let us cry out, Christ is Risen from the dead.  Trampling down death by death and on those in the tombs bestowing life. 
 
 
 
 
Sunday March 10
By Fr Nicholas Karipoff
 
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
It is normally noted that after two preparatory Sundays where the love of God toward repentant sinners is shown.  This Sunday presents the picture of God’s justice.  The picture of the Last Judgement, while it uses the image of human tribunals is vastly different from them.  Saint Isaac, whom I love and whose words I quoted last week, about not calling God “just” but “loving”, says also this:  God’s justice is like a grain of sand in comparison to the mountain of gold which is His mercy.  But that grain of sand must exist nevertheless otherwise human free will becomes undermined.  We need to think about what that means.
 
God wants everyone to be saved but not against their will.  It is not like the social revolutionaries who also, one way or another, follow the words of the 18th century thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau in his “Social Contract” where he says: “ We have the right to force people to be happy, even against their will”.  That’s not God!  The Last Judgement is really a revelation of choices made by us human beings; either to be with God or without God.  “Judge not lest ye be judged”, or in more modern English, “Judge not that you be not judged. With the measure you use it will be measured back to you”, says the Lord in the sermon on the Mount (Mt 7:2).  If you are forgiving you will be forgiven, that is the underlying message of Christ’s Gospel.  Why then do we constantly fall into judging other people? Because deep down inside we believe that we are better.  That is the symptom of the worst human disease, which is pride.  Those people who understand about not judging, or those people historically who understood, believing the promise of the Lord, that they too will not be judged, they eventually reached a deeper understanding of humility, the foundation of all the virtues.  By refusing to yield to the temptation of judging they were given the grace to see just their own vulnerabilities and failures in relation to God and their neighbour.  They were given the grace to see only the inner beauty of each person, not the ugliness of sin which is also present in all of us.  For this reason, both the sheep and the goats are surprised by Christ’s words to them.  The sheep are surprised because they sincerely and genuinely believed that they had never done anything good before God, and suddenly He praises them! The goats, too, are surprised because they thought that they were God’s gift to humanity. Suddenly they find out that they are not!
On occasions in the past, I have done this for a little while, but this is a bigger experiment. I am not saying let’s promise to God, because we are terrible at keeping promises. The experiment is to try and stop judging during Lent.  That is hard!  We can begin by counting how many times in a day we have judged other people in our minds. That knowledge will help us to come to a measure of humility.  We will realise how often we judge other people!  Where does that mean we will end up? By doing this experiment we will come to a measure of humility and love for our neighbour.