Homily 693– 4APE
Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, Ames, Iowa
June 28, 2026
Epistle:  (93) Romans 6:18-23
Gospel:  (25) Matthew 8:5-13

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

I spent a lot of time in the car this week.  Which is dangerous for me, because it gives me time to think.  I drove to Iowa City, helped my son and his wife move on Monday to Minneapolis and returned to Ames, then left Tuesday for Dormition of the Theotokos Monastery in South Central Michigan, returning on Thursday to Ames.

What occupied most of my thoughts was why I felt the way I did.  I felt tired, and frustrated, and angry, and I didn’t have anything to be frustrated or angry about.  Nothing seemed to help – and I couldn’t for the life of me identify the cause.

So, I did what I suggest many of you do in confession.  I thought about what I expected.  For most of us – maybe all of us – these feelings of frustration and anger primarily come from a place of having our expectations not met.  So I thought and thought about my expectations.

There were lots of things bouncing around in my head.  What I finally landed on as my expectation had to do with being treated as a person.  A human being.

So often in today’s world, we have been stripped of our personhood.  We’ve been stripped of our agency.  We are no longer people, but rather cogs in one of a variety of machines.

We are given a title, based on a role that we play.  We are employees.  We are members.  We are parishioners or clergy.  We are tenants.  We are mortgage holders.  We are customers.  We are subscribers.  We are consumers.  We are constituents.  We are husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, boyfriends, girlfriends.

But we aren’t necessarily persons.

In naming all these things, what they all have in common is that they describe a relationship we have to someone else.  The reciprocal is also true – that others relate to us this way.

What is missing is that in each of these roles, we are a person.  The significance of that is that we are more, vastly more, than the role we play.  The titles and roles tend to define us in a very, very limited capacity, and mostly define us for the benefit that others receive.

We cease to be persons – we cease to be humans – and we become the fulfillment of what someone else wants or needs from us.  In turn, they play that role with us.  That’s the way we see them as well as the way they see us.

Now I know many of you at this point may be saying, but Father, what is the problem with this?  It’s just the way things are.

Of course you’d be right.  What I question is if this way that things are was intended to be this way by God.  Is this the significance we play in the world – in the Kingdom of God?

I suspect the answer to that is no.  We are told in Genesis that we were created in the image and likeness of God.  We are also told that before the fall, we experienced communion with God.  We strolled in the Garden God created for us, and we experienced God Himself.

We experienced companionship through others.  God took the human being He created and split it into two persons – stating that being alone was not good for human beings.  We became two – male and female – which originated from one.

Our only task – the task we were created to fulfill – wasn’t economic.  It wasn’t authoritative.  It wasn’t a role.  All we were to do was be.  Exist.  And love.

The fall of humanity changed all that.  The human ego got involved, and humanity was mortally wounded by that ego taking over everything we tried to do.  No longer could we just love, and be loved.

We set God aside, breaking communion with Him and forging our own path.  The grace with which we were clothed by God disappeared.  We became naked.  Shame entered our world.

All of this may sound like so much gibberish at this point.  I can hear the thoughts of some of you at this point going, “Father, what does this have to do with anything?”

Well, what I learned, and what I want to share, is that our personhood and our communion with God was taken away then, and continues to be taken away, by our own egos.  We no longer look for mutual companionship, but only to that which benefits us, and at the lowest possible expenditure to the other.

We have been depersoned, and we have depersoned others, and what I learned is that in this process, my soul has been injured.  When we forget that individuals are so much more than the role they play in the moment.  We are complicated.  We have needs, we require communion with one another and with God.

We run on love.  We give love.  And this exchange of love – you for me, me for you, God for us both, and both for God – this love is what makes us humans, and what makes us persons.  It is what God wants us to be.  When our lives are filled with stuff, even stuff that makes our lives better, we are being deceived into thinking we have no other needs.

Why do we on the whole get upset about billionaires?  It is because they no longer treat us as persons.  Why do we get upset about politics?  Because they no longer treat us as persons.

The hard part of this is that it isn’t really even about what others do for us, nor about what we do for others.  It is about cherishing each other as fellow human beings.  It is about fellowship with one another.  It is about love for one another.

So as we go from here into the world, let’s push the roles we play with each other into the background.  Let’s undertake the difficult task of treating others as persons.  That is how God treats us, and how we best treat one another.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Glory to Jesus Christ!