Homily 644 – 8 Pascha
Holy Transfiguration, Ames, Iowa
June 8, 2025
Epistle:  (3) Acts 2:1-11
Gospel:  (27) John 7:37-52; 8:12

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

Pentecost is generally recognized as the birth of the Church.  I thought this morning, we might talk about the Church for a bit.

One of the things upcoming in our Church is the 21^st All American Council.  As part of the preparation for that gathering, all of us were invited to prepare reflections on the state of the Church.  I thought this would be a good occasion to share my reflection with you.

In reflecting on the state of the Orthodox Church in America, my mind continues to be drawn back to one element that we, as a Church, don’t seem to communicate to the faithful, and to the broader world, on a cohesive basis.

I encourage all of us to look closely at Genesis chapter 3.  In it, we have the account of the fall of humanity – the fall that our Lord reversed, or at least made it possible to be reversed.  In it we see several things with disobedience being the most talked about.

The evil one played to the one thing that he knew could be exploited.  That was the ego – the pride – of Adam and Eve.  He tempted them with “you can decide for yourself what is good and what is bad, and what is helpful or harmful.  You don’t need God.”  In succumbing to that temptation, humanity fell.  The ego overshadowed the nous.  And that “fallenness” is not a frequently utilized word in English.  We call it “sin”, and yet, we understand sin to be a state of existence apart from God, rather than an act of disobedience.  Many of the Church Fathers tell us this act is the result of our separation from God, not the cause of it.  It is missing the mark, and our mark is the perfection of God, the utter self-emptying of our Lord.

When we look at the major societal issues of our day, the core or root of all of those issues is grounded in ego.  We decide about life.  We decide about who we partner with.  We decide what gender we choose to be.  To go further, we decide about greed, and exploitation, and what is holy and what is good and what is evil and what is bad.  We couch it in Christian terminology, but influenced by the Protestant Reformation, we draw back from the teachings of Christ that the appropriate response for Christians is to self-sacrifice and self-denial.

The model for the defeat of ego is Our Lord, particularly in the Garden of Gethsemane.  In that most agonizing time, He told the Father He did not wish to partake of the cup, but nevertheless Your will be done, Father.  The struggle between the human and divine will is palpable, and unlike Adam and Eve, defers to the Divine, the Father.  This restores the nous to the correct orientation over the ego.

This becomes the essence of the Gospel.  Many protestant doctrines have no significance in this understanding of the Gospel.  Nothing is punishment.  Everything is self-sacrifice, given voluntarily, in love for Christ.  We are given forgiveness so that we might heed that most prevalent call of the Gospels:  to repent.

Returning to “missing the mark”, with our “mark” being Christ, we can then understand that any deviation from that target/mark places us in a state of sin.  Our gaze, our thoughts, have turned away from Christ, through distraction.  Whether that distraction is the pleasures of the flesh or the strictness of our fast – it is still a distraction, and still places us in a state of sin, with our ego taking charge of our being.  And, moment by moment, we must repent.  We must change our direction to focus on Christ alone.

By this, we see the creation vastly differently.  We look out and see the people that Christ died for, the people that made the Garden of Gethsemane so agonizing, and we feel, even embody, Christ’s concern for and love for them.  We don’t ask them to be healed first.  We don’t ask them to repent first.

The missionary in me wants to communicate to everyone around me that they don’t even know what is wrong.  They don’t know the significance of the deformity they have inherited.  Nor are they effectively told of the path to healing.

Rather than telling people they are sinful, and guilty, we must tell them that they are fallen, through no fault of their own.  It is an inherited condition.  The ego (in the Church Fathers, pride) is in a place and role it should have never been.  Christ shows us, both in the Garden of Gethsemane and following through His glorious and life-giving passion and crucifixion and resurrection, how we can resolve that discrepancy.  Through that practice of self-denial and self-emptying, we will be healed, by His Grace and through His Power.

Because Christ has broken the bond that death holds on us, we are free, truly free, to offer our love to God through offering ourselves.  That is to say, we offer the entirety of our being, just as we offer ourselves to God on the paten in the Divine Liturgy.  It is us who is raised in offering.  It is us, who take what God gives, wheat and grapes, and we cultivate it and put ourselves into it, creating bread and wine.  It is thus ourselves that we offer.  And our Loving God accepts that offering and returns it to us as Himself – the body and blood of Christ.

As a mission priest, what I have learned in my decade in the middle of the US, in the midst of the Lutherans and Christian Reformed and Baptists and others, is that people are unaware of the true nature of humanity.  The place and importance of the ego is the deformity.  Our ego is the source of our inclination toward disobedience to God.

The correction is self-denial.  It is crucifying our ego.  Whether it is self-denial through marriage, or monasticism, or service to others, we begin to see the needs of others, and we begin to figure out ways to help each other, through giving, but also through sharing – of ourselves, our meals, our homes.  This demands we have a relationship with others, to know their needs and to have their confidence.  Relationships cannot be built on anything other than love, so loving our neighbors becomes critical to our own salvation.

How we accomplish these changes may be more important than the changes themselves.  Because in Christ, we don’t change others.  We don’t compel others to follow Christ.  Christ had the opportunity to overthrow the Godless Romans, and, by the way, that is what the apostles and disciples expected of Christ.

But He chooses not to change the government, nor the law.  He chooses to change us – to transform us, as He transformed Himself on Mt. Tabor, revealing Himself as He truly is.  And more than anything, He desires to transform us, and reveal us, as we truly are.  As we were created to be.

If we want to change the world, we have to start by changing ourselves.  Our call to the world is actually a call to ourselves – repent for the Kingdom of God is in our midst.

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