Last week we marched through downtown Lewisburg with Holy Icons to proclaim the Triumph of Orthodoxy, a spiritual triumph, not a worldly one, a triumph upholding of the fullness of the teaching of our faith with the restoration of the icons. This came about at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787. But it was not the end of the story, any more than it was the end of Great Lent, or of our personal story today as Orthodox Christians.

This Sunday the wisdom of the Church provides us with a next step on our journey to Pascha, the Sunday of the Holy Hierarch Gregory Palamas. In the fourteenth century, when the Christian Roman Empire was moving towards its final crackup a century later, the spiritual integrity of the Church’s teaching was further upheld by this remarkable saint, in preparation for future troubles.

In effect, today is a second Triumph of Orthodoxy Sunday. We as a Church focus on the holiness and faithful courage of one saint to remind us both of the importance of the saints to our faith tradition, and to inspire us to show unworthily even a little of that same devotion, clarity of faith, and strength in Christ. Saint Gregory had fled from invading Turks to Thessalonica. There he became a priest at age 30 and then a monk. In his early 40s on Mount Athos he was asked by his monastic community to help defend them against attacks in sermons and writings by the Italian monk scholar Barlaam, who himself had become a monk on Athos. That heretic Barlaam was a rationalist and humanist. He both stressed the total unknowability of God and the value of what we today call a liberal arts education, which he said would prepare us to be better Christians than Orthodox asceticism. In this, he said the monks on Mount Athos wasted their time in contemplative prayer and should in effect get an education instead.

Barlaam’s argument seemed attractive to some. It reflected heretical aspects of Catholicism at a time when some Orthodox Byzantines unwisely sought alliance with Catholicism for political reasons, given the threat of Islam. Barlaam had infiltrated Mount Athos in effect, by becoming a monk there. This was a potentially dangerous dispute within the heart of Orthodox monasticism.

Barlaam said heretically that the encounter with God of Moses and other Holy Prophets had come from grace that was a specially created effect of God, in a sense like an instrumentalist movie special effect.  He upheld the false Western view that grace is created. In Orthodoxy, we understand and experience how grace is uncreated, is the very energies of God touching us. Gregory responded correctly to Barlaam that Holy Prophets experienced the uncreated glory of God in theophanies or early manifestations of Christ.

St. Gregory unpacked the Orthodox doctrine that it remains impossible to know God in his essence (God in Himself), but possible to know God in his energies, as God reveals himself to humanity. He cited both early Church fathers and Scripture to show this.

Gregory showed how at the Transfiguration the Apostles Peter, James, and John saw the uncreated light of God. He argued that the human person integrated body and soul, as taught by the Church Fathers, a prefiguring of the Incarnation in which Christ as fully God and fully man came in the flesh to save us. So Gregory argued that the physical side of monastic asceticism and prayer was integral to the contemplative monastic way. He contested Barlaam’s falsely intellectual view that the life of the mind is somehow apart from and above Christian living.

St. Gregory wrote that, “When we strive with diligent sobriety to keep watch over our rational faculties, to control and correct them, how else can we succeed in this task except by collecting our mind, which is dispersed abroad through the senses, and bringing it back into the world within, into the heart itself, which is the storehouse of all our thoughts?” He also wrote, “Do you not see that these divine energies are in God, and remain invisible to the created faculties? Yet the saints see them, because they have transcended themselves with the help of the Spirit.” This, he added, “is not only supernatural but beyond all expression.” (Triads, 10)

Although Gregory went through trials, such as being unable to take his seat as Bishop of Thessalonica for years due to political controversy, and being kidnapped by Turkish pirates, he remained steadfast. Inspired church councils in 1341, 1347, and 1351 upheld his views and the correct teaching of the Orthodox Church since Apostolic times. Barlaam ended fleeing to the West and becoming a Roman Catholic Bishop. And the councils associated with Gregory’s correct teaching are so important that they are sometimes referred to as the Ninth Ecumenical Council. They following St. Gregory’s work in effect completed the work of the Council in the era of St. Photius the Great, in 879-80. That Council had upheld the Creed against the heresy of the filioque, and is known as the Eighth Ecumenical Council.

The Eighth and Ninth Councils, exemplified in the work of St. Gregory, upheld the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, that the Holy Spirit proceeds directly from the Father, in the true Trinitarianism of Orthodoxy. In this, the divine energies come from the Holy Trinity as a whole. In the West, false doctrine sought to captivate the Holy Spirit and make it a lesser instrument, wrongly defining grace as created. In this, Catholic Scholasticism removed man further from God’s grace, and over time the West sought to replace it with intellectualism, individualism, and technology. That error grew and grew into the secularism that bedevils the global West today.

Much in so-called Western spirituality and culture today would make Christianity into a bodiless abstraction, a footnote to technological marvels. Not so Orthodoxy. We stand for the Incarnation of Christ, and for the uncreated energies of God that can infuse our very earthly existence with God’s grace. Every time during Lent that we do prostrations to the Prayer of St. Ephraim, as at the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy, and prostrate before icons, we remind ourselves of the embodied nature of Orthodoxy. We do not separate the mind from the body, but we seek to get the mind into the heart, in experience of God’s uncreated grace.  This Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas refutes what the Apostle John called the lie of the spirit of AntiChrist, the lie that Jesus Christ has not come in the flesh. It compliments last week’s Triumph of Orthodoxy and its celebration of iconography.

Today we see the sad results of the heresy of Barlaam in the exaltation of an abstract mind, in the type of weak Unitarianism, Deism, New Age neopaganism, and apostasy that characterize elites of historically Christian countries in the West. When I was growing up, I attended a trendy Unitarian Sunday School. We were taught not to believe in Christ and the Bible, and that traditional Christianity was our enemy and to be ridiculed. We mixed Transcendental Meditation with secular scientism. We even received as children sex education in Unitarian Sunday School that was explicit and given our age and its content abusive even from a non-Orthodox perspective. When conservatives literally held protests against our Sunday School, we laughed at them. Ours was a large congregation of supposed intellectuals and free-thinkers, regarded as a progressive vanguard of a new society in an era of great social disruption not unlike ours today.

But when God led me into Orthodox Christianity, I had the blessing unworthily of being directed to visit regularly a monastery in a rural area outside Chicago, where I helped with lawn mowing. It was a small men’s monastery founded by Elder Ephraim of Philotheou, now often known as Elder Ephraim of Arizona. The practice of meditative prayer there was in a direct line in the Church from the hesychasm upheld by St. Gregory Palamas. It made a great impact on my commitment to Orthodoxy. Once in a crowd I went up and received a blessing from Elder Ephraim and knew I was in the presence of a holy man. My deep and sinful spiritual struggles continued, but the example of those holy monks was to me in my unworthiness akin to the iconography with us in our worship space, and the message of St Gregory Palamas Sunday. It was the teaching we celebrate on the first two Sundays of Orthodoxy made apparent unforgettably in a personal way, despite my sinful winfulness.

Another of 17 monasteries founded by Elder Ephraim in North America in the past three decades is near here, in White Haven, Pennsylvania. Many of us have visited there as pilgrims. It is the largest Orthodox women’s monastery in America today. Such monasteries are a stronghold of the teaching exemplified by St. Gregory Palamas, and a great impetus to mission work in America. In fact, that Holy Protection Monastery helped inspire our original name as a mission.

Brothers and Sisters, let us uphold the true teaching of Orthodoxy highlighted in the First and Second Sundays of Lent, personalized for us today in the holy example of St. Gregory Palamas. For the teachings of the integral wholeness of the Trinity, the holiness of the icons, the integrity of soul and body in worship, and the uncreated nature of the energies of God that infuse Creation with grace, all these together give us a precious legacy as Orthodox Christians. They provide us with the God-given antidote to the false apostate spiritual culture of our age, which is demonic and threatens the spiritual lives and salvation of each of us and our children. Stand against the spirit of Anti-Christ, as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling on a personal level during Great Lent, side by side in the community of Christ’s Church, under the shelter of His mighty and protecting arms. Christ is the Divine Logos. The words of Christ in Creation are the logoi, which articulate the uncreated energies, and shape each of us. One meaning of logos also is story. Each of us has a story in Christ. And St Gregory of Palamas and other great ecumenical teachers of the Church remind us that in Christ the Logos our story comes true.

Glory to God for all things!