Homily from St. John’s in Lewisburg, PA, for the Seventh Sunday of Pascha, the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, June 3, 7532 (June 16, 2024 on the civil calendar).

In the Gospel today for this Sunday, we hear what is called the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus (from John 17, copied at the end below), for our commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, coming shortly after the Feast of the Ascension. In His “High Priestly Prayer,” our Lord and God and Savior affirms the Christology of Orthodoxy, that He is fully God and fully man, along with Orthodox Trinitarianism in the love and essential unity of the Persons of the Trinity. Both are expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, whose core was formed at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 5833 AM (325 AD) and completed at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople, 56 years later. The Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council set forth the Creed in answer to the heresy of Arianism, which falsely claimed that Jesus was not fully God. But the Creed also anticipated the answers of future Councils to another heresy, the mirror image of Arianism, Monophysitism, which denied the full humanhood of Christ. Those heresies – two extremes, one denying the divinity of Christ, and the other His humanity—have become wedded today in the false postmodern spirituality of a neopagan Unitarianism that takes many forms. This “super-heresy” in the formerly heterodox Christian cultures of the West and spread globally through their neocolonialism would set up a deluded religion in the spirit of Antichrist, denying both the divinity and humanity of Christ, and deceiving many. But in Orthodoxy we continue to offer to our neighbors a lifeboat of the full love of God. This is symbolized in the Creed.

In America today, much of the old civil-religion Protestantism has devolved into forms of both Arianism and Monophysitism. These now-wedded heresies underlie radical sexual and racial identity politics along with trends toward a post-human rule by technology. These trends are openly hostile to Orthodox Christainity and threaten to tear apart society and harm young people especially. Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev discussed in his biblical study A Chronicle of the Beginning the historic link between Protestantism and Monophysitism, which paradoxically engenders Arianism or a denigrating of Jesus’ divinity as well. For heresies are all interconnected ultimately, in their false denial of Jesus Christ coming in the flesh, a denial that the Evangelist John wrote is the spirit of Antichrist. This would lead our society to ruin, by missing the proper understanding of how Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man, as set forth in the Creed, which is our safe harbor, thanks to the true Ecumenical Fathers of the Orthodox Church.

Crucial errors arise as a result of ignoring how Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, as outlined in the Creed. As Priest-Martyr Daniel notes, this leads to mistaking the creatures of God’s Creation for the uncreated divine energies or grace expressed by the logoi of the Logos as discussed by Church Fathers such as St. Maximus the Confessor. Such confusion leads to transferring an emphasis on divine will subtly to our own will as individual creatures. We universalize our own individual particular sense of self, separate from God, making self in effect a false god or idol, ignoring our Lord’s Church. We neglect how we must find ourselves by losing ourselves in Him. Instead, we begin to confuse God’s will for our will. This is the source of so much trouble with secular individualism today.

Priest-martyr Daniel further describes how this results in confusion by which virtue becomes so emphasized as unnatural that there becomes a paradoxical over-emphasis pridefully on the achievements of our individual will, which becomes misidentified with God. We act as if our supposed virtue is supernatural and superior in an abstract intellectual way, when in reality it is paradoxically both natural and otherworldly, the result of humility, because all of us are made according to God’s image, in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, and the grace empowering true virtue flows from Him and the Holy Spirit, as indicated in today’s Gospel reading and in our full “Symbol of Faith,” the Creed. By contrast, global secularism today looks to self-assertion for its false salvation. It finds its new high holidays in Pride Month, celebrating the sin of Lucifer, pride—instead of in joyful humility celebrating our Lord’s Nativity, Christmas, and Resurrection at Pascha, Easter.

In such New Age religion that obscures the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, we lose sight of Him. God becomes abstract and identified with our own interior thought and will, and a rational and instrumentalist legalism emerges from it that quickly becomes the justification of spiritually unhealthy self-assertion. This is why, for example, old Puritan congregations in America, known to us in myth from the stories of the First Thanksgiving and the Founding Fathers of New England, amazingly became almost without exception Unitarian by the early 1800s. Yes, the supposedly strictest and most Bible-based Protestant churches of their day ditched Trinitarian theology. They completely lost sight of the Creed of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. Even John Adams and John Quincy Adams, often cited as the most Christian of early American leaders, were Unitarians descended from the old Puritans. Many American Protestants likewise became seduced by Freemasonry, expounding similar Christological heresy.  This is not to denigrate the Christian roots of our country or her founders, but to recognize the root of heretical problems from an Orthodox standpoint that play out more and more today. Today individualized religion permeates American culture. By losing the proper sense of Jesus Christ found in the Creed, American spirituality opened itself fatally to neopaganism and the occult, and to identity-centered secular religion that we find today centered on sex and race in various ways. Ironically this supposedly individualistic spirituality makes our culture more vulnerable to control by secular globalism and technology in place of the Church. Tech feeds the demonic illusion that we can be as gods, controlling nature and ourselves by clicks, drugs, bioengineering, and utopian virtual realities, when we are being enslaved.

The Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council protected us from this, brothers and sisters, by providing us with the core of the Creed, which was completed by the Second Ecumenical Council. The Creed sets forth proper Christology and Trinitarianism against the heresies of both Arianism and Monophysitsm. We repeat the Creed in the Liturgy, and often in our home family prayers, so that we never forget. It is like the formulas given for memorization to the children in Narnia by Aslan in CS Lewis’ allegory The Chronicles of Narnia. The repetition is meant to keep the memory of truth alive and to guide our lives in spiritually healthy ways.

I grew up in Unitarian theology and saw its resulting harmful psychology in two extreme Protestant denominations of my family background, witnessing personal disasters related to their emphasis on individual will. In three cases in my earlier years, young people close to my family in those faiths experienced mental illness and untimely and tragic deaths, and in another case a baby was lost because of a lack of adequate medical care resulting from misguided reliance on false faith in willpower. As our post-modern society wanders more deeply into heretical and occult beliefs, it reaps the whirlwind of the theological errors foreseen and fore-guarded by the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. Those theological errors bear toxic psychological fruit in current epidemics of loneliness, anxiety, mental illness, extreme consumerism and greed in many forms, sex trafficking, cyberporn, and even sexual mutilation of young people.

By contrast, the Creed of the Orthodox Church is in spiritual terms health-giving, because it supports authentic humanhood in relation to the divine. Of course, all can fall prey to tragedies of human life, trials and falls, and we should not be proudful as Orthodox Christians, Lord have mercy! But God helps, and within His Church is the safest place spiritually. Jesus’ high priestly prayer shows us the way. We must love as Jesus loved, as the Trinity models, as in the famous icon of the Holy Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev, which indicates the love among the Persons of the Trinity, Three Persons but one Essence, unconfused and undivided. Thus, our Lord Jesus’ new commandment incorporates and even goes beyond the Great Commandments of the Old Testament. For He tells us that we must love our neighbor more than ourself.

Icon of the Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev.

Brothers and sisters, amid such suffering today, the clear articulation and experience of theology in the Creed makes our missionary work for Orthodoxy more urgent for saving the souls of many including ourselves, with God’s grace in His Church. We arguably live in the era of the Sixth Church in the Book of Revelation. The Seven Churches are likened in tradition to seven eras of the Church. The messages to the Seven Churches in the first chapters of Revelation can be applied to all times, but simultaneously suggest a trajectory in sequence toward the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The last and Seventh Church, of Laodicea, condemned for lukewarmness, has been related to the Church at the Second Coming. But the message before it to the Sixth Church, Philadelphia, focuses on condemnation of the “Synagogue of Satan” and how those in it will come finally to see Truth alongside faithful Christians. The Synagogue of Satan can be understood in relation to our own time and sins, not merely standing for Jews hostile to Christianity being converted, but for those who reject that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, to follow bad theology and psychology and the occult into the modern union of the heretical extremes of Arianism and Monophysitism. For a large-scale apostasy from any trace of Christian culture today overlaps with those ancient false denials of Jesus’ divinity and humanity in a systemic new occult religious culture. But in terms of living authentically, the Creed remains a spiritually health-giving sign of safety in the Orthodox Church.

When St John Chrysostom wrote homilies Against the Jews (sometimes translated Against the Judaizers), this was not Anti-Semitic. He condemned, in the sharp Late Antique polemical style of fourth-century Antioch, Christians affected by social influences in that city who were drifting into the kind of legalism and worldly occult-style interests that marked an emerging Judaism defined by rejecting Christ. Today this can be considered a type and a warning against New Age neopaganism in the modern union of Arianism and Monophysitism, leading to self-idolatry, and an impersonal false theology even making people vulnerable to the delusive appeal of new polytheisms. The false abstracting of the biblical God and denial of the Incarnation as expressed in the Creed seek to undermine Christian tradition and healthy spiritual psychology. Its influence aims at demonic secular globalization in place of our Lord’s Church. As Orthodox Christians we know the Church to be the continuation and full realization of the true Israel. We know Jesus Christ’s sacrificial love for us expresses true Trinitarianism, in which lies our redemption, by loving one another as He loved us. So, as He prayed in His high priestly prayer, may we have His joy fulfilled in ourselves, by loving as He loved, to lose ourselves in His love. Thus, we can know Him Ascended but with us, as the Creed indicates. Christ has Ascended! To the Heavens!

*** 

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to John,

§56 [17:1-13]

At that time Jesus lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour is come. Glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee, as Thou hast given Him power over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him. And this is life eternal: that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. I have glorified Thee on the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own Self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was. I have manifested Thy name unto the men whom Thou gavest Me out of the world. Thine they were, and Thou gavest them to Me, and they have kept Thy Word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever Thou hast given Me are of Thee. For I have given unto them the Words which Thou gavest Me; and they have received them and have known surely that I came out from Thee, and they have believed that Thou didst send Me. I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for them whom Thou hast given Me, for they are Thine. And all Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine, and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, as We are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Thy name. Those that Thou gavest Me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. And now come I to Thee, and these things I speak in the world, that they might have My joy fulfilled in themselves.’