Unworthy reflection on the Feast by a Priest at St. John’s in Lewisburg, 7532 (2024)

When I was young, sinful, and foolish, compared to old, still sinful, and still foolish today, I was so unread in Scripture in my Unitarian agnostic household that I was shocked when I read the actual accounts of the Apostles Peter and Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, probably around eighth or ninth grade. I was reading the Bible under a blanket in bed after “lights out” or in the closet off my room with the door closed and a little light. The neighbor across the street would report to my parents if she saw my lights on late. That was the kind of Midwestern Chicago inner-city neighborhood where I grew up. We used to feel free to run around the city all day as free-range kids but neighbors watched out for us. Yet in my house it was not a positive to be caught reading the Bible or about religion. Lord have mercy!

This was an early version of cancel culture, gentle but definitely a social discouragement to faith in Jesus Christ. What shocked me when I actually read the Book of Acts was that the Apostle Paul originally had been Saul the murderous persecutor of Christians. You see, I only knew Paul in my old American Midwest childhood as a name on religious buildings and as a presumed pillar of proper establishment society. Yet blood was on his hands when he took that name, and he ended up executed by the state.

Likewise, I had held a wrong proudful bias against the Apostle Peter. My initial prejudice against him came because I ignorantly identified him with the oppressive medieval papacy. But then in reading Acts I discovered the fate of Ananias and Sapphira in appearing before Peter. For their hypocritical and self-righteous deceit in withholding property they bragged had been given to the Church, they suddenly died. This seemed harsh and again oppressive to me as a teenager. By then I had entered into an American uber-Protestant culture that favored the sunny side of life. For example, my Christian Science denomination was favored by Walt Disney and members of his family, sharing a similar culture. I sinfully thought the end of Ananias and Sapphira was the result of some kind of occult religious spell and unjust. I did not then understand how, as St. John Chrysostom put it, the Holy Spirit had revealed their sin to the Apostle Peter. As it was declared in the face of their unrepentant deceit, they were struck down by grace. They became iconic examples against self-righteousness in the Church, like the fruitless fig tree for all time, of the need not to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit by claiming to be in the Church and righteous while only going through outward motions for one’s own advancement. While the Church was together with one mind and one accord shortly after Pentecost, Sapphira and Ananias followed Satan in lies to advance themselves, blaspheming the Holy Spirit in their deed. Later I learned in Orthodoxy of the Church’s anathemas, and of her righteous judgment, which is caring and to instruct us, unlike either the personally judging of others in which we forget our own worst sins, or a false sentimentalism covering evil and encouraging corruption.

Around the same time, contradictorily, when I was at a neighbor’s confirmation in a local Methodist congregation and saw “God is love” written on a banner, I thought this was grossly sentimental. But then I was shocked to find out later that actually was a verse from Scripture.

I was so ignorant and had a lot to learn. The Apostles Peter and Paul show us how to live our lives knowing that God is love in a way that is spiritually strong and not selfishly sentimental, but really caring and uplifting. But I had to learn that, too, in Orthodoxy.

Today as a sinner I honor the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul as pillars of the Orthodox Church, asking for their prayers on my behalf and that of my family and community to our Lord and God Jesus Christ, as I unworthily bear the Apostle Paul’s name as a Priest. But to learn the tradition of these apostles and unworthily experience their examples, I had to become obedient to the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and her Holy Fathers.

Indeed, the comfortable acceptance of the names of Peter and Paul in the past in much of modern Western culture without thinking of their trials, otherworldly strength, and martyrdoms belies their courageous witness, and has led to a sinful forgetfulness of them in much of our culture today. The Apostle Peter was crucified upside down and probably set afire during the mad emperor Nero’s mass persecution of Christians in Rome. The Apostle Paul was beheaded in Rome. They were killed for their faith in Jesus Christ and public witness, which brought so many into the Orthodox Church, at the pagan center of the so-called civilized world at the time, the great commercial and political Babylon, Rome.

Writing of how the modern secular world ignores the full story of the Gospel and the Church, including the Apostles, the Blessed Seraphim Rose of California, himself a convert to Orthodoxy from worldly excess and confusion, wrote in the 1970s: “Do we have any image that explains our situation as well as [the Soviet] Gulag [or prison camp system] does that of Russia?” He went on: “I am afraid there is an image, most unflattering to us, which is almost our equivalent of Gulag. It is ‘Disneyland’ – an image which exemplifies our carefree love of ‘fun’ (a most un-Christian word!), our lack of seriousness … unaware or barely aware of the real meaning and seriousness of life…

“The message of this universal temptation that attacks men today—quite openly in its secular forms, but usually more hidden in its religious forms — is: Live for the present, enjoy yourself, relax, be comfortable. Behind this message is another more sinister undertone which is openly expressed only in the officially atheist countries…. We should realize that what is happening in the world today is very similar whether it occurs behind the Iron Curtain or in the free world…

“One might take, as a symbol of our carefree, fun-loving self-worshipping times, our American ‘Disneyland’; if so, we should not neglect to see behind it the more sinister symbol that shows where the ‘me generation’ is really heading: the Soviet Gulag [of totalitarian oppression].”

Using Disneyland (the original Disney park) as an image or metaphor for worldliness may at first seem shocking to those of us who grew up with all things Disney! Today, for example, more than 50 million people visit “Disneyland 2.0,” Walt Disney World, yearly. It is like a place of pilgrimage in the modern West replacing old Gothic Cathedrals of medieval Europe. Yet relevant to Blessed Seraphim’s use of Disneyland to make his point, there is no working Christian chapel or church there, no Christian symbols. Even the replica wooden Norwegian medieval church in EPCOT Center lacks them, and has been housing an exhibit on pagan Viking gods. In the years since Disney’s death, his parks and media also have come to promote anti-Christian pansexual ideology.

To be clear, I relate this not to single out in particular Disney parks and those who enjoy them. Years back I enjoyed going to Disneyland and Eurodisney. Old classic Disney movies and TV shows remain favorite pop culture mainstays that appear wholesome by today’s standards. Walt Disney and his family as mentioned were close to my old religious denomination and that whole culture feels very familiar to me. Disney himself was not only an artistic and business genius but a firmly outspoken anticommunist and patriot and advocate of what were called family values. Such are the gentle enticements of worldiness and ultimately sin. I am the worst of sinners.

Indeed, all that was not enough to save Disney’s corporate empire from sliding into greater hyper-secular and nihilistic worldiness over time, alongside our society at large. Likewise his public life, art, and success were not enough to save his soul, which remains in God’s hands, may the Lord have mercy! But as voiced by Blessed Seraphim Rose, Disneyland remains a metaphor for American life’s accelerating worldiness, in which our online virtual reality today increasingly swallows up our lives in controlled “fun.” What the Orthodox Christian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned of as the three great anti-Christian principles of Communism in the 1970s have become ascendant in global Western culture today: “Survive at any price,” “only material results matter,” and adherence to “the permanent lie” in which a delusional virtual reality replaces truth.

The reason I bring this all up is that the classic American culture in which I grew up in the Midwest (and where Disney grew up) was not enough to resist worldliness, because it was worldliness, if only a seemingly gentler variety. Among many other things, it often reduced the Apostles to familiar names and sentimentality in the backdrop of daily life, amid neighborhood heterodox congregation names and the lack of any Orthodox ascetic practice in the culture, non-Orthodox Vacation Bible Schools and religious coloring books. Comfort and fun became the wages of worldliness and led later to bondage to more open sinfulness with the wages of death. Father Seraphim himself had escaped from the worst of that corruption, already deepening in the bright and sunny southern California of his youth in the 1950s. Through God’s grace and St. John’s prayers however he found the Orthodox Church and became a great missionary to America himself. Thus he gained the real historical and spiritual sense of the Apostles as martyrs, which is why our Priests at this Feast wear red for the blood of their sacrifice.

The Apostles Peter and Paul ultimately stood for going beyond even the Great Commandments given in the Old Testament and highlighted by Jesus Christ to the New Commandment that He finally gave us: Love one another as I have loved you. That is more than to love our neighbor as ourself, it is to love our neighbor as more than ourselves. It is to empty ourselves in Jesus Christ. This is what the Apostles Peter and Paul learned and lived and gave in their incredible missionary work, and how they died to become intercessors for us, as well as models for our own mission outreach.

Self-emptying in Jesus Christ vs. self-assertion., real freedom in Orthodoxy in voluntary service to the universal Truth Who is Jesus Christ, mark the living legacy of the Apostles Peter and Paul. They emptied themselves in Christ, rather than willful assertion of rights and the will to power, with God’s grace overcoming earlier sins, redeemed and redemptive to others through the Gospel. No amount of comfortable forgetfulness about the Apostles in the materialistic heterodox West can erase their truly revolutionary lives in the service of the greatest and truest revolution, that of the Orhtodox Church of Jesus Christ worldwide. Let us pray too that we stand witnesses to Jesus Christ, unworthy missionaries to America today. Let us ask the intercessions of the Apostles Peter and Paul for our mission work in our lives, families, parish, and region, that we may also take up the Cross of our God Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, our God Who is love, Amen.

Apostles Peter and Paul intercede to God for us!