Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission in Lewisburg, PA, for the Sixteenth Sunday of Pentecost, the Feast of St. Michael of Kiev, Sept. 30, 7533 (Oct. 13, 2024 on the civil calendar).
Blessed Seraphim Rose, a spiritual son of our patron St. John of San Francisco, once wrote: “Why is the truth, it would seem, revealed to some and not to others? Is there a special organ for receiving revelation from God? Yes, though usually we close it and do not let it open up: God’s revelation is given to something called a loving heart.”
Today’s Gospel readings (texts at the end below) remind us of this with Jesus Christ’s teaching of the Golden Rule, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This is an extra positive statement of the Old Testament teaching that Jesus taught as the Great Commandments—to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and will, and strength, and mind—and to love our neighbor as ourself.
But Jesus didn’t stop there. He said He gives us a New Commandment to love one another as He loved us. That means to love our neighbor as more than ourselves, because He gave up His life for His love of us. Yet these statements, the Golden Rule, the Great Commandments, and the New Commandment, are all beautifully interwoven.
Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan helps illustrate this. Orthodox Tradition and iconography have understood the Good Samaritan as a symbol of Jesus Christ. In response to Jesus’ teaching about loving our neighbor, He is asked who is our neighbor. He tells the parable. And at the end the answer is that the person who was the neighbor was the Good Samaritan. This is an extra twist, because then Jesus’ teaching would mean that we need to love our neighbor as we would love Christ. This makes sense, though, because we are told to love God with all our self.
There are many indications of this command to love our neighbor more than ourself in the Gospel, but crucially this involves losing ourself in Christ, not just in a fallen human sense of people. In Matthew 25, we are told that what we do to help the least of our fellow humans we do to Christ.
The Orthodox poet Donald Sheehan, in describing the lesson of the Orthodox writer Dostoevsky’s great novels, said that they were about the need to empty one’s self in Christ instead of asserting one’s self. Jesus Himself put it this way, that we must lose ourself to find our self. This makes sense because in Orthodoxy we learn that we are made according to the image of God, which is Christ. We find our self in Him, and in the Body of Christ, His Church. Jesus Himself described the Church as His Bride. St. Basil the Great wrote of “the spark of divine love latent within you,” and this indicates how Orthodoxy regards love as the fulfilling of the law in Christ.
The more we give of ourself into Christ, the more we will live in love. We see this in the life of St. John our patron, whose fall feast we celebrated yesterday. He with God’s grace went through the steps of purification, illumination, and contemplation that are the way of holiness in Christ. He gave his life to this, and the uncreated light of God shone from his heart in his love. At night in Serbia at a seminary he would pray over the young students who were his charges in the midst of the trauma of exile from Russia amid great persecution, making sure they were tucked in as they slept. He walked dangerous streets in Shanghai to rescue orphaned children from trafficking and abuse, and brought his charges safely to America out of conflict there. He gave of his love to nurture seemingly unlikely people such as the American convert Father Seraphim Rose, whose writings helped lead many of us to Orthodoxy.
I spoke yesterday briefly here about my own experience of almost being killed in a car crash two years ago and how this led to my sense of an urgent calling to the priesthood. I felt this was a wake-up call in terms of the need unworthily to empty myself in Christ in our local mission work in this region. The priesthood as illustrated by our patron St. John is at best a sacrifice of self and by family, requiring that self-emptying in Christ, however all-unworthy the vessel such as a sinner like me. It involves for our mission many volunteer hours each week, both serving in Church and in visiting people and other activities. Yet the Cross as we know is a great blessing that unworthily in my case covers a multitude of sins. St. John provides the example with his illumined heart. He would not sleep lying down, in fact would barely sleep, would serve the Liturgy daily, and was a great wonder-working saint. In humility and awareness of our sins, this should seem beyond us. But we can ask the saints for help. And as we empty ourself in Jesus Christ, instead of asserting ourself, God’s grace or uncreated energy will help us. It is not from our self-assertion, but rather it is the beating life of the Church, the life of the heart and the spark of God’s love there, of which St. Basil spoke.
This is not at all limited to clergy and bishops, for as an old Orthodox saying goes, the road to hell is paved with the bones of priests and bishops. Self-emptying love in Christ can be seen in an Orthodox Christian father or mother as parents, for example, and in all of us as missionaries in our Church mission community. I’m thinking also of Thea and Dalton driving to North Carolina to help bring supplies to those in need amid the flooding in witness of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ in Orthodoxy. And of Justin and Nik on Friday giving of their time to fix the Church property’s flooded gravel driveway with their labor, perhaps saving us as a community hundreds of dollars, and then showing up to attend a 2 ½ hour Vigil service for our patron’s feast day out of love for our Lord’s Church. I know there are examples from each of you in our Church family of beautiful self-sacrificial love as Orthodox Christians.
Tomorrow will be our Church’s old feast day, of the Holy Protection of the Mother of God. Although on the calendar this has been superseded for us now by our new patron St John’s fall feast, the two are in blessed coincidence, linked neighbors so to speak, on the Church cycle of feasts. For the Mother of God is the ultimate and first example of theosis, of the fully illuminated heart, and the fullest patron of the Church. She emptied herself in Christ and with her intercessions illumines us to do the same. Our patron St. John once recounted a prophecy that in the end times the Ark of the Covenant would reappear. According to Maccabees, the Holy Prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark at the time of the destruction of the first Temple and the exile of Judaea to Babylon. St John recounts a tradition that Jeremiah hid the Ark in a secret place by a well, and that water from the well thereafter would draw up fire, but the Ark was not found. Jeremiah indicated that the Ark would be found at the right time later, andwould not reveal how to find it. In Orthodox tradition, the Mother of God is seen as typed or symbolized by the Ark of the Convent, as the dwelling place of God, which shines forth fully in the Book of Revelation. Such is the power of her love, by which the Ark is realized in Christ.
The desert father Abba Dorotheus wrote, the closer we come to God, the closer we come to one another. And the way to come close to God, to become one with his uncreated light, is in the Church as the Body of Christ. The saints beginning with the Theotokos show us the way through purification, illumination, and contemplation. The latter means consistency. This comes from the grace that is the uncreated energy of God, which is love, as we empty ourself in Him, and find unity with others then as well.
St. Michael of Kiev whom we commemorate today is yet another example. He came to ancient Kievan-Rus in answer to a call from the new Orthodox Christian Vladimir the Great, the ruling prince. St. Vladimir wanted a bishop from Constantinople, the Christian civilized center of the world at that time. Prior to becoming Orthodox, Vladimir had sought to consolidate and centralize pagan worship in his realm, which spiritually is the origin of Christian Russia. Vladimir’s earlier pagan project had been much like globalization and New Age spirituality today, to try to centralize people in servitude to the demons of the air in some kind of delusional rationalized form. Yet St. Michael arrived to become the first Metropolitan bishop of Kiev, and in his sacrificial love built beautiful Churches and overturned terrorizing idols. His giving of himself in the work of the Church was a model of love that left an enduring imprint across centuries, and still shines today within the outgrowth of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, in the world at large and here in Northern Appalachia. May St, Michael intercede for us, that we may consistently follow Jesus’s new commandment to love our neighbor more than our self in Orthodoxy, which means not merely right teaching but right-glorifying, which is love. Christ’s love is also, as the Evangelist John noted, truth. Love is not love if a lie about God or ourselves or our neighbor. For Jesus Christ said I am the way, the truth, and the life. And as John notes, God is love, and so we must love in truth as Orthodox Christians in our God’s Church, to really help ourselves and others.
Jesus in our other Gospel reading sums it up when he says, I Am the door, and I Am the Good Shepherd. These are some of the great “I Am’s” in the Gospel of John, by which he shows Himself to be the God who spoke with the Holy Prophet Moses at Mount Sinai. The name of God given to Moses is “I Am the Existing One,” rendered in iconography as “He Who is.” He is both the door and the Good Shepherd, the loving yet stern protector. We love because He loved us first. We find our love in Him in order to be a full human being, to trust ourselves fully to Him.
Lord Jesus Christ, have compassion on us. Amen
***
The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,
§26 [6:31-36]
The Lord said, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them that love you, what thanks have ye? For sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thanks have ye? For sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them from whom ye hope to receive, what thanks have ye? For sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest; for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.’
Holy Gospel according to John,
§36 [10: 9-16]
The Lord said to the Jews who came to Him: ‘I am the door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he who is a hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine. As the Father knoweth Me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down My life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice; and there shall be one fold, and one Shepherd.’