Abraham is a central figure in this first of two special Sundays before Christmas, devoted in the Church from ancient times to the Holy Forefathers and the Holy Fathers of our Lord Jesus Christ on this earth. Today is the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, and next week, the Sunday before Christmas, is called the Sunday of the Holy Fathers. Next Sunday in particular we commemorate in the Gospel Reading the genealogy of Jesus Christ in the flesh, and those prophets who spoke of His birth.

The Holy Forefather Abraham left the idolatrous and occult country of Ur of the Chaldees for the promise of the Holy Land. To Him, God said, “In thy seed shall all of the nations of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3, 22:18). As the Church’s Troparion for today puts it,  “By faith didst Thou [O Lord} justify the Forefathers, * when through them Thou didst betroth Thyself aforetime to the Church that was from among the nations. * The Saints boast in glory that from their seed there is a glorious fruit, * even she that bore Thee seedlessly. * By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.”

Like all of us Orthodox Christians, Abraham had to leave the land of his fathers behind. Spiritually, each of us has done this in joining our hearts to the Body of Christ, His Church, in the land of Orthodoxy, so to speak. Even if we were baptized as infants or children, we do this in our lives, and we renew our baptism and chrismation vows each time we come prepared for Holy Communion, to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.

For as St. Cyprian of Carthage noted, to have God as your Father, you must also have the Church as your Mother. Brothers and sisters, our humble little Church, as a fractal of the Orthodox Church worldwide, is our homeland, the Israel of today, where we belong spiritually and physically.

Around the country we see a movement to the Church, in large numbers of converts currently to Orthodoxy in America, in the six catechumens we pray for in our Church, in the newly illumined baptized adults and babies this past year in our new temple. We welcome them home as we come home each day in our hearts and at every worship service to our Church. We see around us the family portraits of the saints across the millennia in the iconography, we study our living ancestry and Tradition in our online Orthodoxy and in-person Bible classes each week, and most of all we join with our Church family now and throughout history in the mysteries of Confession and Holy Communion. And with all of them, our Church family across the ages, we look forward joyful soon to the culmination of our history and theirs and that of the world in the birth of Christ ,

Abraham left the land of the Chaldeans, which long after was still known as a center of occult idolatry. In fact, the exile of the lost ten tribes of Israel in that region of the Assyrians long afterward led to the introduction of the occult into the cabalistic elements of what became Judaism in its rejection of Jesus Christ. Abraham’s journey as the head of his family became a type or sign of the Church family to come, as an ark of salvation for those seeking spiritual safety and thriving in the family of the Church. So at Christmas time the Ark of the Covenant literally is found and restored and fully realized in the previously empty Holy of Holies of the Temple, as never before in the Virgin Mary. The birth giver to Christ the Word, in HIs birth she fulifilled the law of God that had once rested in the supposedly lost Ark of the Covenant. That Ark is symbolized and embodied in the Gospel book and tabernacle and the Bread of Life and Blood of our Lord that will rest on our altar table today.

Abraham’s journey is also a reminder of the living history of Christmas, an historical journey that points toward the historicity and Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and reminds us of the journey of the Wise Men from the land of the Chaldeans to the cave and the manger. Like Abraham, our historical journeys to Orthodoxy, and our knowing this living history in our hearts, are the greatest spiritual medicine and weapon against the spirit of Anti-Christ in our age. For the Evangelist John tells us that the spirit of Anti-Christ denies that Jesus Christ became flesh, when we as Orthodox Christians experience that every time we partake of His Body and Blood at the Eucharist. In our commemoration of the Holy Forefathers of Christ leading up to his historical birth more than two thousand years ago, we highlight how we worship in His Church, which is both historical and mystical, and was never lost but is always sustained by God’s loving hand.

In my own life, I grew up in two Protestant denominations that partook of the spirit of Anti-Christ in downplaying or disregarding how Jesus Christ had come in the flesh. My father’s Unitarian-Universalist congregation believed Jesus only to have been a good human prophet, and my mother’s Christian Science denomination believed that Christ was just a spiritual idea. Those heresies may sound extreme, but they are common in our culture today, a kind of Judaizing Deism or Unitarianism that vaguely infects much of American culture, and leads many young people into atheism and the type of pagan occultism that Abraham left behind. This is why the Orthodox Church is growing today in America, because we reject such heresy, and we stand for the Incarnation of Christ, for the historic embodiment of our Lord ina. Church that has never been lost but is kept in God’s hand as we are here today, however unworthily, to the glory of God.

A memorable central event in Abraham’s life is recorded in the beautiful classic Orthodox Christian icon found both at the back of our worship area on your right, and at the front high place of our altar. This icon is known as the Hospitality of Abraham. In it we see the three angels who came to visit Abraham by the Oak of Mamre in the promised land. He hospitably entertains them though they seem strangers to him. The Church Fathers understood the angels as a type or symbol of the Holy Trinity, and that one of them, depicted in the Center of the icon, was a theophany of Christ, meaning an appearance of Him on earth before the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas. This was a foretaste if you will of Christmas, also indicating the one God in Trinity Whom we worship, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A relic piece of wood from the Oak at Mamre, which is a holy place of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in the Holy Land still today, can be found at the entryway to our Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville.

In keeping with the Hospitality of Abraham, liturgically this Sunday and next we  commemorate the three youths in the fiery furnace who like the Holy Forefathers stood against idolatry. They also can be as types of the Birth of Jesus Christ in the virgin womb. They experienced a theophany of Christ like Abraham, the fourth form in the furnace. As the American Gospel song put it, those holy forefathers although young in their faith did not bend, they did not bow, they did not yield, and they were bedewed by the divine grace of the Holy Ghost in the presence of the Lord amid the worst of trials. As today’s Church Kontakion says, “You did not worship the graven image, O thrice-blessed ones, but armed with the immaterial Essence of God, you were glorified in a trial by fire. From the midst of unbearable flames you called on God, crying: Hasten, O compassionate One! Speedily come to our aid, for You are merciful and able to do as You will.” Indeed, today Christmas is coming dear brothers and sisters, the hope for all mankind, out in the country here as in Bethlehem of old.

The three youths with their theophany also might be considered typology in ancient times of the Holy Trinity–of the Son in Whom human nature was enhypostasized in the Virgin birth, that is embedded in His Person, fully God and fully Man in the Incarnation and beyond, and in the Holy Ghost by whom Mary became the Bride of God as well as the Mother of God. With the Birth of Christ and the Church as the Body of Christ, the Church herself identified with the Theotokos and became in a mystery the Bride of Christ, and the Mother of us all. In the furnace of daily life we too are preserved by Him in His Church. And He is in our midst.

It has been said the Holy Forefathers we commemorate today are the maimed, the halt, and the blind in our Gospel Reading (given at the end below), called to dine with God. In a sense on earth they were everyday saints, like those around us here in Church today, God willing, however unworthy and sinful we may be, myself most of all. The Holy Forefathers like all of us who in our hearts consider ourselves spiritually sick with sin, weep and lament and seek God, and find Him, the Good Shepherd, throughout history, and from today as we look toward the approach of Christmas, and as we are invited to the supper of our Lord in the Eucharist.

The Holy Forefathers are our family tree in the Body of Christ, Brothers and Sisters, our Orthodox Ancestry.com. This is why the Church is described by Scripture and Tradition as our nation, our family, our race, and our spiritual hospital, a place of healing and transfiguration, our home. For we are the people of Israel today. The uncreated grace of God sparkles in our Church Mysteries and in one another as we open our hearts in this Christmas Season to feel Him born in us. May He bless all our struggles in these last two weeks of the Nativity Fast and find us in the joy of His birth in our hearts.

Glory to God for all things!

***

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§76 [14:16-24]

The Lord said this parable: ‘A certain man made a great supper and bade many. And he sent his servant at suppertime to say to them that were bidden, “Come, for all things are now ready.” And they all with one accord began to make excuses. The first said unto him, “I have bought a piece of ground, and I need to go and see it. I pray thee have me excused.” And another said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to test them. I pray thee have me excused.” And another said, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.” So that servant came and showed his lord these things. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant, “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind.” And the servant said, “Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.” And the lord said unto the servant, “Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say unto you that none of those men who were bidden shall taste of my supper. For many are called, but few are chosen.”’