(Above: Painting of Jesus Christ walking on the water by Ivan Aivazovsky, 19th century Russian)

A homily from St. John Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

There’s an old American song that goes, “Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the waters, put your hand in the hand of the man who calmed the sea. You gotta take a good look at yourself, and you can look at others differently. Put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee.”

We can take a good look at ourself by repentance and also by emptying ourselves in Christ to realize with God’s grace how we are made according to the image and likeness of God, brothers and sisters. Then we can look at others accordingly.

When our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ stilled the waters of the storm in the Gospel today, He did not just calm the fears of His disciples in their little boat on a small sea, where like on Lake Michigan where I used to go sailing when I was young, the winds can come fiercely stirring up all like a bathtub tsunami threatening to overwhelm small craft.

Our Lord more than calming His friends showed Himself to be the Creator with all power over His Creation, including ourselves. He showed His loving powerful authority over the very elements of the natural world that at times threaten us from without and within in this fallen earth. He also showed His loving power and authority over the sea of sin and stress and passions that often rages within and between us as fallen humans, stirred by the devil.

Our baptism into His Body the Church as Orthodox Christians gives us poise with His help in such storms when we open our hearts to His grace.

But this Gospel reading today comes on the Church calendar with commemoration of a strange event for a Sunday, commemoration of the great earthquake of Constantinople in 740. There are many such disasters in human history, some of them forces of nature, such as the floods that have hit this area as aftereffects of hurricanes to our south, and some forces of human hate and destruction such as 9-11.

The great earthquake of 740 is instructive for us because it encompasses both in the memory of the Church.

Earthquakes involve loss of control and grounding. The very destructive earthquake of 740, in the Christian capital of the world at the time, came during the movement of iconoclasm, an attempt to ban and destroy icons throughout the Christian world, in imitation of the Unitarian Islamic heresy. The iconoclast movement had been going for a decade when the earthquake hit, and would last on and off for more than a century more. The spiritual warfare and sin associated with iconoclasm were seen as paralleling the unsettling of the earthquake’s destruction. The earthquake reminded Christians that our lives are subject to larger natural forces, and that all is under God’s government, not our own. When we depart from God’s authority, we find ourselves more exposed and vulnerable.

Spiritually, Iconoclasm challenged the Incarnation of Christ, and our own embodied lives in Him, by challenging the Incarnate image of God. The Bible says denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is the spirit of Anti-Christ.

Without finding ourselves, our identity, in Christ, we are even more exposed to the storms and accidents of the world. Today, people often seek identity in ideas of race, ethnicity, gender, and various forms of passions involving power, greed, and lust. Such efforts, often clad in various kinds of non-Christianity spirituality, often seem to have replaced atheistic communism as the world’s great revolutionary forc. But if we seek to replace God’s image, Christ, with a false structure of human utopia based in human ideas of identity, the result will be a personal as well as social Tower of Babel awaiting an earthquake. As an old Russian proverb says, shut out nature ant the door, and she will come in through the window.

Our real nature should be sought in Christ, not in detached aspects of ourselves in worldly chaos. In Him we find the source of true justice as righteousness, and true freedom as release from sin. In Him we experience the safety from the surging storms and seas and yes earthquakes of our own sin and the accidents of the world.

An early Christian writer and martyr Boethius described it this way, while imprisoned for his Orthodox faith.

Life is like a wheel of fortune. It turns and things happen.

But the closer we are to the center of the wheel, through living a virtuous life with God’s help, the less we will spin around in the wheel of fortune. Getting to the center means getting closer to God, and through Him, to one another in a real and loving way.

In this it’s very appropriate that the Church today also remembers the Great Martyr Demetrious the Myrrh-Gusher. A valiant soldier, he was tortured by a pagan Roman emperor in the early 300s. Yet he held firm and his graceful holiness helped others. In fact, his tortured body, his relics, gushed wonderworking myrrh that healed.

Appeals to the prayers of this great soldier saint helped defeat many pagan barbarian attacks on the great Christian Greek center of Thessalonica, which remains a great Orthodox center to this day, not far from Holy Mount Athos, long after fickle Constantinople had fallen.St. Demetrios demonstrated in his life the great truth voiced by another Christian warrior, the Apostle Paul, when he wrote that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

For the virtues to which we open our heart, through God’s grace, are themselves uncreated energies of God. Virtues such as courage, wisdom, faith, hope, and above all love. These all allow us to weather the storms of life, which Christ still calms.

Glory to God for all things!