The Opposite of Faith
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, February 25, 2024 at St. Mary Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. One God. Amen.
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory Forever!
I haven't really preached since this past Christmas because of my illness so I'm going to give it a go today. We'll see what happens!
It's interesting Metropolitan Saba is endearing himself to me quite a bit. He wrote a wonderful piece about the new phariseeism which is infecting the church. So I'm going to preach about the same thing today because it's Pharisee and Publican Sunday.
This will be a two-point sermon.
Today's question is: what is the opposite of Faith? Like a good Agatha Christie story, even though the answer is right before our
eyes all the time, we often cannot see it. Obvious in hindsight and oh so surprising in the end. The Pharisee and the Publican's parable will be our guide into the kingdom of repentance as metanoia, the transformation of the mind.
Today Jesus sets before us a parable about two kinds of people. The first is represented by the proud pharisee as a scholar of the Judaic law. He had come to believe he had accomplished everything God asked of him. He had ascended; he had reached the Mountaintop. From his vantage point he gazed on the Publican, and presumably everybody else, with great disdain. "I thank you, O God," he said, "that I'm not like other men, especially, not like that one over there." We do that all the time, don't we?
The truth is he was not different than the Publican except that he was simply deluded.
A couple of monks, years ago when I was in California, believe It or not, declared themselves to be deified. A sure sign that they were not deified. A deified person doesn't talk about it, doesn't have to, everybody can see it, it's evident. What's he got to do PR for?
The holy fathers and mothers of the church refer to this as "prelest," a spiritual state of self-deception in which we come to believe ourselves better than others. That's a sin, by the way.
From St Paul's Letter to the Romans 12:3, he says, "do not think too highly of yourselves, but think like sober people." Sober. We've all been drinking or something. Presumably, Paul means that the opposite is probably true. If we think ourselves better than anyone we have not yet met Jesus.
The Publican is representative of those who actually have a clue, at least enough to know that they are undeserving of receiving anything from God. You see, no one is deserving and the good news is that you don't have to be. Worthiness is not the issue. Openness is the issue. The Publican was unworthy, and yet his humility saved him, because he was open to God in his humility. He knew more about himself than the Pharisee did, that's for sure. Humility is openness to God.
The prayer of the Cherubic Hymn in the Divine Liturgy tells us, "No one who is bound with the desires and pleasures of the flesh is worthy to approach or draw nigh to serve you, O King of glory," (that's every one of us) "for to serve you is a great and fearful thing even for the Heavenly powers." And then, in the prayer, our Savior appears, and he goes on, "but, because of your infinite love for humanity, you became one of us, and became our High Priest."
With Christ as our High Priest, he who knows our suffering from the inside out by his own experience as a human being, we can only expect one thing from him and that is mercy. But, of course, if you don't think yourself in need of mercy, you will be not open to receiving it. For those who have become the spiritually deluded have rendered themselves incapable of growth. The cup that is full has no room for anything else. If you ask me, that is one major characteristic of hell.
One of the Saints Gregory Nyssa, I believe, declared that "sin is the refusal to grow." The life of the Faithful is marked by infinite change and infinite growth. So, we must keep ourselves open to being surprised to being wrong and to change when we are.
You think St. Basil at 15, for example, was the same as St Basil at 45. I hope and pray, he grew and evolved and learned in his Christian walk otherwise he wouldn't be St Basil the Great, would he?
People grow. People change. The Church changes, too, believe it or not. Yes, it does. There only a couple of things that don't change, like, the Dogma, which is basically two: the Trinity and the Incarnation. Everything else flows from those. The shape of the Liturgy doesn't change very much though it changes; the music changes; the vestments change.
Here's one of my favorite quotes about this phariseeism by the great Christos Yannaras. I love that man. Here's the quote, it's a little bit long, so pay attention:
"Usually, the invocation of Orthodoxy happens with a boasting about faithfulness to what is genuine and authentic. Boasting means a demand for common recognition of and reverence for what has been handed on, but also for those people who maintain and represent it. Thus, Orthodoxy comes to function as a means of justifying not so much conservative ideas as conservative people - to serve often as for the psychological veiling of cowardice or spiritual sterility. Those who will not risk or create something new in life fasten themselves fanatically to some orthodoxy, protectors of form, interpreters of the Letter. They transform, finally, any orthodoxy whatever into a 'procrustean bed' where they mutilate life in order to make it fit the demands of their dogma."
That's really true, isn't it? It's sort of epidemic in our church. 'If you don't believe, what I believe, you're out, right? You're a heretic.' I hear it all the time.
Protectors of form. Interpreters of the letter. In other words, Pharisees. I fear that we often resemble them. There is a tendency for us to look down on people who are not us. This is a great sin, folks. We must look carefully into ourselves.
We're going to transition into the next part now.
Whether or not we have become one of them, if we find that we have through an honest search of ourselves, then repentance must begin there. Repentance being not a listing of individual sins. That is not what metanoia means. Metanoia means to change one's mind, to change the way we think. Are you ready to do that, to give up your most cherished beliefs for the truth? Maybe your cherished beliefs aren't true. We wish they were, but we delude ourselves so often.
Repentance is Christ's life in us. Once we have let go of our opinions, ideologies, judgments, predilections, we make ourselves open to Christ who is the Truth, free from slavery, from ourselves. Perhaps this is why we hear from St John Chrysostom that prayer, true prayer, is the laying aside of thoughts.
"Be still and know that I'm God." There you go. You can't be still if your thoughts are chasing you around the table or chasing you into places you want to go or there's an imagined grizzly bear on the way to get you and you're living in fear. You can't possibly see God, right?
When we lay aside all our thoughts and Earthly cares like the Liturgy calls us to do, what will we find? We will find God and a Cosmos soaked with him.
So, who in the parable is faithful? That's an easy one. The very secure and certain Pharisee or the sinful and odious Publican? Jesus tells us flat out the Publican went away justified. Justified! How much evil had he done? Not enough to beat the Pharisee at his sin, which was far greater - the sin of pride. The ground of the publican's existence and understanding was fertile soil for the development of a rich harvest. The Pharisee stood in an arid and waterless land where the soul, if you will, can do nothing but wither.
The opposite of faith is certainty. There's one quote to help us take a step back from our supposed certainty and see the bigger picture. To see with God's eyes, to be able to say, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."
How do you know that this is happening? St Isaac of Syria tells us how. Here is his definition of a Christian. See where you fit in it.
"The merciful heart in a human person is, therefore, the image and likeness of God's mercy, which Embraces the whole of the Cosmos. People, animals, reptiles, demons. In God, there is no hatred towards any one, but all embracing love, which does not distinguish between righteous and sinner, between a friend of Truth and an enemy of Truth, between Angel and Demon. Every created being is precious in God's eyes. He cares for His creation, and everyone finds in Him a loving Father. Even if we turn away from God, God never turns away from us."
We have no excuse to turn away from anyone for any reason at all. When this Grand and holy Vision replaces our self- centeredness and narrow-minded belief systems that we create by ourselves, we will then know that we are headed in the right direction.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.