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Homily Sunday, 6 October 2024
St. Innocent, Enlightener of North America

Fr. Robert Miclean

Holy Archangels Orthodox Church

Sunday, 6 October 2024—St. Innocent, Enlightener of North America

Epistle: II Cor. 6:1-10; Heb. 7:26-8:2 (St. Innocent)

Gospel: Luke 7:11-16; Jn. 10:9-16 (St. Innocent)

Today we commemorate the Feast of St. Innocent, Enlightener of North America, the first bishop in this land, a lover of the native American peoples of Alaska, planter of the True Faith on these shores, and example to us in our own day of the courage that comes from a life lived for the glory of God in witness to His timeless truth.   He is the father of the Orthodox Church in America, the OCA being the daughter Church of those first Russian missionaries.   

Christ, our Great High Priest, has left us through His Church the Apostles and through the Apostles, their successors, the bishops and priests of the Church to carry on the Apostolic work through the ages.  St. Innocent embodies so well the meaning of the word, “Apostle” (Apostolos), which in the Greek means, “sent.”  The Church in Russia sent St. Innocent to Alaska to pour out God’s love and the truth of Christ that liberates all people.  In St. Innocent’s time, most native Alaskans had not yet heard the Gospel, living in a vast wilderness that had only begun to be evangelized 25 years earlier by his predecessor, St. Herman.    

It’s hard for us living in the 21st century to envision how daring and perilous (from a human perspective) such a journey to Alaska, let alone day to day life in Alaska was like in 1823.  Some of you may have seen the television show, “Deadliest Catch,” that depicts the harrowing exploits of Alaska’s commercial fishermen, who have access to all the modern technology and conveniences and still risk peril every time they are at sea.  Picture for a moment Alaska in St. Innocent’s day in the early 19th-century, when almost all transportation had to be accomplished by boat.  Imagine the cold of Alaska winters and the infinite darkness.

St. Innocent undertook all such perils, visiting remote villages and all the habited Aleutian Islands on those deadly seas, often in no more than a kayak.  In fact, he founded and built Ss. Peter and Paul church on the remote island of the same name in 1830, where today the faithful still celebrate the Divine Liturgy almost two hundred years later.  He faced severe conditions and served at great risk to life.  But listen to the fruit of his work: he baptized ten thousand people, he built numerous churches—many with his own hands and those of his spiritual children, he founded schools and he himself taught the fundamentals of the Christian life. He learned six dialects of the native languages of Alaska and translated the Gospels, the divine services, and much of the hymnody of the Church into those native languages and dialects. 

What could have motivated St. Innocent?  What drove him to risk his own life countless times and endure the harshness of 19th century Alaska?  St. Innocent was driven by the love of Christ for his flock, for all those he could reach, teach, and inspire.  More than anything, he desired that others would embrace the Gospel and the fullness of the life in Christ in His holy Church.  He didn’t come to make them good Russians; he came to make them true Christians, followers of Jesus Christ.  This is seen by the fact that he didn’t let them stay worshiping in Russian, but rather, undertook the daunting task of learning their various native languages and translating the divine services into those native languages.  He is a modern-day Saints Methodius and Cyril, who established an alphabet for the Slavs and translated the divine services into Cyrillic. 

In other words, St. Innocent followed the pattern handed down to him through 2,000 years in the Church.  Through him, we see a true model of the Orthodox Church’s missiology in keeping with what we read in the New Testament and see throughout her history: He came to baptize the culture with the truth of Christ, not to obliterate it or make it into 19th century Russia. 

St. Innocent’s example is also a good one for us to follow as the Church in America today because it is the example of the Apostles.  We don’t seek to become like the culture, nor do we seek to obliterate the culture; instead, we seek to baptize this culture, to transfigure this culture with the light and truth of Christ found in the fullness of His Church of which we are a part. 

We may not face the physical perils that St. Innocent did: we may never have to endure an Alaskan winter without electricity or travel by canoe on deadly ice-cold sees, or travel by land weary of Grizzlies in order to preach the Gospel and share our Orthodox Faith.  But ask yourself, what do I do to live out the Gospel and the Orthodox Faith to those around me here and now? 

Do we love those around us, our co-workers, fellow students, our neighbors, the people we know in town or who we run into time and again at the grocery store?  We often prefer to remain quiet about our faith out of fear or preoccupation with our own problems to such an extent that we are inward focused and not outward focused on the needs around us.  Yet everywhere, there’s an opportunity to love as Christ teaches us and to throw off any indifference to those around us.

Many are the struggles with our culture today and those who taste of its nihilism.  The calling of Christ to deny ourselves and live for Him is a great challenge in our culture, but it’s also liberation, just as it was to the animists in Alaska. St. John Chrysostom assures us, “As we endure His dying now, and choose while living to die for His sake: so also He will choose, when we are dead, to beget us then into life.  For if we come from life into death, He will also lead us by the hand from death into life.”  Are you ready to die to self and live for God?

Nothing is too great for God; no temptation or habitual sin, no spiritual or physical sickness, nothing in this world can rob us of the love of God and our communion with Him if we’re willing to struggle, to fight to die to self and live for God, seeking healing from our passions and sin-sickness.  In His great love and mercy for us, God gives us all the tools we need through His Church: divine worship, opportunities to come outside ourselves to serve others and learn to love Him and others more, the Sacraments, the disciplines of the ascetic life, the prayers and fasting, accountability, and authority—all of which save us from this or any adulterous generation. 

As we die to this world and live for Christ, we give others hope that they too can overcome this world.  As we live out our baptism in repentance, we give others hope that they too can be baptized and put on Christ.  We show others that because we so love God, we’re ready to share His love with them too.  Then, step by step, following in the footsteps and example of St. Innocent as his spiritual descendants, we baptize the culture around us with the light, life and truth of Jesus Christ.  Holy St. Innocent, pray for us sinners for our healing and salvation before the throne of Christ God in whose near presence you now worship with us and intercede for us.

Homily 09/29/24
Follow Christ and Love Your Enemies

Fr. Robert Miclean

Holy Archangels Orthodox Church

Sunday, 29 September 2024—Follow Christ and Love Your Enemies II!

Epistle:           I Cor. 1:21-2:4

Gospel:           Luke 6:31-36

Our Lord Jesus Christ challenges us in today’s Gospel to “love our enemies.”  But before we can begin to understand the “how” of such a command, we have to understand what our Lord means by ‘love’.  There’s great confusion today about the meaning of love.  What often passes for love is not what we as Orthodox (right-believing) Christians have been taught by God, the Author of love.  We learn true love from God or not at all.  The word used in the Greek New Testament to describe God’s love here is ‘agape.’ It is divine love: selfless, holy, and sacrificial, a love which thinks of the needs of others, and which is manifest in humility, service to others, and self-emptying—kenosis in the Greek—the same self-emptying that Christ God so mercifully demonstrates to us in His Incarnation and in His voluntary Passion to defeat sin and death on our behalf.  It’s this love that He, in turn, calls us to exercise if we are to live in communion with Him and love as He has first loved us.  But how do we love our enemies with such agape as God calls us to?    First, we must understand what agape is and what it is not.

Love, as it is often used today is seen manifesting itself as something focused on wants and rights, on a subjective understanding of fulfillment, even of pornia, that is, immorality, against God’s will and the way that leads to and manifests life in Him.  It is lust, a twisted eros, driven by the passions, as well as ego, pride.  Such eros is opposed to the kind of agape love God demonstrates to us through His Incarnation and life-saving Passion.  God’s love is life-giving even as it is self-emptying; it is the opposite of pride. 

And so if that’s how we understand love, as our culture promotes love, sexual fulfillment and immorality, no wonder there’s confusion; if it’s largely driven by an emotional feeling or lust, of the flesh, or selfish motivation, then no wonder so many marriages end in divorce and many young people ask, “why bother with marriage,” even as others try to change what marriage is and who they can be married to, resulting in self-condemnation and separation from the life of God.

Without agape, without God informing our love, the very idea of loving one’s enemies or being generous in our lending, as Christ commands us in today’s Gospel, seem almost ‘quaint,’ an impossibility in today’s world.  We know how to love those who love us (perhaps), but love those who dislike or hate, oppose or persecute us?  Today, we live in a world full of hate and violence, where even the pretense of love has been unmasked.  Today, “hate speech” is a label put on anyone and anything you hate.  There is hatred of those who oppose us politically, hatred of those who oppose the immorality of the culture that targets the most innocent with their sexual perversions, hatred of anyone who contradicts what one believes.  But as Christians we cannot be party to such hatred and scorn, yes even from those who may persecute us, take our livelihood away from us, and cancel us.  Instead, we pray for those who persecute us. Christ says, “…If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.” 

From a worldly standpoint without God, to love one’s enemies would be impossible and, even, nonsensical.  But, rather than putting these commands of Christ away, relegating them to a by-gone era of Church history, of some ‘quaint’ teaching of Christ, we have an opportunity here as Christians to wrestle with and apply this Gospel command to our lives. 

One of our biggest impediments to loving as God loves, as God calls us, in turn, to love (agape), is pride.  Indeed, pride is so wrapped up in our modern understanding of love (think ‘rights’ self-fulfillment, etc.), that we don’t even see how it can be separated.  Ego, pride causes us to be self-focused and indifferent to others, even to God; it’s pride that makes us so easily offended; it’s pride that convinces us in our over-sensitivity to act as if Orthodox Christianity is only ‘my thing’ and not what Christ God calls the whole world to in His love for all.

Pride is, indeed, a great challenge to overcome.  When we discover a foothold of pride through the Holy Spirit working in our hearts through confession, we have an opportunity to confess it and begin praying against it, to become more conscious of its devistating work inside us, and then, step by step, we can allow God to chip away at it and bring us the healing that will free us to truly love as God loves, in a self-emptying way, as we serve and give, unashamed of being an Orthodox Christian even and especially in a culture that rejects Christ’s love and truth.   

As we pray against pride, we pray for humility, assured that God hears such prayers and will work through them for our good and that of others.  As we grow in humility, we grow in love and service to others, not just those easy to love, but yes, even for those who make our lives difficult, even for our enemies, that is, we pray for them, we do good to them. 

Fr. George Calciu was imprisoned by the communist authorities in Romania for 21 years for his faith in Christ God.  After communism fell in December 1989, he refused to name his persecutors, the guards who tortured him and others.  Even during his imprisonment while being tortured he prayed for them, he loved them and did not allow hate to spread its cancer in his soul.

Humility exercised through love in this way is powerful as it is courageous; it’s a true witness of Christ’s truth in a world of enmity, hatred, violence, and pride, as well as a manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst. Exercising agape love in our lives is a uniquely Christian practice empowered by the Holy Spirit working in us and through us.  Christ, in admonishing us to “love our enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return,” promises us great spiritual reward if we let our hearts put this kind of active agape into practice, saying that we will be His sons and daughters, co-heirs with Him, fellow victors with Him over sin and death. 

We’re warned that in the end times because of lawlessness, “love will grow cold” (Matt. 24:12), that we, those in the Body of Christ, must persevere to the end in agape.  We don’t know the time or the day when Christ will return, but we live now with eternity before our eyes, in the fear and love of the Lord, lest our agape grows cold and we remove ourselves from life with Him.  In the reality that our society is becoming more and more polarized, as Orthodox Christians we do not dehumanize or scapegoat others as ‘the enemy.’  Instead, as St. Paul admonishes, we are to
“no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ.” (Eph. 4:14-15)

And so, we daily struggle against the passions, our pride, praying to love as Christ loves, even as others call this ‘hate’ because they do not know what true love is and do not understand that what they call love is actually destructive.  We continue daily to submit ourselves to Christ God, not giving preference to our own ideas or how our culture defines love.  Instead, we courageously speak the truth in love to our culture, unashamed of our Orthodox Faith, knowing it is the Way that leads to the fulness of Him who is Life.  We avail ourselves of the deifying worship of Christ’s holy Church and the Sacraments—and make time for them.  We struggle with our focus on Christ, that we may grow in what it is to be His beloved sons and daughters and experience more of His love in our lives.  This is the love the world needs, agape—the love God would give us in abundance, so that we can, in turn, give it to others and love, yes, even those who hate us. 

 

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