The Fearful Face of Apostolic Failure

Sermon notes Mark 9:17-31    4th Sunday of Lent 2009

And one of the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit; and wherever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” And they brought the boy to him; and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, “How long has he had this?” And he said, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and into the   water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.” And Jesus said to him, “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You dumb and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again.” And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse; so that most of them said, “He is dead.” But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.” They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he would not have any one know it; for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”

This Gospel Lesson of the 4^th Sunday of Great Lent raises the very important yet very troubling issue of what happens when we as Christians fail when trying to do what Christ taught or commanded?  

The disciples in the Gospel lesson could not heal the epileptic boy. It is the boy’s father who brings his son to Christ, not the disciples.   They are not eager to confess their failure to Christ or before the crowd.

Jesus’ reaction to his disciples (he is not speaking to the crowd) is very strongly disapproving:  “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.”

Lent is a sojourn.  Last Sunday we visited the place of the Cross of Christ which was to strengthen us on our way.  This Sunday we have to deal with the eventuality that we will confront situations where our best efforts at being disciples and Christians will not be good enough and we will fail.  This is a difficult message especially in an American culture which measures everything by success – the prosperity Gospel.  It is possible that at times we Christians will try but will fail to do things that Christ commanded us to do.  How will we react?  How should we react?

In the Gospel lesson the father of the boy confesses his unbelief – and Christ heals his son.  The man confesses his failure, he doesn’t try to hide it, or to blame the disciples for his lack of faith.  He makes his confession, and despite admitting to his failure, Christ heals the boy.

The disciples are puzzled by all of this.  “Why could we not cast it out?”  They ask this question privately.  Are they afraid what Christ might say to them?  Are they embarrassed and don’t want the crowd to hear about their failures?  

It seems as if they are saying, “OK, we understand this man lacked faith, but what about all of us?  Why couldn’t we heal the boy for we are following you!?!

It will happen to each of us at some point that we will try but will fail to do Christ’s will.  Will our concern be what the crowd thinks about us, or will we be concerned about the person to whom we failed to successfully minister? 

We can look at ourselves during Lent:   Christ promises to heal our sins.  All we have to do is confess them: But how reluctant we are to confess our sins.  This is simply opening our lives to Christ and being honest about who we are and what we have done.   And yet so many are reluctant to confess and avoid confession and avoid acknowledging their sins. We fail on such a task and then wonder why we can’t do even greater works than these.    Why can’t we do the greater works Christ told us to do?  It will be very hard if we don’t do the first thing He told us to do – repent!

It is in the midst of their failure, that Christ told the Twelve about his impending crucifixion. Despite their failures, despite our failures, God’s plan for salvation continues on.  Christ goes to the cross and defeats death and accomplishes the salvation of the world.  Sometimes God is unfolding bigger things in the plan of salvation while we are too focused on our small defeats and failures.

So what happens when we fail to accomplish what Christ wills us to do?  Salvation, God’s plan and will, go on.   We like the disbelieving father, must confess our sins, and embrace the discipline of being followers of Christ as we continue our own sojourn toward the Kingdom of God.

4th Sunday of Lent – St. John Climacus

On the 4^th Sunday of Great Lent the Orthodox Church commemorates St. John Climacus – St. John of the Ladder.  This 7^th Century monastic receives his name from a work he authored called THE LADDER OF DIVINE ASCENT.   This work was written for monastics as a guide to the ascetic life.  Somewhere about the 11^th Century Great Lent began to lose its catechetical dimension in the life of the Church and become more a time of repentance.   After the 15^th Century when monasticism took control of the liturgical practice of the Orthodox Church, the Sundays of Great Lent became more associated with monastic ascetical practice, and in this time St. John Climacus’ name became associated with the 4^th Sunday of Lent as a reminder that the ascetic practice of Lent was part of the monastic effort to ascend the ladder toward God which was put before each monk.   A quote from St. John’s book:

Repentance is the renewal of baptism and is a contract with God for a fresh start in life. Repentance goes shopping for humility and is ever distrustful of bodily comfort. Repentance is critical awareness and a sure watch over oneself. Repentance is the daughter of hope and the refusal to despair…Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord by the perfor­mance of good deeds which are the opposites of the sins. It is the purification of conscience and the voluntary endurance of affliction. The penitent deals out his own punishment, for repentance is the fierce persecution of the stomach and the flogging of the soul into in­tense awareness.

The theme of the ladder of divine ascent became very popular in Orthodox spirituality.  Thus Bishop Kallistos Ware in his recent book, The Inner Kingdom writes:

Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, and so you will see the things that are in heaven – for there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within your soul. Flee from sin, dive into yourself, and in your soul you will discover the stairs by which to ascend.   

Though monastic spirituality came to dominate Orthodox practice and thinking, at the heart of Orthodox spirituality is still the basic issue of discovering what it truly means to be human – created in God’s image and likeness, endowed with a soul where God’s Spirit combines with the dust of the earth.  As Russian Orthodox priest Fr. Alexandr Elchaninov wrote:

The man who denies his relationship to God, who refuses to be His son, is not a real man but a man diminished, the unfinished plan of a man. For to be sons of God is not only granted us as a gift but is also entrusted to us as a task, and the accomplishment of this task alone, through the conscious putting on of Christ and God, can lead to a full  disclosure, a full blossoming of human personality.

Repenting from the Heart

Great Lent is said to be a “school of repentance,” meaning that in the season of Lent, by honestly facing up to our sins and rejecting them for the evil they are, we learn how to repent and the importance of repentance in our daily lives as Christians (We pray that we might “spend the remaining time of our lives in peace and repentance” – repentance is not a 10 minute spiritual talk in confession, it is a way of life involving self understanding as well as a way of understanding the world; it involves a life time of orienting one’s self to God’s will.)

To understand repentance, we have to understand the nature of sin.  There are some false notions of sin, of which we should be aware.

One idea of sin which is not Christian is based in a notion that the human body is evil and the body is the cause of sin.  

  “Christian tradition vigorously denies that our bodies are the real cause of our sin. This is the Manichean heresy that Christians repudiate. Yet while the chief sins are spiritual rather than carnal, we are still called to order the life of our fleshly sins.”  (Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien) 

Any religion which teaches the physical body is in itself evil is based in some form of dualism, but is not biblical.   God is the creator and fashioner of the human body in biblical thinking and the body is also part of what God sees as good in the universe He made.  Jesus is God incarnate – God in the flesh – where the flesh is savable, good, and capable of bearing God.  Mary, the Theotokos, gives flesh to the God incarnate.  The physical body, including human sexual organs, was fashioned by God to be good, as part of God’s plan for humanity and for salvation.

Ideas that the body somehow belongs to the evil part of creation are ancient – predating Christianity, but they are not biblical.  Sometimes it is possible to read in Orthodox hymns about the flesh dualistic ideas and to imagine that one’s body is evil and the cause of all sin.  But we are not trying to escape the body; the body is saved in the resurrection of Christ and in the resurrection of all the dead in the world to come.   The body is thus not the source of sin, though we do sin with our bodies.   The real culprit is the will – we desire things and so sin with our bodies, but we choose this sin.  Our lives are not totally predetermined nor predestined by having bodies, though some forms of atheistic materialism would claim that we are nothing but genetically determined through our bodies.  This again is not biblical.

A second error in thinking about sin would say that Satan or the devil is the cause of all of our sin.  This idea too is not biblical.  Satan is not God’s opposite and equal.  The very point of Genesis 1-3 is that God alone created the heavens and the earth.  Satan had no part in the creation of the world, and is a creature himself.  Satan is not eternal as God is eternal.  Satan’s powers are extremely limited, and in Christian thinking Christ has defeated Satan.  In the baptismal service we say that Satan doesn’t even have power over swine.   Satan cannot make us do anything, but we can choose evil and can cooperate with evil.   In Genesis 6:5 and 8:21 it is clear that God sees the human heart as being the locus of evil in humans.  God does not blame Satan or anything external to humans.   Jesus Christ repeats a very similar idea in Mark 7:20-23 -

“And he said, ‘What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’”

This is why repentance involves looking into one’s self, to see the sins within one’s own heart, to expose them to the light of Christ, to confess them in order to over come them.

Thus sin is not caused by Satan, nor is it external to us.  Sin is found in our hearts and this is where the spiritual war against “the flesh” and against evil and against Satan must take place.   This is why repentance involves looking into our hearts and openly confessing to Christ what we see there – so that Christ can take away this sin and bring healing to our hearts.

Repentance and fasting do not have as their goal the destruction of the flesh, but rather the destruction of the passions which come from the heart which stimulate our flesh to turn away from God and to seek pleasure and delight only in things which take us further from God.    Sex for example can be part of the sacramental life of marriage, and as such be a way of experiencing love and union with God.  On the other hand, sex can be turned into self love, and godless self-centered passion which does not lead us to God but away from Him so that we can pursue our own pleasures and desires.

To say that I sin only because Satan tempts me or only because my evil body drags me into it, is to deny personal responsibility for sin, it ultimately even blames God for giving me a body or for allowing free will.   Repentance means acknowledging that one has free will and makes real choices in life.  It means acknowledging that there are real temptations and that good and evil are both equally appealing to us.  It means acknowledging that we must CHOOSE good over evil. 

This is why the sacraments are so important to our lives – for in them we are united to Christ, and thus have Christ, the Son of God, as an ally against evil and choosing evil.  The sacramental life does not take away our free will and responsibility, but rather is an aid in helping us see goodness and to choose it, and to recognize evil and to deny ourselves choosing it.   The sacramental life helps to transfigure and transform “mundane” bodily experiences into means of communion with God.

The Prayer of Parents

Sermon notes for the 4^th Sunday of Lent   1985

Mark 9:17-31

The father of the epileptic son said to Jesus, “if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.”

Today I want to focus on the prayer of a parent – the faithful dad or mom who wants to pray for his or her child.

How do we pray for our children?  Today’s Gospel Lesson is a springboard into answering that question.

There is a man in Wisconsin who had Cerebral Palsy and who wrote a short book about what his life has been like.  Cerebral Palsy is at this time considered incurable.  He describes his inability to control his temper and emotions which caused him to be hospitalized and institutionalized time and again.  He described how his parents took him to many doctors who tried various treatments all to no avail.  When he was about 45 years old, his mother took him to yet another specialist whom she had just learned about to try one more time to help her son.  The mom told the doctor, “if you can do anything for my son, please help us because  all the doctors we have seen believe he cannot control himself and must be permanently institutionalized.”

The doctor prescribed a new experimental medication, and miraculously the medication helped the man to control his violent emotional outbursts. 

The story I told you is a contemporary one, and according to the man’s biography a true one.  It should also sound familiar because it is very much like the story we heard in today’s Gospel Lesson. 

In both cases the parent takes their child to a physician.  In the case of the Gosepl, Jesus is the physician who cures the boy.  In our Wisconsin story, a doctor was able to help control the violent fits the man had, though he continued to suffer with Cerebral Palsy.   In both cases we see the parent’s love for the child, and in both cases a parent prays:  “if you can do anything, please help us.”

It is not a prayer of great faith, not a “Help us, I know you can.”  Rather it is a conditional request, “IF you can, help us.”

It is the prayer of parents who have endured a long ordeal with their child’s illness, and have suffered disappointment but don’t know where to turn.  They are trying to hold on to hope, but their frustration and uncertainty is obvious.

In the Gospel Lesson, the father comes to faith - “Lord, I believe, help me overcome my unbelief.”   And the child is healed.  The parents hope is rewarded.  He does not know whether he dare believe in Christ’s power to heal, but he has hope however small that Christ can do this.

We might remember other scriptural stories when parents prayed for their children in hope that God would help them.

King David in 2 Samuel 12 prayed that his new born son might not die from  a serious illness.  However in this case the child dies.

The Patriarch Abraham prayed that his son Ishmael might live under God’s blessing – that God might protect his son, give him physical comfort as well as deep faith. 

We too should pray like Abraham, for too often our prayers for our children are tainted by our notions of success and affluence which may have nothing to do with God’s blessings.  We should pray that our children may always seek God’s blessings even more than success or wealth or fame.  We should pray for them that they may be contented with and grateful for blessings received, no matter how small.  May they seek God and His Kingdom more than material wealth.

King David prayed for his son Solomon that God would give him a whole hearted devotion to keep God’s commandments and requirements.   So we should pray for our children:  ”O Lord, help my child to follow you with all his heart.  Help him to always live according to Your teachings.”

Pray that your children may love God, that they may desire to serve Him always, and that they be devoted to Him and His commandments.

The Prophet Job prayed that God would forgive his children the sins they did commit.   Pray that God may have mercy on your children: to help them resist evil, to resist temptation, to strengthen them when they fail and to forgive their sins when they commit them. 

It is not only parents who need to pray for their children, but all of us in Christian community need to pray for the children in our parishes, in our nation and around the world.  While much evil exists in the world, prayer and fasting are real weapons to over come evil.

The Birth of Economics

Many years ago I read a quote which was parody of the First Chapter of John’s Gospel.  It read something like:

“In the beginning was the word.

And the word became print.

And they called it a lie.”

For some reason I attribute the quote to Jonathan Swift, but I couldn’t find it in a quick online search, so I’m not sure who said it or where I read it as it could be Monty Python for all I know.

What brought the quote to mind was my continued effort to read some things so that I can try to grasp how the economic collapse happened.  As I noted in a previous blog there is plenty of blame to go around but few willing to accept that blame.

Economics is an interesting study.  I mean people talk about theology being confusing, pie in the sky, or man made or nonsense which leads some to become atheists.  But if there is a faith based “science” it is economics which conjures up all kinds of schemes, fake heavens and hells, false gods, and is based largely in opinions of people who do not have to base their theories in any experience or reality.  All they have to do is imagine it, no divine revelation is necessary.  I wonder if there are a-economists, like theology’s atheists, people who simply don’t believe in economists or their theories at all?

I think TIME and NEWSWEEK magazines have been taking turns lining up the usual suspects for who was responsible for the economic crash.  WHO’S TO BLAME: WASHINGTON OR WALL STREET?  asks one NEWSWEEK debate article.     TIME’s HOW AIG BECAME TOO BIG TO FAIL also provides a handy dandy chart answering, “Who’s to Blame?”  I made my own suggestion for cleaning up the mess – have each political party and each of the professions and government agencies which contributed to the mess take a serious look at themselves alone – stop looking at or blaming anyone else and clean up your own house.

I did find the 21 March 2009 NY TIMES article When Deficit Isn’t a Dirty Word a bit helpful.  I have been ever doubtful about the goodness of national debt – even when Reaganomics made it a positive idea.  Robert Franks acknowledges the value of the national debt is difficult to comprehend but he offers some explanation about when and why a national debt serves a purpose.  He ultimately concludes it is what the money in the debt was used for which determines whether it is a good thing or not.  Unfortunately he feels the huge debt run up during the Bush presidency was bad debt and largely a loss for the country.  Now we are faced with the need for even greater debt to get the economy running again.  He notes that Herbert Hoover made the mistake of trying to balance the budget at the very time when government spending was needed to help the economy.    I probably would end up being a Hoover myself as I still feel most comfortable with a balanced budget.  [BTW, in 1815 there were an estimated 8.4 million Americans and President James Madison in his Annual message to congress said the national debt (due to the just concluded war with Great Britain - of 1812) was $120 million.  Which meant each American owed about $14.50 to eliminate the national debt.  According to USA TODAY, when President Bush's term came to an end in January of 2009, the national debt was about $10 Trillion, which meant each American owed about $30,000.   But hey, we just came through the biggest and longest economic boom party ever thrown so we all should expect to have to shoulder the cost of that party, right?  Or wait a second, if there was so much prosperity, how could there be such a huge debt?]  And of course President Obama’s plan is going to increase the debt, but it’s all for more prosperity, so why worry?

But really, will the Geithner-Obama plan work?  Again there is plenty of opinion to go around  (see the NY TIMES’ editor’s opinions) but it still is hard for me to find comments that offer hard evidence for where we will land if we follow this plan.  Plenty of criticism is offered, but as I’ve said before a plan so large offers a huge target for naysayers, but rarely do I see them offer SPECIFICS of an alternative.  But maybe that is exactly what economics can’t do.  Economists seem best at imagining all the things that can go wrong with a concrete but can’t offer a concrete alternative, or they are good at ignoring all the things that might go wrong with their theory and offer it up void of any specifics or critical analysis.    (Would we let architects put up buildings based on abstract theories rather than on sound engineering?  NO, but we will let economists build the economy in this way).

A few facts I noticed -

• 1) More writers seem to be accepting of or talking about some form of progressive consumption tax, especially when it comes to oil use. I will admit this seems wise to me.
• 2) Though there has been a lot of outrage over the million dollar bonuses paid to the very AIG executives who bankrupted their company, and nearly the planet, the truth is the outrage is only because these people failed miserably. But I feel a bit of outrage over how much they were paid in bonuses even if their pyramid schemes had succeeded. At least on that point I found Justin Fox of TIME to agree with me (The Upside of Anger). He offers as an alternative to trying to get back all the bonuses from the AIG losers, to cast a much wider net and impose a retroactive tax (he says 50%) for the past four years on the execs from any financial institution that receives bailout money. He thinks it would make all financial execs keep a much closer eye on what is happening everywhere in their companies.
• 3) Bill Saporito pointed out in his article HOW AIG BECAME TOO BIG TO FAIL that the $165 million in bonuses which is a lot of money, pales to the $170 BILLION which AIG has received in bailout monies. He says we need to be more concerned about that huge bailout than about the bonuses, which may be a real distraction but are “small potatoes” when compared to the whole disaster. What was going on in AIG and in the world economy would make an economist lose all faith in his theories and conclude that economics is not founded in facts or anything real. Saporito does pin a lot of the blame on the President of AIG’s Fianancial Products Joseph Cassano for the AIG disaster. One of Saporito’s best lines: “Cassano said in August 2007 that he couldn’t imagine a situation in which AIG would ‘lose one dollar in any of these transactions.’ He was right. AIG didn’t lose a dollar; it lost billions of them.”

When the word became print, economics was born.   I used to think that only in blogging can you get away with having no facts but still having strong opinions.  But economists were doing the same thing long before the Internet was born.

The Annunciation (2009)

“In the days of creation of the world, when God was uttering his living and mighty “Let there be,” the word of the Creator brought creatures into the world.  But on that day, unprecedented in the history of the world, when Mary uttered her brief and obedient, “So be it,” I hardly dare say what happened then-the word of the creature brought the Creator into the world.”  (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Annunciation, 1874)

I love the theological play on ideas that one finds in the theology of the incarnation. 

In Genesis 1, God said, “Let there be…” and His Word brought creation into existence.

In Luke 1, when the Virgin Mary says, “So be it…” that same Word of God is brought into the Creation which He made!

Such is the most profound and wonderful theology of Christianity.  It reveals to us the true and total love God has for His creation, and the most profound and mysterious relationship that He has with it.   God not only creates a world, but in Mary, the Theotokos, He creates someone capable of bearing God within her!  In God we all live and have our being (Acts 17:28), but then in a most amazing act of salvation, God lovingly enters into creation and is contained within it.   With the Psalmist I ponder,

“When I  look at your heavens, the work of your  fingers,
   the moon and the stars,  which you have set in place,
  what is man that you are  mindful of him,
   and  the son of man that you  care for him?

 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
   and crowned him with glory and honor.”  (Psalm 8:3-5)

Annunciation Greetings!

I wish all of you a blessed Feast of the Annunciation. 

Mary accepted the Archangel’s greetings and humbly submitted herself to God’s will.   In so doing she made it possible for God’s Word to take on human nature and to reveal to us both what it truly means to be human and also the Trinitarian nature of God. 

We honor Mary in our Church because she freely chose to cooperate with God.  God did not force her to consent to His will, but in love accepted her willingness to become Theotokos.  

God’s willingness to submit His plan for salvation to the free cooperation of humans is totally consistent with His giving free will to Adam and Eve in paradise and allowing them to chose what path they would follow – His will or their own.  This certainly reveals the remarkable love of God for His creation that He does not try to impose upon us His will but rather offers to us the possibility of synergy and union with Him.  Our life in the Church is not to consist of imposing God’s will on the unwilling, but to freely and joyfully place our own wills at His disposal.   

To read about the Annunciation, see Luke 1:24-38

Baby McKenzie in God’s Hands

While it is always true that our lives are in God’s hands, we become more acutely aware of this truth in times of chronic and critical illness.  According to a text message I just received, the child of God Mckenzie has gone into stage  2 of rejecting the intestines she received in the transplant surgery.  The medical team working with her is doing all that is humanly possible for her.  So we pray that God will guide the hands of those caring for the one year old McKenzie, and we pray that God Himself will remember His creature and child.   We are forced to recognize the limits of our own powers – not only medically but also in terms of the power of our prayers to effect the course of events.  McKenzie’s life, as with all of our lives, remains in the hands of God our Creator.   Nothing on earth can ever change that reality.

Great Lent is about Christ

Great Lent as is well known served at one time in the church as the special season for preparing catechumens for entrance into the church through baptism.  There are a few remnants of this early catechectical effort still visible in our liturgical readings during the time of the Great Fast.  The week day readings of Genesis and Proverbs were used to instruct the initiates in the basics of the faith and in how to live a godly life.  On weekends the lessons from the Gospel of Mark and the Letter to the Hebrews are also from this catechetical period.   There are secondary epistle and Gospel lessons listed for Great Lent  which reflect the post-15^th Century monastic influence on the Church’s liturgical life (as can be seen in the Lenten themes of Sts. Gregory Palamas, John Climacus and Mary of Egypt). 

I want to draw attention to the themes of the more ancient catechetical Epistle readings from Hebrews for the Sundays of Great Lent and briefly point out a theme in each one:

Hebrews 11:24-12:2  –  ”looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising  the shame, and  is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Hebrews 1:10-2:3  -   Speaking of His Son, God says, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands … and your years will have no end.”

Hebrews 4:14-5:6   -    “Since then we have  a great high priest  who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.”

Hebrews 6:13-20   -    “Jesus has gone  as a forerunner on our behalf,  having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”

Hebrews 9:11-14  -  “Christ appeared as a high priest”

What I want to note is that each of these Great Lent Sunday Epistle readings have as their focus Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Great Lent is about Christ.  It is not about me, about my fasting, my sacrifice, my prayer life, my confession.  The goal of Lent is not to focus on the self, but to unite one’s self to Christ. 

As one of the great examples of ascetic self denial, St. John the Forerunner and Baptist, said in reference to Christ, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).  Our goal in Lent is not to inflate the self and spend more time thinking about the self.  Great Lent is the time of self denial, not self love.  Our focus is to God and neighbor, not our self.  We are to deny self love and self centeredness in order to love God and neighbor.   Fasting from food is a form of self denial, not a way to focus on what my SELF is being denied. 

The only self centeredness of Great Lent is in repentance:  Grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother (or another).   Looking at one’s own sins is the only aspect of self consideration that is appropriate to Lent.  Otherwise we are to look to the good of others and to their needs (see 1 Corinthians 8:8-13, the Epistle for Forgiveness Sunday). 

Focusing too narrowly on “my” Lenten discipline, “my” fasting, or even “my” salvation can end up with way too much focus on “me.”  In this Christian spiritual life it is not all about “me.”  Christ showed us to be servants of one another, to love one another, to work for the good of others.  Great Lent is to help us to make Jesus Christ be the focus of our lives, so that we can indeed love one another as He loved us (John 15:12).

As Fr. Schmemann wrote in GREAT LENT:

“In other words, what is virtually absent from the lenten experience is that physical and spiritual effort aimed at our participation in the today of Christ’s resurrection, not abstract morality, not moral improvement, not greater control of passions, not even personal self-perfecting, but partaking of the ultimate and all-embracing today of Christ.  Christian spirituality not aimed at this is in danger of becoming pseudo-Christian, for in the last analysis it is motivated by the ’self’ and not by Christ.”

The Cross as a Gift

If the price was not an issue, what would you name as a small gift item that you could give to most anybody that they could easily carry on themselves at all times and would be useful almost anywhere they went?

I’m guessing today people would name a cell phone of some kind, or an I-pod or I-phone or BlackBerry.  Not too many years ago people would have listed a watch, or maybe a wallet.

Christians might consider giving the cross as a gift.

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them,

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself

and take up his cross and follow me.”  (Mark 8:34)

Interesting in that passage from Mark’s Gospel Jesus was speaking to the crowd, not just to His disciples.

The cross certainly is something worth carrying for Christians, and it can be easily carried, at least the jewelry we give and receive as gifts.   No matter how tiny, it is useful to the Christian in reminding him or her of Christ and of discipleship and to what people he or she belongs.  The cross reminds us of the importance of love of neighbor and of God, of self denial, of overcoming death, of repentance, of forgiveness, of the way to the Kingdom of Heaven, and that this world is passing away. 

Many use this simple prayer when putting on their cross:

You have said Lord, ‘Whoever would come after Me,

let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 

My cross, O Lord, do I take up. Have mercy on me.”

I have received the cross as a gift several times in my life.  The first was the day  I was baptized as an infant and a small cross was given to me.  Later in my life when in college I consciously embraced Christianity, my mom gave me that cross to wear daily, and I’ve worn it ever since.   I was also given a cross to wear at my ordination to the priesthood and then again when I was made an archpriest.  And that small cross given to me at baptism was given to me one more time after it became lost in a field, but was amazingly found some weeks later and given to me by the parishioners who found it. 

The cross as a gift has been very meaningful to me.  It has felt very heavy at times and then at other times given me strength.

The cross is a gift given to us by Christian parents, godparents, and friends.  It is a gift of love and it reminds us of God’s gift of His Son to the world.   When we put on the gift of the cross, it is reminiscent of Proverbs 6:20-22  

My son, keep your father’s commandment,
   and forsake not your mother’s teaching.
Bind them on your heart always;
   tie them around your neck.
When you walk, they will lead you;
   when you lie down, they will watch over you;
   and when you awake, they will talk with you.