Suffering through the World

Frances Young in her book,  BROKENNESS & BLESSING: TOWARDS A BIBLICAL SPIRITUALITY , makes a few comments on a Christian attitude toward suffering that I think are worth us considering. 

“…we should remind ourselves of the post-Enlightenment tendency to view suffering, atrocity, and so on as grounds for atheism.   The current assumptions of our culture include the notion that all ills can be removed, death can be indefinitely postponed, and all risk can be eliminated, if we can only find the right formula. …  The media encourage us in our refusal to face our vulnerability, mortality, and creatureliness.  The presupposition is that bad things shouldn’t happen, or certainly shouldn’t happen to good people; and since they do happen and the world is imperfect, there cannot be a God.  Indeed, the world is so dreadful, as it impinges on us in our living rooms on the small screen, that trying to put it right  or make sense of it seems beyond us – as compassion fatigue  sets in and we find ourselves lost and insecure, confronted with a world so threatening that the most noticeable reaction is the creation of comfort zones.”  (p 30)

The notion that death is somehow foreign to humanity is certainly found in the Christian interpretation of the Genesis 3 fall of humanity from grace into sin and death.  The Orthodox understanding of this story is the notion of ancestral sin which introduced mortality into the human condition.  The Resurrection of Christ is God’s own defeat of death and promise of eternal life for all humanity.  However, Christianity has been very real that sickness, suffering and sorrow are part of the human condition and will continue to be so until God establishes His Kingdom on earth.   This is no doubt a test of Christian faith as we struggle with why God allows His creatures to suffer, especially when we consider innocents, children, infants or even animals who have not sinned.   Atheists tend to point to the suffering of humanity as a sign that there is no Intelligent Designer for the universe.   Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) remains realistic that in this life we will experience the ravages of disease, injury and illness while constantly seeking the mercy of God to give us the faith, hope and strength to deal with the suffering we encounter.

In Christianity it is the suffering of humanity and our mortality which  are reasons for the incarnation of the Son of God at Christmas.  

“Yet the experience of being physical beings lies at the very cusp of the ambiguity of our human condition.  Vulnerability, corruptibility, and mortality are characteristic of the physical, natural world – ‘Change and decay in all around I see’!  The Fathers were highly sensitive to this reality, but they saw this mortal, natural existence, with all its passions and joys, pointing beyond itself to that full-bodied living which is God’s ultimate purpose.   The physical senses are analogous to the spiritual; physical love is stimulated by beauty, and the beauty of God evokes spiritual love: ‘My God, how wonderful Thou art!’  For the Fathers, ‘anagogy’ meant the spiritual journey upward through analogy.”  (p 114)

Unlike Ray Kurzweil’s singularity in which he sees humanity as escaping the limits of the body by ultimately converting our consciousness into electrical impulses on the Internet, Orthodox Christianity believes our physical bodies are part of God’s plan for us and salvation.  Our bodies despite the limits of physicality, illness and mortality, are made not only to bear divinity (Theotokos) but to become united with divinity (Theosis).  Suffering in this view does not overcome our humanity, but rather our spirituality – namely our union with Christ – overcomes our mortality.  See my blog  Transcending Biology:  Theosis vs. Singularity.

The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents

The Sunday after Christmas     Gospel:  Matthew 2:13-23   

The Slaughter of the Holy Innocent Children   -  This Gospel Lesson in contemporary society has implication for the practice of abortion in which another group of Innocents is slaughtered.  We can recognize the wholesale slaughter of the Israelite babies by Pharaoh or the Bethlehemite infants by Herod as a murderous evil, but apparently if their own mothers had decided to kill these infants in the name of liberation it would be acceptable.   

Regarding the slaughter of the Innocent Boys in Matthew 2, Dale Allison in THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT: INSPIRING THE MORAL IMMAGINATION writes:

“In  chapter 2 [Matthew] Herod’s order to do away with the male infants of Bethlehem (2:16-18) is like Pharaoh’s order to do away with every male Hebrew child (Exodus 1). And if Herod orders the slaughter of Hebrew infants because he had learned of the birth of Israel’s liberator (2:2-18), in Jewish tradition Pharaoh’s slaughters the Hebrew children because he has learned of the very same thing (Josephus, Antiquities 2.205-9; Targum Ps.-Jonathaan on Exod. 1:15). Further, whereas Herod hears of the coming liberator from chief priests, scribes, and magi (2:1-12), Josephus (Antiquities 2.205 and 234) has Pharaoh learn of Israel’s deliverer from scribes, while the  Jersalem Targum on Exod. 1-15 says that Pharaoh’s chief magicians were the sources of his information. The quotation of Hos. 11:1 in Matt. 2:15 further evokes thought of the exodus, for in its original context “Out of Egypt I have called my son” concerns Israel. And then there is 2:19-22, which borrows the language from Exod. 4:19-20: just as Moses, after being told to go back to Egypt because all those seeking his life have died, takes his wife and children and returns to the land of his birth, so too with Jesus; Joseph, after being told to go back to Israel because all those seeking the life of his son have dies, takes his wife and child and returns to the land of his son’s birth.”

Sola Scriptura or the Incarnation of the Word of God?

 Notes from Christmas Sermon 2008   Luke 2:1-20   and  Matthew 1:18-2:23

One of the truths about the entire Christmas story is that it is all about God’s intervention into human history.  God speaks to Mary and Joseph through dreams and angels, to the shepherds through angels, and to the non-Jewish magi through the movement of the stars in the cosmos.  God intervenes into human history and uses supernatural and natural events to convey His message.

For us as Christians today, we also have ways in which God can speak to us – certainly through His Scriptures, His written word, but also in and through His people, the Church, through His saints, through the Liturgy, and also through angels, the Holy Spirit, through dumb beasts, the stars in the heavens, through poets and scientists.   God can use not only His written word, but people, events, symbols, poetry, prophecy, dreams, and animals to convey His message to us.   Our task is to be able to discern these messages, and to know the difference between hearing God speaking to us and listening to our selves, or between God speaking to us and the evil one tempting us.

The teenager and Virgin Mary is pure and holy and yet finds herself pregnant.  She certainly knows the Torah and the righteous demands of how a woman impregnated by someone other than her husband is to be punished.  The Torah, the Scriptures,  are very clear.   And if all she has to rely on are the Scriptures, she is in trouble.  And yet she has heard the word of the Angel Gabriel, and accepts the pregnancy because she has been faithful to both God and to her betrothed.  The Scripture alone would not have been enough to guide her.

Joseph the Betrothed is a righteous man.  He has studied Torah and knows the Law of righteousness.  He contemplates what to do with this pregnant teenager to whom he is betrothed.  And he is a just man and righteous, but also kind and merciful.  He knows what the Torah, the written word of God says about the likes of Mary.  But he is also moved by the mercy taught so clearly in the Torah.  He decides to quietly divorce Mary and not make a big deal or demand justice or public penance or punishment.  His mercy exceeds what Torah expects of him.  And yet, even in this God has some other word to him -  don’t follow Torah, take the pregnant teenager as your wife.  Don’t be afraid, for all of this is the will of God.  And Joseph the old man wizened by years of listening to and obeying Torah is open to the promptings of God and keeps Mary as his wife while contemplating what it could all mean to set aside Torah in order to obey God.

The shepherds hear of the birth of the Messiah from the angelic host, not in the temple, not from rabbis, but out in the field at night as they are keeping watch over dumb sheep – not while they are reading scripture.  They hear God’s message through the angels and then go to see what they have heard about.  Their faith guides them to seek out what new thing God may be doing.

The magi too apparently know of the scriptural prophecies of a Messiah King to be born, but it is not scripture but the stars which lead them to Bethlehem.  They too are open to the promptings of the Spirit and discern not only the stars but their own dreams to obey God.

We too are invited each Christmas to consider God’s revelation to the world and intervention in the world.   How does God speak to each of us at Christmas?  Through all of these people who were open to God’s promptings – magi, shepherds, teenage girl, old man.  God continues to speak to all of us through His scriptures, but also through the saints, in the Liturgy, and through nature itself.  The Holy Spirit is at work in the Church today and speaks in our hearts about what God is doing in the world right now but also in our hearts.   We like the characters in the Nativity story must be ready to hear God and to follow His people and His plan.

The Spirit of Christmas – The Spirit of Christ

While we can find plenty of references from our culture as to what the “spirit of Christmas” is (gift giving, family, food, friends, shopping, peace, warmth, light, tradition, feelings), I’ve tried to offer through this blog more theological ideas about the meaning of spirit of Christmas.   At least in its origins Christmas was a Christian Feast focusing on the birth of Jesus the Son of God and Messiah.  And yes there is good evidence that the Christians intentionally placed the Feast of the Nativity of Christ on December 25 to compete with pagan festivals of the Winter Solstice and the Invincible Sun.  Nevertheless, the Feast is a Christian theological feast, even though for the most part our culture and society endeavors to remove the theology to make Christmas into a winter festival acceptable to all.   As Christians, our best way to keep the Spirit in Christmas is to keep it as a Trinitarian Feast – a Feast which upholds the theology of God the Father, and God the Son/Word and God the Holy Spirit.   It was the Holy Spirit which came upon the Virgin Mary and impregnated her with the Word of God Jesus, Who also is the son of God the Father.   It is the Trinitarian truth about Christmas that gives the Holy Day its power and meaning.   Dorotheos of Gaza in the 6^th Century wrote:

“Therefore our Lord did come, by being made man for our sakes, so that, as the scripture says, like should be healed by like, soul by soul, flesh by flesh, for he became completely man-without sin.  He took our very substance and took his origin form our race and he became a New Adam, like the Adam he himself had formed.  For he renewed man in his nature, restored the depraved senses and sensibility of human nature to what it had been in the beginning.  Having become man, he lifted fallen man up again.”    (DOROTHEOS OF GAZA: DISCOURSE AND SAYINGS) 

Constantine Tsirpanlis in his  INTRODUCTION TO EASTERN PATRISTIC THOUGHT AND ORTHODOX THEOLOGY says of the 4^th Century St. Athanasius:

“For salvation and deification, therefore, Athanasius demands the Incarnation of God.  And even though he mingles the need of the redemption into his explanation, that need is not the ultimate reason, according to  him, why the Incarnation was necessary; the ultimate reason is the fact that man was a mere creature, and it takes a God-Man to deify man.  Consequently, if man was destined to be deified from the beginning, the Word had in mind, from the beginning, to become man.  Union with God is as impossible without the Incarnation as deification.” 

CHRIST IS BORN! GLORIFY HIM!

Wishing you a most blessed Christmas Feast Day!

I do appreciate the many songs of Christmas from around the world.  One of my favorites is Christmas song_Andjeli pevaju which offers a Serbian Christmas Carol.  Though Serbian Christians still keep Christmas according to the Old Calendar, Hristos se Rodi!

God’s peace to all.

Mary Conceived Faith and Joy

The Patristic writers and later hymnographers of our Church loved the interplay of ideas which they found in the scriptures.  One such idea is that the Virgin Mary serves as the fulfillment of what God intended humanity to be, thus undoing Eve’s disobedience.  One of the earliest references connecting Mary and Eve comes from St. Martyr Justin the Philosopher (mid-2^nd Century). 

“Eve was a virgin, without corruption.  By conceiving through the word of the serpent, she gave birth to disobedience and death.  The virgin Mary conceived faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced to her the good news.” 

In the Orthodox Church, the Virgin Mary is no mere passive recipient of God’s grace.  She actively, though humbly, cooperates with God for the salvation of the world.  To be Theotokos, Mary actively listens to God’s Word through the Angel Gabriel, and willingly agrees to accept God’s Word.  In this sense, she is very much a proto-model disciple of Christ, God the Word.  Unlike Eve who disobeyed God and listened to the serpent, Mary rejects the concerns of the world not only to hear God, but to allow His Word to dwell in her so that she could bear fruit for Him.

Christmas: When Repentance is Not Enough

Though the first message Jesus proclaimed was a call to repentance (Matthew 4:17), the early Christians understood that the purpose of Christ’s coming was not mostly about this message.  For indeed the prophets had already called God’s people to repentance, and before Jesus, St. John the Forerunner also called all to repent (Mark 1:15).   Repentance however was not enough to accomplish salvation.   St. Athanasius in the 4^th Century AD said:

“Nor does repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning.  Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God.  No, repentance could not meet the case.  What-or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required?  Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing?  His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all.”  

Christmas for St. Athanasius is about God healing human nature which had become corrupted by sin.   God had already given the Law and sent the prophets to tell the world to stop sinning and how to live properly.  If all that was needed was that humans stop sinning, Christmas would never have been necessary.  For us Christians, we can look at Christmas and ask, “What  was the purpose of the Incarnation?    What was the problem or evil for which God determined the birth of Christ was the solution?”   Christmas is the undoing of what had happened to humanity and to our relationship with God ever since the sin of Eve and Adam in Genesis 3.

The Christian Witness B.C.

On the Sunday before Christmas the epistle reading takes excerpts from Hebrews 11:9-40, the great crowd of witnesses whose faith through adversity is testimony to their hope in God.  In a previous blog, The Heroes of Hebrews 11, I commented on this Epistle Lesson.   As Orthodoxy understands the Old Testament, even before Christ came to earth, the saints who encountered God’s Word and the prophets speaking God’s Word, had already encountered Christ and spoke about Him.  Christ is the key to understanding the Old Testament.  We honor in our Church those who witnessed to Christ before He became flesh.

St. Silouan the Athonite writes of this great cloud of witnesses which we learn about on the Sunday before the Nativity, all of those chosen people of God who worked for Christ, long before he came to earth:

“O how infirm is my spirit. A little wind can blow it out like a candle; but the spirit of the saints glowed with fire like the burning bush, fearless of the wind. Who will give me such fire that I know rest neither by day nor by night from love of God? The love of God is a consuming fire. For the love of God the saints bore every affliction – it was love of God gave them the power to work miracles. They healed the sick, restored the dead to life. They walked upon the waters, were lifted into the air during prayer, and by their prayers they brought rain down from heaven. But all my desire is to learn humility and the love of Christ, that I may offend no man but pray for all as I pray for myself.”

Christmas: A Live Invitation to God’s Grand Banquet

The Gospel reading for the 2^nd Sunday before Christmas, Luke 14:16-24, is the Parable of Jesus which has a master inviting many to a great dinner which he has prepared for them.  Though the original invitees choose to refuse his invitation, the Gospel has the man reaching out to more, different and even undesirable people to come to his dinner party.  The Gospel is very inviting and welcoming – it is not the man who offers the dinner who excludes anyone, but it is those who receive the invitation who choose to refuse to attend the dinner.   This parable Christ tells about His Kingdom and about His Church.   Anne Field in her book, From Darkness to Light: How One Became a Christian in the Early Church, writes this:

My brothers and sisters, I want to begin today by talking about the free gift God is offering His people. Each of you knows what sort of person he is, and what sort of life he lived in the past. When the Lord called you it was not to settle a score against you, not to bring you to account for your sins. It was to save you, to forgive you, to offer you new life. In the    Gospel Jesus Himself calls out to the whole human race: “Come to Me, all you who are weary and overburdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke on your shoulders and learn to imitate Me, for I am meek and humble of heart; then you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:28,29).  What an invitation! Come to Me, all of you! Not just the powerful, the affluent, the educated, the strong, the healthy, the respectable; but also the weak, the poor, the underprivileged, the sick, the blind, the lame, the disabled, the hopeless, the abandoned. The Master makes no distinction       between any of you; the good news is for everyone. Come to Me, He says, all you who toil and groan under your burdens. He is interested especially in those who have squandered their lives, who are weighed down by their sins, who are filled with shame and no longer have self-respect. These are the ones He calls to Himself, not to punish them, but to comfort their sorrows and ease their heavy load.

Christmas: We are Born of God

“And so, my brothers, the feast of the Nativity of Christ reminds us that we are born of God, that we are sons of God (1 John 3:1), that we have been saved from sin (Matthew 1:21) and that we must live for God and not sin; not for flesh and blood, not for the world which lies in evil (1 John 5:19).  What does the Incarnation of the Son of God require of us?  It requires of us to remember and hold in sacred honor the fact that we are born of God; and if we have sullied and trampled upon this birthright with our sins, we must restore it by washing it with tears of repentance; we must restore and renew within us the image of God which has fallen and the union with God and blessedness, truth and holiness which has been destroyed.  ‘Now God became man, that He may make Adam a god.’”  (St. John of Kronstadt)