In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

In the Epistle this morning, the Apostle is talking to us about how everything is gathered into one in Christ. It is important for us to remember that particular admonition of the Apostle this morning, because we live in a time, and a culture in which the opposite is understood. Where God is considered at all, in most of Canadian society these days, in most Canadians’ attitude these days, God is a sort of philosophical concept, something that you turn to when you have some great need or other. These people think that God is out there somewhere, far away, and you approach Him feeling guilty, and full of fear, and so forth.

All of these ideas are contrary to what we, as Orthodox Christians, understand Him to be. He is not a philosophical concept. He is not a construct of our imagination. He is not some sort of sociological development. God is the Creator of everything that is. It is He, who, out of His love, brought everything into being. If there are any scientific attempts to understand the origin of the universe, all of those origins are still very understandable by the movement of God’s love. Even the “Big Bang” conforms very well to the explosion of God’s love. He brings everything into being out of His love, not just out of a compression of gases. From where do those gases come? What makes those gases in the first place? When you have some sort of beginning of creation, you have some sort of primeval mass that is going to go boom. Where did that come from? It comes from God. God is the Creator of everything. He is not just the originator of everything, who winds up the universe, puts it on a shelf, and lets it tick away. God sustains everything. He sustains everything, always. So, when the current Pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger), wrote a book about the Divine Liturgy, entitling it God is near us, he showed that he was off the mark. God is not simply near us. When you say that God is near us like that, you are suggesting that He is close, but separate. This is not at all the case. We say that God is with us. Especially, at the great feasts of the Nativity, and the Theophany, we love to sing at Great Compline that “God is with us”. This is right. God is with us. He is not looking at us from some distance. He is with us. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He is closer to us than we can be to ourselves. That is how “with us” He is.

The Lord in His love sustains with love everything that He created out of love. Since God is love, as we believe, and as the Apostles have taught us (and as we experience also in our life), everything is both created by, and sustained by His loving presence. It is important for us to remember that, because there are societies where people get depressed so easily that they forget to turn to God at all. We wait for crisis moments to turn to Him. In fact we do put God on the back burner of our lives, instead of remembering that we depend on Him for everything. We think in our very technological, and sort of pseudo-scientific age [i.e. “science without God”] that we are doing everything ourselves. We think that we are getting everything for ourselves by ourselves. We also think, as a poet of a couple of hundred years ago said, that we are the “captain of our own ship”, and the “master of everything about us”.

However, that isn’t the case at all. Yes, we acquire many things, and we accomplish many things in the course of our life. However, everything that we have that is good, in fact, we have because God has blessed us to have it. We have it as a responsibility. Nothing that we have is for ourselves alone. The Apostle Paul always makes that clear to us. Everywhere in his writings he is teaching us that what we have been given as gifts (whether they are material gifts or spiritual gifts or intellectual gifts) are not for us alone. They are given to us in order to be of use to other people, in order to build up the Church of Christ, in order to be useful, and helpful to people. The Lord gives everything to us as yeast, and salt (cf. Matthew 5:13; 13:33). He gives us these things in order to make more life, to make more love, and to increase everything. The Lord is the Giver of life.

Many of the scientists, for instance, don’t ask themselves properly: how is it that after some of the cataclysmic catastrophes that have occurred on the earth in the past (with the extinction of dinosaurs and so forth), life came back so quickly, and in such great variety. Creatures that had never existed before, now were, after a cataclysm such as that, and in large numbers. Where did it come from? It’s not that these things just bubbled out of the sea by some sort of fortuitous strike of lightning upon the waters. It had to do with the product of God’s love. God, who was the Creator, and Sustainer of everything, renewed creation. He renewed everything in a fresh way when the time of the dinosaurs came to an end. When we finish poisoning the earth in our time, the Lord will likely renew it again. He will clean it up.

The Lord, the Giver of life, engages you, and me, made in His image, and called to be in His likeness, to be co-workers, co-creators, and co-guardians in His creation. That’s why He gives us these gifts – in order to be this sort of co-worker, and co-guardian. That gives us the opportunity to be such a person as the Samaritan today. This Samaritan was, to the Jews, a despised, and disgusting sort of a person. He was an outsider. He was semi-Jewish, but not really believing, and worshipping correctly according to the Jerusalemite understanding. The Samaritans really were treated like dogs in those days. Yet, when a Jewish man, according to the Lord’s parable, is beaten up, and left for dead, several clergy walk by, and don’t dare touch him because they would be defiled by the possibility of touching a dead body (because they weren’t sure if he was dead or not). Even if he wasn’t dead, and he was bleeding, even that would make them unclean, and unable to serve in the temple. So they didn’t touch him. However, it was this very unclean, and untouchable person who came along, expressed God’s love, and brought God’s healing to this man. He restored him at his own expense, and not at the government’s expense. A denarius is at least a day’s wages for a worker. It is not exactly a small thing that this man is giving up of his own substance in order to restore this man to health, and well-being again.

We, who are Orthodox Christians, in many ways in Canadian society end up being like this Samaritan. Very many Canadians say they are disappointed with Christianity one way or another, because of the failures of Christians, and because of the poverty of Christian witness in the past. We, who are traditional, don’t try to water down Who Christ is for the sake of making people more comfortable. So we preach, and live, and teach, and serve Jesus Christ who loves all these broken-up Canadians, and who wants to heal them like the good Samaritan. He wants to heal them, to renew them, to bring them back to health, and life. It is we who are the hands, and feet of that Samaritan. It is we, unlikely people, who are called by the Lord to bring renewed hope throughout the society in which we live.

In all the places throughout the country where there are churches, we are mostly small, and not seen by most Canadians. Our temples can be sitting on Main Street (some of them quite big, and some of them with very nice architecture), and people don’t see them at all. They are not aware of them, or if they are aware of them, they think that maybe it’s some sort of a Sikh temple, or something like that. They don’t imagine that it could be a Christian church that is standing there. In the long run, people who are coming to us across the country, are people whom the Lord, Himself, sends to us.

I’m still very much impressed by the seriousness of some of our parishes in terms of trying to be visible, and to reach out. For instance, a parish in Edmonton decided that they were going to try to make the church visible. They had just built a new building, and they had moved into the west part of Edmonton. They wanted to let people know they were there, so they published a pamphlet. It is a nice, little, explanatory pamphlet (professionally done) about what is the Orthodox Church, and what is this parish. They printed 10,000 of these, and delivered them all by hand, door to door in the whole west end area around the church. They delivered ten thousand of them. As a result of this, four people came to the church. They advertised in the phone book. They advertised in the newspapers. Once in a while someone would come to the church from that. They were doing something to make themselves visible. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people who come to the church there are people who just show up one Sunday morning. Some of them come because they know someone in the parish. They have encountered this Orthodox Christian, and they understand that there is something good, and different about this person that attracts them. So they dare one Sunday to come to church. Sometimes they don’t stick, but some of them do stick. There are other people who come, and no-one knows why, or how they got there. Out of the blue, the Lord did something in that person’s heart one Sunday morning, and that person arrives in the church.

This is the way yeast operates in bread. It hides, like the Lord said in His own parable — the Kingdom of God is "like leaven which a woman took, and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened" (Luke 13:21). What became of that yeast hidden in the flour (because once it is mixed together you can’t tell one from the other)? It gives life. It raises the whole thing. What happens when someone puts a little bit of salt in the flour? After you add water, where is the salt? However, you can certainly tell its presence by its taste. That’s how we are to be. That’s how we are being in this country. Slowly, our Church is growing, and developing in unexplainable ways, exactly because the Lord is using us as His yeast, and salt. This community has been here for ten years in N, and we haven’t grown a whole lot visibly. On the other hand, there are those people I know who have passed through this parish. They are in one place or another elsewhere in the country, and they are still alive in Christ, and they are still serving Christ in a different parish. I rather suspect that the service of this community is not confined to this country. I understand also that this area is not one of the easiest places to establish the Orthodox Church. That is partly because this area is so old in Canadian settlement. However, there are yet older, and tougher places.

That doesn’t mean that the Church cannot be properly established here. This city, like everywhere else in the country, has people whose hearts are looking for Christ. They are hungering, and they are thirsting. They are looking for Christ. It is up to us to live our lives sincerely, and lovingly, following Christ, with open hearts, open arms, being hospitable in the way the Samaritan was. Actually, if the Levite, and the priest of the temple had really listened to their hearts on that particular day that the Lord spoke of in the parable, they would have let go their service in the temple for the sake of this broken human being. This broken human being is really important to the Lord.

It is important, therefore, for us in our lives here in this city to keep the sense of equilibrium, of balance, and remember that the Lord is with us. He is not far away from us. He is with us. He is helping us at all times, giving us strength at all times, and protecting us at all times in this environment. He is bringing fruit of life from our lives, even if we don’t necessarily see it, as we touch people who are around us in our daily lives. He does something with it. He doesn’t ask us to be or do everything: He asks us to be co-workers with Him. He asks us to work with Him. However, He does the major work all the time. We are the catalysts. We are the yeast. We are the salt.

To underline how much it is our understanding that God is with us, as people are being taught how to do the Jesus Prayer properly (that applies mostly to monks, but other people are doing it too), they are given to understand in the first place that the purpose of saying the Jesus Prayer is to encounter God, to deepen one’s love for God. We do not just say some sort of prayer in order to become better focussed mentally, or to become some sort of a guru or yogi or something like that, because of the ability to concentrate. The repetition of the prayer is all about love. Everything about the Christian way is all about love. The person who is being taught how to say the Jesus Prayer is taught to focus. Where? On the heart. The person has to look not out, but in. One finds Christ here, in the heart, in the center of our being. That’s where we find Christ. It’s a tricky business, so when most people are asking how to say the Jesus Prayer, that particular direction is not given to them in the beginning. The person is taught how to say the prayer slowly, and carefully, and to look at Christ or at an icon of Christ. After that, of course, the person can begin to look in. You have to remember for Whom you are looking when you are looking in. When you look in, you are going to see just soot. Everyone of us is in about the same condition. It takes some time to learn how to find Christ in there.

God is with us. Christ is with us. He is nurturing us. He is supporting us. He is enriching us with His love, always, and everywhere. Let us glorify Him, together with His Father, who is from everlasting, and His all-holy, good, and Life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

† Archdiocese of Canada - Orthodox Church in America