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

When the Apostle is talking to us today about how we should be living correctly, and the consequence of living incorrectly, he doesn’t get a very good hearing from most people these days. However, what he speaks is the absolute Truth. He says that when people are living in self-will, and licentiousness (and primarily the root of it all is their turning their backs on the Lord, doing whatever they think best, and not consulting the Lord at all, but just going according to the winds that blow in their minds), the result of it is death. If this were my ancestors speaking to me, under those circumstances in which I find myself very frequently (although not quite as frequently as in my greater youth), they would say: That’s why the wind is blowing in your mind, because there’s nothing there. There isn’t anything there – in the end, if Christ is not at the centre of everything. He is our anchor. He is our sense of direction. He is our Everything. If He is not our Everything in life, we are empty-headed, and blown about by every wind of who-knows-what. The result of that is, in the end, spiritual death. All sorts of terrible things happen to us.

Often we are going our own way, thinking up our own direction, just paying attention to some psychologist or psychiatrist or some philosopher or some popular, money-making speaker or some theorist who makes things look all rosy, and the sensible way to go – but without Christ, we go nowhere. As I have said many times in my day: in the end, why psychiatrists are so much needed, and why they can make a living is because people do not have the real source of healing at hand. If it is at hand, it is ignored. We are weird people, because the Saviour, who is our Life, who is our Everything, is entirely capable of straightening out everything in our life. Look how He healed the servant of the centurion. Look how He raised people from the dead. Look how He does everything. Look how He heals until this very day. We are somehow afraid of the Lord, who loves us, and is with us, and assures us of His tender loving care for us. We don’t trust Him to do what He says He will do. We turn to everyone, and everything else first, instead.

Another example of that: all of our collective, common experience can be found in what it is like to go to confession, and what it is like for a priest or a bishop to hear confession. Father Schmemann long ago when I was in seminary said: People often erroneously think that it must somehow be exciting for a priest to hear the confessions of all sorts of different people. However, he said: They’re absolutely wrong. It’s boring. It’s boring because people’s sins are all the same. It’s all repetition.

Everyone comes to confession thinking that he or she is committing some unique new sin, and it’s so horrible. Well, yes, it is horrible. Sin is horrible. But there is nothing unique about any of it. There’s no sin anyone of us can come up with that someone else has not already committed somewhere, sometime. In normal parish life, the priest who is hearing these confessions finds that it is all variations on a theme – over and over and over again, hearing the same thing from which people are suffering. Human beings are all about the same, regardless of how we like to think differently. We are all about the same. So we say to ourselves: Why is it that I keep coming to confession over and over and over again for the same things in one form or another? It’s always the same thing. I’m bored with my own confession. It has to do with the fact that we don’t really grasp in our hearts yet that the Lord is the Lord of everything in my life. All this boringness, and repetitiveness is sin. It’s all because I forget.

What am I forgetting? I forget to listen to the Lord first. I listen to my wayward, conflicting thoughts first, instead. I don’t often ask the Lord what is right. I just go ahead, and do whatever seems good according to my thoughts, according to my logic, according to some book I read, according to some TV or radio programme I saw or heard recently, according to what my neighbour said to me over tea recently. I behave according to that instead of remembering to ask the Lord first. And even if I do ask the Lord first, I still end up having to go to confession because I still don’t hear Him properly. I still don’t live as well as I ought according to His will. This is the sensibility all of us have to have. Even if the confession ends up being very simple, and very straightforward, the confessions of really holy people are very profound. It boils down to disappointing Him who is really your Everything in life, whom you love with all your being, and whom you want to please with all your being – and yet you know you fall short. It doesn’t matter how holy a person can get. The holiest of persons is going to recognise how far he or she still is from living according to the fullness of the love of Jesus Christ – how much better it could be still.

Very often people are misunderstanding, by the way, what it is to live in the Kingdom of Heaven. Our society, particularly, is full of all sorts of crazy ideas leading us to think that living in the Kingdom of Heaven is somehow static. You made it to the Kingdom of Heaven. You sit there, and you just have a nice time. That’s the way the Muslims think about heaven -- sitting around, eating grapes, having one big party forever. That's not the way of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven certainly has to do with the banquet, the heavenly banquet of the Lord in which we are participating here today. It’s very different from how the Muslims have distorted it. Feeding on the Lord’s presence, living in His love, we endlessly, endlessly, continue to grow in love. God is unknowable because He is so great but He brings us into Himself in His Son as members of His Body. We are taken into the Holy Trinity, and we are able in love to grow up in this love which never ends, and always changes, always continues to mature. It is never boring. It is never static. It is always alive, and more alive. If you want to read a nice allegory about how this can be, read C S Lewis. His Narnia books, and The Great Divorce, particularly, give some good ideas about how it might be, but it’s all allegory. You can’t expect the Kingdom of Heaven to be just like that.

There is nothing static about the love of Jesus Christ. The love of Jesus Christ is always providing us with surprises: how He leads us unexpectedly over and over again. We who went to Ukraine on a pilgrimage recently, encountered this many times over in those fourteen days: how the Lord knew exactly what we needed, and what the people there needed. He put us together at the right time in the right places in ways that we could never have organised if we had even tried (even with the strongest computers). We could never have done it, but the Lord did it, and continues to do it. In our daily lives here, He is doing it. However, we have to have the eyes of our hearts open to see exactly what is going on, and glorify, and give thanks to Him for it quickly, immediately. The more we are able to recognise the activity of His love surprising us with His tender compassion, and the intimacy with which He is concerned in our lives, the more we are ready to recognise this, and give thanks, the more we are ready to grow up in Him, the more we are able to share with others with joy, and with power the Lord’s tender care for us.

The Lord’s tender care shows itself today in the healing of the centurion’s servant. The Lord’s tender care shows itself in the Gospel that we just read a couple of days ago about the healing of the Apostle Peter’s mother-in-law (cf. Mark 1:30, 31). The Lord’s love shows itself in all sorts of different ways in the Gospel. It shows itself in equally different ways in our lives here, today, now. This is the Way that leads to life, as the Apostle was saying. This is the way that leads to health, to stability, and the ability to live through the worst sort of turmoil, and suffering in life. This is how we get to know that the Lord is with us. He is strengthening us, and He will see us through no matter what, because He loves us. He wants us to live with Him, and be alive in Him. He does not abandon you. He does not abandon me. He does not abandon this community. He does not abandon even this city as crazy as it is getting to be. He gives us work to do. We, Orthodox Christians, must remind people of Who is their end, and what it is that they are looking for. He gives us as a sign of hope, and life to everyone around us.

Brothers, and sisters, let us not leave ourselves open to the accusation of my ancestors to me about empty-headedness, and its results. Instead, let our hearts, our minds, and our whole being be full of Jesus Christ, hoping on Jesus Christ, living in His love, and glorifying Him in eternity, 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