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

The Apostle Paul hit the nail on the head regarding the behaviour of people, and the attitude of people, when he was talking this morning about how some people were, in those days, being circumcised only in order to escape the criticism of those who were insisting that the Old Testament Law had to be followed to the letter. People who are behaving this way, are behaving simply out of fear. The whole point is (especially from everything the Apostle Paul is saying) that the way of Christ is not the way of fear at all. The way of Christ is the way of love, of life, of actual freedom, freedom which North Americans don’t really know. Real freedom. Freedom, living in love with Christ, doing what is God’s will, out of love for Christ – not because we are afraid of what might happen if we don’t obey the Law, if we don’t do what He says. We do what He says because we love Him, following His example, following His path because we love Him.

This is the way of Christian obedience. It’s not: Do what I tell you; do it because I say you should do it. Obedience really is imitation of Christ. I am going to offer my imitation of the Saviour, because He loves me, and I love Him, and I want to be like Him. This is how love works. People who are married have to know about that. People who have ever been in love also probably have to know about that, because the one whom you love you try to emulate. You try to be pleasing to the person whom you love because you love that person. It’s not out of some sort of slavish attitude. If the relationship between a loving couple is really honest, if you love each other, you try to be pleasing to each other out of love.

So it is between us, and Christ. We try to be pleasing to Him because we love Him. That is what Christian obedience is about. It’s not just rules and rules and nothing but rules. In this parable today about Lazarus, and the rich man, we have yet another concrete example of how Christians are supposed to live, or not supposed to live, as the case may be. The rich man is obviously going to the Temple, making the necessary sacrifices. He is being carried in, and out of his palatial estate every day, going about business. Every day, this poor Lazarus is sitting at his gate. I don’t think those were the days when they had curtains around the sedan chairs. In all likelihood, it was not possible for this rich man to be carried out, and escape noticing that Lazarus was sitting there. To him, Lazarus was a piece of furniture. He really was not paying any serious attention to him.

There was his opportunity to practice his love of God: this man sitting outside his door. However, this rich man, like most people are doing even to this day, would have been saying: Let him get a job! What’s he doing sitting there, leeching off me? Let him get a job, and do something constructive instead of sitting there, even if he is covered with sores, and the dogs are licking him. Let him go, and look after himself. Don’t bother me!

In fact, Lazarus had been put there by the Lord so that this rich man would do something for him. You have to remember this was before the welfare state. If you didn’t have work, the only other alternative was to beg. So there was Lazarus sitting outside the gate starving, and who knows if Lazarus didn’t starve to death outside that gate because the rich man didn’t feed him.

When the rich man dies, Lazarus is seen by the rich man in the bosom of Abraham. Then the rich man becomes worried about his brothers, and asks the Lord to send Lazarus to his brothers so that they would be rescued from the same fate as that of the rich man. But if Lazarus should go to his brothers from the dead in order to warn them, what would be the effect? Lazarus, appearing to someone in a dream, is going to be scary. He is going to warn them that if they don’t straighten up, they’re going to come to the same place as their brother. What’s that all about? That’s all about fear: Lazarus should scare his brothers with fear, so that out of fear, they should comply with God’s Law, and do what is right, so that they won’t come there. The fact is, you know, that the Lord doesn’t want us to come into His Kingdom out of fear. He wants us to enter His Kingdom willingly with love, and in freedom, not out of fear. The Apostle John tells us: “Perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). This is the way of the Christian life: without fear. Fear is one of the major tools of the devil by which he regulates our lives, and paralyses us from all sorts of things. Being afraid of God is not the best motivation for entering the Kingdom of Heaven. He wants us to come into His Kingdom in love, and in freedom.

Sometimes people ask me: How do I show God’s love? Obviously, we are showing our love for God by being here this morning together in His temple, worshipping Him. That’s one way of showing our love for God. The second way of showing our love for God is by communicating with Him in our prayers every day at home, because people who love each other don’t ignore each other. If they ignore each other, they don’t really love each other. If they are a married couple, and never talk to each other, that isn’t much of a marriage. Love requires communication. It requires affirmation. It requires renewal all the time. It requires constant, mutual feeling in order to be truly alive.

This is how it is between us, and the Lord. We need to be telling Him that we love Him. We need to be quiet with Him sometimes, letting Him tell us that He loves us. However, it doesn’t stop there. It can never stop there, because Christian love must be expressed in concrete ways, beyond just talking. In a marriage, you can’t just say to your spouse: I love you; I love you; I love you, and leave it at that. That never suffices. Love has to be expressed in concrete ways as well. I’m getting old now, and I find that many people have never seen the operetta, My Fair Lady. They don’t know about the young poet who tells Liza in all sorts of poetry how many ways he loves her. She gets all irritated, and exasperated, and says: Stop telling me how much you love me! Show me if you love me! That’s exactly what we have to show each other: that we love each other. We have to demonstrate to the Lord in concrete ways that we love Him as well.

How do we do that? By how we treat Lazarus. By that I mean by how we treat all the odd, and strange people that the Lord puts in our path in any given day. How do we behave to these people? Do we condemn them for their weirdness, their eccentricities, their weaknesses, or do we thank God for the opportunity to meet such a person, and say a good word to this person? A good word is hard to come by these days. Mostly everywhere you go, people groan, moan, complain about this, and that. They don’t talk about anything good. They have forgotten all about Bambi. Thumper’s mother said: "If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all". People are really gloomy these days. They need a good word. They need – we all need – to hear a good word from time to time.

The Lord does, in His mercy, send people to speak to us good words, nurturing words, helping words, correcting words sometimes, too. We have to do that to other people, without fear, being an example of what it is to have joy in Christ: by how we behave towards a cashier in a store, for example. I saw two cashiers just the other day. Those poor persons looked so down that they didn’t want to talk. The relationship between human beings is painful to them, because people are so grumpy – so they try to avoid it. We have to show them the light of the love of Christ. Those poor cashiers that are beaten down by grumpy people have to be shown the love of Jesus Christ. We have to show the love of Jesus Christ in countless ways, in all sorts of unexpected ways to unexpected people: people in airports, stewards, and stewardesses on airlines….There are all sorts of persons that the Lord sends to us whom we must address with this love, with this joy in Christ. This love of Christ will die unless it is expressed. It must be expressed, and it must be expressed in all sorts of ways every day, and not just to our friends, not just to our family, not just to this congregation. It has to be expressed to the people around us every day among whom the Lord has placed us. We must express this love of Jesus Christ.

Then we will be following the right path. Then we will really have hope of being in the Kingdom of Heaven because it allows this love (which is the nature of life in the Kingdom of Heaven) to flow amongst us, and through us, now, here, today, and every day. We express this love, and share the Lord’s love without preaching, without quoting Scripture, or quoting anything. We just have to be a loving person to everyone around us. If the occasion comes to say something about Scripture, if the occasion comes to speak about Christ openly, and clearly, it will present itself. A person will ask a question, and you have to answer. You have to be this love first. As the Saviour is saying to us in a number of places: we have to be like salt, and yeast in bread (cf. Matt. 5:13; Matt. 5:33). You can’t distinguish salt, and yeast from the rest of the flour or anything else in the mixture. You can’t see where it is, but it is definitely active. Bread rises because the yeast is active, and the bread has flavour because the salt is active. This is how we have to be.

When it is time to be seen, the Lord will give that occasion. Just living this love, with joy, is the main thing of our life, especially as Orthodox Christians, because the Lord has given us everything. There is nothing lacking in our faith. He has given us every tool, every resource necessary to live this life. We have to use those tools. We have to take them up, and we have to employ them.

Brothers, and sisters, let us ask the Lord to give us the strength, the courage, the hope, and the strength of love to do exactly this. Let us concretely express His love, day by day, wherever we are, in the midst of whatever situation He provides for us so that everything about our life will declare His glory, together with that of His Father, who is from everlasting, and His all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

† Archdiocese of Canada - Orthodox Church in America