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

The consequences of living in the unity of love between us, and God, and us with ourselves, is very great. This is the way Christians are supposed to be living in contrast with the way of the world. The way of living the Christian life is the way of living a life in Grace.

When the Lord is baptised in the Jordan today, things change, and they continue to change. Today we are going to be blessing water, participating in the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. We are blessing this water today because Christ is blessing the water Himself by descending into those waters. We will put the Cross into the water today, blessing the water with Christ Himself, because the Holy Cross is the representation of Christ Himself. When the Cross goes into the water, it is Christ Himself going into the water. The consequences are greater than we imagine. What are people doing with the blessed water afterwards? Most people put it in the fridge, and they forget to do anything with it. This blessed water is not to be put on a shelf and looked at. We are supposed to take this water, and use it. It is for the blessing of our homes, and not just at this time of the year, but at any time when there is a difficulty.

A long time ago, I was a priest living in Winnipeg in a district that had many Aboriginal people in it. These Aboriginal people had a real Orthodox sense of life. Whenever there was a big fight or argument in their household, the grandmother of that household (and there was not just one who would come) came to the door saying: Please, Father, can I have some holy water? There was a big dispute in our house, and I want to clean it up with this holy water. She knew what to do. That’s what we’re supposed to do with holy water. Really pious, and knowing Orthodox Christians drink a little bit of holy water every day first thing before taking anything else.

Why do we do this? This water is given to us by the Lord for our physical, and spiritual health. It is not just superstition. We westerners are always so skeptical about everything, and say it is just superstition. It is not superstition at all. The Lord has confirmed this in a very strange way. An atheistic Japanese scientist was studying the crystallisation of water at the freezing point. He discovered that the crystals are not all the same. The crystallisation of water takes many different forms. There are different kinds of water. When water is healthy, and clean, the crystals are quite lovely. They are uniform, balanced, and beautiful. He found that polluted water, or water that has been around anything that is dark, negative, or evil, is all deformed, twisted, and sometimes not even capable of crystallization at all. It’s just ugly, and deformed. However, if you bless this water, and say nice things to this water, it starts to clean itself up. He found that when a Buddhist person said nice things to the water, the water was particularly nice. This was his study. Then Russians, being Russians, found this study, and they decided to take the experimentation even farther. They did very many more experiments on the crystallisation of water in different circumstances. Under all these circumstances, water is being purified, in fact. Then they showed water that had been blessed in the Orthodox Church. The crystals are extraordinary. They are saying now that one part of this clean water will purify, I think, six hundred parts of turgid water.

Scientists now, therefore, are confirming to us that what we are doing today does have its beneficial consequences. When we are baptising a lake, and saying that all the water in the lake is blessed, we can expect it, because we have scientific confirmation that water is changed, as people have always said, by Christ’s descent into it. Dirty water can be healed by the presence of Christ. Since we are made up mostly of water ourselves, we can understand that the Lord is present in us, one part healing six hundred parts, creating beneficial effects in ourselves.

We are not so different from this water, ourselves, in our environment. We, carrying Christ Himself in us, can have a similar effect on the people, and society around us who come in contact with us. Just as the water is healed by contact with Christ, human beings are healed also by their contact with us who bear Christ to them.

Let us give thanks to God that He is so loving to us, so merciful to us. He cares so much about us that He will overcome our skepticism, our doubts, and our weaknesses. For us in the twenty-first century, He will reassure us in a loving, kind way, that His Word is His Word. When He says something, it is. It is not just a philosophical proposition or an idea. We can take Him at His Word. His Word is our Saviour, Jesus Christ, who descends into the waters of the Jordan today. He heals the waters of the Jordan. He heals the waters of the world. He heals the waters in us human beings. He heals His universe. We poison things very often by our bad attitudes, by our falls, by our rebellion. But it is healable by the love of God who is the Creator, and Sustainer of everything, to whom we give glory: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

† Archdiocese of Canada - Orthodox Church in America