In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
At this time of year when we are generally so distracted by everything else except the central fact that we are celebrating right now, it’s important for us to pay attention a little bit more closely to what exactly is happening now. When we hear all these long lists of names that are almost unpronounceable (and for some people are unpronounceable), it just sounds like a long list of names, and funny names, too, because they are all Hebrew names. But those names are not just a list of names, and it’s not even the whole list of names. Matthew, the Apostle, today gives us fourteen times three generations of names of the ancestors of Christ. However, if you look in the Gospel according to St Luke, he goes farther. St Luke takes us all the way back to Adam. The list of the ancestors of Christ is very long indeed.
All of these persons are not just names on a piece of paper that we proclaim once a year. These are all persons (like those of whom theApostle was speaking to us in the Epistle to the Hebrews) who suffered for the sake of the Promise. Abraham was the first to receive clearly of the Promise when he pulled up stakes, and took his whole family, and everything to a strange land where he was a complete stranger, unwelcome, unaccepted. He wandered and wandered around with his sheep, and his family, and their tents all over Palestine (which is not nearly so pleasant as Mesopotamia, or at least it used to be), and yet he did this because the Lord’s Promise was such that he was compelled out of love to do this very weird thing: to get up, and move, and spend the rest of his life wandering. There are many other cases of his descendants, up to the time of Jesus Christ. The Apostle is reminding us of people who suffered every kind of inconvenience for the sake of the Promise of the Saviour, for the sake of the Promise of God with us. I suppose you could say that it is an inconvenience to be burned at the stake, to be beheaded, to be sawn in two, to be crucified, to live in caves – all these things are definitely inconvenient. However, all of these persons, real human beings who lived their lives (just as you, and I are living our lives), lived their lives for the sake of a Promise that was as yet unfulfilled.
Yet, when the fulfillment of the prophecies all came with the Birth of Jesus Christ (which was just now described to us), we did not do much better. Everything didn’t immediately become rosy, and wonderful (at least visibly), because even in His Birth the prophecies of the prophets were being fulfilled. The Lord had no home, and no place, and even in His infancy He was rejected. He had to run away to Egypt with His family, and had to come back, and live in a different part of the county altogether. He had to be thought a stranger during the whole course of His life. He had to suffer in the course of all of this – physically, yes, but in the heart much more because of the nature of His love for us. His love for us is with arms open, accepting anything.
You that are parents have experience of this in your own children, I’m sure. You love them with all your heart, and you give up everything for their sake. Sometimes parents starve themselves for the sake of their children, so that the children can eat, and grow (whereas the parents can sometimes stand to lose a kilo or two here or there). Yet, in the course of life, willy-nilly, children sometimes poke the parents in the eye. Willy-nilly, sometimes children, not understanding the love of the parents, give them a kick – that is the way human beings are. With our self-centredness, and pre-occupation with ourselves, we don’t always realise the immensity of the gifts that God has given to us. I know I certainly didn’t when I was growing up. It was after my parents were dead that I understood, especially, how valuable they were for me in my life, and how much they had given up for the sake of us four, and how much they indeed did, and do love us. Well, this is how the cookie crumbles in being a human. We are always too late about all sorts of things, but the Lord, in His love, nevertheless, makes up for our weakness, for our shortsightedness, for our selfishness. He bridges all these gaps that we produce by our selfishness.
I bring up the life of the family, and the difficulties with love which we have in the family, and sometimes our mistreating of each other in the family because it even happens in the parish family, too, from time to time. We misunderstand each other or we lose sight of one thing or another, or we’re just plain afraid of one thing or another. We can mistreat each other, not even necessarily willingly, but in some sort of knee-jerk reaction sometimes. We don’t treat each other the way we ought to.
Among the saints who are being remembered today there is St Nahum of Bulgaria who was named after the prophet Nahum. This man was a co-worker with Sts Cyril, and Methodius in Moravia, in that part of the country now known as Czechia. Here Sts Cyril, and Methodius, St Nahum, and others established a whole village of up to fifty thousand people who were really anxious to bring Orthodox Christianity, and the Gospel to people who spoke Slavic languages. It was in this village that they were doing the translations of the Divine Liturgy, and the Scriptures, and making the alphabet for the Slavic-speaking people. By God’s mercy, when the Metropolitan was visiting officially Czechia, and Slovakia some years ago, I had the blessing to be with him. We went, and visited this very place which has been archeologically discovered, and unearthed to an extent. Here, these holy persons were living, and giving this gift to us. Because of their life, and their work there in that village, most of us are here today. It was their evangelisation of the Slavic people that produced us here today in the long run. By one direction or another, we are indebted to those men, and women who lived in that village in the ninth century. However, certain other sorts of Christians decided that they were no-goodniks, and drove them all out, and some of them were killed.
St Nahum went then to Bulgaria, which is why he is associated with Bulgaria itself, and there he finished translating the Scriptures into Slavonic. This man, with all those others, out of the love of Jesus Christ was ready to share his love of Jesus Christ with people who didn’t know Him, and who needed to know Him. He, and the others suffered all sorts of pain, and difficulties. It was not easy to build the village in the first place, and it was certainly very painful to be driven out. Yet the driving out produced a scattering of the seed which, I suppose you could say, providentially made the Gospel grow in many more places faster than it would have if the village had stayed intact for a much longer period of time.
Nevertheless, it was still at the hands of so-called Christian brothers that this happened. It still happens to this day. We Christians don’t necessarily treat each other very well because, usually, we’re afraid of something. More than anything else, that’s what makes us behave badly – we’re afraid of something or other. We strike out. We forget Christ. We try to protect things ourselves. We try to be engineers of one thing or another.
You, and I are here today because of the love of Jesus Christ. We are here because we love our Saviour, and we know definitely that He loves us. That’s what brings us all together here. That’s what enables us human beings to manage to live through all the difficulties of life that we face. All of us face difficulties, and pain in our lives but it's the love of our Saviour that enables you, and me to live through it all (and not just to endure), but with joy, and with life, and with hope. It’s not just standing there gritting your teeth – that’s not what we do. With hope, with love, with joy we pass through the pain, the difficulties, the sorrows, the rejections, the misunderstandings. We pass through it all praying for those who don’t understand us, and sometimes reject us, keeping our hearts, and our minds on the Saviour, Himself, who is the only reason for any of us to live on. Keeping our eyes, and our hearts on Him we continue; we persevere; we pass through it all. The Lord renews our joy, our hope, and our strength.
Why we are remembering all those names is that they are not just names, but people with long, and difficult lives, people also like St Nahum. Let’s not forget that each one of us is not just some sort of a statistic or a name. We are all lovers of Jesus Christ suffering together, persevering together. It is important that we, with our love, pray for each other, support each other, encourage each other, and always live in forgiveness with each other. In doing this we will fulfill the work of Christ which is beginning in this Incarnation about which we are hearing, and which we are celebrating now. In doing this we will glorify our Saviour who loves us, 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.