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

Today, once again, we are with the Lord, and today He is healing a child from demon-possession, even though it’s called epilepsy. In this particular case, there are signs of epilepsy, but, in fact, it was demon-possession. We also see how the Apostles admit that they cannot cast out this demon, and they ask the Lord why. He said, of course: “It’s because of your little faith”. But He also said: “This sort can only be driven out with prayer and fasting”.

The Lord, with His love, is always bringing light, life, and healing wherever He goes. The Apostles understood this, and they wanted to participate in this, obviously, but at the same time, they were still burdened down by misconceptions, and misunderstandings. So, in their being burdened, and misunderstanding, they thought that there was a technique to this exorcism. They tried to apply technique in casting out the demon. In other words, they “barked up the wrong tree”. It’s easy for us to bark up the wrong tree, too, if we fall into the temptation of thinking that when the Lord says: “This sort can only be driven out with prayer and fasting”, we will be able to do it also, if we apply certain techniques of prayer and fasting. It’s not about the prayer and fasting as a technique.

The prayer and the fasting is about being in deeper, and greater harmony in love with the Lord so as to know His will. Then we would be able to cast out the demon. To be in harmony with the love of the Lord brings the irresistible light, and love of the Lord to bear. It is not I or any Apostle who is casting out any demon. It is the Lord who is doing this work. Not you, not me, not the Apostles: it is the Lord who is doing this work through the Apostles, and sometimes through us. However, it only happens when we have prayed, fasted, and are in harmony with the Lord. It’s not praying and fasting to obtain a special state of whatever or some sort of power to get rid of those demons. It is never, ever that. When we play with power, we are playing in the devil’s playground, itself. It’s the Lord’s way we have to follow, instead.

The Apostle Paul is emphasising that today, too, because he is telling us about what sort of treatment he is geting as a teacher, and an Apostle. He gets rejection, beatings, imprisonment, and every other sort of thing. He is considered to be completely “cuckoo”. He says that he is a fool for the sake of Christ. What do we mean by someone who is a fool? We mean someone who is “cuckoo”.

That’s what people thought St Xenia of Petersburg was when she was dressing up in her husband’s military uniform after he died. This was 200 years ago, and, at that time, women did not walk around in men’s clothes, let alone a military uniform. Obviously people thought that her “elevator had stopped going to the top floor”. However, that was not at all the case. She was doing it because of love. She was doing it because her husband had been such a drunkard, and she wanted to pray him into the Kingdom. She wore his uniform, and did all those other strange things because of her desire to be pleasing to the Lord, and to bring her fallen husband into the Kingdom. In fact, you know that if you go today to St Petersburg, and you go to the Smolensk Cemetery, and you see a really beautiful nineteenth century church there, all dark blue, that church was, in fact, partly built by St Xenia. In the course of its construction, she, in the night-time was secretly putting all the bricks in place for the bricklayers in the morning so that in the morning they would have no delay in constructing the church. St Xenia had already put all the bricks in place on the scaffolds ahead of time, and they got to work immediately. It took them a long time before they found out who did it. There’s more than one face to being foolish. I will go so far as to say that probably the builders understood St Xenia, but the aristocracy of St Petersburg did not.

To return to the Apostle Paul, he was treated as though he were crazy. There is another important lesson for us all to be remembering in this, because in our culture we are so ready to judge the book by its cover, and the person by clothes. It is by external appearances that we measure people. It’s important for us to remember that things very often are not as they appear. People who seem to be insignificant sorts of personalities, even ineffective personalities, are often those persons who are the best pray-ers. They are very well hidden, but they are the best at praying. They are the ones, who, in their hiddenness, are interceding on our behalf, and bringing light, and life from the Lord to us. We should be very careful in measuring human beings not to measure by appearances because it is the Lord who knows the heart. St Xenia, and the Apostle Paul are good enough examples of this for us.

The Apostle Paul is going on to say that we have many instructors, but we don’t have many fathers. This is yet another important lesson for us to remember today. We are so system-minded in our formation here that we forget to look to the relationship. As I was complaining on the way here this morning, we are very much suffering from the negative, and poisonous event of a little over 1,000 years ago in the west when in study, theology stopped being the mother of all, and was put into second or even less place, as compared to philosophy. Philosophy has been driving us in the west ever since. Because of this philosophy, we are system-minded, and our approach towards the Lord is often system-minded, instead of personal-relationship-minded. It’s from this system-mindedness that we have this strange phenonomen in television, and radio of evangelical outreach where people are misleading other people by letting them think that you can have a certain sort of technique of prayer, or a certain technique of approaching God, with which you can get anything you want from Him. I like to say very often that people are being taught wrongly that if you learn how to milk the cosmic cow correctly, you can get the milk in the quantity you want. Of course, anyone who has milked a cow knows that you have to know how to milk the cow correctly or no milk comes. It’s the same thing with goats, and sheep, I’m sure.

However, it has nothing to do with technique. It has to do with a relationship of loving God, so that in love we know God’s love, and His will. Our hearts know His will, and in our hearts, knowing His will, we have the hope, and the possibility to be doing His will. The Apostle Paul says that he wants to be, and considers himself to be, a father to all those Corinthians, and not just the Corinthians, but all of the people to whom he brought Christ. He is their father. You, and I are mothers, and fathers to each other in Christ in the same way. We do not show the way, in other words, in terms of techniques, and systems. We can’t, in fact, be Orthodox Christians if we just learn a set of rules, and do things a certain way. If we are like this, we are just robots. If we are going to be good Orthodox Christians, we follow these ways of living out of love because these ways of living are expressions purely of the Gospel.

Orthodox Christians, in all their different cultures live as they do, and do what they do because of the baptism of their lives, and their way of life, by the Gospel. That’s why there is so much similarity among all the Orthodox cultures. Certainly we speak different languages, eat different food, and dance in different ways. There’s a slightly different flavour in the way we sing in church, but that’s about it. When you go to one Orthodox church or another you don’t need a book. Sooner or later you know exactly where you are in the Divine Liturgy, or any other service, and you just fall in, language or no language. There’s a famous story about a Russian lady who went one time to Greece on a pilgrimage, and she was often in church. When she came back, people were asking her how were the services there. She said: Well, it was about like how it is here. It was very nice, and I felt very much at home, but the whole service was in Greek except, of course, “Eis polla eti despota”. The joke, itself, is an expression of how things really are. The same thing has happened to me, even when I went to Georgia where the language is so different that our ears cannot get any hooks on which to hang any words. However, you can still know where you are in the Divine Liturgy. The singing is really, really different there, but you know where you are. The Divine Liturgy goes on quite well just as it does everywhere. Our faith is the same. Our attitudes are the same.

The Lord, when He is healing the epileptic, is responding in compassion to the entreaty of the father. He is responding in compassion to the captivity from which that little boy had been suffering. The Lord liberates the child. In the same way, out of compassion, He is liberating you, and me, too, time after time. In the same way, He meets your needs, and my needs time after time. The Lord, in His own way, is being like the father that He tells us about in the parable of the prodigal son. He is also being a father in the same sort of way that the Apostle Paul is trying to be, and is speaking to us about today.

It’s important that we, in living our Christian lives, do our best to wean ourselves, by the Lord’s help, from all this system-thinking, and remember that everything in our life is based in Christ on relationships – human, personal relationships. Bishops, who are supposed to be so high, and mighty, in fact, have to be the opposite of high, and mighty. I was really offended not long ago, when I was referred to as a “prelate”. I do not consider myself to be a prince. A bishop who does consider himself to be a prince, is in extremely dangerous territory. A bishop, like Christ, has to be ready to wash the feet of others just as He said we must do. Bishops are the inheritors of the Apostles. They must be washing feet. They must be serving. They must embody serving. If they don’t manage to do it, they have repenting to do, because the way of Christ is self-sacrificing, loving service, caring for the other, feeding the flock, nurturing the sheep. Doing the best he can, like the Apostles, the bishop must be a loving father, leading the family. If you refer to the bishop as shepherd, he must be leading the flock in Christ, to Christ, to the green pastures of everlasting life.

This is how we all must be towards each other. We must be loving fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. We must be showing Christ to each other. We must be referring each other to Christ. In prayer we must be bearing each other before Christ, lifting each other up before Christ, always, and in everything looking only to Christ. So like the Apostle Peter, looking to Christ, may we be able to stand up on the turbulent waters of this life, and glorify Him in everything with joy, exalting Him, our Saviour, Jesus Christ, 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