Forgive me, a Sinner.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
This is the Sunday on what would have been our Open House Weekend. Like a lot of other things, we’ve had to postpone that event until October. However, just because we aren’t able to invite folks to experience Orthodox life by visiting the parish, there’s no reason why we all can’t practice hospitality by talking to folks about the Faith.
So what would that look like? What would we even say?
Well, this morning the Church has set before us a passage from St. John’s Gospel and a passage from the Acts of the Apostles. Both of those passages are filled with confusion. In our gospel lesson, Christ Jesus heals a man who is blind. That miracle sets off a whole series of discussions and meetings and interviews, but no one can figure out exactly what has happened.
That same sort of thing is going on in our epistle lesson. St. Paul heals a slave girl who is demon possessed. That miracle leads to a riot and legal proceedings and jail time, for St. Paul, but, again, no one seems to know exactly what’s going on.
But if there’s one thing that we have plenty of right now in our country, it’s confusion.
We hear a news story, and then we get the story re-framed in all sorts of different ways. We watch video footage, and then we discover that there’s additional video from another angle or that the first video was actually edited. We all use science and statistics to support our personal perspectives or our political positions, and that practice has become even more intensely partisan during this pandemic. And, on top of all that, we also get to read comments and observations and insults and arguments from hundreds of thousands of complete strangers as folks express their opinions about all the stories and the videos and the science and the statistics.
So, yeah, we know about confusion. It’s just something that we experience on a daily basis, and that leads to all sorts of problems—we get frustrated; we feel disoriented; we try to push back against the confusion, and we get swallowed up in it, or we just stand back and get cynical. But the bottom line is that we are just like the folks in this morning’s scripture lessons. No one seems to know what’s actually going on.
That would be a pretty good subject to discuss with our family members and our co-workers and our neighbors and our friends. Because just like us, they are wondering how in the world we can disconnect from all this confusion. That’s what we’ve been talking about during the Pascha Book Study—different ways to better manage the technology that keeps us wired in to this confusion. Dr. Mark Tarpley is going to be talking to us about the very same subject when we have our Open House Weekend on Saturday, October 3 and Sunday, October 4—and it’s not like the situation will have somehow improved by then. If anything, we can expect that the confusion will be worse, because, in October, we will be just a few weeks away from the presidential election.
So there are things we can do and disciplines we can undertake that will extract us from all this confusion. And there are folks in your life who would really like to talk about all that. But this morning, the Church also has some flat-out Good News for us. And that’s the main thing we need to be sharing with our family members and friends and neighbors and co-workers.
Just think back to our gospel lesson: The man who gets healed is immediately swept up in controversy: he’s interviewed; he’s interrogated, and, ultimately, he’s excommunicated—he’s expelled from the synagogue, from the Jewish community. But then, in the midst of all this chaos and confusion, St. John the Evangelist tells us that Christ Jesus comes and finds the man.
Which means that our Lord and Master will do the very same thing for each and every one of us. No matter how much time you spend on your phone; no matter how addicted you are to social media; no matter what you are watching on your computer screen; no matter how much energy you invest in gaming; no matter how caught up you are in all the confusion which has engulfed or culture; no matter how long you’ve been stuck at home, Christ Jesus is looking for you.
In fact, our Lord and Master is with us all this morning. We’re each standing before His icon. We’ve heard Him speak to us in the Holy Gospel. At some point this week, we will each be able to go the parish—or the clergy will visit our home—and Christ Jesus will impart to us His very life, His body and His blood. And when we encounter our Lord and Master, when we interact with Him, there simply is no confusion; there is no chaos. There is only peace and stillness and beauty.
Of course, when you try to explain all that to folks, at some point, someone’s going to say something like this: “Let’s just slow down a bit. I like the part about Christ Jesus coming to look for me—I really do—but how in the world do you know that He is actually present? I mean, you sound convinced, and I think I’d like to believe that, but how can you ever really be sure that you know what you’re talking about?”
But this is how you can be sure. Remember our epistle lesson? St. Paul heals a slave girl, and he causes a riot and ends up in jail? There are a number of other things that happen in that story, but we are the Church that commissioned St. Paul and sent him out as a missionary. At St. John’s, we are Antiochian Orthodox; that means we are a parish of the Patriarchate of the Great City of God, Antioch, and of All the East, and it’s our Patriarchate who authorized St. Paul to do his work. In fact, the man who wrote the account that we just listened to also belonged to our Patriarchate. His name is St. Luke, and, along with the Apostle Paul, he is also Antiochian Orthodox.
That’s how far back we go; that’s the depth of the experience that we bring to this subject, so when we proclaim to our friends and family members and neighbors and co-workers that Christ Jesus is present with us in the Divine Services and the Holy Icons and the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Eucharist, we are announcing to them that our Lord and Master is here and that He wants to interact with them. He wants to free them from all the chaos and confusion. He wants to give them His peace and His stillness and His beauty.
And, sure, that’s a lot to absorb in one conversation. So, we need to allow folks the time they need to think through all that. But we also need to be available when they are ready to begin processing things again—which may very well be right around Saturday, October 3 and Sunday, October 4, during our next Open House Weekend.
And since Christ Jesus is here with us this morning, we can start praying for all of those conversations and all of those interactions. So, Mothers and Fathers, Brothers and Sisters, as we rise together and turn to this Typika, let us thank our Lord and Master, not only for all of our friends and family members and neighbors and co-workers, but also for His Presence in each of us and in our parish community, as with one mouth and one heart we praise and glorify the all-honorable and majestic Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.