Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 23
John 9:1-38

"Our Father, Who Art in Heaven"

We think of the Gospel of St. John as being the "Father Gospel." No other book in the Bible comes close in the prevalence of the term father except the Book of Genesis with its long lists of genealogies: "Adam became the father of Seth ... Seth became the father of Enoch ... Enosh became the father of Kenan" and so on. But in Genesis father is a function word, not a meditation on fatherhood. By contrast the Gospel of John is about God the Father in relation to God the Son with the word father occurring 107 times, far more than in the Synoptic Gospels (16 times in Mark, 38 times in Luke, and 69 times in Matthew).

In John, Jesus reveals that God is our Father, not figuratively, but actually and with profound implications. We are His adopted children and by that fact alone are heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven. The First-born of all Creation, the Only-begotten Son, enters history as a human in order to define our relationship with God, which had been forgotten. He is our Older Brother, our Eldest Sibling, and, therefore, our Role Model and Guide. He is the perfect Image of our Father. Jesus says

We understand this hope very well. From time immemorial this same process of growth has been the aspiration of each family and the hope of the world — that every son or daughter born to virtuous and admirable parents might shine with the nobility seen in their parents. What should become of the world if this were no longer so?

It is the nobility in humans — whether kindness or valor or self-sacrifice or charity ... — which is universal and which evokes an emotional response wherever it is seen in the world. Whether we are watching movies set in China or Samoa or Africa, we are uplifted when we see virtues shining in the human person. We have become so fixed upon diversity, seeing only differences, that we fail to see the marvelous similarity among all peoples. And well might this be so, this unity. Modern genetic theory holds that all humankind proceeds from the same two parents. Yes, there may be individualities in the family, but genetic science holds that we are one family. Moreover, the ancient Orthodox Church teaches that every boy and girl born into the world is created to be a child of God, invested with a birthright to Heaven, which is ratified through a process known as theosis — attaining to the fullness of God's Image, which had been sketched upon each of us at conception.

No one is born outside the Church, therefore, for all enjoy this same divine birthright. We are created holy at our conception, and our path is a holy one, for each begins in God and ends in God, and the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church stands ready to receive each and every one born into her bosom. Ours is not an exclusive club, for everyone is born into it and with a lifetime membership. But it is a royal club — the highest and the finest and the best.

Tragically, rebellion within God's earthly family ruptured relations early on. Perhaps you know a family in which the children ask, "Why do we never visit Uncle Enoch and Aunt Betty?" and the parents reply, "We won't get into that!" But something happened a long time ago that caused a rupture that is now hidden.

This is the case with all of us. In a willful act of selfishness and ego, our original parents "missed the mark" and decided on a path of their own devising. And having mutated the Creation in this way, giving rise to their own, deformed world, they also gave rise to miscreations that were, and are, not part of the God's life: disease and its consequence, death.

We should not dignify that miscreated path by calling it an alternative to life, for its has no reality of its own, just as death has no reality. On earth, death is merely the absence of life. And afterwards, eternal death is the perversion of eternal life. Let us call this miscreation, therefore, the anti-path. Just as the demons have no bodies of their own and viruses have no cellular form of their own, these anti-agents cannot stand on their own. They must seek out us to have reality ... or rather anti-reality. Just as a virus must invade and take over a cell in order to "live" (if you call disease life), so a demon must take over a human life in order to function in the material world. The anti-path leads to the ultimate nowhere, which is pandemonium (chaos, but also all demons). The Path of Life leads to the somewhere, which is everywhere, which is God's abundant life (John 10:10). And we recall that God's Son is "the Way [Path] and the Truth and the Life." There is no other (Jn 14:6).

All of this proceeds from the words "Our Father," which means "having children." This relationship of family is our everything, our only life, for only through adoption by the Father do we have life. All else is anti-life, and we know what the human form devoid of life looks like: hideous in its rotting finitude.

If the Gospel of St. John is uniquely about Fatherhood, then its eighth chapter, which is the prologue to our Gospel lesson this morning, forms its climax, for prevalence of the word father sharply rises here:

The theme in this brief, though dense, teaching is Fatherhood and failed sonship, a failure always effected through unfaithfulness. The Jews fail to embrace their resemblance to Abraham (his name means "father"), who was the faithful one. In so doing, they are blind to God the Father and fail to see God the Son Who stands now right before them. They have failed to follow the path and have embraced instead the anti-path, figured by Satan, who is the anti-father, the father of lies. Satan has no truths of his own, only anti-truth.

Here is the generational sin above all generational sins, which is blindness to God. It begins as Eve turns away from God with a serpent beguiling her, continues as murder and fratricide enters the world and continues in every book in the Bible. It is the first subject mentioned in Chapter Nine:

Generational sin — the idea of the sins of the father-mother are visited upon the son-daughter — is repugnant to most people today. This is a curiosity, for examples of generational sin are found all around us:

In passing we should note that the Orthodox Catholic Church rejects the teaching of Original Sin, developed during the fifth century, which holds that humans are essentially evil at their conception and birth. By contrast, the ancient Church taught, and teaches, that each of us was born to be perfect, good, and holy and that if we should continue in that goodness, we will grow in favor and beauty unto resemblance to God and thence to the Kingdom of Heaven.

I was raised in a dysfunctional family soaked through with alcoholism. My father had survived a shipwreck brought about by a kamikaze pilot and then spent the rest of his life "treating" his PTSD (the label not invented yet) with alcohol. But let us look at this generationally. This kamikaze pilot's father was raised in an imperialist culture that had progressed to the point of a militaristic mania with ambitions of world dominance. This evil touched his son, not through procreation but through the son's formation in the father's culture. He was reared in evil. This evil touched my father's ship, which then poisoned my father and all those who survived. They brought this evil back with them as they began families. They infected their wives, many of whom became either alcoholics or divorcees. It then touched their children (in my case taking the lives of my father, my mother, my younger brother, and maiming another brother). Many of the surviving children of these alcoholic families retreated with their shattered psyches into drugs and illicit sexual relationships. This potent contagion of evil, administered by one, lone pilot, now continues through generations of addicts-yet-to-be-born and eventually their infected mates and children. Yes, it is possible to say "no" to this disease, for God has granted us a soul, which is sovereign over the mind and will. Sadly, those who exercise this divine power are in the minority.

Our lesson this morning meditates on the greatest of generational sins. The spiritual blindness with which the Sacred Scriptures begin falls to a breathtaking low in the Advent of Christ. That is, God's people stand directly before their God and fail to see him. The greatest event of all human history has occurred and nearly every human creature has missed it.

Our lesson concludes with these simple sentences: