Hebrews 11:33-12:2
Psalm 24:1-6
Matthew 10:32-33,19:27-30

Love of Family

Did anyone teach you to love? Did you have to be taught to love? We were taught to walk. We were taught how to talk. We were taught our manners and our obligations to others and our duties. But no one taught us to love. The little form of the newborn child cries out to be held, and then holding her (in my case) you discover a little force of life that is propelled to receive love and needing to give love.

This is remarkable, for no other single faculty, feeling, or force within us is so powerful as this need to give and receive love. Love holds the entire world together in concord. How else could families or town or nations or the Church cohere together? Love of one another, including romantic love, inspires greatness within us. Love of country raises ordinary men up to heroic stature. Love is the very kernel and living heart of our holy faith, for our God seeks this, above all, in each of us — an overwhelming and all-involving love for Him. And the greatest gift to us is His love. Within us, the immortal soul — weightless, invisible, undetectable by science — is our only Heavenly organ, endowed by God at our conception, and love is its chief faculty and purpose. Our epigram this morning announces just how important this love of God is. For without requiting this love, the Son of God will deny us before the Father, reject us from the Kingdom of Heaven. Rejecting God's love. This is the unpardonable sin, the sin that no power in Heaven or earth can heal or amend. Love. It makes the world go round.

No one taught us to love. God took that divine spark from within His own Holy Fire and set it deep within each of us. And with this spark He holds the human lifeworld together and makes our world turn. Whoever has loved completely knows that it is a consuming fire. You will burn down all else in your life for it when it comes! Similarly, no passage in Holy Scripture nor Ecumenical Council nor Apostolic or Patristic writing has taught us to love our "elder brothers and sisters" in the faith whom we call "the saints." Nowhere in our doctrine or faith are we directed to love the saints. Church history teaches us, though. Church history teaches us, first, that a sanctified man or woman, boy or girl, was universally loved, and, second, that love never dies. No one has to be taught that. It goes on forever. And the saints were loved. Even after their deaths, people prayed to them spontaneously, honored them in their own homes with icons, and named their children after them.

The earliest Eucharistic celebrations were celebrated on the tombs of the saints, and that tradition continues to the present day. For that is what a Christian Altar is: a place above the confessio, where the saints are buried (by virtue of their relics) on which the Eucharist is celebrated. If there is no relic beneath it, which is the main thing, then it is not a valid Altar, and you cannot celebrate a valid Eucharist upon it. At our Hermitage Church of Our Lady of the Angels, Ss. Dionysius the Areopagite, Pope Fabian (third-century pope of Rome), and Elizabeth the New Martyr, Queen Victoria's granddaughter, are buried through their relics here with us. This is personal for us. They are at the center of our daily Eucharistic celebrations. We commune with them as we gaze into their luminous images on holy icons. We love them. We tell St. Elizabeth's story as if relating the story of our own cousin or aunt.

I recall walking into an Eastern Orthodox monastery. As sister of this Hermitage and I were on pilgrimage, a Franciscan pilgrimage. We visited all twenty-one of the original Franciscan missions along the West Coast from Sonoma County to near the Mexican border. We were picking up a produce delivery van for the farm and had some other business on the Mainland.

We decided to take a day off (what a novelty!), so we went a little town, Calistoga, that we might soak ourselves in the mineral pools, restore ourselves, talk to others in these pools, and, "dip" into the world, so to speak. We decided also to "to out." So we picked up the newspaper to find where one "goes out" and discovered that a nearby monastery was celebrating its patronal feast, the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos.

I recall walking into the monastery church. I scanned near the Altar for a tabernacle lamp, as I always did, wondering if I should genuflect. I asked the abbess of the monastery, "Is the Lord were present here?" Her reply I shall never forget: gently touching an icon among the many surrounding us, she said, "We have good fellowship here." And I looked around me, and I saw that I was among family — life-size icons of the saints, that "great cloud of witnesses" I had read so many times in the Letter to the Hebrews.

You see, here was the point and meaning of my life as I stood among those who loved God with a love supreme. Here was my life's beginning, end, and never-ending character ... all around me they stood. Like them, I was created with the Royal Image stamped upon me. I also held the precious birthright to the Kingdom of Heaven (as we all do). And like them, I was born as a stranger in a strange land with a long and winding road before me, so that someday I might experience the fullness of my Divine character and come to the logical conclusion of family resemblance, which is mysteriously to become so united with the Lord Jesus that I was "at one with Him" as "He is One with the Father" (Jn 17:11). They were all around me. And I could feel them beckoning to me with their love, for that essence which continues to be Divine was the single most important fact about them and about me, that spark, set within me from conception, which is love. At my ordination, Hilarion, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, told me that the most important gift that a priest brings to his people is compassion, to look upon them with the eyes of understanding love.

Yes, the Lord was Present. He was Present in each of them, and all of them together, who shone with His fullness of humanity and Divinity, in perfection, for they had arrived to fulfillment of their journeys. They had arrived to the abundance of theosis, which is humanity overbrimming with Divinity and a Divinity embued with humanity. Like the Lord Jesus, they shone with the fullness of God's conception of each and every one of us. Our parents have a vision as they see our little personalities unfold that we will come to a completeness of perfection. And God is, above all, Our Father.

As members of the Hermitage stepped into the ancient Catholic Church, following these same saints (for everyone in the world before the twelfth century was Orthodox Catholic), we began to understand what real Christianity looked like. As I look back to the day that I first entered that Orthodox monastery, I now realize that I was all-focused on the One Who was sacrificed. I looked for the Altar. I scanned for the Reserved Sacrament, which would have been the remains of the "Holy Sacrifice" (as I called the Mass). And I began to realize how this had dominated my conception of communion with God. Had dominated my religious life. And why not? My formation had been Anglo-Catholic, where I had participated or celebrated at High Altars, in large sanctuaries, with soaring reredoses, where the Holy Sacrifice had been carried out with great pomp and solemnity. Indeed, the whole floor plan of Western churches was, and continues to be, dominated by this understanding of worship — with all sight lines converging upon the High Altar, standing as it does at the end of a long center aisle, visually anchoring the entire nave.

Sacred space in the West is linear suggesting a lifelong journey toward God. It begins on the church steps where exorcisms are performed. The catechumen then enters the church to be baptized in a font standing immediately to one side of the entrance. He makes his way forward down a straight and narrow path, the nave, which is bounded on either side by the world (albeit the baptized world). Some people are for him. Some are against him. Some do not care. Those serious about communion make their journey eastward down the center aisle toward the birth of the sun, which is why Pascha is called Easter (Easter than East) in the West. And there one finds a High Altar standing on a footpace requiring an ascent of three or five or seven steps. Behind the Altar is an arc-ing wall, a supernatural geometry (as the circle is a perfection and a mystery) called the apse. In ancient churches the word Paradise was written on this wall or depicted with its peaceable animals and streams. Only by crossing through the Divine Sacrifice — perhaps, through the trials of life, to hang beside the Lord on a cross like the penitent thief — only then could one hope to be with Him in Paradise.

Beginning in the eleventh century, the Western Church taught that this divide between earth and Heaven is impassable. For a great debt must first be offered and satisfaction be made before humankind might be reconciled to God. But this debt was far beyond the capacity of any human to pay.

This so-called Satisfaction Theory of Atonement was invented by an Italian Benedictine monk, Anselmo (later a Western saint), which opened the way to further (and grotesque) refinements. Later, the unpayable bond is said to be held by an angry Father God. He shakes the bond with His fist in the air demanding payment. But no one can pay. No one is able to pay, for the principal was far beyond human means and now has accrued interest over many thousands of years. Only one sacrifice is able to satisfy this debt: the bloody sacrifice of God's Son.

Small wonder that the perspective of Western worship, is linear with its suggestion of the tragic (and inescapable) convergence of all lines upon the High Altar — the priest solemnly ascending, step by step, carrying the limp and bloody body of the Lord Jesus Christ in his arms, and laying it upon the Altar in an act of propitiation. Well might the early statuary of Western churches (and many corpuses hung upon crossing roods) drip with bright, red blood.

The mood in these churches is somber. The helpless faithful inevitably assume a posture of kneeling prayer. They are utterly passive and (ideally) filled with remorse as they consider the sins that have finally brought the Beloved Son of God to this pass! The people are not engaged, but watchful. In the Western medieval Church, communion was received perhaps once a year. "The Host was something to be seen, not to be consumed" the great scholar Eamon Duffy wrote (The Stripping of the Altars).

The ancient Catholic Church, and the entire Undivided Church for the first thousand years, had never heard of such a thing. Yes, the ancient Church held Atonement (At-one-ment) with God to be paramount, but this bloody idea of sacrifice was foreign to the Church. For these notions of sacrifice came to us only a thousand years ago from a monastery in Italy.

The Apostolic and Early Church Fathers interpreted the Scriptures very differently. Origen had proposed that ours was once a Divine Image stamped upon a noble metal, but over time we had forgot who we were (Royal heirs), where we were going (to claim a birthright in God's Kingdom), and what we were supposed to look like (the Great Emperor). We had become dull slugs of silver. But at the Incarnation of God, every coin was re-minted (a proof minting!), and our Image was restored. That was Atonement in the eyes of the most influential of all the Fathers.

St. Athanasius had proposed that the Divine Portrait, which had been painted upon each of us, had been defaced. But how to restore the portrait when the original model could no longer be found, much less petitioned. At the Incarnation of God, the Perfect Image once again sat for the master portrait, so that it could be repaired.

During the first century, the story of two friends dominated our understanding of Atonement. All throughout the ancient lifeworld, the story of Damon and Pythias was circulated. It expressed the highest ideals of the ancient world. As the story unfolds, Pythias was accused of plotting the overthrow of the cruel tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius I. He was arrested, and sentenced to death. Accepting his sentence, Pythias asked the tyrant if he might first go home, settle his affairs, and bid goodbye to his family. This the king refused .... until Pythias' friend, Damon, offered himself as a temporary ransom until Pythias could return. When the day of execution came, Pythias was nowhere to be seen, and Damon was taken to the place of beheading. At the last minute Pythias appeared explaining that pirates had overtaken his ship and that he had escaped, then swimming for his life that Damon might be spared the fate that was properly his. The tyrant Dionysius was so moved by this show of friendship that he released them both.

This story, central to the beliefs of the Pythagorean School of Philosophy, was universally shared in Jesus' time. In the sparely written Acts of the Apostles, where we find little "small talk," St. Luke mentions a tiny detail: the ship that would carry them to Syracuse had carved upon its prow Twin Boys (Acts 28:11) — a clear reference to Damon and Pythias. And why not? Did the story of Damon and Pythias not go to the heart of the faith's meaning? Of the ideal of universal love? The Apostles and their fellows had heard Jesus' pronouncements on friendship — becoming His friends (Jn 15:15), following Him (Mk 1:17), and loving each other (1 Jn 3:11). And above all, this:

The story of Damon and Pythias was not a story of death, for no one died. The story of the Lord Jesus Christ, similarly, is not a story of death, but a story of faithfulness in life.

You see, the evil one (as he always does) had overplayed his hand. He would gladly exchange the denizens of Hell for the Lord, the Heir, the Prince of Heaven. But in so doing Hell attempted to swallow that One in all humanity Whom it could not hold. The ancient Church understood that Atonement was not about death, but about an expansive understanding of Life that stretches our hearts and imaginations to divine proportions.

Yes, this was good fellowship, and I began to understand the character of worship which I then witnessed in the noble spaces of the monastery church in Calistoga. In this mysterious place you may well soon ask, "Where is this place? How did I get here? I am not sure of the way out." For it seems to be circular ... but that is not quite right. Let us say, non-linear. At the door, one encounters holy icons and stops to greet and venerate "family," the Communion of Saints. The saints greet you and welcome you into an experience not bounded by time or space. They invite you into their love if your heart be right. They offer to guide you on a path leading to holiness ... where they are. Soon this mysterious place begins to fill with incense. Bells are sounding from .... one knows not where. Chanting is heard wafting through the air it seems from all directions. Sacred ministers roam about in no certain direction. No one is seated; in fact, no geometry of chairs or groups can be discerned. Geometry and logic seem to have been suspended. The experience is of mystery and spiritual fellowship. Even the boundaries separating this life and the greater life seem to have collapsed. Soon the Beloved, the Master, will appear. He is now among us! We know that He loves all and each of us as we love Him. How did this happen? Where did He come from? We do not know. For a hidden place is concealed by the iconostasis, which seems no different than any other wall ... if you can call crowds of saints "a wall." For it is really an embrace, an endlessly deep embrace. And, then, one considers that ancient phrase, yet again, "a great cloud of witnesses" ... and begins to understand it even through the prism of the five senses. Over time as you advance more deeply into that embrace, you begin to wonder if this so-called church building is not something else, like the manger that surrounded the Christ child, infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside (C. S. Lewis).

I looked all around in this mysterious place and I saw earnest, serious people intent on Heaven. They were all on the same journey, all loved by the Lord and loving Him, and each other, and I felt Heaven all around me, on every side. There was no single point of sacrifice but rather our Eldest Brother, Jesus, the first-born of Creation, showing us the way to this marvelous new world of fellowship. He shone like the sun, radiant like the saints.