Phil 2:5-11
Psalm 9:1-10
Luke 10:38-42,11:27-28
In His human death, we enter Divine Life. In His subtraction of Heavenly glory, we receive all-important addition: the Kingdom of Heaven. When the subject is spiritual life, what marvelous windows we peer through! More marvelous still, it is the peering through them which changes us from clay into light. Hold that gaze, for it fills you with eternity and transforms the ungainly animal of your body into the gracious divine person of your soul. So taught St. Athanasius in his landmark, On the Incarnation. Yes, the Son of God has paid the ransom for our sins, St. Athanasius continued, but what is it that keeps us from the prisonhouse of sin, from which He freed us? Why is it that we do not lapse back into the mire? It is our gaze, our gaze upon Him, St. Athanasius wrote. This act of fixed contemplation fastening our eyes and our lives upon Him keeps fresh our new life.
Let us think about icons in this celestial light. For they are not art. They are windows into Heaven. They are relationship, if you will. Throw open this window, and breathe Heaven's air.
There is no particular style that makes an icon an icon, no medium, whether of paper or wood, whether in paints or pencil sketches. The icon is not a genre or objet d'art. We might say it is a divine experience ... but I fear such words will elicit the cynical in those who hear or read them. So let me shift focus here.
What would you say if I told you that words can transform you? After all, they are a kind of icon themselves: tiny lines making little cryptic forms upon a page. They can reduce the reader to uproarious laughter ... or to tears. You say, that I am confusing letters and words with stories? I don't think so. For if you change even a single word in an important sentence, the experience will be entirely different. "The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning," wrote Mark Twain. Who has not felt this magic take hold, these waves of, of ... rapture sweeping over the body when reading Shakespeare or Milton or Keats or that most sacred book, the Holy Scriptures?
Explaining C. G. Jung's theory of synchronicity, the story is told of a poet who received a flood of inspiration in the morning that enabled him to write down an almost-complete poem. He wrestled for hours trying to finish it. There was a word ... he could not think of it! Finally, exhausted, he decided to go down into the street and buy an apple. As he approached the apple cart where two men were talking, the first word he heard was the one he was looking for. The word, not one like it, suspended like a shining diamond burning before him. There it was with all its other-earthly power.
Did you know that God did not create the universe first with light? Yes, God made light first but He made it with a word. "In principio, Deus dixit ...." First, God spoke, "Let there be light." And in the space of our own quotidian lives we set down ordinary lines upon a page, whether as letters and words or as more gracious and sweeping lines of paint, and Heavenly life appears before us. How does this happen? We do not know. We do see connections, though. For example, the Russian word pisat (peeSOT') means simultaneously to write and to paint.
Why did Heaven lead us in this way? Why should sacred words and holy icons have been set before us in the first place? But it is not humans who have decided to attach importance to the holy icon, but rather the reverse: icons open a window unto Heaven before humans, and a divine importance has become attached them. By ancient tradition the first icon painter was St. Luke, a ζογρα'φος, to borrow the word used by the Second Council of Nicaea. The painter of life. His subject was the Most Holy Theotokos and the Christ Child, a holy image that has been central to the faith ever since.
Among the icons painted by St. Luke is said to be the Panagia Portaitisse, meaning the All-Holy One who stands by the gate. Which gate? There are many. The Theotokos is the gate through which God entered the human lifeworld. She is also the New Eve, who stands at the Gate to Eden, of Paradise, interceding for us that we may enter. And there is the icon itself, for the icon is a gate to Heaven. It is beautiful in and of itself, but what it opens on to ... that is what really has our attention.
During the Iconoclasm heresy of the ninth century, a soldier entered a little private chapel owned by a widow where it was venerated and stabbed it with a dagger. Blood flowed from the wound. The soldier, badly shaken, repented, converted, and entered a monastery. Miracles associated with the Panagia Portaitisse icon are beyond numbering. It is venerated today at the Iveron Monastery at Mount Athos and for that reason is also called the Iveron Icon.
But it is not the Iveron icon itself, touched by the brush of St. Luke, that is wonderworking .... not only that one but also the icons painted in emulation of it. A recent story is told of a Chilean man recently converted to Russian Orthodoxy who then made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos. He visited a skete situated on the southern tip of the peninsula where he encountered a copy of this most sacred icon. He expressed a desire to purchase it from the studio but learned it was not available for sale. Before leaving the little monastery, the abbot approached him with a package, containing (as it turned out) the icon copy he had admired. The abbot explained that he had received a vision the preceding night directing him to give custody of the icon to this man — this man from Chile living in Canada visiting Mount Athos. He was to give the icon to this man. And he humbly received it and brought it to North America, to Montreal.
One morning, after arriving home, he awoke to the scent of roses in the room where the icon was placed. What is this? What has happened? Did someone enter his apartment in the night? Did they spill perfume ... cologne ... a certain type of rose water? Then he realized that the fragrance was emanating from the icon, not redolent of it, but emanating, radiating from it. In a reflection of light from a nearby icon lamp, he saw little droplets upon the icon. The icon was streaming myrrh. Not only would it bring Heavenly fragrance into this man's life but miracles into the world, for it, too, like its original, was a wonderworking icon with many miracles granted to people who prayed before it.
Here in far away Polynesia, yet another copy of the Iveron icon hung in a little church of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. On the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Br. Jose, the custodian of the Montreal icon, people entered the church and smelled a startling new fragrance. Where was it coming from? Their copy of the Ivernon Icon had begun to stream myrrh. Through the generosity of Mitered Archpriest Mark Rowe, that myrrh was used to anoint a sister of this Hermitage and my own unworthy head on the day of my ordination to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Who can speak to the power of an icon? The power to raise us up to spiritual heights is wonderful. More wonderful still is its power to shine a radiance out onto the world with a power that alters vast historical forces, decides contests between great armies, and could even becomes the Protectress of Russian. The icon whose appearance on earth we celebrate today is all of these things.
The incomparable and powerful Kazan Icon of the Most Holy Theotokos and the Christ Child, appeared during the thirteenth century in the City of Kazan, in southwest Russia. Today, we celebrate Our Lady of Kazan depicted in the holy icon by the same name. And the poet W.B. Yeats asked, "Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" By tradition this icon was brought to the city of Kazan in southwest Russia from Constantinople, where it then disappeared for a century when the area was taken over my Muslims with the establishment of the Khanate of Kazan (c. 1438). In 1579, a fire destroyed the city and soon after the Most Holy Ever-virgin Mary appeared to a ten-year-old girl, Matrona, and revealed the location where the icon lay safe, but hidden. Both Church and secular rulers ignored the girl dismissing her claims, so the girl and her mother recovered the icon themselves. Multiple churches were built to honor this visitation from Heaven, forever called Our Lady of Kazan, and a copy of the image was painted to hang in the Kazan Cathedral of Moscow in Red Square.
This icon has led armies. It has been credited with protecting Russia against the Polish Invasion of 1612 the Swedish Invasion of 1709, and Napoleon's invasion of 1812. It is the Protectress of Russia.
When our Lord accomplished the impossible feat of pouring His Divinity into the narrow confines of our broken humanity, a great icon appeared among us. On the outside, matter ... human flesh, but on the inside, infinite Heaven, the Person of God, the Son.
Have you ever been in a little cabin up in the northern mountains on a winter's night? A great blizzard blows all around you, and world of white and purity appears from seemingly nowhere. The cabin windows suddenly become portraits of the beautiful, impossible to capture with human arts: a swirling blizzard in motion, a great winter storm unfolding. Then, suddenly you notice on the inside of the windows, marvelous crystals bringing the overwhelming power outside and its essence of beauty into your very sphere. How can this be?
The Son of God radiates from the humble and mortal flesh of a human changing the entire human lifeworld across all ages. Is it really so hard to grasp that His Most Holy Mother may appear to us, that a fragrance of roses could be detected all round her form, or that tears of Heaven may flow from her Most Holy Image?
Kneel before the Heavenly things.
Venerate the Most Holy icons.
Open your life to that which our humble lives cannot attain alone ... but may become over time
if only we will consent to it.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.