Hebrews 13:7-16
Psalm 138:1-8
John 17:1-13

"Standing in Holy Fire"

Walk into any one of hundreds of thousands of Orthodox churches worldwide, and you will find yourself instantly surrounded by saints. That is nothing new for most Catholics. Every Catholic church contains relics. There can be no holy Altar, and therefore no Mass, without relics, for the Mass has been celebrated upon the tombs and relics of the saints from the earliest decades of the Church. But the company I have in mind is different. Consider the words of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats:

In a sense, relics are abstractions of saints. That is, imagination must work very hard to gaze upon a tiny sliver of bone and from that to see a saint. Now, I hasten to add that we are profoundly humbled that a true particle of the body of St. Dionysius the Areopagite is buried in our Altar at the Hermitage. A first-century saint! Attested in the Acts of the Apostles! Nonetheless, we must strain to see the luminous figure of the saint on earth peering through the window, as it were, of a tiny fragment of bone. Yes, we venerate the saint as these tiny remains are embedded in wax in our very midst. But this is not the experience Yeats famously has enshrined in his holy words. The experience we have in mind through Yeats is mysterious, even imparting a sense of otherworldiness and, in that sense, perhaps dread. Upon entering an Orthodox church, you may ask, "Where is this place? How did I get here? I am not sure of the way out." It seems to be a circular space, but even that is not quite right. 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.

Each person who walks up to them has a personal relationship with them. Just as in a family reunion. Each may approach grandmother, but it is not the same with each person because each person has a different relationship with her.

I share with you that when I stand before this Altar, when I gaze into the face of the Pantocrator as I pray, I look upon His right side of blessing, but I also look upon His left side — the scrutinizing eye, the Book of the Lamb He holds in His arm. Is my name inscribed there? I wonder. It is constantly on my mind. I look on the Gospel side of the Altar upon the Tenderness Icon of the Theotokos, and I say a prayer: "O Holy Mother, O Blessed Virgin, continue to hold me under your mantle of chastity. Protect me from myself and my wandering mind." I look at the Icon of St. Elizabeth the New Martyr. Her relics are also buried in our Altar. And I see her goodness, her intention to look away from the world ... except to give succor to those in need. I look at her simplicity. And I seek real fellowship with her, one heart to another. Holy Icons, you see, are a personal thing. And I know that they invite us. They invite our hearts, our hearts to be right. That is what they want. They offer to guide you on a path leading to holiness, where they are.

Soon this mysterious place begins to fill with incense, this Orthodox church. Bells are sounding from .... one knows not where. Chanting is heard wafting through the air it seems from all directions. Sacred ministers roam about (it seems) 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 Most Beloved will appear. He will be among us! We know that He loves all and each of us, for that is His Nature. Where did he come from? How did this happen? We do not know. For a hidden place is concealed by the iconostasis, the wall with the Icons, which seems no different than any other wall ... if you can call crowds of saints "a wall." For really it is an embrace, an endlessly deep embrace. And, then, one considers that ancient phrase, "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.

As we read in our Gospel lesson this morning, Jesus asks the Father that He be glorified. And He plainly says, "I am no more in the world .... though we can see Him. He tells us in this same passage that He does not pray for the world but only for those who are gathered and gathering into the Kingdom of God. What we are encountering here is an otherworld in the world. And an otherworldliness, too. Here we take our first steps to understanding Orthodox worship, which is a mystery, a mystery of many mysteries, in a world that commonly is all too un-mysterious. All clay and no treasure (2 Cor 4:7-9).

Today we celebrate the Fathers of the Undivided Church's Seventh Ecumenical Council — great Christian saints who were confronted with a catastrophe: in the eighth century a Byzantine emperor and his sons who were intent on disrupting Orthodox worship and replacing the veneration of icons with with a cult of themselves. Their battle cry was Iconoclasm, "Destroy the Holy Icons!" Whereas the eighth-century Byzantine emperor Justinian II had placed the image of Jesus on the coins of the empire, his successor a few years later, Leo III, had these images removed favoring an image of himself. Coins were also struck to commemorate imperial events such as the coronation of his son Constantine V as co-emperor in 720, which bore little crosses. The imperial ambition was to promote unity within the Byzantine Empire by offering the figure of the emperor as the locus of national loyalty and identity. The theological argument the emperor set forward was idolatry — that the veneration of icons violated the Ten Commandments.

As the Fathers of the Seventh Council made clear, there is nothing wrong with depicting divine beings upon icons or coins or any other worthy medium. In the Books of Exodus (25:19ff.), Numbers (7:89), Hebrews (9:5), and Ezekiel (41:18), we find reference to depictions of cherubim upon the Ark of the Covenant. If so sacred a place as the Holy of Holies on so sacred an object as the Mercy Seat, if this might be adorned with Holy Icons by order of God, surely no human law ought to proscribe it.

Nonetheless, the emperor and his sons ordered that icons be destroyed. Holy icons. Wonderworking icons. Miraculous icons that streamed myrrh. The Icon of the Mother of God of the Sign of Kursk, also called the Root Icon, saved the life of one of Russia's greatest future saints, St. Seraphim of Sarov. The young boy Prochor lay in his death bed when a procession of this famous icon was making its way through the streets of his city. His mother ran into the rain and bade the holy pilgrims come into the house. Proximity to the icon healed him.

Here in Hawai'i a copy made at Mt. Athos of the Ivernon Icon of the Mother of God, also called the Panagia Portaitisse (the All-Holy One Who Stands by the Gate) has begun to stream myrrh. We three have been anointed with the myrrh of that icon. The history of the original takes us back to this same period of icon destruction ordered by Leo III and his successors. During the reign of the emperor Theophilus, soldiers approached a chapel in Niceaea where the Iveron Icon was venerated. A soldier stepped in and struck the Icon with his sword. Suddenly blood flowed freely from the Blessed Virgin' gashed cheek. Badly shaken, the man fell to his knees weeping. He repented. He renounced the iconoclast heresy. And he entered a monastery beginning a life of penitence and religious life. Upon leaving the chapel, he admonished the widow who kept the Icon to hide it lest worst things befall it. And we know its history from there — how it has healed and protected and stood by the Gate separating Heaven from the world protecting us even as our Holy Mother protects us. For she is an Icon as well, albeit in an incommensurable form — materially resurrected in her body yet radiating an awesome display of God's holy fire.

Icons are holy. We light candles before them remembering that, like us, they have a material part and a holy part: fire. The fire is unsubstantial. You cannot pick it up between your fingers. But it is endowed with power: cleansing power. It gives off light: divine light, which transforms the spirit. Ask anyone who steps into a candlelit chapel. Transforms the spirit. Indeed, the towers on Russian churches are crowned with golden onion domes glistening in the sun to signify that they are topped with living fire, God's holy fire set upon the earth to guide our paths.

It is our life's work, all of us, to stand with the saints in light in that holy fire. The saints are present, a great cloud of witnesses to call us forward. They implore us to put down the unworthy things that would make us all wax and never fire. We gaze into their faces at Mass and prayer. They are pleased to worship God along side us. And they will be there, all holy fire, on the day we die to receive us into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is made of such stuff as them.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.