3rd Sunday after Pentecost / All Saints of Russia / Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian / Romans 5.1-10; Matthew 6.22-33
F/S/HS. Brothers and sisters, our Gospel reading this morning comes from the middle of one of our Lord’s most cherished single teachings—the Sermon on the Mount.
Three major themes are underscored by Jesus in His teaching. The first is about our bodies, or, as our church fathers and mothers say, our nous, and whether our bodies, our nous, is full of light; or is it full of darkness? Because whatever it is that we take into ourselves, through our eyes, will either illumine our inner self with light—with goodness, wholesomeness, and purity—or it will illumine our inner self with darkness.
St. Paisios, whose name’s day we celebrated two days ago, a saint of our contemporary times, says that in no period of human history have our eyes and senses been more bombarded with so much imagery. Some of these images bequeath light, and many of them bequeath darkness. And St. Paisios reposed before the advent of the modern internet, where the volume, the quantity of these images, has increased a thousand fold.
Dear ones, I am your priest. I get to hear your confessions. How many of you confess your struggle with gazing at too much internet or TV; you grieve all of the images that you take in. Images that are junk and darkness to your soul. Too much news and politics. Too much UTube. And perhaps the most evil of this imagry: pornography in all of its ugly and carnal-inducing iterations.
You know very well how such images pollute your soul with a darkness that pushes the light of Christ into a tiny little corner of your heart, where you can barely see that light.
God help us dear ones. God help us to strive for chastity and purity of heart, the virtue of self-control and discernment, to know the difference between images that bequeath light within our souls, and images that generate darkness.
When one of those North American saints whom we celebrate today, St. John Maximovich, was only twenty years old, he adopted the strict discipline of allowing only certain kinds of images to enter his eyes. These images must be beautiful, was his first criterion. Beauty will save the word, he used to quote Dostoevsky. St. John wanted to gaze upon imagery that was redeeming and of the nature of goodness and purity; imagery that was wholesome and holy.
St. John extolled the value of reading the Scriptures, the lives of the saints, attending worship services and gazing upon icons and listening to beautiful hymnology.
And he extolled the value of good secular literature and music, even good movies, and of strolling in nature, for the purpose of creating a holy pathway so that light could travel through our senses and fill us with the luminous presence of Christ.
Our Lord’s second teaching in this morning’s Gospel addresses the impossibility of serving two masters. You cannot serve (both) God and mammon, Jesus says (v. 24). Mammon here is defined as material items, material possessions.
At the heart of our Lord’s concern is the priority that we give to this material mammon. He knows well its glittery allure, of the great temptation to be attached to things. So attached that we become a slave and that possession our master.
Mother Olga of Alaska, who currently is on her way to being glorified as a saint, adopted a particular practice based on Jesus’ teaching in this morning’s Gospel. At the conclusion of every year, near Nativity, she would identify a particular person or family to give three of her personal possessions to: A set of her clothing, one kitchen appliance, and a large bag of groceries. This annual practice, she said, helped her achieve greater dispassion about the mammon in her life. It helped her honor v. 33 of this morning’s Gospel: But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.
But it is Jesus’ third teaching in this morning’s Gospel that I want to give the most attention this morning. Jesus refers to something that everyone here this morning has more than likely experienced, namely worry and anxiety. Do not worry about your life, He says (v. 25). Another common translation: Do not be anxious about your life.
Worried and anxious about what? Specifically Jesus is speaking about not worrying about what you will eat or drink, or what you will cloth your body with. Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (v. 26)
Another of our North American saints, St. Innocent, says that at the heart of Jesus’ teaching here, on worry and anxiety, is whether we trust God to provide for our lives. Persistent worry and anxiety about the things of life, even non-material things, he says, demonstrates internal insecurity and a weak or superficial faith.
Yes, some anxiety and some worry are natural human emotions. We need not think of their presence as sinful. What is wrong and sinful is persistent worry and anxiety that reveals a lack of faith in God, that shows that we do not trust God’s mysterious providence, especially where it can be shown that God has provided for us time and again.
But I want to conclude this morning by zeroing in on one very specific area in our life that sometimes generates worry and anxiety. It is the worry and anxiety that God does not somehow forgive us our many sins, even after we have confessed these sins.
Not long after I became a priest, I was intrigued with the comments of a particular Russian priest. Knowing that I was a convert to the Faith, and having more and more converts joining his own church, he said to me one day: I’m intrigued with you converts. You seem to have some sort of guilt complex even after you’ve confessed, as you still worry and fret about your sins, as if you do not trust that God has fully forgiven you. I wonder, do Protestants lack a full understanding of the mystery of Holy Confession and its Sacramental value?
Now that I’ve been a priest for nearly eighteen years, the truth of this priest’s words has been driven home to me time and again. How often do I hear some of you fret and worry and be anxious about whether you truly are forgiven by your Heavenly Father, even after you’ve confessed.
Dear ones, as part of my summer reading I am rereading Wounded By Love by St. Porphyrios. Just the other night I stumbled upon these words. Oh my, what medicine; medicine to free us from the worry and anxiety that can sometimes grip our soul.
Says St. Porphyrios: Don’t let’s turn back (and worry about the) sins we have confessed. The recollection of sins is harmful. Have we asked for forgiveness? Then the matter is closed. God forgives everything with confession. We mustn’t turn back and enmesh ourselves in despair. We need to be humble servants before God and have a sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of our sins.
It is not healthy to be excessively downcast on account of your sins and to turn with such revulsion against your evil self that you end up in despair. Despondency is the worst thing. It is a snare set by Satan to make a person lose his appetite for spiritual things and to bring him into a state of despair, inactivity and negligence. In this state a person is unable to do anything and rendered useless. The person say, I am sinful and wretched, I am this, I am that, I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that … I should have done that then, now it’s too late, nothing can be done … I’ve wasted my life, I am unworthy …’ He is brought into a sense of inferiority and consumed by fruitless self-reproach. Do you know what a destructive thing that is? It’s pseudo-humility.
All these things are symptoms of a person in despair whom Satan has brought under his sway. Such a person reaches the point where he doesn’t’ even want to receive Communion because he regards himself as unworthy of everything. He attempts to negate everything about himself and is rendered useless. This is a snare set by Satan so that a person will lose his hope in God’s love. All this is quite terrible and contrary to the Spirit of God.
I, too, think that I am sinful and that I am not living as I should. Nevertheless, I make whatever distressed me into prayer. I do not shut it up inside myself. I go to my spiritual father and confess it and it is finished and done with. Don’t let’s go back and recriminate and say what we didn’t do. What is important is what we will do now, from this moment onwards—as Saint Paul says, ‘forgetting the things that are behind and stretching forward to the things that are before us.’
Brothers and sisters, let the light of beautiful things into your soul, and not darkness. Do not live in servitude to your mammon—to your material possessions. And trust in our Lord’s forgiveness of our sins, and do not be overly worried or anxious. Thanks be to God for the medicine of Jesus’ words in His Sermon on the Mount. F/S/HS
