St. Botolph’s Parish, Palm Sunday, 18 March 2010

Like the children with the palms of victory, we cry out to Thee, O Vanquisher of Death … (Troparion of the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem)

We are at war: so choose your sides, now! No one is neutral. No one stands idly by and says: This war has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with you! Do you know

what is at stake? Your home, your freedom. Your family and all your loved ones. All that you have, or ever had, or ever will have. Everything you treasure is at stake. The enemy is everywhere, there is nowhere to hide. Wherever you flee, you run straight into his line of fire. His bombs are planted where you least expect; his landmines, wherever you set your foot. His gun is pointed at your gut. This enemy wants more than victory. He wants to watch you whimper, to see you crawl on all fours and plead for your life. He prolongs your agony until you curse the hour you were born. You can never buy him off – you can never frighten him away. Try to negotiate with him: you will only hand over the ones that you love, straight into his hands. The only question is: Will you collaborate? Or will you resist? In this fight, there are no neutrals: whoever is not with us, is against us. So form ranks, now! The oldest war you have ever fought, you are engaged in; the oldest enemy you have ever known is at your throat. You have been fighting this enemy from the hour that you were conceived in the womb.

The enemy … is death.

How can you recognise him? A masked figure in a black cape, lined with scarlet? Death is subtler than that. He creeps up behind, like an assassin. He infiltrates all your lines of defence. He stirs up a panic. He strikes and retreats, wears you down until you lose the strength to resist. Worst of all, he places his allies all around you. Biologists, professors of the public understanding of science tell you: ‘Death is natural. Your heart stops, that’s is it’. Professional atheists, sipping port in the members’ common room, saying: ‘When you die, you decay. No harps, no angels, no nothing. So stop bothering our high society with your fairy tales about life after death’. So-called bishops in stiff clerical collars join in and tell you: ‘Jesus never rose again in his body. His Resurrection means that his moral teachings live on forever’. The allies and accomplices of death never need to form ranks

at all. Young atheists are too full of themselves to think about death; old atheists are too full of irony to notice, they are dead already. But make no mistake. Whoever denies the Resurrection is the accomplice of death: above all, if he (or she?) wears a clerical collar.

He collaborates: he negotiates to hand over your loved ones to the enemy. He holds the door open to death and says: ‘Come on in!’ ‘Sell all the candles, the robes and the ritual ointment’, the atheist shouts. ‘Give it to the poor!’ That is what Christianity is about, not fairy tales about rising from the dead.

But, if you have ever watched a loved one die, you know death isn’t natural. Death does not begin when your heart stops. Death begins as soon as you give him the victory. The enemy, the obscene, unnatural monster, yawns in front of you. He opens the black pit of his throat, until you give him the last word. Today, we deny him the last word.

This day, Palm Sunday, we declare war on death. Death in all his forms. Your baby, too weak to move in his incubator. Your husband or wife, your father or mother, wasting and confused: a mind demented, a body darkened with sores, slipping like sand out of your hands. A child left to bleed in the street. The black pit of death opens up before us – and Christ, the enemy of death, stands at the pit and calls inside. His voice echoes in the pit, in the dark. Yesterday, he stood at the mouth of the cave and called out: ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ Now, his friend Lazarus sits at table with him. Mary, the sister of Lazarus, anoints his feet with the most costly ointment. Already, the accomplices of death complain: ‘Sell the ointment, give it to the poor’. But the ointment is for more than anointing the dead. It is the oil of a wrestler, preparing for combat. ‘Kill Lazarus!’ cry the accomplices of death. On account of him, the crowds begin to see why Jesus has come. This is no carpenter’s son, teaching morals on a mountain top. This is the final Vanquisher of Death. He does not ride into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. He rides out into the field of battle. This is the final showdown. This is the conquest of death.

The crowds that surround him throw branches of palm trees on his path. They shout out ‘Hosanna to the Liberator! Hosanna to the King of Israel!’ They await his final showdown – but they mistake the enemy. This is no freedom fighter, seated on horseback to meet the Romans face to face. He wears no armour, no helmet or breastplate. He rides on to victory; but it is no ordinary victory, in no ordinary war. If the enemy is everywhere, so is he; if the enemy is ruthless, he is more ruthless; if the enemy prolongs your anguish, he absorbs that anguish into himself. This day, he rides right into the line of fire. Yesterday, he stood at the mouth of the cave and called Lazarus forth; in five days, he will ride into mouth of hell. He will plunge into the throat of death. He will stand firm, like the stubborn colt of a donkey that he rides into Jerusalem today. He will stand his ground – and the fire of his divine being will burn out the enemy from inside. Death will groan in agony: ‘What was this flesh I swallowed up? A mangled, tortured body, a body abandoned by his friends: I swallowed it, and met God face to face! I took what I saw and crumbled at what I could not see. Now, I surrender all the dead’. This Sunday, death opens its throat to swallow us live – and Christ rides in, on an ass’s colt. By the eve of Friday, he will cut death open from inside. On Saturday, he will burn out the chambers of hell. On Sunday, death will vomit him out; and, with him, all the dead will arise.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: this is not a piece of folk art in my hand. It is a weapon. A token of the worst that death can do. Two bars of wood, hoisted up from the ground in a desolate place. A victim, stripped naked, his hands and feet nailed into the wood; then, exposed to sun and wind, flies and birds – left to die a slow, obscene death. But every death is obscene. Every death is an insult to a creature made in the image of God. But see! This cross is not made of wood. It is woven from palm branches, strewn on the streets of the Holy City. Branches, trampled under the foot of a donkey; just as the One who rides on that donkey, will trample down death by death. Everyone here who has lost someone he or she loved; everyone here, whom death has robbed: let him go forth into the battle this day. This is the final showdown. Christ enters the Holy City, on his way to win back your loved ones. He rides down the throat of the monster. This day, carrying palms of victory, we cry out ‘Hosanna!’ to the Vanquisher of Death.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Veneration of the Cross,  7 March 2010

“Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” (Mark 8.35)

What would you give for a moment of perfect joy? I said joy, not pleasure. Pleasure is the reverse side of pain: how quickly pleasure turns into the bitter aftertaste of pain. Joy, I mean, not happiness. Happiness is a dream that disperses, as soon as you rub your eyes in the morning. Joy is an awakening. It pierces you, transfigures you – and, once you taste joy, that moment stretches into eternity. An aging philosopher once sold his soul to the devil for a moment of perfect joy. Sick and tired of everything, wanting to end his life, he sold his soul for the moment he could say: ‘Stay awhile, you are so beautiful’. The devil tried everything to satisfy him. Give him back his youth; dress him up; pour the oceans of money into his pocket; give him the love, and the virginal body, of a beautiful girl – it all left him with heartache. So the devil gave him magical powers, power to direct world affairs – but it left him bored and empty. The pearl of great price that he sold his soul to have, he could find nowhere on earth. Only in the foretaste of one, selfless act to benefit mankind – the act of giving what he alone could give – did the old philosopher find his moment of joy. It took him out of himself, out of the devil’s grasp, and so, saved his soul.

What would you give for a moment of perfect joy? Would you sell your soul? Your life? Or would you save your life – and never taste that perfect joy?

A stranger strolls into an Orthodox church. Maybe he has read a book about us or taken a course. Maybe heard from a friend or found us online. Maybe she is bored with a ‘nine to five’ lifestyle, tired of designer clothes and broken relationships and a pointless dash for money that falls through your fingers in an economic recession. The devil tempts him or her with all that the world has to offer but it’s not enough. Sooner or later, he wanders in. Catches a glimpse of joy, real joy, in a whiff of incense or the face of a holy icon. And before you know it, he is instructed, sealed with the oil of chrism: united to the Orthodox Church. ‘The pearl of great price, I’ve found it’, he thinks – and he’s right. But what will you give for it? What will you give up? For a pearl of such price, Christ says, a merchant went and sold everything he had. What are you ready to give up? There are ‘converts’ who never convert. A body enters the Church, a soul remains Anglican, Baptist, what have you. Sentimentally, they cling to another identity: familiar hymn tunes, quaint little country churches, red mailboxes and misty mornings that all spell ‘Queen and Country’. What will they give up for the moment of joy? They’re like immigrants who live in ghettos or in-laws who never meet the family. Squeaky-clean ‘Christians’ who fit too neatly into nice society to give it up. What will you give for that moment you saw? A pint of beer for a chalice of wine? A bar of chocolate for the Body of Christ? Joining the Church means more than giving up chocolate for Lent. It means giving up your life. Are you ready to be re-written? Re-made? Reborn? Are you ready for New Life, or will you cling to the old? Will you keep your old, familiar world – and lose your own soul?

‘To begin a new life’, Saint Basil teaches, ‘you must first put an end to the old’. To enter the dawn of Resurrection, you must pass through the night of the Cross.

This is a hard saying. Deny yourself! Take your cross. It goes against our instincts, to preserve our selves and everything familiar to us. It crucifies the consumer inside us. A squeaky-clean, middle-class Christian pulls back, for fear of soiling his hands. A learned Professor of Divinity reasons it away – ashamed to confess that the mangled, bleeding body, slowly dying on the Cross, is God before the ages. If you come to church only for comfort, shield your eyes from the Cross. It confronts us. It appals us. Who but a lunatic would take up his cross, freely? Pay such a price for a moment of joy? Who, but the one who has nothing left to lose? One whose hands are not clean. A girl who sells her body, or gives it away, for an angry fix. A man, no longer young, who stares at his dirty secrets through the bottom of a glass. A woman – alone, abused, abandoned – with no one left to trust but God. Foreign faces, scarred faces on council estates: anyone who doesn’t fit in. Those who are ready to lose everything, surrender everything, for the God who alone can breathe life into them. They are ready to throw themselves into the fire: uncreated fire, the fire of the Divine Liturgy. The moment of perfect joy.

Whoever will follow me, says Christ, let him deny himself more than chocolate. Let him take up his cross: all your dirty secrets, all your sorrows and wounds that never heal, all your bad memories. Whatever torments you is your cross – as every prostitute in a back alley, every drunkard alone in his room understands. Let him take up his cross, says our Crucified Lord, and follow me to mine. This is the Gospel preached to the poor: anyone, in any kind of need. It will never be tame. It will never be ‘respectable’. It will never fit so neatly into ‘nice’ society. Flee it, deny it, cling to your comfortable life and ignore it – the Cross will never go away. Our God came in the flesh, and we killed him. Then, through his death – only through his death, on an instrument of torture and shame – he lifted us up to heaven and bestowed on us his Kingdom, which is to come. This is the Gospel of Christ. You may ask, can’t we have a softer, more ‘nuanced’ Gospel, more positive, less harsh? But the girl who sells her body, the addict who sells his soul, the convict with the stain of blood on his hands – and your own broken heart – these have no use for a tame Gospel. Anyone who has lost his life will surrender everything for the slightest chance to live again. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Beloved in Christ: what would you give for the Gospel? A bar of chocolate – or your life? What would you give for a moment of perfect joy? You glimpse it in the fire of the Divine Liturgy, maybe in a moment when the grace of God descends on your prayer. But don’t be deceived. Life costs. Love costs. Anyone who has ever loved a single human being, knows this perfectly well. On this Sunday of mid-Lent, this Sunday of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross, we give what we alone can give: one selfless act to benefit mankind. This day, on the street, in the tube, you will see a face crying silently: ‘No one can help. No one cares’. Silently, look into the face and say: God cares. God dies, as we die; God is crucified, in everyone and everything that has nothing else. God, triumphant in glory, will be in agony until the end of time. God – is the pearl of great price, for which a man sells all his past – all his old familiar life – all that he has. God, crucified and risen: risen from the grave that is the only fountain of our resurrection.

For that moment of perfect joy, we bow down and worship a Life-Giving Cross, a tool of agony and shame; and the Holy Resurrection, we glorify.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, 28 February 2010

I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me. (John 10.14)

‘I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth …… in Leicester Square!’ If only it were that simple. In fact, the poet doesn’t know where the arrow fell. Shoot an arrow high enough into the air and you’ve lost it. It could end up anywhere. What’s the use of shooting an arrow in no particular direction, shooting it beyond your sight? Prayer is like shooting an arrow. What happens when you pray? Where does your prayer go? Up to God? Or just into the ether? Prayer comes from a place in you where you are really you. But how can it reach God? A God you can’t see or hear, touch or smell or taste? What makes you so sure that he’s there? ‘I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth……  I knew not where’. Most people in this country don’t know either. Earlier this week, I got a letter from a teenage atheist, in the typically rude, impudent style of a Cambridge undergraduate. ‘What makes you think that atheists hate God?’ he wrote. ‘Most of us atheists don’t think about God’. He’s right. The vast majority of people in this part of the world don’t pray. They don’t think about God at all. Fewer people in the UK– or Sweden, or France, or Germany today – think about God than anywhere on earth. Why shoot an arrow in the air? Why pray a God you can’t prove? A God who has nothing to do with your life? A God who won’t even buy you a pint at the pub? We live in a secular culture: a culture that thinks it has outgrown God. Churches are empty, universities are full. Why not close down shop altogether?

Praying to God in the twenty-first century makes as much sense as shooting an arrow in the air, at nothing in particular. Why pray to a feeling? Why pray to an abstract idea called ‘God’? ‘I shot an arrow into the air…’ But what if you were the arrow? What if prayer were not something you do – but someone you are?

Four decades have passed since 1968, since the ‘Secular Sixties’. The ruling atheists in this country grin at the sight of empty churches and snotty undergrads – the politicians of tomorrow. They cringe at newcomers from Barbados and Jamaica, from Ghana and Nigeria who still crowd into little chapels and believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. The ruling atheists say: ‘Let them shoot their arrows. They’ll find out, prayer goes nowhere’. Then, along comes the minister of a mainline church. She looks over those empty pews. She hears the smirks from Downing Street or the student common room of an Oxbridge college, and thinks: ‘My word, we’re behind the times. Let’s demystify our worship. Let’s update our doctrines. Church? It’s not about mysteries, but morals. Prayer? It’s not God but feelings. God is an idea. Maybe, secular people will buy that’. Public morals, private feeling: that’s all that’s left of the Gospel, tailored to a secular age. In a secular age, you don’t kill faith; you starve it to death. You don’t outlaw God; you ignore him, you deny him authority on earth.

But what if you are the arrow? What if your prayer wells up straight from the core of who you are? What if you find yourself praying when you least expect to? What if your whole soul, your whole mind reaches out to God: a God you can’t see or hear, touch or taste? What are you to do with that hunger to pray? Turn it into a feeling, an idea – a delusion? Seven centuries ago, a scholar named Barlaam tried to do so. ‘Why waste your time at prayer?’ he told the monks of Mount Athos. ‘The light you see inside, it’s the light of your own mind. Study philosophy and science instead’. Demystify your worship, update your doctrines. Church? It’s not about mysteries, but morals. Prayer? It’s not about God but your feelings. God is an idea. One learned monk said: ‘No. I don’t pray to an idea; I pray to the Living God. I don’t stare at the light of my mind; I enter the Uncreated Light, the Light that is God himself. I don’t shoot an arrow into the air. I AM the arrow; and that arrow enters the very being of God’. That monk, the Archbishop of Thessalonica, was named Gregory Palamas.

When you truly pray, Saint Gregory taught, you are your prayer; and, by the grace of an invisible, incomprehensible God, you become the God to whom you pray. You become by grace everything that God is by nature. Is that difficult to understand? Of course – if you’ve never prayed, it’s impossible to understand. If you’ve never prayed, church is about morals, not mystery; prayer is about feelings, not God. If you have never tasted true worship, you will flee the might of a secular age and forsake the flock. ‘He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches and scatters them’. A hireling leaves the flock paralysed, helpless before the wolf – the Secular Wolf. The good shepherd confronts the Wolf; denounces the Wolf; and, if necessary, lays his life down for the flock. Imprisoned. Tortured. Held for ransom. Saint Gregory paid dearly for teaching one truth: your prayer is real, not an illusion. Your prayer is you; and each of you has the potential to become infinitely more than what you are. To become God.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: the scribes – the academic scholars of the day – thought, ‘How pointless, how blasphemous, to forgive a paralysed man!’ Faith, they figured, was about morals; prayer was a feeling, an idea – not an arrow that carries you into the very being of God. ‘Which is easier for you to grasp?’ Jesus asks. ‘That I make a paralytic walk, or have authority on this earth? Behold, then, I raise the paralysed man from his pallet. I carry the arrow of your prayer into the heart of my Father in the heavens. I – am the God you can see in the holy icons, hear in the chanting of the prayers, smell in the incense, touch in wood and paint and brocade, and taste in the Mysteries of my Precious Body and Divine Blood’. The unbeliever has no eyes to see, no ears to hear. So long as he is too arrogant to see and hear, he never will. ‘But I am still the Good Shepherd’, says Christ. ‘I know my own and they know me’.

At the prayers of the holy hierarch, Gregory Palamas, we shoot an arrow into the air and follow it … all the way, into eternal life.