The Crowds, Disciples and Apostles

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While I have a quiet moment, and it is quiet that won't last I fear, I can finally put the last of my retreat notes online for consideration. In my last session I looked with people at the typology of parish membership.


In Christ,


+Fr Gregory


Fr. Ted Bobosh, the priest of St. Paul the Apostle Church (OCA) in Dayton, OH, has a very helpful way of thinking about the parish. In a blog post, "Seeking Christ: The Parish as Crowd," he begins by observing that:

Every parish gathering is a time for people to come to be near Christ. As in the Gospels, people came to Christ for all kinds of reasons - some to hear Him, some to see Him, some to oppose Him, some to touch Him, some to be healed, some to be fed, some to trap Him or trick Him, some to be His disciples, some out of curiosity, and some out of animosity, some in hope, some in despair, some to debate Him, some to stop Him, some to be comforted by Him, some to learn from Him, some to be praised by Him, some just to touch the hem of His garment and some to be glorified by Him. Whatever the reason, they came and crowded around Christ - friend, foe, follower. And He allowed it. He didn't chase away the curious or the hostile, the needy or the greedy, the hungry or those full of themselves. And just as the bishop notes in Leskov's novel On the Edge of the World, some really do just want to touch the hem of His garment and not become His disciples or his ambassadors. He welcomes them all blessing some, bantering with others, shepherding and being lamb, teacher and foil, giver of light and lightening rod.

As I have thought about this, and especially as I have thought about this in light of our conversations here, I have come to see the value of Fr Ted's observation.


During His earthly ministry, the vast majority of the human community was unaware of the events happening in Israel. Of those who may have had some awareness, most were indifferent. Of those who weren't indifferent, some were hostile, some were believers, but the vast majority were somewhere in the middle.


And even among those who were followers of Jesus Christ, there were two different groups: disciples and apostles—an outer circle and inner circle of believers. We can draw from the Gospel a typology of the Church that lets us see three concentric circles of believers: the crowd (who are the vast majority), the disciples (who were once part of the crowd but now have drawn closer to Jesus Christ as students who form their lives around Him and His teaching) and the apostles (those disciples who have said yes to a personal call to be ambassadors of Christ).


But again, we need to keep in mind that at any given moment, the majority of parishioners are going to be members of the crowd. These men and women are not—at least not yet—disciples, much less apostles, of Christ. This does not preclude them from the life of the Church, from her liturgical life or the sacraments.

As with the crowds who surround Jesus in the Gospels, they have their own motivation for coming Liturgy on Sunday, for receiving Holy Communion, baptizing their children, for having their marriages blessed, and it is important that we not put any obstacles in their way. The temptation of disciples and apostles is to send the crowds away, to leave them to their own devise, and to refuse to feed them from the bounty they have received from Christ. When they do this, when they drive away the crowds (whether passively or actively, by word or deed), the disciples and apostles fail in their own obligation.


This then raises a question: What is the obligation of the disciples and apostles to the crowd?


The task, the vocation of disciples and apostles, relative to the crowd is to invite the men and women in the crowd to become themselves disciples. This is hard work and work that is often met with frustration. But it is essential that those who are disciples and apostles within the Church understand that they are no more or less members of the Body of Christ then are those who are in the crowd. And just as those in all three groups are equally members of the Body of Christ, so to they are members of one another and they need one and other.


Events such as this one, retreats, workshops, pilgrimages, visits to monastic communities, adult education classes, preaching that has as its goal the spiritual formation of those who listen, all of these things need to be supported in the parish by those who are disciples and apostles. And they must encourage—and even make possible—the participation of those who are members of the crowd in these and other events that have as their goal awakening people to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.


Where we usually go wrong in the parish, is in one of two ways. First, and this is more the shortcoming of converts and communities in which converts are prominent, we want to exclude the men and women who are in the crowd. When I was first ordained, I did damage I think to people because I wanted a parish of all disciples and apostles. While this might seem a noble goal I wanted to be more successful than Jesus.


The second mistake that we often make is that we fail to distinguish the different groups within the parish. At the risk of being offensive, we cannot entrust leadership positions in the parish or the diocese, to the crowds. Discipleship is the prerequisite for any leadership position in the Church. Members of the crowd are certainly member of the Body of Christ, but they can't serve as parish or diocesan council members or church school teachers. Those who are not disciples, can't undertake the apostolic works of outreach and evangelism. And they cannot be seminarians and they certainly can't be ordained into the clergy.


Unfortunately, this is often what does happen. We are often so concerned to get volunteers, that we entrust leadership roles to those who are themselves not disciples of Christ. Doing this is it any wonder that we have some of the problems we have in the Church?


Let me conclude by encouraging you to take seriously the necessity of a personal commitment to Christ. And let me encourage you, no, better yet, let me beg you, to support your priest in his limiting leadership roles in the parish to those who have demonstrated by the integrity of their lives, their commitment to the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church, their stewardship of time, talent and treasure and their life of philanthropic involvement to others (whether inside and outside the Church), their commitment to Christ.


Leadership in the Church cannot be simply a matter of functional skills, much less a popularity contest or a frantic attempt to fill slots. Christian leadership is the fruit of a personal commitment not only to Christ and His Church, but also to the poor and all those who the world deems marginal and even useless.

I often hear from people that their parish is dying. And every time I've heard this, and heard the reasons why this is so, I have also seen possibilities for life and growth that people simply weren't taking. Parishes, I have concluded, don't die. The commit suicide.


The Way of Life for our community, your community, is by embracing all who are members of Christ, not only those who are disciples and apostles, but also those in the crowd. But not only this. We must understand that Christ has called to serve as leaders in the Church only those who are disciples. Having said this, though, we must remember that those who see themselves as disciples, as leaders—whether lay or clergy—must never tire of inviting, encouraging and sustaining those in the crowd to become disciples.


In Christ,


+Fr Gregory


This ends my retreat notes. I hope tomorrow, and to end 2008, to finish my thoughts on Holy Confession.

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Baptism, Monastic Life and Lay Spirituality

More of my retreat notes… 

The idea of a lay spirituality or lay discipleship is a new concept for many Orthodox Christians. And many of those who have thought about it, however, reject the very idea of a "lay spirituality." They argue that there is no such thing as "lay spirituality." There is simply the one Orthodox Christian spiritual life that each person fulfills as he or she is able. While this is certainly true as far as it goes, it is an inadequate response to the concrete needs of many Orthodox Christian men and women. And as for "lay discipleship," that is often dismissed out of hand as well because it sounds too "Protestant" or is a "Western" Christian idea.
 

But think about these words from Metropolitan MAXIMOS of Pittsburgh (GOA). His Eminence writes that "When, toward the middle of the second century of the Christian era, Christian life reached a low ebb, some Christians, both men and women, reacted to this by raising their own personal standards of austere Christian life." This austere life, of course, is monasticism. Throughout the history of the Church, monasticism, which was and still is a fundamentally lay movement, a lay form of spirituality and Christian discipleship if you will, upheld for the Church the highest standards of the Christian life. In addition, monasticism has been not only a source of renewal for the Church, but also the impetus behind Orthodox missions and evangelism throughout the world and especially in North America.
 

It is the faith of the Church that in Baptism each of us comes to participate in an intimate relationship with Holy Trinity. As a part of that relationship, we are each of us equipped to fulfill a priestly, prophetic and royal ministry for the "life of the world."

In other words, what we have talked about is possible because of our baptism. The Apostle Paul challenges the Church at Galatia to act on their baptism when he writes to them "For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise (Gal 3.26-29). The Church is a great mystery of unity in diversity; we each of us have our own gifts and ministries within and for the Church. But while our gifts and ministries are different, in Baptism we have all been entrusted to share in the priesthood, prophetic ministry and Lordship of Jesus Christ. In this last conversation we will look together at what the mystery of Baptism means for each of us as we strive to follow faithfully Jesus Christ.

Reflecting on the words we heard this morning from St Peter, that Christians are "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light" (1 Peter 2.9), St Clement of Alexandria writes that "We are called a priesthood because of the offering which is made in prayers and in the teaching by which souls are offered to God are won." 

Commenting on the same passage, Origen says that we are [the whole Church] "are a priestly race . . . [and] are able to approach the sanctuary of God. . . . If you want to exercise the priesthood of your soul, do not let the fire depart from your soul. 

More tomorrow…

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Our Original Beauty

A continuation of my retreat notes.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

As I have thought matters more and more, I have come to realize that when God creates, He does so by beautifying; God orders what is chaotic; He fills what is empty to overflowing; He illumines what is in darkness; He redeems that which is lost. In other words, God is not simply a Creator, He is not simply an Artist, He is, from the first moment of His relationship to the cosmos, a Redeemer and it is beauty that is the hallmark of His redemptive work.

Beauty is not merely decorative, a nice but optional after thought—it is a basic quality of creation. To be is to be beautiful. In the case of humanity this outpouring of beauty is a reflection of divine deliberation and intention. When God creates humanity, when He creates you and me, He does so with deliberation: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." (Gn 1.26) God, St John Chrysostom says,

did not say, as He did when creating other things, "Let there be a human." See how worthy you are! Your origins are not in the imperative. Instead God deliberated about the best way to bring to life a creation worthy of honor.

According to the saint, God signals our creation with "deliberation, collaboration and conference . . . not because God needs advice . . . but so that the very impact of the language of our creation would show us honor."

But what is this divinely created honor that is given to humanity? As originally created, it belongs to humanity—to you and me, to each of us personally and communally—to sum up in ourselves, the beautiful creation.

Scripture informs us that the Deity proceeded by a sort of graduated and ordered advance to the creation of man. After the foundations of the universe were laid, as the history records, man did not appear on earth at once, but the creation of the brutes preceded him, and the plants preceded them. Thereby Scripture shows that the vital forces blended with the world of matter according to graduation; first it infused itself into insensate nature; and in continuation of this advanced into the sentient world; and then ascended to intelligent and rational beings. . . . The creation of man is related as coming last, as of one who took up into himself every single form of life, both that of plants and that which is seen in brutes.

To be human means that we are created in the "image and likeness" of God (cf., Gn 1.26); as icons of the Most Holy Trinity, we are both the reason for, and the voice of, creation. Let me make this a bit stronger.

God creates by naming things—He calls "the light Day," the darkness He calls "Night," the firmament, "Heaven," the dry land "Earth," the waters "Sea," and all of it He calls "good" (Gn 1.1-10). It is this god-like task of naming the creation that God entrusts to humanity. It is the Man who gives "names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field."(Gn. 2.20) To be human is to be a prophetic creature because, as the "mouthpiece" of God, we give voice to that which God has done. So while it is God Who creates the lion and the lamb, it is the Man who is called by God to bear witness in the presence of the angels (for who else can listen and understand the names that the Man bestows?) to what God has done by naming the animals.

As he goes about the task of bestowing, or maybe more accurately bearing witness, to the significance and meaning of creation, the First Adam discovers something about himself that we can reasonable assume God already knew: That in all creation "there was not found a helper for him." (Gn 2.20) The man is profoundly lonely and he knows without any doubt at all that it "is not good for man to be alone."

Unlike humanity after the Fall, Adam before the Fall is faithful to his prophetic vocation no matter where it leads him. Eventually his vocation to be the voice of creation leads him to discover and then bear witness to the fact that there is in him a longing not simply for communion with God, not simply for work, but for human companionship and community; to be human is to be a being-for-others.

God responds to the man's need for human companionship and community by causing "a deep sleep to fall upon the man." And while the man sleeps, God takes "one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh" and uses the rib to make "woman" who God then introduces to the man (Gn 2.21-22). When he sees the Woman the Man declares (again exercising his prophetic vocation):

This at least is bone of my bones

    and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman

    because she was taken out of Man (v.23)

Unlike the rest of creation, which is created by divine declaration and instantaneously, humanity is created only after divine deliberation and even then, only by stages. Like the rest of creation we are ontologically contingent, that is, dependent upon God for our existence. Unlike the rest of creation however, there is room in our being for our own freedom—yes we though we are dependent on God, we are not passive, God waits upon us before He completes our creation and then He only completes our creation together with us. Only when we discover and bear witness to what is lacking in us, does God act. As St. John Chrysostom reminds us, God "will not have us always saved by grace [alone], . . . He will have us contribute something from ourselves as well."

But, as we saw earlier, there is often a gap between who we are called to be in Christ and how we live. While there are a number of reasons for this, a very general reason is that we often fail to realize what we have been given.

More tomorrow…

+FrG

 

Now the Bad News…

A continuation of my notes from the retreat I did this weekend at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Scottsdale, AZ.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

For several years I served as the chaplain for students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. This left me free on the weekend to serve different parishes in western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio in the absence of their priest.

One year, I was at a different parish every Sunday for the entire summer. From May through August, I served Liturgy and preached at parishes in all the different jurisdictions: Greek, Antiochian, Ukrainian, Serbian and OCA.

And in each parish, my sermon was some variation of the same theme: Jesus loves you.

And in each parish for the whole of the summer, I got the same two responses again and again from multiple parishioners: (1) "Wow! That was the best sermon I ever heard!" and (2) "I never knew Jesus loved me." As you can imagine, the first response was gratifying—like everyone else, I enjoy hearing I did a good job.

But my joy was mixed with sorrow. It bothered me that some many Orthodox Christians simply did not know that they were loved by Jesus Christ.

I spent the better part of the next 2 or 3 years thinking about why people didn't know they were loved by Jesus Christ.

The conclusion I have come to, and I found this above all In St Augustine's own struggles in the Confessions, is that sign of our fallenness is not, primarily, that we do bad things. No I know that we are sinners when we realize that we are in the grip of grief, that we do not know that we are lovable, loved and able to love. To escape that grief, to hold it a bay, even momentarily, there is very little that we won't do.

How then do we put this grief behind us and become sensitive to love?

In a word, asceticism. As the newly elected primate of the OCA, His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah, argued asceticism, which is "the root and the foundation of our whole life as a Christian" is nothing more or less than the

awareness of the presence of God. It's what the Fathers called the "remembrance of God", and it doesn't mean that you're remembering it in your head that God is present, it's that God's presence is a fundamental part of your own awareness. You know that He is present, and when we can bring that awareness of His presence by stilling our minds and stilling our hearts, then His love overflows through us. And transforms us. And that experience of sanctity isn't just limited to when we walk into or church. It isn't just limited to when we venerate the icons or go before the relics of the saints. That experience of sanctity is with us everywhere, all the time. We have to do the one without forgetting the other.

Through prayer and fasting I begin to still my own egoic strivings for power and control. And over time I become in God and after God I become an authority for myself. The fruit of asceticism, the goal of asceticism, is for me to become the author of my own life rather than to live the life that is written for me by others who use (often unintentionally) my own transitory desires against me.

For this reason, again to quote Metropolitan Jonah,

We need to have spiritual discipline. And the disciplines [are] not in ends in themselves, but [serve our own growing] spiritual awareness and transformation and conversion of our souls, in order to do the act of ministries. Otherwise what are we doing with the act of ministries, they become some kind of projection of our own egos. And that's not going to help much, if anybody, least of all myself.

In my view, it is the bitterest of ironies that the more I turn my life and desire for happiness into a project of my own ego, the more happy alludes me and the more I lose control over my own life. Autonomy and happiness are the fruits of an ascetical self-denial that aims not only at the eradication of vice but the cultivation of the life of virtue that lies just below the surface of human sinfulness.

More tomorrow…

The Goodness of the Human

Because I have been preparing for the retreat I'm leading this morning in Phoenix, I haven't posted as much this week as I would like. So I thought I would put abbreviated versions of my conferences online for your consideration, comments, questions and criticism.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Looking up to God, King David cries out:

O LORD, our Lord,

How excellent is Your name in all the earth,

Who have set Your glory above the heavens! (Ps 8.1)

Commenting on this opening verse, St John Chrysostom say that by the Name of God, that is through Christ, "death was dissolved, demons imprisoned . . . heaven opened, the gates of Paradise thrown wide, the [Holy] Spirit sent down, slaves made free, enemies become sons [of God], strangers . . . , heirs [of the Heavenly Kingdom]" and most extraordinarily of all, human beings, you and me and all of us who are in Christ have "become angels."

With Chrysostom, you might ask, why does David speak of human beings as "angels"?

Angels, for St John, are not what our popular religious culture means by angels. Rather for him human beings have become angelic because as with the Cherubim and the Angelic Hosts we who are in Christ are no longer separated from God.

As we will celebrate in just a few days, God has become man, and so "man became God; heaven accepted . . . earth, earth accepted" heaven. The separation between God and humanity, the divisions within the human family, and in each human heart, all of these have been overcome. "The wall . . . removed, the partition dissolved." What once "were separated" the saint tells us, are now in Christ "united, darkness [has been] banished, light [shines and] death [is] swallowed up" by life.

Immediately after considering the majesty of God, King David turns inward, he looks at humanity, he looks at himself, his own life and his own experience with the eyes of faith and realizes that God silences "the enemy and the avenger" not only by granting life, but guiding the growth and development of that life:

Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants

You have ordained strength,

Because of Your enemies,

That You may silence the enemy and the avenger. (v. 2)

 

David for a second time turns his mind and heart to God and is overwhelmed by the beauty of creation, of the harmony of the cosmos. And then he pauses in his meditation, his reverie on the majesty of God, and returns for a second time to the human mystery, to his place, and ours, in the divine plan:

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,

The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,

What is man that You are mindful of him,

And the son of man that You visit him?

For You have made him a little lower than the angels,

And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

 

You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;

You have put all things under his feet,

All sheep and oxen—

Even the beasts of the field,

The birds of the air,

And the fish of the sea

That pass through the paths of the seas. (vv. 3-8)

 

And just as it has twice before, the mystery of the human causes David to again turn back in praise and thanksgiving to God:

O LORD, our Lord,

How excellent is Your name in all the earth! (v. 9)

 

There is something extraordinary about humanity, about each and every one of you here this evening and indeed each and every human being who was, is, and will someday be.

As we will celebrate in a few days, our common humanity is something worthy of God Himself. Or, as I tell my own spiritual children, being human is so good even God wants to do it.

Think about that for a moment. The God we worship, the God we preach, doesn't simply know about us as our Creator. He knows about us as our Brother. God knows and values you not simply from outside and above, but from within and next to you.

All of this is part and parcel of the Gospel—that we, you and me, all of us, are loved by God. That's the primary truth of both our personal identity and the content of the Gospel, all of this is central to Good News about Jesus Christ that Church is called to preach.

My life, your life, is an extraordinary and awe inspiring gift.

And it is a gift that comes to each of us not simply from God, but also from our parents, even as their life came from their parents, and so on.

But this doesn't exhaust the mystery of the gift of our life. Because just as my life comes from God through my parents, and their parents, and in at least a small way through the whole family, my life also comes to me as part of the natural order—both animate and inanimate.

More tomorrow…