Fr. Timothy Barkley
St. James Orthodox Church
(6/8) Today the Orthodox Christian
Church celebrates the Feast of Pentecost. We make present
to the world, including (but not limited to) our own
faithful, the once-for-all-time historical event of the
descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Christ, now
called the "apostles," those sent with the message of
God’s love and salvation from sin and death. We do not
just remember; we participate, in the never-ending
now-ness of the Kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit IS COME.
The Feast of Pentecost is many
things, but I want to focus on this Feast as the feast of
reconciliation for humankind. As we sing in one of the
hymns of the Feast: "When the High One descended,
confusing tongues, He divided the nations. And when He
distributed the fiery tongues He called all to one unity.
Wherefore, in unison we glorify the most Holy Spirit."
When God created the human race as
an expression of the love shared within the persons of the
Holy Trinity – for love shared creates life – there was
resident within that life the image of its creator, which
should not surprise us at all, because that is the nature
of life-generation. God, as love, as three persons in one
nature, reciprocates desire for communion, which should
not surprise us, since that is the nature of love. That
desire was implanted in us – the desire for communion with
the source of life and love. Or love and life, to be more
precise, putting first things first.
In that communion we receive the
divine nature, by joining our desire and hope to His
self-revelation and self-giving. Because God is the
creator and we are the creatures, because we as the
created are not the first reality, but God is, our union
with God and our reception of the divine nature must be on
His terms, not on ours. We receive life and love from the
source; we do not dictate, but receive with gratitude.
Evidently, that rankled with our
forebears, because we know they were open to the
suggestion of the enemy of life and love, the first rebel
who was not satisfied with the fulness of communion with
the very source of meaning and existence … they "bought"
His insinuation that God was denying them their
birthright, that He was a selfish tyrant and was really
lying to them, that they did not have to come to life and
love on His terms, that they were by nature gods and all
they had to do was reach out and grasp their divinity.
They bit.
In so doing – because they bought
the lie – they severed themselves from the source of love
and life, and entered – created – a broken and twisted
world of domination, darkness and death. In his love and
mercy, God made sure that we did not attain unending life,
because he knew that living forever without love, severed
from the source of life, but unable to end the misery,
would be … well, in the colloquial, that’s what we call
Hell.
Living on borrowed notions of what
love means, using and allowing ourselves to be used to
fulfill our gnawing emptiness, in the end embracing
nihilism and emptiness, with nowhere to go and no way to
escape. That’s Hell. So God lovingly banished them from
paradise, so that they would have time to consider the
lostness and emptiness they had created, and turn back
toward the love and life that created them.
Some, indeed, turned back and
sought the communion with the God their forebears had
surrendered. But many did not.
Still in the thrall of the lie of
the seducer, they endeavored to build a tower to heaven at
a place now known as Babel, and supplant God. They were
trying to finish what the liar had begun in his rebellion
against God. And God was not bothered, or offended, and he
knew that they could not succeed … but he was concerned
that if they continued, they would only accelerate their
flight from the fount of all that makes life possible.
They would fling themselves into utter darkness and death.
So he partially withdrew his hand
of mercy and allowed them to experience what it means to
be in rebellion against the source of meaning and
coherence in the universe. If God is the creator, all
truth and comprehensibility proceed from union with him;
rebellion against him is by definition insane, a throwing
off of the very possibility of truth and reason. And
that’s what these folks found. When he no longer extended
his grace of comprehensibility and meaning to those who
hated him and wanted to destroy him, they simply could not
communicate. They could not coordinate their rebellion
against God once he no longer sustained them. And so they
fled one another. They could not stand being together.
In God’s mercy and love, he did
not abandon us; he sent his messengers to show how to
regain union with him, and, when the time was right, he
himself – not a messenger, nor an angel, but God himself,
the second person of the three-personed Godhead – came to
restore our communion with life and love. He brought the
divine nature of God and united it to a human nature,
becoming the god-man, with a divine and human nature
existing by nature in one person, his human nature full
and untrammeled, but willingly subject to his divine
nature. He both taught and showed us how to become by
grace what he was by nature, to receive the divine life
into our human person. We learned how to become gods by
grace.
And then he returned whence he had
come, taking our human nature and eternally uniting it to
the divine nature, reconciling us to God. Our human nature
stands before the throne of heaven.
And in order to reconcile us
humans to one another, he came again, this time in the
divine person of the Holy Spirit, to fill the apostles,
the messengers of salvation, with divine life. And as
evidence of this divine life, people from all over the
known world who spoke every imaginable language understood
the apostles, who spoke only Aramaic, proclaiming the good
news of reconciliation with God and communion with the
divine life. Thousands, from every known ethnos, joined
themselves to this new community of Christians on that
day. That day is called "Pentecost."
At the tower of Babel, people
speaking the same language found themselves unable to
communicate; at Pentecost, people speaking different
languages understood each other perfectly. At Babel,
rebellion produced the world’s first race riot; at
Pentecost, faith in Jesus produced harmony and voluntary
union in the Body of Christ, between members of ethnic
groups (Jews, Romans, Greeks) who were traditional enemies
and who historically disdained one another.
In the Church, there is neither
black nor white, Democrat nor Republican, foreigner nor
"one of us." We are all one in Christ. We can celebrate
our diversity – gimme some blackeyed peas and collard
greens with ham, and some souvlaki and spanakopita, and
more of those perogies, please, and I’ll top it off with
kringla – but the differences don’t divide. They bring joy
to our unity, they give us reasons to love one another, to
want to know one another better, and to take delight in
each other.
As we are reconciled to God and
each other in his holy church, may we be beacons of unity
to our world. And when we see someone different than we,
may we embrace him or her as bearing the same image of the
same God we bear. If the image of God in them needs
polishing and cleaning … well, so does ours, so let’s
embrace our brothers and sisters, whatever they look like
and wherever they are found, and bring them to the
household of faith. In the Church, there is hope for the
world.
Read other homilies by Father Barkley
About St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown
The Holy Orthodox Church is the Church founded by Jesus Christ and described throughout the New Testament. All other Christian Churches and sects can be traced back historically to it. The word Orthodox literally means "straight teaching" or "straight worship," being derived from two Greek words: orthos, "straight," and doxa, "teaching" or "worship."
As the encroachments of false teaching and division multiplied in early Christian times, threatening to obscure the identity and purity of the Church, the term "Orthodox" quite logically came to be applied to it. The Orthodox Church carefully guards the truth against all error and schism, both to protect its flock and to glorify Christ, whose Body the Church is.
St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown is a congregation of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. We are the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Christian Church whose roots trace directly back to first century Antioch, the city in which the disciples of Jesus Christ were first called "Christians" (Acts 11:26). The
Orthodox Church is the oldest and second largest Christian group in the world. We are called by God our creator to worship and follow Him, and to proclaim to the world His message of love, peace, and salvation.
God loves all mankind and desires that all human beings should believe in Him, know Him, abide in Him, and receive eternal life from Him. To accomplish this, God Himself came into the world as a man, Jesus Christ, becoming man that we might become like God.
The Antiochian Archdiocese, under the leadership of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph, sees itself on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian Faith. We join our brothers and sisters in the various Orthodox Christian jurisdictions — Greek, Orthodox Church in America, Romanian, Ukrainian, and more — in this endeavor. In less than 20
years the Archdiocese has doubled in size to well over 200 churches and missions throughout the United States and Canada.
