Bishop Melchisedek - 2010 Lenten Message
February 28, 2010
Reg. 240
Beloved in Christ,
This Sunday, the first Sunday of the Great Fast, we celebrate the restoration of Icons to the use of the Church. Historically, this commemorates the victory of those Fathers of the Church who defended the use and veneration of icons in the Church against those who tried, under the influence of various pressures, to remove icons and their veneration from the Church. The historical narrative is a long and complicated one, but the practical result was that because the Church came to a deeper and more essential understanding of what the word "image" meant, icons were explicitly understood to be a necessary means of approaching and being in a real relationship with God, through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.
One of the theological results of this deepened understanding of "image" was a more adequate understanding of our very humanity understood as being made in "the image and likeness of God". Seen in this light, the restoration of icons is much more than the simple restoration of pictures of the Lord, His All-Holy Mother, and the saints to our Church buildings. It speaks, ultimately, to the restoration of the image of God which resides in each of us.
In the first chapters of the Holy Scriptures we are told the story of that act of disobedience, by which death entered into the world. Later, as a result of the human birth, human life, human death and resurrection of Jesus Christ -- the Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, who took our human nature from His all-pure Mother so that He could live a human life and die a human death in order to save us from sin and death, and make us partakers of His Divinity -- our humanity was saved from death and restored to life. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." (I Cor. 15:22) Death, the final enemy, is conquered with the result that our 'natural' death is transformed from the hopelessness of an existence without life to the possibility of advancing infinitely, through Christ and in the Holy Spirit, "from Glory to Glory" in the life of God.
However, this free gift of life is given to us with a choice. The choice is to live it in conformity with the life of God and the love which God has for us, or not. It has been often remarked that hell is a very private place with the gates or doors locked from the inside. It is the place to which we retreat to nurse our passions of anger and resentment, our hatreds, and lusts, and where we build the false-selves which we construct out of that self-worship which psychologists call the ego. But, we are assured by our Lord Himself, that the gates of hell cannot withstand the Church. The gates of hell cannot withstand the Body of Christ. The gates of hell cannot withstand the infinite love and mercy of God. Thus the choice before us is whether we will live our lives here and now in such a way that when we meet the love and mercy of God face to face it will be eternal bliss, or whether it will be that which smashes down the gates of our private hells with the result that we are eternally tormented by our rejection of God and all He has done for us even as we are engulfed in His love and mercy.
In the Gospels, our Lord opens His ministry with the words, "...repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand." (Mt.4:17) Our principal mode of repentance is the sacrament of confession. In this Mystery of the Church we receive forgiveness by confessing our sins to God in the presence of the confessor-priest who is our witness before God of what we say and do. By the act of confessing our sins we are doing much more than merely telling how we have broken a few rules, or violated a few relationships. By laying those things of which we are most ashamed before God in the presence of the priestly witness, we are opening the gates of our private hell to the love and mercy of God so that we are able to receive it willingly rather than unwillingly, so that it will be bliss instead of torment. By swallowing our pride, by refusing to idolize the false-selves we construct from our egos, we are enabled to embrace our true selves which abide in Christ.
It is by repentance actualized by confession that we participate in the true fast -- the fast from sin. Last week we heard at Vespers: "As we fast from food, let us abstain also from every passion.... Let us observe a fast acceptable and pleasing to the Lord. True fasting is to put away all evil, To control the tongue, to forbear from anger, to abstain from lust, slander, falsehood and perjury. If we renounce these things, then is our fasting true and acceptable to God. Let us keep the Fast not only by refraining from food, but by becoming strangers to all the bodily passions." One of the main purposes of abstaining and fasting from food and drink is to help us gain control over how we think and how we act. One other purpose is to remind ourselves how dispensable are many things in our lives which we think we cannot live without. And finally it teaches us proper appreciation for all of the things which we have and take for granted. It is by all of these things working together that the Lord restores, in each of us, that image of God in which we are made. It is because of this restoration that the Church does not recommend, but rather requires that we participate in the mystery of Confession -- frequently likened by the Church Fathers to a second baptism -- to maintain our membership in the Church which is our place in the Body of Christ. A well known staretz of the Church has said that is our vocation to "become clear, to become transparent" so that we can become bearers of the light of Christ. It is by true confession arising out of sincere repentance that we become clear enough -- clean enough -- to bear that light.
Finally, it is worth observing how so much of secular culture borrows and distorts these gifts of the Church. How many tens of thousands of dollars are spent on "counseling" to people with little or no particular expertise -- counseling which frequently involves baring one's most intimate secrets. Is it not a travesty that an entire segment of the entertainment industry is devoted to people -- whole groups and families -- who make public confessions over television and the radio to talk show hosts with no particular expertise. And yet how many of these people would make the same confession to a priest who offers the forgiveness of God? How many tens and thousands of dollars are spent by people undertaking elaborate diet plans when the same and better is offered by 2,000 years of Christian fasting experience?
Let us, rather, keep the fast in the spirit of the fast -- the spirit of repentance -- so that when we come to the night of Pascha, the fact of the Resurrection of Christ will be the most real, the most solid fact of our lives.
In Christ,
+Melchisedek
of Pittsburgh and Western PA