John 20:19-23 (Matins)
Acts 2:1-11
John 7:37-52,8:12

"I AM the Lord Your God"

Today we observe, not a feast or a holy day, but something far above these and containing all else. Today we reverence and bow down before That Which is everything and beside Which there is nothing. We may attempt to name it, though our Hebrew forebears were cautious to do so. We may term it, "God's Self-revelation." But does not this phrase seem tame .... as if it described a deeper disclosure of something we already knew about? But that would be far from true. For we live in a Creation from, by, in, and about God, which we barely understand .... at least in terms of the One Who made it.

Yesterday, on my way back from one of our fields, I cut the stalk of a plant — six feet tall; bright yellow, snap-dragon type flowers; alternating, trefoil leaves. I brought it back to the farmhouse, so I could identify it. By the time I arrived to put it in water, the leaves were wilting and began hanging down. Soon the bright yellow flowers would fade, turn crisp and fall to the ground. What was that magic that had made this comely plant tall, upright, bright yet subtle in its color, and proud in its outreaching, firm stems? Where had it gone? Where did it come from?

How often have I paused in my work to watch some tiny creature? Take up the little ant in your hand and watch it .... turning its sentient head left and right and then preening its antennae, preparing bravely to leap back into the fray of life! What is this stirring? What is this animate power, .... this, what else can you call it: Divine spark?

Perhaps we take it for granted. But we do not understand this stirring we call life. We may describe it at a microscopic level, enumerate it, even interact with its genes. But be assured of this: we do not really understand it, and we shall never be able to create it ourselves. Our capacities reach no further than to snuff this magical fire out. But we could never light it, much less re-light it. I cannot say it more trenchantly than St. John the Theologian:

When we are granted a glimpse into His Nature, this Most Holy Mystery, into the stirring itself of Life, which is God, we find ourselves standing on the holiest ground imaginable. This is what we try to capture (but fail to capture) in the prosaic phrase, God's self-revelation.

A holy irony is that we single out the revelation of One Who is everywhere and in everything. Yet, every detail is always new and exciting and the proper occupation of our lives. We attend. We reverence it. We are filled with awe because of it.

Today we observe the fifty-day season of God's Self-revelation, from Great Pascha (called Easter in the West) and the Ascension when God the Son is revealed until Pentecost when the Holy Spirit is revealed. In this we behold the outsized and awesome and public Self-revelation of the Three-Person God, called the Most Holy Trinity.

May I humbly offer that another prosaic phrase is the birthday of the Church? Do we not receive the first glimpse of the Church in Eden with two human creatures made in God's Image, who are in communion with each other and together are in most intimate and harmonious communion with God? Is this not the perfect Image of what we call the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which is the Church? What then do we day about Pentecost, which St. Luke depicted on an epic scale?

The fifty-day-season marked by Pascha unto Pentecost points back to the most holy essences of God's Nature and of His relationship with us, His beloved human creatures. And what are the holy elements of this relationship? They are wine and bread, the precious Blood of the Lamb of God and the Bread of Heaven, Which is His Body. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Orthodox Church constantly points back to our beginnings: from Creation to Eden to Noah and on to the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Orthodoxy terms its church buildings temples. Collectively these form the Ark of Noah, set off from a dangerous and chaotic world. Orthodoxy's rules for fasting are obviously rooted in the Hebrew Bible with its Kashrut restrictions. This is not traditionalism for its own sake but rather faithfulness to the essence of divine things, and to the life God has called us to live.

They point back to the extraordinary moment of Moses standing shoeless in Midian before I AM THAT I AM. For here God inaugurates the Exodus of His people out of death-like bondage into the Land of Promise — an image of Eden. Jews continue to celebrate this as Pesach (also called Passover) and then fifty days later, the Feast of Weeks (called Shavuot), or known in Jesus time by the Greek word Pentecost,' which is the festival that commemorates the Giving of the Torah to the people Israel, accounted by Jews to be the holiest moment in human history.

Do I reach too far when I say that the exodus from Egypt goes to the heart of God's identity communicated to humans? Following the Flood and the revelation of the world in which we now live, the first manifestation of God is to Abram. He materializes several times in sparely written accounts. We read that God appears, He calls Abram, He promises. But He never identifies Himself to Abram. Only to Moses is this astonishing act performed:

Forever after, in human history, God will point back to this encounter and to the Exodus to identity Himself:

Like Judaism, Orthodoxy is the Holy Land religion. The Holy Land alone was never evangelized by missionaries, but by Evangelists .... and their Master, the Son of God.

Closely related to Pesach is our own Pascha — the word is a transliteration of the Aramaic. Pesach is the "blood event." Egypt is about to suffer a catastrophic loss of life. Every "first born," from the first born of dogs to Pharaoh's son, will die. But the Jews, protected by the blood of an unblemished lamb will not not die:

Fifty days later Judaism celebrates Pentecost, falling on the ancient wheat harvest festival, Shavuot — the "bread event." It coincides with God's revelation of the Torah, These two frame the Jewish religious experience: the blood of Pesach and the bread of Shavuot. The "showbread" upon the Temple altar points to the Jewish lifeworld: twelve unleavened loaves representing God's abundant life, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. On Shavuot, two leavened loaves are offered representing the two remaining Houses of Israel, Ephraim and Judah.

Mysteriously the inner life and identity of God is expressed in these two: the Blood of the Lamb and the Bread of Life. When Jesus says that man does not live by bread alone, He says the obvious: "Man lives by bread," which is the staff of life. And He also lives by the Word of God, which at this speaking is the Torah, in particular called "the Ten Words," which we term the Ten Commandments.

In Jesus first public miracle, He turns water into wine, which points ahead to His final miracle, turning wine into His blood. In Moses' first public miracle He turns water into blood (Ex 7:14ff). And his last miracle, wrought by God, marks the fulfillment of the wheat harvest: God's abundance seen in the Ten Words, which Jesus associates with bread: "not bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds out of the Mouth of God (Mt 4:4)."

In Pesach and Shavuot, the table is set for the Heavenly Banquet, which in the West is called the "Last Supper" (though it is, ironically, the first of many) — with Christ's blood appearing as wine and His body appearing as bread set before the world for salvation. "I am the Lord your God Who led you out of Egypt."

The Greek word for bread, αρτο'ς (arto's), and the Greek word for artery and, therefore, blood, αρτηρι'α (artyri'a,), come out of the same root. Even more striking is that the Latin word for art, artem, also derives from this same root. Bread. Blood. This is God's great and holy art.

From our Pascha, which reveals God's Son in high relief, to our Pentecost, which reveals the Holy Spirit in that same high relief, we come full circle. For what is this roar, this mighty wind, that St. Luke describes and this fire? Is this not the breath of God, which was breathed upon the void at the moment of Creation and then breathed to Moses out of the fire "I AM Who I AM"? Is it not the breath of God etched in stone, Ten Words, on Mt. Sinai? And is this not the Divine Fire breathed out upon the Apostles in St. John the Theologian's account of the giving of the Holy Spirit?

Let us receive our God, for He is a consuming fire and the sublime lifespring of all Creation.

The final sentence of our Gospel lesson this morning locates Jesus as being "the light of life," pointing us back to Genesis 1:3 and to a light so powerful that it created the universe in a fractional second in a force and scale and magnitude that defies human comprehension.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.