"This Is Eternal Life"

To know God is eternal life. Religious life is not a church or a priest or a collection of books. Yes, these guide us. But relationship with God is the beating heart of life, defining and permeating everything. And the vocation of Holy Orthodoxy is to guard this all-encompassing relationship, making sure that it not be contaminated. Lies, misinformation, bad theology, heresy .... all of these, separate us from God. Small wonder, that the evil one is called the father of lies, a constant theme in St. John's Gospel and Letters.

Today, we celebrate the Fathers of the Seventh Council, who turned back a centuries-long attempt to impoverish religious life, separating us from God — depriving us of personal relationship with God and the holy ones of Heaven .... personal relationship. For what is love and intimacy amongst family without pictures? Otherwise, how do our grandchildren feel a bond with their family? "What did grandpa look like? What was grandma like? Was she short or tall or thin or large or ..... what was she like?" We would have no idea what our family looked like, where they were from, what they were about.

For centuries the iconclasts desecrated and destroyed holy icons until the Seventh Council in 787 AD put and end to it.

The iconoclasts believed they were acting on good authority going back to Moses. But even the ancient Hebrew Holy of Holies and its ante-chamber, as the Fathers argues, were adorned with "images" — depictions of Eden and figures of angels.

The text which upheld their movement, the iconoclasts believed, was Deuteronomy. They could not have known during the first millennium that Deuteronomy was itself a heretical innovation. They could not have known that its strictures ran four-square against the spiritual life revealed by God. But with stunning sensitivity, the Fathers of the Seventh Council could hear that Deuteronomy did not ring true .... as least with respect to graven images.

It would not be until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Biblical scholars would isolate certain books and passages of the Hebrew Bible that had been revised. One book in particular, the scholars argued, was a thorough-going counterfeit: Deuteronomy.

The aim of Deuteronomy, crafted in the court of King Josiah six centuries before Jesus' birth, was to concentrate spiritual, social, and political power in Jerusalem. Above all, Deuteronomy sought to end direct relationship with God. Not only was one not to know God, but the description of Moses approaching God directly was edited out altogether. Moses, you see, did not see God or really hear God, Deuteronomy asserted. Rather, he heard a faint voice arising from a mist. And the holy places scattered throughout all of Israel, affording people little gates to Heaven (so to speak), must be destroyed. The Heavenly hosts must be deprecated and gradually expunged from Temple worship. And all such intimacies would be labeled "idolatry." This program of desecration would be supported with propaganda laced through the Books of Chronicles, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Jeremiah.

Shortly after Josiah's death, roughly one-third of the Judean population was carried off to Babylon, where they continued their program of re-engineering the Hebrew faith. Upon their return three generations later, their leaders, notably the high priest Ezra, would characterize their sojourn in Mesopotamia as a "Second Exodus." Those who participated were the "True Israel."

As for the two-thirds who had stayed behind, devoting themselves to God in the ancient tradition, these would be derided as "the people of the land" and their Hebrew religion mocked as "paganism."

The new religion, called Judah-ism, would be enshrined in a Second Temple, stripped of holy images including the Heavenly host and deprived of the throne of God, where the High Priest encountered the Most High God. That is, the ideal of direct knowledge of God through theosis was banned.

The encounter with God henceforth would be through appeasement, following the Mesopotamian cult of blood sacrifice. And the ancient wisdom of the Hebrews would be supplanted by the Law. Ezra would oversee a re-writing of the Holy Books.

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We at the Hermitage feel ourselves to be inheritors of this struggle in a sense, for personal encounter vs. the priest's sacrifice offered at an altar is a basic East-West difference. I recall our first entry into this personal dimension vividly. During a pilgrimage through the twenty-one Franciscan missions of Old California, two of us stayed in Calistoga for the night.

We read in the paper that the nearby Monastery of the Holy Assumption was celebrating its annual patronal feast. How auspicious, we thought, to be present on their special day. It felt like a Divine appointment.

We arrived early and soon found ourselves in the midst of warm hospitality as we met the abbess, Mother Melania. She showed us in to the monastery church, a placed filled with holy mystery palpably soaked through with prayer and worship. Our first instinct as Western Catholics was whether to genuflect. "Is the Lord present?" I asked, looking for a lighted sanctuary lamp.

Mother Melania replied in a reassuring tone, "We have good fellowship here."

Hearing her words and looking around at the icons, many of them life-size, we understood the atmosphere of Holy Orthodoxy really for the first time. Surrounding us were the holy people of God. This place radiated out across the centuries, without boundary between Heaven and earth, face-to-face, heart-to-heart. And I recalled G. K. Chesteron's comment that the Church's membership is vast, with only a tiny fraction alive on earth.

The Divine Liturgy, which came later, was luminous. Afterwards, we were served antidoron so as not to feel left out. When we took our leave, Mother Melania presented us with a beautiful present: a large icon of St. John Chrysostom. As we drove back to our lodgings for the night, I thought of the passage from St. John:

The beauty of the Christian faith — so intimate, so personal, so individual (yet including all) — filled me to overflowing.

It was not that we heard new information, but rather that we saw in a new way. Christian life is a most intimate experience — as the child to the father and mother; as the sister or brother to the Lord Jesus, First-born of Creation. Every detail of our lives is open to them, and their lives are very present to us. The Lord wishes to dwell in us and we in Him.

Our part in this is to develop and mature. Our goal is know God, to know His Son, and to live into and to become the living Image of God.

Yes, there will be growing pains, to be sure, and awkward stages. This is the reality of maturing. We will be tempted and tried and sifted and fail and get back up again. Yet through all, we are surrounded with a great cloud of witnesses — family, who deeply care, and who have gone through the same things we are going through.

This family is no ordinary family, and its pictures are not ordinary pictures. They are mysterious and holy — little windows into the Divine world, yet hanging on the walls of our homes.

This very tension between the intimacy of Hebrew religion, still alive in northern Israel at Jesus' birth, and the impersonal religion of Judah formed the historical backdrop for the entry of God into our world. The iconoclasts would be inheritors of this struggle.

In the West, Jesus passion is understood to begin on a Thursday night and conclude at noon the next day. His arrest, torture, and death is understood as a one-time atonement for the sins of the world. It is brief, nearly instant, and objective: Jesus body given for our salvation.

But Holy Orthodoxy sees Jesus' passion as beginning at His birth. He set aside His Heavenly Glory, as we heard in our Gospel lesson this morning, in order to enter the horrible straits of our narrow humanity. He is born in a cold stable, mongst dung-stained hay. He is an outcast. Christian life consists in following Him through this alien landscape as strangers in a strange land. "Here we have no abiding city," as we heard in St. Paul's Letter to the Hebrews this morning.

As the Lord is hated, so we are hated. As He is tempted, so we are tempted. As He is endures suffering, so we suffer. We walk in His shoes. We see the world through His eyes. Our vocation is to know Him. You see, His lifelong passion is one we are born into. And the living saints of God waste no time in carrying these burdens in the third and fourth worlds.

Orthodox life consists in an intimate gathering of luminous family members, who also have followed Him. All seek transformation into our common destiny: to become Him, coming to the full stature of our essential Divine identity. And this is the spirit of Orthodox worship.

Imagine entering a Divine Liturgy after worship has begun. You may ask "Where is this place? How did I get here? I am not sure of the way out." The place seems to be circular, but that is not quite right. At the door, one encounters holy icons, whom people greet and kiss as family. The saints welcome us into their fellowship. Boundaries between time and space disappear. Soon the place fills with incense. Bells are sounding from .... one knows not where. Chanting is heard wafting through the air it seems from all directions. Sacred ministers roam about (it seems) in no certain direction. No one is seated. In fact, no clusters of pews or chairs or groups are to be found. Geometry and logic have been suspended. The experience is of mystery and spiritual fellowship. Soon the Beloved will appear. He is amongst us! We know that He loves us, every one of us.

How did this happen? Whence has He come? We do not know. Yes, there is a wall of icons, an iconostasis, but it is not a wall of separation or division. Mysteriously, it is a wall of unity — of our unity with the Holy Ones and God's offer of unity with us. It is a family embrace with no end. Is not this true of all family embraces? And you begin to wonder if this building is not like the manger that surrounded the Christ child, a humble building holding something larger than the universe.

In a sense, the Hermitage does not know how we got here. A series of Divine appointments led us into a mysterious cloud of possibility and welcome. By twists and turns we found ourselves in relationship with the First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. His Eminence Metropolitan Hilarion of blessed memory would receive us. He would name our monastery, "Our Lady of the Angels." And we would find ourselves in good fellowship .... with the saints of God but also with serious Christians, who love decency and who are in the care of holy and devout bishops.

We have come to know the Lord Jesus as we never have before. And we have come to know His Church. The icons adorning our little temple are luminous figures who are very much alive. We speak to them. We pray to them. They intercede for us. We share family.

Theosis is the purpose of our lives. With our bishops, we strive to slough off our carnal skins freeing the bright Divine life within, coming to fullness in knowing our Great High Priest, Whose glorious Resurrection and Ascension revealed His Unity with the Father.

This is the ancient faith, stretching back to Eden and celebrated in the First Temple of Solomon. This is the place of transformation, the gate of Heaven, and entrance into eternal life.

These are the things Josiah would suppress, fearing such awesome power in the hands of his humble subjects. He would remove the ark from the Temple attempting to eradicate direct relationship with God. He would commence a propaganda campaign, exalting kings who desecrated Israel's holy places while demonizing kings who worshiped at these ancient altars. And these vestiges of Hebrew religion he would condemn as "graven images."

But this calamity on earth did not escape the notice of High Heaven. As centuries passed, Judah-ism would be overtaken by the paganism of Alexander, who subjugated the world, and then by the invincible Roman Empire, which would confirm it. The mills of God grind slowly, wrote a second-century Greek philosopher (Sextus Empiricus), but they grind exceeding fine. By twists and turns the temple that had been stripped of God's throne would face God Himself, Who declared that He would destroy it.

The life in God's sight is profoundly personal, even the transformation of our minds and souls into the figure Who stood before that temple. In this, Orthodoxy is an inheritor of the ancient Hebrew religion, so individual, so personal, so Divine.

When His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah invited Margaret Barker to speak at St. Vladimir's Seminary in 2012, she witnessed Orthodox worship for the first time in her life. When the Liturgy had concluded, she said that it was not strange to her but rather familiar, for it was like the liturgies she had pictured in the First Temple. (See Margaret Barker, Papers, "Now I See," 2008)

Orthodox Christians are not fundamentalists. We devote ourselves to truth. Most often our safeguard is the ancient and most reliable sources, especially Holy Scripture. It, therefore, becomes a sacred duty to devote ourselves to authentic Scripture.

This is one of the reasons the Orthodox Church valorizes the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation, over Scriptures written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Yes, the LXX does not predate Ezra and the Second Temple. It was translated roughly two centuries after that. At the direction of the Egyptian pharaoh, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-247 BC), six translators from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (not just Judah) were asked to translate the Hebrew texts into Greek. In this sense, the LXX represents the only, ever "download" of the mind and soul of the ancient Hebrew lifeworld. What a precious document!

For translation is inevitably the process of pushing concepts of mind through the forms of cultural and religious belief. You see how our thoughts are shaped by the categories and structures in our minds which we were raised in. The LXX, then, is utterly unlike the Judean redaction of the holy books, guided by a very different agenda and final goals, associated with names like Josiah, Deuteronomy, the Babylonian reforms — two different agendas, two different value systems, two different worlds.

Now, if the phrase "Hebrew heritage" does not fall pleasingly upon twenty-first-century ears, then I ask you to consider a phrase which Jesus favored: the Bosom of Abraham. We include this icon at the top of today's reflection depicting the Most Holy Theotokos attended by angels and seated beside Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who are indeed the True Israel.

We at the Hermitage have journeyed through three great communions of Christianity. We are old and frail. Our goal has not been the convenient and the comfortable. We have declined titles and honors and lucrative salaries. The burning point of our lives is one: to follow the living God. And God has led us to His ancient Church, along with a faithful minister named Mother Melania and His Eminence Metropolitan Hilarion.

On this day, we offer prayers of thanksgiving to the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, who turned back an innovation .... a movement, ironically, intended to turn back innovations.

You see, the way ahead to God is never easy. The prince of this world is called "the Deuce." He is the double, the counterfeit. And deception is his craft and art. He insinuates his way into our own thinking and our own explanations of ourselves to ourselves. His utmost purpose it that we lose our inheritance. Is not this always the devil's bargain? Ask Adam and Eve: to trade away everything in the world that is precious and good in order to receive in return .... nothing, except disease and death.

Our only safety in this perilous world is the Divine and imperishable Church. Today we give thanks for the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council. This day is also known by its other name: the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

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