"Return to Your Own House"

Let us take a car trip back to 1950. First stop is New York City. Don't forget Newark, Hoboken, and Jersey City. That's New York, too, at least culturally. In some areas, such a Canarsie down in Brooklyn or Jersey City, it might be hard to understand what the natives are saying. For New York speaks a different language .... in phrases but also in values. They see themselves as "street-smart" and "savvy." If go to a newsstand and put down $20, you better say, "That's a twenty. Or you will get change for a five." You see, they pride themselves in "working the angles."

Now, let's head up to New England. This won't be easy, though, for there are no highways, except to New Haven, Connecticut, which actually doesn't go all the way through. Even the state highways offer only one lane in each direction. And wood-plank bridges will take your car over its many rivers and streams, where you can find a bridge. Months will be required even to pass through its villages and hamlets. But understanding its natives will take much longer than that. For their language will seem indecipherable. In Vermont it will take longer still, for Vermont Yankees say so little. Their values are simple .... and reclusive: flinty self-reliance, parsimony, and guarded speech after the pattern of Vermont's only president, "Silent Cal."

The Deep South comes next. You'll hear the change in accent as soon as you arrive to Virginia and the Carolinas. U.S. Highway 1 with its many traffic lights is the only main road to Georgia. From there you can drive through the Florida Panhandle to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana along the "Gu'f." Surely, this is a different planet from New England. Vigor and efficiency give way to a "What's your hurry?" attitude. President Kennedy once quipped that Washington was a city that combined the warmth and hospitality of the North with the efficiency of the South. Listening to the radio with its many local preachers and reading the billboards declaring that "Jesus Saves," you realize that their values are nothing like New York's.

Now, we don't have time to continue our trip — through the cowboy culture of the Republic of Texas and Oklahoma with its rugged individualism, through Southern California with its fast living and bling. The point has been made. The United States in the space of our lifetimes at the Hermitage was many countries in terms of culture, values, and dialect — we might say unintellible to each other.

Two great "uniters" bound these disparate nations together. First, was a rather distant federal government, for county government with its sheriff and commissioners had ruled the U.S. for centuries. The other "uniter" was a silent partner who only slowly stretched its myriad tendrils over these different populations. It made no pretense to rule or even to influence, only to entertain. Who knew that television would become the most powerful, single influencer upon the American mind and soul? As the night follows the day, the values decided in New York and, later in Hollywood, would shape, even determine, the American character. Regional accents would disappear. Cherished beliefs would fracture and collapse. And moral life, along with its self-concept and aspirations, would be exterminated.

This re-programming of the American mind and spirit would take time. Computer screens and smart phones would carry on the work. But make no mistake about it. In the space of a single lifetime, a whole world has vanished. Thousands of priests and nuns in New York alone, gone. Little white churches in every New England village, repurposed. Revival meetings across the South, vanished. And prayer in every public school, criminalized. The life of faith has become mostly a memory .... at least as we see life represented on our televisions and at the movies.

This is the paradigm through which we must understand the people Israel. Once a upon a time, the region we call the Holy Land was a confederacy of little "nation states" named for Jacob's sons: the Twelve Tribes of Israel (Jacob's other name). To the south, Benjamin, Judah, and Simeon lay between the southeast Mediterranean shore and the Dead Sea. To the north, Asher, Zebulon, Naphtali, and Manasseh (Joseph's son) surrounded the Sea of Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee). Fronting the southeast shore of this freshwater lake was the Tribe of Gad — "on the other side" from the villages of Bethsaida and Capernaum, where Jesus often called His home. Each tribe was a distinct culture. Each called Abraham its father. And each cherished their local claims to the Patriarchs, as we hear in Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman, St. Photini, who took pride in the well dug by Jacob himself: he and his animals actually drank from this well.

This helps us to understand the importance of the United Monarchy of King David and King Solomon, which bound Israel together as one. For balkanizing into smaller groups, these little worlds would be vulnerable. By 721 B.C. the northern tribes would be vanquished by the Neo-Assyrian empire, to be known to history as the Ten Lost Tribes, that is, all but Benjamin and Judah.

By 586 B.C. the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar would conquer Jerusalem, too, destroying the First Temple and carrying one-third of the Judean population, especially the elite, to Babylon, where they would remain for three generations.

You understand my point here. These distinct localities, looking up to Heaven, scribing a holy circle around themselves, practicing the religion of the Patriarchs .... all of this was now vanished. And they would be homogenized by Mesopotamian culture.

Jumping head to the first century A.D., the Jewish Roman historian Josephus (b. 37) would write that

But we should say as a footnote, unintelligible as the religious people they once were. The vestiges remain. The memory remains.

All of this sets the scene for the Son of God Who enters human history to gather the Lost Sheep of Israel (Mt 15:24). They are lost in every way. The whole area, politically speaking, is now a Roman Province called Judaea. For the preceding three centuries, it had been Hellenized following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Indeed, a whole world from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to Arabia in the east, people spoke Greek, among other languages.

Today we can make out the vestiges of two cultures from ancient Israel — the Hebrews to the north and the Jews to the south as we have explored in many reflections this past year.

Judah-ism, a blend of Mesopotamian religion and Hebrew belief, would be invented just before, during, and after the Babylonian Exile as the formidable scholar of Hebrew Bible, John J. Collins, has shown. The Jews no longer spoke Hebrew but Babylonian Aramaic. They no longer observed the religion of Abraham really, but rather a revised version more focused on animal sacrifice.

How is the Son of God to understand the word lost, therefore? Does it have to do with vanished languages and dialects? Does it have to do with the loss of local customs or traditions? Jesus Himself spoke in Greek citing only the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint. He taught in the Jewish Temple though He and His Disciples were mostly Hebrews. He quoted Deuteronomy, that central text of invented Judaism, as more than a century of modern biblical scholarship has demonstrated.

So .... does being lost have to do with which Biblical books you accept or reject as canonical? We must remember that during Jesus' lifetime, the Hebrew Scriptures were still open. Ongoing debate and revision was commonly practiced. We would not have a settled text of the Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic text) for, perhaps, a thousand years. No. It cannot be that countless layers of cultural and linguistic change, beyond the control of the people whom it has surrounded and covered, should be the decider. And we can make this same point about the United States as well.

Moreover, our Gospels tell a different story. Jesus comes into our world revealing a new geography, announcing it in a new language. It is the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Bosom of Abraham. These wonderful phrases were unknown before He spoke them. The first word of His ministry calls us away from the world's geographies: Metanoiete! His Forerunner, cut from the cloth of Eden, had articulated this same word: Metanoiete! Be transformed! Make a U-turn! You are going in the wrong way! Return to Eden, to personal purity, and, most important, to God! Commune with Him in the cool of the afternoon.

That is, who is lost and who is not lost is determined by only one thing: closeness to God. God is the great Uniter. And union with God is the great purpose of our lives. Indeed, each degree of separation from God is a gradation towards death, eternal death.

This is the high importance of the Gad story, to which the lectionary of the Orthodox Church returns so often. For here, in the Land of Gad, we encounter the great example of all that is utterly lost: the culture of death. Gad is the Bible's outstanding depiction of perdition on earth, a living Hell. Demons run rampant through a field of victory. Men are not simply possessed by a demon, but infested .... by multitudes of demons: "Legion," as one demon tells Jesus. The citizens of Gad, whom Jesus encounters, have become inured to the culture of death, chained in their sins, dwelling amongst tombs. Meanwhile, the Gadarenes feed on filthy swine, indifferent to the commandments of God. This is a sign. We can infer that other aspects of their lives are also indifferent to the commandments of God.

We get to the heart of the story as Jesus does mighty works in their midst and begins the process of cleansing the entire country, restoring men to their right place and ridding the countryside of swine, all in a single stroke.

The background here would have been well known, for Philo and Josephus quote Homer in their writings. In Book 10 of the Odyssey, Odysseus discovers that his men have been transformed into pigs by an enchantress, by the charming call of the sirens, by the enticing scent of temptation. The allegory is obvious: forgetting their noble bearing and values, they have given themselves over to depravity becoming hoggish in soul and mind. So that the mean things of this world begin to creep into them, filling them up and covering them, until they have become them.

In Gad, God has drawn near, however. Just being in His Presence cleanses every last stain and blot upon their lives. Indeed, He has begun His work of purification, but they repel Him. Not only do they ignore Him. They repel Him. They choose hoggish life over the life of Eden. They prefer separation from God rather than communing with Him in the cool of the day. And they drive Him back to His ship, back to whence He came.

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During our recent elections, it turns out abortion rights were decisive, a landslide issue among women.

Now, let's be clear on this subject. In the year 2022, abortion is about society catching up with science. With the advent of advanced medical imaging as well as fiber optic photography (where a tiny inserted thread can depict the whole scene), the personhood of the unborn is on a rock solid footing. The Swedish photographer Lennart Nillson, who was awarded an honorary doctorate in medicine, had revealed this truth generations ago. His landmark work, A Child Is Born (1965), depicted the developing human person from conception to birth in crystal clarity. The pictures are startling. Those who open this book are ineluctably carried to the conclusion that the unborn child is just that — a child.

Today, medical imaging takes our very first family pictures, introducing a new daughter or son. All mothers and fathers receive these precious "photos" as a matter of course. In the first trimester children have little personalities, can listen to music, have favorite songs, and become animated after birth when they hear them.

Yet, we live in a nation where a national election is settled by the impulse to kill them: our own children. Where in the world are we?! Abraham was called away from Babylon, a region that practiced ritual child sacrifice. The elaborate narrative in Genesis, which we call "the Binding of Isaac," presents a great truth in, as I say, elaborate drama and high suspense. It's clear message is, We don't do that. We do not sacrifice our children. Blood sacrifice is not an acceptable offering to God but rather a broken heart, a humble spirit (Ps 51) and a transformation of heart and mind (Rom 2:12).

Yet, in 2022 this nation, dominated by an ethos of personal liberation, clamors for the right to sacrifice children on the altar of tha same liberation. Is this not the American religion de facto? Is this not what freedom (a once sacred word) has come to mean? To be free from marital obligations. To be free from child-rearing. To be free to take drugs sanctioned under law. To be free to watch legal pornography in our homes. To be free to break every sexual taboo .... and free from any kind of censorship or judgment.

The word Babylon had a distinct connotation to Jesus and His followers as the Book of Revelation attests: her scarlet raiment was synonymous with every kind of filth and blood ritual. Its meaning today is not so distant from that. Not so long ago, Babylon was synonymous with "the depravities of Hollywood." Books and movies such as The Valley of the Dolls revealed a world of drugs and sexual perversion pervasive in Hollywood. Do you remember a song which played on every radio in America? Its lyrics haunt us today with its heart-breaking, childlike confusion and yearning:

So many in our country are lost as lambs. So many are possessed by demons whose mark is a drug-fueled stupor and fog. So many are slaves to unwholesome desires. They cannot escape. And drug addiction and STDs are epidemic throughout our land, nearly pandemic.

But the One Who came to gather the lost sheep still walks among us. He is keen not lose a single lamb. His shepherd's crook guides us into the way of true and sacred freedom. He has given His holy angels charge over us. They love us .... and sometimes weep over us.

To be sure, demons run rampant in a field of victory. They seek to drive the Good Shepherd back to His boat and out of our land. Their craft is great, enslaving vast multitudes with powerful temptations to unredeemed pleasure, pleasures that will surely lead to eternal death.

On Amazon Prime, we find a highly touted series, "Mammals," arguing the necessity of adultery, which is nothing less than our need "to breathe" within the "suffocation" of marriage (as one reviewer in the New Yorker put it). On social media, postings go viral deploring motherhood in profanity-laced language because it requires giving yourself away, one TikTok posting resonating in newspaper headlines coast-to-coast.

But chief among the demonic arts is the most subtle and dangerous one of all: the lie that we have not rejected God when, in fact, our separation from Him is already complete. We say that we love God. But can we say in all truth that we speak to Him each and every day? Do greet Him in prayer each morning? Do we pray to Him each night, even if only lying on our pillow? Do we give thanks for our blessings? Do we ask forgiveness for the wrongs we have done? Do we turn to Him in times of need? Do we ever acknowledge our guardian angels? Do we approach the Gate of Heaven every Sunday whenever possible? For God is, in His nature, relationship. If we cannot say that we are really in relationship with God, true and loving relationship, then we must admit that here is the true meaning of lost. And we must never forget that rejecting the Holy Spirit is the unpardonable sin (Mt 12:31).

In the analogy of marriage, the courts would term this as mental cruelty, psychological suffering, and irretrievable breakdown of marriage, the aggrieved party being God. If our minds drift constantly to our next drink or joint, if we daydream of promiscuity and pornography, if we become attached to anything that would break up the integrity of our marriage ..... or offend our God, then the cause of divorce is adultery (as we read in Hosea) or a greater cause still: idolatry (as we read in Exodus).

No matter. Still He comes. For such is the greatness of His love. He comes across seas and oceans. He comes across rocky mountains and great plains. He comes from on High .... to gather the lambs who cry out. They know the sound of His voice (Jn 10:27). And He wants them to know their own names. For we belong to Him. And our names unlock our birthright to His marvelous Kingdom.

Religion is not out there. Yes, priests and bishops continue the pastor's art. Luminous churches continue to feed the faithful with Heavenly food. But religion resides, first, in our minds and our hearts and our souls, which why we pray the Great Commandment.

The Land of Gad is within. But a new geography, a pristine land filled with light, is only a few steps away. Our Savior and God calls it "the Kingdom of Heaven." And here He awaits us, He awaits us with His understanding, His love, and His forgiveness. If only we would accept it.

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