The Magic Kingdom

Today, we celebrate All Saints Day venerating the pioneers of our faith. We look to the saints for guidance and intercession. We seek them in a world-gone-mad for their rightness and goodness. Many believe that Orthodoxy is about the saints. At least, that is the impression newcomers form when they enter our sacred space, where a great cloud of witnesses has assembled in the form of icons, even life-size icons, and certainly their relics. Make no mistake about this: they are present. Our Liturgy promises that we worship with angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven. They are present. They are welcoming. They welcome us into a world we seek with every fiber of our being: the land of good and right and peace and, above all, mutual love, which we call the Kingdom of God.

As children, we cherished the idea that the saints are beloved by all the world. Sadly, this turns out to be a childish idea, beautiful if only it were true. What is true goes to the heart of the saints in light and their marvelous world of love.

Let us step back and consider the perfect rectitude and peace of well-ordered Heaven, where our thought-trends and nature have come to harmonize with God's, which we call saintliness. By contrast, let us consider the moral and existential chaos of the world that has rejected God — its burning cities, its anything-goes morality; its sexualized children doomed to disease, disfigurement, and suffering; its shattered families; its Mad-hatter life and values. Finally, let us stand in the place where the disjointed world faces faultless Heaven .... as it must. For try as it will, it cannot break free from God, not in the end.

Now, this place is not the gentle place of God's still, small voice. It is the place where the world crushes the saints. Let us recall the angels sent to rescue Lot's family from Sodom. They were not venerated. Indeed, they had difficulty persuading Lot's family to leave. And they nearly became the victims of homosexual rape (a biblical scene giving rise to our word sodomy).

Jesus speaks to this place where the saints are crushed:

The wholesale persecution of the saints was hard to imagine two generations ago in the United States. But today we understand it very well. It has become a fundamental aspect of faithful Christian life here. The Master predicted this. And He consoles us:

The unruly world rages against saintliness. For the desecration of God's goodness is never far from rage .... or lust or envy or any of the furies that churn restlessly in the reptilian brain of the human (a technical term I borrow from Neurology).

As we consider this place, this deadly torsion produced by a world twisting away from Heaven's goodness, we begin to grasp an element from the Divine "periodic table": the Cross. The Cross is where God meets with the world, where the Son of God was torn apart.

We saw this foreshadowed in the land of Gad, where the life-giving Lord healed outcasts and banished demons .... then immediately was driven out, forced back to His boat. This place was not so distant from Gabatha, where Jesus would be rejected by the people, and from Golgotha, where God's Son would be murdered. As the Gadarenes had before them, the Judeans speak in one voice, opposing the Roman disposition to spare Jesus. "Crucify Him!" they shout. "Crucify Him!"

You see, the Cross is where God meets with man, where God's mercy intersects with His perfect Justice, where His Kingdom of Heaven faces the irredeemable world. It was upon this holy geometry where the God-Man was stretched to join the broken world to healing Heaven.

When we say that Jesus has redeemed the world, we are forced to admit that much of the world plainly is not redeemed — where holy marriage is disfigured, where holy children are blighted, where newly conceived infants are murdered (more than 63 million since the Roe decision of 1973). These three most holy and good creations of God have been offered up in blood sacrifice to the god of sex.

Sex is the universal god of the West. Whether it be promiscuous sex, homo-sex, trans-sex, bi-sex ..... Make no mistake about it: all of these things, which have shattered our lifeworld, are about sex and the many forms of desire it incites. Indeed, we live in a world where sexual preference has been promoted to the status of gender.

Yes, I have read the scientific papers under the heading "gender science." They describe the microbiology of a very small group of individuals. And we must always bear in mind an immutable law arching over all the life sciences: what is mostly true is what is true. You cannot overturn scientific truth with anecdotes about this person or that person .... as if you really knew the things people keep secret. This is why all life science majors must study statistics. For everything studied in the natural world can never yield more than what is mostly true. There is no 100%. There is no black-and-white. This is not mathematics or logic. This is the messy place we call our material world of cells and atoms, where "scientific truth" is clustered in data points. The truth is in the cluster. The remaining few, the small minority, scientists call outliers: data points that do not conform to the "mostly true."

What shall we say when these outliers are thinking, feeling human lives? First and foremost, we are called to be compassionate, charitable, and patient. In many cases, these are confused people who have been carried along by an unwholesome tide, alienated people, addicted people, sometimes mentally ill people, and, too often, very young people who are not so much sexually-oriented as they are disoriented. As pastor of a church located in a so-called "gay resort destination" on the New England coast, I have known these lives and have opened my heart to them.

I am also pastor to a world that is not homosexual, which is most of the world by a very far margin. A truly compassionate heart and open mind realize that reconfiguring the world to appease a tiny, vocal minority will not do. It will not do to bring boys into locker rooms where girls undress and shower together. It will not do to destroy our sports world that was only recently a component of wholesome childhood. It will not do to legislate truth-claims that are not true. And, most certainly, it will not do to prey on impressionable children with a carefully engineered program of indoctrination and peer pressure. For the question of a young person's identity is the very thing that makes childhood and adolescence so notoriously difficult. Identity. To single out this fragile place as the point of attack is nothing less than predatory and cynical.

Now, let us ask the central question in the midst of tearing down our whole world: exactly how many outliers are there? In the study of gender dysphoria, the prestigious journal Nature asserts that it "could be as high a one percent." One percent? We are reconfiguring the norms of ninety-nine percent of our children, undoubtedly inflicting psychological duress if not injury, to a minority that "could be as high as one percent"? Yet, when you study the data further, you realize that the true number is probably far lower, for too much of this data has been cherry-picked to support a conclusion decided in advance. Even Nature was embarrassed at some of these study population levels.

Studies I have read on the National Institutes of Health website (nih.gov) suggest that 80% of all cases concerning gender dysphoria resolve naturally without intervention. All by themselves. 80%.

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This morning, we reflect on the saints. We celebrate them for their closeness to God, Whose mercy and justice are perfect. While the saints in light are surely loving men and women, they are also our wisdom figures. They too lived in a mad, mad world, and they see our world as well. Above all, they know right from wrong — not such a remarkable thing a short time ago. And we come to them in prayer hoping to receive their guidance.

They were not, and are not, of this world. They proceed straight out of the pages of St. John's Epistles countenancing the world to be toxic, even the implacable enemy of God. And in their wisdom, they realize that the world proposes the counterfeit, countering God's truths, ruled by the father of lies. The world proposes a morality that is not moral. a new normal that is abnormal, an economy that celebrates glamour and wealth even as it forgets ordinary people. (I need not say that the obscene gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" is far wider today than at any time in the history of this country.) It proposes science that cannot see beyond cells and atoms and technology that has destroyed our planet home .... even as it devolves into a mania to discover alternative worlds, refusing to believe the Divine truth, that God made this breathtaking and unrepeatable Creation mentioning no other.

The worldlings who have committed themselves to the counterfeit, sadly, include our mothers and fathers, even our grandmothers and grandfathers, our children and grandchildren, and our childhood friends and teachers. They have accepted the cruel calculus of "cancel culture" .... many of them in fear. They tell us, either we go along with the world's untrue truths, or we shall be left behind! Of course, this greatly underestimates the penalties we will suffer: if only we could simply be left behind!

Today's "difficult Gospel" addresses this situation squarely. It speaks directly to those caught in this cruel trap of conflicting loyalties. Do we not see it all around us? In our families? Among our friends? How many parents adopt "woke" opinions, so their children will not cancel them? How many toe the party line fearing that, otherwise, they will lose their grandchildren? I am sure you have heard these phrases: "My toxic parents? No, no. They cannot see my children."

You know the proverb of past generations: grandparents and grandchildren enjoy a certain closeness because they have a common enemy. It was always said with a note of jest. But it pointed to a truth: you see, the innocence of childhood and the wisdom of old age understand each other. But the feverish rat-race of middle age, having lost its innocence but not yet attaining to wisdom, has rendered middle age a lost generation. Today, the feverish rat-race indoctrinates its children and terrorizes their grandparents. Even that reassuring haven of innocence, Disney, where grandparents took their grandchildren to deepen this special bond, has been hi-jacked.

Yes, the chiseled sentences from our Gospel this morning speak boldly into our age today. But what will be the solution? The Gospel includes that, too. We must go to the Cross. The life-giving Cross, with its indelible message of self-sacrifice, will lead us and our children to safety.

When we say that Jesus Christ has redeemed the world, we do not mean that He has sprinkled it with pixie dust or that He has passed a magic wand over it. Rather, He has shown us the way out of its brokenness and ruin. The Gospels, in general, do not propose to change the world. They express no Roman ambition to empire. Jesus said,

And

And

The Good News is that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. This is the Magic Kingdom whose power cannot fade and which will never bend to the gods of any age.

God's Kingdom is at hand but not of this world. This important difference is an essence of the Beatitudes related by St. Luke:

These promises of Christ are addressed to the saints throughout the ages, who were crushed in the torsion between Heavenly and earthly life. Indeed, the twentieth-century martyrs exceed the number of all those before them. And these promises hold true for the saints of our time, as well — all who are faithful, come what may, during this dark time.

Yet, the darkness will scatter, just as our own lives will pass, in a twinkling, yet precious in God's sight if we are faithful and welcomed into the brilliant light of His good Kingdom.

The place where the rebellious world faces Heaven is the place where we see God's gentle ways most clearly. His Beatitudes bespeak a world which is at hand .... though not yet here. At the Hermitage we call them the "Proverbs of Heaven," for they are not about success in the world but rather reveal the ways of Heaven. They reveal His Kingdom as the place of abiding happiness and peace and, yes, of magic. Do not fail to teach your children and your grandchildren. For without your love and guidance, they will fail and suffer. And you will have forfeited your aspiration ever to be a saint, whose wisdom has become now a matter of eternal life and death.

What do the saints say in the year 2023? They assure their daughters, whose bodies are changing and who are being forced out of the garden of innocence, that the sanctuaries safeguarding these delicate things are safe. The saints show their children and grandchildren what sanctified marriage looks like by presenting the dignity of modest life and the beauty of faithful love to the world. Finally and forever, the saints model for their families the simple love of God and the goodness of God's ways.

Concerning His ways, there is no room for compromise. Either you are in, or you are out. Either you are hot, or you are cold, but lukewarm sickens the Lord (Rev 3:16). Elsewhere He says, "No one can serve two masters": you must either love God or become a slave to the material world (Mt 6:24). There is no middle way.

Yes, these simple offerings of faithfulness come at a cost in the year 2023. But that is the self-sacrificing love of the Cross. This is where God's goodness meets an evil world. But take heart being ever mindful of our godly purpose: this evil is terrorizing our daughters; it is polluting our sons; and it is shattering the holy refuge we once knew as family.

Come, let us be saints! Let us be the friends of God!

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