Family Tree

We celebrate a great feast today: the Conception of the All-Holy Theotokos by St. Anna. It is special to the Hermitage as each day we venerate a second-class relic of St. Anna, whose custodian for decades has been our monastery's Sr. Mary Anne.

It is a fact that upon arriving to these Islands, and deep in the jungles of Maui, we saw a distant, mysterious white building from a hillside which seemed to call to us. With difficulty we made our way to it and with trepidation as the branches on either side of the narrow, twisting lane scraped both sides of the car. When we arrived we saw that it was empty, apparently not used. It was built entirely from coral. In fact, it was the scene of a Marian miracle. Our Lady appeared to a villager on Maui and commanded that a chapel be built.

"With what will I build a chapel?" he asked.

She replied that all would be made available to him. In the days following, a great storm appeared and deposited a large quantity of coral on the shore. The devout villagers cut it into blocks and constructed the chapel. We ventured inside. As I say, it was empty. There were only to figures in this palpably holy place: St. Anna and her Most Holy Daughter. Of course, our Hermitage is dedicated to the Most Holy Theotokos.

St. Anna represents the proximate genealogy of Jesus through Mary — the only branch of any earthly family tree to touch the Man-God. In fact, that is what this feast celebrates: family ties, conception according to the flesh of the Most Holy Theotokos. Now, explicit genealogies do appear find in the Gospels — in the Third Chapter of St. Luke's Gospel and the opening of St. Matthew's Gospel — are that of Joseph, Jesus' stepfather, not a blood-and-bone descent. (But more on that in a minute).

The point of announcing a genealogy is to present one's identity and credentials. For example, for a King to ensure the continuation of his royal line, he must produce a legitimate heir. In the Middle Ages it was believed that the genealogy inhered within the person of the heir, so even if he were lost, the boy would be every inch a king. For example, in the Middle English romance King Horn, a lost heir could not help but be royal exhaling a blue flame in his sleep.

This was an especially vexed issue during the centuries following the Return from Babylon. The questions were, "Who are the true people of God?" and, as there stood three temples, "Which represents the true religion?" We get a little window into this widespread confusion as Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman:

The first-century reader of the Gospel of St. John, who knew Jesus was distinctly not a Jew, sees just how tangled and confused the issue was.

Within Judah, however, this no open, searching question. Asserting the one, true religion was feverishly the preoccupation of the Returnees from Babylon. Their Temple in Jerusalem was most imposing — built by the mighty Persian Empire. In response to this, large groups of Hebrews peoples fled to the north (Samaria) and to the south (Elephantine). Meantime, the message put out by Nehemiah, the Persian governor, and Ezra, his scribe and priest, was all the more shrill: If you didn't experience the Exile in Babylon then you cannot be true Hebrew. The Exile, they claimed, was the Second Exodus. (Hans-Georg Wunch, 2021).

As you know, as I mentioned last week, a tablet of the Ten Commandments has survived (the oldest tablet, should add) introduced an additional command: "Thou shalt only worship on Mt. Gerizim." As I say, a vexed issue for the whole Levant.

Over time, they forged a new identity in the fires of this controversy. Their religion was no longer the ill-defined Hebrew religion with its diverse adherents scattered throughout the area. Their brand would be sharply defined as a cult practiced within their massive Temple on Mt. Zion: Judah-ism, and its people would be called the Jews. Before then, "no Jews," after then, "The Jews." The success of their effort can be measured today ..... as only Pharisees survived the cataclysm of 70 A.D. becoming Rabbinical Judaism.

St. John the Theologian uses this distinctive name sixty-six times in his Gospel to signify a great difference: them, not us. Their festivals may have mandated pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but they were no less alien for that. The Passover of the Jews, St. John asserted, was their feast, not ours.

But this was the view of those living in the historical Northern Kingdom. In the South, the distinctions made by Ezra were taken quite seriously. Herod the Great (an Arab by birth) put out the story that his genealogy was descended from the Returning Exiles. You see, he was a true Jew. And the Sadducees, whose lineage was also shadowy, argued strenuously that their genealogy was descended from Zadok, High Priest of the First Temple. But, as I say, this is controverted.

St. Anna's family line was said to descend from the Tribe of Levi, a priestly line. You will recall that the Levites received no tribal area but were designated to serve the Lord. Anna's story is virtually identical to the story of Hannah in the First Book of Samuel. Stiking, isn't it? As barren Hannah gave birth late in life to Samuel, so Anna (a variant spelling of Hannah) gave birth late in life to the Theotokos. As Hannah presented Samuel to "the House of Lord and remain there forever" (1Sam 1:22), so Anna presented the Most Holy Theotokos to the Temple there to live, well, until first menses (as menstrual blood could not be tolerated in the Temple).

Who were the true people of God? Which was the true Temple? The historical picture is uncertain. Even people living during the first-century Levant couldn't tell you. But this was reason one Jesus was sent into the world: the Tribes of Israel were lost. They did not know who they were. They did not know where they were going. They were lost sheep.

Can't we say that this is the general condition of humanity? As we were made in God's Image, born to become God's adopted children, what can we say about our present state? What could be more important than being born to the lineage of God. Yet, this is something we seem to be unclear on. Are we not more lost than ever before? Our leaders cannot even tell us what a man is or a woman. Shall they aspire to more rarefied questions like, "What are our national values?" or "What is the purpose of our common life?" These may sound like impossible questions to young people today. But we sitting here were very clear on our national values as children. When I tell young people that we started the school day reading from the Psalms, in public school, they can scarcely believe it. And most certainly God does not come into the general conversation.

The world of the first-century Levant, and our own, was and is an undecipherable mess. But it was designed that way. God's original act was to impose order out of chaos. We hear this primal, decisive act echoing throughout the Scriptures: YHWH tames the sea monster Leviathan representing the unruly sea — the symbol par excellence of chaos in the ancient world. The Son of God, the Logos, masters the waves and the winds. God, and God alone, is the source and guarantor of orderliness. Without God in no order, only chaos. And it is no coincidence that another name for Hell is Pandemonium: chaos, but also All Demons. We seek to be covered beneath the refuge and shadow of His wing (Ps 9). For He alone is the rock, the sure defense, our only hope against universal mayhem. For the universe, like the restless sea, threatens to devolve back into origninal chaos. Our homes, our families, our towns, our cities, our nation, our government, and infrastructures everywhere .... deteriorate — all disintegrate unavoidably returning to the void from which all things began, rusting and rotting along the way.

You know, we could sing during nineteenth century, "Her alabaster cities gleam!" And New York City once sought to be that perfection: the tallest building, the largest cathedral, the greatest university. But New York today can barely function .... riddled with crime and rats. It is chaos.

Sir Isaac Newton identified this as a basic fact about our universe, a physical law: "every random event contributes to the disorder of the universe."

The Well-ordered One, the One Who is Master over chaos, displayed this singular power which only He could. And the Disciples cry, "Who then is This, Who commands the winds and seas, and they obey?!" Why, He is Master even over death — the ultimate human chaos.

Yet He permitted His human person to be torn to shreds by the high velocities of this world's chaos and enshrined it forever on a Cross. What is the outsized, most heinous act in human history and the ultimate human crime? Regicide, fratricide, never-to-be-surpassed betrayal and treachery. I ask you: what greater chaos, which event or human act, could possibly rival this: the murder of God and the attempted annihilation of our Creator and Bulwark-against-all-chaos?

He showed us Who He was — raising the dead on three occasions — yet we could not manage to see or hear Him or Who He Was.

Still today (and always), He alone is the One stable thing, and the Absolute Certainty. No subject to Newton's laws. Cutting through the everlasting ambiguities of our fogbound world, cutting through the interminable confusion, He is the only changeless Meaning: "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (Jn 14:6).

And as He drew a great boundary for the Samaritan woman — to "worship the Father in spirit and truth" (Jn 4:23) — so He sets His Holy Seal on the one, true genealogy.

The Gospel reading for this feast depicts Jesus as brushing aside the vaunting egoism of genealogies, wending over the centuries to this priest or that. The only genealogy worth recording, He says, is our descent from the King of Heaven. What is more, He offers that royal lineage to us. All we need do is stand ready to receive God's command and do it. God has requirements. We simply must fulfill them. They are well within reach.

In this, God is our only Father, trumping all genealogies, and Jesus is our eldest brother, showing us the way.

The first and last word on genealogy.

But He has already told us this, over and over, from the time He was a young boy, when He was about His Father's business (Lu 2:49). God is His Father and ours — the Father is One to Whom we must pray (Lu 11:2). St. John uses the term over one hundred times in his Gospel.

He is our Father, and we are to love God with all our beings striving always to do His Holy Will. And what is His will? His will is to give us life, holy life. He has sent His Son to reveal it. Yet we already know it, for it grows organically from our relationship with Him, our Father. We are to love. And as the day follows the night, our next duty is decent affection for one another. This is family — the singular love of mother-father and our love for our brothers and sisters. As I read St. Paul preparing this homily, I went to 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13. And I realized how much his celebrated description of love matches our experience of loving our brothers and sisters, about loving our siblings: long-suffering, patient, self-denying, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things to the end, enduring all things (1 Cor 13:4-7) .... all pointing back to the One Who has been long-suffering, patient, self-denying, bearing all things, and hoping, our Father. For as the Divine Liturgy tells us, He is the Giver and the Gift.

"And your Father," Jesus promises, "Who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly" (Mt 6:4). Indeed, He will adopt us as His own sons and daughters. And the First-born among His children, even the Lord Jesus, will embrace us as His own. "My brothers," He says in our reading today. What sweet words! .... the sweetest words, and the desire of the everlasting hills! (Gen 49:26). To be in the family of God.

In this love, we hear a faint echo of the Divine gift-in-love coming from faithful spouse, Joseph, extending his family tree from King David to Mary and Jesus. We know the story through the Protoevangelion of the St. James. Joseph was a respected and pious man with grown sons. But it fell to him by lot to be guardian spouse of Ever-Virgin Mary (perhaps a twelve-year-old girl). This he flatly refused. "I am an old man," he said. "If I take this child to wife, I will become the talk of my village and the constant object of my son's mocking laughter." All true enough. Yet he plainly saw, even from a lily sprouting from his staff, it was God's will. Not always convenient, but the only way to life.

As we observe the Conception of the Most Holy Theotokos, let us claim our part in God's story, let us take our place in this holy lineage, let us live our lives in love, as God intended. For in this, we shall know who we are: the children of God. We shall know where we are going, for the Lord Jesus has promised He has prepared a place for us (Jn 14:2). And we shall know the purpose of our lives: to be gathered in and to gather others in to the only life worth living and the only family line worth claiming: the Kingdom of God. And we shall receive signs. Oh yes, God is not silent, little and great signs, that the Father, Who sees and hears in secret, is watching over every step of the way.

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