The Very Rev. Michael Westerberg and his wife, Matushka Lydia, rejoiced with friends and parishioners on Sunday, October 10, 2010, as they celebrated thirty years of service at Holy Transfiguration Church, New Haven, Connecticut. His Grace, The Rt. Rev. Nikon, bishop of Boston and New England, presided at the hierarchical Divine Liturgy in the morning and joined the hundreds of well wishers at the banquet following. Several clergy from the New England Diocese and Connecticut Deanery and their spouses, including The Very Rev. John Kreta, chancellor of the Diocese, and The Very Rev. Vladimir Aleandro, dean of the Connecticut Deanery, came to extend their congratulations as well.

Fr. Michael, who also was commemorating the thirty-fifth year of his ordination to the priesthood, recalled the extraordinary events that led him to his assignment at Holy Transfiguration, from his first parish in Berlin, New Hampshire. He also acknowledged the special support given to him throughout his ministry by Mat.' Lydia, particularly in her faithful direction of the choir. After various speakers had lauded his accomplishments, Fr. Michael took the podium and began humbly, "I would like to meet this fellow you've been talking about."

Over the years, Fr. Michael has been dedicated to mentoring seminarians from St. Vladimir's Seminary, who come to his church on weekends to fulfill their parish placement duties required by the seminary curriculum. The Very Rev. Steven Belonick, chaplain at the Seminary and overseer of the parish placement program, commended Fr. Michael on his exceptional care for SVOTS seminarians, saying, "You open your church doors, your sanctuary, and your home to them. You provide them with guidance, wisdom, counsel, inspiration, and love. But most importantly, you mentor them not only by what you teach them but also by your own example of a priest who loves to be a parish priest. And, there is no better lesson for them than that." Fr. Steven also presented Fr. Michael with correspondence from the seminarians who had been mentored under his wing, as mementos of his faithful and conscientious care.

Axios! to Fr. Michael and Mat.' Lydia as they continue their ministry in God's vineyard.

At the invitation of His Beatitude Sawa, archbishop of Warsaw and metropolitan of All Poland, Fr. John Matusiak delivered the keynote at a national gathering of Orthodox catechists held at the Orthodox Culture Center, Bialystok, Poland, September 24–25, 2010. The conference was organized by the Publishing Department of the Orthodox Church in Poland and the Department of Christian Education of the Diocese of Bialystok-Gdansk.

Since the fall of Communism in 1991, Fr. John has traveled throughout Eastern Europe at the invitation of the churches there, speaking and teaching on youth ministry and Christian education as well as organizing youth camps and conferences for SYNDESMOS, The World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth.

Father John is the Rector of St. Joseph Orthodox Church, Wheaton, IL, and the Managing Editor of The Orthodox Church, the official publication of the Orthodox Church in America.

His Grace Basil (Essey) (SVS '73), has been named secretary to the Episcopal Assembly of North and Central America. His Grace is the Bishop of Wichita and the Diocese of Mid-America in the Self-Ruled Antiochian Christian Archdiocese of North and South America. The SVS Board of Trustees bestowed the degree Doctor of Divinity honoris causa on His Grace at our May 2010 commencement ceremonies.

Founded in 2010, the assembly consists of all the active Orthodox bishops of North and Central America, representing multiple jurisdictions. It is the successor to SCOBA and has assumed responsibility for all SCOBA agencies and ministries. The primary purpose of the Assembly is to prepare the Orthodox of the region for an upcoming "Great and Holy Council" which will include all Orthodox bishops throughout the world. The secondary purpose of the Assembly is to provide a forum for the formation of a common pastoral vision in the region, examining various matters of common concern. Read a full interview about Bishop Basil's views on the Episcopal Assembly here.

As we approach Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, it is fitting that we consider once again the nature of the banquet to which we are invited.  As we will sing at Matins on Holy Thursday, we are called to ascend, with our minds on high, to enjoy the Master’s hospitality, the banquet of immortality in the upper chamber, receiving the words of the Word.  The nourishment that we are offered is a feast of theology; the food that we will feast on is the body and blood of the Word, the one who opens the Scriptures to show how they all speak of him and provide the means for entering into communion with him.

Our chapel here at St Vladimir’s Seminary is dedicated to Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom.  Although they each have a particular day of celebration, our patronal feast celebrates them together, as the Three Great Hierarchs.  The hymnography for the feast celebrates first of all their words, their words of theology, how they spoke about God.  The feast was conceived in the eleventh century as a feast of oratory: it was a celebration of those who found the words adequate to express the Word of God.  Such theology is a sacred art – the Byzantines even called it a mysterion, a sacrament – and it is charged with divinity.  It embraces and elevates the words of men to convey Jesus Christ, the Word of God.

The Church celebrates the Three Hierarchs as great examples of those who took on this work.  Having studied at Athens and other intellectual centers of the ancient world, they used all their God-given intellectual powers for the celebration of this divine task.  If we too wish be disciples, or, more accurately, “students” of Christ, we must take on this task of theology, learning Christ and being renewed in our minds.  And there are two very important aspects of this that we always need to bear in mind.

First, that theology is not an abstract discipline or specialized profession.  It is not speculation about God himself, separated from his own revelation or what his revelation says about us.  It is not taking all the things that humans might think of as divine – omnipotence, omniscience, immortality – and then projecting them into the heavens.  This approach creates nothing better than a “super-human”, with divine attributes, perhaps, but nothing more than the best we can humanly conceive.  Rather, theology begins and ends with the contemplation of the revelation of God, as he has shown himself to be.  Anything else is not theology at all, but fantasy.  We do theology when we contemplate God’s own revelation: God, whose strength and wisdom is shown in the weakness and the folly of the cross.  Christ himself, the Word of God, demonstrates his strength and power in this all-too-human way, by dying a shameful death on the cross, in humility and servitude – trampling down death by death – showing that true lordship is service.  This one is the image of the invisible God: in Christ the fullness of divinity dwells bodily – the whole fullness, such that divinity is found nowhere else and known by no other means.

All of us, therefore, all of the people of God, must focus on the transforming power of God revealed in Christ by the power of the Spirit.  As the Great Hierarchs affirmed, we cannot know what God is in himself, but we know how he acts.  We are invited to come to a proper appreciation of the work of God in Christ by the Spirit.  We are called to understand that Jesus Christ is indeed the Word of God, whom, by the same Spirit, we must convey in our words.  To recognize him as the Word of God is not a matter of human perception, but to find the words to convey him certainly demands the application of our minds.  It requires that we raise our minds to a properly theological level, that we may be transformed by the renewal of our minds.  As Great Lent prepares us for the Feast of Feasts, so also honing our mental skills should prepare us for the feast of theology.

The second point to remember is that the theology that we celebrate is a pastoral theology.  The hymns for the Great Hierarchs proclaim that the pastoral power of their theology has overthrown the illusory words of the orators, of those who play with words, speaking on a merely human level.  Their theology is pastoral, in that it shepherds us into true life.  It invites us to understand ourselves, and the whole of creation, in the light of God revealed in Christ by the Holy Spirit.  This is not simply a matter of asking “What Would Jesus Do?”  Nor is it simply a matter of being “pastoral,” as we often hear that word used today, in the sense of ministering to others on their own terms, enabling them to feel comfortable with themselves.  Rather, it is the challenge to transfigure our own lives by allowing God’s own transforming power to be at work within us.

This means that we must confront our own brokenness and weakness, for this is how God has shown his own strength: it is only in our weakness that God’s strength is made perfect.  And we will only have the strength to do this, we can do this only if we begin with God’s own revelation, if we begin with the theology taught to us by the Great Hierarchs.  We have to abandon what we humanly think divinity is, and to let God show us who and what he is.  We must begin, therefore, with the God who confronts us on the cross, who shows his love for us in this:  the love that he embodies.  Reflect on this: that when we are confronted with divine love in action, it is in the crucified Christ.  This reality reveals two things: how alienated we are from the call that brought us into existence, yet, at the same time, how much we are loved and forgiven.  In the light of Christ, we can begin both to understand our brokenness, our emptiness without him, and also to be filled with his love.  Theology shows us that the truth about God and the truth about ourselves always go together.

So, as we approach the Feast of Feasts, let us prepare ourselves to receive this revelation of God on his own terms.  Let us prepare ourselves for the challenge that his revelation presents, so that the Resurrection will transform us and renew our minds and we will find the words appropriate to offer the Word to others.

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Fr. John Behr (SVOTS ’97) is Dean and Professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. His early work was on issues of asceticism and anthropology, focusing on St. Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria. After spending almost a decade in the second century, Fr John began the publication of a series on the Formation of Christian Theology, and has now reached the fifth and sixth centuries. He has recently completed an edition and translation of, and introduction to, the remaining texts of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia. He has also published a synthetic presentation of the theology of the early centuries, focused on the mystery of Christ. He is also a passionate cyclist, often rescheduling family events around the Tour de France. Fr. John’s wife, a Tour de France enthusiast and armchair cyclist, teaches English at a nearby college, and their two sons and daughter are being taught to appreciate the finer points of French culture: the great “constructeurs” of the last century, Le Grande Boucle, and … cheese.

This article was originally published April 3, 2012.

Human suffering, no matter the form it takes, be it natural disasters or human-initiated evil, leads many to doubt the omnipotence of God. Catastrophes such as tsunamis, wars, or ethnic “cleansings,” whose human casualties number in the thousands or hundreds of thousands (or more), stretch our sensibilities so far that they become difficult to relate to or comprehend for a sustained period of time. But suffering cannot be relegated simply to the realm of the extraordinary (although such occurrences take place more frequently than we would like to imagine). Often, we deal with the pressures and loneliness of our own lives, pressures that tend to set a rather monotonous and annoying rhythm, but which impact us nonetheless. Many times, it is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back that leads to a “blow-up” on our part. When such incidents transpire, the questions that plague us become more personal in nature, leading people of faith to question the almightiness of God. (The atheist, or the non-theist, may have an easier time of things — if life is just a meaningless jumble of random happenings, then I need not see the hand of a higher power in the quagmire I find myself in at the moment.) We cry from the depths of our being, “Why was I not spared this once? Was I not struggling enough? If God is omnipotent, why did He allow this to take place? Surely He knows what I’m going through!”

No simple answer can or should be given to suffering. This short reflection only wants to draw attention to a particularly curious passage in the Scriptures that might serve as a guide in our quest to understand the meaning of God’s almightiness: “At a lodging place on the way the Lord met [Moses] and sought to kill him” (Exodus 4:24). This verse comes on the heels of Moses’ great commission, when God asks Moses to present himself to Pharaoh on behalf of His people and plead with him to free the Israelites so that they can journey to the wilderness and offer sacrifices to their God. Yahweh warns Moses that the Egyptian king will refuse to listen, so Moses is to perform all the miracles God has taught him in order to soften Pharaoh’s heart. The next thing we know, the Lord seeks to murder His spokesman. Yahweh may sometimes seem like a capricious deity in the Old Testament, but He is rarely irrational. He either sends Moses on a suicide mission, which Moses successfully avoids; or, more likely, there is something about this undertaking that allows Moses to come so close to the truth of who God is that death must be faced as a real possibility. It is not that Abba wishes for His servants to die (and, by extention, for His creation to suffer), but that in a fallen world that resists to the point of violence the Word of God, those who agree to be His earthen vessels choose a perilous path, fraught with sufferings spanning the entire spectrum of human experience (physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual — and even death).

Abba’s omnipotence is often understood to mean His ability to do anything He desires.[1] Such a statement, rather than stemming from a Scriptural mind, seems to be a projection of our own misguided imagination and our own self-centeredness. It is we who wish to do as we please, not a loving Creator who refused to abandon His creatures to the grave. That Abba is almighty means that there is no situation in which He is not present or relevant, no situation that will make Him turn away from us, or cause Him to retract His love from us, or recant His commitment to us and our freedom. There is no circumstance that stumps Him or intimidates Him or frustrates His plans. There is simply nothing that God cannot transform, so long as our hearts remain of flesh.

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Andreea Bălan (SVOTS ’10) was born and raised in Romania, moving to the U.S. when she was 16 years old. After graduating from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM with a degree in liberal arts, she went to study theology at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. Upon completion of her degree in 2010, she relocated to Dallas, TX where she serves as the youth director for a local Orthodox church in the Antiochian Archdiocese.

This article was originally published March 21, 2012.

A homily delivered in the Three Hierarchs Chapel at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary on the Feast of the Holy Apostle Onesimus of the Seventy (Wednesday, February 15, 2012).

What does it mean to be an Apostle?

What kind of person is an Apostle?

Being pious Orthodox we hold Apostles in high esteem. They are writers of gospels, and epistles. Their proclamation has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the universe. Their icons adorn the walls of the sanctuary. Apostles are important, and famous, and holy. And when people are regarded as important and famous and holy, we have a tendency to regard them as distant and exotic. Like famous artists or historical figures, like Bach and Beethoven, or Michelangelo, or Abraham Lincoln.

And at some level it is safer this way. Isn’t it?

If the apostles are unusual and extraordinary, then we really can’t be like them, which sort of lets us off the hook. Because being an apostle is hard work. An apostle does not get to sit around. Apostle means the one who is “sent out” If you are an apostle, Christ entrusts you with His teaching, he seals you with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and he sends you out to preach the good news, in season and out of season, to any and all people, using whatever means available, so that some might be saved. Now that’s not an easy job description, not to mention many of the apostles suffered great persecution and died as martyrs. So it is perhaps rather comforting to say to ourselves,

“I try to be a good Christian, but I’m no apostle.”

But if the apostles are exotic and distant, then the Christ who they preached becomes exotic and distant. If the apostles’ work and ministry is something remote and inaccessible, then Christ who sent them becomes remote and inaccessible. Yet we know that that is not who Christ is. He is the Son of God, who took flesh and became man, he died a painful humiliating death on the Cross, he endured three days in the tomb, and he was raised from the dead. Christ did all of that, so that we might be reconciled to God, so that we might be united to God, so that in Christ we might never, ever be alone.

So what does it mean to be an apostle?

Who were the apostles?

We know that the apostle Paul violently persecuted the Church in his younger days. And Christ chose him to be an apostle. Today we hear about the Apostle Peter who famously denied Jesus three times, publicly abandoning Christ in his darkest hour, swearing that he did not know Jesus. Yet Christ forgave Peter, and sent him out as an apostle.

Today we celebrate the life of Onesimus, one of the Seventy Apostles. Onesimus was a slave in Phrygia, which is in modern day Turkey. At some point Onesimus did something to offend his master and fearing severe punishment, he fled to Rome but ended up in prison. In the Roman Empire, runaway slaves were dealt with extremely harshly. But in Rome, Onesimus met St. Paul who was also in prison. I suppose we could say that Onesimus was something of a captive audience, but in the course of their relationship Onesimus was baptized. St. Paul then wrote a letter to Onesimus’ master Philemon  and in the gentlest terms, St. Paul implores Philemon to receive Onesimus in a spirit of Christian love, not as a runaway slave, but as a brother in Christ. This letter became part of the New Testament. It is said that Philemon not only received Onesimus in love, but sent him out to serve the in the Apostolic work of St. Paul and the others.

So what does it take to be an apostle?

An apostle can be a persecutor, a betrayer, and even a runaway slave. But ultimately, an apostle is a man, or a woman (we can’t forget Nina the enlightener of Georgia and equal to the apostles). An apostle is a man or woman who hears God’s call and goes to serve specific people. Christ never sends apostles to places; He sends them to serve people. Of course, in a formal sense, there are the 12 and the 70.

But in a real sense we are all apostles.

We have all heard the teaching of Christ, we have been sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and now Christ sends us out to do his work.

Where is he sending you?

It could be to a remote international mission field, or an old dying parish in New England, or a mission in the southwest. But none of us are going there today. Today Christ is sending us to our workplace, or to the classroom, or to our home, or to the hospital, or to the CVS, or to the grocery store. And in all of those places we will meet people with hopes and dreams and fears, and Christ sends us to them.

Today, like St. Onesimus, be an apostle to the people you meet. Bring them the love, and mercy and joy of Jesus Christ. This is what it means to be an apostle, and it is a vocation for all of us.

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Fr. Sergius Halvorsen (SVOTS ’96) received his M.Div. from St. Vladimir’s Seminary and completed his doctoral dissertation at Drew University in 2002. From 2000 to 2011 he taught at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell Connecticut, where he also served as Director of Distance Learning. He was ordained to the priesthood in February 2004, and currently serves on the faculty of SVOTS as Associate Professor of Homiletics and Rhetoric.

This article was originally published February 16, 2012.

These two words immediately call to mind a story about Elijah (1 Kings 19:11-13). We all know the story. Elijah goes up a mountain to converse with God and there’s an earthquake, fire, and what sounds like hurricane-type winds. Elijah looks for God in all of these things, but He’s not there. After all of these things, Elijah hears what is described as a “still, small voice.” That’s where we find God.

I feel I must give the following disclaimer: I am not good at practicing stillness. If I’m in the car, the radio is playing. If I’m at my desk – including the time spent writing this – I’m listening to iTunes. I know this isn’t the best way to live. I know we are supposed to be still, spend time in reflection and quiet prayer and have had many chances to hear it. I first met Dr. Al Rossi when I was working at the Antiochian Village during my summer break in college. He came and spent time with us during training week and taught us the importance of “more quiet prayer.” As I continued to encounter Dr. Rossi at retreats and later during classes at SVS, I found it was a constant theme. He would start and end all of his talks, retreats, workshops and classes with a few minutes of quiet prayer saying something like “let’s take a moment to sit in silence to recognize that we are in the holy presence of God.” I must admit, it was a form of torture to me.

Here’s my elaborate excuse as to why this was so torturous: hearing “be still” stirs up negative and even rebellious feelings for me. As a kid, I was often told to “sit still” in church, at school, at home, in the car…pretty much everywhere. Of course, it would only make me want to do the opposite: stand up and jump around. Now I’m almost 30 and, unfortunately, being told to sit still continues to have the same effect.

While at seminary, my father confessor suggested that I take five minutes a day to read one Psalm and then sit in stillness and quiet. The plan was to go through the entire book of Psalms then repeat it. I made it to Psalm 3. The bookmark is still there waiting for me to pick up where I left off. Why was that so difficult? What is it about stillness and silence that is so uncomfortable for me?

My thought is this: it’s often much easier to make excuses as to why we shut out God – like the somewhat elaborate one above – than it is to seek Him out. It is easier to live in our own universe than it is to endure the discomfort of sitting still and consciously quieting what often feels like monkeys jumping around inside my head. Some of this stems from fear. We fear encountering God in a real way and possibly finding out things we don’t want to find out or, more realistically, things we know to be true and don’t want to believe or follow. It is much more comfortable to stay hidden by the walls we construct than to face the reality that we are constantly falling short.

Very soon we begin the Lenten period. We must go beyond our fears and move outside our comfort zone. We need to stop fearing the “still, small voice.” We need to look for it, search it out, and, having heard, follow. Let us take this time to refocus our lives, cut through our bogus excuses and focus on being in the holy presence of God.

So, all together, “let’s end as we began and recognize that right here, right now, we are in the holy presence of God.”

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Greg Abdalah (SVOTS ’08) is the Director of Youth and Family Ministries at St. George Cathedral in Worcester, MA.  He graduated from SVOTS in 2008 with a Master of Divinity and currently sits on the SVOTS Alumni Board.

This article was originally published February 3, 2012.

Reading the bulletin in Church this morning, I noticed that next Sunday is already Zacchaeus Sunday, the signal that Great Lent is soon upon us. How did that happen? The way the liturgical year works, we fast, then we feast, then almost immediately we fast again. There is almost no “normal time.” Probably the single most important thing to me in my life as a Christian is going to Church. Whether it’s a fast (struggling to stand there and pay attention) or a feast (joyous, peaceful, balm for my soul), hearing the words of God and receiving the Eucharist is what makes everything else in life – every single other thing – bearable and even, mostly, good. When I can’t go to Church, well, let’s just say that crankiness is inevitably around the corner. To go to Church is like breathing.

I can think of only two negative experiences I have ever had in Church. I will tell you about one of them, but first I’ll share a little about myself. For better or worse, I always make things too complicated. My husband will tell you that I am not an “analyzer,” I’m a “synthesizer,” by which I think he means that I far prefer to connect everything all up together – all my experiences, thoughts, emotions, people, things, places, everything. While other people are great at focusing in on one thing – and are great at getting things done! – my mind is scattered all over the place trying to pull everything together. So one Holy Week, I was so happy to be in Church every day, because I know that only there I can find genuine holiness and beauty. But this time, there were too many words. You know how it is during Holy Week. You barely finish one service, and you are on to the next one, and every service has hymn after hymn after glorious (or, in the case of Holy Week, gloriously heart-wrenching) hymn. So many words, teaching me, exhorting me, drawing my heart one way and another, putting all the images and experiences and words of the disciples and the people of Jerusalem, Judas, and the Lord himself, in front of me to contemplate. It was too much. I simply could not make it all fit. While God knows, and the wisdom of the Church knows how it all synthesizes together, this was utterly beyond me.

At the time I thought this was such a negative thing, but as another Lent comes upon us, I am actually looking forward to it, services and multitudes of words and all. It will be a time to fast – to give up my “need” to put every last puzzle piece in place, to make everything fit. Giving up my need will then lead to the feast of joy that is Pascha, when the whole of creation, down to the darkest corners of the pit of Hades, will see Who it is that is victoriously in charge.

Recently I have learned that it is not we who inherit the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit inherits us. We are grafted in, we are nourished and cultivated by God to bear fruit unto eternal life. It’s His work on us – in us – accustoming us to bear His Spirit as He takes us into Himself. The work of Christ in His Holy Passion and Resurrection from the dead can be no other than the work of the Son of God made man, ascending the Cross, descending to Hades to recover the lost sheep, and then ascending into heaven to bring His creation to the Father. It’s strictly unfathomable, and yet it’s all given to us when we go to Church.

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Tracy Gustilo (SVOTS ’13)

This article was originally published January 24, 2012.

There’s something very “fruitful” about this idea: Bloom where God plants you. It really illustrates the drastic difference between success that belongs to you and fruit of the Kingdom that is produced when you truly see yourself as God’s plant… His creation… one through whom He can get His work done, if you offer yourself to be used. The simple, not easy, way this is accomplished is by truly recognizing that wherever you are, you are Christ’s ambassador. Whoever you are with… family or strangers… that is your community. Your job, wherever you are, is to see and love the people you are with, responding to their needs that you open yourself up to see… loving them fully without condition. It is by living as a citizen of the Kingdom and seeing your life as an offering that Christ’s healing will be brought to the people that He puts in front of you. And, consequently, your own poverty will be revealed to you and be healed as well.

St. Basil the Great poses these questions: “Did you not come forth naked from the womb and will you not return naked to the earth? Where then did you obtain your belongings? If you say that you acquired them by chance, then you deny God, since you neither recognize your Creator, nor are you grateful to the one who gave these things to you. But if you acknowledge that they were given to you by God, then tell me, for what purpose did you receive them?” If we do acknowledge that the stuff we have is from God, then why do we have what we have? Why would God give unequally to those He values equally? The more I experience community with the poor, the more it becomes clear what the answer is: community with the poor. St. Basil continues to discuss how the poor should benefit from what the rich are given and the rich should benefit from the patient endurance of the poor. The reason we have unequal amounts of stuff is so that we come together! And because we are literally spending time with Him, the one who equates Himself with the hungry and naked, the joy and healing is not able to be expressed in words. It’s not the “feel good” thing that people talk about when they “give back.” It’s the true joy of the Kingdom that comes when His people are gathered together around His table, serving each other and feeding each other in multiple ways.

The wisdom and love of God is so amazing to me. He doesn’t just want you to come together with those you can provide for so that their needs are met. He wants you to be free from yourself as well! He wants you to focus on others so that you are free from your desires and worries. He wants you to see that He plants you where you are at any moment with the people you are with for their sake. You will experience real fulfillment and come to know your true self if you look to satisfy others. If you exist in the delusion that trying to satisfy yourself will comfort you and lead you to who you are, you will likely live in the misery of your own constant desire for what you don’t have. Last month I met Ashley at a gathering of people who serve breakfast to the homeless community every Saturday morning at an outdoor park in Detroit. As Ashley was coming through the food line, she hugged every person and thanked them, sharing with them that God loves them. We later had the pleasure of hearing her story. What she told my friends and I stunned us. She said with a smile, “God made me homeless about a year ago.” After everyone left the park, we saw that Ashley was staying.  She told us that she likes to stay and make sure all the trash is picked up. Bloom where God plants you.

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Katrina Bitar (SVOTS ’09) has been doing youth ministry since 2001. She has been the Director of the St. Nicholas Camping Program in LA since 2003, and is currently the Director of the YES Program (Youth Equipped to Serve) of FOCUS North America.

This article was originally published January 17, 2012.

People love to follow rules! Right from the start — from our youth up, we have followed rules. Even as kids, we seemed to thrive on rules. We would even make games out of rule following. Did any of you play follow the leader? The whole point of the game is to follow rules, and kids love it!

As adults, we take rule following to the extreme. We have laws to protect people, customs to protect the status quo, and sometimes we have rules ‘just because.’ One set of customs told us each what to wear today. A slightly broader ordinance told us we had to wear some clothing. Etiquette tells us not to slurp our soup at lunch. And those of us who drive are familiar with a whole book of traffic laws.

These laws and rules and customs support our culture. Like the wooden frame of a house being constructed, law is the framework of our society. The rules outline how we all live together, how we all agree to interact with each other.

God gave the Law to Israel for this very reason. The Law of Moses brings God’s children together as one culture — one people. Authority, purity, sacred places and sacred spaces, tithes and sacrifice — all of these commands, all of these precepts outline how a society lives together in God’s presence. And the Law is the framework of God’s covenant — God’s promise to remember us, and our promise to remember God.

We believe this, but at some point, we forget our place. We focus in on the promise — on God’s blessings as rewards for our obedience. We try to earn these blessings, to earn God’s love and approval through our willingness to follow his commands. But the moment we think we understand how to earn blessings, we become the judges. We become the administrators of the law, and we interpret the law to best serve our purposes. And other people become a threat to our blessings. Suddenly, we’re no longer neighbors, but adversaries. The rules and laws no longer unite us, but divide us. Now we’re not working together. We’re competing against each other.

We play with laws and ordinances, and even with commandments and traditions like a poker game. Constantly trading cards, betting and raising, bluffing and calling each other’s bluff, exploiting the rules to our advantage. Making sure that we get the rewards, even at somebody else’s expense.

Does anybody remember the company Enron?  The most hated company of the last decade. They used their authority to hijack the power grid. They blackmailed state governments with rolling blackouts, taking taxpayer money in return. And they spent their employees’ pensions on their personal riches, until the whole company buckled under the greed of just a handful of executives who were drunk with authority.

Ponzi schemes, fraud, mafias and drug lords. With the wave of a pen or the click of a trigger, any of us can take a law we all agree on — a law meant to help us interact — we take that law and use it competitively. We use it to our advantage.

God’s covenant is not a private agreement. The Law of Moses promises eternal life to all humanity. It’s our way to paradise, and it’s available to everybody. We know this. We believe this, and still we figure out ways to abuse and exploit the ordinances of our Lord. Just as Enron used the power grid, we try to use God’s promise of paradise to our advantage, and to our neighbor’s disadvantage. When we imagine ourselves in heaven, we each have somebody who is not in that dream. All too easily, we can imagine paradise without somebody.

What a horrible thing to say, right? That we could imagine paradise without a person?! And yet we do so constantly.  Sure, we don’t set out to think these evil thoughts. We set out to help people. We know that God forgives sinners, and that God loves everybody, so we just want people to change, to repent. To be saved.

Because we know that all people will be judged by God. And as students of the word, and students of the law, we know the law by which we are judged. We have heard the commandments — all of God’s “do’s and don’ts.” From Moses and the Prophets and Jesus and Paul. We know that we cannot relax them. Today’s text tells us this. So we have to make people understand — we have to help people, get them to somehow hear the same law we’re hearing. And oh, do we know how to manipulate people with this idea of sin.

Sexuality is one of those enduring examples of church authority. Our way of “helping the lost sheep.” Whether its preference or promiscuity, we comment on the disparity between what we see in the world and what we read in the scriptures. Some of us preach. Some of us write. Some of us pastor, and some of us keep our mouths shut and do the judging in our hearts and in our minds. But every one of us has rendered a judgment against another human being.

Our Lord has come today to knock us off our little thrones of judgment, because we’ve got it all wrong. Christ cannot imagine paradise without us. He can’t imagine paradise without us, so he doesn’t want us imagining paradise without each other. Because we are not the judge.

Our Lord meets us today in the midst of our legal competition, in the midst of our wicked card game of rules and customs and rewards and punishments. Christ takes Moses’ seat on the mountain, takes his place as the law-giver — and he gathers us all around for another familiar game of cards. And this time he’s the dealer.

There is only one round of cards being dealt, and the stakes are very high.  Christ tells us all that “not one iota of the law will pass away” (Matt 5:18). We like to judge by the law, so the Author of the law can show us how it’s done.  Jesus offers a radically intense reading of the commandments. “You have heard in the law…dot dot dot… but I tell you even more” (Matt 5:21f, 27f, 33f).  He teaches us that hating our neighbor is the same as murder (vv 21–6). He tells us that looking lustfully at another person is the same as adultery (vv 27–32). The Law structures and governs and judges not only our actions, but also our emotions and our thoughts.

All of the chips are in now, and we’re starting to see that we have a lousy hand of cards for this final round. As Christ has now explained the law of Moses, it’s impossible to follow! Game over, the house wins. Every one of us — all human beings will fall short under this law. Woe to us, scribes and Pharisees. None of us will be blameless in a judgment. None of us will be righteous by following the letter of the law. In fact, he tells us “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you will not get into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:20).

But suddenly this isn’t the same sleazy backroom poker game we know and love. Something more is going on here. Christ unexpectedly unites himself with — well, with the losers.  He blesses those who can’t follow the laws, who struggle with rules, who aren’t the most competitive. The outcasts, the downtrodden, the hurtin’ people. Christ unites himself to these people, because they are his creation. They are his chosen people. Long ago he promised to remember them all, and today he honors this promise. Our Lord remembers those we would just as soon forget. And he blesses them (Matt 5:3–12). He can’t imagine paradise without them.

Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Christ cares about his children. He can’t imagine paradise without any of us.

And if the people that we would just as soon forget are an image of our Lord…well that’s bad news for our exclusive ideas of heaven. Now, if we imagine paradise without each other, we’re imagining paradise without Christ. And paradise without the messiah — well, there’s another name for that place.

But instead of beating us at our own game of judgment, our Lord does something completely unexpected. He lays down his hand of cards and walks away from the game table. He reveals the law in a new light. This new righteousness our Lord speaks of. He’s not saying try harder, be craftier, or hang in there. He’s telling us to stop playing this silly game.

Today Christ instructs us to love each other, because he loves us. This is the great law of the law-giver; the great lesson given by the teacher. He teaches us on the mountain, and he shows us on the cross. “I can’t imagine paradise without you.” And when we return on Easter Sunday to hear to hear Jesus’ second sermon on the mount — we witness the resurrection — the perfect display of Love. The Father’s love for his Son, and our Lord’s love for his creation.

Love is action and love is a gift freely given. Throughout his ministry, Christ shows us how to give this gift of love to each other. Every time he healed a person or cast out a demon, or fed a group of people, he brought them back into his community. He singlehandedly dissolved all of the exclusion we had mistakenly created. He tears down our walls, he breaks our defenses. He takes our rules and our laws and our customs that divide us, that make us unique, and he unites us once again as his creation.

Christ waits for all of us in paradise — in the resurrection. And as we journey through life in hope of the resurrection, we help each other along the way. And we help each other through God’s blessings.

Because God’s blessings are gifts, not rewards. And we are stewards of these gifts, not recipients. As stewards, we share our blessings with others — with the least of the brethren (cf. Matt 25:31–46). Those hurting people that our Lord has recently blessed, the ones who have nobody else to look after them.

And what better place to start caring for each other, to start helping each other, to start loving each other than through basic needs. One of the great fathers of the church said, “to a hungry person, God is a loaf of bread.” As we give of our possessions, our time and our talents to those who need them, we offer hope. We offer hope in God’s promise. Hope in paradise. Hope in the Resurrection. Hope in our Lord. Every time one of us gives a coat and a cup of soup to a homeless person, both people suddenly understand Christ’s love. The scales fall out of our eyes, and we realize something. We realize that we can no longer imagine paradise without this other person. These loving interactions with each other are glimpses into the kingdom. The fiery red sky before the brilliant sunrise.

Our Lord’s great lesson is that we love each other. We give to those in need. We offer our strengths and our blessings to those who need them. But the least of Christ’s brethren, the weaker brother or sister — they not only live somewhere else, in shelters or slums. In fact, they are not even outside of this room. There is no “they” but only “we.”

So as we pause for a moment from our busyness, from our anxiety, from our theology — as we stop playing poker with all our rules and customs and expectations, we encounter our Lord. We encounter our Lord as we pause to ask the person sitting beside us how they’re doing today. Or maybe even “what’s your name?” We encounter Christ the moment we honestly say to one another “I can’t imagine paradise without you.”

Christ gives us each other to prepare us for the kingdom of heaven, through our love for one another. As we care for each other, little by little, and day by day, we come to understand the depth of Christ’s love. Today he has opened his law to us once again. Today he has renewed the covenant, and today he has invited us to his heavenly kingdom. Today we rejoice, because Christ has said to us all “I can’t imagine paradise without you.” AMEN

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Jason Ketz (SVOTS ’12) is a third year seminarian at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.

This article was originally published January 13, 2012.