I would like to offer one further remark — and it may simply reflect a different perspective: I have become somewhat sensitive of late to the fact that the cross is the center and sine qua non of Christian faith. Chris mentioned the Lord’s passion (which is the cross); it could have been a bit more central to the entire homily. The cross is the sacrament from which every other sacrament flows. You see this in icons of the crucifixion: A cup capturing the blood and water flowing from the Lord’s side. (This image of baptism and eucharist — of the church as sacrament — represents a timeless connection rather than an historical event. The crucified Lord eternally gives birth to the church in the timeless reality of the cross.) I would have nailed the fact that the Lord’s cross is the medicine (and sometimes, we don’t get a spoonful of sugar to make it go down more easily).

Sometimes we speak easily of the church and theology without referring it back to the cross. However, the earliest patristic writers, as well as many of the most important through the centuries, always took the cross as their starting point and referred to it constantly. The more that our teaching becomes able to stand apart from the cross (which is the revelation of God enfleshed), the less it resembles patristic teaching. A theology which can stand without the cross is not the gospel and it is not really Christian.

In closing, I reemphasize that I really liked this homily. However, I think that the cross is crucial to Christian teaching and thought it important enough to mention. In some ways, this merely reflects a different perspective. I am emphasizing this crucial element of Christian teaching partly due to the deep vale where my own journey has taken me. However, part of it is also a shift in thinking spearheaded by Fr John Behr, now the dean at St Vladimir’s Seminary, where I am a student. I highly recommend his book, The Mystery of Christ. To get an idea of his central thesis, read this article: “The Paschal Foundations of Christian Theology.”

…actual behavior …distinguished from the arguments… [put] forward for the benefit of the naïve and gullible, represent the real aims and objectives of the homosexual rights movement. … In other words, if you support what is now described in euphemistic terms as ‘the blessing of same-sex unions,’ in practice you are supporting the abolition of the entire Christian sexual ethic, and its substitution with an unrestricted, laissez faire, free sexual market.

To some of my readers, that thesis may sound like the ravings of a homophobe. By the time we get to this thesis, though, Mr Lee has already let us know that he’s an insider. “By the time I lived in Austin, I had been thinking of myself as a gay man for almost 20 years,” he writes in the second paragraph. Lee’s article is entirely anecdotal, and it may be a sophisticated, extended ad hominem against GLBT[Q] rights activists. However, it seems to me that his perspective may not be isolated or eccentric, and his conclusion should be answered, if not accepted.

Lee argues that he never found monogamous gay couples. I know two. My experience is biased (both of the couples I know are family members). I am asking several friends, family members and acquaintances to comment on this article with their experience — anonymously if necessary. Is the gay subculture as Lee describes it? How should a reader understand his thesis that monogamous homosexuality is merely a front for indiscriminate sexual license, the real goal?

Please read the article and comment on the article. Uncharitable comments will be deleted. Anonymous comments are welcomed if charitable.

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him find what makes him happy and take up his joy and follow me. For whoever would save his happiness is blessed, but whoever loses his joy for my sake and the gospel’s will be cast out into eternal darkness where the fire never ceases and the worm never dies. For what does it profit a man to gain his soul and forfeit his happiness? For what can a man give in return for his joy? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my happiness in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the happiness of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God coming with joy.”

Today’s hymn:
Troparion of the resurrection

O Lord, save your people, and make joyful your inheritance. Grant happiness to the people who are always happy, and by your resurrection preserve your habitation.

O Lord and master of my life! Dispel from me the spirit of discouragement and slothfulness, of ambition and vain talk!
Prostration.

Instead, give me the spirit of prudence and humility, of patience and charity.
Prostration.

Yes, my king and Lord, let me look at my own sins and refrain from judging others: For you are bless’d unto ages of ages, amen.
Prostration.

Then, with three lesser reverences:

O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!
O God, in your mercy wipe out my sins!
I have sinned very often, Lord; forgive me!

Prayer text copyright © The Monks of New Skete.

But that psalm ends by underscoring the psalmist’s commitment to God in spite of being abandoned: But my soul shall live for him and my children shall serve him. And the next psalm begins with the answer to the question: The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I need. Even though he seems to ignore our cries, leaving us in darkness, he is present. Even if I walk through the valley of darkness, I fear nothing: you are there with your rod and staff, and with these you console me.

Even when he seems to be silent, he is still present, and he loves us even when we doubt him.

Nine years ago, a tiny transformation occurred. Christ the Life-giver Orthodox Church in Nicholasville, Ky., formerly a mission of the Evangelical Orthodox Church (EOC), entered the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). Unlike other parishes that entered at the same time, every single member of Christ the Life-giver chose to remain with the parish in its transition to the OCA, an amazing detail that is sometimes forgotten. In the days that followed, a new name (Saint Athanasius) appeared in the window, and the layman who was formerly the priest would again be ordained to lead the tiny band of pilgrims. To better understand the place of that decisive moment in the history of the parish, I present it here through the lens of my own life.

My story begins in 1995, when I entered the Roman Catholic Church. Before that, I was an evangelical, and I continued to attend an evangelical college. One of my art professors began reading about Eastern Orthodoxy and attending prayers held in the living room of a nearby seminarian, David Rucker. Rucker was studying missiology. He served in Hong Kong, and he was frustrated over inadequate responses to ancestor veneration in Asian cultures. He believed that Eastern Orthodoxy could provide a positive answer for Asians. My professor’s interest piqued my own, and I began attending the Sunday evening prayers. In the fall of 1995, Rucker began holding catechism classes. He invited me to attend, and I did.

In 1996, Rucker’s doctoral thesis advisor unexpectedly died, and he faced the prospect of completely rewriting his thesis on ancestor veneration in Chinese culture. When he discussed returning to Hong Kong with his missions board, he realized that Orthodox practices had become more than an academic investigation. The evangelical mission board forbade him to use the sign of the cross or icons in his ministry. They required the impossible. Rucker resigned and responded positively to pleas to form a mission in Kentucky. Together they named the new mission Christ the Life-giver, because now they experienced him as one who gives life.

At that time, I was still faithfully attending mass in the Roman Catholic Church. It frustrated me that the EOC was not a canonical Orthodox group. To grasp why I eventually joined the EOC, understanding their unique vision is essential. The people of the EOC abandoned church-as-usual. Church-as-usual looks like this: You go to church on Sundays, or maybe two or three times a week; maybe there’s a monthly or weekly fellowship in there. By contrast, the New Testament demonstrates a church that is infinitely more than that. The people of the EOC hungered after that New Testament church.

We routinely hear the story of Christians studying the primitive church and becoming progressively more traditional and often eventually joining a church with an apostolic lineage, such as the Catholic or Orthodox churches. A community vision set the EOC apart for me. They abandoned worship of themselves for lives together centered on Jesus Christ in his church. They started communities of young Christians radically imitating what they read in the New Testament, emptying themselves for each other: living together, sharing with each other, and generally enjoying the communion of life in Christ. They bought houses in the same neighborhoods so that they could be within walking distance of the church, both the physical temple and the living temples of each other’s lives. When I saw this in a concrete community, living and worshipping together, radically putting the orthodox and catholic faith into practice, I was hooked.

And, like many, the services of holy week and Pascha pushed me over the edge. In the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church, I experienced beautiful paschal worship. In Indianapolis, however, I saw a whole community center its life around the worship of the church. It was very common to walk to church. As we walked, we joined others who were also walking to the same service. The worship was beautiful. Between services, people spent time with each other, talking about the cross and the resurrection. I longed for that community life.

In 1997, I joined Christ the Life-giver, but I never stopped pushing toward union with the wider Orthodox Church. I felt it was essential for our shared life to be authentically Orthodox. We already drank deeply from the fathers and from recent Orthodox writings; we needed to take the next step. As the world headed into a new millennium, a crisis in leadership demonstrated just how far we were from the episcopal governance of the Orthodox faith. The retirement of our bishop opened the door for us to make that next step.

In 2001, after nearly five years together, Christ the Life-giver decided in council to petition Archbishop Dmitri (Royster), then the ruling bishop of the OCA’s Diocese of the South, to accept us into communion. Initially the diocese gave us a date for our chrismations slightly after Pascha of 2002. It would be difficult, but we accepted this in obedience to our new father. In January 2002, however, the leaders of our mother church in Indianapolis met with members of the OCA’s Department of Evangelism, which included key figures from the Diocese of the South’s missions and evangelism team. After this meeting, the diocese advanced our date to February 2, the Meeting of the Lord. “You’re already more Orthodox than we initially thought,” they said, “And we can’t bear to make you go through Great Lent and Pascha without the eucharist!”

Of the day itself, my memories blurred, so much was going on. I recall we baptized one or two children. The chrismations took so long, there were so many of us, that we ended up kneeling on the floor for parts of it. I also recall it was a Saturday. We celebrated the divine liturgy together; the next day we gathered for a non-eucharistic prayer service — it may have been matins or typica; I don’t remember. I do recall the memories of that Lent, though: Finally approaching the chalice with Orthodox Christians at our sister parishes in Lexington, with whom I had worshipped so many times before, unable to participate in table fellowship.

A tiny transformation! Yet in the lives of every member of the parish, past and present, the resulting transfiguration defies description. In the last nine years, our parish witnessed many changes as it grew under the patronage of St Athanasius. Yet it remains committed to life centered on and committed to the community of the life-giving Lord Jesus Christ. We continually learn to love one another concretely. We continually grow in our common daily and eucharistic worship. Raise a toast to our first fifteen years together, with hopes and prayers for many, many more!

In some Western customs, pious Christians considered it bad luck for Christmas decorations to be up after Candlemas. This indicates that they perceived the Christmas season (as distinct from the twelve day feast itself) to continue until Candlemas. Christmas decor was acceptable and could remain in place up to (and perhaps including) this celebration; after Candlemas, the Christmas season definitely ended, and people boxed their decorations for another year.

Yesterday I dined in a nearby International House of Pancakes. Among the ordinary songs of the Muzak playlist, holiday tunes occasionally still played. None of them were Christmas carols, I noted, but it was still interesting to hear an establishment such as Muzak (or a surrogate music service) continuing to play holiday music over a week after New Year’s Day. Usually, secular marketers have boxed up and forgotten everything Christmas before the twelve days are even half-way over.

I grant that the holiday tunes selected were far from Christmas carols: they included Amy Grant’s cover of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and Wilson Philips’ “Hey Santa,” among others. However, I smiled as I mused that it perhaps could be a start towards extending the holiday season into January rather than into October.

Merry Christmas!

I grew up in the West, and so Advent was an important part of the preparation for Christmas.^[1] The Advent wreath, Advent calendars, singing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus” — these memories burn in mind like a flame as shining examples of what Advent means.

Advent comes from the Latin adventus, meaning “coming.” “Beginning the Church’s liturgical year, Advent is the season leading up to the celebration of Christmas. The Advent season is a time of preparation that directs our hearts and minds to Christ’s second coming at the end of time and also to the anniversary of the Lord’s birth on Christmas,” according to the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The second coming of Christ is the focus of Advent because the readings and proper hymnography of the church remind the faithful of the yearning of suffering Israel, as well as the imminent coming of the Lord. The burning desire of the old covenant saints burns in our hearts as we long for the coming of the Lord.

The first Sunday of Advent always follows the last Sunday of the church year, the Solemnity of Christ the King. Prior to the liturgical reforms of the twentieth century, the gospel for Christ the King led directly into the yearning of Advent (Mt 24.15–35): “And then the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven; then, too, all the peoples of the earth will beat their breasts; and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” (v. 30, NJB)^[2] The King is coming: Be ready! It is the perfect prelude to the penitence of the coming season of preparation.

The scripture readings now in use in the Roman Catholic Church focus on the Lord as “the coming one.” Adding (or recovering) an Old Testament reading prior to the gradual psalm, these readings are all drawn from Isaiah. Yes, there is the obvious choice, Is 7.10–14: “the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel” (v. 14, NAB). But this reading doesn’t come until the fourth Sunday, when Advent is almost over and Christmas almost here!

The first Sunday’s Isaiah reading reminds us that “in days to come,” Jerusalem will draw people from every nation, and “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again” (Is 2.1–5, v. 4). Paul’s letter to the Romans reminds them that it is time to wake up: “The night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Ro 13.11–14, v. 12). The gospel is the passage immediately following the one formerly for Christ the King (quoted above): Mt 24.37–44. “As it was in the days of Noah,” says Jesus to his disciples, “so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” The Lord is coming, and you will not know when it will happen. It will be sudden and unexpected.

The gospel of the second Sunday continues this theme by focusing on John the Baptizer’s message. “It was of him that the prophet Isaiah had spoken when he said: A voice of one crying out in the desert, Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths” (Mt 3.1–12, v. 3). “The wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid” (Is 11.1–10, v. 6). The hyperbole has become so trite that we forget its power: The wolf and the lamb dine together? The leopard and the newly-born goat sleep together? Lions eat hay? Absurdities, all of them: But if we picture it, it is exactly that kind of peace that the coming of the Lord will bring. And we must prepare for it; that’s what this season is about.

So, the question that I keep coming back to is this: Is the Christmas fast observed by the Eastern churches anything at all like the season of Advent? Let’s put aside the entire sentimental question of devotions and externals. The East knows nothing of an Advent wreath! Advent carols? Let us instead focus on the meaning of the seasons as represented in the liturgical texts.

The fast itself begins forty days before Christmas, on November 15, two weeks before the beginning of Advent. Liturgically, however, the first change is at the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, when we first hear the Canon of Christmas. Other than this, there is no liturgical change — it’s all “Sundays after Pentecost” — until the Sunday of the Forefathers, two Sundays before Christmas. Liturgically, this day is all about the old covenant saints. We are reminded here and there of Christmas celebration, but it is just that: A reminder that the annual commemoration of the Lord’s birth in the flesh is near. The one mention of “come” is not a reference to the coming Lord, but a mention of the Persian magicians in the canon for the prefestive period: “Magi, kings of the East, come to see him” (Ode IV).

The one glimmer of the coming Lord, though, is significant: At the epistle for the Sunday of the Forefathers. “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory,” it begins, “Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col 3.4–11, vv. 4, 5, NKJV). But the gospel is a parable about the rejection of the Lord’s invitation: “‘Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say to you that none of those men who were invited shall taste my supper” (Lk 14.16–24, vv. 23, 24, NKJV).

The gospel of the Sunday before the Nativity of our Lord mirrors exactly the gospel used in the Roman Catholic lectionary (though we include the genealogy, which they omit for pastoral reasons), Mt 1.1–25, which is the appearance to Joseph by the angel. In the Eastern lectionary, the epistle makes a lot of sense: select verses from Hebrews 11, which recounts the stories of old covenant heroes who waited patiently for the fulfillment of the messianic promise. This passage is about the patient waiting of the ancestors of Christ, but it is not about the coming Lord (except insofar as all scripture is about the coming Lord).

The hymnography, again, has no mention of the coming Lord. The virgin comes to give birth, and Ephratha should prepare for his arrival. But the idea that the Lord is coming again is not the point of the Eastern liturgical commemoration of the Birth of Christ. Why this is so will have to wait for another time: This reflection is already too long. But is the Christmas fast about the “advent” of the Lord? No.

Why does this bother me? Well, for one thing, I really miss Advent a lot, so it bothers me when people call something “Advent” that clearly is not Advent at all. Why do people do this? Well, Orthodox Christians who have grown up Orthodox may do it for two reasons: 1) The people who taught them the faith may have called the fast “Advent”, or 2) they want to be like the other Christians around them, and they don’t realize that the two liturgical seasons are completely unlike one another in every way except one: They both precede Christmas.

However, people who grew up in Western churches and converted to Orthodoxy (like myself) have a more sentimental reason: They miss Advent, too. Well, folks: Buck up. Advent is on the other side of the Bosphorus from here. We don’t have Advent in this church, as I have shown above. We have a fast which precedes Christmas, but it isn’t about the advent of the Lord. The Greek word which exactly corresponds to “advent” is parousia, but it doesn’t appear in the liturgical texts leading up to Christmas. The Parousia isn’t what the Christmas fast is about!

Why not? Well, I’m still trying to figure that out.