The Transformative Power of Faith and the Cross
Fr. Geoff delivers an inspiring sermon on the profound journey of faith and transformation, drawing from the teachings of St. Paul and Orthodox spirituality. Through personal anecdotes and deep theological insights, Fr. Geoff emphasizes the necessity of experiencing God's love and the crucial role of the cross in our spiritual struggle and deification.
Transcript
I want to start with the last words of today's epistle, which I find personally are the most moving words in the New Testament. We all know the story of St. Paul, how he was a persecutor of the church. He was a very, very, what's the word? A Pharisee, very strictly following the law and everything. When the Christian faith came to life, he was totally against it. As I put in my weekly email, he was a witness to the death of the first martyr in the Christian church, St. Stephen, and he was pleased that it took place, would you believe? Then he set about persecuting the Christians, putting them in prison. He went to Damascus and, on his way, the Lord met him on the road and changed his life completely, turned it upside down.
We get a little bit of a clue here of what happened there at the end of this reading today. "And now the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." That's St. Paul. That's the heart of his life. He realized that he is loved by God, and it came to him as a result of that experience on the Damascus road and it changed his life.
Why are we here today? Some of you have probably heard of St. Thean the Recluse. He spent the last 28 years of his life in isolation, in seclusion, and in prayer. He used to get 30 or 40 letters a day, and he would reply to every one of them. One of the questions he was asked was, "Why is it that some people who are always in church, they never miss a service, are awful people?" St. Thean said, "They're not there for God. They're there for some other reason. Might be the music, the language, the culture, or they want to be seen. But they're not there for God. They haven't experienced the love of God and are responding to him as St. Paul did."
In my own journey of faith, it was the same, really. I was brought up in the Christian faith. We went to church every Sunday. I thank God for that. I joined the army following my father's footsteps. The first thing they do in the army is to give you a number, dehumanizing you, and you feel sort of downhearted with all the pressure. They still marched us to church every Sunday, which was great. I went to a meeting one night in the chapel, and I've told some of you this story before. The person who asked me, I thought he was going to burst into tears if I didn't say yes, so I went. In that chapel that night, I had that sense that God loved me for the first time. I wasn't just a number. I was somebody that God loved. And it changed my life. After that, I wanted to go to church and worship God. I wanted to tell God I loved him and thank him for his love. That's why this verse is one of the most moving verses in the scriptures for me.
"I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." Amazing. So, I hope we're all here because God loves us and we know it. We need to know that God loves us. I'm sure if I asked people today what their stories are, there's probably some little thing that happened to you that makes you want to be here to worship God and helps you to know that you are loved.
Let's have a look at the scriptures. Now, brethren, we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. If you want to have a verse that shows the difference between the Protestant church and the Orthodox church, this would be it. We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. They really push this faith, and St. Paul says it was through faith that he follows Christ. I looked up an old commentary from my principal at Ridley College 40 years ago. He was a wonderful, godly man who understood scripture and Greek. He used to read from the Greek New Testament and translate it into English. In his commentary on Galatians, he puts the heading "Justification by Faith Alone."
That's the Protestant teaching. But the Orthodox have been teaching something different for 2,000 years. This only came in with the Reformation. If you look through the Bible, type in the words "through faith alone" into your search engine in the Bible and see what comes up. Does anybody know what might come up? One verse. That's all. And it's James chapter 2 verse 4. And it says by faith alone. But there's a word in front of it. Not. Not by faith alone. That's the only verse in the scriptures which says "by faith alone," and it's got a "not" in front of it.
St. James is very clear on that. It's not by faith alone. The Protestants have misinterpreted what St. Paul says here. The background to what St. Paul is talking about is an incident where some Jews came up to Antioch and St. Peter was there. St. Peter was eating with the Gentiles when the Jews came up. He decided not to eat with the Gentiles while they were there. St. Paul really went crazy with him. He said, "This is wrong. You're living by the law." It's not by works of the law but by faith in Christ that you're going to be saved. So, we also have believed in Christ in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. St. Paul says, "It's through faith in Christ. So, we also have believed in Christ in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law." So, he's saying it because by works of the law, no one is justified. But also, by faith alone, no one's justified either. That comes out in James's epistle. Martin Luther, who started the Reformation, thought we should take James's book out of the Bible, behaving like a bad pope trying to change the scriptures.
We need the law. We need faith in Christ. If you don't have faith, you might be searching, and that's fine. What's the solution? St. Paul says, "Through the law, I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ." Now, what's he talking about there? Because he's still alive. He hasn't physically been crucified. What has happened is what’s being crucified is his flesh, not his human flesh, but what the Bible describes as flesh. Galatians 5:24 says, "And those who are in Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires."
Galatians 5:16, "I say then, walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." The flesh is the sort of wrong passions that we struggle with. The Amplified Bible says, "Walk habitually in the Holy Spirit. Seek him and be responsive to his guidance. Then you will certainly not carry out the desire of the sinful nature which responds impulsively without regard for God and his precepts." In Galatians 5, by the flesh, St. Paul does not mean the body. The flesh is the general term for evil actions, the depraved will, the earthly mind, the slothful and careless soul, things that are under our control, not part of human nature. This flesh is crucified with Christ. It is not human nature that is put to death, but its evil deeds. What's the flesh? What are the evil deeds? Galatians 5:19-20 lists them: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lwdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. Of which I tell you beforehand, says St. Paul, just as I have told you in the past that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. So that's what's being crucified in Paul's life and that's what needs to be crucified in our lives if we're going to be followers of Christ.
St. Paul goes on to say, "And those who are Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit." In one translation it says, "If we live by the spirit, let us also walk in step with the spirit." I love that verse. It reminds me of my army days. You know, you all got to be in step, and we got to be in step with the spirit. So, we need to know what the spirit wants us to do. You find that from reading the scriptures and from coming to the church and hearing the sermons. If we aren't saved by faith alone, we aren't saved by works alone, how are we saved? By being crucified, by overcoming some of these things. In the gospels, Jesus said, "If any man will follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." This is the important part of our crucifixion. We need to take up our crosses.
This is a key part. The western church focuses a lot on justification by faith. We focus a lot more on deification by struggle. I've just finished reading a book called "You Are Mine" by Sister Anastasia. I was hoping that the bishop would bless her to come to our conference in November. It's an amazing story. She was brought up in a Christian home. She rejected her parents' Christian faith. She went into the occult, witchcraft. It was terrible. Then through her sister, she ended up going to see an Orthodox monk called Father Theophan. I hope you don't mind me reading a bit from the book. "I had met many healers, yogis, lamas, and gurus, all of whom had immense wisdom regarding living in harmony with nature and the sacrifices required for spiritual development. They were often humble, loving, and generous. But meeting this ascetic Orthodox monk in a little kitchen in a suburb in South London, I encountered something I never had before. Holiness. It was a purity that was so specific, so special. I know now, though I didn't at the time, that this is because it had heaven as its source. My mother told me that when I came out of the room, I was crying and all I could say was, 'He's so beautiful. He's so beautiful. I trust him with my life.'"
She came to the point where she realized the relationship with her creator that she was unconsciously seeking had eluded her. When Father Theophan prayed for her at the end of the meeting, he spoke to God as if God were right there in the room with us, with familiarity, with intimacy, and with reverence. She felt a divine presence fill the room as his hand rested on her head and then anointed her forehead with holy oil. Something inside her relaxed and opened. It felt innocent and sweet and had nothing to do with strength or force or power. All buzzwords from her pagan world that was new. A seed of certainty that she was known and loved by God was planted in her heart. So that's where she first realized that God, the creator of the world, loved her. It came about through being in touch with a holy man. How did he become holy? She gave us the clue early on. He was an ascetic.
This is the way of the Orthodox faith: asceticism. This is where confession, almsgiving, fasting, eucharist, scriptures, service, and saints all come in, undergirded with prayer. This is the struggle that comes in so that we can be holy. We are never going to have fellowship with God if we aren't holy. He’s holy. We have to be holy. If we're going to draw people into the faith, we have to be holy like that monk. This is the key. St. Paul tells us, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." These words reveal the very heart of our Christian calling. Through the cross, our life becomes Christ's life, and in him, we are united to God.
We've been thinking about the cross for the last three weeks. Last week we had a beautiful decorated cross which Laura prepared for us. When you see the cross, you see it's a flowered cross. It's not a stark cross, it's a flowered cross. In the Orthodox church, we always think of the resurrection when we think of the cross. The cross comes first, the struggle comes first, and then comes the deification, theosis if you like. It's possible only through the cross. The early church fathers including Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nissa taught that deification occurs through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the reception of the Eucharist where believers are literally incarnating Christ in their bodies. This is why it's so important to come to the liturgy every week to receive the body and blood of Christ.
The crucifixion is viewed as the ultimate act of humility and obedience which Christ demonstrated and which we are called to imitate through our aesthetic struggles. In Philippians 3:10, St. Paul says, "That I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death." So he expressed his desire to be conformed to Christ's death in order to know the power of the resurrection. We started this journey in baptism. You might remember when in baptism we go into the water. It's a symbol of us being buried with Christ and then rising with him. In the baptism service we say, "For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with." That's what baptism is all about. Then, likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's something we've all experienced in our baptisms.
St. Maximus the Confessor says that Christ showed us the method of deification: its obedience and its suffering. When we crucify our passions and learn to love as he loved, even our enemies sometimes, we begin to share his divine life. St. Gregory Palamas also reminds us that the cross is the door to God's glory. There's no deification without the cross. This is the paradox of our faith. By dying we live. By emptying ourselves we're filled. By taking up the cross, we are raised into divine light. St. Isaac the Syrian said, "The way of God is a daily cross." No one has ascended into heaven by living in comfort. We shouldn't fear the cross. Each act of self-denial, each sacrifice of love, each moment we place God's will above our own is a sharing in Christ's crucifixion. Through that sharing, Christ himself comes to live in us, transforming us with his light. So the cross is not the end, it's the beginning. Like the cross, it's not just the cross. It's surrounded by flowers because the resurrection is coming. May God help us to embrace it with faith and joy that Christ may live in us forever. Now to God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit be ascribed your might, majesty, dominion, and praise now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.
