Homily

Today’s epistle got me thinking about the differences and similarities between our present-day culture and the culture of the Roman empire 2,000 years ago. I saw a little video once about food preparation for large numbers of people and it mentioned that sometimes emperors gave out free bread to the people who came to the Coliseum so they could have something to eat while they watched the gladiators fight, or the criminals or prisoners of war being killed, or the Christians being thrown to the lions. It seems, to us, almost unbelievable that not only would people sit there to watch those blood baths, but that they would eat while they were doing it. This is the type of world the Corinthians of St. Paul's time were living in.

But there are some differences as between us and the world of the Corinthians of St. Paul. For them, they grew up in a world where such violence was the everyday accepted form of entertainment. They grew up in a world where many people were considered to be the property of others as slaves—and that masters had the right of life and death over those souls whom they owned. No one thought that people had God-given rights or that human life was sacred, and everyone knew the state had the authority to take those lives, any life, any time it chose to do so. Not only the state, but fathers had to right to sell their children into slavery, and even to end their lives at any age, if they wished to do so.

St. Paul's Christians were no doubt attracted to the Faith not because it provided them with greater economic or political power. We hear St. Paul in fact claim the opposite. He was despised, lowly, hungry, poorly clothed, roughly treated, a homeless wanderer who worked hard to provide for himself. People did not become Christian because they intended to end up like that! No, they found faith because of the love of Christ, and then their love for Him. They found faith in knowing their sins could be forgiven, that eternal life was a reality, that love was the greatest force in the universe, not power or money. They found faith in learning that, as children of God the Father, adopted in baptism, they possessed the dignity of sons and daughters of the living God, whether they were slaves or free in this present life. They very much understood the values and style of life they were giving up to become followers of Christ. They became, in a sense, strangers and aliens to the culture they lived in, even though they understood that culture very, very well. They now belonged to another King; they now belonged to another Kingdom.

Our situation today is rather different. We, ourselves, grew up in a society that considered itself to be largely Christian, although the younger we are the less true that is. We grew up in a society that began some decades ago to chuck out, piece by piece, sections of Christian thought and beliefs that were held by almost all Christian people—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox—beliefs that were universal among the followers of Christ. We began to throw those principles out, one by one, not because Caesar forced us to do so, but we forced Caesar to allow them, to give us the freedom to go against the teachings of 2,000 years and embrace new codes of morality. It may not have been a majority decision on the part of the people once each moral teaching was cast aside, but all too many others, even if they did not agree, sat silently by and allowed it to happen. Perhaps it was thought to be too difficult to oppose the changes in law, or too much trouble as we went about looking for more comfortable lives, or too uncaring in not allowing other people to have what they claimed were just and humane and even loving actions and values. And we were told it was all about freedom and rights. Of course, we don't allow slavery, but we're told that life in the womb is the property of the person who carries the womb. Very, very Roman that idea. And so is the idea that even outside the womb that lives of the elderly and very ill can still be shut down, as happens quietly here and in Europe every day. The big difference between us and the people of the Empire is that now these life and death decisions are not legally the right of the father, but they now fall into the hands of the child's own mother, and for others, the members of their family, or even hospital staff making decisions to end lives. And this is the sign of how far we have come from the brutality and patriarchal injustice of former times and places?

Sixty-three million unborn lives taken, from 1973 until today. Hard to imagine that number. We can only stomach it by trying to ignore it. And as a people, that's what we have done. We don't like it, most of us Americans, but we'll just ignore it. And as so easily happens, once one area of immoral behavior is ignored, because we're told we can't interfere with the so-called right of other people, once it is ignored, it is often eventually embraced by those who once looked the other way. Having sexual relations outside of marriage was universally seen as immoral when I was a boy. How many people in our society still think this is true today?

We have seen over the past decades the Christian values that supported our nation struck down, one by one. Since we have been convinced that Christian ethics have no place in public life, and since we have often preferred the indulgent looseness of modern culture to rule over us in place of the truth of Christ, it is hard not to see how even more breaches of Christian moral living will be coming our way to further tear down the sanctity of the family and the God-given gift of human life. And we can be sure the devil works 24 hours a day. Unlike the Corinthian Christians, we have the power to turn all this around, but, as Christian Americans, we are afraid to use it lest we be called hateful people; we are afraid to use it because we do not fully embrace Christ the way we ought to.

But we, those of us here and many, many others, we can do something that the early Christians did. We can love Christ. We can love one another. We can love our neighbor as ourselves, even if our neighbor be poor, confused, sinful, weak, hateful, wealthy, Protestant, Muslim, or Wiccan. We can keep ourselves on the path of Christ by serving the Divine Liturgy, through Confession and Holy Communion, by our personal prayers. We can firmly believe in the judgment of Christ and His great mercy, and in life everlasting because this is not our home. We can strive to help rebuild a just and moral society, but all the while remembering our hope cannot be in Caesar, or government, or judges, and certainly not in wealth or power of our own making, but only in Jesus Christ.

I do not believe we can promise our children to have a better life than we do, simply because they are born in America, as the Christian slaves in Corinth could not promise their children that kind of better life either. But like those poor Christians back then we can promise our children a better life because they are reborn in Christ, and no one can take that divine life away from them. If they choose to live in that life, they will indeed have a better life. No one can offer them greater dignity, value or hope than what our Lord offers to them. No one else has a better life to offer than Christ, and it is that same life, St. Paul urges us, to share with one another and to offer to those standing in need of it in our world today.

Let us pray for one another. And let us pray for those who are seeking truth and a love that does not fail.