Blessed New Year! The new Church year began September 1. We remember with thanksgiving the many ways that God made Himself present to us in the past year even as we look to grow in our Faith in the new ecclesiastical year just begun. With the advent of the new Church year and the first Feast of the new year this Friday—the Nativity of the Theotokos—we’re presented by God’s grace with an opportunity for a new beginning, for spiritual progress and renewal.
The passing of time provides us an opportunity to think about how we’ve used this past year God’s entrusted to us even as we ponder what this new year may bring. We know that everything temporal in our lives, those material things that consume so much of our time and focus, begin and come to an end, as do the cycles of the year, our human calendars and sense of time (chromos) are temporal, even our own lives, as we hear from King David in Psalm 103: “As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more (Ps. 103:15-16).
But everything born of God grows in perpetuity to eternal life. At Vespers each Saturday we sing the beautiful verses of Psalm 104, “The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens. The sun ariseth, and man goeth forth unto his work and to his labor until the evening.” That sun knows its setting, but the Sun of righteousness, born of the Virgin in means past human comprehension, knows no evening, and has, according to the Apostle James, “no variableness neither shadow of turning (Js. 1:17).
Of this joyous Light we sing each Vespers as the highlight of the service and the beginning of the new day, but also of the eschaton, the day that will have no end, which will see the faithful ushered into God’s eternal Kingdom. The Phos Hilaron, (Lumina Lina), “Gladsome Light,” is the oldest hymn of the Church outside the Scriptures and was already in St. Basil’s day in the 4th century considered a “cherished tradition of the Church”:
O Gladsome Light of the holy glory of the Immortal Father, heavenly, holy, blessed Jesus Christ. Now we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening. We praise God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For it is right at all times to worship Thee with voices of praise, O Son of God and Giver of Life, therefore all the world glorifies Thee.
Christ God, the Light of the world, alone dispels the darkness and fills our souls with this light which is the eternal truth of His being. It is to Him we look with anticipation for the opportunity to draw closer in our communion with God the Holy Trinity, in participation of the Life that God is—and this anticipation should be heightened as we begin a new year with the Lord.
Many people I meet in my comings and goings these days make it clear when it comes to faith in God, that whatever they believe or do, doesn’t matter; God will accept them anyway. Rod Dreher in his new book, the Benedict Option, calls this predominant religion of America, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” In this religion that many mistakening call “Christianity,” here’s no need for communion or relationship to or with God, in obedience to Him and the Holy Scriptures, but rather an expectation that God has no right to judge based on the criteria that He’s established. Truth is relative (which is an oxymoron) and if God doesn’t grant them life with Him, well, that’s God’s fault. Certainly, then, He must be a capricious god or just plain wrong.
Those of us who do have faith in God as He has revealed Himself to His Church through the ages, are often ridiculed or even rejected in today’s society. The Lord warns us of this rejection beforehand, reminding us that not only were the prophets who foretold of Messiah’s coming rejected, beaten, and martyred, but He Himself, suffered the same even though He is the Son of God, the Messiah, the long-awaited and prophesied Savior of the world. If Christ and His prophets suffered such abuse at the hands of those who would not believe, who preferred their own religion to God’s divine revelation, then you and I can expect to also, in some, way, suffer for the sake of being a true follower of Jesus Christ in this world.
The “Landowner” in Christ’s parable did not stand for this, but instead destroyed those who would do such evil against His own servants and even dare to do so against His own Son. Not only is there a parallel here with the Jewish leaders of Christ’s day, who rejected Messiah and the prophets before Him, whom they beat and killed, but there is also a parallel with those in this age who take Christ and His holy Church for granted, who make up their own religion, or who see themselves as “in the club” of Christianity, but reject the call to repentance, healing, and growth in communion with God and in submission to Christ and His holy Body, the Church.
There is really no such thing as “ethnic Orthodox;” there are no grandchildren who automatically inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, eternal life with God by virtue of their ancestry. Christ God uses this parable to remind the faithful in the midst of Judaim their gathered, that salvation will be opened to the Gentiles and that no Jew will ‘inherit’ salvation because of his race. As Christ says, “My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it” (Lk. 8:21).
People from every tribe and nation are called into life and communion with God through the new birth of “water and the spirit” (John 3). But not all those who come and experience the truth of Christ and His holy Orthodox Church, remain; not all those ‘born into the Faith,’ act upon and choose to ‘own’ that Faith. All are called, but not all choose to live their lives for Christ and His Bride, the Church. For this reason, the end of the parable is sobering:
“He will destroy those wicked men miserably, and lease his vineyard to other vinedressers who will render to him the fruits in their seasons…. ‘The stone which the builders rejected Has become the chief cornerstone. This was the LORD’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’”
As Christians we affirm that “Christ is coming again to judge the living and the dead.” The calling, the invitation to life, to participate in the life of the Holy Trinity is real and so are the consequences of those who reject this life. Why? Because God is not only the Author of Life, but the Sustainer of all life. “for in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Embrace the life that is only in Him, seize the day for repentance, life with God.
As we approach the Great Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos this Friday, let us beseech our Holy Mother to intercede for us before the King that in this new year we may make new strides to grow in faith, to say yes to God and the life that’s only in Him and no to sin and all that is unworthy of so great a gift as eternal life, communion with God and participation in the Divine Life of the Holy Trinity, One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Fr. Robert Miclean
3 September 2017
Epistles: I Cor., 16:13-24
Gospels: Matt. 21:33-42
