1. WHY PREACH THE GOSPEL
The theme of today's conference, "Preaching the
Gospel of Christ in the Modern World," is relevant
to everyone here, not only to those who are called
to preach sermons from the ambo. Each of us is
called to preach the Gospel, first of all by bearing
witness to it through our lives, and secondly by
making it available to others. This morning I will
talk about why we should preach the Gospel,
about the prerequisites for preaching the Gospel,
and finally about how to bear witness to it in our
lives.
The Gospel, of course, is the sum of the message of
the Christian Faith, and especially the good news
that Christ has saved mankind from the eternal
consequences of sin, that He has overcome the
central problem of the world death, both bodily
and spiritual by means of His Incarnation, Death,
and Resurrection.
In
approaching the subject of preaching the Gospel, the
first question that arises is: Why should we
be preaching the Gospel of Christ in our modern
world?
Why, indeed, when the Protestants seem to be doing
it much better? They have evangelistic programs,
crusades that fill stadiums, mega-churches,
television channels, Christian bookstores, a
Christian music industry, and all the money they
could want. We Orthodox in America are small by
comparison. Why can't we just concentrate on our
beautiful services and our social functions, and let
the evangelicals preach to the unchurched?
The answer to this question is that the Protestants,
and the Roman Catholics as well, do not preach the
whole, complete, and unadulterated Gospel of Christ.
Only the Orthodox Church can do that, because the
Orthodox Church is the true Church that Christ
founded, and that has continued up to today in a
continuous, unbroken line of Holy Apostolic
Tradition. This is the Church against which, as
Christ promised, the gates of hell shall not prevail
(cf. Matt. 16:18). Right before His Crucifixion,
Christ told His disciples that the Holy Spirit would
come and lead them into all Truth. That promise was
indeed fulfilled after Christ's Resurrection. But it
did not cease to be fulfilled after His Apostles
reposed. Christ has continued to fulfill that
promise through two millennia of upheaval and
tribulation; He continues doing so even now, and He
will continue until His Second Coming. During our
Church's history, heretical emperors, priests,
bishops, and even patriarchs threatened to destroy
the purity of the Orthodox Faith, but through the
guidance of the Holy Spirit the Church was preserved
in Truth, and the heresies were overcome.
The non-Orthodox Christian churches have preserved
some of the Truth of the
original Christian Faith. But whatever they
have that is true whether it be the Holy
Scriptures, the dogma of the Holy Trinity, or the
dogma of Christ's Incarnation they have
received from the original, Apostolic Church, the
Orthodox Church, whether they acknowledge this or
not. But, again, they possess only some of
the Truth, and the rest they have distorted because
they are separated from the true Church that Christ
founded. Only the Orthodox Church is the repository
of the pristine Gospel and the undistorted image of
Christ.
This, then, is why we Orthodox Christians are
called to preach the Gospel of Christ. We have
something to give that no one outside the Church can
give. Since the Christian Faith is the true Faith,
and the Orthodox Faith is the true form of that true
Faith, we alone can give the fullness of Truth to
the searching humanity of our days. It would be
selfish of us to keep it to ourselves. Yes, we
should care about our beautiful church services,
which are the center of our life as the worshipping
Body of Christ; and, yes, we should have our social
functions, since we need to have fellowship with
other members of Christ's Body. But, together with
this, we are called to share our Faith, to offer
it to those who have not yet been given the
great gift of being part of Christ's true Church.
This is a tremendous responsibility, and it's time
the Orthodox Christians in this country stepped up
to it. Of course, much has been done and is being
done. Just in the last twenty-five years since I
first discovered Orthodoxy, I've seen a tremendous
growth in the Orthodox mission in this country. But
we can do a lot more, and that's what we'll be
looking at and discussing today.
Back in the early 1960s, when the co-founder of our
St. Herman Brotherhood, Fr. Seraphim (then Eugene )
Rose, was working in the brotherhood's Orthodox
bookstore in San Francisco, his ruling bishop, St.
John of Shanghai and San Francisco, walked in, as
he often did. Fr. Seraphim asked St. John a question
he had been pondering: "Nearly all the peoples of
the earth have had the Gospel preached to them. Does
this mean that it's the end of the world, as the
Scriptures say?"[1]
"No," replied St. John . "The Gospel of
Christ must be preached in all tongues throughout
the world in an Orthodox context. Only then
will the end come."[2]
This is an awesome thing to contemplate. St. John,
who in other instances demonstrated that he had the
gift of prophecy, is telling us that we cannot leave
it up to Protestants and Roman Catholics to
enlighten the world with the Gospel. That task
ultimately belongs to us Orthodox Christians. It's
not enough, for example, that three thousand Chinese
are becoming Christian every day, according to the
latest statistics. Yes, they are becoming
Protestants and Roman Catholics, and that's good as
far as it goes, but they are not becoming Orthodox
Christians. Ultimately, it will be up to us to
preach the Gospel to them in the Orthodox
context.
Fr. Seraphim once noted that, "When Archbishop John[3]
first came to Paris from Shanghai [in the early
1950s], instead of giving a merely polite and formal
greeting to his new flock in church the first time
he saw them, he gave them real spiritual meat:
The meaning of the
Russian exile [he said] is to preach the Gospel over
the whole earth, which must happen before the end of
the world; and that means not just any Gospel, any
kind of 'Christianity,' but Orthodoxy."[4]
What St. John said about the Russian exiles can be
applied equally well to the diaspora of all the
other Orthodox nationalities: Bulgarian, Georgian,
Greek, Lebanese, Palestinian, Romanian, Serbian,
Syrian, Ukrainian, etc.
Speaking of prophecy, here is one from a Greek saint
of our times (not yet canonized): Elder Paisios of
Mount Athos. Before his repose in 1994, he was asked
by one of his spiritual sons: "Elder, today there
are so many people billions who don't know Christ
and so few of them who do know Him. What will
happen?"
Elder Paisios answered: "Things will happen which
will shake the nations. It will not be the Second
Coming, but it will be a Divine intervention. People
will be searching for someone to speak to about
Christ. They will pull you by the hand: 'Come here,
sit down and tell me about Christ.'[5]
We
don't have to look into the future for this.
Already, even now, people are starving spiritually.
How can we give them what they need?
2. PREREQUISITES FOR PREACHING THE GOSPELI
would now like to outline three things which we
should have in place in order to preach the Gospel
of Christ in the modern world: First, we must
know the Orthodox Gospel of Christ; second, we
must live the Gospel; and, third, we must
know the modern world, in order to know what we're
dealing with.
1.
So, to begin with, we must know the Gospel
in the Orthodox context. This means that,
not only should we know the Divinely inspired Holy
Scriptures, but we should know how the Church, which
gave us the Scriptures, has interpreted the
Scriptures through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
We can know this through the writings of the Holy
Fathers of the Church who have written extensive
commentaries on the Scriptures, especially the book
of Genesis and the entire New Testament. Almost all
of these commentaries are now easily available in
English. They are not hard to understand, even
though some of them, like the commentaries of St.
John Chrysostom, were written sixteen hundred years
ago.
There is no question in our confused times that
cannot be answered by a careful, pious, and reverent
reading of the Holy Fathers, who give us to
understand the true meaning of Holy Scripture and to
know the substance of our Orthodox Faith. We must go
to the Fathers in order to become their disciples,
laying aside our own "wisdom" which we have acquired
from the modern secular world." When we find the
consensus of the Fathers on any given issue, we find
the teaching which has prevailed and has been upheld
in the Church. Thus, we find the mind of the Church,
which is the mind of Christ, since Christ is the
Head of His Church.
Of
course, we should read Orthodox books by some
contemporary authors also, because they distill the
teaching of the Fathers and bring it to bear on
modern concerns. But to get a well-rounded view of
the Patristic teaching, and to know which
modern authors reflect more of the Patristic mind,
we should not neglect to go to the writings of the
Fathers directly.
The Lives of Saints and righteous ones of earlier
times and of our own times are also essential
reading, as are the spiritual counsels of these same
saints and righteous ones. These writings give us a
blueprint for our own Christian life, both
instructing and inspiring us to live our lives
in
Christ, in communion with Him, and on the path
to unending union with Him.
St. John Chrysostom once said: "The Christian who is
not reading spiritual books cannot save his soul."
Commenting on this statement, Fr. Seraphim Rose
said: "We must be constantly filling ourselves with
the word of God, the Holy Scriptures, and other
Orthodox literature, so that, as St. Seraphim [of
Sarov] says, we will be literally 'swimming in the
law of the Lord.' The science of how to please God
and save our souls will become a deep part of
ourselves that can't be taken away from us.
"The process of Orthodox education begins with
infancy, with the simplest Bible stories and Lives
of Saints related by one's parents, and it should
not cease this side of the grave. If anyone learning
an earthly profession devotes all his energy to
studying and gaining practice in it, how much more
should Christians be studying and preparing for
eternal life, the Kingdom of Heaven which is ours
for a short struggle in this life."[6]
2. This brings us to the second prerequisite
for preaching the Gospel in the modern world, and
that is, we must live
the Gospel.
Again, to quote from Fr. Seraphim: "There exists a
false opinion, which unfortunately is all too
widespread today, that it is enough to have an
Orthodoxy that is limited to the church building and
formal 'Orthodox' activities, such as praying at
certain times and making the sign of the Cross; in
everything else, so this opinion goes, one can be
like anyone else; participating in the life and
culture of our times without any problem, as long as
we don't commit sin.
"Anyone who has come to realize how deep Orthodoxy
is, and how full is the commitment which is required
of the serious Orthodox Christian, and likewise what
totalitarian demands the contemporary world makes on
us, will easily see how wrong this opinion is. One
is Orthodox all the time,
everyday, in every
situation of life, or one is not really Orthodox
at all. Our Orthodoxy is revealed not just in our
strictly religious views, but
in everything we do and say.
Most of us are very unaware of the Christian,
religious responsibility we have for the seemingly
secular part of our lives. The person with a
truly Orthodox worldview lives every part of his
life as Orthodox."[7]
As
we go deeper into the Orthodox Christian life, with
daily prayer, daily reading of spiritual books,
regular attendance of Church services, and regular
confession and reception of Holy Communion, we will
see our entire lives transformed in this way. When
we come before Christ every day and speak to Him
with love and longing, we will find our relationship
with Him deepen, so that He will live in us more
fully. When we daily reestablish our connection with
Jesus Christ in this way, it will become natural for
us to follow His commandments throughout the day, in
every aspect of our lives. Then His commandments
even the hardest ones, like loving those who
spitefully use us (cf. Matt. 5:44) will not seem
burdensome to us.
Through our life of Grace in the Church, we are to
be continually transformed into the likeness
of God, which is the likeness of Christ. We are to
be united with God ever more fully by acquiring and
assimilating His Grace, His Uncreated Energy.
For the Orthodox Church, salvation includes the
forgiveness of sins and justification before God
(cf. Eph. 1:7; Rom. 5:16, 18), but it is also more
than these. It means to abide in Christ the God-man
and have Him abiding in us (cf. John 15:4),
to participate in the life of God Himself, to become
partakers of the Divine Nature
(II Peter 1:4) both in the present life and in
eternity. In the language of Orthodox Patristic
theology, to be saved ultimately means to be
deified. As the Romanian Orthodox writer Fr. Dumitru
Staniloae explains: "Deification is the passing of
man from created things to the Uncreated, to the
level of the Divine Energies Man assimilates more
and more of the Divine Energies, without this
assimilation ever ending, since he will never
assimilate their Source itself, that is, the Divine
Essence, and become God by Essence, or another
Christ. In the measure in which man increases his
capacity to become a subject of ever richer Divine
Energies, these Energies from the Divine Essence are
revealed to him in a greater proportion."[8]
In
a similar vein, we can say that being Orthodox
includes having the right beliefs, the right
doctrines, the right worship, and the right
interpretation of Scripture, but it is more than
these. Being Orthodox means being in the Church.
We should not only know this intellectually; we
should feel it in the depths of our being. By the
Grace of God, although we are sinful and unworthy,
we are part of Christ's Body; we are members of His
one and only true Church. As such, we believe
in the Church.
In
order to communicate this belief in the Church to
those outside the Church, we must experience what it
means to be in the Church. In other words, we must
experience, gradually and a step at a time, what it
means to be transformed into the likeness of Christ,
to live in Christ and have Him live in us, to
participate in His life, to be deified.
It
is significant that, of all the Christian
confessions, only the Orthodox Faith understands
Grace to be the Uncreated Energy of God, in which
God Himself is fully present. In the Orthodox
Church, Grace is known to be God Himself. In the
non-Orthodox confessions, on the other hand, the
grace that is communicated is considered to be a
created phenomenon. In Roman Catholic theology, it
is said that grace cannot exist apart from the soul,
and that it is only a "quality" of the soul.[9]
When in the Orthodox Church we say that we are to be
filled with Grace, that we are to acquire the Grace
of the Holy Spirit, this means to be literally
filled with God Himself. Only in the Orthodox Church
do we know and confess that it is possible for a
Christian to be deified in the sense of becoming god
through His Grace that is, not God by Nature and
pre-eternal begetting, as only Christ was and is, but
a god by Grace and adoption. This is what the
Apostle John meant when he wrote in his Gospel:
As many as received Him [Christ], to them He
gave the power to become sons of God, even to those
who believe on His name(John 1:12).
Yes, it is significant that only the Orthodox Church
has this understanding of Grace and deification. But
it is significant not just in the sense that only
the Orthodox Church has the right views on these
subjects. Most of all, it is important to consider
why the Orthodox Church alone has the right
understanding. Of course, one could say that it is
because, as I've already mentioned, only the
Orthodox Church is the true Church which Christ has
preserved from error and heresy for two thousand
years. But I would say that it is more than this.
Does not the Orthodox Church alone have the right
understanding of Grace and deification because she
alone makes possible this full participation in the
life of God, this union with God, this deification?
To be sure, those outside the Church can experience
God's Grace. In fact, some Holy Fathers, such as St.
Maximus the Confessor,[10]
teach that nothing could exist for an instant
without God's Grace. But full participation in God's
Energies, as much as is possible for human nature,
is only available in the Orthodox Church.
As
I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, the
Gospel of Christ is, most essentially, the good news
that the central problem of the world death, both
bodily and spiritual has been overcome by Jesus
Christ. Through His Incarnation, His Death on the
Cross, and His Resurrection, Christ has brought Life
to the world; He has made it possible for man to
live eternally with Him in His Kingdom not only in
soul, but also in body after the General
Resurrection. Any Christian confession that has
retained the basic teachings of Christianity will
affirm this. But only in the Orthodox Church do we
find the complete understanding and experience of
this salvation that Christ has brought to the
world, this Life that He has brought to the
world (cf. John 11:25), this Living Water
that He has promised to His followers (cf. John
7:38). This Life that Christ gives is the Life of
God Himself it is God Himself and that is
why the Saints and righteous ones of the Orthodox
Church are known to be literally filled with God, to
be deified by Him. And, in the General Resurrection,
it will not only be the soul of man that will be
deified; the body will be deified as well.
Therefore, the Orthodox Holy Fathers have summed up
the Gospel of Christ with a phrase that might seem
surprising to Christians outside the Orthodox
Church. "God became man," they say, "so that man can
become god."
These considerations can help us to appreciate more
fully why we, as Orthodox Christians, have a
responsibility to preach the Gospel of Christ to
those around us. We have the right teaching; we know
or should know what it means to be in the Church
and believe in the Church; and we have all the means
that Christ has made available to mankind to be
saved saved, that is, in the maximalist sense of
being transformed, even deified, in order to be made
fit for the everlasting Kingdom of Heaven.
Of
course, we do not have to be fully deified that
is, fully and perfectly penetrated by God's Energies
in order to preach the Gospel. All of us who have
been baptized and chrismated Orthodox have already
been deified to some extent, since we receive the
Uncreated Energy of God united to our souls at
Baptism; and all of us who receive Holy Communion
experience a kind of deification. St. Symeon the New
Theologian, who was deified in the full and strict
sense of the word, affirmed that all those who
partake of the Holy Mysteries "with sincerity of
heart are quickened and deified
[11]
that is, deified in the broader sense. We are to
grow toward a more full deification, a more full
participation in God throughout our whole lives. As
we grow in this way, we will have more and more
Grace to give to others when we preach the Gospel of
Christ.
3.
Now we come to the third prerequisite for
preaching the Gospel in the modern world,
and that is to know
the modern world, or, more
specifically, the modern Western society in which we
find ourselves. Compared to the countries of Western
Europe , our American society has retained a
considerable Christian sector, but that sector is
becoming smaller and smaller. Recent polls have
found that every year, there are two million
fewer Christians in America . At the same time,
there are two million workpeople who say, "I'm not
religious; I'm spiritual." In other words, they are
abandoning churches and are opting for a
spirituality of their own devising: personalized
spirituality.
Fr. Seraphim Rose identified the sickness of the
modern world as "nihilism": the abandonment of
belief in absolute Truth, which is grounded in faith
in God. As Fr. Seraphim taught, the philosophy of
the modern age can be summed up in the following
phrase: "God is dead, therefore man becomes
God and everything is possible."[12]
We
have to be aware of the effects of this underlying
nihilistic philosophy on the life around us, and on
ourselves. Although many people give lip service to
God, they live as though He doesn't exist. And we
ourselves, sadly, if we will only admit it, also
behave sometimes as if God doesn't exist, being also
under the influence of the spirit of the times.
If
there is no God to Whom we are answerable and Who
gives meaning and purpose to our lives, then our
lives are all about "me": what I want, my personal
gratification, my personal fulfillment, my "quality
of life." According to this view, there is no
absolute or objective meaning to life; there is only
a relative or subjective meaning: what it means to
me, how it suits me. This idea is very strong in our
society; we breathe it in with the contemporary air,
so to speak.
In
preparing this talk, I was reading over the talks
that Fr. Seraphim gave at our monastery nearly
twenty-five years ago, which I have already been
quoting from. Back then, he was saying that the
current generation has been described as the "me"
generation. Many of us here are from that
generation. But what of the generations that have
come after the "me" generation? They have been
called "generation X" and "generation Y." These
generations have also grown up in a society
characterized by a gradual loss of belief in
absolute Truth and by a concurrent
absorption in self-gratification. At the
same time, noticeably more than the "me" generation,
they have felt the angst of this empty philosophy of
life. As society moves further away from God, we are
supplied with more sophisticated ways of distracting
us from the pain that comes from being separated
from God, and more medications to numb that pain.
Generation Y has more access to entertainments than
any other generation in history, but at the same
time, with its use of antidepressants, it has been
called the most medicated generation in human
history.
In
the meantime, to fill in the vacuum caused by the
abandonment of Christian Faith, numerous
forms of false spirituality have been on the rise
for decades. Today, the fastest growing
religion in the United States , in terms of
percentage, is witchcraft. This is not unrelated to
the fact that numerous movies, television shows,
books, and games present young people with the idea
that witchcraft is "cool" and "fun." Members of
Pagan and Wiccan groups say that, whenever a popular
book, movie or TV show comes out with this theme,
they get a surge of phone calls from young people.
This is only the latest sign of the times. There are
many other such signs, from the growth of Eastern
religions to the UFO subculture, to the
pseudo-Christian experiences seen at such gatherings
as the "Toronto Blessing."
And, while all of this pseudo-spirituality
is being put into the air, there is a
concerted effort to obliterate what is left of
traditional Christian society in contemporary
America . Not a year goes by without several cover
stories in such major national magazines as Time,
Newsweek, and US News and World Report,
which attempt to undermine Christian faith under the
guise of "objective" reporting. Not only is the
reality of the Biblical account of creation and the
global Flood rejected, but the historicity of the
Prophet Moses is dismissed, the historicity of the
Gospels is called into question, and the lives of
Christ and His Apostles are reinterpreted according
to heretical Gnostic notions which were condemned by
the Church many centuries ago. The aim of these
articles and of much else of what we see and hear
in the media nowadays is to denature
Christianity. In order to fit in with the
nihilistic, secularistic, self-worshipping spirit of
the times, Christianity must be reinterpreted so as
to abandon any claims to absolute Truth, and to
abandon faith in Christ as the Only Begotten
Son of God. Instead, Christ is made out to be some
kind of New Age guru who leads each of us to the
realization that each one of us is God: not god by
Grace as in the Orthodox understanding, but God by
Nature in the New Age, Gnostic understanding. To a
self-worshipping society for which absolute Truth
has been replaced by "me," nothing less than this
false form of self-deification is satisfactory. It
is precisely with this idea that Lucifer tempted
Adam and Eve: Your eyes shall be opened, and ye
shall be as Gods (Gen. 3:5).
As
we Orthodox Christians reach out to the modern
world, we need to take into account this barrage of
propaganda that is thrust on people in our society,
that makes them forget God, give up on Christ as
traditional Christianity understands Him, and live
for themselves, live for this world only, live for
today. It so happens that we Orthodox Christians
have answers to all the misguided attempts to deny
the historicity of the Old and New Testaments, and
to turn Christianity into something that it is not.
Books and articles have been written by Orthodox
theological writers, historians, and scientists to
defend the historical interpretation of Holy
Scripture that is found in the writings of the Holy
Fathers. Some of these only exist in Russian, Greek,
or Serbian, but some are in English, and others will
be translated. It can be helpful for us to avail
ourselves of these materials in order to defend our
Faith, but we must also realize that, ultimately, it
is not arguments that persuade people to come to the
Orthodox Church, but something that moves their
hearts. And, to move hearts, we must first of all
have our own hearts turned to God.
With all the so-called spirituality available to
people today, which they can find literally at their
fingertips on the internet, people's souls are
empty. They are desperately in need of the fullness
of Christ's Uncreated Grace, which only the Orthodox
Church can give.
3. BEARING WITNESS ТО THE GOSPEL
Now that we have looked at three prerequisites to
preaching the Gospel in the modern world knowing
the Gospel, living the Gospel, and knowing the
modern world we can now go on to discuss how
to preach the Gospel.
In
preaching the Gospel, we should not take the
in-your-face approach that is occasionally found
among Protestants. Sometimes Protestants will place
pressure on people to convert. Perhaps this stems,
at least in part, from the Calvinist doctrine that
denies free will even though most Protestant
churches have rejected the strict interpretation of
that doctrine. In any case, the Orthodox approach in
preaching the Gospel is, contrary to Calvinism, to
honor a person's free will just as God honors
it. Our task is simply to bear witness to the Truth,
and to make it available to others. Each person must
make his own choice, without any coercion, as to
whether or not to become a member of the Orthodox
Church.
What does it mean to bear witness to our Faith? In
one of the talks he gave toward the end of his life,
Fr. Seraphim Rose said: "Once we are learning of the
Orthodox Faith, we must be ready, as the Apostle
Peter teaches, to give an account of it to those who
may ask (cf. I Peter 3:15). Nowadays there is no one
who is not asked at some time about his Faith. We
must make our Faith something deep, conscious, and
serious, so that we ourselves know why we are
Orthodox and this will already be an answer to
those outside the Faith.
"And further, in our times of searching, we should
be on the watch for those who are searching. We
should be prepared to find them in the most
unexpected places. We should be evangelical
and this does not mean just sticking Bible verses
into one's conversation or asking everyone, 'Are you
saved?' It means living by the Gospel, even
with all our weaknesses and falls living the
Orthodox Faith. Many outsiders, just seeing that
we try to lead a life different from the pagan and
semi-pagan society around us, can become interested
in the Faith just by this."[13]
To
illustrate this last point, I will relate a few
stories. In the early history of our brotherhood,
some Orthodox pilgrims were on their way home from
our monastery, when they stopped at a restaurant in
Williams, California . Before the meal, they crossed
themselves and prayed aloud. Some people at an
adjacent table asked them what Faith they belonged
to. They struck up a friendship with the Orthodox
pilgrims, and went on to become Orthodox Christians
themselves.
Just by doing such a simple things as making the
sign of the Cross and praying, one can change the
lives of those who are looking for something
authentic in Christianity.
Here is another story which provides an even better
example of what Fr. Seraphim said about "outsiders"
becoming interested in the Orthodox Faith just by
seeing us live that Faith. About five years ago, a
young mother in Santa Rosa , California was in a toy
store with her two-year-old son. As she was walking
around looking at things, she saw a woman older than
herself, modestly dressed, who had come to the store
with her teenaged son. The young mother noticed that
there was something different about this woman and
her son. They were calm, peaceful, not distracted;
but it was their relationship that impressed her
most of all. The older mother and her teenaged son
obviously had a close relationship; the boy showed
respect and consideration for his mother, and she
was kind and loving to him. The younger woman
thought to herself: That's the kind of relationship
I want with my son when he gets older. So she went
up to the other woman and asked her, "Do you go to a
church?" It so happened that the older woman was the
wife of a priest, and her church was in Santa Rosa .
She talked with the younger woman, told her about
her church, and told her that there was an Orthodox
bookstore just a few blocks away. The young woman
went directly to the bookstore, which serves as an
outreach center for the Orthodox Faith, and talked
with the man who runs the store. She then started
attending the church with her husband and son, and
in time they all became Orthodox. They still attend
the church regularly, and now have another boy in
the family.
In
discussing what it means to bear witness to our
Faith, we should emphasize that, in all situations,
we must act and speak
with love. Christ told His
disciples: By this shall all men know that ye are
My disciples, if ye have love one to another
(John 13:35). We have the fullness of Truth, yes,
but this Truth must be spoken and given in love,
lest it be corrupted in the very manner in which it
is presented. People
will look for God in us, and if they see no love
there, they will not recognize the presence of God,
even if we know all the Orthodox dogmas and can
recite Scripture verses and the Nicene Creed by
heart.
Fr. Seraphim stressed this in one of his talks. He
said: "Being filled with the Gospel teaching and
trying to live by it, we should have love and
compassion for the miserable humanity of our days.
Probably never have people been more unhappy than
the people of our days, even with all the outward
conveniences and gadgets our society provides us
with. People are suffering and dying for the lack of
God and we can help give God to them. The love of
many has truly grown cold in our days but let us
not be cold. As long as Christ sends us His Grace
and warms our hearts, we do not need to be cold. If
we are cold and indifferent; if our response to the
need for a Christian answer to those who are
miserable is only: 'Who cares? Let someone else do
it; I don't feel like it' (and I have heard Orthodox
people say those very things!) then we are the
salt that has lost its savor and is good for nothing
but to be thrown out (cf. Matt. 5:13)."'
May these words warm our hearts, so that we will go
forth and bear witness to the Orthodox Gospel with
love a love that flows from our relationship with
Jesus Christ, and from the Grace He bestows on us in
His Church.