Homily - Orthodox Familial Ecclesiology

St. Luke 8:5-15. In today's homily, Fr. Anthony speaks about how a marriage should function in an Orthodox context and how that translates to our life in the Church. Enjoy the show!

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Here's the homily I planned on giving before I called an audible.  

Homily Notes: Tending the Garden of our Souls
St. Luke 8:5-15: The Gospel of the Sower

“Have you rejected Satan and all his works and all his pomp and all his pride?
Have you rejected Satan and all his works and all his pomp and all his pride? 
Have you rejected Satan and all his works and all his pomp and all his pride?”

“Have you accepted Christ? 
Have you accepted Christ? 
Have you accepted Christ?”

Our affirmation of these questions before our baptism, the sacramental participation that followed, and the fact that we are here today means that we are Christians.  We have rejected the way of the world – which is ruled by Satan – and have become part of the New Humanity that is preparing to inherit the New World; a world that is uncorrupted by Satan and the sins of the Old Humanity. 

To move away from eschatological and theological terms into the beautiful metaphors Christ gave us in today’s parable:  the seed of perfection (Christ Himself!) has been planted in our souls. 

A seed is a miraculous thing; it contains all the information needed for the growing of a perfect plant.  The DNA is all there.  A wheat seed has everything needed to grow up to be a perfect stalk of wheat.  More amazingly, a small acorn can grow into an enormous tree.  The seed of Christ that has been planted in our souls is jut like that: we have been given everything we need – all the information – to grow into perfect men and women, into saints, into little Christ’s… to grow into the kind of peaceful, loving, and productive humans we were conceived and born to become.  The perfect seed is within our souls. 

But is that enough?  We have all planted many seeds in our lifetime.  Good seeds.  Good soil.  And yet we know that if we are not careful, we will still end up with a terrible harvest of weeds and brambles. 

Why?  How does this happen?

We live in a world that is full of loose spores.  The winds are full of the world’s little seeds.  They, too, carry all the potential of full growth within themselves.  At some point, some of these spores are bound to find their way into our gardens … and into the soil of our souls. 

The corruption of our gardens may begin through inattention – a lack of what we call “nepsis” – but that doesn’t explain why we end up with a bumper crop of thistles and thorns, leaving the seed we originally planted weak or even completely dead.  How did it happen?  It certainly wasn’t the seed.  And it wasn’t just that we weren’t paying attention – we always notice when something has changed in our gardens and in our lives.

It happened because we didn’t bother with the difficult work of weeding.

Weeding is such a judgmental term – it assumes a discernment that we have all but forgotten.  It requires, for instance, the realization, that Church on Sunday is more important than sports or sleeping in; that Feast Days are even more worthy ways to spend vacation days than trips to the beach; that spending a few minutes in prayer is worth the sacrifice of a few minutes of facebook or television; and that chastity is better in every respect than the transitory joy of serial monogamy, pornography, and adultery. 

New gardeners can’t tell a beautiful weed from beanstalk; they need to learn.  We also need to learn.  We need to realize

1.    That there are such things as weeds;

2.    That they are dangerous threats to our souls, our families, and our communities; and

3.    That it is our responsibility as human beings (God’s imagers on this earth; the New Humans!) to pull them out.

Terrible and noxious things have made their way into our souls.  We don’t like to call them weeds because some of them are pretty and it sounds so judgmental.  But as Christ says, you know a plant by its fruit;vand the plants of this world may look nice for a while, but their fruit is death and damnation (see Luke 6:44).

The Tree of the Cross is the plant that rises from the well-tended garden of the Christian soul, and its fruit is eternal life.