Sermon
This kind can only come out with prayer
and fasting-the windows of the soul
What
is the role of a disciple? A disciple is
one who believes in Christ, who believes in His Words and His promises. A disciple is one who actively engages in
learning about Christianity, who is actively preparing in this life for his or
her entrance into the next life, and who is actively involved in the ministry
of the church. When I speak of the
ministries of the church, I am not speaking about belonging to a certain group
of the church, like the choir or the Philoptochos or the GOYA or even the
Parish Council. When we speak of the
ministries of the church, we are speaking about preaching, teaching, and
healing—these are the three specific ministries of the church—to teach about
the things of God, to preach, in the sense of trying to bring souls to God, and
to heal, which is done through prayer—our own personal prayer for our own
healing, and communal prayer which helps to bring healing to those around us,
where they in turn help bring healing to us.
The various groups in our church, such as the choir, Philoptochos, GOYA
and the Parish Council each have a specific group of people they reach to—The
choir are the musicians, the Philoptochos are the women, the GOYA are the
teenagers and the Parish Council the elected leaders—you have to fit a certain
category to belong to each group. Each
group has specific things it does—the choir sings, the Philoptochos helps, the
GOYA learns and has fun, and the Parish Council administers. But the end goal for all of these groups is
ministry—there must be preaching, teaching and healing that occurs in each
group.
In
the Gospel lesson this morning, the disciples encountered a man whose son was
possessed by a spirit. The boy’s father wants the disciples to heal his
son. The disciples are not able to. Jesus is able to heal the boy. Later on, the disciples approach Jesus and
ask, “Why could we not cast the spirit out?”
Jesus answers them, this kind can only be cast out by prayer and
fasting.
Before
I continue, let me relate a story told by St. John Chrysostom—Jesus is not only
the Son of God, but the S-U-N of justice.
The rays of this spiritual Sun spread out in all directions; the rays of
the Sun are God’s grace. And this Grace
spreads equally upon the whole world.
However, not everyone receives the same amount of grace. All homes are hit by the same sun, in equal
amount, yet some homes are warmer and other homes are colder. It seems that the warmer homes are those
homes who windows are large, and are open wide to receive the warmth of the
sun. And the colder homes are those
homes whose windows are narrow and whose windows are closed, so that they
cannot be warmed by the sun. Each human
soul is like a home—our thoughts and our purposes are like windows—If our
thoughts and purposes are focused on Godly things, our souls will be light and
warm, they will be full of grace. If our
thoughts and purposes are not focused on Godly things, then our souls become
dark and cold, they are full of darkness and sadness.
Back
to the story in the Gospel, the Disciples approached Jesus after He had healed
the young boy and asked, “why could we not cast the spirit out?” Jesus answered them, “This kind can only come
out through prayer and fasting.” So, if
our souls become warm and light by being focused on the things of God, prayer
and fasting are two tools that the church offers us for the growth of our
souls, in order to purify our souls, so that the light of Christ can illumine
and warm our souls. I’m not speaking for
non-Orthodox Churches and their respective theologies. I am an Orthodox Christian and can speak only
for our theology. Prayer and fasting are
cornerstones to Orthodox theology and practice.
Prayer helps to keep us connected to God. If we are praying frequently, it is going to
be harder to stray too far from God. One
problem, however, with prayer in the Orthodox church, is that for some reason,
we’ve made it okay to substitute ritual for prayer. So someone sits down for a meal as an
example, and does their Stavro, their cross, out of habit, as if to do your
Stavro, lay the napkin in your lap, pick up your fork and go to it. There isn’t a momentary pause to thank God or
consider the fact that you have food in front of you as a blessing. Lighting a candle in church is a beautiful
way to enter into the church building.
But picking up a candle and lighting it is a rather meaningless ritual
if it is not accompanied by some prayer.
A few years ago, I pasted a prayer over the candlestands in the narthex
that asks that the light of Christ come into each of us as we light a candle
and enter into His temple. How many
people offer that prayer when they light a candle? How many people have memorized that prayer? Prayer
is not merely ritual, or even words, but a disposition of the heart that opens
itself up and expresses true feelings to God—feelings of joy, or sadness, of
need, of gratitude. It is essential to
the Orthodox Christian that you open your heart often to God and to communicate
Joy, thanksgiving, repentance and need.
This is how we grow closer to God, not by heaping up empty phrases or
making empty rituals but coming to God with sincerity, with openness.
Fasting
is another tradition of our Orthodox Church.
Many people have said, “I don’t believe in fasting.” Well, I don’t “believe” in fasting
either. I believe in God. I use fasting, however, to help let God into
my soul. Fasting is a tool that we use
in the Orthodox Church. The Church
Fathers write about passions that assault all people—lust, ego, greed, anger,
power—these as passions that assault every human life, they are the root cause
of all sin. The most basic of the
passions is hunger. One can go a long
time without a lustful thought, or a greedy thought or an angry thought, but
one can only go a few hours without having a hungry thought. So, when we learn to discipline ourselves to
go without food, either abstaining from food on a Sunday morning before
receiving Communion, as I spoke about last Sunday, or abstaining from certain
foods during Lent or during the regular year on Wednesdays and Fridays,
according to the Tradition of the church, the hope is that we will learn to
discipline our minds to go without some of the other passions—to put away lust,
ego, greed, anger and power but learning to abstain from food.
Now,
when one fasts by going out and eating a lobster instead of a steak, or when
one eats a whole pizza but says “Well, it didn’t have meat on it,” that isn’t
really fasting. And when one fasts but
does not pray, we call that dieting, not fasting.
Let’s
talk about authority for a moment—when you go to the supermarket, who is the
authority? It is the store manager. So if the store you are in catches on fire,
and the store manager says “Get out of the store,” you get out of the
store. You don’t say to the store
manager “Hey I have a PhD and you don’t.”
The store manager is the authority and it doesn’t matter how many
degrees we hold, if the store manager is asking us to do something, then we are
to oblige. Similarly, when you go to the
doctor because you are sick, the doctor is the authority on how to get
well. So, when the doctor says, “you
need to do such and such thing,” the answer cannot be “I make more money than
you, don’t tell me what to do.”
Ironically, there is lots of authority in the world today—there are
rules that govern owning a home, driving a car, keeping your teeth, and holding
a job. That’s why it always confounds me
when people have a hard time with the concept of authority in the church. From a purely pragmatic point of view, if
there is authority in the rest of the world, why shouldn’t there be authority
in the church. And from a theological
perspective, God, the author of all creation and the architect of salvation is
obviously the chief authority in the church.
Other sources of authority include God’s servants—His disciples, His
bishops, His priests, His Holy people who have expounded on His words and
interpreted them to us in their sacred writings that have become the backbone
of many of our traditions and practices, including prayer and fasting.
Archimandrite
Chrysostomos, in his book The Ancient Fathers of the Desert, relates
this story:
A
young Abbot was counseled thus, in our own day, by a Holy man: Today many people, wish for an excuse not to
do what God asks of them, find fault with the teaching of the
Again,
speaking for only the Orthodox Church, the truth in this church is that prayer
and fasting are the tools that open the windows of the soul and allow the light
of Christ to shine in the soul more brightly.
So that if you are a dark person, or if your life is full of sadness,
you have to ask yourself, why are the windows to your soul closed, and what can
you do to get them open, because the light of Christ warms every soul whose
windows are open. Or to put it another
way, there is no soul whose windows are opened that will not be warmed by the
light of Christ.
This
past Wednesday, we celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation as well as the
cultural holiday of Greek Independence Day.
The central theme of both feasts is freedom. Ironically, the central component of freedom
is obedience. We are “free” in
So,
going back to the Gospel reading, when the disciples could not cast out a demon
and Christ told them that “this kind can only come out through prayer and
fasting,” what He was saying in essence was, “open the windows of your souls
through prayer and fasting, allow the light of Christ to come into them, and
then you will be able to preach, teach and heal,” the things that a disciple is
supposed to be doing, through God’s grace, which comes when we open the windows
of our souls to the light of Christ.
Someone
who sat down with me for confession the other day said a very profound thing as
we finished: “I love going to confession,
it’s where I get all the darkness and crap out of me, and feel new, light and
good.”
Lent,
with its emphasis on fasting, more corporate prayer, repentance and confession,
afford us the opportunity to get the darkness and crap out of ourselves and to
feel renewed, lightened and good. As we
make the home stretch on Lent and head towards Holy Week, give some thought to
repentance and confession, prayer and fasting.
If these things are part of your life, be sure to maintain them, since
they are the windows that keep your soul warm with the light of Christ. And if these things are not part of your life
at present, make a conscious effort in the remaining three weeks of Lent to
incorporate prayer and fasting, make that appointment you know you need to make
for confession with myself or Fr. John, so that your soul too may be warmed
with the light of Christ.
I
will close with a quote from the writings of St. John Chrysostom:
Since
our thoughts and purposes are the windows of our souls, when you open wide your
heart you receive a larger, more generous, divine favor; when you narrow your
soul, you can but receive a less abundant grace. Open wide and lay bare your heart and soul to
God, that His splendor may enter into you. Amen.