In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Beloved Clergy and lay-Brethren throughout the Portland Diocese,
Greetings in Christ the Lord!
We have all just passed along that familiar path of the five pre-Lenten Sundays as the Church carefully and with deep love guided us on the first of these Sundays to Zacchaeus, with his deep desire to see Christ (and in some traditions, this same message gets across from the Gospel concerning the Woman at the Well). This brought us next to the great problem that emerges for all who truly desire Christ; that is, to the struggle between our fallen human pride and our consciousness that without genuine humility we cannot be saved, as we hear the Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee on the second of the five Sundays.
Then, on the third of the five pre-Lenten Sundays, the Church presented us with the astonishing Parable of the Prodigal Son, with its multiple themes of greed and lust, exile and hunger, repentance and return, all brought to a focus as we behold the unexpected depth of the father's love for his erring, straying son — that father who beheld the errant boy "while he was yet afar off".
On the fourth of the five pre-Lenten Sundays we find ourselves confronted with the dividing-up of humanity, between the saved and the damned. And here, the Gospel that presides over this Sunday of the Last Judgement, reveals that the "other" one — even the one who is the "least of these My brethren" — is in fact Christ the Lord Himself. We cannot serve that "other" person without, in fact, serving Christ; and we cannot serve Christ until we really do accept some responsibility for that "other one" — even for him whom we esteem "the least".
And today, the final and fifth of these preparatory Sundays, we come to the goal to which all these Gospel instructions, these scriptural "seminars," have been leading us — we come before the great spiritual work of Forgiveness.
You and I will rarely have to confront a more difficult task throughout our entire earthly pilgrimage than the hard task of forgiving someone who has wronged us, who has even betrayed us, especially if he happens to have been a friend — worst of all, a close friend or even a member of our own family!
The bar is raised high on this last, this fifth Sunday, which is also the gate through which you and I will have to pass in order to enter fully into the great Forty-Day Fast. Brethren, on each of these five Sundays our Saviour — Who wills that every one of us should be saved, Who loves us more, and better, than we love ourselves — on each of these remarkable Sundays, we realize that we have serious work to undertake within ourselves, deep inside our own heart, down in the depths of our personalities.
Each week that follows these five Sunday Gospels has been, for all of us who take our faith seriously, a time of deep and sobering self-confrontation — we who so frequently over the past year since the last Pascha, have confronted not our own self, but instead, others, blamed others, spent time in difficult and at times deeply contentious exchanges with others — we who in so many ways may well have violated the integrity of our own bodies, our own souls.
Now we find ourselves in Lent, and we stop looking at others, and begin to look at own life, critically.
Lent is a time of strenuous ascetic exercising. The Greek term askisis, from which we get our English term "ascetic", comes from the ancient Greek wrestling ring, and referred to the course of daily exercising that got people back into shape physically, and kept them in good condition.
The Church's Great Lent is also an arena, a gymnasium; but not only for the body.
It involves our spiritual exercises as well as the Lenten diet to which we subject our demanding, "always ready for a second helping" stomachs, our stomachs which the Greek Fathers accurately describe as "tyrants"!
We pick up the pace of our prayer life, setting aside television, entertainment, sports spectating, and other time-consuming activities; and instead, we always have the option of turning that time over to prayer, to reading Scripture, the lives of the Saints, attending services in our communities, and engaging in active charity on a larger scale.
The ascetic struggle to keep faith with the Lenten dietary guidelines not only leaves us leaner and healthier physically and mentally, but gives us living proof that with a strong desire, we can take control of our lives, and turn them to spiritually-profitable activities.
Let us, you and I, pray for one another throughout the period from today through bright Pascha. But let us pray especially for anyone who may fit the category of our "enemy", since we know that we have to love our enemies, and there is no finer sign of genuine love for someone than to pray for him. Enough of these "enemies"! Lent is really that season in which you and I have no time for enemies! Let us rather attend to ourselves.
Let us make a greater effort to sustain our inner attention on the wonderful words of the hymns and prayers of our Church services. Even if we cannot attend services with a community, we most certainly can read these texts — attentively and with reverent concentration — on our own.
This is, in and of itself an enormous ascetic task as we literally wrestle with inner distracting thoughts, struggling hard to keep our attention on the one thing needful, whether following these remarkable services in church or at home.
Think — to give but one example — what a transformative power we have readily available if we simply add the Lenten prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian to our daily prayers!
And brothers and sisters, let us attend to our own families and colleagues with a greater "Lenten" sensitivity, with greater "Lenten" attention, let us regard them with a kindlier "Lenten" eye, a better "Lenten" tone of voice, than we may have been doing of late.
We do not need to be sarcastic, snide, endlessly whining, judging others. We can always find a better way to use our power of speech, and if we have Christ at the center of our attention, we will find our way to a manner of speaking to others that is worthy of a practicing Christian believer, that is, above all, consistent with the Great Fast.
God gave each one of us believers an amazing amount of personal freedom: let us use our freedom wisely in the service of our spiritual life. Let us set aside those divisive elements, those areas of destructive friction, between ourselves and others, and instead, replace all that with a sober respect for the "other" one, no matter how often, or how seriously, we think he has let us down and disappointed us.
Husbands and wives, parents and children. fellow-students and fellow workers, colleagues in the office and on the job site, neighbours in the neighbourhood — here in these relationships we find the faces of the ones whom we must see differently than we perhaps have been seeing them, if we have in fact been treating them without much real respect, if we have been inattentive or insensitive to others as we make our journey over the course of our life on this earth.
The holy Forty-Day Fast can be a time of enormous interior change and transformation if we will meet it at least half way, and if we will meet it on its own terms, and not on our own terms. This year, let us let Lent be a true Lent, and not merely an external change of diet, which we may largely ignore, a time of increased services — and longer ones! — which we may often skip, or which we will attend, while spending the service day dreaming.
Enough of all that. Here is Christ; and here are you. Spend time in Christ's company throughout Lent; get used to Him; allow yourself to become fascinated with Him Who is your Saviour; savour the Gospels and the Epistles that speak of Him.
Without a conscious effort to see this authentic Christ at the heart of our life, at the heart of our day, at the heart of our struggle to live as decent disciples of Christ, at the heart of all our relationships, you and I can not be saved.
But WITH these things in place — oh, my! What can we not accomplish spiritually, you and I, in the Forty Days of Fasting and praying that now have come upon us, which are just about to begin? And in the light of all these things, let us review ourselves, innerly.
In Christ's love, asking your prayers, and wishing you a life-changing Lenten journey,
+Bishop Sergios of Portland
Forgiveness Sunday
4/17 March 2013