Fr. Timothy Barkley
St. James Orthodox Church
(1/1) "Man! I just can’t get going today!" … "Didn’t sleep well?" … "No, I gave up coffee for Lent!"
"Look out for Stan! He’s got serious badditude! Gave up drinking for Lent!"
"Do you know what happened on Jeopardy last night? I gave it up for Lent!"
Sacrifice and self-denial, and a touch of irony and misery. What’s it all about? And is that all there is to the "joy-filled sorrow" of Lent?
Great Lent, the period of preparation for Easter – the Feast of Feasts, the bursting-forth of Christ’s resurrection from the dead into our world, "Pascha," to use the more ancient term – has been a time of fasting since the earliest days of the Church.
Lenten practices derive in part from Old Testament ritual fasts, and in part from the preparation of the catechumens (those converting to Christianity from pagan religions and seeking admission to the Church). Fasting in the Church predates the New Testament. It predates the Christian biblical canon.
Why do we fast?
To make a sacrifice to God of our desires? Yes, we sacrifice our desires, but not with the expectation that a God of exacting justice will count our sacrifice against our sins, in a one-for-one offset. Rather, we sacrifice our desires to rid ourselves of the disordered demands of our human nature.
The most ancient temptation was to be "as gods," living life in our way, in our time, on our terms. But while we were always meant to "partake of the divine nature" and bear the image and likeness of God, we refused to submit ourselves to our Creator and God, and thereby became victims of our own limitations.
So we sacrifice our desires (a) to remind ourselves that our belly – our desires, passions (to use the ancient term), our very humanity – is not our god, (b) to declare to all listening intelligences, from the Holy Spirit of God and the holy angels to the wolf of souls and his minions, that we humble ourselves and relinquish our control over our lives
to the One who first loved us and gave Himself for us, (c) to join with the Body of Christ and our adoptive family in preparation for our communal festival of the resurrection of Our Lord, and (d) to rid ourselves of that which is petty and base in order to make room for that which is glorious and divine.
To deny ourselves? Fasting can be simply denying our base impulses and desires, and that is good. But more, if fasting – if it goes beyond simply giving up something we cherish and includes giving up or limiting our intake of something we need – by constraining or denying our most fundamental desire for food and drink, gives us the opportunity to
remind ourselves that we live, not by bread alone, but by the Word of God, Who is our provider and sustainer. The One who provides for the birds of the air and the grass of the field can and will also provide for us.
To give something to God? God receives and cherishes our gifts to Him, as any father cherishes the gifts given by his children. But we cannot add anything to God, nor by our own pitiable efforts can we augment His transcendent infinity. We are benefitted by our giving, even if He is not increased by receiving.
And here is the key. We empty ourselves, not to make God more, but to make ourselves less. We then have room for Him, for His grace, His very energies that can fill our lives with His love, His presence, and His power. Thereby we become not "less," but truly attain by grace all we were created to be.
We get rid of the "good" to make room for the ineffable Best. Nothing we give up during Lent should be bad in itself – if it is, just stop doing it – right now – and don’t start again! – but rather, we give up that which is lesser, to attain that which cannot be surpassed. We give up that which is merely desirable, to embrace that which satisfies
beyond expression.
We give up that which sates our bodies – in the most ancient practice we forswear meat, dairy and eggs – and limit our intake to only those simple foods necessary to sustain us, so that in our hunger we are reminded that we are never truly filled until we are filled with Him. We give up that which sates our souls – entertainments, leisure reading,
eating out – to confront us with the truth that our souls are unfulfilled until they find fulfillment in God.
We do not just fast. We also embrace prayer and almsgiving. The latter, because God is our provider and all we have is from Him and must be available to Him. We thus feed Him as we feed "the least of these," clothe Him, visit and comfort Him in the person of the poor. We are merely stewards of that which ultimately belongs to Another, and our return of
some of His beneficence to Him confirms our freedom from the tyranny of self.
We pray. Great Lent is a time of quiet meditation, of drawing aside from bustle and distractions of life in "this world" to contemplate the fulness of our nature and our calling. We have just emerged from the agonizing commercialized excrescence on the Nativity of Christ. We can prayerfully receive the gift of peaceful reflection on the promise of His
coming and the expectation of the fulfillment of that promise in His resurrection.
And we repent. Lent is a time to make a course correction, which is the meaning of "repentance" – a "change of direction." We examine our lives and see where we have, maybe negligently, maybe recklessly, maybe intentionally heeded the sirens’ call and drifted near, even onto the rocks, and deviated from our progress to the heart of the One Who is Love.
Lent is a time to rededicate ourselves to pressing on to the mark of the high calling, to set aside the sins that entangle and so easily beset us, and fix our eyes on the Resurrected Christ, who "for the joy" (!) "set before Him, endured the cross" and was raised from the dead by His Father, in fidelity and love.
The resurrection of Christ, and His triumph over sin and death, enables us by "putting on Christ," having Christ "formed in us," to "partake of the divine nature" and become by grace what He is by nature. We are able to resume our place, by grace, in continual repentance and worship, as sons of God, as those whom He has called to Himself, as younger
brothers of our Older Brother and inheritors of the Kingdom.
Let us embrace the fasting, repentance and quietude of Great Lent, that we might, like Christ, spring forth in the joy of His resurrection. Great Lent!
To learn more about St. James Orthodox Church in Taneytown, call them at 443-821-7246, visit them on-line at www.stjamesorthodoxchurch.org, or better yet, join them for Sunday service at 30 York St., Taneytown.
Read other homilies by Father Barkley
About St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown
The Holy Orthodox Church is the Church founded by Jesus Christ and described throughout the New Testament. All other Christian Churches and sects can be traced back historically to it. The word Orthodox literally means "straight teaching" or "straight worship," being derived from two Greek words: orthos, "straight," and doxa, "teaching" or "worship."
As the encroachments of false teaching and division multiplied in early Christian times, threatening to obscure the identity and purity of the Church, the term "Orthodox" quite logically came to be applied to it. The Orthodox Church carefully guards the truth against all error and schism, both to protect its flock and to glorify Christ, whose Body the Church is.
St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown is a congregation of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. We are the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Christian Church whose roots trace directly back to first century Antioch, the city in which the disciples of Jesus Christ were first called "Christians" (Acts 11:26). The
Orthodox Church is the oldest and second largest Christian group in the world. We are called by God our creator to worship and follow Him, and to proclaim to the world His message of love, peace, and salvation.
God loves all mankind and desires that all human beings should believe in Him, know Him, abide in Him, and receive eternal life from Him. To accomplish this, God Himself came into the world as a man, Jesus Christ, becoming man that we might become like God.
The Antiochian Archdiocese, under the leadership of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph, sees itself on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian Faith. We join our brothers and sisters in the various Orthodox Christian jurisdictions — Greek, Orthodox Church in America, Romanian, Ukrainian, and more — in this endeavor. In less than 20
years the Archdiocese has doubled in size to well over 200 churches and missions throughout the United States and Canada.
