The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20141102

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In the last issue of this article, I began sharing with you the evolution of the Divine Liturgy and suggested that in the beginning even the frequency with which it was celebrated was uncertain. This is partially due to the fact that the early Christians didn’t necessarily think about establishing a new religion which has, as a part of it, various ritualized forms of prayer and worship.

The shape of the Liturgy as we now celebrate it, emerged by the middle of the 2nd century. The history distinct periods. During the first period, the Lord’s Supper is separated from the agape, that is an actual evening meal during which the Lord’s actions during His Last Supper with His disciples was recalled. The separation, as I explained, took place because of the abuses the crept into the holding of this dinner – people sometimes drank too much wine. This first period was from the 1st century into the 2nd century.

During the second period, the middle of the 2nd century, a format began to emerge. It appeared in the Apology, a writing of Justin Martyr. In this writing Justin suggests this format:

 

Readings
Preaching
Common Prayers
Kiss of Peace
Transfer of Gifts
Prayer over the Gifts
Communion and Dismissal

 

All prayers during this period, as during the first period, were spontaneous and led by an elder who was asked by the community to serve as the convener of the community’s common prayer.

During the third period of the Liturgy’s evolution, actual prayer texts begin to be developed. Formularies are written for each community. All of them differ, showing that there was no one apostolic liturgy from which they derived. Yet all of them follow the same basic outline first seen in Justin’s Apology.

During the next period, after the peace of Constantine in 313, when Christian worship became the public ceremonial of a church freed from civil restraints, liturgical development quickened. It is in this period that we first hear of the rite of Byzantium. It is the rite of the new capital of Constantine, the founding of which in 315 inaugurates the new era of imperial Christendom. As one can guess, the format of worship developed in the capital influenced all other communities. It should be noted, however, that again the sequence of ritual events continued to draw upon the format that Justin Martyr reported. It is also in the period that more and more churches began to standardize their worship practice.

During the final stage, different liturgical families evolved as distinct entities.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20141102

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You will recall that in considering the chronological development of the New Testament (NT), we have looked at the documents in this order: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, Romans and the Gospel of Mark. We now consider Paul’s Letter to the Colossians.

It is almost certainly the earliest of the letters attributed to Paul but not actually written by him. Its strongest literary connections are to Ephesians, whose author most likely knew Colossians. Ephesians was most likely written no later than around the year 90 CE, and thus Colossians must have been written earlier, probably in the 80s.

A minority of mainline scholars argue that Colossians is even earlier, because it was written by Paul himself. The letter not only says so, but it has the classic form of a Pauline letter. It begins with the author identifying himself, the naming of the addressees, and an introductory blessing: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father.” It continues with a prayer of thanksgiving and, after the body of the letter, concludes with a closing greeting and blessing: “Grace be with you.

But in style and content, it differs significantly from the seven genuine letter of Paul. Its sentences are much longer and more complex (obscured in some editions of the NT [NRSV] because they break up the sentences into shorter units for sake of clarity). Its content not only does beyond what is in the seven genuine letters, but sometimes conflicts with them.

For example, recall that Paul’s letter to the Galatians affirms that Jew and Gentile, male and female, and slave and free are all one in Christ and that his letter to Philemon asserts that a Christian master may not have a Christian slave. When Colossians (3:11) echoes Galatians, it does not mention the equality of male and female. A few verses later, the earliest NT example of what are called household codes begins. It includes the subordination of wives to husbands and slaves to masters. “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting to the Lord” (3:18). Slaves are to be obedient to their “earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord” (3:22). The radicalism of Paul’s early communities is being accommodated to the hierarchical normalcy of the Roman world.

The letter is addressed to Christians in Colossae and Laodicea, two cities near each other in western Asia Minor. According to the letter itself, Paul did not know these communities in person; he was not their founder and had not visited them. The letter is called one of the “prison letters” because of its closing: “Remember my chains.” The author, assuming it was not Paul, knew that Paul had been imprisoned.

The highly developed Christology of Colossians would seem to indicate a later imprisonment, most likely the traditional Roman house arrest.

Getting to Know Something About Our Greek Catholic Faith — 20141102

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The Union of Brest was the the 1595-96 decision of the Ruthenian Church of Rus’, the Metropolia of Kiev-Halych and all Rus’, to break relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople and to enter into communion with the Bishop of Rome. At the time, this church included most Ukrainians and Belarusians who lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The hierarchs of the Kievan Church gathered in synod in the city of Brest and composed 33 articles of union which were accepted by the Bishop of Rome. At first it was widely accepted but, within several decades, it lost much of its initial support. Several uprisings, particularly the Khmelnytskyj and the Zaporozhian Cossak uprisings caused the Commonwealth to lose Ukraine. By the end of the 18th century the Ukrainian Church united to Rome became the sole church for Ruthenians living in the Commonwealth. After the Partition of Poland, all but Galicia enter into the Russian Empire and within decades all but the Chelm Eparchy would revert to Orthodoxy. The latter would be forcibly converted in 1875.

In Austrian Galicia, however, the church underwent a transformation to one of the founding cornerstones of the Ukrainian national awakening in the 19th century. It became the center for Ukrainian culture during the Second Polish Republic and Ukrainian nationalism during the Second World War. Although between 1946 and 1989 it was forcibly adjoined to the Russian Orthodox Church by Soviet authorities, it would come out of the catacombs as the Ukrainiain Greek-Catholic Church in the prelude to Ukraine’s independence.

The Union of Brest was solemnly and publicly proclaimed in the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican. Canon Eustachy Woltowicz of Vilnius read the letter of the Ruthenian episcopate in both Ruthenian and Latin to the Pope on June 12, 1595 declaring their desire for union with Rome. Cardinal Silvio Antoniani thanked the Ruthenian episcopate in the name of the Pope and expressed his joy at the happy event. Adam Pociej, Bishop of Vladimir, in his own name and that of the Ruthenian episcopate, then read, in Latin, the formula of abjuration of the Greek Schism. Bishop Cyryl Terlecki of Lutsk read it in Ruthenian. They all then affixed their signatures to the document. Pope Clement VIII addressed to them an allocution, expressing his joy and promising the Ruthenians his support and a medal was struck to commemorate the event. The inscription on the coin read: Ruthenis receptis.

On the same day the Pope published the Bull Magnus Dominus et laudabilis which announced to the Roman Catholic world the return of the Ruthenians to the unity of the Roman Church.

The Bull cites the events which led to the union, the arrival of Pociej and Terlecki at Rome, their abjuration, and the concessions made to the Ruthenians. (More to come)

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20141102

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As I attempted to express in the last issue of this article, prayer is essential for our spiritual life. We cannot maintain any type of real relationship with God if we don’t engage in prayer. Spiritual writers divide prayer into many different categories. A simple division is to look at prayer either as one-to-one, the prayer a person does by him/herself, or as many-to-one, the prayer a person does with others. One-to-one prayer has three expressions:

(1) we reach out to God by saying prayers we were taught – by reciting the formulas we have memorized;
(2) we reach out to God and speak to God in our own words – this form of prayer very often comes from reading and reflecting on the Scriptures or some spiritual book; and
(3) we reach out to God heart to heart in the language of silence, in the language of the heart.

Each of these forms of personal prayer serves us well at different times in our lives, and we may well use all three on the same day. In no way are they exclusive. Actually they can feed into one another and enhance one another. Each expression has advantages and dangers.

Reciting prayers that we have memorized can be of great comfort. They are familiar. They are available. We can “hook into them.” They can carry us along in periods of dryness. Although they do not usually carry a high emotional charge, they help us realize that we need to keep in touch with God. We feel that these prayers belong to us, even though we did not create them. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, He did not give them a series of exercises to do for meditation or teach them a method of prayer. He gave them a formula, a very simple formula: “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins for we too forgive all who do us wrong; and subject us not to the trial.”

All prayer is conversation with God. It is only in silence that we hear His response!

Learning Our Faith from the Fathers of the Church — 20141102

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As I suggested in the last issue of this article, the Eastern Fathers of the Church maintained that the Incarnation of God as a human being had cosmic significance. It renewed creation. In fact, the Fathers talk about the New Creation that resulted from God’s action of actually entering into human history and actually taking on human nature.

The cosmic dimension of the Incarnation is implied in the definition produced by the Council of Chalcedon (451), to which Byzantine theology remains faithful: “Christ is of one substance with us in His humanity, ‘like unto us in all things save sin.’” He is God and man for “the distinction of natures is in no way abolished because of the union; rather, the characteristic properties of each nature are preserved.” The last sentence of the definition covers, obviously, the creative, inventive, controlling functions of man in the cosmos. The idea is developed in the theology of Maximus the Confessor, when he argues against the Monothelites, for the existence in Christ of a human will, or energy, stressing that without it authentic humanity is inconceivable. If Christ’s manhood is identical with outs in all things except sin, one must admit that Christ, who is man in His body, in His soul and in His mind, was indeed acting with all these functions of true humanity. As Maximus fully understood, Christ’s human energy or will was not superseded by His divine will, but accepted conformity with it. “The two natural wills of Christ are not contrary to each other…but the human will follows the divine.” This conformity of the human with the divine in Christ is, therefore, not a diminution of humanity, but its restoration: “Christ restores nature to conformity with itself….Becoming man, He keeps His free will in impassibility and peace with nature.” “Participation” in God is the very nature of man, not its abolition. This is the key to Eastern Christian understanding of the God-man relationship.

[You will recall the Chalcedon, which was the fourth Ecumenical Council and ranks as probably the second most important of the first seven Councils, clearly defined Christ as having two natures, divine and human, and condemned Monophysitism].

In Christ, the union of the two natures is hypostatic: they “concur into one person and one hypostasis” (underlying state or underlying substance – the fundamental reality that supports all else) according to the Fathers of Chalcedon. Indeed the controversies which arose from the Chalcedonian formula led to further definitions of the meaning of the term hypostasis.

We must remember that the Church struggled for many centuries to come to an agreed upon understanding of Who Christ is and what it meant, in human words, that God became incarnate – became man.

The Call To Holiness — 20141102

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The Call to Holiness can also be considered to be a call to a Spiritual Journey of Personal Relationships. By this we understand that any spiritual growth involves the development of the ability to sustain healthy relationships with others. This can be, of course, a struggle at times since it does require us to divest ourselves of our personal self-concern and focus on the other.

Further, the spiritual journey is not clearly marked. People are not always sure of the direction they should take. They may stumble, take detours, miss the signs, and even have to retrace their steps. But they trust that God is with them even in these false steps, inspiring, guiding, correcting so that they general direction of their lives is growth in relationship with the Lord and with their neighbors.

The journey is not a solitary one that we have to make alone. In our efforts to grow spiritually we have the help, the example, the prayers, the guidance of the Church, the Christian community of which we are a part. Even though each of us goes to God in our own way, we also go with others as a member of a community.

This is an important point. A truly vibrant parish is one that finds ways to support one another. Truly, anyone belonging to a Christian community should feel that they have the support of the community. This may mean, at times, that we reach out to one another, demonstrating this support. Each member of the community should know and feel that they have the support of the         community and also feel their own responsibility to support others in the community. It is always a two-way street. If we desire to be supported by the community, we must be willing to offer our support to members of the community. This, of course, requires active membership. Active membership, of course, also has to take into account our physical ability to support the     community. Perhaps, because of age and health, all we can do is be friendly to others. That is a form of support.

Mary, the first member of the community, is a prime example of this growth. Even though Mary’s journey was always in accordance with the will of God, she had to grow in her understanding of and in her response to God’s will. The stories in the Gospel which speak of her show her as a young girl afraid yet courageously responsive to God’s call, a young mother caring for her child, a mother confused and wondering about her lost son, a mother who must let go of her son as he goes about his public ministry, a mother who must watch her son die, and, finally, a mothers, confirmed in Easter faith, who waits for the coming Spirit of Pentecost.

October 26, 2014

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My child, replied Abraham,
remember that you were well off in your lifetime,
while Lazarus was in misery.
Now he has found consolation here, but you have found torment.

Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus

Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus

Luke’s Gospel presents two parables about riches together, the parable of the Dishonest Manager and the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This second parable is only found in Luke’s Gospel and the context of the parable is Jesus speaking to the Pharisees who were fond of money and who thought to find justification in their own punctilious observance of the Law. The rich man is similar in many respects to the Dishonest Manager since both appear to be successful for a time but are unaware of the evil in mishandling money. It is important to note that similar stories existed among the rabbis in Egypt. Jesus could easily have adapted this tradition for his own personal purposes.

I think that this parable highlights, at least for me, the fact that most of us have a difficult time developing a truly healthy attitude about money. Since money impacts our lives so deeply, it seems we are always struggling with how to effectively deal with it. While the Gospels remind us that all we have is from God and that it is given to us so that we might be generous to others, this is not an attitude that is easily embraced since most of us have to work quite hard for what we have. Further, since we work hard for what we have, we don’t always feel generous to those who don’t have access to money since we hear that they don’t work and, even, sometimes scam the system. Most of us have to work really hard to maintain a sound Christian attitude about money.

During the Divine Liturgy we are reminded about the attitude that we must have to be true followers of Christ. In the Ambo Prayer or Prayer of Thanksgiving I declare, on behalf of the entire congregation, that we know that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from You, the Father of lights. This means that we realize that, even though we may work very hard for the things that we have, the attitude we must have as children of God is that all we have is a result of God’s goodness. So the challenge facing us is this: we have to work as hard as we can for what we have but then have the attitude that all we have comes from God. It is a challenge to develop this attitude, especially in a society such as ours that so emphasizes our own personal individuality. What does it take in order to adopt this Christian attitude which says: all I have comes from God in spite of my personal hard word? Humility! I have to realize that God gives me what I need to develop my spiritual life. If I don’t get these things, I probably don’t need them to spiritually grow. The person who is deprived of material things has a challenge to still be spiritual in spite of his lack. Most of us are challenged to spiritually grow in spite of our material abundance! I truly believe that both are equally challenging, if only we think about it. Things, and the abundance of the things of this earth, are a burden since they can seriously hinder us from spiritual growth unless we are well grounded in our belief that they are from God. This is something that we can all do well to think about.

Do you believe that what you have comes from our loving God?

Learning Our Faith from the Fathers of the Church — 20141026

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The incarnation of the Word of God (i.e., Logos, Son of God or Christ) was very consistently considered by Byzantine theologians as truly having a cosmic significance. The cosmic dimension of the Christ-event is expressed particularly well in Byzantine hymnology: Every creature made by You offers You thanks: the Angels offer You a hymn; the heavens, a star; the Magi, gifts; the shepherds, their wonder; the earth, its cave; the wilderness, the manger, and we offer You a Virgin Mother.” The connection between creation and the Incarnation is constantly emphasized in the hymns: Man fell from the divine and better life; though made in the image of God, through transgression he became wholly subject to corruption and decay. But now the wise Creator fashions him anew; for He has been glorified. Similarly, the hymnology of Great and Good Friday stresses the involvement of creation as a whole in the death of Christ: The sun beholding You upon the Cross covered itself with gloom; the earth trembled for fear.

Thus, poetic images reflect the parallelism between Genesis 1:2 and John 1. The coming of Christ is the Incarnation of the Logos thorough whom all things were made: it is a new creation, but the creator is the same. Against the Gnostics, who professed a dualism distinguishing the God of the Old Testament from the Father of Jesus, patristic tradition affirmed their absolute identity and, therefore, the essential goodness of the original creation.

The Christ-event is a cosmic event both because Christ is the Logos – and, therefore, in God the agent of creation – and because He is man, since man is a microcosm. Man’s sin plunges creation into death and decay, but man’s restoration in Christ is a restoration of the cosmos to its original beauty. Here again, Byzantine hymnology is the best witness:

David foreseeing in spirit the sojourn with men of the Only-begotten Son in the flesh, called the creation to rejoice with him, and prophetically lifted up his voice to cry: “Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Your name”. For having gone up, O Christ, with Your disciples into Mount Tabor, You were transfigured, and made the nature that had grown dark in Adam to shine again as lightning.

The glorification of man, which is also the glorification of the whole of creation, should be understood eschatologically. In the person of Christ, in the sacramental reality of His Body, and in the life of the saints, the transfiguration of the entire cosmos is anticipated’ but its advent in strength is still to come. This glorification, however, is indeed already a living experience available to all Christians, especially in the Liturgy. This experience alone can give a goal and a meaning to human history.

Getting to Know Something About Our Greek Catholic Faith — 20141026

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Some have asked me how our Greek-Catholic Church came into existence. As I have shared, our Church was established through the missionary activities of priests from Constantinople, namely Cyril and Methodius. Prince Volodymyr embraced Christianity as practiced in Constantinople. In fact the Patriarch of that city appointed the bishops that served our early Church.
The Metropolitan of Kiev-Halych was appointed by Constantinople and fell under the jurisdiction and influence of that patriarchate. It remained within that sphere of influence even after the Great Schism (1054) which separated the Church into two different Churches, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. It was not until the sixteenth century, at a time when the great Reformation (i.e., Protestantism) was taking place in the Western Church, that the relationship between our Church and the Catholic Church changed.
hagiasophialastIn 1595-1596 the Union of Brest took place. A number of bishops in the region of what is modern Ukraine, Poland and Belarus (“Rus'”), decided to come into union with the Western Church. This was done for two reasons: (1) union with the Bishop of Rome, the See of the Apostle Peter, was how Christ established the Church; and (2) it was a way to avoid being ruled by the newly established Patriarch of Moscow.
At the time, the Church in the area included most Ukrainians and Belarusians, under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The bishops of the Kievan Church met in synod in the city of Brest to compose the union’s 33 articles which were then accepted by the Roman Catholic pope. In Austrian Galicia the church fared well and remains strong to this day, most notably in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
The union was strongly supported by the king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, Sigismund III Vasa, but opposed by some bishops and prominent nobles of Rus’ and perhaps most importantly by the nascent Cossack movement for Ukrainian self-rule. A large area in the southwest of the Rusyn Empire became absorbed by Lithuania and Poland after the destruction of Kievan power by the Tartars. This southwestern part of Rus’ was known as Little Rus’ (in Latin Ruthenia); this is the territory that is present day Ukraine.
An important influence in this process of coming into union with Rome was the arrival of the Jesuits in 1564. The bishops of the Rus’ were stuck between a population converting to Roman Catholicism in the West and a rising Muscovite force in the East. At the synod in Brest six out of eight bishops – including the Metropolitan of Kiev, Michael Ragoza – supported the union. The remaining three bishops from the extreme west of Ukraine and eastern Poland (Lviv, Lutsk, and Przemyśl) did not join the union until 1700, 1702, and 1693 respectively. Our Church’s history is fascinating!

The Call To Holiness — 20141026

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The Call to Holiness, the Spiritual Journey that God calls us to, is a journey of personal relationships, a journey on which a person grows closer to God or further from God,  depending on how he or she relates to others. Many people instinctively think of the journey as an intrapersonal project – a trip into themselves, a journey to explore themselves, improve themselves and so become better and holier in God’s eyes. But the spiritual journey is not simply an intrapersonal process, something confined to self-improvement. It is an interpersonal process by which people deepen and strengthen their relationships with God and with others, as well as with themselves. Jesus put is simply: Treat others the way you would have them treat you; this sums up the law and the prophets. Jesus also said:

You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments the whole law is based, and the prophets as well.

We are called to be in a covenant with God, a pact of lasting, loving fidelity. This relationship can best be described as an invitation to share the very life of God. God is not merely out there running this universe and waiting for us to call Him to come down and enter into our lives. God, who is love, total, complete and absolute, is already present in the depths of our being with forgiveness and power to transform. The relationship God calls us to is one of opening ourselves to that love, that forgiveness, that transforming power. It is a process by which we gradually break down the barriers within us so that God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s transforming power can flow more and more in our lives. As the God-life becomes more and more operative in us, as our lives blend with God’s more and more, we are impelled to move out of ourselves and enter into relationships with other people, in order to help them free themselves from the restraints that prison God’s love, forgiveness and transforming power within them.

This journey into deeper and deeper relationships is not easy. It is marked by struggle. If we focus simply on ourselves, the struggle will always be within and with ourselves. We will become more and more self-centered. If our journey focuses on our relationships with God and     others, then the struggle will be to connect with and respond to the others in our relationships. We will find a wider and wider world in which we can walk in love and forgiveness and transforming power.

Hopefully these thoughts clarify the journey a little more!