Today we celebrate a kind of birthday of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church. For the First Ecumenical Council represents the first plenary meeting of all bishops in a universal council formally submitting to the Rulership of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. It is ironic that it should be convoked by an emperor, for to confirm oneself in the Church means a turning away from the world. That is not a theological proposition but rather a plain fact: the Rite of Baptism marks our entrance into Church, the moment our membership becomes real, and the vows of Baptism include a repudiation of the world.

In our rush to pray for the world, in evident opposition to the final teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ, these two sentences have been obscured by habitual neglect. We longer see them. indeed, we find them alien.

Yes, I am familiar with the Beatitudes and, in particular, these words of the Master:

But I point out that the first clause of this sentence, which is in the stark imperative mood grammatically (a command), has naturally eclipsed the second clause, which is in the elusive subjunctive mood. "Do this ..... that a great wish be fulfilled." You see how the first clause dominates the second.

As we have contemplated together many times, the Beatitudes are the "Proverbs of Heaven." Anyone who commits himself to live by them will either be forced to admit that it cannot be done or perseveres until the conduct of life they require destroys him. For example, Francis of Assisi lived the Beatitudes boldly and with exactitude until they used him up, dying with the wounds of Christ etched upon his body at about age 33. The preeminent and universal Example, of course, is the Fool on the Hill, Who was obedient to the Proverbs of Heaven unto death on Cross.

Am I proposing that we must commit ourselves to be destroyed by the world in order to become the sons and daughters of God? The Master has already proposed it:

To follow Jesus is to turn away from success in the world. And the question which prompted all this in the first place was

Is there a more momentous question in the space of an individual life? And, remember, it is being asked by a "ruler," that is, someone who governs and regulates life. These are the most things in Christianity, we might say the elements of the periodic table.

These days, we like to use the word disrupting as a great positive. Today we contemplate the ultimate disruption: burning down your whole life in order to become a disciple of Jesus. But would notsay it is extremist? The world would say so. Yet, this is basic and common in Orthodox life. Does not the Master plainly require it?

I ask you, what is more orthodox than that? What is more basic than that. These are the stated conditions for becoming Christian .... then and now.

All the members of the Hermitage have done precisely this, as all nuns and monks everywhere have ..... and always within the heart of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. For to burn down your world outside of the Church is merely arson or madness, and in any case material and spiritual suicide.

Our ground of being as Christians is the Church. This is the "gathering" (the Greek word is εκκλεσία / ekklesía ) of those "whom You have given Me, for they are Yours. And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them." These are the ones for whom Jesus prays. And these are the ones in whom the Father and the Son are glorified, for glorifying God is the Church's vocation. This is one of the meanings of Ortho-doxy: right glory, right worship, right praise. Recall the word doxology.

At the point of His Ascension to the Right Hand of the Father, the Lord provides us with something that is fitted for the broken world: His Orthodox Catholic Church. The Greek is κατα `ολον / kata holon, "according to the whole." His Church will grant us sanctuary from the world and it will contain the whole world if we will, if we will turn our backs on the world, definitively and forever. Again, this is our pledge at Baptism and punctuated during the rite by actually spitting upon the name of the ruler of this world.

I was in Kailua recently at an Orthodox service. Praise was being lifted the skies. And no doubt it could be heard radiating down the neighborhood blocks. A woman who heard it greaty resented that gathering. And she handed a note to someone who brought it to the rector. It read, "I have a gun. I am entering this church. I will kill everyone in it." No doubt she had invited a demon into her anger. She felt excluded, rejected. The saintly rector, Fr. Nectarios, walked out, presumably into the line of fire. And he told her she was very welcome in the Church. All are welcome in the Church. But in order to enter this holy place, we have decision to make: will we choose to live in the world and its worldly way, or will we become God's own. You cannot do both. Jesus said, "You cannot serve two masters, for you will hate one and love the other.

I recall Sr. Mary Martha's rite of Baptism. It took place right here before this holy Altar and upon this lovely oriental rug. At one point in the rite, I asked her to spit on the ground upon the name of Satan.

At the point of His Ascension, which we celebrated only three days ago, He utters these last words, pledging His prayers for the Church, and for her alone: "I do not pray for the world." And this is our feast today: commemorating 318 Bishops who met at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. You see? They met for the first time and truly became the Church.

Let us trace the path that led up to this moment. Jesus has gathered His disciples near foremost pagan shrines. As they sit facing the Lord, they see the imposing Grotto of Pan, said to be god of all nature, and the enormous Temple to Augustus Caesar, said to be a god, soaring upwards to its left. Jesus asks them, "Who do you say that I AM?" A choice is made.

The answer, offered by Andrew: "We have found the Christ!" (Jn 1:41) and by Simon-Peter: "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God" (Mt 16:16) forming the foundation of the Kingdom of Heaven, Whose manifestation on Earth is the Church. Jesus replies,

The rock, of course, is not the person of Peter .... though the Apostle Cephas (Aramaic for "rock") is most certainly a living stone built into a spiritual temple as he will later affirm (1 Peter 2:5). After all, only five verses later in Matthew 16, the Lord dismisses Peter as being more a stumbling block than a foundation stone:

Here is your decision.

And this is the point, for the rock of foundation consists in our acceptance of His friendship and intimacy: the things of God, not the things of men. We must turn our back on the world if we expect to have a part in the rock.

"Know God!" is a Divine Command which Jesus issues again and again, which which we have explored at length and heard in today's lesson.

Theologians call this knowledge the Patristic consensus, the agreement among the Fathers, and captured in this fourth-century formula:

We turn to the disciples of Jesus first. They knew God; they spoke with God; they were instructed by God. Next, we turn to the disciples of these men, called the Apostlic Fathers. After that, we turn to their disciples, the Early Church Fathers. There is Sacred Tradition here, no doubt, informed by the unwritten teachings of the Risen Christ — that missing "middle volume" we considered recently.

This consensus, being incommensurately holy and the sure bulwark of our salvation, has been understood from the beginning to be infallibly taught, expressed in the third century by St Cyprian of Carthage:

Today's feast is a celebration of truth, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, taught by the Master, affirmed by many, chosen witnesses, protected by the martyred lives of the Apostles and saints, and transmitted with great care by bishops who understood (and understand) that their vocation is to preserve the faith.

The Sisters and I were received into the Orthodox Church in February, 2019. We began preparing for the reception in 2017. We can tell you without any hesitation that our Orthodox bishops are not business men, they are not corporate executives, they are not CEOs. They are holy men intent on one thing: preserving the Christian faith and its holy traditions.

The most holy example of this episcopal vocation are, of course, the Ecumenical Councils. The timeline for convening the First Ecumenical Council makes one's head spin:

The timeline is important, for its perspective reveals something far greater than specific heresies or the particular steps taken to amend or annul them. We have something far greater: the first gathering of the One Church is a towering fact. She is called the Ecclesia, the "gathering." No heresy, however great, could compare with history's first meeting of the Bishops of the Catholic Church — a name declared matter-of-factly in A. D. 110 by St Ignatius of Antioch (Letter to the Smyrnaeans), a disciple of St John the Theologian:

He was not thinking of a dissident patriarchate a thousand years later. He was thinking of the Church founded upon the Apostles. Soon, dissidents and their followers would assert that they are "the Catholic Church." As St. John the Theologian would write,

They might be made manifest. St. John says that it is their breaking off, their becoming a splinter, that evinces that they are a false church. There is only one unsplintered Church, and that this the Church in Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome .... until Rome broke off.

Consequently, an additional, indispensable name became necessary: Orthodox, meaning "right glory, right belief" and, by extension, "right glorification" of God.

Over the centuries those who "went out from us" would include whole jurisdictions of the Church. The list of schismatics is brief but notable:

The Church's vocation is to safeguard Truth.

The horizon of white-hot change and intellectual innovation is the domain of science, not religion. In the material world, we rightly countenance all advancements in knowledge to be partial, fragmentary, and temporary. The duty of the scientist is to overturn the provisional truths of the past. The history of science is not linear, not one of steady development. It is the history of shipwrecks. We believed that the universe consisted of concentric, crystalline spheres, with a flat world resting on each. It turn out we were wrong. What can we salvage from this belief?

In the fields of medicine and physics, to name but two, what we believed in the 1940s, represented as "scientific truth," had more in common with the beliefs of the ancients than with scientific orthodoxies of the twenty-first century. Think about that .... this is nearly within the span of our lives. Lewis Thomas wrote in The Youngest Science (1983) that the medicine his father practiced, say in 1950, had more in common with the medicine practiced by Hippocrates (the ancient Greek) or by Galen (the ancient Roman) than with modern medicine. And that book was written more than forty years ago.

These are "the things of men," which Jesus mentioned right after He uttered the words, "On this rock." The things of men are doomed to error and confusion, such that men proudly proclaim them in one century and then are mocked for believing such nonsense in the next.

By contrast, "The things of God" are unchanging and unchangeable. They have been revealed and delivered once and for all (Jude 16:13). They are Revelation from God. Their acceptance is a matter of Divine Command. To slight them in any way is to reject God. And as the Son of God says,

To believe that He is God means obedience to His teachings and commands. These are not optional. And foremost among His teachings is that the Church will lead us to all else. Our claim to knowledge of God is made possible only by and through the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, guarded by the Apostles and faithfully taught by her bishops. Consider the logic of the great feasts: the Lord has departed (last Thursday). The general pouring out of the Holy Spirit has not yet occurred (next Sunday). We are alone and unsteady. It is the Church, commemorated today, which is our stronghold and our redoubt.

The Lord God has given His Church. She is changeless being founded in truth, not subject to innovation or the latest scientific advances. And she shall remain changeless till the end of the age, thanks to the stern and courageous bishops who protect her, vouchsafing for us a miracle: this ancient treasure, pristine and undisturbed in her faith and worship.

As the sciences advanced, people mocked the Bible for having a defective understanding of physics. And when men flew above the clouds and found no Heaven there, that was a scandal. But a saint of the West (I believe it was Robert Ballarmine) responded, "So it turns out the Bible is not about 'how the Heaven go,' by about 'how to go to Heaven.'"

The Church. Either we are in, or we are out. There is no part-way or neutral position. Lukewarm will not do. Says the flinty Jesus,

As the Lord prepares to ascend, He bestows these last words:

All are invited. All are welcomed. No one has been forgotten. Each one of us is a first-class citizen and an equal in God's Kingdom. But there is one great divide, one sorting of the better from the worse. And that is, we must choose. The greater decider, the great excluder, we might say, is ourselves.

Are you surprised? Shouldn't I have mentioned the Last Judgment as the point of our acceptance of exclusion? But it turns out that the this great judge is ourselves. At the great moment of decision we must choose whether we are a sheep or a goat. We will be one to choose to unending joy or unending torment.

My neighbor came by yesterday, and he wanted to know whether we were happy. He came to a monastery. He some spent time with the Sisters. And when he got me alone he wanted to know if I were happy. I replied that I would be bold to speak for the Sisters as well as for myself. I perceive that we are living through the golden age of our lives.

But you work fourteen hours a day on a dirt farm. And you've denied yourself the pleasures that most people equate to happiness.

And I said, the Hermitage and farm are an eight-acre circle scribed on the earth beneath Heaven. And within these precincts we are able to live in Kingdom of Heaven. (I will say to you, we are able to live the proverbs of Heaven.) I am glad to give them everything that I have. I am glad to forgive them if they strike me across the face. I am glad to go the extra mile for them. Indeed, we all go the extra mile every day for each other. The Sisters in their eighties work tirelessly unto exhaustion.

To be perfectly accepted by God, to be in the Company of Heaven, to be able to pray the ancients prayers of the Church unmolested, to be approved by our venerable and holy bishops, I cannot imagine what more we could ask for. And as for material security, no one who visits here can believe that no one has received a salary: Sr. Mary Anne not since 1962, Sr. Marty since the 1980s, and myself not since 1995. How is this possible?! The new buildings! The farm with its equipment! How is this possible?! We have accepted the intimate friendship of (we might say marriage to) God. We are loved with a pure and good love.

Doesn't marriage teach us everything we need to know. This is the nature of intimate friendship or of marriage. If we should defend its purity and its goodness, if we should embrace that love and protect it and honor it and reverence it and let nothing vile come near it, ours is a lifetime of immunity from evil. The demons cannot touch us. For we belong to the Other in that goodness. And temptation loses all of its power.

But we should lose that paradise, which once was ours to have, which once came so near, then our lot will be unending regret, and we will look in our hands for what we received in exchange for such priceless treasure and find nothing.

After trading his soul for all knowledge, Dr. Faustus realized that he had not received anything he did not already know. And, disconsolate, he said to Mephistopheles, "Tell me at least this: where is Hell?"
And the demon replied, "Why, this is Hell. Nor are we out of it."

We are our own Hell or our own Heaven. And the Kingdom of Heaven is no more nor less that this: Heavenly people who have gather in the love of God.

The choice for Hell is so common. You might say it is trending, or even viral. Let us, then, be disruptive. Let us embrace the ultimate counterculture. Let us be friends of God and living stones in His undoubted Church.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.