Today, we commemorate All Saints, so let us ask the question, What is a saint? What is saintly life both on earth and in Heaven? Certainly, the saint represents the fullness of the human creature having completed the journey of theosis, and closely resembling our King and God, Jesus Christ.

Much is revealed in the Gospel of St. Matthew, where we find those singular phrases, "the Kingdom of God" and "the Kingdom of Heaven." Jesus never invites us anywhere except it be the Kingdom. And in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is depicted in the fullness of Kingly glory, we must come to the conclusion that here is a King raising up royalty. For it turns out that being a saint is defined by our proper place in the Kingdom and by our individual relationship with the King. And what is that relationship? It is as a King to His fellow royals.

In our lesson from Matthew's Gospel, Jesus' word regeneration is the main subject. The underlying Greek word is

In the second half of this word, we see the word Genesis, the Creation. But this creation is preceded by pali, which mean a return to the same thing. That is, "the regeneration" will be a re-creation of what already has been created and specifically a renovation of the human lifeworld — a re-nova, a "making all things new" again:

Is not this scene a repetition of the one we read in our Gospel lesson:

We surmise "the regeneration," the making all things new, s at hand. He utters the words true and faithful naming with His Divine Breath the elements of the renewal.

We recognize here the inspiration for the Patristic theology of recapitulation (St. Irenaeus, 130-203) — that the purpose of the Incarnation was to re-create the human lifeworld with the Son of God completing Adam's course as it should have been done.

This is Divine Creation with a difference: from elements which God has already created. Yet, God, Who can create only good, must reject elements which have perverted the good and, consequently, are themselves depraved. Do you see? He created all things and saw that were good. So He can do no less than to select only the good for His re-creation. The regeneration must begin with a re-sorting. We return to Chapter 21 of Revelation:

And perversion vanishes from the world to join a population which has already chosen permanent divorce from God.

What remains? St. Peter supplies the answer:

Here's that word generation again and is indistinguishable from royal. This is a saint: like Jesus he is a king, and cooperating with the regeneration. He is chosen: "living stones .... being built up a spiritual house."

Jesus re-creates the human lifeworld. He can only do so with good elements. The good ends up being the royal. These are saints, and they cooperate with Him in the His great regeneration. They are chose to cooperate. They are thus living stones being built into a spiritual house. He might call this spiritual house a royal house. We might call this royal house the Kingdom.

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Now, if there is one people on the earth ill-fitted to grasp Kingdoms and Kingship, it is Americans. America was conceived as a repudiation of kingship of any kind. She would be the never-attempted experiment of governance by the people — to her detractors, little more than mob rule; to her friends, "the great experiment" (said George Washington) with the inevitable implication that its outcome could not be predicted. Even ardent supporters like Alexis De Toqueville (who wrote Democracy in America) saw the danger:

Does this not summon the hideous image of a body with its instinctual urges and wants running amok without a head to rule it. Indeed, this was the state of things in the anything-goes colonies before the arrival of a constabulary and clergy.

You know how this continent was settled by the English. It was done as a series of business ventures, the Virginia Company to name one. From time to time people were told of a transfer to operations in the New World and asked those who knew, "What is it like?"

The reply was, "Wow! It's whiskey and women and no one tell you 'No'!" These were not so much sons of liberty as they were men taking indecent liberties .... liberarians.

Can't we admit that latent in democracy is a lack of self-restraint? A few years after American independence, another experiment, the French Revolution, would provide a distillation of both: the absence of self-restraint and the people arrogating to themselves the right to do anything. You know that the houses of God were gutted. A statue of human reason was placed in Notre Dame Cathedral. And, notoriously, rivers of blood ran everywhere as people were delighted to see who would be publicly executed today.

In America's taverns, men across the nascent country raised their tankards of ale in a toast:

Here was liberty! Governance by no monarch of any stripe!

We cannot know how many of them realized that their toast was, in fact, an inversion of the famous declaration of King James I nearly two centuries earlier:

His meaning was quite the opposite of the one heard in raucous barrooms. It was the observation that only a valid bishop could consecrate a king, engendering much more than political reality: but a vast, transcendent unity from the step-stool of God down through His vicar on earth, who was the king, and thence to the nobles and gentry and to all the human lifeworld. This sum of Divine interrelationship of all things,, E.M.W. Tillyard called "the great chain of being," from his book of the same name (1943). The reign of King James (who in 1611 ordered what we call the King James Bible) coincided with the Shakespeare plays Hamlet, (1601) Troilus and Cressida (1601), King Lear, (1605) and Macbeth, (1605) — works that are essentially about the great chain and the organic unity of the created order.

In this light perhaps we are better able to approach that (for Americans, unacceptible) quotation of St. John of Kronstadt:

Hell is the realm of ungoverned and ungovernable passions — the grotesque vision of the "body" feeding its progressively repugnant impulses with no "head" to restrain it. This is pure democracy. You do your thing, and I'll do mine. "Live and let live" and "Don't judge me" are the Two Great Commandments of Hell. Animal urges for more and more and more ..... Wasn't this the "freedom" promised by the serpent in Eden. You see, there were once two people who had everything in the world, but they wanted more, more than everything.

In our own time, the people have voiced their will as never before. Can anyone or anything oppose them? Have we not arrived to the fullness of more and more and more. Our out-of-control consumerism cannot be contained. Our oceans are overflowing with the garbage we have thrown in, belching it back on every shore. Our atmospheres are full, smothering us with the garbage with which we have filled them. I say, smothering. This is no exaggeration. Our planet is dying. And obese Americans — 42.4% of all adults .... this isn't "overweight" three-quarters are overweight) — are sated with every licit pleasure and so demand more and more and more of the illicit. What was forbidden a generation ago is licit today and taught to our children in school.

We are awash in pornography displaying the indecent and forbidden. We have legalized marijuana though it has been shown to lead to madness. And every kind of perversion vies for general acceptance. Even child pornography is judged to be legal if the children's faces have been edited (compliments of AI). The ancient canons of decency have been overturned. The rule of law is burned in the streets with our firemen, police, soldiers, and marines vilified and attacked. Is this not a foretaste of the dark kingdom? For what is Hell if it is not anarchy and egoism clutching pornography, abortion, and anything-goes life, baring demonic teeth at anyone who would take these things away?

I am obliged to say that I began this reflection well in advance of the "No Kings" riots currently sweeping the country. Therefore, I am equally obliged to observe that here on this Sunday I behold a little miracle, and I am humbled by the sovereign power of Divine timing, which cannot resisted nor refused. For God alone is the First Word, and He is the Final Word.

We could say that America is engulfed by a great civil war, a moral civil war. It's indisputable. But the Orthodox Church could tell you that this has always been the case: the War in Heaven which continued on earth, whose first casualties were seen in Eden, and whose character and scope are interwoven through everything. We call this spiritual warfare. People ask me, "But where do you see spiritual warfare?"

I reply, "I see it everywhere. Look inside your heart!"

What Jesus offers us fundamentally is rule. Divine rule. He is a King, in fact a Warrior King. The Scriptures are about a Final Battle and the destiny of every living soul ever born on the earth.

Jesus is addressed as Kyrios more than six hundred times in the New Testament. The word means King and God. (For Kyrios is the title accorded YHWH in the Greek Old Testament.)

Certainly, Jesus could have adduced democracy as the ideal form of governance in Heaven. The model of Greek democracy preceded His Birth by five centuries. But He offers us a Kingdom of Heaven which is organically united to Heaven's King.

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You might say, "I'm not interested in conflict, much less warfare! I'm a man of peace." So let us explore the nature of this warfare. It is interior combat, and from it there is no escape. Everybody is in it. Now, there are those who never consented to evil in the first place. Yes, they've had brushes with sin. Who is not surrounded by sin?! Yet sin never really claimed a part of them. But to those who have boldly sinned and remained in sin, a lifelong struggle very probably is still in progress.

What is sin? It is life offensive to God. The "true and faithful" live in harmony with God. God alone is Truth. And God's nature is Relationship. He offers Friendship to us (Jn 15:15), and the essence of friendship is faithfulness.

From the human perspective this unfolds in a paradox, which is captured in the ancient English prayer,

Here is the servitude which mysteriously opens on to freedom. We are endowed with boundless freedom. But that freedom, devoid of God, becomes a cruel and implacable slavery. Examples abound, usually including the word addiction.

True freedom is discovered when we harmonize with God's will for our lives, expressed in the word, vocation. He calls each one of us to it (the word derives from vocare, "to call"). He will guide us and assist us and give His angels charge over us the moment we choose for our vocation (whatever it may be). Stand on the square of vocation, and flowers come rapidly into bloom. All things that you set your hand to will thrive.

Those who have discerned their Divine vocation, which is God's goodness matched to each of our gifts, and then have lived it with every atom of their being are called saints. They have cleared the ground of everything that is not of God. They have burned down their lives, departing from ungodly relationships of every kind, and stand ready and serviceable to their King.

We recall this morning's lesson:

Jesus expects and commands that we leave behind all vestiges of unworthy life. He certainly does not expect a godly man to leave behind a godly wife.

Meantime, the Logos has already begun His regeneration. It is called "the Kingdom of God." It has drawn near, He told us two thousand years ago. All have been invited to this marriage of Heaven and earth. We participate with our souls and minds. Those who chronically habituate perversion of God's goodness are removed from the wedding feast. We say "their wedding garment is not right" (Mt 22:11-14). They have been found to be untrue and unfaithful.

Obviously, when you sin, you betray God. I have told many men who have justified their adultery by the cruel behavior of their wife, "This is not about your wife. This is about you and God This is about your betrayal of God and your willingness to effect a divorce from God." So they will be cast into the "lake which burns with fire and brimstone."

Is this, therefore, a cruel king, then, a tyrant? I suppose if you are an atheist or anarchist, you would say so. But the King must be mindful of His Kingdom. I said earlier that the Kingdom of organic: everything that happens in it affects everything else that happens in it. The King must be mindful of His Kingdom. If crime and moral rot are to take over, can we say that He is a good King? Is this the sort of Kingdom you had hoped and prayed for all your life? It this the Heaven you anticipate?

And what is our part in this goodly realm? We, who have conquered the unruly passions, who have requited the self-denying love of God, who present to the world the sovereignty of self-restraint? We have become the fullness of all God created us to be: royals and saints.

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