Saint John's Oil

(+) The Oil from Tomb of Saint John Maximovitch – The Wonderworker. Indeed!

What can science, technology and modern theories of being, teach us about "something from nothing?"  

January 1999.

Yet this very means “something from nothing” is given us by TRUTH, demonstrated by TRUTH in his many "signs and wonders" when He walked among us and continues to this day in the countless miracles of healing and restoration. "Only God can restore a conscience turned to dust." This is the mystery of the ineffable God to whom we owe our very being, HE who created "something from nothing." Is it any wonder that this wonderful reality of creative energy would be witnessed in Oil from the Tomb of Saint John Maximovitch – the Wonderworker?
 
A Russian Orthodox priest's wife sent Father Symeon a small vial of oil from St John's Tomb. The year was 1996. As difficult as it is to accept or for most to believe that Oil carried with it a wonderful and special blessing from St John, and has produced many miracles of healing and help, too numerous to thoroughly recount without writing a book.


Here are only a few examples: 

A struggling young Satanist (we will call him Brandt W.) who was seeking deliverance from demonic possession and trying to come to God. Over many months we systematically exorcised him as he prayed the Hours and worked on his catechism. This young man had become so sickened by demonic possession that he tried to sacrifice his own infant son, burning him severely on a cook stove to gain favor with Satan. The child survived and the man was convicted for his crime. He had wealthy parents and they succeeded getting a much too light sentence for him. Because of the nature of his crime he had spent four years in solitary confinement, by legal agreement in protective confinement, as he would not have lasted a day in the general population, so hated was he. 

Those years of silence had allowed him to come to the realization of his crimes and he came to us with the desperate plead, “Father, I’m going to be released next year and I know if I am not delivered from this torment I’m going to hurt someone else or kill them!” It was a sincere desperate plea.

I want to paint a picture of how powerfully possessed he was.  He could not be taken from his cell, except by "certified emergency response team" of six officers and it took six to handle him and he was a small young man.  He was kept in an isolated corner cell, the cell next to him unoccupied and of no use because any inmate placed there would quickly go mad. I was allowed to speak with him only through the food tray opening in his cell door. There was a constant mumbling, almost like chanting aural noise in his room, that would become quite angry when I arrived. On our first meeting I asked him, why don't you turn on the light so I can see you.  He said, "Two hundred watt bulbs are burning. If you stoop down lower you ought to be able to see the one in the back of the cell."  I did as he instructed and I could barely make out the bulb through a mass of black fog. "They won't let me read anything but the Satanic bible" he said.  "How are you going to be able to read what I give you?"  He had already worked it out with the guards. They would leave the food tray door open for periods each day so he could read by the light from outside.
 
After several months of twice-weekly prayer with him, which included layer by layer exorcism, in August of 1997, Father Symeon along with Father David Monroe (CEC) anointed Brandt’s forehead with the sign of the Cross, with the words, "Satan, you will not dare torment the man whose forehead has received the sign of the cross."  I was called away, but my deacon visited each week. Three weeks later, to our great surprise that cross was still visible on his forehead. The cross was clean looking and shiny, the rest of his face looked dusty, as if death were already at work upon his skin. And three months later when that precious young man was baptized in the Chapel at Hays State Prison, the cross was still visible! Following Baptism and Christmation something wonderful happened. When we plunged him into the water for the third time, that Cross disappeared! Not because it lost its Glory, rather because all the dustiness of his countenance was swallowed up in radiance, and the rest of Brandt’s face took on the same beautiful radiance as the Cross. 

Two “accidental witnesses” to this miracle of systematic exorcism and Brandt's baptism, two very cynical prison guards came secretly and asked to be anointed with the same oil. They requested prayer for needs and asked for blessings. One was a known agnostic who had earlier scoffed at Father Symeon’s work with Brandt and others. She said, “These guys make a fool of you. You think you know them, but you don’t. You don’t know how they are when you are not around. They put on a show for you, and the whole thing is silly since the state pays you for this spiritual charade.” She was an embittered closeted lesbian. Knowing that St John, himself, would never have hesitated to grant such a blessing to a non-Christian, and seeing the sudden change and faith engendered, Father Symeon also did not hesitate, but anointed her and began teaching her the true Gospel.


A Wiccan Inmate, a former Deputy Sheriff, turned Satanist, was anointed with Saint John's Oil in November 1998, and was instantly healed of a major heart defect. This inmate (Perry B. we will call him) was convicted of despicable crimes of abuse, crimes engendered under the influence of Wiccanism as he in his words, "Explored the dark side seeking more Satanic power.  He had taken the roll of Wizard, painted a huge pentagram on the floor of his “sanctuary room” upon which both adults and children would be horribly victimized. The despicable acts were of the same psychology as those previously expressed by Brandt, he sought more power. 

Perry B had attended quite a few liturgies and we knew something was happening with him. He had arrived first to demonically torment another Satanist who had come to Christ. We had to start sanctifying (exorcising) the Chapel before Liturgy, literally surrounding the space with Holy Angels. From then on,  when Perry arrived, he could not last more than ten minutes before Holy Angels forced him to leave. He quickly realized he was powerless during the Liturgy and could not torment his victim. On top of that, a congenital heart defect became much worse and he was scheduled for open heart surgery as soon as it could be arranged.
One day he arrived and asked, “Would Christ heal someone of a physical ailment, even if the person wasn’t a Christian and didn’t want to be a Christian?” I said, “Perry, it is upon the field of faith where the Orthodox Christian and Christ meet both non-Orthodox Christians and pagans alike. Do you believe you will be healed?” He said, “Yes, if you will just pray for me.” I said, “I will pray and God will restore your heart to perfect health, but you must know that from that moment on every heartbeat will torment you, because it will be a witness against you. Every healthy breath you take will be a testimony of the power of the true God and the powerlessness of your fantasy earth religion.” Perry was instantly healed. The prison doctor and subsequent tests at Floyd Medical Center in Rome, Georgia documented his healing. His heart beat and blood work became absolutely normal for the first time in his life and his “defective valve” is working perfectly.
 
A Strange and Wonderful Sign:

The most amazing quality concerning St John's blessing is that this Oil has continued for three years to renew itself! Upwards of five-hundred people including many who have been chrismated have been anointed with this one single, tiny vial of oil by my own hand!  But that is not nearly the complete story.

How the miracle began: About six months after receiving the oil, Father Symeon misplaced the oil, accidentally leaving it in the inside pocket of his favorite sport jacket. Until that time he had suspected nothing out of the ordinary about the oil. He needed the oil that day so he quickly searched and discovered the vial in the pocket. He said candidly, “I almost cursed when I saw that the vial had leaked all over my jacket lining.” He instinctively turned the cap to see how loose it was. When he did oil spewed out of the container and covered his hands. Still he didn’t understand what was happening but later that day it became obvious as the tiny vial continued to leak oil. The vial had to be placed into a larger container and later when that container threatened to overflow it was placed in yet a larger jar. The contents of the containers have been emptied several times, given to the fellow clergy, used for anointing of the sick and for chrismations. Yet each time the tiny vial replenishes itself. We do not know why we have been blessed with this witness of "loaves and fishes" displayed in blessing oil, but we witness its reality and are humbled by the blessing. +++


When we met Saint John the Wonderworker:
When Father Symeon was a boy, son of Assembly of God parents, St John blessed him under the most unlikely of circumstances. He testified to it in a letter saying:

The Holy Spirit's presence in Orthodoxy is a powerful and wonderful thing. I was blessed to be "accidentally" exposed to an Orthodox Saint as a child, only for a moment. It was a two-minute conversation, when riding my bike one Sunday afternoon. I stopped to rest on the curb next to a church. It was in the mid-nineteen-fifties. A frighteningly "huge" man (at my age he was huge) with a pronounced limp, dressed in black robes and eyes so bright and alive he scared me and confused me because I saw unquestioned love in them, knelt down with some difficulty and introduced himself and asked my name. My bike lay on its side because it didn’t have a kickstand. I can see his hand today as clearly as that day as Saint John absentmindedly touched to spokes and set the wheel in motion. That’s what I had been doing before he arrived, spinning the wheel. I have shared with only a few people what he said to me. I knew nothing of Orthodoxy, yet when I came to Orthodoxy his words took on such a wonderful blessing of confirmation. 

We give the Synergistic Power of the Holy Spirit so little credit. We talk about it a lot, but we give it so little trust and we rely on our own will, our own reasoning, on canonical legalism, theories of the nature of the Church and we kill ourselves trying to create the reign of God upon the earth, if we are sincere. God’s reign is not of our making but the realty of history’s story whether we grasp it, and acknowledge it or not. It was almost Forty Years later when I learned who that man was, and when I met him again I met him in an ICON, discovering he is called St John the Wonderworker. Those eyes made such an impression! Forty years later their memory is a wonderful blessing!

 
Now, because of the wonderful way in which St John has blessed the OSJ - He has healed, he has given guidance, he has reached even to those caught in pagan religions for a witness of God's power of healing, he has given us courage, and was faithful to us as a true Hierarch, even when "living" Hierarchs failed us, we are willing to say that at that "chance" meeting seeing the love with which a young boy held Christ and quickly witnessed his own faith, St John simply blessed us saying, "Butch Robinson, you will come to me." And indeed come to him we have, in Jesus Christ's Life, the SOMA, the Body, which True Christians share, for the Glory of God. +++



2009 UPDATE:

Father Symeon: In 2008 I visited our OSJ Brother (whom we will call, John C.) in a Georgia State prison on a sweltering hot summer day. The prison was quite a distance, so the night before I had traveled there and taken a cheap hotel room. As the groaning old window AC unit struggled to overcome the heat in the room, I inventoried for security reasons, everything I would be taking into the prison. It had been months since I had taken any real notice of the tiny vial of oil from St. John’s tomb. I noticed a little wistfully that the container was about half-empty. I chuckled to myself and suddenly felt the Holy Spirit’s presence. I said aloud, “Half empty or half full? Am I an optimist or a pessimist?” Frankly I was sharing a little humor with Saint John. That evening I spent it praying the Hours, and remembering the miracles of wonder God had allowed those special years at Hays Prison, not least among them the blessing of Saint John’s oil. Looking at the half-empty vial I had thought, “Even miracles of blessing have a place, a time, assuming that time was coming to an end. Even though their expression, wonders are temporal and temporary their substance is eternal, I silently thought.  I knew that when I used the last drop of that oil, in reality nothing would be lost, it would simply be that which was.

It was a great blessing to see John C. after a number of years. Almost a decade has elapse since we had shared prayers at an altar. The camp chaplain was kind enough to schedule time in the Chapel for us. After prayers we had time to sit and talk. Brother John asked me if I still had the oil from Saint John’s tomb. He was hoping I had the oil with me. He asked to be anointed. As I was getting it out of my case he asked if the oil was still reproducing itself. I answered that I hadn’t really noticed, until the night before. As odd as this may seem – me not knowing – it is the result of thirteen years of the oil just being there. 

From the start the oil reproducing itself had been a mixed blessing. In what I can only name as spiritual pride it insulted me that I was saddled with this inconvenient “physical sign.” “Especially me” I had thought at the time. After all, I was the one who even as a child perceived the fake healing slight-of-hands of revival charlatans. “I” had perceived the group hypnosis methods used by many revivalists. Thinking I was finished with such charlatanism when I found Orthodoxy, I was given a body blow when I attended a Vespers service at a local Orthodox church and realized that the myrrh flowing Icon greatly venerated (at the time) was the work of a charlatan priest who was its caretaker. The motions of the magician were too obvious and a few rightly place words and in time the hoax was exposed, the former magician died in a homosexual brothel and the "Ikon" disappeared into the ether, never to be "re-discovered." Yet here I was, with a tiny vial of oil that would not empty.

Initially I was sent the oil to anoint my natural brother who was suffering from a rare form of Leukemia, which was not treatable by bone marrow transplant. I didn’t use the oil for that purpose because I knew my brother would not be open to the idea. But some months later I told him about the miracle that was happening in our chapel with the oil. He reacted like I thought he would. After asking a few simple questions as to how I suspected this was happening he concluded in the gentlest tone saying, “Butch, someone is making a fool of you. I would have to be present and have the room monitored by every means possible and know that no one could have gotten to the vial to fill it before I would begin to entertain the idea of something from nothing.” I said, “But Bubba, that’s exactly it. It IS something from nothing.” It wasn’t until he was near death some months later, that I arrived anointed him with the oil and the next day the doctors could not understand what was happening. Suddenly he was strong and they could not find the genetic marker that said he had Leukemia. Six weeks later he arrived at my home on his motorcycle looking and acting strong. He had not ridden his motorcycle for years because of weakness. It happened that I had the vial sitting next to me on a table between us. He lifted the vial, held it up to the light carefully turning it back and forth. He asked, “Butch, have you thought about having this chemically analyzed?”

I said, “Don, do you realize how silly that question is. It’s oil. What do you think the chemists would find except oil? What could they possibly tell us about something from nothing?”

He said, “Maybe the plastic is leaching some chemical that is causing the oil to expand?” He had no idea how silly that thought was since the volume of oil the vial produced was many times the volume of matter contained in the plastic of the tiny vial.

I said, “But you see, it has expanded many hundreds of times its original size with no effect on it, as it still remains oil?” Don remained Leukemia free for ten months, but went each month “to let them draw blood – just to be on the safe side.” Four or five years later (I've lost count) he reposed of the disease, but literally upon his death bed in a fog of Glory, the air literally luminous, and having been granted his desire to live long enough to see his children grown and on their own.


After these years I’ve come to realize my own resistance to the oil lies in vestiges of my former iconoclasm. I remember the time that the thought that Christ’s body and blood was actually upon the altar seemed ridiculous, sacrilegious and even superstitious to me. In fact it seemed idolatrous, which is of course the position of the iconoclasts. When the oil began to reproduce I was too proud to believe that it had a lesson to teach ME.  After all I was ABOVE that sort of thing. I was bothered by the miracle rather than blessed by it. It was rather a curse in that I was placed under the heading of “suspected of slight of hand” and “charlatanism.” I was acutely aware of God’s constant and abiding presence, why did I have to be saddled with this “sign” of his presence and creative energy? That was my attitude. I saw often the real miracles of healing, the real living signs of his presence and creative energy. Why this oddity, this reproducing vial of oil? I could have written books about the myriad examples of the miracles of His Presence in ordinary everyday life most people denied or ignored or were blind to. Yet here was this thing, this oil overflowing making a mess! My natural brother was given six years of life because of God’s mercy through Saint John’s oil. Even still the “sign” was offensive to me, as I am so full of pride. 

Brother John C. knew my “misgivings” my resistance to the miracle and gave me strong warnings back in the 1990s about my ingratitude. So here we were a decade later, and when I pulled the vial out of its case it was only half full. I saw disappointment on his face and tears well in his eyes. He sat quietly while I anointed him, but afterward he was unable to keep silent. He asked to look at the vial and I handed it to him. He looked sadly at it and handed it back to me. And as I placed it in the side pocket of my case he said with all the kindness he could muster, “Father Rob (what the inmates call me) I tried to warn you. Do you remember?” I acknowledged that I did. And even as he quoted everything he had said to me, I knew on one level he was absolutely right as I did not truly appreciate the miracle (of the oil itself) as he did or indeed as I should have. But in my defense there is also the fact that for me having witnessed many really great miracles of healing and deliverance, oil replenishing in a small vial wasn’t high on my list. It was a small miracle to me, a mere “sign”, which was not outweighed by the natural suspicion such a thing brings upon its caretaker. Surely wonderful miracles of healing and deliverance had been wrought through faith engendered in some by the oil, but still to me it was just a sign. What did Jesus mean when he said, “An evil generation seeks a sign”? I've NEVER sought a sign, never taken an extra step to "view a miracle."  I could take some comfort in knowing to my core that I DID NOT seek this sign. I let Brother John C. lecture me pretty strongly for a moment. But suddenly it was all-different and I knew something for certain. Saint John’s faithfulness to our ministry was not a fluke or a temporary circumstance. I said, “John, what you say is true, but that’s not the point. It has never been about ME. But I’m going to teach you a lesson in faithfulness. It has been about God’s faithfulness in and through his saints, and the broken and loving heart of Saint John Maximovitch who has been so real and especially present to me and to you and to so many of the OSJ brothers and sisters. That faithfulness exists in eternity and it isn’t governed by my feelings about a mere sign.” I placed the case in front of him and instructed him to retrieve the vial. I KNEW what it would be. When we looked at the vial, it was full, completely full and tears welled in both our eyes. It was full to the rim. John in awe said in his best x-protestant way, “Oh my brother!” this time with more than a few tears. I could tell that it took will power to hand the "sacred object" back to its unworthy caretaker.

Friday, July 03, 2009: Yesterday evening as I prayed evening prayers I placed the vial on the table next to me. When I finished praying I had to wipe oil off the table.




Epilogue: 
I pray God’s mercy that every ounce of iconoclasm is wrenched from my soul and my mindset. I know that the miracle of the oil for me was/is just this blessing, to pummel, crush and destroy every ounce of resistance to the reality of the sacramental nature of all of life – life lived unto HIM inside his unbounded creative energy. It is a process of making the profane, sacred; the unholy and fallen, holy; the broken and deformed whole and restored; the sick and tormented, healthy and at peace; the material imbued with the creative reality of His uncreated energies. All of the universe awaits this restoration, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” 

This immediacy is so much a part of real Christianity – of Orthodoxy that it is the reason that the Orthodox pray with their eyes OPEN. They know there is NO separation between what they are seeing and the real, true and actual presence of the creator of all things. 

Sadly, though lip service is paid to non-dualism in Evangelicalism, for the most part the “duality” remains and the reality is lost to those buried in the mythology of the material-only world and those who believe there is a chasm between what is material and what is spiritual. In that world, even those who are “spiritual” and “of faith” find a giant chasm between the material world and the spiritual. God has to be “reached” even coaxed, with much effort, as He is removed from the everyday things. 

Contaminated by Gnosticism, treating the material on the one hand, as if it is God himself, and on the other hand as if matter is evil and an attack upon God, and so not realizing it, they cannot allow God’s creative energy to truly permeate all their life, their soul, their mind, their body, their home, their family, their food, their plants, their pets, their friends, the machines that serve them, their business, their governments and even their enemies. I’m not talking of some other-worldly spiritual existence – No rather, in this life, with eyes to see, God’s creative energy permeates the ordinary and this is perfectly “natural” in fact, TRULY natural as opposed to being “super-natural, i.e. removed from us. We remove ourselves in our disbelief, but HE is not removed from us even then. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” This is not a promise for some far off time and place, but a literal physical reality here and now. 
+++ 
Father Symeon Elias (Robinson- Father Rob)

Which Way To Sanity? - Living Prayerfully

 Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Which Way to Sanity? - Living Prayerfully

Which Way To Sanity? - Living Prayerfully.
By Archpriest Symeon Elias

A Christian friend said to me, “I don't know when to help, when helping is really helping and not hurting. Some need to experience being really down and out to have hope of a better way.” She's right. She was speaking of the difference between intelligent help vs helping for one's own emotional needs - I think. I won't lay my interpretation on it, but this is what I had in mind, thinking about how one knows and does the will of the Lord. How one knows that their actions will have a good result. 
So to the basic question when to help and when not to help? For the Christian, I really don't believe there is a wrong answer.
Acts of love (charity) are not a philosophical quest, and there is no pre-knowledge of result, except in the humility to know who is really in charge. Really this basic knowledge extends to a host of decisions. But this is assuming that the person is living prayerfully. And what could living prayerfully mean or as I would frame it, “What does it mean to participate in the Liturgy of Living”? I can only think of living prayerfully in terms of the earliest biblical reference to Christianity, when it wasn't Christianity, but "The Way."

When Adam and Eve were removed from the Garden, the book of Genesis has this strange way of explaining how and why they were barred from returning. "So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep THE WAY of the tree of life." (To preserve The Way) A literal translation of the Hebrew would be "to create a hedge around the entity, the life road." (The entity, the living road).  Isn't it amazing that such language was used so very early in Sacred Jewish Scripture, already painting a picture of Jesus Christ as The Way, and The Way of Life. The "entity" of the LIVING ROAD.

The Christian grasps that "the way" "the entity" "the life road" was restored to us and it is primarily NOT a religious thing. (Those who worship God won't worship at this place or that place, but in spirit (small s) and truth (small t). Literally in the truth of their own spirit. As my brother use to say, "From the gut.”

What allows this true worship to happen? It is an existential presence, Jesus, himself. His words come into focus when he says, "I AM the Way, the Truth and The Life." Although there are some excellent religious means of relating to Jesus, the vast majority of the experience of The Way, The Truth and The LIFE is not religious but lived, encompassing a 360% view of every moment. (The eternal moment - always alive in the moment - no past, no future, just now). Actions in that moment are without regard to past or future and are guided only by what is REAL NOW. Action are taken in TRUTH without regard to the personal consequences. The opposite of this boldness is people cowering in fear, frightened that some true action on their part, might expose some non-popular truth in their person, the which might cause them "consequences."  For such people, the Gospel has been locked into some Politically Correct Lock Box and thus DESTROYED, or at least imprisoned and left worthless and powerless, something which God will quickly disown.

Grasping that knowledge one can easily see why the first Christians didn't use the name Christian but spoke simply of 'The Way." Isaiah didn't say, "I've lived in your judgements, O Lord" but " "Yea, in THE WAY of thy judgments, O LORD, have we waited for thee; the desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee." Paul never taught "salvation" but "the way of salvation" the apostles never expounded upon the subject of God, but "the way of the Lord" and "the way of God." Not peace the concept, "but the way of peace" People were instructed in "the way of the Lord" a lived experience.

The Way is All action, all path not theory. So the concepts are the roadmap, not the road. The living is the road. It is why the Bible is scripture and the most perfect Icon of God, Icon of the Living Word, but Jesus is The Living Word; not to be confused. The LIVING is the road, and every moment lived isn't accidental but synergistically lived, the Holy Spirit in charge of every breath, of every apparent incidental moment, passing, meeting, sight, step. So rejecting "the world" isn't absenting ourselves from life, rather engaging life creatively, while rejecting the mind and soul-numbing illusions and delusions of the world. (the myriad idols) And BECOMING that is, coming into BEING - His Being - as we WALK The Way, isn't becoming religious but rather becoming truly human. He is the True Human, we are to become as He is - truly Human.

There is huge freedom in this and massive creativity and the peace "to be" never to "act" as the actor, but upon the firm foundation of who we are, to act rather upon the reality of who we are. Actor and hypocrite share the same root word. A man cannot act contrary to his own nature, it is simply a metaphysical fact. If he chooses to act dishonestly and with pretense he is still acting upon the Truth of his nature, that is acting as a liar, an actor, a hypocrite. In this, it matters not whether his actions appear good, or appear bad, in both instances they share the same root: the lie.

The freedom To BE and not to Act is an enormous power. Because it also means that there is no time that is not right. No place that one can be "out of place" even if that place is hell. Any place we are is then "perfect" any state of our spiritual development is "perfect" (not complete) just perfect, in this time, at this place upon The Way. The honesty that is possible in this is healing because no pretense is necessary before God and far less needed before men. You see, healing and salvation are synonymous – they share the same word in Greek SOZO. What must I do to be saved? What must I do to be healed? Same question. - same answer: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be healed and your entire household.

How can that be, they are sinners, unbelievers, deluded, confused, hurting? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be healed and your household. This is stone cold fact!

I'm alway amazed at the shallow questions, "How do I witness to my neighbors, to my family, to my friends, to my co-workers?"  They picture having philosophical, logical and reasonable verbal skills, when the answer has nothing to do with words, but the willingness to WALK the WAY, honestly before them warts and all, never making pretense to ANYTHING that is not REAL. Then when speaking, simply speaking honestly. Should one of little faith pretend great faith? Should one of limited knowledge pretend great knowledge? Should one of limited wisdom pretend great wisdom? Should one of limited understanding pretend great understanding? Practiced words of witness that do not flow from the GUT, that are not a reality of who we are are just such a pretense.
Even those in rebellion, having heard the Good New of the restoration of the "Live Road" "The Way" that is a person, are preparing to be healed. "And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers: And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left." Turning to the right - that hurt. Turning to the left - that hurt. NO This is the way, walk ye in it. It is this imagery where the saying, "The Way of the Lord is Straight and Narrow." Religionists read this as if it means that the way of the Lord is a "Straight Jacket" an impediment to living instead of the creative catalyst to liberty.

In the last few months, I've spent an inordinate amount of time debating with young people over politics. Challenging them to see past their "fan based idolatry" and learn the history so that all claims may be viewed in context; to learn the system, learn the power structures, learn the core philosophies, the drivers of the candidates and so on. The ones claiming the greatest Liberty (the libertarians) are seen to hold the greatest mental/emotional bondage. And that is the trick of evil, the twist to everything, that what to the coldly rational or wildly emotional person seems self-evidently good is most times poison. This is the basic lie and deception of the un-regenerated heart. All the religions and philosophies, utopian plans, hope, change, American Constitution or Communist Manifesto cannot create anything but a slow or accelerated march to death without the leavening of the sons of God, actively alive in the mix, guiding, withstanding, teaching, reproving, leading or empowering others to lead. "Lord, if there are a hundred righteous?” the Patriarch asked.

A Christian can no more approach the function of citizenship, the right to empower leaders with a vote, the discussion of ideas and ideals removed from the Life Giving Flow than he can approach charity solely with reason, or solely with emotion. There is a higher way. The Way. And for the true Christian even the function of “secular governance” that MUST be secular and religiously neutral, is informed of what is Life engendering and Death engendering via the nature of his own nature, as he experiences LIFE in The Way.

"For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen is not hope; for what anyone sees, why does he also hope for it?  But if we hope for that which we do not see, then we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit also helps our infirmities. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And He searching the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son, for Him to be the First-born among many brothers."

The Book of Revelations and Proper Worship

Gary Broyles, who according to his profile, "Studied Business Administration & Mind Reading at EWU Cheney Wa"


Asked the following question. "How much of an understanding of the book of Revelation do you have ?"


So I answered:


Outside the context of the Divine Liturgy, which is clearly pictured in the Apocalypse of John, Revelations has little meaning. But understand that I am not diminishing the meaning of "revelations" just freeing it from earthly time and giving it the eternal and heavenly dimension it clearly holds.


When Christians worship properly, as Saint Paul states in the first two verses of Roman's the 12th Chapter, "presenting your bodies" the same word carried across 2000 years of time, where the military commander says, "present arms!" that is STANDING together, our attention focused, "A living sacrifice" this is a Jew talking, invoking the Liturgical language of the Temple, "Holy and acceptable unto God" This is a picture of worship - as all of Revelations is, "Which is your RATIONAL LITURGIZING." (the LITERAL interpretation of the Greek, λογικην λατρειαν ) Saint Paul said that this worship was so powerful, so real that if you are not properly prepared, that if you partake unworthily, that if you come to this altar of worship while holding something against someone that you risked sickness and death by the power of it, but that if you worshiped rightly, properly it was the power of God unto salvation. He siad, "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?"


Why do we participate in the Divine Liturgy? What the Roman Catholics call "The Mass"? So that we will not be hypnotized by the present common mindset, a false mindset created by Lucifer, (And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,) and why do we endure this worship, which creates a metempsychosis - a metamorphosis of our minds? that we may prove in our LIVING, in our experience of it, "what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."


When we are molded to that perfect will of God, we are already living in HIS Kingdom.


Outside of the context of this worship - which is eternal worship - not an event on Sundays, but everywhere, ALL the time, whenever we do this, in "anamnesis" - stepping into eternity with HIM, we join with the Heavenly Host pictured in Revelation, opening the gates of heaven and we actually worship with the Saints of Old (all the saints) and the Holy (opposed to the wicked) Angels who surround HIS throne, saying, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, Heaven AND EARTH are filled with YOUR Glory. Hosanna, in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord."


And who is it that comes, but Jesus himself, inhabiting the bread and wine of our Liturgical Sacrifice, sharing with us, his Divine Human reality, allowing us to consume it. What did John the Beloved quote Jesus as saying? In the 6th Chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus speaking, "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have NO life in you."

The Growing HOLY ARMY of GOD.

As a protestant I was lead to believe in a Gnostic and Greek myth, that all God was concerned with was my "soul" and "spirit" and that my fate, were I to be faithful to Christ, was to live in some "floaty spiritual realm" of Spirit, far removed from the struggle of those left behind. I was also taught that those faithful who have reposed before us exist on a plane unable to see our struggles here. I didn't understand the total complexity of the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant as the one Body, where each person attached to that Body has concern and is willing to fight for the good of the rest.

After reciting the heroic Saints of old, the writer of Hebrews (which some think was Paul and others think was James, and some think was Jesus' other brother, Judas "Jude") he states the following:

1 Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
3 For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.
4 Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.
Hebrews 12:1-4 (King James Version)

Now so many have done just that, "resisted unto blood" and stand in eternal strength GREATER than the angels.

As a Protestant, I was lead to read that passage above as meaning merely that these people's lives as recorded in scripture are a witness to us, in an evangelical sense, merely examples and not also observers (witnesses) of our own struggles. The space between that realm and this realm was made to be very great, impossible for any communication to pass between. But then what is the meaning of:
7 For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.
8 For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's.
9 For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living.
Romans 14:6-9 (King James Version)

People write much about the increase of evil in the world, as I do, following the mandate to be "wise as a serpent" encouraging other to also be "wise as a serpent" so they are not prey to evil, foolishly, are not destroyed by blindness. But just as evil has increased so has the power of the Good, produced by the amassing cloud of God's Triumphant Army, which operate both in heaven and earth. God may do as he wills, we know this from the nature of BEING, but he has chosen that this army be built for the final battle, which has been ongoing for two thousand years and will culminate in that Great Day. This army operates both in heaven and in earth, both on the spiritual and material realm. "Whatsoever things you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven." This has to have real meaning. "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven." No this mighty army is not resting in some mindless nirvana, but it is working still as they have been unalterably joined with the Father, who works for our good still.

But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.
John 5:17 (King James Version)

And his mighty army that is growing day by day also works with him. These warriors have become powerful beings who will judge the angels. They have concern for US. Why should we set ourselves apart from them? Should we not instead invoke their help, for surely evil is increased in the land, and so may the wonder-working power of the Good, as we join with those warriors who are eternally bound with the Father's Will, that none should be lost.

The stories number in the millions of the intervention of the Saints into the lives of mortal men, too great a witness to be ignored. Too powerful an aid in our own struggles to be rejected.

Teaching "Just From the Bible"

One of the great blessings of becoming Orthodox Catholic was the consolidation of scripture, where, in Orthodox understanding, all of it "fits" and has context.   Nothing but the Gospels are "amplified" and by "amplified" I mean contain the information, the story upon which all other scriptures are viewed.  In Orthodox Catholicism, all scripture is genuinely interpreted IN Christ, not in a personally held understanding of what "the Light of Christ" is, or what a particular or passage or section of scripture says.  Nor is the Church's interpretation subject to that personal understanding, the ego filter, which colors scripture.  Rather, all is understood, all of the Tradition, which includes Scripture, in the Light of Christ held by the Whole (Catholic -of the Whole) Church from the very beginning. 

I suddenly was relieved of the burden of defending my interpretation of scripture on every issue, all those things a thinking Protestant needs hold an opinion. I speak of the myriad huge, mild, and subtle difference of Protestant scriptural interpretation, creating 44,000 denominations of Protestants in the world, and millions more non-churched Protestants all holding their "personal interpretation" of scripture. In this sea of confusion, it was like battling waves that could sink you, and suddenly finding rock solid ground, and being able to say, "The Church Teaches."  Because she indeed does.  No matter what scripture, the church teaches; no matter what the competing dogma, the church teaches. She always has and her light has not been extinguished.   ON this subject a friend wrote the following.
 +++
My Protestant Coworker Has Been Learning From a Bible Teacher
 
One of my coworkers, whom I'll call Terry, goes to an Evangelical Protestant "non-denominational" church.

He had a conversion a few years back and does not yet understand much about the differences between different Protestant denominations, much less what Catholicism teaches.
 
He found out that I was Catholic, and we began to discuss some of the important issues surrounding which Church, if any, is the true one.
 
Terry told me that his family member gave him and his wife a set of DVDs of a Protestant pastor's sermons, and that they had been watching them.
 
"He teaches straight from the Bible," Terry said. "And when he says something that is his own opinion, he tells you. He says 'this is my own belief here,' or 'this is directly from Scripture.'"

So I pointed out to Terry that even the things this pastor is saying are directly from Scripture are actually only his opinions as well. Terry didn't understand, but I soon demonstrated it to him.
 
He told me the pastor's name, and I googled him. Turns out the pastor is a mid-Acts hyper-dispensationalist Protestant.
 
A Hyper-What?

It does not particularly matter what small niche within a niche within Protestantism that this pastor follows. In this case though, I was familiar with this sub-sub-strain within Protestantism from a guy I interacted with a year or so ago who was a late-Acts (or Acts 28) hyper-dispensationalist.
 
Every statement that this pastor made--even those he claimed were straight from the Bible--were his own interpretation of the Bible through a particular lens or tradition.
 
In this case, the tradition is a hyper-dispensationalist one that was invented about one hundred years ago by some other Protestants.

My friend Terry was confused. So I explained briefly to him that he is listening and believing a man who has no more authority than any other Protestant who picks up a Bible and says "this verse means X."

And in this case, he was following a man whose beliefs are such a tiny minority within Protestantism that even his fellow Protestants had created websites devoted to debunking his teachings.
 
Terry didn't know how to respond. But I didn't press him on it. A seed is planted. A seed that will make him think critically about what this pastor is saying before blindly believing in it.
 
Most Protestants Are Like Terry
 
Most Protestants are not apologetics experts. They are not Bible experts.
 
They are instead like Terry.

They know what they have been taught from some particular set of Protestant pastors and friends. They think that it is just "plain Bible teaching," not even realizing that thousands of Protestant denominations differ on those "plain teachings."

You don't have to refute everything they wrongly believe. You just have to gently and kindly point out the questions they need to ask themselves: "How do I know what Jesus and the Apostles really taught?"

God bless,
Devin
+++
2701 Quanah Dr.
Round Rock TX 78681
USA

Lesson Seventeen: Forensic Justification

or the Calvinist's core heresy.

A well-meaning woman offered me this paragraph and it is a good springboard to teach something crucial.
K.D.:
"My righteousness is Jesus Christ himself, not whether I've sinned in a particular way 11 years ago or 5 minutes ago. When God looks at the believer, yes a fallen man or sinner, if you will, He sees Christ. When we look at another man we will ALWAYS see another fallen man, like ourselves. Think this through carefully and take heart!"

+++
Can't let this Calvinism stand without challenge. You have just described exactly 1/3th of the healing/salvation story told in the Bible, held in the New Testament and consistently taught by the Church for 21 hundred years. What you have described is Christ's finished work of salvation on our behalf. What you have NOT described, in fact, skewed is our present working out of our salvation "in Him" and finally that finished and complete work IN US, where we will fulfill the prophecy, "I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people."


Salvation is spoken of in the New Testament in both Chronos and Kairos times (earthly and heavenly) and in three tenses in the Greek that closely relate to but are not identical to, past tense, present tense and future tense in English. In Greek, it is a little more complicated because there are those tenses that indicate a "past action that is still happening" not just a past action that is completed. Also, "a present action that is happening and will continue to happen." And that action that will happen in the future. Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament, as did all the early Church fathers talk about Healing/Salvation in these different tenses. Something that happened in the past and is complete; Something that happened in the past and is still happening; Something that is happening in the present; Something that is happening in the present and will continue to happen; and something that will happen and become complete in the future.


So where you adequately describe Christ's completed work in the past and its present effect from HIS (God's perspective) you have not described our answer to it, and the Holy Spirit's work with us and in us in the present, nor the completed work "in that great day."


God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is NOT blind to us as you indicate, but rather examines us and reveals new layers of sin to us, for which we MUST repent, progressively as we GROW and go from simple Repentance/Conversion (which you describe) to Enlightenment/Maturity (translated "perfection" in the KJV) and finally to Sanctification/Theosis/Deification, actually becoming a part of God Himself, that is in hypostatic union with Him, sharing with him the common Divine Human Nature of Jesus Christ. BTW when I say that you "skew" the one-third of the story of salvation and salvation history in your little theological presumption, what you present is actually a heresy called, "forensic justification" a core heretical teaching of the "reformed" movement. Forensic Justification claims that our Justification happens "outside of us" "independent of us" and that our own sinfulness cannot change that "forensic justification." Such is not the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles, or the teaching of ANY teacher of the Church, only the confused teaching of heretics.


Even Saint Peter's healing the lame man by the "Gate Beautiful" was not a completed thing, but required something of the man. He did not say to him as it is translated into English for convenience sake, "stand up and walk", the literal meaning is "stand up and begin to walk about, and continue to walk about for the duration." And this is an excellent picture of the "work of salvation." IT is not a legal game, but an organic process.


God is NOT blind to us as you indicate, but rather a healing presence to us, able to guide us, teach us, give us the lessons we need, to both "persevere" and "become completed" in HIM.