One of
the biggest challenges we face as Christians is the danger of becoming
complacent or comfortable with our passions and sins, justifying or explaining
them away as ‘necessary,’ logical, or ‘no big deal.’ What is behind such
complacency varies: laziness, fear, lack of faith or hope that God can change
us for the better or that we can muster the effort to cooperate with the Holy
Spirit and learn new ways of being.
St. Paul
reminds us today that we’re justified by faith. It’s faith that’s life-saving
for us because it’s faith that gives us access into the deifying,
life-changing, transformative grace of God, that gives us the ability to put
our trust in God’s work in our lives. Through this faith, we’re called today to
have hope—hope for the change God would work in us, hope to grow in our
knowledge and love of God, to be furthered in faith, and deified.
In this
context, he also reminds us that in our efforts to live out the Gospel, we will
certainly encounter, as he puts it, “various trials.” Don’t we know it! It
seems that as soon as we start praying for more patience, we’re bombarded by
all sorts of problems that test that patience. As soon as we begin to plead
with God for more faith, we’re hit by trials that really challenge that faith.
Many, if not most, of our sins can be traced to lack of faith in God’s power,
love, healing, and salvation. Pride, the mother of all vices, has its root in
this lack of faith in God, which is the opposite of putting our trust in Him.
We
experience and grow in faith to the extent we’re willing to cooperate with the
Holy Spirit in us. Sadly though, we can also choose to shut out this work of
God or put God on the periphery, preferring to put our trust in ourselves, or,
as Christ warns today, “in mammon,” in our material resources, reliance on
one’s self. God doesn’t force Himself upon us because what He invites us into
is a synergistic relationship and communion with the life that He alone is.
If your
hope is in God that He will deify you and continue to make you into the man or
woman of God He’s created us to be in Him, then, if this is your hope—what you
desire above all else—then pray, struggle to follow through, persevere in
cooperating with the work of the Holy Spirit and entrusting yourself fully, 100
percent, to Him, His Church, and His use of you in the world in need around us.
St. Paul assures us that if this is our hope it will “not disappoint, because
the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was
given to us.”
But you
have to ask yourself, in all honesty, is this really my aim, do I really desire
salvation and eternal life with God? Do I want God and participation in His
life more than anything else or am I content to give God just a portion of
myself, my time, my talents, my resources? In this sense, we cannot just be
resolved to give a tithe of ourselves and our possessions to God. If we are to
grow in faith, we come to recognize that all we are and all we have entrusted
to us comes from God and finds its meaning and proper place in God, submitted
to God.
Our
temptation is to worry, to think that we can procure everything we ‘need’ in
life on our own, to be independent, self-sufficient, “balanced” (not giving God
too much of our time or energy), but this is false, this is not Christianity.
Instead, Christ admonishes us today, saying, “Look at the birds of the air, for
they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds
them. Are you not of more value than they?” As a Christian, we put our trust in
God and not in the world, not in ourselves because we recognize that Christ is
the life of all.
Christ
reminds us today: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the
one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the
other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” When it comes to God’s Kingdom,
double-mindedness will not get us into heaven.
Just as
Christ does today, St. Paul also warns that we conformity to the culture, the
world, and its priorities and ideas through the pursuit of our own comfort and
false sense of ‘security’ is, in reality, enslavement to ‘mammon.’ The
alternative is our transformation through a life lived for and in Christ,
which, by necessity means being open to continued growth in faith, entrusting
ourselves more and more to His mercy, and not relying on ourselves or our
worldly success.
The
world, the culture, will pull us in its own direction, may try to convince us
we don’t need God or that in our striving after mammon, in holding onto our own
will, our own desires, our passions, and all our material provisions, we are
somehow ‘safe’ or ‘prudent’. This is the lie fed to us by a materialist and
secular culture, by the devil himself. Christ reminds us, that “after all these
things the Gentiles seek. At the same time, He assures us, admonishing us,
today: “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these
things shall be added to you.”
As
followers of Christ, we cannot be absorbed in, be slaves to, our desire for the
things of this world and false security. Such double-mindedness, Christ reminds
us, is not compatible with His eternal Kingdom: “you cannot serve God and
mammon.” Instead, we’re challenged to open ourselves up to a greater generosity
of spirit, of service, of giving to Christ, His Church, to those around us,
knowing that He’ll give us Himself in return, that He’ll minister Himself to us
through the Sacramental life of His Church and grow us in our communion with
Him.
And so,
here’s our choice: we can either respond to our anxieties, our problems, our
lack of faith, thinking that if we hold onto our time, our gifts, our pride,
our material resources more tightly, then we’re more powerful, then we’re in control,
or, we can realize that such projections are just a hollow façade, that truly
we need God, indeed, we’re created for life with God, that we need to put our
trust, our faith and hope, in Him, who alone is eternal, who alone is worthy of
our trust.
If we
choose God, stepping forward in faith, we learn to submit all of ourselves, all
we are and all we have to Him and His will. The choice is ours; what Christ
makes clear is that we cannot serve both Him and mammon. For this reason, to
save our souls, so that we worship, that is, that we rely on God and glorify
Him and not our material possessions and false security, Christ concludes
today’s Gospel with this admonition and promise: “Seek first the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
When we
choose to interject faith in Christ into our struggles, our fears, our desire
for financial security or personal control, then they and we can become a means
for our further growth in faith and God can return to us His spiritual
blessings, which are beyond anything this world can give. In the midst of our
trials and tribulations, our struggles to live this life for God and not for
mammon, God fills us with His promise and hope, which St. Paul assures, does
not disappoint.
So choose
God, put your faith into practice: serve pray, repent, entrust yourself to His
loving kindness, open your hand to give back to God from what He’s entrusted
and freely given you in His mercy. Step forward in faith and put your trust in
Him. If we you do so, He will free you from dependence on this world, from
enslavement to mammon and the world, from the despondency of trusting in
yourself, from all that’s temporal and passing away, and He will grow you in
the eternal life that He alone is—the well-spring of great joy, love, and
peace.
By Fr. Robert Miclean
Source: https://www.orthodoxannapolis.org/3rd-sunday-after-pentecost-orthodox-homily-on-the-justification-of-faith/
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