This morning, my brothers and sisters, it’s what we call the Sunday of the Paralytic, although in the readings this morning two paralytics are healed, one by Jesus and the other by St. Peter at the city of Joppa. The second man has the same name as the founder of the city of Rome: Aeneas. “Aeneas, Jesus of Nazareth heals you,” says Peter. The first time I noticed that, years ago, it seemed to me that was part of what Luke was getting at, the healing of the Romans.

Let’s talk about three points this morning with respect to the healing of the man with paralysis in the gospel. He hears a word of command. “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” Now there are those who believe that God’s grace comes to us and salvation is given to us without anything on our part. They must have severely redacted texts of the New Testament. Like trying to get papers from the state department, things are sort of blotted out. They must have blotted out certain texts of the New Testament to come to that conclusion, that God saves us. Whether we want to or not, he just does, and he justifies us, and we wake up justified. And then we might do something.

No, the Gospel comes to this man. “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” The Gospel comes as an imperative. The ability for him to walk comes from the command itself. The word of Christ is what heals this neurological disorder and gives abundant strength to muscles weakened by 38 years of atrophy. Jesus commands this man to do what this man was sure he could not do.

Now the summons to walk is always from outside us, by the way. That is not something we would do by ourselves, ever: walk. The only reason a little baby even tries is because other people are doing it and he’s mimicking them. He learns to walk the same way he learns to talk. He looks around and sees what they’re doing, and they have authority over him and he knows this. So eventually when he can, his nervous system starts to accommodate, and he eventually walks.

If you left a human being, say, among wolves, that human being would walk on all fours for the rest of his life. He would also never talk; he would growl. In other words, the formation of our humanity comes through this social imperative and this social context of authority.

So this man does not argue with Christ. He doesn’t argue with Christ. He may only be a toddler—lovely word, isn’t it, to toddle? One of the sweetest words in the English language, to toddle. He may be only a toddler, but he does not plead his cause. He does not protest. He does not say, “Look, I simply cannot do what you’re telling me to do.” Everything depends on this man’s obedience to the apodictic command of Christ.

Now, the verb used here is present imperative, peripati. It’s significant that it is the present imperative and not the aorist. It does not mean, “Start walking.” Not what it means. It means “Keep going; keep walking.” That is to say, Jesus is telling him, “You must spend the rest of your life walking. And listen, buddy, the next time I see you, I expect to see you walking. Get up from there. No more lying around. Keep putting one foot in front of the other until you have walked all your way to heaven.”

Second, let us reflect on what it means to walk. My thesis in point two is walking is talking. We learn to walk about the same time that we learn to talk, about, and in exactly the same way. A sociological response that creates a new structure to our neurological system. In fact, our first talking is a form of walking; our first walking is a form of talking. Walking is one of our most basic forms of communication.

I don’t know if I can believe them or not—sometimes I think they’re just making stuff up off the top of their heads—but archaeologists speculate that humans beings have walked as bipeds for about six million years. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Sometimes I think: How do they know? Six million—these figures! Where do they come up with this? But let’s grant them that. We’ve been walking on two feet for six million years. Only recently have we adopted other forms of transportation. In fact, if you consider six million years, it’s virtually just yesterday.

The first evidence for the wheel, for example, is only about 6,000 years old. The first evidence for the wheel. The wheel as an instrument of travel was unknown in the major tribes of the Western hemisphere until the coming of the white man. It just was. The Aztecs had wheels on their toys, but since they had no animals domesticated to pull carts, they didn’t invent carts. Although they knew about wheels, it was just a toy.

The clear evidence for the use of the horse for this purpose is about 4,000 years old. In other words, well within recorded history. These things are fairly recent. Given the long sweep of human history, carriages are inventions of mere yesterday. Walking is arguably our most fundamental act of communication. We can communicate a lot of things without opening our mouths, just how we walk. How we walk usually indicates our sex. It often indicates our age, alas. It invariably conveys something of our social status, and not infrequently proclaims our attitude toward the world and our place in it. Speed, gait, and posture portray what we think of ourselves and what is expected of us. A person’s walk is virtually a personal signature.

I was recently reading a novel by Daniel Silva which had an interesting—it was a novel. I thought he was overdoing it, because he has this one spy who can detect a suicide bomber absolutely flawlessly by watching him walk for about five minutes—he knows. That seemed a little overblown to me until I read some statistics from our own defense department, according to which up to 95% of international terrorists can be identified infallibly by how they walk. This is the most common form of profiling practiced by those charged with public safety: how do they walk?

With varying degrees of subtlety, a walk announces a person’s mood or attitude. It signals a person’s intent, energy or lassitude, happiness or dejection. Anatomy and conditions [differentiate] individual walks and make them emphatic over a lifetime. The plant of the foot, the length of the stride, and other mechanics of locomotion tend to distinguish toddlers almost from the first steps.

Denise and I raised a daughter who did not learn to walk until she was nearly six years old. She spent the first five years running! [Laughter] Just one day, she jumped up on her feet. She had not been doing anything like pulling up, holding onto things, toddling over from one thing to another. No, she jumped up on her feet and took off! For the first five years, she ran at top speed, stopping only when she ran into something or fell down. When she fell, which was often, she invariably fell forwards and usually landed on her face. So when I see another little boy in this parish who, as soon as he’s turned loose, racing all over the place and having a good old time, it brings back lots of memories for me. Her little brother, in contrast, walked cautiously and always fell backwards, where a natural padding protected him.

Some people walk around on all occasions as though they were coming forward to receive a diploma! Their tempo is decided entirely by the cadence of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

We pay dearly for the habit of walking. According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, there are four million annual visits to emergency rooms in America every year for knee, ankle, foot, and toe injuries. Four million visits to emergency rooms, just from walking.

Have you noticed how many words we have for walking? How many words do we have for snow? Anybody know any other words for snow besides “snow”? I mean, don’t tell me nieve and neige; I know that. I’m talking about English words for snow. I only know one! Certain Eskimo languages have up to 17 words for snow, and you have to use the right one or you won’t get back that day! [Laughter]

Look at all the words we have for walking. People we see are said to slink, to slither, to stalk, to shuffle, slog, trudge, march, swagger, promenade, hike, stroll, amble, strut, [pound], stomp, or saunter. I’m just touching the top layer of words. One person is said to waddle like a goose; someone else charges like a bull. According to the ancient Greeks, anthropos esti zoon dipon apteron; man is the featherless biped animal. Some people spend their lives mucking around while others are hoofing it.

You can tell a great deal about a person by how he walks. In 1830, when he published his Journey to Italy, Heinrich Heine believed he could even discern a man’s theology by how he walks. I quote Heine:

A Catholic priest walks as though heaven belonged to him. A Protestant clergyman, on the other hand, goes about as though he had leased it.

I thought that was funnier than you seem to. [Laughter]

In short, walking is a form of communication. It sends messages. Walking is talking. No wonder, then, that walking is a metaphor for living. Walking could hardly serve us as a moral metaphor unless walking itself were capable of carrying a moral message. The first quality of an upright man, according to the book of Psalms, is that “he walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.” And this consideration brings us to our final point.

Point three. Ashre ha’ish ha’sher ho halak ba’aset reshaim. Ashre ha’ish ha’sher ho halak ba’aset reshaim. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. If anything can be said to surround us these days, my beloved in Christ, it is surely the counsel of the ungodly. The counsel of the ungodly is everywhere. It is pervasive in our political, economic, social, cultural forms. It absolutely pervades our educational institutions, and also virtually all forms of contemporary education convey the counsel of the ungodly. Lying has become a professional sport, well, first of all, among sports, but also among politicians. Not to walk in the counsel of the ungodly requires an enormous and ongoing moral effort, because it is all too easy to go along in order to get along. There’s a perfectly good example, just that saying: Go along to get along. So that those who refuse to walk in the counsel of the ungodly will certainly stand out in society. They will be noticed, and they won’t be liked.

The last few years, as I’ve shared with you on quite a number of occasions, it appears to me like the world lost its mind about the same time the pope became infallible, in 1870. I don’t know that they’re related, but the world seemed to have lost its mind. The world did not realize anything was wrong at all, in fact, until the summer of 1914. Then a few people in Austria, France, a few other places, stood back and said, “Whoa! Hey, what just happened? How did this happen?” That’s the Rebecca West. She looked back and said, “How did this happen? How did this happen?”

Last week, somebody handed me a copy of Frederick Brown’s The Embrace of Unreason. The Embrace of Unreason: marvelous book. The subtitle of that book is: “France, 1914-1940.” France! The people that taught us the use of reason. In the summer of 1914, the policies of a whole nation began to walk in the counsel of the ungodly. Everybody else followed suit pretty soon: the Russian Revolution, the rise of the fascists, the rise of the Nazis.

On February 6 of this year, the noted author, George Weigel, gave the thirteenth annual William E. Simon lecture, and a form of that lecture appeared in the May issue of First Things. This article jumped to my attention because it concerns the subject of which, as you know, I’ve been preoccupied for quite a while. Weigel argues that World War I, probably the most improbable and fruitless of all wars, was not simply an accident. It came about, he contends, because Europe had just lost its moral way; it was teaching that loss to America. He argues:

The erosion of religious authority in Europe over the centuries—meaning the erosion of biblically informed concepts of the human person, human communities, human origins, and human destiny—created a European moral-culture environment in which politics was no longer bound and constrained by a higher authority operative in the minds and consciences of leaders and populations.

How did the Church answer this? You see, also in 1914, something else happened. Pope Pius X died, and the cardinals met in conclave. There was an Austrian cardinal there, and there was a Belgian cardinal there. The Austrian cardinal said to the Belgian cardinal, “I hope while we’re here there will be no talk of war,” to which the Belgian replied, “I hope while we’re here there will be no talk of peace.” What did the Church do? What has the Church done?

Why is it that Serbia has the highest abortion rate of any nation of the world? That is a completely Orthodox nation. Why is it that Greece is second, a completely Orthodox nation? Why is that? What has the Church done. Don’t tell me it’s because of communism. Don’t tell me that! Albania had just as [much] a communist government than any of these other places, and Albania has the highest birth rate in the world during the same period, so don’t tell me it was communism. Don’t tell me it was communism; it was something else. It was the failure of the Church to teach. To teach what? Biblically informed concepts of the human person, human communities, human origins, human destiny.

How did it happen that mankind suddenly lost its mind and went mad in the summer of 1914? Weigel quotes the answer that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave 30 years ago. Solzhenitsyn said, “Man forgot God. Man forgot God.” Now, brothers and sisters, this is a walking problem. Over the course of a few years—pardon me, over the course of a few weeks, in July and August of 1914, men found themselves far departed from the way of God, and they took great, meticulous care to walk in the counsel of the ungodly. They were lost. Lost the way. Weigel continues:

The brute of the problem, however, is not political; it is moral. Human beings cannot continue to ignore the eternal moral law in decisions relevant to their own lives and still expect the world to proceed along the paths to peace.

In “Pastoral Ponderings” this week, I deal with this—you can read it as you have leisure—taking a different direction, particularly the inability of the Church to address the moral concerns of the world in a rational way. So much of the morality within the Church has separated itself from reason, abrogated reason. I don’t know why that is. There must be something… But it must, must be cured. It’s a terrible thing. When the Church cannot stand up to society and say, “There is a moral law and you’re as bound to it as we are! It is not just that I have decided to accept Jesus, I’ve decided to follow Jesus, therefore I’m bound by a moral law, but if you haven’t decided to follow Jesus then you do what you want.”

The Church should be standing fourfold, right now, about the right to life of the unborn infant, on the structure of marriage, and the freedom of religion—those three things that appeared in the Manhattan Declaration several years ago, of which Jim Kushiner and I were two of the earliest signers, I believe. I think of the guff we’ve taken from fellow Orthodox for having signed that and aligned ourselves with the moral conservative people outside the Church. It is simply amazing.

Right now, my brothers and sisters, within the Church as well as without, there are a lot of atrophied minds, because this is an age given over to irrationality. I sent that “Pastoral Pondering” out yesterday; within an hour I received a reprimand. I received a reprimand from another Orthodox Christian, that I was giving reason too much say over the moral life.

See, Jesus, my brothers and sisters, he doesn’t say, “Come, follow me, and the first thing you must do is turn off your brains; don’t use your minds.” He doesn’t say that. When Christ the Lord commands us, “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk,” we’re to walk in a way that communicates. I’m using “walk,” of course, in its normal metaphorical sense of the style of life. How we speak, what we speak about, how we dress, how we address one another, how we think—is Christ conveyed, the power of Christ conveyed in the manner of our lives. If we walk by his strength and in obedience to his command, it is supremely important that we walk not in the counsel of the ungodly. In that way only will we be as he wants us to be, a light unto the world. Amen.