In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I would like to think I’m getting a little bit more disciplined as I approach the final exam, and this morning I decided to prove it to myself. I resisted a strong temptation when you were singing Alleluia right before the Gospel to turn to Fr. Maximus and say, “What are you preaching on this morning?” [Laughter]

Both of this morning’s readings, beloved, I believe, are concerned with the mystery of the Church. The first 17 verses of 1 Corinthians and Matthew’s first account of the multiplication of the loaves. Today, therefore, I want to talk about the mystery of the Church under three headings and borrowing material—well, taking material; I’m not borrowing it: I’m not going to borrow it; I’m going to use it, consume it—taking the material from both readings this morning.

First let’s talk about the center, the living center of the Church. To illustrate this, I want to do a brief analysis of the first 17 verses of 1 Corinthians. Now you just heard them less than five minutes ago, and right before they were read, what did I tell you? Anybody. Dennis. [Be attentive.] Pay attention! Very good. Before we do any reading of holy Scripture in the Orthodox Church, we say, “Pay attention! Wisdom!” By the way, that means, “Wise up!” Pay attention! That’s usually the job of the deacon. The deacon should come out and throw his arm out in sort of a menacing way, say, “Pay attention!”

And since you all were paying attention, let me ask you some questions about those first 17 verses. You sit there quietly and wait to be called on. [Laughter] No, you can just shout out the answers. I won’t ask you how many individual Christians were named in these first 17 verses, but does anybody actually remember exactly how many individual Christians were named? Were you counting them? Perhaps not. That is one way of paying attention. Let’s see if we can name them, though.

Who are the Christians who are named in this morning’s epistle? First name. [Silas.] No, no, no: Paul. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ. And his brother— [Sosthenes.] Sosthenes, very good. And his brother, Sosthenes. You know who Paul is. I hope you remember who Sosthenes is, since we spent quite a bit of time on this in adult Sunday school just, well, just a couple years ago. [Laughter] Sosthenes was the head of the synagogue at Corinth, wasn’t he? Sosthenes was beaten before the tribunal of Gallio. It’s all there in the book of Acts. Sosthenes is now with Paul in Ephesus, and he’s the one taking dictation; he sends the epistle. So we’ve got two of them.

Who else was named in there? [Chloe?] Chloe! Chloe’s people. They came; they made a delegation to Paul at Ephesus. Chloe is probably the owner of the home in which the congregation at Ephesus met. Church did not have real estate in these times. Therefore they did not have the problems that go with real estate such as flooding of basements and things of this sort. Anybody else? Apollos, right? Apollos. Cephas—that’s Simon Peter, isn’t it, named Cephas? Then three more Corinthians are mentioned.  Did somebody say Gaius? Who said Gaius? Yeah, Gaius is one of them. Crispus. Anybody remember Crispus? “Crispus” means “curly.” That’s what “crispus” means, “curly.” It’s sort of a nickname. I’m suspecting he was bald! [Laughter] And the last was Stephanas. Oh yes, says Paul, I did baptize the household of Stephanas.

Now, if I count them correctly, there are eight Christians named there. Now, that is significant. It’s very significant because it speaks about the nature of the Christian experience. It has to do with people, people who can be named. We know these eight people from the first 17 verses of [1 Corinthians], and we know them almost 2,000 years later. Their names are proclaimed on West Newport. So, say, 2,000 years from now when the Gospel is being proclaimed on Mars, will people remember the names of the Christians on West Newport? Well, let’s hope so.

Now I want to do an exercise, a philosophical pursuit of the many and the one. If you want to know the significance about that philosophical question, about the approach of the many and the one, it’s essentially the difference between Plato and Aristotle. The difference is explained, for example, in the wonderful painting of Raphael of The School of Athens, where Plato is pointing to the one, and Aristotle has his hand extended over the many. Will you begin empirically or will you begin transcendentally?

We just took the many; let’s take the one. I’d like for you this morning please to—not to listen to the whole 17 first verses again, because you heard them once, although I think if I read them again you might pay close attention—let’s read the first ten verses. I want you to count the number of times you hear the word “Christ” in ten verses. Everybody all ready?

Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, through the will of God, and Sosthenes, our brother. To the Church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called saints, with all those who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, both theirs and ours. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given us in Christ Jesus, that you were enriched in everything by him in all utterance and all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so did you come up short in no gift, eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the communion of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of Jesus Christ—

Now I think we can stop there, halfway through the tenth verse. How many? [Ten.] Very good! I mean, I’ve got some people down here really on the ball. When the deacon says, “Pay attention,” they pay attention!

Here’s the living center of the Church. Ten verses, ten times he mentions it. Keeps coming back to this, because Christ is the center, the living center of the Church. As soon as our attention goes anywhere else, there’s a danger we will lose that binding center of the Church, because there is a centrifugal force in all of history to flee from the center. Cen-tri-fu-gal: fleeing from the center. Because, as you physics majors know, when it spins, the energy goes out; it’s centrifugal. And we certainly—this is a living center, so that’s always going to be a question.

The danger here, beloved, is one of distraction. Dis-traction. Hear that word? Distraction. What English words might come from the same root as “distraction”? The obvious one for me is “tractor.” A tractor is something that pulls, isn’t it? A dis-traction is something that pulls away. Traction, pulling away. This is point two: the distractions from the center.

Paul has a specific situation in mind at Corinth. There were certain special problems endemic to Corinth. First of all, Corinth was one of the most pagan cities in a pagan culture. When I was thinking about the problems at Corinth, I spontaneously thought of certain American cities, but since we live in one of them, let me just mention that one: Corinth and Chicago. The ambient culture of both cities is deeply pagan. I’m not using the word in an etymological sense, because “pagan” really means “country hick.” It’s not pagan in that sense. The pagani people lived in the country, therefore the last ones to receive the Gospel.

The certain ambient culture in which the Corinthian Christians lived was deeply immoral. At the center of the city, on the Acrocorinth, was a temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Thousands of temple prostitutes were employed there on that temple. That dominated the city. Lots of transient people coming through Corinth because it joined two seas, two completely different waterways, one going out to the Aegean, the other going over to the Adriatic. Lots of sailors, for example, merchant men, coming over to Corinth. That’s the reason, I believe, why there’s so much attention in 1 and 2 Corinthians given to sexual immorality: a certain ambient culture.

Then there were the circumstances of its founding. How long did Paul take to found the church at Corinth? You should remember that from the classes on Acts. How long was Paul there? Very good, very good. 18 months. A year and a half. That’s right there in the book of Acts. Shortly after Paul went there, Apollos came from Ephesus, and he ministered to the parish himself. Although the book of Acts does not talk about this, apparently Simon Peter was there—Cephas. So there were a number of apostles who were in on the founding of that congregation.

Some people came into the Church under the preaching of Paul. You remember, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that he preached to the dregs of society; he did not preach to the philosophers. In comes this Alexandrian Jew named Apollos. He’s bound to have appealed to a different sort of people. Very often, we can only hear the Gospel from certain people; we can’t hear it from others. That’s just the way it is. So the circumstances of the founding tended to put different and perhaps conflicting components into the Church. There were different levels of education.

The Corinthian Church was constantly threatened by divisions. The center will hold. It’s a question about whether we’ll hold onto the center. The center will always be there. Christ does not abandon his Church. The big question is whether we will cling to Christ—or get distracted by something else.

The Church of Corinth received five epistles that we know of within the first century, all of which complained about divisions in the Church. From the two epistles in the New Testament we know that Paul wrote two other epistles. In fact, 2 Corinthians might be two epistles. But Paul wrote three epistles. Before the end of the first century, the third bishop of Rome, Clement of Rome—see, Irenaeus gives us the list of the bishops of Rome: Linus, Cletus, Clement, first three bishops of Rome. The third one, Clement, wrote the Corinthians a letter reprimanding them, calling them to repentance, and reminding them that he was just repeating the things that Paul had said. So the Corinthian Church was very much given to distractions from this perspective.

This is always going to be a problem in the Church to the extent that the Church becomes self-preoccupied and starts trying to define itself too much. The Church itself can become a distraction if the people are no longer centered on Christ, but they’re centered on certain features that just happen to come through the course of Christian history.

Some years ago, online, I found some criticisms of the local priest on Newport Avenue, one of which is, “Well, he’s really not Orthodox because he doesn’t have a really big iconostas, and he lays no stress on the iconostas.” If the iconostas defines whether you’re Orthodox or not, we’ve just excommunicated St. John Chrysostom, who never saw an iconostas in his life, and would be very bewildered if he walked into church and saw an iconostas. That’s one of those things that happens to have happened in the course of history. It has its place, but it’s not one of these places that defines the Church. The Orthodox Church is not defined by the iconostas. It’s not defined by its fasting seasons, although, by the way, we start a new one on Tuesday. [Laughter] Just wanted to do my duty to remind you that we start a new fasting season on Tuesday, which goes to the feast of our Lady’s Dormition.

The Church is not defined by these things. The Church is defined by one center, and that is the true faith in Christ. Just to check down on it, several years ago, I took down my great big copy of Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon to the New Testament. That thing must weigh ten or twelve pounds. I should keep it on a lower shelf, honestly. I just took it down and looked up the meaning, among the Fathers of the Church, of orthodoxia, orthodoxy. What does it mean? It never refers to any of the things by which the Orthodox Church likes to define itself now. It doesn’t refer to any of those things.

It refers always to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the Chalcedonian faith in Christ. That’s the only meaning the Fathers of the Church had for orthodoxy. They don’t know about this “holy orthodoxy” which has certain forms of prayer, for example, which has certain forms of fasting, certain forms of meditation. The Fathers of the Church don’t know anything about that. Orthodoxy means the correct doctrine about the Trinity and Christ. In other words, the Fathers of the Church were rooted in the center; they held onto the center and were defined by Christ.

What shall we say of Christ? Christ is the iconic center, because he’s the image of God, he’s the icon of God, he’s the revelation of God. So iconography, the divine iconography, is at the center of our identity because of Christ. How does Christ appear in this morning’s gospel, Matthew 14? He’s breaking the bread, raising his eyes to heaven—at least in Mark’s version he does. He breaks the bread, says the blessing, gives the bread to the disciples, and they give it to the people. It’s very interesting that long before we have an icon of the crucifixion, centuries before we have an icon of the crucifixion, we have icons of Christ at the Last Supper, taking the bread, saying the blessing, and giving it. There is the picture of Christ. It’s not a picture from antiquity; it’s a picture about now. Christ is the living presence now. He’s not a distant memory; he is now.

When people tell me they’re having trouble with their faith, invariably when I speak to them—invariably—it’s theoretical. It has nothing to do with the relationship to Christ. Very often, they simply don’t have that relationship to Christ. They’ve grown up in the Church, but the center has not been inculcated to be the center of their souls. They think about other things that define the Church, and these things are not interesting. If losing the faith means giving up my best friend, giving up my only hope, then I’m not going to lose the faith; I’m going to cling to the faith with all my being, because my faith is rooted in Christ.

The Christ we’re presented with this morning is the most normal way the New Testament pictures Christ. The multiplication of the loaves, there’s two representations of it in Mark: Mark 6 and Mark 8; and Matthew: Matthew 14 and Matthew 15; Luke 9; John 6. This is the Christ who lives in the center of the Church and feeds us: feeds us daily with our sustenance.

You know, we have a great advantage, even over the early Christians, because everybody here has a copy of the Bible in his home. That’s the great blessing given to us by the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation did not give us that. The Orthodox Church did not give us that because we didn’t get the printing press. We were late getting the printing press. There was not a printing press in Greek until the early 19th century. That’s because of the Turk, by the way. The Greek liturgical books were printed over in Venice. They couldn’t be printed in [Greece] because of the Turks. Even the Russians were 200 years late getting the printing press. The printing press was given to us by the Protestant Reformation and by those Roman Catholics who took it seriously, by the translators at Douay and at Rheims. Put a Bible in every single home.

How does Christ feed us? Beloved, you have the food right there in your home. You have the apostolic writings, the epistles of Paul and the gospels. It was a great blessing of the early Christian centuries that they were forced to deal with the question of Christology. That’s a great blessing. If there had not been heretics such as Arius and Sabellius and the others, who had raised theological questions about Christ, I’m sure the early Church would have fought over non-essentials the way it fights over non-essentials right now—over what calendar you use. For crying out loud! Talk about distractions! That has absolutely nothing to do with whether you’re an Orthodox Christian or not.

The Christological and Trinitarian controversies of the early centuries focused the attention of the Christians on the essential question: Who is the Christ? What do you think of the Christ?

Distractions from the center remain the abiding problem for the Church, and they remain the abiding problem for everybody here, not just the Church, but also each Christian: this distraction from the center, this inability to live from the center, to cling to the center, who is Christ. I say these things likewise in preparation for next week, next Sunday. We’ll be celebrating the feast of the celebration of Christ. Amen.