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

This morning’s epistle, my brothers and sisters in Christ, is drawn from the epistle to the Ephesians. It was one of the last of Paul’s letters, toward the end, written from probably prison in Caesarea, those two years that he was in prison, according to the Acts of the Apostles. It’s about the revelation of God’s mystery in history and about the term and goal of history, and it’s with this problem with history that I want to concern our minds this morning.

When I joined the Orthodox Church, 20-and-a-half years ago now, it was a major concern to me to be on the side of history. I was persuaded that the church to which I belonged was not on the side of history, that it had become, in fact, a backwater and a cesspool, thus no longer part of the stream of God’s salvific work. I couldn’t belong to that church. I don’t know why, but during my whole life I’ve never been able to think of anything in view of my life except in terms of being on the side of history. That has always seemed perfectly normal to me, which is why I have a very difficult time even dealing with people to whom that concept is foreign.

I want to consider with you this morning what I believe it means to be on the side of history, and I suggest there are three matters we may explore with respect to this consideration: first, whether history is important; second, the competition we find at the heart of history; third, the choice implied by this historical competition: how does one take sides with history?

First, whether history is important. I believe, my brothers and sisters, that history is the only thing that is important, because God chose history and only history as the medium of his revelation to man. This question would never have been debated in the early Church simply because the importance and the centrality, the essential nature of history is the common and constant presupposition of the Bible. This is why the Bible mainly contains historical and prophetic books, and the other books are all meditations on history, as today’s epistle.

Our own times, however, are dominated by the heresy that Russell Kirk called presentism. Presentism, the thesis that only the present generation is significant, separates itself from the authority of the past, tradition, and then quite logically cuts itself off from the hope of the future. One thing Dan Berrigan got right: those who don’t come from anywhere are not going anywhere. Characteristic of the heresy of presentism is a preoccupation with the sense of personal fulfillment without regard to either the norms of tradition or the burden of posterity. Presentism hasn’t come from anywhere, and it’s not going anywhere.

This must be the case, of course, because tradition is just as concerned about the future as it is about the past. It’s important to keep that in mind. Tradition is just as concerned about the future as about the past. To reject either the past or the future is to deny the importance of history, the human experience. Someone who lives entirely in the present has reduced history to autobiography: it’s my history.

The loss of the sense of history is related to the loss of hope, because hope and history are truly inseparable. Hope has been bequeathed to us from the past, and hope is what is handed on to us in the future.

Now, presentism is a very widespread sickeness, but let me just by way of illustration suggest that one of its more obvious symptoms is the current culture of birth control. I’m talking about the culture of birth control, not the hard cases, those really bad cases where someone’s life is put in danger if there’s a pregnancy. I’m not talking about that; those need to be worked out in quiet of the confessional, with private counseling. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the culture that’s based on birth control. I have an initial gut response to it because it simply sounds too much like pest control or weed control. Something bad: you’ve got to control it.

The culture of birth control, which obviously represents a break with the tradition of the past, also separates sexuality from responsibility for the future. It’s difficult to talk on this subject in this parish because I know there’s so many couples in the parish who want to have children, and God has not given them children. A message like today’s probably has to be very distressing to them. I think of how many prayers I say every day for various couples in this parish who so desperately want to have children and can’t. That’s what makes it very difficult to talk on this subject.

But of course to birth control, the experience of sex shrivels to a mere sense of pleasure and fulfillment in the present. It is so easy a step to go from this to homosexual marriage; it’s a very easy step. The step is so logical, in fact, I don’t know why more people haven’t made it. Sex is rendered, very literally, barren. And you know barrenness in the Bible is not considered a blessing. It’s reduced to the mere physical and psychological pleasure. People actually speak of this barren experience as “fulfilling.” Fulfilling what? Nothing more than a subjective and narcissistic experience.

Divorcing sexuality from history, it deprives it of hope. And now in our own era, for the first time in man’s life on this earth, the experience of sexuality has now become radically separated from hope. This is a really new thing! Former ages knew nothing of it. Sex becomes literally hopeless because it’s not geared to the future; it’s not directed to the future. And what is obviously worse is many people today imagine that this sorry state is progress and that it’s normal. In fact, there are whole books written on this subject, how now, because of this wonderful thing called The Pill, the woman has been “freed” to find her own destiny. They have lost even the memory that God designed hope as an essential component of sex. And that’s what every childbirth is: a new experiment in hope.

Let me suggest, however, if there is anything more lamentable than hopeless sex, it is hopeless salvation. Among those who call themselves Christians, the heresy of presentism is manifest in a total preoccupation with individual salvation, a sense of “being saved,” an experience of “being saved,” that has nothing to do with the authority of the past or the concerns of the future. “Being saved”: an experience of “being saved” has nothing at all to do intrinsically with the mystery we’re talking about this morning in Ephesians, which is that of the Church.

Popular American religion manifests this kind of presentism that’s very common. Many American Christians nowadays have lost all sense that salvation, as presented in the Bible, is essentially the redemption of history. They have privatized salvation very much the way they have privatized sex. Both have become radically selfish preoccupations.

Back when I was a student at Southern Baptist Seminary, decades ago—I’ve told you this story before, but some of you are now—a fellow classmate named Goki Saito—Goki Saito, as you might suggest, was from Japan—and Goki was talking about the difficulty of preaching in Japan the theology he was learning at Southern Baptist Seminary, and he was very up-front about that. He says, “I can’t go back to Japan and ask people if they’re saved! I can’t go back to Japan ask people if they want to go to heaven. That doesn’t make any sense to them.” He says, “You have no idea how much ‘being saved’ is an American cultural phenomenon. They don’t understand that in Japan!” He says, “Frankly, I don’t understand it either.” [Laughter]

He said, “In Japan, what they want to know is: Am I going to be with Mom and Dad? Am I going to be with my parents? Am I going to be part of this ongoing inheritance which is my culture and my existence?” He says, “The Japanese person”—now, this may just be Goki, but I’ll give you what Goki said. He said, “The Japanese person, he doesn’t think of himself as an individual needing to be saved. He thinks of the whole culture as something that needs to be saved.” We’re talking about the redemption of history.

I’ll tell you someone who exemplified what I’m talking about, at least the good part of what I’m talking about. That’s Fr. David Lynch, who had the good fortune this day of passing into eternal life on the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul. His last words, according to Martha, who heard them and handed them on to me; here are his last words: “I ask only that they will let me enter the kingdom.” There’s salvation. “I ask only that they—“plural! Plural! “I ask only that they will let me enter the kingdom.” Salvation is becoming part of the kingdom.

This is what we see in the epistle to the Ephesians, which speaks of salvation in terms of historical fulfillment. Salvation consists in being introduced into that historical body called the Church. Why do we come to the Church? Because therein is found eternal life. The Church is that institution that God has made central to the redemption of history.

I bow my knees (writes Paul in the epistle to the Ephesians) to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom all paternity in heaven and on earth is named, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with might through his Holy Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and the length and the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Salvation in the Bible means that we are introduced to salvation history till, Paul says—“till we all come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” Now, he’s talking about a historical development that is going on right now, for Christ is still growing to full stature throughout history.

Second, God’s history is not man’s. You see, there is a competition at the heart of history. All flesh is grass, according to Isaiah, and all its beauty like the flower of the field. And he goes on to spell this out in detail. “Behold the nations like a drop in a bucket.” All the nations like a drop in the bucket! [Laughter] “And all are accounted as dust on the scales.” When you weigh on a scale, you’re not even bothered by the dust; it doesn’t count. The drop in the bucket. “Behold, the Lord takes up the coastlands like fine dust.”

Now, the book of Isaiah was written over a rather lengthy period of time. The first part of it is concerned with the grandeur and the arrogance of the Assyrian Empire, and the second part with the same thing in the Babylonian Empire, the third part with the Persian Empire. It’s a major theme in Isaiah. It’s talking about all these great empires that conquered what was the known world at the time. They’re all, he says, a drop in the bucket. If they’re a drop in the bucket, so is the United States of America a drop in the bucket. In the plan of God, it counts for no more than dust on the scales. Worrying very much about who managed to be the next president of the United States is about as sensible as worrying whether or not Sennacherib is going to succeed Sargon II. What does the prophet say? It’s all a drop in the bucket!

Suppose they were running a survey—say TIME Magazine was running a survey in the year 49, and they wanted Person of the Year, of the year 49. Who might that have been? Well, it might have been the Roman Emperor Claudius, who, the first time set foot in England in the year 49 because the Roman forces had just conquered Wales. I’ll bet that was a deuce of a job, conquering Wales! And Claudius visited England. Could he be the Person of the Year? Whoever they would have picked, I bet they probably would not have picked a Jewish tent-maker who landed at Thessaloniki that summer, just a Jewish rabbi who was a tent-maker. And yet, looking back on the last 2,000 years, what was the significant event? [Laughter] What event in the year 49 transformed Western culture, gave history a whole new shape? The man who came and founded the Church at Thessaloniki, from whence would venture the missionaries to go out to convert eastern Europe! This Jewish tent-maker shows up. He wouldn’t have been made Person of the Year.

You see, God sees things quite differently from ourselves. Why? Paul addresses this question. You’ve heard it this morning. God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. You may have noticed this about dead people: they don’t take very good care of themselves. Can’t even bury themselves. This is how Paul describes man apart from God: dead, a drop in the bucket, dust on the scales.

Man without Christ is helpless. He’s helpless in the sense of not being able to do anything permanently significant in history or even in his own life. No matter what man without God may seem to accomplish, none of it is of permanent significance. When history has run its last course, all the deeds of men will be found wanting. These deeds include every human accomplishment, every scientific endeavor, every cultural achievement, every political and military exploit, absolutely everything that man by his own standards thinks to be great and proclaims to be present—none of it will be found significant.

Many Christians took offense, back when we first put a man on the moon, and Richard Nixon said, “This is the greatest week since the creation of the world.” [Laughter] He actually said that! And he ran for re-election after saying something like that! And he won! [Laughter] You see, human history does not justify itself. God is not impressed with any of these works.

And third, there is a choice implied by this historical competition. How are we to live a life that is really worth living? It has to do with worth. That was the title of Archbishop Sheen’s television program several aeons ago. [Laughter] “Life is Worth Living.” Well, I don’t think really Bishop Sheen made that up. It seems to me it’s already in the Gospel, because you’re talking about worth. Jesus asked the question: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul.” Let us put it down on a ledger, figure it out. Put it down on a ledger.

The answer is the same. Just as God alone can redeem history, God alone can redeem every life within history. Only God can infuse our personal lives with meaning, significance, and importance. If we would live such a life, then each of us must permit God to do in our own lives what he does in the course of history, and that is to take charge.

Prior to writing the epistle to the Ephesians, probably six months to a year before writing it, he wrote the epistle to the Romans, which I believe is written between January and March of the year 57. Romans, especially chapters 9, 10, and 11, is a treatment of the dialectics of history. The entire course of history, says Paul, is dotted by God’s governance. If you read the things that Metropolitan Philip says, he returns to this theme all the time. I’m astounded how deeply plugged into this message Metropolitan Philip’s words have always been. God is the Lord of history, that’s how Metropolitan Philip looks at the Middle East, for example, from which he finds an immense sense of despair, and how he looks at it, that God still is in charge in the Middle East, as he’s in charge everywhere.

The eighth chapter of Romans, Paul gives the secret of how we are to enter into the mystery of God’s redemption in history when he says that all of those of the sons of God are led by the Spirit of God. It is only the Holy Spirit and the guidance of the Holy Spirit that can take us through and lead us through history, incorporate us into the dynamics of God’s grace being effective in history. We must, in faith, put ourselves and our lives completely under his redemption.