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

This morning I want to reflect with you on the apostolic office, using three—count them—apostolic modifiers, a phrase I made up: “apostolic modifiers.” The three apostolic modifiers. The first is “elect.”

In the thought of contemporary Christians, I believe, the notion of the divine election doesn’t play anything like so prominent a role as it does to the Christians of the New Testament. In fact, it appears to me a very deliberate effort not to use that expression. I recall when I first used it—oh, goodness: I’ve been a priest in the Orthodox Church for over 25 years, so this would have been a very long time ago—I used the expression “elect,” and somebody says, “Ah, you’re a Calvinists!” Look, just because Calvin got it wrong, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing right about it!

Elect: What does the biblical concept and experience of “elect” mean? I want to explain this, elaborate on it, by considering two approaches to the study of history. A first approach to the study of history lays great emphasis on the great, but anonymous, forces that impel—even compel—the destinies of races and nations. These forces are social, cultural, political, economic. Just take an appropriate, simple example.

Around the year 2,000 BC, the white man descended toward the Persian Gulf and the Indus River. The white man, from up in the area of the Caspian Sea and the Lake of Van. The Caspian Sea lies—the Caspian Sea is usually recognized as the border between Asia and Europe. Great rivers flow into the Caspian Sea, the largest of the inland seas: salt water. People that live there think of it as a lake, as they live around it. The people who lived around the Mediterranean thought it was a lake; in fact they called it lacus noster, “our lake.”

The Caspian Sea is salt water. The people that lived around it we now call “Aryans,” A-r-y-a-n. Not the other Arians. It’s really wrong to call them Aryans; in fact, it’s a serious misreading of the literature. Arya in Sanscrit means “noble,” and that’s the way this people referred to themselves, because they were the conquerors; they were the white man coming south. And when they reached the Indus River, they were facing the Dasas, dark-skinned people; and they conquered them. And the history of India flows out of that.

When they came to the Persian Gulf, they met the Semites, and the Semites fled west; they migrated west to flee from the white man, those known as Aryans—wrongly known as Aryans. That was a great, extremely important period of history. The forced migration of the Semites to the west is the source of the Hebrew expression Habiru, which means “those who have passed over.” The word is probably not originally Hebrew; it was probably a word used in the west to describe the people, the influx of these people coming in. You recognize in the word habiru, you recognize the root of the expression “Hebrew, Hebrews.”

The Hebrews fled west across the Fertile Crescent, all the way down the west end of the Fertile Crescent into Egypt. So the Hebrews can be explained by a historical theory, which is rooted in fact, because all these things really did happen. But, you see, there’s another approach to the thing. There’s another approach, and that’s the approach of the Bible. The Bible does not see the arrival of the Hebrews as part of a great social political migratory movement. In the Bible, God speaks to a single man at the city of Ur on the Persian Gulf. In the Bible it’s known as Ur of the Chaldees. That’s an anachronism, by the way; there were no Chaldees there when Abraham was there. It’s like saying that Columbus discovered America. He didn’t discover America. When he landed, they didn’t say, “Welcome to America!” [Laughter] Wasn’t called “America” until much later. There were no Chaldees at Ur at this time; Chaldees are the Babylonians. This is centuries before the neo-Babylonians would be there.

But God speaks to one man there at Ur of the Chaldees. Notice here the Bible’s approach to history—it has to do with election. He picks a man and starts something. Abraham leaves Ur of the Chaldees and goes—I’ve got to figure out how you see it. He goes northwest up to Haran at the top of the Fertile Crescent. And some things happen there, and God says, “Keep going.” And he comes all the way to the south end of the Fertile Crescent and goes into Egypt. That’s all there in Genesis. God speaks to a single man.

You see, both Hinduism and Judaism can be interpreted as the result of the migration of the white man. But what distinguishes the western religion, the Hebrew religion, is the sense of election, that people, individual people, make historical decisions, and that is what gives form to history. Can you explain Charles de Gaulle simply as the product of French culture? It’s impossible to conceive of Charles de Gaulle apart from toutes les gloires de la France, all the glories of France! But did France produce Charles de Gaulle? In a certain sense, modern France was produced by Charles de Gaulle.

Come back to Hinduism. Notice that Hinduism has no founder. Can’t describe that there’s a founder to it. It can be explained without recourse to that concept of category. There are historians who imagine they can do the same thing for the Jews. The Bible disagrees. The Bible does not see Abraham as simply part of a migratory movement. Take the example of Moses—oh please, take the example of Moses; we’ve been saying a lot about him over the last several months in the Wednesday and Saturday sermons at vespers, as we go through the book of Exodus. See, in the Bible, Moses is not portrayed as the leader of a popular liberation movement. He’s not portrayed that way at all. On the contrary, the Hebrews didn’t want to leave Egypt! They just wanted things better in Egypt; they didn’t want to leave. Indeed, the Hebrews give Moses more grief than the Egyptians do. The Egyptians just for a while; he’s going to have to put up with the Hebrews for another 40 years!

Moses is not simply the expression of a popular liberation movement. The Bible does not see history as the progress of mass movements. History in the Bible has to do with election. Now that’s very important: election, choice. The Christian Church, all historians know, originated in a century of great political turmoil in Galilee. During that century in Galilee, probably more than a score of men led revolutionary movements against the Roman overlord. More than a score of men claimed to be the Messiah. There are those who think that the Christian Church can be explained by that, by that messianic movement. One of the most famous of these messiahs was a man, in the Christian second century, early, by the name of Bar Cosiba, who had put down by the Romans. Those who thought he was the Messiah called him Bar Kokhva, the “son of the star.” Kokhevim mean “stars,” by the way; kokhevim.

Historians who take this mass-movement approach seek it to be applied to the origins of Christianity. But what does the Bible say? What’s the Bible’s approach? The Bible’s approach was in this morning’s reading: He called to him certain individuals. He called them. He and they: the election. Got the picture? Election. This is part of what the apostles mean in history. When God speaks to the personal conscience, when the divine attraction confronts the personal soul.

Now, these personal consciences are certainly social, but they’re not social in the way of the instincts of the animal are social. Men belong in society, but they are not reducible to a herd or a swarm or a flock. My own century, the century that, somehow or another, I’ve outlived—the 20th—was a time of great mass movements. They came into massive conflicts. British politics, however, no more explain Churchill than German politics explain Hitler. And Hitler reminds us that somebody else is making choices; somebody else is choosing.

I refer you to the massive and definitive two-volume biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw. The great thesis in Kershaw’s massive two volumes is that Germany did not produce Hitler. It was not inevitable there would be a Hitler. If it were not for Hitler, Germany could have gone in a very different direction. One man changed it, because somebody else had chosen him.

I remember reading, many, many years ago—oh, goodness, mid ‘50s—when I first started becoming aware of the story of Benedict of Nursia. The biography of Benedict of Nursia, the earliest biography, is in the second book of the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Dialogist; the whole second book is about St. Benedict of Nursia. He describes there how Benedict, when he went out to live as a hermit, in a place called Subiaco, and later moved to a place called Monte Cassino. But young Benedict was tortured with the passions of the flesh and actually thought of returning to Rome, giving up this monastic calling. To overcome that, Benedict stripped off all of his clothes, and he rolled around for a long while in a thorn bush, and he found he didn’t—his lust did not survive it. And I reflected: What would have happened to Europe if Benedict had returned to Rome? It would be impossible to conceive Europe as we know it. Impossible!

You see, Benedict of Nursia was the founder of something called Europe! He is the patron saint of Europe. It’s impossible to explain European history without Benedict of Nursia, something that—I wonder how many Europeans have ever heard his name, much to say Americans! But without Benedict of Nursia, there is no holy Rule of St. Benedict. The holy Rule of St. Benedict has the largest number of manuscripts of any work, of any work in Europe—in the world! The largest number of manuscripts except for the Bible. Except for the Bible.

The disciples of Benedict of Nursia, the ones who evangelized England, and England evangelized Germany, and the forests were cleared all across Europe and the swamps were drained. You thought somebody else talked about draining the swamp! [Laughter] That’s a real old thing, draining of the swamps. And virtually all of Europe—almost all of Europe—was put under the plow, and the highest standard of physical living developed that the rest of the world is trying to keep up with, because of the disciples of Benedict of Nursia.

So you see, the calling of the apostles, beloved, points to the primacy of personal conscience. People meet God. God chooses them. He says, “Come. Follow me.” Suppose Peter and Andrew and James and John had said, “No… We got a good thing going here. In fact, we have a chance of being the biggest fishing operation on the whole Sea of Galilee. And we would follow you, but we need to inspect your dental plan and your provision for our retirement.” No! Someone spoke to their personal conscience, and they followed him. And those men—that little handful of uneducated men—became the founders of the Christian Church, and of all of western civilization!

It has to do with a personal relationship with the incarnate Truth. Saul—“Saul! Why do you persecute me?” You and me—conscience. You and me—why do you persecute me? And everything changed. See, in that sense the apostles are elect. Their election changes everything. The Christian faith is not just a massive movement. In fact, it’s very hard to have a massive movement in which almost all the founders get killed.

Let’s take a second apostolic modifier: instructed. The apostles are instructed. They just go through two years of personal instruction in the apostolic band. I mean, even seminary now takes three years. But seminarians are disadvantaged, because they’ve been to college. It takes an extra year just to get rid of that. Just kidding, just kidding. What about this personal experience of two years with Jesus? It’s the time of apostolic instruction. They were instructed about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, but they were not just learning, they were learning from Christ. What they learned is essentially based in the Teacher, and the core of their learning is their relationship to Christ. Everything they learned has to do with Christ. The teaching of Christ is not separable from Christ. You don’t get it without Christ. Take away Christ, and there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that the heavenly Father looks after the birds of the air. Modern biologists don’t believe that. Modern biologists believe that birds look out for themselves. See, you can’t really believe that unless you believe Jesus.

You see, what occurred during those two years of personal discipleship was the formation of a personal relationship to Christ, and only one of the students failed that course. Now, beloved, all transmission of the Christian faith shares that quality. Not a single one of you here today—and certainly not the one who’s preaching to you—came to the Christian faith on his own. Faith is always from hearing. Every single one of us here today is a believer because some other believer shared his faith with us. We are never one on one with respect to Jesus. There are those who believe that, that the Christian faith is me-and-Jesus. It is not! There’s always at least somebody else involved.

My personal faith in Jesus was given to me by other people—by my mother and father; in a special way, by my grandparents, especially my grandmother. As I get old, I hope I can continue to resemble my grandmother more and more. Whatever Jesus is to you, you received it from someone else, whether parents, the Church, friends—yeah, Richard, friends! You might even have gotten your personal faith from the discovery of a Gideon Bible in your hotel room, but, you see, somebody else put that Bible there, and certainly you didn’t write that Bible—somebody else wrote that Bible, and they published it. I’m talking about back when they had Gideon Bibles.

See, the Christian faith is, at root, and by divine intent, a shared faith. We have the personal faith of the apostles. They believed, and they shared their personal relationship, their faith in Christ, with other people. The Jesus known by each of us here today is the Jesus known by Peter, by John, by Thomas, by Andrew, by Paul, by Mary Magdalene, by Martha of Bethany. We share their faith, and it came to us by the faith of other people down to us. Think of the faith of Ignatius of Antioch, a second-generation Christian. Ignatius grew up in Antioch, a little boy growing up in Antioch. Guess who some of the visiting preachers were at Antioch? Peter, Paul, Barnabas, Luke, Mark. Ignatius, a little boy, growing up there. And that’s why the faith of Ignatius of Antioch was identical to the faith of the apostles, and that faith has been handed down at Antioch—at Antioch, at that church, which has had a continual existence from then until now. And that faith is identical to the faith professed here on Newport Avenue, in this Antiochian parish.

The apostolic faith is a shared faith. They instruct us in relationship to Christ.

And third, as we prepare for the fourth of July, let’s talk about a third quality of the apostolic faith. It is: monumental. Mon-u-mental. What do we mean by “monument”? The Latin monumentum means “a reminder.” A monumentum is a reminder. It’s something that exists for the purpose of keeping alive a memory. A monument is something erected to co-mmem-o-rate. Most interesting. A monument has the quality of perm-a-nence. These are wonderful roots! Monere means to remind; manere means to stay. One of my favorite mon-u-ments is in Thessaly. It’s the Lion of Amphipolis. I’ve talked about the Lion of Amphipolis to you before, a few times in the past, haven’t I? Some of you weren’t here then, perhaps, so let me review for you the Lion of Amphipolis.

I’ve only seen the Lion of Amphipolis one time, but I got out of a vehicle with my camera, and I was there for another 30 minutes, Steve, taking pictures. You would have been there for three hours! Taking pictures of the Lion of Amphipolis. It’s this enormous lion. It stands four meters high, and it sits on a pedestal four meters high. The widths of the lion’s head is a meter. It is mon-u-mental! It’s big and unmistakable.

The Bible tells us that Paul and Silas walked past Amphipolis. They were following the Egnatian Way, the Hodos Egnatios. It still sits there today on the Hodos Egnatios, and when Paul and Silas saw that, it was already four and a half centuries old. It was somewhat older when I saw it.

Now, all civilized nations have their monuments. It would be extremely disturbing—and I mention this only in passing—it should be a cause of alarm that Americans are taking down their monuments, instead of understanding their monuments. They’re taking down their monuments on the basis of contemporary thought. So the contemporary thought rules history—and that is a very dangerous thing to happen. Great monuments of great people have been taken down.

But all civilized nations have their monuments. As soon as you start applying the standards of contemporary political correctness to that phenomenon, no one will have a statue left. Every single one of the hundred statues in the Congress will have to be taken down. I am so surprised that Junípero Cera is still there, this Franciscan friar who represents the state of California; I’m surprised it’s still there, because I can’t believe he’s very happy about what’s going on in California.

Our earliest monuments come from the world’s earliest civilization: Egypt. The first civilization that recorded the past as a guide for the future. That’s a definition, by the way, I’m getting from Jacob Burckhardt. Egypt. The monuments. They’re still there. They’re still there; they’ve been there for 4,000 years, those monuments. You’ve probably been told that the pyramids were put up with slave labor. That’s a calumny; an absolute lie! The people who worked on that were skilled laborers; they were not slaves. They were skilled laborers, and the government fed them very well. They had a good health plan. I don’t know if they had a dental plan, but they certainly had what they would have called “Pharaoh-care.” [Laughter] The government took care of their health, because they were very, very important. Those people who constructed the pyramids were very important to the transmission of what Egypt means.

You see, the purpose of a monument is the preservation of a memory. Ad perpetuam re memoriam, some of the texts begin: “unto the perpetual memory of the thing.” Not a bad thing to think about, because this week one of our monuments is going to be celebrated: the Declaration of Independence. I won’t go any further than that, just simply to mention it.

The purpose of a monument is the preservation of memory, and memory is the foundation of identity. Monuments are not normally constructed of perishable material. I’m presuming that many of you have actually stood there in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Now in this sense the apostles are monumental. They are monumental, and we forget the apostles at our peril. We remind ourselves, at least every Sunday when we recite the Nicene Creed, that the Church we believe in is apostolic. One thinks of the apostolic names, from the twelve foundation stones of the heavenly Jerusalem. These simple laboring men are the monumental figures of the Christian Church. It is an apostolic Church, founded on the personal testimony of men who had met Christ, had their consciences summoned by Christ, were instructed by Christ, and are at the center of the memory of the Church. Amen.