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

There are certain years, beloved in the Lord, and I’m not quite sure what to do with this particular Sunday: the Sunday after Ascension but before the arrival of the Holy Spirit. I have the impression that those who designed the structure of the service of this day—and I have no doubt that Joseph Letendre could tell you who they were [Laughter]—they had in mind to do the equivalent of what Keats said he was trying to do in one of his poems, which was to “load every rift with ore”: pour as much gold into it as possible; “load every rift with ore.” Because we just have these scenes piled onto one another, all of which are rich.

This is the time when the apostles for the ten days are in the upper room, with the holy women and Mary the Mother of the Lord, waiting for the arrival of the Holy Spirit. So they give us this upper room. The gospel this morning goes back to the upper room, where Jesus gives the high priestly prayer. We have this sermon of St. Paul to the Ephesian elders, which is as far as we know the first gathering of the bishops of the Church. It was a local synod, and Paul has them there, and he hands on his own last will and testament, just as Jesus does in the high priestly prayer in the Last Supper. He warns them against the wolves that are coming. I’ll be talking about those wolves this morning in the three points. On top of all that, they give you the Council of Nicaea in 325. All these references to the Council of Nicaea that we have in the hymnography of vespers last night when we began the feast, and then the matins this morning.

All of these scenes are what I would call programmatic scenes: they’re scenes that say something about the program, as though the Church were trying to get the program set up so when the Holy Spirit came down he could infuse them with his grace, but the Church would have already what she needed. It’s during this period that they elect somebody, for example, to take the place of Judas Iscariot. They study the Scriptures; Jesus has just given them the understanding of the Scriptures before he left. These are programmatic scenes within what I would call a linear history.

We have all of these things because the Church is rooted in memory. Even though we keep a liturgical cycle, the Church does not think of time as cyclical. And be careful of anybody who thinks of time as cyclical. The Church regards time as linear, and that’s why the Gospel is anamnetic. Anamnetic; I’m going to give you that nice Greek root: anamnetic. Anamnesis means—the Hebrew has zikaron—the memorial, the remembrance, the living remembrance. Our identity as Christians is in the living remembrance. The Gospel is anamnetic; it is linear.

I’d like to speak to you this morning about three of the wolves: the wolves that challenge what I’ve just said. The first of these wolves is this: the flight from history. Some of this is going to sound very strange to you, because I really believe that many, many Christians, and perhaps chiefly Orthodox Christians, are in a full flight from history. I have lost count—because it’s hundreds—of the number of people I have received into the Orthodox Church over the last 28 years: whole congregations, actually. One of the things I’ve fairly insisted in my instruction to them is that you are not joining Orthodoxy; you are joining the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church has the true faith. Some folks seem to think in Orthodoxy they have a religious system of a sort. It’s detachable from everything; it’s a religious system.

I remember my long conversation with Fr. Wilbur on this about, oh, goodness, 15 years ago. He says, “I’ve been studying Orthodoxy.” I said, “Give it up!” [Laughter] “Don’t! Stop studying Orthodoxy. Study the Orthodox Church.” When people want to join the Orthodox Church, because that’s where Orthodoxy is found, I guess, we give them books. I give them Isaiah and the Gospel of John.

What do I mean by “the flight from history”? Beloved, the Gospel is rooted in factual history, not a coherent religious ideology. And when we try to make it coherent as a religious and rational system, we ended up falling into the sin of Arius, who did exactly that. He had a theory. The first of these “flights from history” that the Church faced was Gnosticism, because Gnosticism was an abstract religious theory, highly rational and utterly insane. Gnosticism was a timeless religious ideology. I’m going to refer here to a book that I’m positive none of you have read; in fact, I’d be very surprised if you had. The one good thing about this book is that it’s out of print. [Laughter] And I hope it stays out of print.

The title of the book is Le Mystère de Jésus, the mystery of Jesus. That sounds like a good title. See, that’s the sheep’s clothing. It was written by someone named Paul-Louis Couchoud. I’ll give you several quotations from Paul-Louis Couchoud: I believe everything in the Creed except—‘he suffered under Pontius Pilate.’ I believe everything in the Creed except ‘he suffered under Pontius Pilate.’ ” Now, I bet if I took a survey of Christians, by and large—certainly not this congregation—I would ask: Can we take Pontius Pilate out of the Creed? What would happen to the Creed if we did? It would be the end of the Christian faith. The Gospel would become one of the Aeneids; it would become one of the Upanishads, become one of the Sutras.

“Suffered under Pontius Pilate”: take that out of the Creed, and the Christian faith becomes something completely different. For Couchoud, the mention of a Roman procurator debased the universal significance of Jesus. It reduced the Gospel—that Pontius Pilate reference, he believed—by qualifying it with a note of particularity. It made Jesus vulnerable to the historian, and it made the Christian faith vulnerable to historical criticism, because it placed Jesus in the realm of documentable history.

“But I,” wrote Couchoud, “by elevating him above that level, make the Faith invulnerable.” Yes. If the Faith is invulnerable, we can certainly take down the crosses from our churches. Beloved, it is important to understand exactly what Couchoud had in mind to do, because I think he is not alone at all. He wanted to make the Gospel a message of universal application. So he thought it necessary to abstract the Gospel from the limitations of historical particularity. You all following me on this? It’s not an easy concept to wrap your head around, is it? It’s the flight from history. You see, the one thing in the Creed that makes this impossible is this naughty and annoying name, Pontius Pilate, because that fixes it into history. This reference to Pilate in the very formulation of the Christian faith reduced the force of that faith to a particular time and place. But particular time and place, we believe, is essential to the Gospel.

Let me ask you this: Do you believe it is essential to the Christian Gospel that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate? Of course, you do believe it, because otherwise it wouldn’t be in the Creed. What I hope I can get you to understand is that the Creed would be a complete reversal if we took that out. Is that historical connection part of the essence of the Gospel? Yes, it is. The reference to Pontius Pilate is what anchors the Gospel in ordinary world history. This bothersome mention of Pontius Pilate is what precludes forever the Gospel’s becoming a religious theory. This is the reason why Pilate is mentioned repeatedly in the early Church Fathers, especially during those two centuries before the Nicene Creed. You see, the reference to Pontius Pilate would not be in that Creed if it had not been in earlier creeds. There’s a section of a book that came out last year on that subject: Recovering the Atonement or something like that.

All four gospels insist that it took place under Pontius Pilate: “In the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.” It’s rooted there. This bothersome mention of Pilate is part of the arsenal of the faith. It is what safeguards the Gospel [from] becoming a religious system. This is why Pilate is mentioned over and over again. This reference to Pontius Pilate lies at the very core of the Gospel. The Gospel can never be detached from specific history as long as that secular root is right there. See, we not only believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; we believe [Clap] in Pontius Pilate. He is the documented link of the Gospel to recorded history. You see, beloved, the Gospel is a tree; it’s not a tumbleweed.

Paul-Louis Couchoud had in mind to protect the Gospel, to save the Gospel, by detaching it from the ravages of history. In reality, his efforts, if he followed them, would utterly destroy the Gospel by detaching it from factual history. The Christian faith would be transformed into a new Gnosticism.

It would be unfair of me to criticize the ideas of Couchoud, especially since he’s not around to defend himself, if he were only an isolated oddity. I am persuaded, however, that this is not the case. Throughout the case of Christian history, starting from second-century Gnosticism and to the present day, we find this disposition, to de-historicize the Gospel, as a constant temptation. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of this, up to the apologists of the second and third centuries; that’s where their work was extremely important: the fight against Gnosticism. The fight against Gnosticism, and then their fight against neo-Platonism. Not many Fathers of the Church knew about Buddhism. Clement of Alexandria did, and he saw that it was rotten to the core, because it was a religious system entirely coherent, entirely logical, absolutely invulnerable to criticism. The Christian faith is utterly vulnerable. It’s as vulnerable as Christ himself.

I recently heard on—what do they call that? YouTube? Is that the thing—I was seeing an interview on YouTube in which the young man described the experience of Orthodox Christian worship in these very terms: “One hears an enthusiastic Orthodox Christian speak of the Divine Liturgy as a timeless and eternal experience.” Thank God there are little children standing around who will make that impossible! [Laughter] The little children will keep bringing us back to the earth, any time we start to slip off into nirvana. [Laughter] One of these little children will do something and shake us up.

The Divine Liturgy, beloved, is absolutely rooted in salvation history. We call to mind all those things which have come to pass for us. There’s the anamnesis. Remember the deacon? You’ll see this morning the deacon will cross his arms and hold up the Body and Blood of Christ, and tell God: Remember. “Calling to remembrance…” Our Orthodox worship is anchored in specific historical facts. Otherwise, we lose the Gospel itself. There’s the first of the wolves: the flight from history.

Second, the breakdown of continuity. This one also seems to me a very, very active thing. I was asking myself the other day, as I was riding the elevator up in Wisconsin; I was riding up the elevator, and the elevator was very slow, so it gave me time to think. I was thinking, “We are calling ourselves ‘Ancient Faith Radio,’ ‘Ancient Faith Press,’ ‘Ancient Faith Ministries.’ Do we really know what that means?” Suppose we started Ancient Faith Radio on the day of Pentecost. Suppose that had been possible. It wasn’t possible simply because John Maddex wasn’t alive yet. [Laughter] John Maddex, as far as I am concerned, invented the radio.

But if we had started it that day of Pentecost, what should we have called it? “Ancient Faith Radio!” Ancient Faith Radio, that’s what we should have called it. You see, the reference to “ancient faith” is more than chronology. This breakdown of continuity has heretical expressions. One of these, I believe, is the theory of displacement, where the Christian Church displaces the Jewish religion. That’s a heresy, absolutely a heresy. The Christian Church is the continuity of the theology and the people, the institutions of the Old Testament. The theory that the Christian Church has displaced the Jews—that we’re the chosen people now and they’re not—that’s heretical! That’s Marcianism. They worshiped really a different god. This Marcianism, like Gnosticism, was a religious theory; in particular, it was an attempt at a philosophy of history, the imposition of theory on memory, so that the memory of self is distorted.

The apostles, when they emerged from the upper room, came forth fortified with what is known as the Tanakh. If you take the ahs out, we can just look at the consonants: T refers to Torah; N refers to the Nevi’im, the Prophets; the KH refers to the Ketuvim, the writings; the three parts of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Tanakh. The apostles came forth fortified with the Tanakh. The first Christian Scriptures, beloved, are the Jewish Scriptures. Our faith is identical with the faith of the patriarchs. The New Testament insists on this over and over again. Just read the 12th chapter of Hebrews, which goes through the history of the heroes of the faith. The author of Hebrews is persuaded that the faith of the Old Testament is identical with the faith of the New.

This remains, I believe, a constant temptation. You see this temptation again among those who believe that Jesus is a religious founder, like Siddhartha or perhaps Confucius—how anybody can think of Confucius as a religious founder, I have no idea, but they do—or Mohammed, or Moses. You think of religious founders. Moses was not a religious founder, and most emphatically Jesus was not a religious founder. Jesus is, rather, the fulfillment of an ancient faith. What does he tell his contemporaries? “You want to know who I am? Read Moses. He wrote about me. The reason you don’t understand me is because you don’t understand Moses.” When Jesus handed on the Gospel, the Tanakh pertained to the essence of that message. He opened their minds, their hearts, that they might understand the Scriptures, and then said, “Go forth,” in the 24th chapter of Luke.

And third and finally—and this one is only one page [Laughter]—the third of the wolves: absorption into the world. Today’s gospel—you all heard it—what did Jesus say? “I do not pray for the world. I do not pray for the world, because friendship with the world is enmity with God.” Now, what do I mean by “the absorption into the world”? It’s that temptation to blur the boundaries of the Gospel, to confuse politics with the message of salvation. Theories like liberation theology, where the Gospel is put to the service of political and economic reform.

Now, to confuse politics with the message of salvation was not a temptation of the apostles. It was not a temptation of the apostles. It did not become a temptation to the Church until 313. Back then you could really have a confusion of the Gospel with the world. With the Edict of Milan, gradually the making of the Christian faith and the Christian Church into a political institution—that’s when bishops started dressing up like emperors, wearing crowns. This confusion of the Church with the world, we had that this morning in the reading, didn’t we? At matins. Constantine calls the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. Does anybody see why that’s not a step in the wrong direction? Constantine calls the Council. In fact, that Council was the first crisis in the problem I’m talking about. There’s a great political irony about Nicaea. Christians became very worldly, because the faith was now accepted by the political system. We start to get Christian kings and Christian emperors. And there are Christians, Orthodox Christians right now, who think that should be restored.

But the great irony of Nicaea, that it formulated the faith and opened the door to the world. Something happened in the fourth century, very strongly, where some aspect of the Church finally emerged as an institution, and it’s with us to this day, and we’d better cherish it, and that’s the institution of monasticism. When the Church started to assimilate the world, and the world the Church, the very serious Christians who stood up and said, “Oh, no. Oh, no,” and they fled to the desert, and they took the Church with them. That’s the beginnings of the burgeoning of monasticism in the Church. You see, monasticism, I believe, is our permanent prophetic institution. That’s why I believe that monasticism has now become part of the essence of the Church, not because it is something new, but because it arose out of something seminal, something germinal, within the Church itself. Monasticism dramatizes an essential dimension of the Gospel, and that is: We are not of the world.

That’s why there has to be something monastic about every Christian. He has to have some kind of inner cloister, and the home should become cloisters, where we pull back from the world; the world is kept out. We don’t want your entertainment, we don’t want your standards—we don’t want any of these things. We’re going to come back, and we’re going to retrench. We’re going to be a Christian family, and we’re going to forcefully keep the world out of our household. We have Christian souls, and we forcefully keep the world out of our Christian souls. Amen.