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

Today we celebrate the memory of St. Anthony the Great, and one of the best ways for you to familiarize yourself with the great Desert Fathers is to get yourself a copy of The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and to read it regularly, because it has great spiritual insight from cover to cover. And it has quite a few of the sayings of St. Anthony the Great, but I’ll quote you one that I think is particularly relevant in our time.

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad; you are not like us.”

Welcome to a world gone mad, because that’s the world that we’re living in today. The question that we have to ask if we are striving to be faithful Christians is whether we’re going to be more afraid of being thought to be crazy and keep our sanity, or whether we’re going to willfully go along with the insane so that it’ll be more comfortable, so that people will think that we’re okay. Now unfortunately all too many people in our society are willing to go along with this stuff. I’m old enough to remember before the world went totally insane, and I can tell you that if you took people in a time machine from the current time back to almost any time in human history, and you told them about the kinds of things that are commonly taught in our schools and are assumed to be true, that there’s almost no time where you wouldn’t be thought to be a lunatic.

Even the most decadent times where civilizations were about to collapse haven’t gone as far as we have gone. I think we have left Sodom and Gomorrah in the dust, as a matter of fact. I mean, we have gone into infinite numbers of genders. This kind of stuff is not sustainable; you can’t have a society where you don’t know how many genders there are, and the people who push this stuff, if you ask them how many genders there are, they don’t want to say, because they’re afraid they might have forgotten that there have been 15 added yesterday, and they don’t want to be canceled for being insensitive to the latest sexual minority that’s been identified.

Unfortunately, we have people even in the Orthodox Church that are pushing this stuff. I wish that I could tell you that that wasn’t the case, and when I converted to Orthodoxy, I would have told you that wasn’t the case, but we have a small minority of people who have been pushing the stuff, because they would rather be thought to be sane by crazy people than to keep their sanity and remain faithful to the Orthodox Tradition.

Just this past week, I was listening to a lecture that was posted by a very prominent priest of another jurisdiction, and he was attacking those whom he labeled as “fundamentalist and rigorist,” but he never defined really what made these people fundamentalist or rigorist. And if you wanted to ask him that question, basically the only thing he said was: invariably, their immediate focus is on issues of sexual immorality, but their attacks are ultimately assault on catholicity. So he’s basically saying they make a big issue of sexual morality, but they’ve really got a whole ‘nother problem.

Just so that you understand what “catholicity” is, we sometimes use the word “conciliarity,” but it’s how the Orthodox Church approaches theology. We don’t have a pope, and we don’t have an infinite number of popes like the Protestants do, where everybody gets to be their own pope. We believe that we’re supposed to conform ourselves to the mind of the Church, and conciliarity involves listening to the people in the Church today, and particularly the Church authorities, but also our fellow believers, but it’s also listening to the Church of all the ages past.

St. Vincent of Lerin gave the classic definition of catholicity. He said, “In the catholic Church itself, every care should be taken to hold fast to that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” And he’s talking about those within the Church, not heretics, because obviously you can always find heretics that didn’t believe what we taught. But the point is that there is a continuous tradition of faithful teaching that goes all the way back to Christ and the apostles.

And this priest actually dismissed this and basically tried to suggest that the Church has said these kinds of things, but it wasn’t really true, because they’d be constantly changing things and then appealing to past traditions and rereading them to make them conform to changes that were being introduced. The things he was actually talking about are adjustments to changes in circumstances. Obviously the Church was in a very different circumstance when it was being persecuted by the Romans than it was when essentially everybody was a nominal member of the Church and had been baptized as an infant. So there were adjustments that had to be made to the change in circumstances, but there was no adjustment that was made to the teachings of the Church.

Now, if this priest was really identifying some flaw in the people that he’s describing, you would expect that maybe at some point he would have said, “Well, of course, we all agree that we have to maintain traditional Christian morality, but here’s where these people go wrong, or here’s where they take it too far.” But he never says this, and that’s because these people are very sly, and they’re dishonest. They won’t really come right out and say honestly what it is that they’re trying to get to; what they’ll talk about is they’ll say, “Well, we need to talk about this; we need to discuss this. We need to find truths that have not yet been fully revealed to the Church. And we need to keep an open mind.”

But basically what they’re trying to accomplish is made very clear by the kind of people they associate with and the kind of people that they defend. They will defend websites like Public Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy in Dialogue, which are constantly spewing out articles that are promoting transgenderism and homosexuality and the acceptance of gay marriage, and these are by ostensibly Orthodox authors. And so when they defend sites like that and when they associate with sites like that, it’s not really hard to guess where it is that they want us to go, but they won’t come right out and say it, because they know that they would force their bishops to suspend them and to depose them if they came right out and were honest.

They try to argue around these questions and suggest that it’s an open question: “We have to discuss it, and we don’t really know what the Church really thinks about these things, because the Church has never dealt with things like sexual immorality.” What nonsense! There’s nothing about human sexuality that has changed since God created Adam and Eve, other than the fall and sin. But sins are not new, and sexual immorality you find described in great detail in the Old Testament, and it’s also described in the New Testament as well.

This priest went on to say it’s dangerous to prematurely decide who is an enemy of the Church rather than a brother or a sister, and that it’s premature to decide, really, what the Church thinks about all these issues that we’re trying to raise, because we haven’t had an ecumenical council that’s dealt with these things, and also even a council that ostensibly appears to be ecumenical isn’t really ecumenical until it’s accepted by the entire Church, and we shouldn’t judge things before the time, he says. He talks about how God is impenetrable. We believe in mystery in the Orthodox Church, so we don’t really know anything, essentially, is what he’s trying to get at: we can’t really be sure about anything; our knowledge is imperfect.

Well, is it true that there are many mysteries that we can’t really define? Yes. Is is true that God is impenetrable and that we can only know what he’s revealed about himself? Yes. Is it true that we should be really careful when we’re talking about God or Christology because these things are hard to understand; they’re hard for us to wrap our minds around and we don’t want to fall into error? All of that’s true, but there are many things that are very clearly taught in Scripture, and there are many things that the Church has made very clear.

The Church has settled this question. As a matter of fact, the Church had a council in Acts 15; this was the council of the apostles in Jerusalem, and they dealt with this issue, because the question was: What are we going to require all these converts to do? Are we going to require them to be Jews? Are we going to require them to be circumcised? Are we going to require them to keep the whole law of Moses? And the decision: No, we won’t require them to keep the ceremonial law of Moses, but we are going to require them to keep some things. It says in the letter that they issued—or the dogma or the decrees of the council that St. Paul later distributed to the various churches as he traveled around and visited churches that he’d established:

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication, from which, if ye keep yourselves, ye shall fare well. Fare ye well.

Now, when you hear “blood,” they’re talking about eating blood. They’re not talking about having a steak that has some juice coming out of it. And some people will look at that and say, “See, we don’t pay attention to that any more, so, therefore we don’t have to—this is really not applicable.” Well, this is not true. In the Orthodox Church, we’ve affirmed that these things still apply to us, and so if you’re eating blood sausage or something like that, you need to stop, because the Church says we’re not supposed to eat blood. The only blood we consume is the blood of Christ in the Eucharist. That’s it, and that’s the reason why it’s very important, because blood has a very deep meaning, and we want to make sure that we keep focused on the blood of Christ and not mix up this question by consuming other things.

But when it says, “abstain from fornication,” the Greek word there is porneia, and that word, used by Christians and Jews alike, meant any kind of sexual immorality; anything that was outside of the moral law of God falls into the category of porneia. In Leviticus 18, there is a description of a whole list of things that amount to sexual immorality, but it’s bookended by two comments about the fact that God is displacing the nations before you because they fell into these things. The Gentiles were never expected to not eat pork. The Gentiles were never told, “You can’t eat shrimp.” They were never told you had to wear a phylactery. They were never told they had to keep the sabbath like the Jews did. None of these things applied to the Gentiles, but the Gentiles were held accountable for certain things, like murder and sexual immorality and those kinds of things. When Leviticus 18 goes on to describe all these things and said God punished the nations for these things, that means that everybody is held accountable for this. It’s always been applicable and it will always be applicable.

Also in the New Testament itself, St. Paul deals with this very directly in several places, especially Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6. And we also have numerous canons from the ecumenical councils that directly address these issues. And, as a matter of fact, they were affirmed by the ecumenical councils and have been embraced by the whole Church. So to say that these are just open questions—we don’t really know whether homosexual sex is a sin or not; we don’t really know if gay marriage is something we should say is okay or not—nonsense. Anyone that tells you that is lying, or they’re deluded; they’re insane. So they’re either choosing to be insane, or they’re already made to be insane.

Now, one of the things they brought up was the whole question of pastoral compassion versus discipline, and he cited some people in the history of the Church that wound up in schism because they didn’t think the Church was being strict enough on people. The point when it comes… There’s two distinct questions here. There’s the question of: What is wrong? And then there’s the question: What do you do when someone repents of something that’s wrong? So pastoral compassion comes into play when you’re talking about someone who repents of a sin, and I’m glad that the Church is very pastorally compassionate, because I have plenty of sins that would have excommunicated me a long time ago if the canons were fully enforced. But pastoral compassion means the Church says after you acknowledge that it’s a sin, you say you’re determined to turn away from this—the Church could either say, “You can’t take Communion for ten years,” like some of the canons say; or they might say, “You need to stop that. Do the Jesus Prayer; do the Canon of Repentance,” which would be on the other end of the spectrum.

How exactly you apply this is a matter of pastoral discretion. As St. Basil says, you don’t want to apply medicine in a way that kills the patient. In the early Church, there were people who were very strong, and when they fell, strong medicine was very beneficial to them. In our times, if we apply that strong medicine, most of us wouldn’t be able to take it, and so we apply the medicine more lightly. But that’s an entirely different question. I can’t say the prayer of absolution over someone who refuses to repent of a sin. If someone confesses a sin, but then says that they aren’t sorry, they intend to keep doing it—I can’t say the prayer of absolution.

And I have a great deal of compassion for people who struggle with all kinds of sexual immorality, because we live in a society that’s been bathed in pornography, and people have access to it 24/7, and I’m glad I didn’t grow up in that time, because I don’t know where I would be, because I can imagine that the temptations are very strong. And I think that we do need to be compassionate to people, and when we have someone who is a homosexual, or who struggles with one of the other alphabet-soup kind of problems, we need to be compassionate that these people—it’s not that they chose to be born at a time when this kind of insanity was being promoted, and so when they have the desire to turn away from this, of course we want to do everything we can to help them. We want to love them, because Christ loved them and Christ died for them.

But that’s an entirely different matter than the question of: Is it wrong or is it not wrong? And anyone who—when you say that good is evil and evil is good, you’re not teaching the Orthodox faith. We have to earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints, as St. Jude tells us. And the teachings of the Church, the dogmas of the Church, do in fact include morality. That’s clear from Scripture itself, and it’s also clear from the canons of the Church. And we have to do so even in a world that’s gone nuts, even in a world where people are going to look at us and are going to point to us and say, “You people are crazy. You’re a bunch of haters.” Despite all that, we have to stand for the truth anyway, because if we don’t we’re not being faithful to Christ; we’re denying Christ if we won’t stand for the truth.

As Christ said in the beatitudes:

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Amen.