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

If you’ve been watching the news, it’s becoming more and more apparent what a thin line there is between civilization and barbarity, and it gets thinner all the time. It turns out that if you’re a country where you mock people of honor and you mock people who try to live a moral life, that you wind up with more and more people who have no honor and are immoral. Turns out that when you raise up generations of people to believe that there is no God and that there’s nothing more to be gained in this life than the pleasure of the moment that you start having people who will act like that. Turns out that when you raise up people to think that they’re nothing more than highly evolved animals, that they’ll begin to act like animals. They’ll do as they please. They’ll live without honor; they’ll live without any moral code.

If you want to understand what’s happening in our country, if you haven’t already read this novel, I would encourage you to do so, but Dostoevsky wrote a novel sometimes translated as The Possessed, sometimes translated as The Demons. But he saw what was going on in Russia among the more elite, educated class, as people were getting further and further away from God. That novel was a very prophetic novel about where Russia was headed. Unfortunately I think that that’s where we’re headed.

I’ve told you many times, and the reason why I tell you is because those of you who live to see it—and there’s no way that we’re going to know which ones will be in that group, but if you live to see it—it won’t be a shock to you. But the Elder Ignatius of Harbin, who was a saintly man, and people understood that he was clairvoyant, said that what began in Russia will end in America. I talk to people who were from Harbin who said that the way they heard it was that he added, “But it will be worse.” And with the technology that we have, with the efficiency that we have over Russian culture, I think that we could make a much more hellacious totalitarian country than you saw in the Soviet Union. So don’t be surprised if that’s where we’re headed.

But in that novel, Dostoevsky has one of his characters make the statement: “If there is no God, then all things are lawful.” And that’s absolutely true. I’ve talked to many atheists about morality, and when you get down to it, they really have no basis for their reality other than “Well, I just think that’s the way we ought to be.” These are human values, they say, but you can point to many instances in human history where whole societies of people didn’t have the values that they tried to say are human values, so basically it just comes down to the fact that these are people who are living on the moral fumes of a Christian civilization that they despise, but they kind of like those fumes; they like the fact that they can walk the streets and not have people try to rob them, at least most of the time, and that people try to live some kind of a fair and moral life. But you can’t sustain that kind of a society when you don’t believe in God, and that’s what’s happening to our country. More and more people don’t believe in God, and among those people who say that they believe in God, there’s more and more of them that really don’t.

I could spend all day talking about how our country is going to hell in a hand-basket, but the question that we have to ask is: What are we going to do about it? One thing I would point out is Fr. Josiah Trenham in his sermon noted that in the last three months, as he’s observed what’s happened in our country and also what’s been happening in the Church, he was disappointed to discover that the Church in North America, the Orthodox Church, not just Christians in general, but the Orthodox Church, is far more secular than even he had imagined. We see far too many Orthodox Christians that think and believe in ways that are no different than the world, too many Orthodox Christians who, when you look at the way they actually live and where their priorities are, you see that they really don’t believe that there’s a hope beyond this life, so they cling to this physical existence because that’s all they’ve got. They don’t really have any faith that if something happens to them that there’s something better waiting for them.

This is something that we have to face. We have to face the truth that there are so many people like that in our Church, and we also have to face the fact that all of us have been influenced by secular thinking to one extent or another, and the only way that you are going to overcome that is by actively trying to overcome that, by trying to renew your mind, as St. Paul says in the Scriptures. You have to renew your own mind, and you have to fight to instill an Orthodox mindset and to fight a worldly mindset in those of your children, because otherwise they’re not going to be Orthodox Christians. They might be Orthodox Christians in name only, but we don’t want that; we want our children to be saved. We want to be saved, and we want to be Orthodox Christians indeed, not just by pretense.

But if you go with the flow of society, you will lose your soul. This is not a Christian nation. It was by at least some definitions a Christian nation at one time, but there’s no definition by which this country is a Christian nation any more, and that’s a reality that you have to face. You are in a society that is hostile to what you believe as an Orthodox Christian, and you’re only going to remain an Orthodox Christian by struggling against that.

Christ said in the Gospel, “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets.” If people who hate God love you, if you’re cool, if everybody thinks that you’re cool and these are the people who hate God, then you’re doing something wrong, because they shouldn’t love you when they hate God. If they hate God but they love you, that’s because they’re not seeing God in you, and you need to start— you need to repent of that. You need to start trying to live a Christian life.

St. Paul says in the epistle to the Romans, “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your body as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” So your whole life, your bodies—you should be willing to die for the faith. Everything you do should be a sacrifice to God. Then he says, “And be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” You have to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You have to work at it. You have to work to have an Orthodox mindset.

When I converted to Orthodoxy, I had one advantage over many people who had grown up in the Church, because a lot of people who have grown up in the Church, there are some things they have an advantage over, because Orthodoxy was very natural to them. They grew up with customs; there are things that they understood, but also if they grew up in this country, they’ve been very influenced by the same Protestant mindset that I was raised in. It’s just they didn’t realize that that’s what it was. But when I became an Orthodox Christian, I realized that I had to go through a worldview shift. My mind had to change; I had to start thinking differently. How do you do that? You have to stop feeding your mind with the garbage that the world is dishing out, and you have to start feeding your mind with the things that God wants you to be nourished by. You have to read the Scriptures. You have to read the lives of the saints.

St. John of Shanghai regularly quoted from the lives of the saints. When there was a problem, when the question was, “What should we do in this situation?” St. John would either quote something from the Scriptures or quote from some example in the lives of the saints, and he’d say, “Well, see, that’s the way we should deal with this.” We’ve got too many people, that thought doesn’t even occur to them. They don’t know the lives of the saints. They just do whatever the world tells them to do, and they live accordingly. But if you’re an Orthodox Christian, you ought to be asking yourself, “If St. Paisius was in my situation, how would he handle it? If St. John was in my situation, how would he handle it? If the martyrs of the early Church were in my situation, how would they handle that?” And you’re not going to know if you don’t read their lives.

You also have to attend the services and pray with the services and pray the prayers of the Church at home as well. This is how you train your mind. And when you read these things and you say these prayers, you begin to see where you’re coming up short and what needs to change. So gradually if you do this, you can renew your mind. You can begin to think like an Orthodox Christian. But you have to stop allowing the world to poison your mind, and that means that there’s some things that you’ve got to cut out of your life, and there’s some things you’ve got to cut out of your children’s lives. I’m not saying that we become Amish and we try to shelter our children from everything in the world, because it’s not really possible for us to do that, but there ought to be some filters.

There ought to be some attempt on your part to make sure that your children are not spending their time watching and listening to the same garbage that everybody else is listening to. I believe it was Malcolm X that said, “Only a fool lets his enemies educate his children.” You need to think long and hard about whether you’re doing that, because the school system, even though there are many good teachers—there are teachers in our Church that are not that way, but if you talk to them, they will tell you the school system is very much becoming and already is, in most cases, anti-Christian. They do what they can do with the limited freedom that they have, but they’re fighting against the stream, and your children, it’s better for you not to be hoping that they’re going to come out okay at the end, because it’s a difficult situation for an adult to be in, much less for a child. Children should be nurtured by people in the faith, people who are going to encourage them to understand what God wants them to do, what it means to be a Christian and to do it. That’s not happening in the public schools, and it’s certainly not happening with most of the friends that they have, that they’re spending most of their time with at the public school.

Finally, you need to prepare for martyrdom, and that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to one day face the choice of denying Christ or being executed, although that may very well be the case, but the point is when you get to that point, you don’t want to start saying, “Well, now I need to prepare to be a martyr,” because it’s too late to prepare to be a martyr when you’re already facing the choice: are you going to die for Christ or not. You have to prepare to be a martyr right now; every day of your life should be a preparation for that. Even if you never are put to the test in terms of dying for the faith, being a martyr—the word “martyr” means a witness—so you can be a martyr in that sense, a witness to those around you, because you’re living for Christ; you’re not living like everybody else.

At the very least, if you do that, you will save your own soul. In all likelihood, if you do that, you will save the souls of your family. You may be a part of an influence on this society that turns that around; we don’t have any promise of that. Whether this country will survive in a form into the next several generations that’s at all recognizable to us is something that we can’t know. It’s already becoming pretty hard for me to recognize just from my own short lifetime, but at least there still are some good things in our country that are worth fighting for and preserving.

But we have to understand that this is not our home. St. Paul tells us, “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” There’s only so much we can do to help our society, and we should try to do it, but we have no promise from God that we will be successful. But we do have a promise from God that if we are faithful to him, he will be faithful to us. We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know that God holds the future in his hands and that he will get us through it, if we will keep our eyes on him and do what he has told us to do. Amen.