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

We’ve completed the first week of Lent, and on each weekend of Great Lent, we have a celebration. We celebrate today the triumph of Orthodoxy over heresy, and particularly the triumph of Orthodoxy over the iconoclast heresy. This is a heresy that still is ongoing heresy because we have especially Protestants that teach it. Of course, Muslims also are iconoclasts, and that’s really where iconoclasm originated from, if you want to know the truth. If you look at it historically, they were the first iconoclasts.

Recently, there was a Protestant apologist who made a video that’s caused a little bit of a stir on the Orthodox internet. A lot of people—some people haven’t heard these arguments before, but if you’ve been around for a while, it’s not like he discovered anything new. To make his case, he had to use a lot of inaccurate translations who— by their terminology in the original language, it’s very clear, and also from the context of what they say, that they were talking about pagan idolatry. It’s a stretch, to say the least, to apply this and make the case that they were against images of any kind or the veneration of images or that they thought that that was idolatry. That just doesn’t follow. But the title of this video was: “This Alone Will Make You a Protestant,” as if you just knew the truth, you would become a Protestant as a result.

Another thing that they do is they twist the meaning of the second commandment. The second commandment is very clear, particularly if you read it in Greek, but also if you read it in Hebrew and you understand the words you’re reading there. It says— “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” is the way that it’s translated in the King James, but in the Septuagint, the word is the word that we get the word “idol” from in Greek, and in Hebrew the word is pesel, and it’s only used in reference to pagan idols. So that’s what it’s talking about: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any idol, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor shalt thou serve them.”

So if this was a ban on all images, we would run into the problem that the very next chapter starts talking about God commanding the Israelites to make images, making images of cherubim that went on the ark. There are images of cherubim that were on the curtains to the holy of holies. There were images of cherubim that were on the doors of the temple. They were on the walls of the temple. Basically, everywhere you looked in the Old Testament tabernacle and temple, you saw images of cherubim, because the tabernacle was an image of heaven. And prior to the resurrection of Christ, heaven was populated by angels. It’s only at the resurrection that you begin to have saints that enter into paradise and begin to populate heaven, and that’s why when you look around this church you don’t just see angels, you see saints, because that’s to reflect what we see or what we will see when we see in heaven—also that presence, that great cloud of witnesses that we heard about in the epistle reading that surrounds us.

But basically if you were to take the second commandment and put it into a formula, and put the word “X” there, like you would in an algebraic equation, what it says is: “You shall not make X, you shall not bow to X, you shall not worship X.” And so if X is “images of any kind,” then that means that God violated his own commandment in the very next chapter, because whatever X is, you can’t make it, you can’t bow to it, and you can’t serve it or worship it, worship it in the ultimate sense.

One of the problems Protestants also have is they don’t have a well-developed concept of worship. They think that worship involves prayer and singing hymns and that kind of thing, so the meaning of worship is a very confused thing. But if you look at the time that the Scriptures were being written, worship had a very clear sense, when we’re talking about the ultimate worship, or the worship of service, and that was sacrifice. Protestants don’t have sacrifice because they don’t believe that the Eucharist is any kind of a sacrifice, at least generally don’t believe that. We do, so we maintain a sense of sacrifice, although it’s a bloodless sacrifice, because Christ shed his blood on the cross once and for all for us, but we are participating in that sacrifice when we offer up the Eucharist every Sunday. “Thine own of thine own we offer unto thee, on behalf of all and for all.” And then we partake truly of the body and blood of Christ.

Another problem that we have in English is that the word “worship” has come to mean something that it didn’t really mean historically. In the old Anglican wedding service, there was a line that said, “With my body I thee worship.” This is one of the vows that spouses would make to each other in the wedding service. “With my body I thee worship.” Now, I don’t think anybody thought that that meant that they were offering the ultimate worship that was due only to God; what they meant was: “With my body I honor you.” A lot of older translations use the word “worship” in this sense, although we tend to use “worship” in English now only in the sense of ultimate worship or in the worship of service or sacrifice. So that’s an English problem, because in Greek it’s clear, and in Russian it’s clear. The word that we often have translated as “worship” in English, in both Greek and Slavonic it means literally to bow, and then the ultimate service is latreia. That means to serve like a servant would serve, or implies, in the terms of the liturgical worship, sacrifice.

We know that the early Church didn’t have a problem with icons, because if they thought that icons were idols, they wouldn’t have been able to make them. So that’s the first thing that the second commandment forbids, is not to make whatever it is that’s forbidden. But you find icons all over the worship spaces of the early Church. You also find them on the very chalices that people received the Eucharist from. Priests kissed the chalice; people kissed the chalice. So you have an icon right there that we know people were showing honor to.

But I could go on and on about how we know that icons are not idolatrous, but let me tell you what made me not a Protestant. I was studying to be a Protestant minister, and then I read the epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch. St. Ignatius of Antioch was a disciple of the Apostle John. You can dismiss, if you’re a Protestant, later Church figures and say, “Oh, well, the Church was paganized; it was corrupted: we can’t trust what they say,” although a lot of these Protestant apologists want to claim people like St. Augustine, St. Athanasius the Great, even though they at the same time have to say that they’re idolaters and pagans because they clearly believed in things like the veneration of the saints, the veneration of relics. We would say that they believed in icons, the veneration of icons, although we don’t have written descriptions of how icons were venerated at that time. We certainly have them talking about icons in the Church and being moved by icons.

And prayers for the dead: For Lent I decided to listen to St. Augustine’s Confessions, and in St. Augustine’s Confessions, as his mother, Monica, whom he loved very much and who prayed him into the kingdom of heaven and was the very reason why he became a Christian and a saint, as she was dying her last request was: “Remember me at the altar of the Lord.” In other words: “Pray for me.” These are all things that Protestants reject.

When I read the epistles of St. Ignatius, a disciple of the Apostle John, I knew that I couldn’t blow him off, because obviously the Apostle John had to be good enough of a teacher to have passed on the faith to at least one generation, and certainly a man whom he would entrust to make the bishop of Antioch, one of the most important centers of Christianity in the early Church, he would have had confidence that this person knew what he was talking about, that he wasn’t an idolater or someone who was ignorant of the basics of the faith. Here are a few of the things St. Ignatius says in his epistles that I wrote down at the time to remember because they stood out so much. He said:

Similarly, let everyone respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, just as they would respect the bishop, who is a model of the Father, and the presbyters as God’s council and as the band of the apostles. Without these, no group can be called a church.

So if you don’t have bishops, priests, and deacons, according to a disciple of the Apostle John, you can’t be called a church.

Make no mistake, brethren: no one who follows another into a schism will inherit the kingdom of God. No one who follows heretical doctrine is on the side of the passion.

Protestants can’t even possibly commit the sin of schism because they’re already into 50,000 schisms, so how could you commit the sin of schism? There’s no concept of schism in the Protestant world, because as long as you believe in certain basic things like the doctrine of the Trinity, if I was still a Protestant I could go down the street and start the First Church of the Fire Baptized Holy Ghost, and I could make myself the bishop, or the patriarch if I wanted to, of that church, and all the other Protestants would have to say, “Well, if he believes in Jesus, he’s still the Church.” But that was not the concept of the Church that the early Church had or that the Fathers of the Church had or that you can even find in the New Testament.

Be zealous, then, in the observance of one Eucharist, for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one chalice that brings union in his blood. There is one altar; there is one bishop, with the priests and the deacons, who are my fellow workers.

And then he says:

But consider those who are of a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ which has come unto us, who oppose the will of God.

So what is it that marks these people who oppose the will of God?

They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior, Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father, of his goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against the gift of God incur death in the midst of their disputes, but it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again.

So if they abstain from the Eucharist and prayer because they don’t believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ—well, that describes most Protestants right there!

Flee from divisions as from the beginning of evils. You must all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ followed the Father, and follow the presbyters as you would the apostles, and respect the deacons as the commandment of God. Let no one do anything that has to do with the Church without the bishop. Only that Eucharist which is under the authority of the bishop, or whomever he designates, is to be considered valid. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church.

It is not permissible either to baptize or to hold a love-feast without the bishop, but whatever he approves is also pleasing to God in order that everything you may do may be trustworthy and valid. Assemble yourselves together in common, every one of you severally, man by man, in grace, in one faith and one Jesus Christ, who after the flesh was of David’s race, who is the Son of man and Son of God, to the end that you may obey the bishop and presbytery without distraction of mind, breaking one bread which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die but live forever in Jesus Christ.

Well, after I read the epistles of St. Ignatius, I wasn’t sure what I was going to become, but I knew I couldn’t stay a Protestant, because I knew I didn’t belong in the same Church that St. Ignatius did, and I figured since he was ordained the bishop of Antioch by the Apostle John and was his disciple, that he was probably in the right Church and I was probably in the wrong church. I knew I wasn’t in the same Church that he was, and I wanted to find that Church.

Christ himself says in the gospels, “I say unto thee: Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” So he promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. Then when he talks about disputes in the Church—which there’s always going to be disputes in the Church—if you have some disagreement or problem with your brother, you talk to your brother one-on-one. If that doesn’t get you anywhere, then you get two or three witnesses. Then finally, he says, “And if he neglect to hear them,” those witnesses, “if he neglect to hear them, tell it to the Church. But if he neglect to hear the Church, then let him be to thee as a heathen man and a publican,” in other words, as someone who’s outside the Church.

How could a Protestant do that? If I have aught against my brother and he’s a member of the First Fire Baptized Church of the Holy Ghost down the street and I’m a member of the First Baptist Church of Spring, what church do we take it to? We don’t have a Church we can take it to, because we’re not in the same Church.

St. Paul said in his epistle, first epistle to Timothy; he says, “But if I tarry long, thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God”—in other words, he’s saying, “I wrote this letter because I might be a while here, but I want you to know how you should behave yourself in the house of God”—“which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” And when it talks about the ground of the truth, that’s like the foundation, or it could be translated even as the buttress. It’s the thing that— The pillar holds things up, and the buttress and the foundation keep it from falling apart. So the Church is that in relation to the truth: How can you have the truth without the Church? You can’t. If you separate yourself from the Church, you’ve separated yourself from the truth, and Christ is the truth himself. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he says. So if he’s the head of the Church and you’ve separated yourself from the Church, you’ve separated yourself from Christ.

The Church upholds the truth; it defends the truth; it preserves the truth, just as it was delivered to her by Christ and the holy apostles. In the Creed we confess that we believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Why is that in the Creed? It’s in the Creed because we have to believe that. We have to believe that, and the thing is there are times when there are divisions in the Church where you still have to believe that, despite the fact that you see people acting in ways that they ought not.

But there always will be one Church. People can separate themselves from the Church; groups can separate themselves from the Church, but the Church has always believed that there is only one Church, and it’s visible and it’s in communion with each other. You can’t believe this—you can’t believe in the Creed and at the same time believe that the Church fell into idolatry, which is what Protestants want to argue. You can’t believe in the Nicene Creed and at the same time believe that the Church exists in tens of thousands of sects that disagree in doctrine and don’t have any common understanding of what the Eucharist is, much less do they have a common Eucharist that they can share together.

This Church is only found in the Orthodox Catholic Church which affirms the same faith as that of the Ecumenical Councils and shares a common Eucharist. This is the Church that the gates of hell cannot prevail against. This is the Church that is the pillar and the foundation of the truth. This is the Church that has Christ as its head. This is the Church that is the bride of Christ and the ark of salvation. Amen.