Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and with me, via the magic of modern technology, is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, in Lafayette, Louisiana. If you are listening to this episode live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we will get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

In a June 1941 letter to his son, Michael, Lord of the Rings author and Anglo-Saxon professor J.R.R. Tolkien included this passage. He wrote this:

There is a place called heaven where the good here unfinished is completed and where the stories unwritten and the hopes unfulfilled are continued.

I remember the first time I read that passage and my heart leapt within my as I knew immediately that it was true. You see, even though I am a lifelong Christian, the sense of what it is that this earthly struggle is all for has not, for much of my life, been clear. Yes, we all want to “go to heaven” when we die, but I think that for many of us, this just means that we prefer to go to “the good place” rather than “the bad place,” and therefore heaven is envisioned as a kind of permanent tropical vacation, or perhaps a utopian city, and in its most insipid depictions, it’s saints with glowing rings round their heads, sitting on clouds, playing hand-held harps for all eternity.

Yes, we all want to have the good end and not the bad one, but is heaven really a good end? For many, it sounds kind of boring. In the dubious words of the Talking Heads, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” Well, that’s bunk! Tonight we’re going to discuss exactly what all of this Christian life is aiming at. What does it mean to be saved when we get to the other side of the resurrection? Will we actually have anything to do?

Last time, on our Halloween special, we talked about doing combat with the forces of evil, the demons. The angels do it, the saints do it, and we are called to do it. But what about their final defeat? And what bearing does that have on life here and now? Well, you guessed it: we’re going to start by talking about angels again. [Laughter] So, like I said, last time we talked about doing combat with demons, so let’s begin there. Fr. Stephen, take us in!

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah! So our last few episodes we’ve kind of been on this trajectory, talking about the angelic beings whom God created and with whom he shared his dominion and his rule over creation. We’ve read some quotes from ancient folks about how God has sort of a government or a commonwealth over his creation and that he assigned these beings to hold these different roles sort of in his administration over the cosmos. And we talked about how some of them, at various points, have fallen and how humans, as adopted sons of God, who have received that adoption by grace and that inheritance and have been glorified, then fill those roles, those job openings, as we said, that are left behind by those fallen spirits. So we’ve kind of outlined this idea of the saints in glory as being part of this sort of administration and this governance.

There’s another major element to the ministry that the saints in glory have in this age and that we hope to share in the age to come in God’s kingdom. It’s sort of that second role that we are going to be talking about and expanding on tonight, how those two things fit together as sort of this two-fold ministry of the sons of God, of glorified humanity, and of the elect angels, as St. Paul calls them, the angels who have remained in their original righteousness and purity.

Fr. Andrew: And I think that… occasionally we get asked the question, “You guys are talking about angels and demons”—and next time we’ll be talking about giants; everybody’s excited!

Fr. Stephen: People get excited when I talk about giants.

Fr. Andrew: There it is. That’s Fr. Stephen De Young’s catch-phrase, everybody! [Laughter] But there is this question like: “Okay, that’s all well and good, but does it have any practical side?” And that’s one of the emphases that we try to give over and over again. I think that this might be one of the fuzziest spots in a lot of Christians’ imagination. Is our participation in the divine council, is that practical, or is that just some kind of status? Or again, the life of the age to come sounds kind of boring to a lot of people. Does it have anything to it?

I remember when I was a kid, and even now—we read those passages in the Scripture where it talks about the saints will reign together with Christ. We will reign with him. This language is in multiple places, especially in the New Testament. I think that when I first saw that I thought, “Okay, we’re going to reign with him. Great! What…?” I never gave too much thought to what exactly that means. Okay, we’re going to sit on thrones, I’m going to have a crown, that kind of thing. But not much in the sense of a kind of day-to-day reality. I think a lot of us have the sense of the life of the age to come being kind of static, and there’s not going to be sort of work to do.

But tonight that’s what we’re discussing, all of that. In fact, there is in the Scripture a robust image of what it is that the saints in glory—and that’s what we’re called to be—do in the kingdom of God. There’s actually something to do. There’s this kind of two-fold ministry that the angels have, and last week we talked especially about their position as combatants in spiritual warfare and how we join them in that. (“Last week”—sorry, a couple of weeks ago.) But there’s another side to it, like you said. Let’s talk about that a little bit this evening.

Fr. Stephen: And this is the place where we see sort of our more active and direct relationship with the spirits, both angelic spirits and the spirits of the righteous who have gone before us. We had some questions last time about: “What does it mean to me, if I live in Thessaloniki, what does it mean to me and about my life that St. Demetrios is now in charge instead of Africa?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it sounds cool…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I guess that’s better, but… Right? So this is more at the level of interaction. A lot of times I think it’s diminished. I think this is—in terms of our Protestant friends, whom I don’t want to be seen as picking on, because they are our friends; I don’t want to pick on them—but there is a nervousness and a diminishment due to, I think, the history with Roman Catholicism, of wanting there to be any kind of active relationship, even with our departed loved ones. That, well, they’re in heaven now, so, okay, we’ll see them later. And you don’t want to be talking to angels; you don’t want to be talking to saints that have gone before, because they’re now gone and there’s a separation.

But in response to that, what we see in the Scriptures and in the traditions surrounding the Scriptures in ancient Judaism that we’re going to talk about a little bit, is the idea that there’s this very direct relationship, and that there is a role that they play, not coming in between humans and God, but a role that we’re going to define—I think you’re going to hear the word “intercession” a lot tonight. [Laughter] That’s interceding, which is not mediating, coming between, but interceding. And there are examples already, as I just mentioned, in the Scripture and in early Jewish traditions from the Second Temple period of human beings seeking the intercession of angelic beings, and what that means concretely is seeking their prayers, seeking their prayers to God on their behalf.

Fr. Andrew: I think one of the problems that we have is, because we live in this sort of flattened, secular, materialist world where we generally do not have what we might describe as “spiritual encounters,” or we don’t acknowledge that we do, or we don’t know that we do, the idea of sort of bringing in an angel or bringing in a saint sounds extraordinary and crazy and weird. Okay, we’ll acknowledge that God breaks in. This is what we talked about from the very first episode, this idea of “Okay, we’re going to put brackets around certain supernatural things we’re going to believe in, but it seems a little crowded when you start bringing in angels and saints!” But I think it’s because this is our experience of the world that we think of it as some weird extra thing, like: “Why do you need to add that on? Can’t you just talk to God yourself? Why do you need…? Doesn’t that get between you and God?”

As you said, this sense of interfering. And yet, ancient peoples had a constant sense of spiritual encounter. They may not be having visionary experiences 24 hours a day, but they knew that that was the world they lived in, and they were having experiences more often than we are, so the idea of “I’m just not going to believe in that, because that never happens”: no one would say that, because it happened, and people knew that that was just part of life. The set of evidence that we’re dealing with, which is, again, mediated through our senses and through our perception and through our interpretation, is a different set of evidence than ancient peoples had, where the encounters with spiritual beings were not something that happened every second of every day, but enough that it was kind of normal.

I think that that’s a really, really important point to make here from the outset in terms of framing this. For instance, if I lived… So I’m up here in my studio right now. The building is basically empty except for me. If that was my experience every single day, and I never saw anybody else here, ever, it might become easy for me to believe that I work here by myself, that no one else works here, if I never saw anyone else. They might be on floors that I never go to. They might be in rooms that I never walk by. But if I never see them, then it’s easier for me not to believe that they’re there, and to function like they’re not even there.

And then if suddenly I become aware of all the people working in this building and I start to hear them walking on the floor above me and I hear their voices and I see them in the elevator, it might feel really deeply weird and kind of crowded and “What are they doing here? This was my nice, quiet building.” [Laughter] That’s the way that I think about this kind of issue, especially for people coming into the Orthodox Church for the first time. They walk into the church and they see all these saints and angels surrounding them in the icons and constantly being referenced in the services and so forth. It seems a little spiritually crowded if you’re used to just “me and Jesus.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we don’t sort of apply that logic to the rest of our lives. Very few of us—there are some people out there, but very few of us would say, “If you get sick, don’t go to a doctor; just go directly to God.” Right? “You don’t need a human.”

Fr. Andrew: There are people out there, but not a lot.

Fr. Stephen: Because they don’t last very long. And we don’t say, “If you have a problem, don’t talk to your spouse about it, don’t talk to your family about it, don’t talk to your pastor about it. Just take it straight to God; don’t talk to anyone else.” We all understand that works in our lives through other people. He doesn’t have to do everything just directly for it to be from him. That doesn’t conflict with the fact that it’s God who’s doing it. So in the same way we feel perfectly comfortable asking people to pray for us. We see that happening in the Scriptures. For example—this is kind of the prime example, because in the book of Job… The book of Job, of course—I’m not going to go through the whole thing—we’ve quoted it already, the beginning part, where Satan has gotten permission to sort of test Job, and this testing is not testing like taking a test and you pass or you fail; this is testing like testing metal when you’re doing blacksmithing. This is to refine and purify Job.

So Job is being tested, and he hasn’t gotten a direct communication as to why. From the human perspective, all these horrible things have happened to him. His family members have been killed, he’s gotten boils all over his body, he’s lost everything, he’s sitting on the community dung-heap, using potsherds on his boils to lance them. So things have gone very badly for Job, and he has all of his “friends” coming up to him and saying, “Well, clearly we know what’s going on. You did something bad, and God’s punishing you.” And Job is saying, “No, that’s not it.” He says, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know that’s not it.” And then his charming wife comes and says, “God’s just dealing with you unjustly, so curse God and die,” because she’s a lovely person. [Laughter] And Job declines that also, and says, “No, I’m not doing that either.”

At one point, when he’s speaking with one of his friends, one of his friends says, “Well, if you’re going to reject our answers, then you need to find out what’s going on.” So he says to him in Job 5:1, “To which of the holy ones will you address your case?” If we translated that “holy ones”—we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, but if we translated that the way we translate the same word in the New Testament, we’d say, “To which of the saints will you address your plea?” implying: Are you going to go to one of the people in God’s administration and ask them to intercede for you and find out what’s going on, not that, oh, just go and find a god (small-g) and ask them to fix it for you, since apparently the true God is angry at you? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting to me, looking at that verse, Job 5:1, as it gets rendered in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was done by Greek-speaking Jews—so these were Jews doing a translation into Greek according to their own understanding of their own Scriptures—the way that the Greek, if you were to translate the Greek into English, it doesn’t say, “To which of the holy ones,” it says, “To which of the holy angels will you address your case?” So it’s interesting that when Jews, ancient Jews, pre-Christian Jews, hundreds of years before Christ, were translating their own Scriptures into Greek, they understood this reference to the holy ones or to the saints, if you’re going to translate it as we do in the New Testament into English, is a reference to the angels. In other words, “Which angels are you going to talk to, Job?” which indicates that that is a thing. That’s a thing.

Fr. Stephen: They were disambiguating it, to make it clear. He’s not talking about finding a holy man to pray for him; he’s talking about angelic intercession. We see this in Jewish traditional sources outside of or at the periphery of, with this first one, the canonical Old Testament Scriptures. In 1 Enoch 15:2, at this point in the story, the imprisoned fallen angels, who are imprisoned in the underworld… Enoch has sort of been taken on tour and has seen them in prison there, and they ask Enoch to go… They say, “God likes you, Enoch; he doesn’t like us so much now. Why don’t you go and pray for us and intercede for us with God, and see if maybe he’ll show some leniency and let us out of this prison?” Now, they’re not actually repentant; they’re not sorry for anything they did. They just don’t like the consequences and the punishment, and want out of it.

And so Enoch goes and does this, and God basically gives him a message to take back to the imprisoned fallen angels. A major portion of that message is Enoch telling them on God’s behalf that “you were to intercede for men, not men for you,” so saying, “Why are you sending this human to intercede for you? You were supposed to be. Part of your job was to intercede for human beings, not just to govern and rule over them, but to intercede for them and bring their prayers before God.” That’s imagery that’s also echoed in the book of Revelation, where we see the prayers of the saints in these incense censers that are being brought before God’s throne by the angels, this same kind of idea.

What that’s saying, because that was understood to be… They weren’t just watchers and governors, as we’ve already described, but also were to have this intercessory role. They were supposed to be interceding and trying to lead human beings closer to God, closer to Christ.

Then we had one more example. This is… Now we’ve moved out, another concentric circle, to a text, and this gets, as I told you earlier today, really complicated. There are dozens of books called “Lives of Adam and Eve” or “Life of Adam” or “Book of Adam” in different languages. They’re all related, but scholars argue as to how, because you have to write a dissertation about something. But one of them in particular, which is one of the earliest versions of the text that comes from the first century A.D. This is the time of Christ, this is the time of the apostles, the time when the New Testament is being written. It’s referred to as the Greek Life of Adam and Eve, or sometimes The Apocalypse of Moses, even though those titles do not seem to have anything in common.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s a whole ‘nother episode right there!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, disambiguating these texts. So in this text, it’s basically describing the repentance of Adam and Eve after they’ve been exiled from paradise, and they realize that they’ve sinned and transgressed, and now they want to repent. There are a lot of interesting things in the text. I’m sure we’ll reference it at other times on the show, but for our purposes tonight, it describes that while they’re taking these actions of repentance—they’re doing these sort of penitential things involving prayer and fasting and vigils—while they’re doing that, the sun and the moon and the stars and the angels are said to be praying and offering incense to God on their behalf.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: They’re sort of praying and interceding with God for mercy for them while they’re repenting.

Fr. Andrew: And of course, as we’ve pointed out before, when you talk about the sun and the moon and the stars, in Scripture, you have to read that as being involved with angelic beings. Just to reiterate maybe, because I think this is important because you just quoted from 1 Enoch and then from the Greek Life of Adam and Eve, a.k.a., The Apocalypse of Moses, that we don’t regard these books as Scripture, but Enoch is kind of Scripture-adjacent, and this Greek Life of Adam and Eve is kind of in the books that are being read at the time.

The point of quoting these things is not to say, “Oh, well, we’re reading these books, and we’re drawing out doctrines from these that you won’t find anywhere else!” But rather the point is: These are simply witnesses to what’s being believed at that time, and the first century especially, when Christ is on earth visibly, and the apostles are being sent out by him and the New Testament is being written—the early Church: this is there; this is in that tradition. We mention these texts, again, not to say that this is a source of doctrine, but it is a testament, a witness to, what is being believed. We already quoted from Job, so clearly this idea of the angels praying for us, and even that you can ask them to pray for you, is a thing. In the Old Testament, and definitely in the period of the New Testament as well. Cool, cool stuff.

Fr. Stephen: It’s an issue of context, because there are a lot of things in the Bible that if we just isolate the biblical texts, [they] can be ambiguous, where you look at it and say, “Well, wait. What does that mean?” So if we have other writings, written by faithful Jewish people, at the same time, they can give us a clue to at least how the original readers would have read it and understood it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, rather than just supplying our lives here in the 21st century as the context in which you should read the Scripture. That’s an important context in some ways for application, but it’s not the primary one, because it wasn’t written now; it was written then, and that’s super, super important. It’s from there, then, we get, as you see throughout Orthodox tradition, that, seeing this has been a thing for a long time, we continue to do what had always been done by the people of God, and we ask the angels to intercede for us. We ask the holy ones to intercede for us, pray for us. But, again, we don’t understand it as getting between us and God or like I can’t talk to God directly so I’d better get somebody near him to pass this message on, but rather that we ask them to pray alongside us, to pray for us.

Just as in your own church, if there’s somebody who’s really good at prayer, who’s really dedicated to prayer, wouldn’t you go to them and say, “Please pray for me”? The thing is that that makes it more plausible for me to talk about that human person who’s doing that thing and say, “Okay, I guess maybe angels and saints,” but actually it should be rather the other direction, that that human in my parish who is really good at prayer is simply participating in this ministry that’s always taking place. They are continuing to do the same thing, so of course we’re going to ask them. We just in the Orthodox Church, at least on the new calendar, just celebrated a few days ago the feast of the archangels, and we very explicitly, over and over again, ask them to pray for us. “Please pray for us, Michael and Gabriel and Raphael and all of them.” And it’s beautiful, just really beautiful, beautiful, beautiful stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s key to hammer on: “Pray for us” doesn’t mean “Pray so that we don’t have to.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right!

Fr. Stephen: They’re not praying instead of us, like “God’s not going to listen to me, but he’ll listen to you, so you pray.” That’s not it. It’s alongside.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or like “I have better things to do, so could you take care of the prayer part for me there, please?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “Oh, we’ve got monks praying. I can go about my business.” [Laughter] No!

But we see that in that Life of Adam and Eve example, that Adam and Eve are very busy about repenting, and the angels are praying alongside them. Going into that, this is something that we see all through the Scriptures, in the psalms especially. “Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his hosts. To thee, O God, is due our song.” The psalms and the worship of Israel is constantly invoking the angels to join in and to worship and to pray alongside and at the same time and with us.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, especially those last few psalms that are so explicit about that. I think if I read that and say, “Oh, that’s not invoking angels,” then that just means I don’t take seriously what it actually says there. When it says, “Praise him, all ye his angels.” That’s talking to angels and saying, “Praise God.” [Laughter] It’s simply right there. But if I approach it from the point of view of “Oh, this is not a thing we do,” then I just have to say, “Oh, well, it’s just kind of poetic and not meant to be taken seriously.”

Fr. Stephen: And not only that, with Psalm 147-150, that’s how we understand what it means when the Psalmist asks a bunch of inanimate objects (from our perspective) to praise God.

Fr. Andrew: He’s not talking to rocks and air.

Fr. Stephen: And the sun and the moon and the stars.

Fr. Andrew: He’s talking to angelic beings.

Fr. Stephen: Who are assigned to those. This is something that’s run all through our liturgical services in the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Andrew: Everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: When we make an entrance, we ask the angels to make the entrance with us. When we pray, we ask the angels to pray with us. When we sing, we ask the angels to sing with us.

Fr. Andrew: Can’t escape it.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] This is a joining-together, and this is part of their role. We see in Scripture that those two things, the things we’ve talked about, that ruling and reigning, that royal part, and the priesthood part are supposed to be joined together. Israel is supposed to be a kingdom of priests. St. Peter says that we are in the Church a “royal priesthood.” We have the example of Melchizedek, and Christ’s Melchizedek priesthood that brings priesthood and kingship back together. When they’re separated, they’re separated as sort of a judgment because of a problem with sin, and when that’s overcome, they’re brought back together.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting that even in the pagan context, they’re—obviously they’re worshiping demons, but the local pagan king was the guy standing in front of the altar as well. He had that task.

I recall one time a conversation in which you talked about Alexander the Great and how he deliberately, as he conquered various nations, he did the work that it took—the ritual work that it took—to become the son of whoever was their most high god. Like, he became Pharaoh, for instance. And that involved him offering sacrifices. But in Israel it gets divided, as you said, because of sin. The kingship and priesthood have to get divided because of sin, and part of the problem with paganism is that they’re sinning, but they’re not chastened by God, the way that Israel is chastened, so they just keep sinning and they sin worse and worse and they’re worshiping demons.

Fr. Stephen: When, as we’ve been talking about in the last couple episodes, glorified humans are glorified as sons of God, they come to share in God’s eternal, divine life, and they take these places vacated by the fallen angels, they take on not just the royal part of this ministry but the priesthood. I’ve got us a good old-fashioned proof-text.

Fr. Andrew: Yay!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We’ve talked about this.

Fr. Andrew: Can I read this?

Fr. Stephen: Absolutely. You can read it.

Fr. Andrew: All right. I’m going to read this, and then we’re going to go to break shortly after this. So this is from Revelation 20:4-6. This is the Apostle, St. John, speaking in this visionary experience that he had.

And I saw thrones, they that sat upon them, and judgment was given to them. And the souls of those who had been beheaded because of the witness of Jesus and because of the word of God and who did not worship the beast nor his image and did not take the mark upon their forehead or upon their hand. Then they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years will be completed. This is the first resurrection. Blissful and a holy one is the one who has a part in the first resurrection. Over these the second death has no authority, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him a thousand years.

I think it’s important to note that it starts out by saying that it’s the souls of “those who have been beheaded because of the witness of Jesus.” In other words, this is human beings who have been martyred for Christ. That’s whom this passage is talking about. As you said, it talks about them reigning with Christ and also that they are priests. I loved the little bit of word-nerdery that you put in here about the word “priests,” because sometimes people like to say, “Well, in the new covenant there aren’t priests,” in other words, there aren’t people who are offering sacrifices on altars; there’s just presbyters.

There is an argument to be made there, because the English word “priest” actually comes from the word “presbyter,” but in English Bibles we tend to translate presbyteros as “presbyter” or “elder,” and we translate ierevs as “priest.” What’s interesting is that in this passage, as you said when we were talking about this earlier today, that the word that’s talking about them as being priests is ierevs. It actually says they’re going to be sacrificial priests of God and of Christ, and they’ll reign with him in that beautiful millennium.

Fr. Stephen: I know there’s a lot of other popular interpretations of this passage vis-a-vis the end times, but just to point out a couple reasons why this has to be talking about the saints in glory now. You notice it talks about these are the… The word for “witness” in “the witness of Jesus” is martyrion, so these are literally martyrs in the actual word. They come to life and they reign with Christ, and [their] coming to life and reigning with Christ is described as, it says literally, “This is the first resurrection.” They’re seated on these thrones and reigning with Christ in the first resurrection.

Then it says, “Over these (those who participate in the first resurrection), the second death has no authority,” meaning those who aren’t participants in the first resurrection are under the authority of the second death. So this can’t be describing a group of people who are raised from the dead early, like a rapture, as opposed to some other Christians who are raised later. The people who are raised later are the dead who are not righteous, or the dead who are not holy, or the dead who are subject to the second death. So this is talking about, in the first resurrection, the life of the souls of the departed, of those who are specifically the martyrs here. So this is quite literally talking about the departed saints and what they’re doing right now, and that is that they are reigning with Christ and they are serving as priests, which means that they’re interceding and they’re offering worship and praise.

Fr. Andrew: And with that we’re going ahead and take a break, and when we get back we’re going to answer a question that we just got via Facebook. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! So this is the second part of our show, and this is where we begin to take your calls, and like you just heard from the voice of Steve, you can reach us at 855-AF-RADIO, which is 855-237-2346. You can also send questions to us on social media, and hopefully if one of our helpers spots it, they’ll send it to us and we can answer it that way. But of course we would also love to hear your voices.

So the first question that we received this evening is from Helen, who left us this comment on our Facebook stream. And Helen said this:

Do the ancients believe the planets are angels? Are they praying to what we know as planets?

We’ve kind of addressed that before, but why don’t you go ahead and give us a little refresher there, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: They’re not praying to the physical object, but ancient people understood that there were spirits associated with all of these visible objects. There were invisible spirits associated with them, involved in their governance and otherwise associated with them. For ancient Israelites and for people of the Second Temple period, they believed that these were angelic beings (or demonic beings) created by God, who had been given authority from him to exercise over these things. If we’re talking about pagans, they worshiped these spirits sort of in their own right, and that was, of course, the problem, rather than seeing them as part of the administration of the true God, the Most High God. That’s the idea. It’s not like… We know the sun is a “mass of incandescent gas”; it’s a gigantic nuclear furnace. They didn’t worship that.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s an interesting question. So if there is an angel associated with the sun, who is obedient to God, but then you have pagans over here who are worshiping their sun god. Are they attempting to worship an angel who doesn’t want their worship? Or is there basically some demon that’s saying, “Yeah, I’ll take that worship, excuse me”? Obviously it’s kind of hard to sort all this stuff out, but that kind of connects a little bit with one question we’ve gotten over and over again—I think we’ll explore this a lot more in a future episode—which is “Can angels still fall?” If there is a good angel, so to speak, that’s tending to the sun, could he decide, “You know what? I’m going to go ahead and take that sun worship.” Or is it really another demon, a demon who is accepting that?

Fr. Stephen: There’s no reason to believe—we always have to keep in mind a couple of things. The first one is that demons are creatures of deceit and chaos and lies, so there’s no reason to believe that every spirit that showed up in the ancient world and claimed to be Apollo was the same being.

Fr. Andrew: Or you could say, “I am the sun god!”

Fr. Stephen: Right. And then secondly—and this is addressing this struggles and others that I know people are having listening to the show and sort of processing things, and this is something we’re always going to have to come back to from the very beginning, and that’s talking about the grid, the Western grid we have. With this show, we’re not coming to you with new things to fill out the fields in the grid, as opposed to the old ones that were wrong. We’re trying to get you to get rid of the grid. So sometimes this confusion is going to be caused by: I’m sending you a Word document that’s got a poem in it, and you’re importing it into Excel as a spreadsheet.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: It’s poetry; it’s not math. So it’s going to come through garbled. So if we’re looking for precision: Okay, exactly what angel is doing this and what’s his rank and what’s his name and who is he and then who’s this one and who’s that?—you’re not going to have a good time. [Laughter] That’s not how it works.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting that that’s a kind of—correct me if I’m wrong here—but ancient Gnostics tended to… They loved their big charts. All of this was arranged: this angel was at this eon, and this archon is over here assigned to this. What’s amazing with how complex some of those arrangements are is the variety of them! When they’re attempting to get it all sorted out, no one, except maybe their little particular group, buys into that sorting.

Anyways, with the second part of our show tonight, we want to talk about some possible objections that people might have to what we described in the first part. The first objection we want to discuss is something that especially Protestants who encounter the Orthodox Church can tend to have a big, big problem with. And it’s an understandable problem; I totally get it. I used to see things this way myself, because I was not always Orthodox; I was raised as an Evangelical Protestant. And that’s that when Orthodox Christians give veneration to angels, to saints, a lot of Protestants will look at that and say, “Why are you worshiping saints? Why are you worshiping angels? Isn’t that idolatry?” The Orthodox person will respond by saying, “I’m not worshiping them; I’m venerating them.” The response to that might be, “Well, six of one, half a dozen of the other.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I want to make sure we’re being as charitable as possible. Even, yeah, in one way it’s objections, but I want to give our Protestant friends who have this issue even more credit than that, and say that this isn’t just them wanting to have an argument, although some of them, that probably is it, but that this is a difference that they don’t see. So the whole idea—they’re good-hearted people, they love Christ, they want to worship only the true Christ, and since they don’t see the distinction, the whole thing makes them really queasy and nervous. It’s not just a sort of intellectual objection or something.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it looks like worship to them, what we do with saints and angels. I think that the basis for that is—and we’re going to get into this especially—that the actions that most Protestants do in their worship services… Let’s be explicit: singing to God, praying to God and telling him how awesome he is, and in some cases, if you’re more affected by, let’s say, the charismatic movement, they might lift up their hands. These kinds of things are what is identified as being worship in those contexts. Especially as you get to more of the “low church” side of things, more of a Zwinglian, for instance, communion, even if they do have communion, interestingly, that action is not described as being worship, but rather as being a memorial, like, we’re doing this to remember what Jesus did for us.

The actions that are described as worship in many Protestant contexts—singing, praying, praising God, and so forth—Orthodox look at that stuff and say, “Well, that’s just veneration.” So when we sing to a saint or tell him that he’s awesome or ask him to help us, we don’t regard that as worship; we regard that as veneration. We’re not making this point as just pure apologetics—this is not an apologetics show—but I think this is an important point to make, because, like you said, we’re trying to get people kind of off the grid, off the matrix that they’re in, and say, “There’s a whole different world here, actually, that we’re trying to help people see and experience.”

For the Orthodox, worship is focused on the act of offering. It’s not just offering prayers but actually offering sacrifices. In the Orthodox Church, there’s essentially two sacrifices that are offered. Now, I mean, the term gets metaphorically used to refer, for instance, to the sacrifice of praise, right? But there’s really two sacrifices being offered. One is the sacrifice of the Eucharist: bread and wine being offered on the altar, changed by God to be the body and blood of Christ, and then we share that sacrificial meal with him, because that’s what a sacrifice is. And then also, incense is sacrificed; incense is offered. It’s offered to God, but, again, we share it with him. We smell it. It’s not just offered to God for him to smell, so to speak, but it’s offered to God, and we share it with him. Again, it becomes a means of communion between us and him. Even though it’s not a meal, it’s still ingested, literally. We’re still bringing it into ourselves. So incense and the Eucharist are the things that are sacrificed, offered, in the Orthodox Church, and that we understand as being… That is what worship truly is.

There are services where we don’t offer those things, like compline, for instance, or the hours, and we would say those are prayer services. But worship in its true, true sense is about offering sacrifices for the purpose of communing with God. And we don’t offer the Eucharist to angels. We don’t offer incense to saints. We offer those things to God alone. So for us it’s like you say, “You’re worshiping saints!” Well, no, we didn’t offer them the Eucharist! It becomes really obvious when you understand that that’s what worship is.

You can see this in the Scripture. That’s what worship is in the Scripture. The ancient world understands that, and whether you’re talking about ancient Israel or the New Testament or even pagans understood that that’s what worship is. It’s sacrifices, whether it’s food sacrifices or incense sacrifice, that’s what worship is.

Sometimes, again, a well-meaning Protestant might say, “What about some uneducated Orthodox person who’s bowing in front of an icon of a saint? For them is there any big difference between worship and veneration?” They may not be able to explain the difference to you; they may not have the theological education to say the things that I just said, but they know that they don’t offer the Eucharist to St. George! [Laughter] They know they don’t do that. They know that when they eat and drink that bread and wine that that’s the body and blood of Jesus Christ, not the body and blood of… St. Paul, or of an angel. That’s really the key, key difference.

Let’s get deeper into some of that now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s made very explicit in the words of the Divine Liturgy, that when we’re offering the Eucharist, we’re offering the Eucharist for the people there, for the whole Church, for the whole world, and for—and after the word “for” it runs through a list of the saints, including the saints commemorated for that day—and after the list culminates, it says we’re offering it especially for the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary, Christ’s mother. It’s offered not to her, but especially for her. So just as the saints pray for us, we offer our worship for ourselves and for the saints in this unity.

But there’s a place where, in the ancient world, this rubber really met the road. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this was really interesting to me as we started exploring this as we prepped for this. Go ahead, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: In the ancient world, we’ve talked about the divine council. The divine council, in a pagan context, is what we today call a pantheon: the group of the gods, and then there’s one who presides. Kingship—and this goes all the way back to Samaria. The Samarian’s kings’ list begins with the kingship coming down out of heaven. They viewed the king as a god, as a divine figure, and he was a member of that council. So as the member of that council, he had a role in representing his people in the council, though that was often not taken very seriously, he had a role in representing that council to the people in terms of him being a God—that was taken more seriously by pagan kings. But while those elements are sort of adapted into the kings of Israel, where, for example, King David did pray and intercede for Israel before God, and was responsible to administer God’s justice on this earth, to serve as sort of an icon or image of God, in the pagan context, the king also, as a god, received worship. He was the object of worship. Sacrifices and libations were made and offered to the king as one of the gods.

Fr. Andrew: To the king.

Fr. Stephen: We see that sort of an exhibit A, just an example that the vast majority of people listening to this will be familiar with, comes from the third chapter of the book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar sets up the big statue of himself and commands that everyone must worship it. Of course, the three youths refuse and end up getting thrown into the fiery furnace. This was prototypical in the pagan world, not just in Babylon. As I said, this started in Samaria; this goes on to the imperial cult in the Roman Empire before St. Constantine, where, starting with Julius Caesar, they believed he ascended into the heavens and joined the divine council as one of the gods, so he was the object of the offering of incense. Thousands of Christians were killed by the Roman state for refusing to offer incense to the spirit of Caesar. This was just commonplace.

But the answer to that, when it comes to the Jewish people, and the rubber meets the road on this… In Daniel 3 when they’re in exile, when they’re not in their own land, because when they’re in their own land and they have their own king, it’s kind of clear to both the king and the people they’re not supposed to worship the king and to the king he’s not supposed to be worshiped. But now they’re living in the land ruled by another king, a pagan king, who does demand their worship. And the answer to that, for the faithful Judah-ites in Babylon is not “No, you’re to have nothing to do with that no-good pagan king. Stay separate from him.” In our modern terms: “He’s the Antichrist. Anarchy. Oppose him.” The answer is, “No, you don’t pray to him or worship him; you pray for him and you offer worship for him. You offer sacrifices for him. You offer prayers for him. You offer incense for him to the true God, to the one true God, who is his Creator.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the direction that you offer your worship is really important. It’s not just, okay, you’re doing this act of worship, but to whom is it being offered? There’s an offerer and a receiver. There’s multiple places in the Scripture where it says to pray for the king, or pray for… For instance, Jeremiah 29:7: “Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to live in captivity. Pray for it to Yahweh, for in its peace you will have peace.” Support your local community by praying for it. And, of course, we do that in all of our church services in the Orthodox Church: “For this city and for every city and countryside, and the people who dwell therein, the faithful who dwell therein, let us pray to the Lord.” It’s exactly that sense that [we get] from that verse I just read from Jeremiah.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s a key. To someone today it may seem hazy, even when we talk about the difference between, like tonight, seeking intercession and worshiping. Seeking intercession from the spirit before the true God versus worshiping this as a god alongside God. But here, when you’ve got a king, he’s standing in front of you, threatening to murder you, that difference becomes very clear, because there’s something you’re called to do and then something you cannot do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s super-applicable to us today, where we are just in the midst of a really tense political period right now, at least in the United States, and sometimes praying for a particular government official, or for a particular candidate for office, is taken as a kind of endorsement. But the Scripture tells us to pray even for pagan kings who are actively slaughtering the people of God! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Let me put a fine point on that. In 1 Timothy 2:1-2, St. Paul says:

Therefore I exhort, first of all, that entreaties be made, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings (the word for “thanksgivings” there is literally “eucharists”) on behalf of all men, on behalf of kings and all those who are in authority, so that we may lead a calm and peaceful life in all godliness and sanctity.

And that’s taken over to the prayers of the liturgy. But St. Paul is saying that in the Roman Empire. Much of St. Paul’s ministry was conducted under the reign of Caligula.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] Google him, people, if you don’t know who that guy is! He was out of his mind.

Fr. Stephen: Literally, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: One of the most vile human beings who ever lived. On purpose. So if St. Paul could pray for him, if St. Paul’s approach to him is: “Oh, we need to pray for him and hope that he will find Christ, and that’s what we need to all do,” then I don’t care how much you hate the current president or the previous one, you can pray for him, too. [Laughter] Because he’s got nothing on Caligula; I guarantee it.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. And so then, even more than that, even more than just praying for the authorities, which I think most Christians can swallow that, like, “Okay, yes, I will pray for the authorities, even if I don’t like them, even if they’re actively trying to kill me,” the Scriptures actually also tell us to honor them, to honor the authorities. For instance, in the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother,” that’s not understood in the Scripture as, if you give honor to your father that that’s taking something from God, because all honor should go to God. It doesn’t do that. And in 1 Peter 2:17: “Honor all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king.” Again, the Scripture tells us explicitly to give honor to human beings who are set in authority over us, and even, it says, to honor all men, everybody. And that’s what we’re talking about. As Orthodox Christians, we’re talking about giving honor. So we honor the king, we pray for the king, but we do not give sacrifices to the king. The same is true with the angels and the saints. We honor them. Of course, we don’t need to pray for them—we ask them to pray for us—but we also definitely do not offer sacrifice to them. That’s a worship that’s due God alone. You don’t give sacrifice to anyone but to God.

Fr. Stephen: And more than just honoring our parents or honoring the civil the authorities or honoring the saints or honoring the angelic hosts—not only does that not conflict with giving all honor and glory to God, that is how we give honor and glory to God. The New Testament is very clear on that. That’s why it says to serve your master or your employer as you would serve Christ, because the authority they have over you they have from Christ. So if you respect and honor and obey that authority, you are respecting and honoring and obeying Christ; if you rebel against it, you’re rebelling against Christ. If you rebel against your parents, you’re rebelling against Christ.

Fr. Andrew: And I think one of the problems, of course, again is looking at it from a modern point of view. When we talk about honor… Orthodox Christians, when we say we honor the saints, we know what that means. We bow in front of an icon, we kiss an icon, we sing praises to a saint. These are the things we do when we honor, when we venerate. There’s actions, specific actions. In the modern world, when we tend to talk about honor, it’s a much more ephemeral kind of idea, like, “Oh, I’m honored that you would choose me,” or “I honor the sacrifice that you made.” It’s more about things that you say more than anything else.

But we still actually do have some of those specific actions of honor. Some examples, for instance: when a soldier is very brave in battle and has done something meritorious, we give him a medal. That is an action of honor; that is an action of veneration to that man or woman. Again, to continue in the military image, junior servicemen and women salute their superior officers. That is to give honor and veneration to that superior officer because of where that person is in the hierarchy. In public events, we stand up for the flag, we take our hats off, we put our hands over our hearts.

We may say words of praise for someone that we’re honoring, but, likewise, to take it out of all those kinds of public things, one of my public examples is if you go to a cemetery. Everyone venerates in a cemetery. You’re quiet; that’s a way to show veneration, honor. You might put flowers next to a grave; that’s veneration and honor. You might light a candle next to a grave. You might say prayers there. You might even talk to the person who has departed. These are all ways that we show veneration and honor in various circumstances.

So when the Orthodox say that we venerate and honor saints and angels, that’s what we mean. That is what we mean, and really nothing else. We’re not trying to pull a fast one on anybody and say, “Oh, I’m honoring this saint, but I’m going to slip in a little worship while no one’s looking.” [Laughter] That’s just two different actions! It’s not the same thing. Now, often veneration goes alongside worship, but worship is a specific action of offering; it’s not “any religious-looking thing you might do.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Are we going to have our break before our third half and then come back with necromancy?

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Yes, it’s a great time to take a break, and we’ll have everybody on the edge of their seats as they think about necromancy for the third half of The Lord of Spirits. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. You know when you hear the voice of Steve, that means we’re about to come back. Before we get back into our discussion of necromancy, first we want to take one of our calls, and that is from Elijah in Georgia. Elijah, welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Elijah: Hey, thank you very much. Fathers, bless!

Fr. Andrew: God bless you. You made it through! [Laughter]

Elijah: I did. This is wonderful. Thank y’all so much for doing this show. It really beats sitting around watching the news or something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! This is the real news.

Elijah: This is great.

Fr. Andrew: This is what’s actually going on.

Elijah: Absolutely.

Fr. Andrew: So what’s your question, Elijah?

Elijah: Well, honestly, I have tons of questions; no surprise. But the one that I called in last night—[Laughter] yes, exactly—was regarding something that was asked of Fr. Stephen on a previous episode. Somebody asked, “What is the relationship between mental illness and spiritual affliction?” And he just said, “Oh, probably the same as the relationship between physical illness and spiritual afflictions.” So I was wondering if maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Well, you’re on the spot, Fr. Stephen. Say more!

Fr. Stephen: As I recall, we experienced some of our trademarked technical difficulties in the middle of that answer, to boot.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right! That’s when the power went out. [Laughter] Everybody make the sign of the cross right now…

Fr. Stephen: Hopefully, yes. The first part of that was I was obviously making an equation between mental illness and physical illness, that these are the same kind of thing, and we tend to think about them differently. We tend to think about mental illness as if it’s something you can think your way out of or talk your way out of or just “cheer up.” If you saw someone with a broken leg and the bone protruding, you wouldn’t say, “Hey, cheer up, guy!” [Laughter] “Get up and walk it off.” But we say that to people suffering from depression all the time, and it’s just as ridiculous.

I wanted to make that equation, but then the other piece, and I think what you’re actually wanting to know about is how that relates to spiritual beings and that kind of thing. We know from the Scriptures and from Orthodox tradition that there are times when—we already talked about Job a little bit tonight—God allows demonic spirits to afflict human beings in different ways, and sometimes that’s mental, sometimes that’s spiritual, sometimes that’s physical, like in the case of Job: a building collapsed on his children.

God allows these things to happen, and we get windows. One of them is Job; one of them is St. Paul talking about the thorn in his flesh, when he was afflicted by the evil one: the purpose that people are able to find in them—and I phrased that a very deliberate way, because a lot of times, when things like that happen to us and we suffer or we suffer some catastrophe or some loss, we ask sort of “Why?” in the sense that we’re looking for some kind of answer out in the ether somewhere. This is a theme in Job. Job really reflects on this in the ancient world. We want to go and find God and ask him, or if we’re feeling really salty, we want God to come down here and explain himself, because we’re angry that this has happened to us, and we want him to sort of explain, “Here’s the reason why,” and if you just understood the whole cosmos and what’s going on, you’d know why you had to break your leg or why this person you love had to pass away now instead of years from now.

That’s not what we see in the Scriptures, and that’s not what we see in our tradition in terms of how we receive it. What can make these things meaningful is how we receive these things. So Job suffered all of these things. That’s just a reality; it happened to him. And he could have reacted the way his friends did and said, “Oh, well, I must have done something bad, and I deserve this,” and sort of wallowed in self-pity. He could have done what his wife said, and just gotten angry at God and rejected God over it—and this happens a lot in our modern world. That’s why we have a lot of the atheists we have in our modern world; not all of them, but a lot of them. That’s not how he chose to receive it, and that’s not how St. Paul chose to receive the thorn in his flesh. The way that they chose to receive it, as this testing from God for the purification of their soul, the purification of their body, and by trusting him that made it meaningful for them, that made it transformative for them.

The reason why I say that meaningful is the day’s going to come for every one of us when we die. That’s reality. We don’t like it, we don’t want to talk about it, we don’t want to think about it, but that’s reality. And when we do, all of our stuff is going to rot, and our reputation is going to vanish and be forgotten, and all these other things are going to disappear, and the only thing that’s going to be left is our selves: our soul and eventually our resurrected body, and what we made of it. So if these temporal catastrophes, even the most horrible and painful of them that I suffer, if I can receive those in a way that is beneficial to me and helps me grow and become more like Christ, then that—the person who I become through them—is something that’s going to last into eternity. So it’s infinitely meaningful, far more meaningful than whatever it is I lost, whether that was years of friendship or years of love, whether that was possessions, my health, whatever else it was. Those two things that St. Paul says: you can’t compare those sufferings that only go on for a time to the glory of God that goes on forever.

Fr. Andrew: Does that help you out, Elijah?

Elijah: Yeah, I believe so. Like I said, I have plenty of questions. I called to ask this one on behalf of my wife.

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Elijah: I appreciate it, and I know she does, too.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent. God bless you.

Before we continue on, we have another question. This comes from Lisa on Facebook. Lisa asks this:

If we are destined to rule with Christ, I never understood what we are ruling over. Is it a hierarchy of unison and mutual submission?

That’s a great question, and I think it goes to this issue of what exactly it means to rule and to reign. On the one hand, there is a kind of ruling-over that happens. So, for instance, the apostles are going to sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel, so that does happen in that sense. But if you look at what the angels, for instance, are doing as we described it, what do they rule over? Well, they rule over a kind of making things run.

The word that actually came to mind when I was thinking about this was a word that is used in the monastic context. They have a word that’s “ecclesiarch.” That word, “ecclesiarch,” it’s used in a lot of different ways in the Orthodox Church, but generally in a monastic context the ecclesiarch… If you think about that word, it means “the church-ruler,” if you take it apart etymologically. But what the ecclesiarch is, generally speaking in the monastic context, is the guy who takes care of the church building.

He may—he or she; sorry, I said “guy,” but it might be a nun as well—also be in charge of, for instance, setting up the books that the chanters are using or making sure all the supplies are where they need to go, but it may also be cleaning and lighting lamps and all that kind of thing. That notion of ruling or reigning is not just the idea of having control over other people, but it’s really that something is in your care. Something is in your care: it might be other people, but it might also be: if you’re an angel that’s been assigned to the stars, then you’re taking care of stars. I don’t know; Fr. Stephen, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, I think we need to keep in mind what Christ said about rule and authority to his apostles.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: He said the rulers of—and I really dislike the word “Gentiles” as a translation.

Fr. Andrew: “The nations.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “the nations” or, if it’s referring to people, “pagans” is actually a better translation, because it’s not talking about an ethnic concept; that’s a more modern thing. But the rulers of the nations, the rulers among the pagans, they lord it over one another. I know there’s a tension there. You say, “Well, you’re going to rule over the world to come. Are you going to rule over other people. Does that mean I’m going to have a boss in the world to come?” Bleah, right? [Laughter]

But that’s not how authority works when it’s purified and holy. The authority that Christ tells his apostles that they are supposed to exercise is one of communion and love, that the authority he talks about between a husband and wife is love and self-sacrifice. That’s what authority is. So we have to always keep that understanding of authority in mind here, that we’re not going to sort of be lording it over the animals or the plants or the trees or each other in the world to come.

Fr. Andrew: It’s service. When Christ wanted to show his disciples the way they were supposed to treat each other, he washed their feet.

All right, well, let’s continue on. Now we’re going to talk about… Necromancy. Death magic! [Laughter] We bring that up, not just because Fr. Stephen and I have liked role-playing games in our past and present, but because that is the way that some people, for instance, look at Orthodox Christian interaction with the departed saints, that “you’re trying to summon the dead; you’re communicating with the dead.” And that’s what “necormancy” means: it means death-magic, or attempting especially… The traditional understanding of necromancy, with almost all those words that end with -mancy, it’s about trying to get knowledge that you’re not supposed to have, whether it’s foretelling the future or seeing something that’s happening in a place that you normally couldn’t see. So in this case, it’s using death-magic to make that happen.

So why, why is Orthodox Christian invocation of the saints not death-magic? Why is it not necromancy?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and I’ve gone through phases with this in interacting with people, people whom I care about, people whom I like, people whom I love, particularly, again, from a Protestant background, who have this issue. In terms of levels, there’s sort of the snappy answer. There’s our snappy Orthodox apologetic answer, which is we tell them, we tell someone who has a problem with this to go read Matthew 22:32, Mark 12:27, Luke 20:38, where Christ, talking about the resurrection to the Sadducees, says, “God is the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. He’s not the God of the dead but of the living.” See? They’re not dead; they’re alive, and since they’re alive we can ask them to pray for us. See? Gotcha, right? That’s our snappy answer.

Fr. Andrew: Checkmate! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They’re alive, they’re active, and they’re doing something.

But that snappy answer doesn’t really answer the concern, because, again, these are people who are sincere and good-hearted and love Christ and want to worship only God, and the idea of this makes them queasy. So pushing a little further, the next step, pushing it a little further is: Okay, are there examples of something like this in the Bible and in ancient Israelite religion, the religion of the Second Temple? And the answer to that is yes. We see this already beginning in Genesis, where Genesis makes the point of telling us where Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Joseph eventually: where they’re buried; where their tombs are. These are sites that are still known to this day.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can go there!

Fr. Stephen: This wasn’t just a matter of curiosity, because already then these were places where people would take pilgrimages, places where they would go to pray, the place where… When you say, “God’s everywhere. Why does it matter where Abraham’s now completely decomposed body is?—but this was a place. And that has continued to be true in Judaism, to this very day. I mentioned to you last week that there was that news article I saw that a group of Israeli settlers had gone to the tomb of Abraham to pray for the results of the United States presidential election. That may blow some of our views of Judaism, right, because you’d say, “Well, why did they go?” It’s because when they go there and pray, Abraham is praying with them.

When you read the interpretation of the verse that gets quoted by St. Matthew in terms of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, about Rachel weeping for her children, the interpretation of that that you find all through early Jewish literature in the Second Temple period is that that’s talking about Rachel’s spirit praying for the people as they went into exile, that this isn’t just figurative language, that Rachel actually was weeping and praying and interceding for her children. So this was present in ancient Israel; it’s present in Judaism all the way through to this present day, this idea.

Fr. Andrew: Amazing.

Fr. Stephen: But I pushed a little deeper than that!

Fr. Andrew: Okay!

Fr. Stephen: Because that’s still just giving examples. That’s still just “Well, Jewish people do it.”

Fr. Andrew: Precedent, right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and here’s some Bible verses that point to it. And so I wanted to really get into it, because I was still hearing this, and even after I would say these things, I was still hearing this from people, and they weren’t people whom I could just dismiss as like, “Well, this guy isn’t the sharpest tool in the drawer; he just doesn’t get it.” No, these are intelligent people who are saying, “It’s necromancy; it’s necromancy.” So I pushed a little deeper. What is it? Because it’s not apparent to me. It wasn’t apparent to me why you would even connect those two, how those things are even similar. How what the witch of Endor does with Samuel is similar to me asking the Theotokos or St. Stephen to pray for me—how are these the same?

I think, when I really pushed, I think what’s happening for a lot of the people whom I talked to who have this issue, [for whom] this makes them queasy and disturbed, I think they’re thinking of prayer in terms of communion with God, in terms of experiencing this spiritual communion with God and talking to God, and then God talking to them. And so, when they hear us use the language that I don’t think we should use—of praying to saints—then they hear, “Oh, well, you’re communing with St. Nicholas, and you’re talking to him, and he’s talking to you.” Like you’re using him as a Ouija board.

Fr. Andrew: “But he’s dead.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that’s why I say I don’t think we should use that language, because that, of course, is not what we’re doing. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not. You could say, “Well, look, in 16th- and 17th-century English, which is the language that we should be praying in, ‘pray’ just means ‘ask.’ We see it in Shakespeare all the time, people ‘praying’ to each other; it just means ask.” But that just sort of begs the point, because we don’t use the word “pray” in 21st-century English to mean something other than a religious act. I mean, I may wake up and say to my child, “I pray thee, fetch another gallon of milk from the basement…”

Fr. Stephen: I believe that you do that, by the way. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I do talk to my kids that way once in a while, and they usually go, “Da-aad!” But the fact that they would react that way is that they know that I don’t normally talk that way and I’m sort of putting something on when I do that. I think you’re right that asking the saints to pray for us, that we pray with saints, that we pray alongside saints, just as you gave that example of Israeli settlers going to the tomb of Abraham, that they understand that Abraham prays with them when they do that. And it makes sense to me that for people who believe that prayer is sort of the great act of communion with God, that you wouldn’t want to do that with a saint.

But for us—again, we talked about sacrifice and worship and so forth and what exactly those things really, really mean—necromancy is… Again, it’s about control. I think that people do have sometimes that sense that “The reason you’re talking to a saint is you’re trying to find out something secret.” Well, the truth is that most of the time when I ask—in fact, almost every single time when I ask a saint to pray for me—I do not get some kind of voice in response back, saying, “I will now reveal to you the esoteric secrets that you have asked for!” [Laughter] We’re not the Illuminati sitting around some giant pyramid in the middle of whatever and putting our hands out and saying, “Ohhh, St. Nicholas, tell us the future!” That’s not what’s going on.

And the thing about necromancy is it’s really about control. I mentioned role-playing games. I think people who’ve played those, they get this a little bit better than most, because what does a necromancer do in Dungeons & Dragons? He tries to make skeletons do his bidding, or he makes zombies arise and do [his bidding]. That’s what he does. That’s what a necromancer is, someone who’s exerting a force over dead bodies and stuff and trying to make them do things.

I think another side of this also is I think of our 21st century aversion to death and to dead bodies and so forth. Sure, we should have an aversion to death, but we’ve so sanitized it that any kind of interaction with bodies—we’re just not really into that. I think that that also is something of an influencer in terms of the way that people think about this.

Fr. Stephen: And also, as you were getting to this, this really brings us full circle to what we were talking about, that for us as Orthodox Christians, the fundamental act of communion—this was true for all ancient people—is not prayer but is sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And what you see when you look at examples of ancient necromancy—not D&D necromancy, but ancient necromancy—is it all involves sacrifice and sacrificial meals. On the folk level, it involves eating meals with the dead as a way of communing with them in that sacrificial sense, but if you want the clearest example, you can look at the Odyssey and see that when Odysseus wants wisdom, he says, “Well, I’m going to go and talk to the shade of Achilles,” and the way he does that is to go to one of the places that is a gate to Hades—which exist, and we’ll go into that in a future episode: teaser—he sacrifices black goats, and he pours their blood into a pool so that the shades could come and drink it. Like to lure them up out of Hades so that he can inquire about it. This is not just communion in a general sense, but this is sacrificial communion. This is not just the understanding of communion that exists there, but this is our understanding and the understanding of St. Paul as to how sacrifice and how the Eucharist work. Do you want to read the quote?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure! In 1 Corinthians 10—you just have to love this chapter for so many reasons. But anyways, 1 Corinthians 10:16-21.

The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not communion in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, because we all commune in the one bread. Consider Israel according to the flesh. Are not those who eat the sacrifices communicants of the altar? What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagan sacrifice, they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to commune with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot commune in the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

I feel like there should be an apostolic mic-drop at the end of that. [Laughter] Boom!

Fr. Stephen: So we do not have, we do not offer the Eucharist, we do not offer sacrifices to the saints, but by offering the Eucharist for ourselves and for the saints, we are in communion with each other, because all of us are in communion with Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Before we wrap up, we want to take one more call, and this is from Shary in Washington State. Shary, welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Shary: Thank you, Father!

Fr. Andrew: What’s your question for us this evening, Shary?

Shary: Sorry. Let me mute this. I apologize. I was going to ask this question last week, and it pertains to what y’all were talking about a little while ago about possession and demonic oppression. I would like to know your thoughts on: do you feel that a baptized Orthodox Christian can be possessed by demons? Not just oppressed but actually possessed?

Fr. Andrew: Possessed, like taken control of, yeah. That was brought up very briefly, and, again, I think… Was this one of our other power problems, Fr. Stephen, where you started talking?Yeah, this was the question about mental illness as well, about someone being demon-possessed. And, Father, you said there’s a difference between mental illness and being demon-possessed. So, Shary, you’re asking: Can and Orthodox Christian actually be possessed by a demon?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and I’m asking that because I actually in my life have seen a manifestation of that in someone. I won’t go into too much detail, but literally a physical manifestation, like the color of a person’s eyes changing, their countenance changing, very dramatic. I’ve wondered for years about that issue. I do believe that mental health issues are involved, but something like that where you actually see a physical manifestation of something, it’s like: wow.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Yeah, as I often say, we can’t necessarily pinpoint what’s happening in particular instances with particular people, but Fr. Stephen will give us a general remark. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I can’t weigh in on that, but I will say the things you’re describing are kind of archetypal signs of where you consider demonic possession. The answer to this is: you can’t get possessed by a demon accidentally. People aren’t just walking down the street, minding their own business one day, and they get possessed by a demon. People who get possessed—not afflicted; we talked about affliction a little bit ago, but people who get actually possessed—have invited it. Now, sometimes that’s very literal. I’m here in southern Louisiana. There’s people who literally invite spirits to possess them and perform ritual sacrifices to make that happen. But sometimes it’s more subtle. Sometimes it’s an invitation that’s extended over a long period of time, and it’s like the frog in the boiling water where it gets turned up slowly, and you end up in a place that you didn’t want to when you set out on that journey.

Shary: I agree with that.

Fr. Stephen: So that never happens accidentally. Now, that can’t happen to an Orthodox Christian, obviously, accidentally. My qualm with just saying, “No, that can’t happen to a baptized Orthodox Christian,” is, unfortunately, some of our folks think that, “Well, if I was baptized in an Orthodox church, I’m an Orthodox Christian, even if I’ve never seen one since and I’m 50.” Being an Orthodox Christian is not like being a Jet: when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet for life. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: West Side Story reference for all of you young’ns out there!

Fr. Stephen: But one can be baptized an Orthodox Christian and then proceed to live one’s life in a way where you are no longer an Orthodox Christian. So it is possible to, and there are plenty of Scriptures that talk about this in the New Testament, that talk about trampling underfoot the blood of the covenant and this. Apostasy is something that can happen, and if you choose to go back to Egypt, you’re choosing to go back to Egypt, and then you’re under the authority of Egypt’s gods again and you’re back in slavery. That’s how St. Paul talks about it a lot, is going back into the slavery from which Christ delivered you.

So that can happen, but there’s still hope for you. That’s not like, okay, now you’re done. You can return. There is a service that I think we should do more as priests in the Orthodox Church, for any other priests who are listening. There is a service for receiving someone back into the Church who has lapsed, and we don’t do it a lot. We’re just sort of happy they came back. We should be happy that they came back, but doing that service of reconciling them to the Church and formally receiving them back I think is a powerful service and important, because these services that we do and these rituals that we do aren’t just symbols or “nice things” or nice events or milestones in our life, but they actually do something. When that service is done, they are brought back in the Church, and they are brought back out from under the power of those things, back into the kingdom of God, and they’re set free again. So that’s my answer to your question.

Shary: Oh, thank you. That’s a very good answer, and I appreciate it.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for calling, Shary. It’s good to hear from you. I always like it when we get follow-up questions like: Could you say more about this? [Laughter] Thank you very much for that, Shary.

Before we close tonight, we’re going to give some final thoughts, but before we do that, I just want to give everyone the big teaser that I know that so many of our dedicated listeners have been waiting for, and that is that our episode on giants is going to be happening next—and cheers go up all throughout America and throughout the world! [Laughter] Yeah, we’re going to be talking about giants. We’ve teased it over and over again, but we’re finally going to be doing an episode on giants.

I just want to mention that because it is falling on American Thanksgiving, we’re not going to be in the studio that night, doing it live. It’s going to be a pre-recorded show. That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be taking any of your questions; you’re just going to have to submit them beforehand. You can send them to us via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can also use our “speakpipe.” If you go to the live show, part of the ancientfaith.com website, you’ll find, way down at the bottom, because we’re the most recent live show that’s happening, there is a Speakpipe link that you can click there, and you can leave us a voice message. If we choose that one, then we will include your voice on that recorded episode that’s happening two weeks from today. Like I said, we’re not going to be in the studio live doing it, but we’re going to record that episode. You’re not going to have to go without. And it is going to finally be our giants episode, so you’re not going to want to miss it at all.

I just wanted to give a few closing thoughts, and then Fr. Stephen, and then we’ll be done for the evening. We titled this episode “His Ministers Flaming Fire,” which is the end of a clause, first in Psalm 104:4, and it’s also quoted then in Hebrews 1:7. We hear this a lot in the Orthodox Church pertaining to angels: “He makes his angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire,” and this gets translated in various ways. Where does this image come from? Well, to dive into what I know is Fr. Stephen’s favorite subjects, just a little bit, in Ugaritic mythology—that’s the Baal cycle stuff; we’re going to talk about Baal a lot more in the future—the god Yam, who is the god of the oceans and is the most high god within that mythology, his messengers appear as flaming fire in the assembly of the gods in that pagan version of the divine council.

So what happens then is that idea of angels being associated with fire, that image is used in the Scriptures: “His ministers flaming fire.” But this is not just a poetic image, like “angels are scary, fire is scary, so we’re going to make them look like fire.” Rather, this fire is understood as being the fire of God’s presence and that they become kindled by their participation in God, by his act of love for them and, especially important for our purposes this evening, his sharing of his ministry with them, his governance of this world, his love for the creation that he has made and especially for us.

That powerful, powerful image of God’s presence in his angels—it says in the Scriptures that God is wondrous or wonderful in his saints—this is one of the ways that we understand that. The saints, the angels do not function apart from God as they participate in the rule of this creation, as they help to steward it, to take care of it, to intercede for it. They’re not apart from God; they’re participating in God. One of the conversations that Fr. Stephen and I had—and maybe I’m stealing his thunder here a little bit; I don’t know—when a king assigns a duchy within his kingdom to a duke, that doesn’t take away from the honor of that king, and indeed it extends it. You honor the duke and you are therefore honoring the king, and the duke takes care of the lands assigned to him, because he’s honoring the king, and he does it in the name of the king.

That’s what the angels and the saints do. They are participating in God’s own care for the creation, his own ministry. So they intercede for us, and they help to take care of us. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful image. When the Scripture says, over and over again, that we’re going to reign with Christ. This is what it means: that we are actively doing the things that are necessary to make the kingdom go. But it’s not going to be drudgery because all of the imperfection of this world will have fallen away; all of the sin of this world will have fallen away. It’s not going to be drudgery; it’s going to be glorious, beautiful, and super not-boring! The life of the age to come is not going to be some static thing; it’s going to be active; it’s going to be creative; it’s going to be the continuation of stories, to use J.R.R. Tolkien’s image that I mentioned at the beginning; it’s going to be the continuation of all that is good, and even more than now.

Fr. Stephen, why don’t you give us the final word.

Fr. Stephen: Sure, and I do want to say first I was perfectly willing to do a live program on Thanksgiving, but Bobby Maddex is going to be in a turkey coma, so we wouldn’t have an engineer. [Laughter] So I’m just going to throw him under the bus on this one. [Laughter]

But in terms of summing up what we’ve been talking about this evening, I think the preposition “with” is very important. I mentioned a little bit, switching from “praying to” to “with.” The sun and the moon and the stars praying with Adam and Eve for repentance. The angels making our entrances in the church and worshiping with us. I think it’s crucially important.

St. John Chrysostom says that wherever Christ is, there are the saints, there are the angels, there are all the hosts of heaven there with him. I think especially now, as when I was seeing some news earlier today—things are getting locked down again—and throughout this year, I think a lot of people have felt alone. I don’t think that the way—a lot of times we talked about taxonomy and trying to find these structures—the way we think about God’s heavenly administration and the saints and the angels, where it’s like “What, you can’t go to God directly, you have to go through these other people?” and this…

I think that’s especially unhelpful in a time like this, because the truth that we’re talking about at its core and at its most practical level, in terms of the saints and the angels praying with us and interceding for us, is that, if I am not allowed to leave my house and I am stuck in my room and I’ve got an icon of Christ and a candle and I light it and I pray—I’m not alone. I’m surrounded by saints from thousands of years, of righteous people who’ve loved God as I do and who’ve loved Christ as I do and who have struggled with what I’ve struggled with, been through what I’ve been through, gone ahead of me and are now there praying with me and for me. And the angels are there worshiping with me and Christ is there with me.

So as Christians, we’re never alone. That’s what this is about, realizing that. And not only are we never alone, we’re never going to be alone. This communion and this fellowship and this family that we’re in, and this brotherhood and this sisterhood that we share with each other, with all those who have gone before us and all those who will come ahead of us in the future, it’s something that’s going to last forever, into the world to come.

That love and communion and faith is the substance of the rule that we’re talking about and the intercession we’re talking about. So it’s the stuff that sort of makes up what it means when we say we have this glorious destiny to be sons of God in the world to come.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you to all of you for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you, either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page, or leave us a message via Speakpipe. We read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits Facebook page while you’re at it. Join our Facebook discussion group. Leave a recommendation, and then invite all your friends.

Fr. Andrew: And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever you get your podcasts, then that raises the visibility of this show and gets more people connected.

Fr. Stephen: Finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure that we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, and God bless you.