Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, and welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. John is going to be taking your calls tonight, and we’ll get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So The Lord of Spirits podcast is brought to you by our listeners—that’s you—with help from St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology. St. Athanasius is an online academy for K-12, offering live classrooms in core subjects, foreign languages, various electives, and Orthodox studies. To learn more about St. Athanasius Academy, please visit www.saaot.edu.

Fr. Stephen De Young: And I talked to Dn. Adam again over at St. Athanasius Academy, and he wanted people to know, because those photos the paparazzi took got out of him at Tiffany’s. [Laughter] And he wanted me to assure everyone that, despite those pictures, he is not using St. Athanasius tuition money to buy an engagement ring for J-Lo.

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: So you don’t have to worry about it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, especially since he’s already married. [Laughter]

So tonight we’re going to be talking about St. John the Forerunner and Baptist. Before we get to that, though, I just wanted to say thank you to all of the physicists and the many more people who wrote in and said, “I’m not a physicist, but…” who filled us in more on the details of what happens to matter, both biological and inert, in response to our previous episode, which was on relics. Your emails actually confused me so much that I actually called my big brother on the phone. He’s a chemical engineer, and he explained everything to me very, very thoroughly. Very interesting. So we don’t claim to be physicists, biologists, chemists, though, thank God, even though we might have gotten a few of the details last time a bit off, the point, though, is about what matter has to do with being; that’s the important thing. So thank you very much for all those emails.

All right, well, let’s talk about the one who is being, the Forerunner of Jesus Christ, St. John the Baptist, that enigmatic figure who was prophesied in the Old Testament and is the last of the prophets. In classic Lord of Spirits podcast fashion, we’re going to go back first, though in this case we’re not headed all the way back to Genesis—I know it’s a big shocker, everybody—but rather back to the books of Kings. And we’re not talking first about the last of the prophets, but rather the prophet that is sort of the prophet, the paradigmatic prophet, and that is the Prophet Elijah. So, Fr. Stephen, why is Prophet Elijah the paradigmatic prophet? Boy, that’s easy to say… “Paradigmatic prophet.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Lots of hard consonants. We’re going Welsh tonight.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Too many vowels for Welsh.

Fr. Stephen: And we are, indeed, varying up our usual format this evening.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, just a touch.

Fr. Stephen: Well, in a couple of ways. So we need to prepare people.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: People don’t like change; a lot of them are Orthodox. [Laughter] They don’t want things to change at all. But, yeah, we’re only starting with Elijah, so we’re still in the first millennium B.C., which is a rarity. And also, though people might be expecting this now, we’re not going to spend the first act running through prophethood in the Ancient Near East and the earliest prophets—though at some point we probably will, in some other future episode. Mark that on your bingo card: future episode.

But we’re starting with Elijah, and Elijah or St. Elias or Ilyas or Louis, if you’re French-speaking, is the paradigmatic prophet not just in the sense that, well, this is the prophet we have a lot of information about, or a lot of other prophets look like him or act like him, but in the way, first and foremost, that he’s treated by the text of the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so why isn’t Moses? If someone just threw that at me: “Who’s the paradigmatic prophet?” I would probably have guessed Moses. Why isn’t Moses the one?

Fr. Stephen: You could make a good argument for Moses, in the sense that you have the prophecy of a prophet like Moses in Deuteronomy, but Moses has a different role than most of the later prophets. I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit-trail, but Moses at the beginning of his calling is actually sort of a prophet, a priest, and a king all at once. Part of that gets taken away from him, and that’s a whole other discussion. So when we’re talking about Moses as a paradigm, it’s usually Moses as a type of Christ himself.

Fr. Andrew: The Law-giver.

Fr. Stephen: Whereas when we’re talking about who sets the standard for prophethood as such… And we’re going to see a lot of ways as we go on, but it begins with how he’s treated in the text, because we sometimes take for granted or haven’t thought about the fact that the story of Elijah and Elisha, whom we’re also going to talk about tonight, that story is in the books of the Kings. Neither of them are kings. So these books, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, or 1-4 Kingdoms, if you’re in the Orthodox Study Bible, are very clearly written by the same person, but they completely change format in order to tell us the stories of Elijah and Elisha.

Fr. Andrew: So does that suggest we’ve got an insertion from some other author?

Fr. Stephen: No, because they’re very clearly written by the same author, stylistically. Stylistically and everything, they match up, and they’re part of the overall arc of the story that’s being told, but you get the story of Samuel, the story of David—or which leads into the story of Saul which leads into David, Solomon. Then you get the divided kingdoms and the books of the Kings. And you have these lists of the kings, a few things about them, whether they were good or bad, a few stories. There’s this rhythm that gets set up, and then all of a sudden, once you get past Omri to his son Ahab, all of a sudden that pattern breaks, and it’s: Now we’re going to follow the Prophet Elijah and then the Prophet Elisha. And then after Elisha it goes back to that previous rhythm and format.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which kind of suggests that God is sort of following the kings and then, because the king becomes a complete jerk… [Laughter] I can say those kinds of things about Ahab. Then, you know, the focus then is on the man of God, who is the leader of the people, effectively.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there are other prophets. Most of the other writing prophets are alive somewhere in the time covered by that narrative, and a few of them are briefly mentioned, like Jonah is briefly mentioned in 2 Kings, but nothing really about him; he just has this bare mention. So it’s not just like: “Well, I’m writing about kings, but I really wish I was writing about prophets, darn it!” [Laughter] And so he seizes this opportunity. But he feels the need to tell these stories about Elijah and Elisha in detail, and so that can then be seen as: Here’s the sort of sine qua non prophethood, so when I talk about someone else who is a prophet, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about, from the perspective of the, what we call now the historical books, that they’re the ones holding this up as: Here’s the pattern of the prophet’s life. And most of the books that we call the Prophets now don’t have tons and tons of details of the prophet’s life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s mostly just: “Thus saith the Lord…” and then whatever it is that the prophet had to deliver.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there will be enough of a narrative frame sort of to tell you when it happened and what was going on and who the prophet was talking to, that kind of thing, or if the prophet was doing some sort of prophetic action that accompanied what he said, but you don’t get this kind of detailed narrative of the lives of other prophets.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean these are—in some sense, these look very much like saints’ Lives.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and they become… The life of Moses and the life of Elijah really become the paradigms for that—the life of David—become sort of the paradigms for how that’s done later on for the saints, and even in extrabiblical literature in the Old Testament. We’re actually going to reference this later on, in Act 3, but one of the older pieces of post-first century AD Jewish tradition we have is a work called the Lives of the Prophets, and that is very much following this kind of paradigm in talking about the other prophets of Israel who don’t have those biographical details in the Hebrew Bible itself.

But so when we encounter Elijah, as we mentioned, it’s within the context of this feud with Ahab. And that’s because, even though there’s very little about him in the Bible, archaeologically speaking, in terms of material history, the most important king of the northern kingdom of Israel was Omri. Omri was so important that the neighboring nations referred to the northern kingdom of Israel as Beit Omri, the house of Omri, pretty much until its destruction, from the time of Omri until it was destroyed. Even though it wasn’t actually his dynasty any more, after that, because of how he had expanded it, built up its military, his building projects. The main one of those building projects is that he actually built the capital of the northern kingdom. He bought the hill on which to build the city of Samaria, that was the capital of the northern kingdom.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and yet, in the Bible, he gets, like, what? One verse? Two verses? What is it?

Fr. Stephen: Six. He gets six.

Fr. Andrew: Six verses, excuse me.

Fr. Stephen: A couple of which are talking about him buying that hill. [Laughter] And the rest of which are saying when he was born, how old he was when he died, that he was wicked, and the rest of the stuff that he did is in the annals. [Laughter] That’s pretty much all we get about him. But his son is Ahab, and so another of the things that he did in terms of building up the northern kingdom of Israel’s status and power in the world was form alliances with his neighbors. One of those neighbors was the Phoenicians, whose civilization at this time was centered around Tyre and Sidon.

Fr. Andrew: Lebanon, yep. Modern Lebanon.

Fr. Stephen: Yep, what’s now Lebanon. And so he marries his son, Ahab, to the daughter of the king of Sidon, namely, Jezebel, who has now become infamous with everyone, even if you’ve never read the Bible in your life. And so she brought with her her religion from her hometown.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so she’s a Baal-worshiper. It’s our old friend, Baal. I’m still looking forward to that Baal book, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s down the road a piece.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter] One book at a time. Yeah, so she brings in Baal worship, and this is a major interesting point: she kills a whole bunch of the prophets of Yahweh, the God of Israel. It’s basically religious, ethnic cleansing, so to speak: eliminate the religious leaders from the previous religion, bring in her own prophets that promote the worship of Baal. The idea is to essentially convert the northern kingdom of Israel to Baal worship. There it is at the royal court. I mean, this is the way it tends to go in history: the royals convert, and then eventually the rest of the country kind of follows suit. I mean, it seems from what’s written in the Scripture that most people up there go ahead and join the king and queen in their Baal worship. Most people are doing it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but we have to remember that before this—so before the Omride dynasty, the worship in the northern kingdom was already not in a great place. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, they were already kind of converging on idolatry and engaging in some idolatry, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Well, full-on idolatry, yeah. Jeroboam, son of Nebat, who was the first king of the northern kingdom, as a separate kingdom of the ten tribes, didn’t want people making pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, so he kept, at least in name, the worship of Yahweh, but he built the two shrines, at Bethel and Dan, which were at the extreme north and the extreme south of the northern kingdom, and he put golden calves there that were supposed to be Yahweh. And we’ve talked before about how idolatry works, and, full-on, that was it. And that was in addition to high places and shrines for other gods that he allowed to exist.

So what Jezebel is doing is not just: “Oh, hey, I want to add in mine to the mix.” That mix was already going on. This was a deliberate attempt to bring the northern kingdom under the religious and cultural and political—because these things weren’t separate—hegemony of the Phoenicians, to essentially make the northern Israelites into Phoenicians, into one of the nations, and have them cease being Israel.

Yeah, and so it is, like you say, ethnic cleansing is really what it is. It was trying to destroy this people as a people, and make them into another people. We’re told she murdered hundreds of Yahweh’s prophets, because, as you might imagine, the Levites who were working at these high places and at these shrines in Bethel and Dan were not sort of super-strident fundamentalists about northern kingdom worship. If they had been they would have moved back to Judah and gone back to the Temple!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they were already compromisers and collaborators with pagan rituals.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the holdouts who were trying to rally the people against this pagan worship and against following the edicts of Ahab and Jezebel are the prophets. And among them Elijah has this sort of forefront role. So this whole battle ends up becoming between Elijah and Ahab, who (Ahab) is portrayed as exceedingly weak, and it’s essentially between Elijah and Jezebel, but Ahab is kind of the one who’s making the pronouncements and doing her bidding.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I was just going to say, just to kind of… I mean, we talked about Baal lots of times, but just to remind everybody: Baal is depicted as a storm-god; he’s a thunder-god. He’s the one who brings lightning and rain, and as we’ve talked before his story says that he sets himself up as… He’s installed a new most-high god, who is his father, El, up on the divine council, and then he rules the divine council directly himself. So this is the one that they’re worshiping and the one that they’re trying to assimilate the northern kingdom to, is this storm-god, this usurper.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Cloud-rider is one of his titles, and we’ve talked before about how that imagery and stuff gets taken in the Old Testament and applied instead to Yahweh, to say, no, it’s Yahweh who does this. And so this is going to be where sort of the rubber meets the road. What Yahweh, the God of Israel, is going to do, is through Elijah he’s going to demonstrate to Ahab, Jezebel, and all the people of the northern kingdom who he is and who Baal isn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right! [Laughter] And, you know, one of the cool ways that it starts out is kind of the contrast between Elijah and the royals. They’re living in luxury, controlling everything, and where is Elijah? He’s out in the Kidron Valley. He lives by himself, out in the wilderness; he lives next to this brook, a little river; and he’s fed there by ravens, which—you had a cool textual thing that we talked about in our notes! It’s not super important to everybody, but you’re just going to sort of love this. So, yeah, fed by ravens.

Fr. Stephen: It’s funny.

Fr. Andrew: Fed by ravens is the way that most people understand what it says in Scripture, but there are those who actually say that it doesn’t say “ravens,” and instead say what?

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, some of our modernist friends, like our 19th century German friends, et al., decided: somebody being fed by birds? that’s ridiculous. Right? No one can believe that birds are bringing him food! So they say that, based on a similarity in the consonants, they say, “Oh, well, that word has the wrong vowel points,” because of course when you write Hebrew and most Semitic languages, you don’t write the vowels, and so later in the Medieval period, they went and added vowels to the Old Testament; they say, “Oh, well, they did it wrong. What it really says is that Arabs came and brought him food.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Which… So that’s, apparently, so much more believable, that Arabs just came along every so often and supplied Elijah with food.

Fr. Stephen: And gave him food.

Fr. Andrew: Out there in the Kidron Valley.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, just wandered by. Because birds are far more ridiculous.

Fr. Andrew: “Oh look! Traveling Arabs!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, birds are ridiculous. So he’s out there, wearing camel-hair, and even his, in the Hebrew, his dialogue is pretty curt and stunted. There’s a lot of… We see a lot in the writing prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, these kind of eloquent speeches and imagery and all of this. That’s not Elijah! St. Elias isn’t into that. So when he first comes wandering into the royal court to confront Ahab, he basically says the equivalent of: “Ain’t gonna rain no more.”

Fr. Andrew: Right? “Rain. Stopping.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “No more rain.” Just drops that; mic drops and walks back out. And that’s it, and he leaves. And it stops raining for years. So he’s just informing them that it’s not going to rain any more! [Laughter] Now, this already is a display, because the fact that Elijah comes and announces it as the prophet of Yahweh means Yahweh’s the one who’s not sending the rain. And the whole purpose of worshiping Baal—well, there were two purposes of worshiping Baal as a storm-god: the first one was to get him to send the rains in their seasons, and the second one was to ward off destructive storms. Keep him happy so that he gave you the rain you wanted and he didn’t give you the storm and lightning that you didn’t want.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because idolatry is essentially a kind of spiritual technology: Keep the god happy and this is what… Well, he’s really good at this, so he’ll do this thing for us, and Elijah making it—well, from Ahab’s point of view, Elijah making it stop raining, what that really does is it says, “Yeah, this guy doesn’t actually have control of the rain.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, because they’re still out there at the high places and at the shrines of Bethel, and they’re doing the sacrifices; they’re doing the rituals; they’re doing the stuff: they’re reading the guts of the animals. They’re doing… I mean, not to get too dark, but we’ve got to be honest; there’s shrines to Molech at this point; they’re sacrificing children. And rain still isn’t coming.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not working. He’s discredited.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not working. So this already is a display. So that’s sort of the beginning, and of course we’re more familiar with the culmination of that sort of show-down, which happens at Mount Carmel.

Fr. Andrew: Mt. Carmel, right, and this was always one of my favorite stories in Sunday school. I mean, I loved this so much I named my first son Elias. That’s pretty much the reason why. So for those of you who don’t remember this from Sunday school, what Elijah does is he proposes a show-down, basically a kind of prophetic duel of sorts, and says, “Okay, I’m going to set up an altar to my God over here; you guys set up your altar to Baal. And you put your bull on your altar, and I’ll put my bull on my altar. And you guys, you can call down fire from heaven”—that’s what it says in the Scripture, fire from heaven. “Just pray to your god, and if he sends it, then everybody will know that Baal is our god, Baal is god. But if my God sends it, then everyone will know that Yahweh is God.”

And so the prophets of Baal, they set it all up, and they dance in circles around it, and they call out to Baal, and they cut themselves with knives because apparently that’s a part of their ritual—and nothing happens. And this is where St. Elijah proves that he is the patron saint of sarcasm. [Laughter] And he begins to mock them. Very ecumenical move on Elijah’s part. He begins to mock Baal, actually; he mocks the demon, from our point of view, and says, “Well, maybe he’s out on a trip. Maybe he’s somewhere relieving himself. He’s on vacation. Call out louder; maybe he’s hard of hearing.” But still nothing happens.

And then, after that, after that failure on the Baal prophets’ part, Elijah says, “Okay, I want you guys to bring a bunch of water and soak my sacrifice with water and pour it all over the altar.” They dig a trench around that and fill that with water, too. And Elijah prays to God and says, essentially, “Show them that you’re God,” and then God sends the fire from heaven, and it—despite all the water—consumes the sacrifice, consumes the wood, and even dries up all the water that’s in the moat around the altar. And all the people standing by say, “Yahweh is God.” It’s a really embarrassing moment for Ahab and Jezebel and for those prophets. So that’s the summary of this show-down; very much worth reading, just great.

So “fire from heaven,” is that like a big, swirling thing of fire going… [Noises] Like, I’ve always seen that in the comic books and stuff like the pictures in the flannelgraph, swirling flames like a small tornado of fire. Is that what we’re talking about?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and I’m about to ruin your Sunday school, everyone.

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man!

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, and in fact, when I was in seventh grade, we did a student film of this event.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh! Special effects?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and for the climax we got some GI Joes and wrapped them up in toilet paper like robes and then had them standing around a little paper altar, and then we got a can of WD-40 and a lighter, off-camera…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh man!

Fr. Stephen: And we, like, zoomed in and flamed the whole thing. Then we did this slow zoom on this melting GI Joe face to do Great Value Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Fr. Andrew: Please tell me you still have the VHS of this!

Fr. Stephen: I do not. I do not.

Fr. Andrew: Aww! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah. So that was the best we could do on our budget, which was nothing. [Laughter] But in actuality, if you read the Baal cycle, for example, in the Baal cycle, Baal is the one who sends fire from heaven, but what that’s referring to is lightning. It’s the thunderbolt, because, of course, they didn’t have the concept of electricity.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the Baal-fire.

Fr. Stephen: So, fire… Yeah. Fire from the sky, fire from heaven. So that’s what it’s actually talking about. The thunderbolt was actually the symbol of Baal’s power, and some of the Baal statues we have uncovered, he’s holding a thunderbolt, and you see that with Zeus, too, and with other storm-gods. That’s the symbol of their power. So the idea that, “Hey, try as you might, you can’t get him to send it, but it’s actually Yahweh, the God of Israel, who has that power, who has the dynamis, who is able to do that.”

That’s, then… and the conclusion here—we usually leave off there, but what happens immediately after that is two things. Number one, the Prophet Elijah leads them to go and kill a few hundred of the prophets of Baal, which is distributive justice. Jezebel had gone out and murdered hundreds of Yahweh’s prophets, and this is not just directed at Jezebel, because Jezebel is serving Baal. So in the same way that you get, at the time of the Exodus—remember what the Egyptians had done: they had gone and murdered all of the Israelite male infants, and so when the judgment comes, God announces that that tenth plague, the Passover, is his judgment on the gods of Egypt, and so the gods of Egypt, then, lose their children. In the same way now, Baal loses his prophets.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, this is spiritual warfare, God against a rebellious angel, a demon. And, you know, if you don’t recall that act that Jezebel did on behalf of Baal, then this always just seems like a vindictive, awful thing for Elijah to do. But, again, if we believe that he is truly a prophet of God—which, if we believe in the integrity of Scriptures, then we believe that—then that means that the things that he does are on behalf of God. So when he takes out these Baal-prophets, he’s not just doing it because he’s trying to, you know, he’s just trying to kill them or whatever. It’s God’s response to this action that Jezebel had done earlier. Yeah, so that happens, and then also, it begins to rain!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it pours, after not raining for years, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Because God has the rain. It’s not with Baal; the lightning’s not with Baal. This is about shaming Baal; it’s about utterly humiliating Baal in front of everyone so that they won’t worship him, because why would you worship a powerless god?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so Elijah’s ministry, this central portion of Elijah’s ministry as a prophet, is basically serving as an officer in spiritual warfare. That’s sort of literally what he’s doing. And so he’s sort of one of the officers, if you think about the—and we’re going to talk about this more in a minute—but if you think about the heavenly host, as a host, as an army, Elijah is sort of, even though he’s a human, is sort of an officer in that army already, in what he’s doing and how he’s operating in his life.

And then, if you’re familiar with another Prophet Elijah story… I don’t know. How common do you think it is at Orthodox churches that at great vespers for the Prophet St. Elias, they actually read all three Old Testament readings in toto?

Fr. Andrew: I think they’re usually abridged a little bit, although, I mean, I feel like the last time we did it, that I read rather long bits, so…

Fr. Stephen: It’s chapters and chapters!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s long! You basically get kind of the highlights of his whole story, the major events.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but… So if you remember another story, it’s probably right after this, and it’s usually portrayed as Prophet Elijah’s at this real high, and then he has this real low.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he gets bummed out in the wilderness, right.

Fr. Stephen: He gets bummed out. [Laughter] That’s not really what’s happening here. That’s not really what’s happening here. I won’t go into the whole thing right now; maybe we’ll have another time to do that, the Theophany element of what happens, but what’s important here for our topic tonight is that, at the conclusion, God tells him that Elijah is not actually alone. He’s not the last one left who’s following, who’s still faithful to Yahweh. He’s not the last faithful one, but there are 10,000—and we shouldn’t think that that’s a precise number; the idea is that it’s ten myriad—

Fr. Andrew: There’s a whole bunch.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a lot.

Fr. Andrew: Who have not, as, and the line is, “have not bowed the knee to Baal.” The faithfulness to God is expressed explicitly in terms of not engaging in idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this little story, while we sort of look at it as this little vignette, where Elijah gets bummed out and God encourages him, like, “No, you’re not alone, Elijah!” [Laughter] That this, though, in terms of the Scriptures, becomes crucially important, this idea that, no matter how bleak and how bad things get, what God is doing throughout the history of the Old Testament is preserving and refining and purifying a remnant for himself, that it’s never about all of Israel is saved, all of Israel is blessed, all of Israel is following Yahweh all the time. It cracks me up so much when people with PhDs in Old Testament say, “Well, hey, we found this archaeological evidence that Israel was worshiping gods other than Yahweh, so apparently the Bible’s wrong!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Have you read the Bible?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, have you read the Old Testament that you have a PhD in? The Bible says they were out worshiping… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the idea that there was this remnant, and that’s what God was about and that’s what God was doing, that the whole project of the Old Testament was to create and preserve and refine this remnant. And again, someday when we do our second episode on the Theotokos, we’ll get into how the Church’s understanding of the Theotokos builds on that as well. But St. Paul, then, probably the most famous place that this is appealed to is by St. Paul in Romans 9-11—I’ll drop in a “sorry, Calvinists” now—where St. Paul, in addressing the fact that most of the Judeans of his day, who were seen as the… Because the Old Testament prophets picked up on this idea of a remnant, your average Pharisee saw himself, said, “Well, we’re that remnant”; they identified themselves with that remnant. “We are the remnant who’s come through and survived and been purified.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which ironically, like, “No, you guys are the establishment!”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] And that’s what St. John the Forerunner and Christ are always telling them: “You’re not the remnant. You’re the priests at Bethel and Dan. You’re the…” [Laughter] “That’s who you are!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’re the religious adulterers, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: You’ve wrongly identified yourself in this story. But so they see themselves as the remnant, but St. Paul is addressing… Well, most of this, what was claiming to be the remnant, most of that did not accept Jesus as the Messiah when he came. How’s that work? And his answer, ultimately, and we won’t go—we could spend the rest of the night on this—but the answer he gives in Romans 9-11 ultimately is: Why would it be any different now than it has been throughout the history of Israel, where it was just this remnant? And he says: But there is this remnant that is faithful to Yahweh, because they’re faithful to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know, for me there is an immediate pastoral application to that, and whether you’re in pastoral ministry or not, one thing probably a lot of pastors have noticed is: Wow, most of the people I work with kind of don’t do the things that I advise them to do. There’s only this handful that are actually really on board. But even if you’re not a priest or a pastor, and just kind of looking at the world and going: Oh man, look at the world. It’s so awful. You know, this is the narrative that it’s always been. I’m not saying that there aren’t lower and higher times in history—there definitely are; there are definitely times and places where things are worse than they have been at other times—but this is actually the norm!

The norm is that most are not following God truly and faithfully, but there is always this remnant, and the application for the individual is not to say, “Oh, I’m the remnant.” The application is to say, “Okay, I need to be part of the remnant. I need to be faithful, because I’m not as faithful—I’m not faithful in the way that I should be.” So, yeah, I mean, this is one of these things that, if you misidentify yourself, then it can become kind of a sectarian impulse, but if you realize, “No, wait, I need to apply this to myself. I’m the sinner. I’m the sinner,” then you’ve got it right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, by the way, especially to our Orthodox listeners, this is true of Church history, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, totally!

Fr. Stephen: Just like King David, sort of the paradigmatic king, committed some awful sins, so did St. Constantine. That doesn’t make him not a saint, but the fact that he’s a saint doesn’t mean he didn’t do those things, just like with David. And just like almost all the kings of Israel and Judah were wicked men, almost all of the Byzantine emperors and almost all of the tsars were wicked men. There are a few here and there who were really righteous and holy. Most of the Byzantine emperors were not saints.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and even, frankly… Not that we’re trying to condemn everybody or whatever, but there’s a reason that, for instance, St. Gregory the Theologian said, “Flee the reunions of bishops.” Like: “I don’t want to have anything to do with my fellow bishops!” Like, well… There must be a problem there, if a saint says that about his own time and place.

Fr. Stephen: But there was always a remnant.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, every age…

Fr. Stephen: St. Symeon the New Theologian.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right!

Fr. Stephen: There’s always a remnant, and that remnant was not sitting around cursing everyone else and talking about how everyone else was an apostate and just condemning everyone else. That remnant was busy being faithful to God. So if you’re one of those folks—there seem to be a lot of them on the internet—who are convinced that 90% of the Orthodox Church is corrupt, we won’t argue about numbers, but you need to find, then, that other 10%. You need to go find the remnant, the faithful people, the faithful Christians, and you need to get with them and get on board with them and be faithful yourself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re not going to be the ones cursing everybody else. [Laughter] That is not the remnant. Sorry. [Laughter]

Okay, so the last major Elijah event is the sort of succession.

Fr. Stephen: The hand-off.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the hand-off, where it’s time for Elijah to go and to be with God. I mean, he doesn’t die, right? He gets taken up in a chariot of fire. Dun-dun-dun-da-dah. Yeah, he gets taken up in a chariot of fire, and this also says a lot of interesting things about what it means to be, as we’ve said, the paradigmatic prophet. And so one of the things that we talked about in our prep for this is a passage from Jeremiah 23, which talks about sort of the mark of the true prophet. I just want to read this. So this is from Jeremiah, and this is what he has to say.

For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord, to see and to hear his word? Or who has paid attention to his word and listened? Behold, the storm of the Lord: wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest. It will burst upon the head of the wicked. The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his heart. In the latter days you will understand it clearly. I did not send the prophets, and yet they ran. I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their deeds.

So the point of this is Jeremiah is making a contrast between false prophets and true prophets, and he says the true prophets are the ones who stand in the council of the Lord to see and to hear the word, and he also says that they stand in the council and they proclaim his word to the people so that they would turn away from their evil ways. So that’s what Jeremiah says, that the prophet is one who’s in the divine council and who is a messenger of the divine council.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you see that very clearly when you look at the call of the Prophet Isaiah, and he comes before the throne of God. And “whom shall we send to make this announcement?” And he famously says, “Here I am. Send me.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, he stands in the council of the Lord, becomes a messenger for the council.

Fr. Stephen: And the Prophet Ezekiel, Jeremiah hear this call and says, “Here.” And, by the way, if you haven’t read Religion of the Apostles yet, this is what happens with St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: That’s why he says he’s been sent with a message, by Christ himself.

Fr. Andrew: And so this makes sense, then, with the way that Elijah goes, because what’s happening is he’s being taken up into the divine council, very, very visually. It’s not just “okay, he’s dying and now we believe…” It’s like, it’s quite literally happening before the eyes of Elisha, you know, that this chariot takes him up. And of course, what’s the whole point of the chariot? This is the image of the mobile throne of God which is everywhere. So he’s being taken up by the throne of God, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and God’s throne is a chariot, because it’s mobile. The whole council is mobile. When you get to Daniel, and when Daniel’s standing in the divine council again, thrones are set, and the council is seated around the throne of God. So, yes, this is one of those throne-chairs, coming to get Elijah, so that now he can be permanently there. But he’s already been sort of acting, as we saw in this whole spiritual warfare; he’s already sort of been an officer in the heavenly hosts. He’s already sort of been serving in this role, but now is the time for him to go there permanently. And you see him still serving in that council role at Mount Tabor in the Transfiguration. That’s why, when St. Elias and Moses appear with Christ, it says that they’re conferring amongst themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s this council function.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s the idea. That’s why it says that they’re talking. They’re not exchanging pleasantries. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like, “Hey, what’s you been doing since you left in that…?”

Fr. Stephen: Or philosophical ideas or something. That’s what this is and what it’s meant to show us. And we know that this wasn’t… I mean we’re going to get in more detail here in a second in this transition from Elijah to Elisha, but we know that Elisha had the same experience with the whole incident with his servant Gehazi, where they’re facing an invading army, and Elisha’s servant, Gehazi, is terrified, and so Elisha prays, and Gehazi’s eyes are opened to see the heavenly host, to see the angelic beings arrayed around them, protecting them. But the reason in the text that Elisha wasn’t afraid is that he already saw them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which means he’s kind of in the divine council all the time, even while walking around on this earth, because he sees them out there. He sees that the hosts of heaven are also present. He sees the bigger army, the more powerful army, which Gehazi can’t see, so Elisha has to ask that his eyes be opened to see that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s why this way of life, the way of life that we see with the prophets of the Old Testament, that we’re going to see with St. John the Forerunner, begins to be referred to as the angelic life. It’s not just like it’s angelic life because they’re superhuman or because they’re not married. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s that they live with—they basically live with the angels. And, you know, how many hymns do we have in our liturgical tradition that talk about saints as being companions with the angels? Like, that’s everywhere. Almost every single day, the Menaion has something about that particular saint being a companion of the angels or dancing with the angels. There’s this equal to the angels idea, just like the Lord says in Luke 20.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is… the means by which this happens is the Spirit, and it’s particularly connected with worship. Worship is being in the Spirit, so the beginning of the book of Revelation, St. John is in the Spirit, meaning he’s worshiping on the Lord’s day. And as he’s worshiping, he sees Christ walking among the candlestands that are there in the church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, I think a lot of times when people see that “in the Spirit,” they’re like: “Oh! He went into a trance!” or something like that, but, like you said, there’s this indication that it’s a liturgical experience.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this, then, is what is continued in the Church as the monastic way of life. There are people who live in the Church, who live in worship.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because there’s these Old Testament communities of prophets, who are basically living in this way. I mean, it’s not going to look exactly like modern monasticism, but the essence of it is the same. They live together.

Fr. Stephen: Elisha—and that’s where Elisha goes, after the transition, after he receives the mantle. We’re going to talk more about that in a second, but as he receives the mantle from Elijah, he goes to the community of the prophets to being his mission. But that community had existed a long time before that. A long, long time before that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I mean, monasticism is not invented in the fourth century or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but these prophetic communities go way back, to one of the craziest passages.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes!

Fr. Stephen: In the story of David.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Yeah, you pointed this out to me the other day, and I was like: I don’t remember this from Sunday school… Yeah, so 1 Samuel 19—this would be, what? 1 Kingdoms, if you’re looking at the Orthodox Study Bible?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: So 1 Samuel 19:18-24, this is part of the David and Saul story. I’m just going to read this.

Now David fled and escaped, and he came to Samuel at Ramah and told him all that Saul had done to him. And he and Samuel went and lived at Naioth, and it was told Saul: “Behold, David is at Naioth in Ramah (or Rah-mah; I’m not sure of the correct pronunciation).” Then Saul sent messengers to take David, and when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing as head over them, the Spirit of God came upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied. When it was told Saul, he sent other messengers, and they also prophesied. And Saul sent messengers again the third time, and they also prophesied. Then he himself went to Ramah and came to the great well that is in Secu; and he asked, “Where are Samuel and David?” And one said, “Behold, they are at Naioth in Ramah.” And he went there to Naioth in Ramah, and the Spirit of God came upon him also, and as he went, he prophesied until he came to Naioth in Ramah, and he, too, stripped off his clothes, and he, too, prophesied next to Samuel and lay naked all that day and all that night. Thus it is said, “Is Saul also among the prophets?”

Again, I’ve never seen a flannelgraph of that!

Fr. Stephen: I think that story’s self-explanatory, don’t you?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, totally! Yeah, there’s something about being at that spot. Like, you go there… The Spirit of God is going to sort of take you, and it even does this with Saul.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because what we see here is Samuel standing as chief among them. So Samuel is there, leading this community of prophets, this prophetic community, in worship.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s like their abbot or bishop, effectively.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what’s happening is they have this worship going on in the Spirit, and every messenger whom Saul sends to come down there is sort of seized by it and ends up joining in and staying. So a sort of modernization of this would be if some wicked king wanted to seize the land of a monastery, and so he sent messengers to them, and they ended up becoming monks. And then he sends some more messengers, and they ended up becoming monks! [Laughter] And that’s the idea with him. He prophesies as he goes, and then when he gets there, when he strips naked, he’s taking off all of the symbols of his office as king. All of that is stripped away from him, and then he just [lies] there, naked, exposed, before God and before Samuel. And then leaves without troubling anyone. So, yeah, it’s…

Fr. Andrew: It’s a weird passage!

Fr. Stephen: It’s a little bit of a weird passage, but that’s sort of what’s going on, and it gives us a sort of window into these communities. But we have stories from monasticism about things like this. St. Moses the Ethiopian is on the run. He goes into this monastery and he ends up joining it. And the famous messengers of St. Vladimir come into the church and don’t know whether they’re in heaven or on earth. There are times where the Spirit is present in a place where worship is happening, and grips people who come in. People who enter are seized by it. Hopefully they don’t take off all their clothes and lie down on the floor. I’d prefer you not do that at my parish.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] If you don’t mind. We have a dress code, and it involves…

Fr. Stephen: If it’s all the same to you… [Laughter]

So, then, the last little piece of this we want to touch on here in terms of this transition…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the actual hand-off.

Fr. Stephen: The passing of the mantle, which is both a physical piece of clothing and a mantle in the way that we now use that term analogically. And I don’t mean over your fireplace; I mean “taking up the mantle.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a long piece of cloth. That’s what it is.

Fr. Stephen: And so Elisha prays, as Elijah is being taken up into heaven and joining the council, that he would have a double portion of Elijah’s spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what’s that about?

Fr. Stephen: And that wording is kind of important, because he doesn’t say, “I want a double portion of the Spirit of God that Elijah had,” like this isn’t: “I want to be twice as good as Elijah; I want to be twice as powerful as Elijah.” This is about his relationship with Elijah, because what’s happening is Elijah, his beloved friend and mentor, is now being parted from him, and he’s praying that this would not separate him from Elijah, but their relationship now, as Elijah goes into heaven, their relationship would be redoubled, would be deeper and richer and greater rather than less because of the separation.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it continues. It continues, right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then he receives the piece of cloth as a symbol of this being answered, of this being true. He’s going to walk around wearing this piece of Elijah’s clothing as the sort of sign of this continued relationship, and what he does with it is, since he has to cross the Jordan, is he takes that mantle, strikes the Jordan with it, and the Jordan splits in two so that he can cross over on dry land.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “Where is the God of Elijah?” as he says that. Which, of course, this is one of the passages that gets read at Theophany, where you get almost every single passage from the Scripture having to do with water. [Laughter] But this one is the one—

Fr. Stephen: But that’s not the real reason. Anyway, we won’t get into that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, we’ll have to do an episode on that, but it is true.

Fr. Stephen: This is connecting that to Joshua entering Canaan.

Fr. Andrew: Right, where the Jordan parts in the same—yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The Jordan parted so they could march in. Marched in, ark first: they marched in as an invading army. So this is a sign that that spiritual warfare that characterized the ministry of St. Elias is now going to continue with Elisha.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Very cool. Well, that wraps up Act 1, and we’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! We have a couple of callers that we wanted to get to who have been patiently waiting. So the first one that we’ve got is Perdomo in Texas. So, are you there? Welcome!

Perdomo: Hello, yes, I’m here. I have my audio.

Fr. Andrew: All right, good. Well, welcome to the podcast. What’s your question for us this evening?

Perdomo: Well, I’ve got a question about the sacrifice of Abel and also the sacrifice of Cain, because they always come together. If you don’t mind, I’ll break it up into a couple of little questions, the first being since folks didn’t meet until the time of Noah, so we’re told, is the first sacrifice just a sacrifice of blood and smoke?

Fr. Andrew: So you’re asking exactly what was being sacrificed in the time of Abel and Cain?

Perdomo: And what was being sacrificed and how, what was the nature of Abel’s sacrifice, of his flock?

Fr. Andrew: Right, I mean, so we’re not given much in the way of details. But if you listen, for instance, to our episodes where we talked about sacrifice, then you can hear an outline of what we do know in terms of the details of sacrificial worship in the ancient world. But the basic outline of it is it’s food being offered to your god, and then it’s a shared meal with that god. So in Cain’s case, he’s offering vegetables, and in Abel’s case, he’s offering from his flock. But the Scripture tells us that what’s different about them is not so much the thing that they offered, because it’s not that God rejects vegetables, because he commands vegetables later to be offered, especially grain and stuff, but rather the way that they did it; what was in their hearts was really the difference. Fr. Stephen, did you have anything you wanted to add or correct to that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, I think he was getting at the eating part, and, yeah, presumably it would have been on Abel’s part a whole-burnt offering.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so offered completely to God, then. And then probably a sprinkling or anointing or something like that with the ashes. Does that make sense?

Perdomo: That makes sense. Purification of the space. And then with Cain’s offering, since… not a bad offering. Our Eucharist is in part a grain offering. So is it…? But even… He was presumably partaking of it, which makes it a bit more like the fruit from the garden. And is it safe, would it be safe to say that the angels, the Apkallu, taught Cain to make that sort of sacrifice, before he was ready, before it was permitted?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s famously not a lot in the text to tell us why. I mean, people have all kinds of suggestions and surmises about why Cain’s offering was bad. And I think the best guess is, as Fr. Andrew said, that it wasn’t about the offering itself or even how he did it, but it was about what was going on in his heart and who he was. That’s alluded to in 1 John, where it talks about how the works of Abel were good and the works of Cain were evil, and I don’t think it’s just talking about sacrificial procedure there; I think it’s talking about works, like their deeds, the way they lived in the world, because one of the big problems in the Old Testament is that most people had the idea, because this is sort of how pagans operated… Like, the pagan gods didn’t care what was in your heart. You make offerings to them and you tell them they’re great; they don’t care if you really mean it. They’re not like super investigative of this.

So we see points in the prophets where the Israelites are raising Cain—pardon the pun—but still doing the sacrificial offerings, as if that makes it okay. “Well, God will still be happy with us, because we’re giving him his goats and his bulls and his blood. So he’s taken care of so we can just do as we please.” God eventually through the prophets is telling them, “Just stop with the sacrifices. I don’t delight in the blood of bulls and goats. I don’t want them any more.” So I think that’s probably the best idea of what’s going on with Cain, because it’s not… The problem isn’t that he offered the wrong kind of sacrifice or followed the wrong procedure. That would be how the pagans would think you would have God not accept your sacrifice: “Oh, you blew the procedure. You made a mistake somewhere.” But it was the fact that Cain’s heart was far from God, and so God wasn’t interested in his sacrifice if he couldn’t have his heart.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, does that make sense to you, Perdomo.

Perdomo: Sure, sure, that makes sense. I mean, is it…? I guess one follow-up question coming to me now is… So then it’s an open question whether Cain and Abel were taught by God how to make the sacrifice or not?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, we’re not told.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t say. It just simply doesn’t say. We just see them doing it.

Perdomo: Okay. All right.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thank you very much. So we’ve got Nick on the line, calling from California. So, Nick, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Nick: Thank you, Father. Bless!

Fr. Andrew: God bless you! What’s your question or comment for us this evening?

Nick: So I was… when you were talking about David and his sin and repentance, came to my mind the prodigal son. So he, for his inheritance, the father gave it to him, he went, wasted it, and came back, and the father was pleased and happy, and he gave him a dress, ring, and a feast. And the older son said, he asked the father why he is doing that, and the father said, “Because he was dead and he is alive.” And also, Father: “All that is mine is yours.” So my question is: What happened to the prodigal son’s inheritance? I have teenager boys, and I always compare this to… in case if things go astray, I always tell them, “Boys, watch out for your inheritance, because I’m not sure you’re going to get it back.” Am I right or wrong or I don’t know—what should I say for that situation?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, the prodigal son definitely goes and wastes what he takes with him. That’s gone. But the point that the parable is making is that it’s really not even about things that he gets from his father, but rather being part of the father’s household and that what the father has is what really is important. So it’s not like God has a finite amount of gifts to give mankind, that he’s going to run out. So we shouldn’t come away with a kind of economic reading of the parable in terms of application for our own lives. I mean, if… Yeah, it just doesn’t work well that way. Does that make sense to you?

Nick: Well, then, you know, certain people can be priests, and if they commit something wasting for them, inappropriate for them to be a priest, they’re not allowed to be a priest, so they lose their inheritance to… For me, it’s a complete answer. Forgive me, Father, but then while the father is saying, “All that is mine is yours” to the older son…

Fr. Stephen: Let me “Um, actually…” what Fr. Andrew said.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Okay, so—and this is why this is a really important question, is the term “inheritance” is incredibly important in the Bible, and understanding this is incredibly important. But one of the things we chronically misunderstand about the parable of the prodigal son, which is emphasized by the fact that we call it the parable of the prodigal son, is that it’s not just about the prodigal son.

Fr. Andrew: Right, his brother, too.

Fr. Stephen: If you read the parable closely, it begins with: “There was a man who had two sons.” [Laughter] Two sons. And it’s also important that the other son, besides the prodigal son, is the older brother.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he’s the one who gets the inheritance.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So if things had functioned the way they were supposed to, then when the father died—and this is what he says in the end—the older son inherits everything in that system. And then it is his job to then distribute the inheritance to his siblings—to the other sons, because the daughters would have become part of other families. So part of why the older brother’s upset is that the prodigal son had no right to that money that he took and wasted. That money would have actually gone to the older brother. But the theme is not just about the prodigal son; the theme of the parable is about the older son learning something. That’s where it ends, is with the older son learning something, because part of what the father is telling him is that, when the father dies, it’s going to be the older son’s job to take care of his brother, because, regardless, the prodigal son under no circumstances would have inherited anything directly from his father, and so the older brother can either maintain that grudge against him and cut him off and throw him back into the pigpen, or he can learn the lesson and learn to love his brother the way the father loves his son.

So this parable was being directed by Jesus in part to the Pharisees, who were begrudging the sinners, the tax-collectors, the repentant, later on the Gentiles, who were coming to follow God. And it wasn’t just a question of God loving those people so leave them alone; it was: God loves them, so you need to learn to love them, too, because, in fact, you’re the ones who have received the religious inheritance, like St. Paul as a Pharisee. You’ve received the Torah. You’ve received the oracles of God. You’ve received the revelation and the worship of God. You need to be loving them and taking care of them and helping them come in, not being resentful or angry towards them.

So that’s really what’s going on, I think, in the parable. We all find our salvation in the Church together, not as a bunch of individuals. And if inheritance is our salvation, we don’t find that off on our own because we deserve it and we have this direct relationship with no community, with God; but we find that together as we love each other and support and help each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, Nick, to your question about if a priest commits a particular sin, he can lose his priesthood permanently, I don’t think that the reason for that is because of what’s in the parable of the prodigal son. Rather, it’s… there are all kinds of things that are impediments to serving in the priesthood, and some of them are sins and some of them are not sins. If someone, say, for instance, someone is born without legs: he could not be ordained; that’s an impediment to the priesthood. He didn’t do anything wrong, but there are some things that you can do wrong that make it so that you could get deposed from the priesthood. Yeah, one could metaphorically call that squandering your inheritance, but that’s a very broad use of it as a metaphor. I mean, the true inheritance is salvation; it’s not about serving in the priesthood, because even someone who’s been deposed from the priesthood could become a saint. There’s never a permanent loss for salvation as long as someone is going to be faithful. It’s much more about what’s expedient in terms of serving in the priesthood. There’s not exactly a one-to-one application of this to that particular situation. Does that make sense, Nick?

Nick: Yeah, I didn’t frame my question properly. I meant to say, if I do something, this will limit my abilities to advance in my Orthodoxy, like become a priest or… I don’t know. That’s what I meant to say. In Orthodoxy, we have limitations like who can be and who can’t, so that’s a good thing. Thank you, Fathers, for this wonderful explanation. Can I follow up with the other previous caller about Cain and Abel and Noah?

Fr. Andrew: Well, we have other callers waiting, so we need to kind of move on to them. I just wanted to add this one thing to something you said, which is advancing in Orthodoxy does not necessarily mean ordination. In fact, ordination for some people could actually be a regression in Orthodoxy; it could be bad for their salvation. All right, well, thank you very much, Nick. Okay, we’re going to take one more call, and then we’re going to move on, and we have Matt calling from Houston. So, Matt, are you there?

Matt: Yes, Fathers, I am. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we can hear you! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Now, is your name really Matt or is this a joke about the Matt Houston television program? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Matt: No, no.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Matt: Well, legally my name is David, but, you know…

Fr. Stephen: A-ha!

Matt: Things get complicated.

Fr. Stephen: Digging in the crates on the TV references.

Matt: My full name is David Matthew, so there was an abundance of David Matthews references to be made, too.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Ants go marching and all that.

Matt: Oh, yeah, definitely! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: God bless you. So what’s up, David Matthew from Houston?

Matt: [Laughter] Okay, so a few times on the show, you guys have talked about how humans interact with the cosmos in four primary ways: language, music, art, and ritual; and how one of the big issues that we have in Western culture, amongst the many that there are, is that we tend to reduce the last three into language. So that’s like people having their noses buried in their service books during the liturgy rather than just participating. So that’s what bad looks like, but presumably there is some value in using language to explain the last three forms, and to attest to that… Sorry, there’s a huge body of work on Ancient Faith that is using language to describe the liturgy and iconography. So I guess what my question is: Could y’all just flesh out a little bit what that balance looks like, between using language well to describe these things that sort of transcend language, and how to know, perhaps, when you’ve taken it too far?

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. So I would say the point at which you’ve taken it too far is when you’re excluding the other things, when you’re distorting them or excluding them. So the person who refuses to go to church but says, “I can read it at home, because I don’t want to go to church. There’s people there. The priest is a bad preacher, or the choir is terrible, or I don’t like the way the incense smells. I’m just going to read. I can read it at home, and that’s the same thing.” So that would be an obvious distortion or reduction of it. By no means, by our saying that things should not be reduced to language are we denouncing language. I mean, this is a podcast! We’re sitting here talking! So by no means, right? Fr. Stephen and I both love language and are dedicated to it in a lot of ways.

But, yeah, there’s a lot in the Bible about bad use of language. So lying is a misuse of language. Idle talk, just going on about nothing useful, especially when it becomes harmful to other people around you. Those would be… Persuading people for your own advantage rather than for the truth. So there’s all kinds of ways to misuse language, just as there’s ways to misuse music and to misuse ritual. These things, they all have their abuse as well as their proper use. But, yeah, I think balance is the key, and I think that balance is going to look a little bit different from one person to the next. If you’re a monastic, then your engagement with ritual is going to be way more than the average person. If you’re a preacher or a teacher, your use of language is going to be way more and quite different from the average person. So I don’t think we can set up a one-size-fits-all, but I think the point when you’re cutting stuff out should be a red flag, and, of course, like I said, abusing it for nefarious ends rather than to use it to the glory of God as all these things were designed. Fr. Stephen, did you have any “Um, actually…“s or anything to add to that?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Not an “Um, actually…” per se, but I mean, I think there are examples that might help explain it, because it’s a balance. Like all virtue, it’s the mean between two extremes. So you look at the hymns of the Church. If you have no idea what the words are, and you’re walking around humming Tone 8, you would very clearly know that, okay, well, that’s missing something. I’m missing the words; I’m missing the communication: the hymn, the words, what’s being taught by it. At the same time, we know full well that sitting there and just reading the text, without the music—without it being chanted, without anything, just reading it as prose on paper—there’s something missing. Like, that’s not the same experience as singing the hymn. So the correct is when you have both of those together. And then when you’re singing those hymns together in the liturgical space in the context of the liturgy, now you’ve added ritual. And when it’s on a feast day and you’re singing the troparion of the feast, and the icon is there of the feast, these things all get brought together.

So the issue isn’t just that there’s some perfect percentage or ratio of language to art to ritual to music; it’s that these things have to operate together and can’t be pulled apart and separated out without losing something.

Matt: Sure, sure, and now that y’all have fleshed it out a little bit more, I think I’ve realized that the area in which my mind is focused on is particularly engagement with non-Orthodox Christians. I’m a very naturally argumentative person, say, and so I recognize that about myself and I try to limit that as much as I can. I try to limit over-explaining things to people, because I really enjoy explaining things. But I’ve heard stories of people who had a lot of questions, and then they go and sit in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary and just, somehow, their questions feel answered. Yeah, and so I think that’s a little bit more where my mind was, thinking about perhaps encouraging non-Orthodox Christians to just go to Liturgy, and then when they get there, just don’t over-explain it to them, maybe. [Laughter] I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you were sort of reducing the question of “reducing things to language” to language. [Laughter] It’s like an inception. [Sound effect]

Fr. Andrew: You know, the other thing that I would add, Matt, as someone who has a strong proclivity to be a talker is it’s easy to spend time trying to convince people of something, and that, you know, that maybe can be fruitful sometimes. But there is a use of language that is actually very powerful, and that is to pray for those people. We shouldn’t enter into theological conversation without prayer before and after, because it’s just very dangerous to do that otherwise.

And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always do that, because I often forget because I’m a sinner. But I have found that when I’m going to have conversation with somebody about theological things, or even just okay, I’m going to be interviewing somebody or being interviewed by somebody or just having a conversation with my wife or my children or whatever, I try to pray beforehand, even if it’s just to make the sign of the cross and say, “Lord, bless this conversation.” Even if it’s just that. And then you’re offering the words to God and asking him to bless them and shape them. That’s going to be much more powerful than… even if you’re just a really great debater.

People being convinced into worshiping Christ through the power of debate is just not a thing. I mean, I’ve watched people be destroyed by the power of somebody else’s debate, who then later dedicated themselves to Christ, but, generally speaking, when someone just sort of destroys someone else by the use— And I’m not saying you do that; I don’t know you. But this is a distortion or abuse of language. When someone destroys someone else with a debate, typically what happens in response to that is not faithfulness to Christ. It’s usually that that person is turned away from Christ, especially if that person who’s debating them sets themselves up as his representative.

There is a place for debate, especially for defending the simple and the faithful against being undermined, but that doesn’t happen that often in most people’s lives, that you’re called upon to protect the flock. The flock has shepherds, and that’s not most of us, for whatever that’s worth. Is that helpful?

Matt: Yes, yes, very much so.

Fr. Andrew: Great. Well, all right, thank you very much for calling, Matt. Okay, well, rolling along—and this is weird: Here we are, Lord of Spirits, and we’re actually in Act 2 beginning to explicitly talk about the subject of our episode!

Fr. Stephen: Varying up the format.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’ve got to shake things up a little bit here.

Fr. Stephen: I just wanted to add, since apparently we’re getting a fair number of calls: Go easy on John; it’s his first day. [Laughter] Be nice.

Mr. John Maddex: I’m doing fine, thanks.

Fr. Andrew: Hey! Wow. [Laughter] All right, John Maddex, everybody! My boss, by the way. You know, after God and the bishop, but yeah—and my wife. [Laughter]

Okay, so, well, this episode is about St. John the Forerunner, and we need to establish exactly who he is, and what better way to do that than to talk about his parents dying, right?

Fr. Stephen: It’s like a Disney movie!

Fr. Andrew: Right!? Exactly!

Fr. Stephen: That’s how every story starts.

Fr. Andrew: Why is it that so many Disney movies always start with the main character being orphaned? Like, Disney loves to kill people’s parents. Man, that’s frequent!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s like every movie. [Laughter] But that is sort of how the story of how St. John the Forerunner starts. But the specifics of this is important to… The reason we were talking about St. Elias, about the Prophet Elijah, is that he is connected in many important ways to St. John the Forerunner, and so to show a very important one of those connections, we need to talk about the eventualities surrounding the death of his parents.

Fr. Andrew: Right, Zachariah and Elizabeth.

Fr. Stephen: Both saints in their own right. And there is not a lot—as in, almost nothing—in the New Testament itself. We’ve got basically one verse, and that’s Luke 1:80. Yes, there are more than 80 verses in the first chapter of St. Luke’s gospel.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, I mean, it’s a very slight little reference to St. John having been taken into the wilderness by his mother, and it says, “And the child grew and became strong in the Spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day of his public appearance to Israel.” And you know, he’s brought out there by St. Elizabeth because Herod is slaughtering all of the two-year-old boys and under in the region of Bethlehem. With this massive massacre going on, she takes him out to save him so that he doesn’t get caught up in that.

Fr. Stephen: And that is— Well, first, I want to highlight: Notice it says he was in the wilderness “until the day he revealed himself.” But, lo and behold, when we read the story of him revealing himself, he’s still in the wilderness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn’t get like an apartment in town.

Fr. Stephen: And so there’s folks out there that need to hear this: The word “until” in the Bible doesn’t mean that something changed afterward.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it just means up to that point.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn’t say anything about what happens after. You know who you are. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, so living out there in the desert.

Fr. Stephen: So we have this one sentence: He is a child, is living out in the desert, and growing up out in the wilderness. That’s the only reference we have. Now, Church Tradition, which is a fancy way of saying the history of the Church that’s been handed down to us—and we’ve talked before about how modernism somehow thinks that history written down by pagans is history, and history written down by Christians is a pack o’ lies! but the reality is that it’s just as valid, if not more so, when written by Christians. So they fill that out with this story that, as part of Herod’s murders, his slaughters of the innocents, as you were describing, they came for St. John, and when his father, St. Zacharias, at the Temple, refused to reveal his location, they killed him, and then his mother, St. Elizabeth, took St. John out into the wilderness as an infant and ended up dying there 40 years later.

Fr. Andrew: 40 days later.

Fr. Stephen: 40 days later, sorry. 40 days, yeah. 40 days later. So then St. John grew up in the wilderness, not alone, but with the angels.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Basically, he was fostered by angels.

Fr. Stephen: So he was living this same kind of life that we see the prophets of the Old Testament leading. And there is actually another passage that refers to these events in the New Testament, but for reasons not entirely clear to me, people are very hostile towards reading this passage as endorsing what the Church has universally said about the childhood of St. John the Forerunner for 2,000 years.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so this is Matthew 23:34-35, and this is the Lord speaking. He says:

Therefore, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zachariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

So the traditional reading is that when Christ makes reference to this Zachariah who gets killed between the sanctuary and the altar, that this is in fact the Zachariah, father of St. John the Forerunner. Now, the problem with this, for those who don’t want to believe that this is the same one, is that this is a common name. Zachariah is a really common name.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, yeah. There’s a bunch of them. So for those who are motivated to just say that anything in Church Tradition is wrong for some reason—and these are mostly Christians, so, again, I don’t understand exactly why that’s your raison d’être, but, hey, that’s where we are—there’s a whole bunch of problems with reading… So, first of all, if you have, if he’s not… Well, let’s start here. The natural reading is that he’s talking about St. Zachariah, St. John’s father. And the reason I say it’s the natural reading is that you may have noticed, when Fr. Andrew was reading those two verses, that you—and it’s a plural “you”—

Fr. Andrew: Y’all.

Fr. Stephen: All y’all. [Laughter] —is used several times.

Fr. Andrew: I say, “You prophets, you abused them, you flogged them, you persecute them…”

Fr. Stephen: “You will do this…” That’s future tense! So he’s talking to the Pharisees and to the scribes. It’s very clear at the beginning, he’s sending to them, to the leaders of Judah, he’s sending them prophets, he’s sending the people, and they’re going to persecute them. “And then there will come on you—will come on the people I’m talking to—all that blood, from Abel to Zachariah, is going to come on you.” And then he says, “Zachariah, whom you killed.”

So to take this as not referring to someone who died real recently, unless this is someone who died in the last 40 years, the last generation, you have to say that that “you” means something different than all the other “you"s in those sentences.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which doesn’t make sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that’s the natural reading, is that this is something that just happened. Now, you can add to this the kind of preposterousness, or presposterosity—I don’t know what the word is [Laughter]—of the counter-suggestions. The funniest one that I’ve heard is someone who I guess was just reading this in the King James or something, and only in English, because they said, “Look, this is all the martyrs from A to Z.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Abel to Zachariah. Yeah, which, like… I mean, there is no “A to Z” in Hebrew or in Greek. That’s not the way those alphabets work.

Fr. Stephen: Famously, the Greek alphabet is Alpha and Omega. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Zeta is aways back.

Fr. Stephen: And not in Hebrew, not in Aramaic: Z is not the last letter. So that makes no sense. That’s kind of farcical.

Fr. Andrew: Or Zed for our commonwealth listeners.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Canada.

Fr. Stephen: Whither, Canada? Anyway. So one of the more common ones that’s not utterly ridiculous is people will point to the Zachariah, the priest who was killed in the Temple… By the way, “between the altar and the high place”—remember the altar of burnt-offering was sort of outside the central building, around the holy… This isn’t in the holy of holies; this is between the place where the holy place and the holy of holies were and the altar of burnt-offering that was outside, so this is in the Temple courts that people are being killed. So there is a Zechariah who is killed in the Temple in 2 Chronicles 24:20-21.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so some people suggest that that’s him instead.

Fr. Stephen: And I have a guess at the reason for this, and that’s that, in the ordering of what becomes the Hebrew Bible, once they collect all the books in Hebrew into the Hebrew Bible, 2 Chronicles is the last book.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so then this is again an A-to-Z sort of argument, Genesis to 2 Chronicles.

Fr. Stephen: Genesis is the first book. Abel, Genesis 4, all the way to the end of 2 Chronicles. So this is: “See it’s the whole ‘canonical Scriptures.’ ” So if you’re of the bent—and we all know whom we’re talking about—who hold the Hebrew Bible to be the canonical Scriptures, then you could say, “Ah!” And I have even heard people try to use this as a proof for the Hebrew canon! [Laughter] Turn it around and try to use it as a proof for the Hebrew canon.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a couple problems with this. Number one, the books hadn’t been compiled in this way yet when Jesus said it. So if you think Jesus actually said it, which I do, then that doesn’t work. There’s also the problem that that Zechariah in 2 Chronicles is the son of Jehoiada, not Berechiah. And you will get some people who engage in some extreme special pleading to try and say, “Well, Jehoiada’s grandfather? So he’s the son of both?” or something, but there’s no evidence of that in the Scripture; they’re just trying to come up with something.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s another candidate, which is the Zechariah who writes the book of prophecy in the book of prophecy in the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Called Zechariah, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And, and, slightly more believable, his father is named Berechiah, but, again, these are both really common names. But here’s the problem: that Zechariah was not murdered.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There is nothing in the Old Testament whatsoever indicating that he was murdered, and the earliest record that we have of his life, that Lives of the Prophets I mentioned earlier, the earliest Jewish source that we have, says that he died peacefully and at a ripe old age, not that he was murdered in the Temple. So that part doesn’t fit.

Now, Fr. Andrew has said a couple times now that Zechariah is a very common name. There are 27 Zechariahs in the Old Testament! 27 different people, identifiably different people named Zechariah. And Berechiah means “blessed by Yahweh,” so, again, very common name. So there is yet another Zechariah, who was murdered in the Temple, who is mentioned by Josephus, but he was murdered in the Temple in the 60s AD, so after Christ said this.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, decades after. So this would be… Yeah. Right.

Fr. Stephen: So you would think, and people present as an argument: Well, how many people named Zechariah do you know were murdered in the Temple? Well, at least two or three, based on the records we have!

Fr. Andrew: Right, this seems to be a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and one of the reasons why people get murdered in the Temple… Basically from the Hasmonean period on, a lot of people became high priest by assassinating the previous high priest. That was fairly common during that period. The Sadducees are not good folks! [Laughter] So there were, unfortunately.

All of that is to say that the Christian Tradition that we’ve received uniformly for 2,000 years about this being a reference to St. John’s father and him then going and being raised, living with the angels in the wilderness and coming of age there—just Occam’s razor, because the only thing that makes sense of the biblical and extra-biblical data that we have.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then the traditional Life of St. Elizabeth says that she dies 40 days after she takes John into the wilderness. The text that I looked at didn’t mention how she died, just said that she died. So the point is that he’s two years old, living out there in the wilderness, by the Jordan River, and being raised by angels. Angels are basically his foster parents, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Literally living the angelic life, in the way we talked about in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Now that might seem like a long sort of divergence, but it’s important to establish that his parents are dead from an early, early age, because it shows the way that he was formed. I don’t think there’s anyone else in Scripture or that we get who basically grows up as an angel, so to speak, than this man.

Fr. Stephen: The Theotokos is close.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right. Certainly, like we said, you get other prophets living the angelic life, but he’s getting it from the beginning, from being a two-year-old; I mean, he’s a toddler! And that’s the man that we meet out at the Jordan. But there are prophecies about him that connect him directly, and things said about him in the New Testament that directly connect him to the prophet that we talked about in Act 1, and that’s the Prophet Elijah or Elias.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s not just that he lived the prophetic life and is a continuation of the Old Testament prophets, but there is also a particular connection between him and St. Elias, the Prophet Elijah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a couple of very famous passages from the prophecy of Malachi. So you’ve got Malachi 3:1:

Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says Yahweh, Lord Sabaoth (Lord of hosts).

And then Malachi 4:5-6:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the Prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes, and he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.

So there’s this prophecy about Elijah coming back, this messenger being sent to prepare the way before the Lord comes to his temple and the day of the Lord comes. So this is there, that Elijah’s coming back.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we see this—this is the concern for God’s holiness again.

Fr. Andrew: Right, death by holiness.

Fr. Stephen: If God just shows up, there’s going to be utter destruction if there’s no preparation, because of his holiness. And so he’s sending this messenger to prepare them by turning their hearts—this idea of repentance. He’s going to send someone to bring about repentance, so that those who repent will not be destroyed; those who don’t will be. So we could call those who do repent and are purified through this—the remnant. Here’s the remnant idea coming back and being associated with this ministry of Elijah when he comes.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, and this is what St. John preaches out there at the Jordan. There’s that point where he says, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come?” He asks, “Did you come out here to see a reed shaken in the wilderness?” But he is—by his preaching, he’s fulfilling this prophecy about him, which is specifically about avoiding wrath that is to come. St. John is out there, gathering this remnant together by his preaching, by his baptism.

Fr. Stephen: And calling them to repentance, baptizing them for repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, and telling them how to repent. “You soldiers repent this way, you parents…” He’s giving specific pastoral instructions. “This is how you repent.”

Fr. Stephen: They have to do something? Not just feel bad?

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! They have to do something, not just feel bad. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Wow. I’ve also always been a fan of how St. John greeted inquirers, which is: “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath that is coming?” I think we should put that on a sign over the door of our churches, just to greet people who show up for the first time. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, this is exactly what he’s preaching, exactly what Malachi was talking about. And the other main passage from the Old Testament that’s quoted in terms of St. John the Forerunner’s ministry—and when I say one of the main one’s that’s quoted, all four gospel writers—this is one of those rare things where even St. John’s gospel is aligned with the synoptics—is Isaiah 40:3.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, this is the very famous, probably the most famous prophecy about St. John the Forerunner: “A voice cries: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” And then it goes on to say every valley is going to be exalted, every mountain brought low, etc. So, okay, why…? A lot of times that this gets quoted, it’s about the punctuation. A voice, some will say: A voice, crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord! The ESV, which is what I just read from, has: “A voice cries: In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” So what’s the difference there, and why does that matter?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the ESV is right on that, in my non-humble opinion. And because the way that’s read is “A voice crying in the wilderness,” comma, and people sort of ignore the quote. It’s like “voice crying in the wilderness”: “Oh, yeah. St. John’s out in the wilderness, yelling.” [Laughter] “So that’s him, right, see? Prophecy fulfilled.” But the focus is on preparing the way of the Lord in the wilderness, because this is part of a prophecy about the end of the exile.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and look at what the next thing it says. It talks about valleys being exalted and hills being brought— It’s literally talking about things happening in the wilderness.

Fr. Stephen: It’s making a road from Babylon to Jerusalem so that the remnant, who has been preserved through the exile, can return home. That’s what the prophecy is about. So that’s what St. John is doing, and that’s what they’re saying with this quote. The quote isn’t just of one line and superficial things—“he’s in the desert, wilderness: there you go”—it’s bringing to mind that whole passage, that this is what St. John is about, this is what he’s doing. Preparing a way is literally a way, a road, a path, and he is preparing it, and he is gathering this remnant.

So then we get, at the end of the main part of St. John’s story in the gospels, we get this transition at the Jordan, just like we saw with St. Elias and Elisha, where St. John hands over to Christ that remnant who’s been purified by baptism and repentance. He gives that remnant over to him to be now the starting point of his people.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I have to point out that one of the people who is part of that remnant is my patron saint, the Apostle Andrew. He’s explicitly described as a disciple of St. John, and then John’s like, “Okay, he’s yours now, Jesus.”

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I thought you were going to say St. Stephen.

Fr. Andrew: Well, he’s all right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I was going to correct you… I want to continue to confuse people about what your name is. [Laughter] Right, and we see in our hymnography and in our iconography, again, as we’ve commented on before, that hymnography, that iconography talks about and depicts the Jordan parting.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s this echo, then, of what happens with Elisha—the Jordan parts as part of that handover—and it’s not explicit in the Scripture, but iconographically, hymnographically, we talk about “Jordan turned back.” If you’ve ever gone to the Theophany services, especially the Great Blessing of the Water, you hear the priest say that over and over again, “Jordan turned back; Jordan turned back.” There’s this idea that it parts when this handover happens, from John to Jesus now. So, again, this other echo from Elijah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s… So we’ve got… St. John has the same kind of lifestyle—this angelic life, this prophetic life—that Elijah does. He’s doing the things that these Old Testament prophecies predicted Elijah would do when he comes. And then, probably the most superficial one, but nonetheless worth mentioning, is that they look alike and dress alike. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah. So you’ve got 2 Kings 1:8 and Matthew 3:4. Here’s the 2 Kings reference. “They answered him: He wore a garment of hair with a belt of leather about his waist. And he said: It is Elijah the Tishbite.” That’s about Elijah. Matthew 3:4: “Now John wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt about his waist, and his food was locusts and honey.” So, yeah, they even look alike; they dress alike. And then what’s funny then, okay, it becomes very explicit in multiple passages in the New Testament (Matthew 11:7-15 and 17:10-13, and then Mark 9:11-13—I’m just reading them off so you can look them up later, folks), but all of those basically, someone says, “Yes, this is Elijah. Yeah, this is Elijah.”

Fr. Stephen: The question comes up: “Are you Elijah?” And all those are basically saying, “Yes, he’s Elijah.”

Fr. Andrew: And then John himself, John 19:1-22, is basically John saying, “No, I’m not.” [Laughter] What’s that about? How can he both…? Why would John deny it if Jesus is saying, yeah, he’s Elijah?

Fr. Stephen: I think we found a contradiction in the Bible, so we’re just going to have to chuck this whole thing and go home.

Fr. Andrew: Good night, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, so there’s this idea communicated that he is and he isn’t. And part of the way through this, the way to understand what this relationship is, where he is and he isn’t, comes through going back a little and looking at the prophecy that was made to his father, St. Zachariah, before his birth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, back in Luke 1:13-17. You’ll hear this at the feasts of his—I think of his conception and also of his birth, if I remember correctly.

But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zachariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”

I mean, when Zachariah heard that, I’m sure he thought, “Wait, wait, wait, wait! Malachi 4”—oh, they wouldn’t have had verses or whatever. [Laughter] But I’m sure he was thinking of that passage from Malachi 4, because it says: I will send you Elijah the Prophet. He’ll turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, the hearts of children to their fathers. I mean, it’s just… It echoes it directly. This is an angel speaking to Zachariah.

Fr. Stephen: You see all that Malachi language, but note here the language used about Elijah, that he comes— He doesn’t say that he’s going to be Elijah reincarnated.

Fr. Andrew: No, in the spirit.

Fr. Stephen: He says, “In the spirit and power of Elijah.” Where have we seen that kind of language before? Well, at the transition from St. Elias, from Elijah to Elisha, where he wants a double portion of his, of Elijah’s, spirit. And so what this is setting up is the idea that, in the same way, Elisha continued to have this relationship with his friend and mentor, who had now been exalted to the heavenly places, in the same way now St. John has a relationship with St. Elias, who has been exalted to the heavenly places and is part of the divine council, and so would have been one of those beings whom he was growing up among, out there in the wilderness.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that he would have known him, because he’s living in the divine council. Yeah, and so there’s this reference— And it’s funny, because until we started talking about this, I didn’t read this this way, but now it makes sense. So John 1:33, so this is John the Forerunner speaking, talking about recognizing Jesus.

I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.”

Now, most of the time I read that, that phrase, “He who sent me to baptize,” I always thought, “Okay, well, God sent John to baptize.” But if God appears to John the Forerunner, who is that that’s appearing to him? That’s going to be the Son of God, because that’s who appears to people. Why would he appear and say, “Now you’re going to recognize me because the Holy Spirit’s going to descend on me.” He would probably say, “Well, won’t you just look like I see you now?”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and while St. John is sent to go start baptizing, the second Person of the Trinity is living in Nazareth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, already incarnate, living in Nazareth. So “he who sent me to baptize,” it makes sense, then, to read this as Elijah sent him to baptize and said, “This is how you’re going to recognize the Son of God when you see him.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we see this pattern that when one of the prophets, one of the human prophets, is in the divine council, in these scenes where they’re commissioned for example, like the Prophet Isaiah, there’s an angelic being who comes and is sort of their guide and explains things to them and shows things to them and interacts with them. This happens with Isaiah; you see this happen with Daniel in his visions; you see this happen with St. John in the Apocalypse: in the book of Revelation, he has these angelic beings who show him things and explain things to him and tell him—he asks them questions; they tell him. So presumably, as St. John is living the angelic life, he has someone who is his guide, and we’ve been told that he’s coming in the spirit and power of Elijah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it makes sense that that’s his guide. And we see this outside Scripture, too: obviously Enoch, in that text he’s guided by an angel. And of course, the one that probably everyone’s already got in their mind now: Dante, being guided when he makes his trip into paradise. So, yeah, powerful, powerful stuff. Okay, well, we are going to go ahead and go to break, and we are going to be right back and talk some more about St. John the Forerunner.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, welcome back to the third half—yes, I mean to say third half. We do have a couple callers on the line. We’ve got Samuel calling from Virginia. Samuel, are you there? All right.

Fr. Stephen: Speak to us, Samuel!

Fr. Andrew: Samuel, are you there?

Fr. Stephen: Are you all right?

Samuel: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Okay! [Laughter]

Samuel: I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome!

Samuel: So my question is about how a lot of the talk of God speaking through the prophets in the Old Testament, it focuses on the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, but how much of a presence is the second Person, the Son, in speaking through the prophets explicitly in the Old Testament?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m going to have Fr. Stephen mostly answer this, but I want to just begin by saying, in many cases it says, “And the word of the Lord came to”—fill in the name of the prophet. And who is— I mean, the word of the Lord is the Lord Jesus Christ; that’s the Son of God. So, Fr. Stephen, take it away.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, because there’s a bunch of examples. One of them is when Samuel is being called. At the beginning of that story, it says, at that time—I think King James says there was a “poverty” of the word of God; there was a lack of the word of God. Then it says, “There were not many visions.” It doesn’t say people weren’t hearing from God; it says there were not many visions. And then the word of God comes to Samuel and stands at the side of his bed. And there’s a place with Jeremiah where the Lord comes to him and touches him. So the word of the Lord is used in this sort of bodily way to represent a person throughout the Old Testament.

And one of the key words for prophets in the Old Testament is actually seer, s-e-e-r. So we have in the contemporary West kind of the weird idea of Old Testament prophets basically based on them hearing a voice in their head, and then maybe associate that with the Holy Spirit, or maybe even more subtle than that, that the Holy Spirit is sort of nudging them or giving them ideas or just making sure they do and say the right things, but in the text of the Scriptures itself, what you see prophets doing is having visions, entering the council of God, where the word of God, the second Person of the Trinity, is, and he commissions them, talks to them, and sends them. And that’s why, as we were talking about in the first half, this is why what happens with St. Paul on the road to Damascus is in such total continuity with what happens with the prophets.

And this is what St. John is getting at, sort of as a summary statement. St. John says at the end of his Prologue to the gospel; he says, “No one has seen God at any time, but the unique God who is in the bosom of the Father has made him known.” He’s not saying, “Hey, you remember all those times in the Old Testament where people said they saw God? No, that’s all bogus; nobody saw him until Jesus came,” because that doesn’t make any sense. St. John clearly believes that all that happened in the Old Testament. What he’s saying is, all those times where it says that they saw God in the Old Testament and interacted with him and he spoke to them, that was Christ. That was the second Person of the Trinity; that was the Word of God, capital-W, the Logos, whom they saw and heard from and interacted with, and now has become flesh and dwelt among us.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Does that make sense, Samuel?

Samuel: Oh, yeah, it does. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, great. All right. So we’re having a couple of audio issues with Fr. Stephen’s connection. So, Fr. Stephen, I’m just going to ask you to switch over to the other system that we have. But meanwhile, I’m going to attempt to take Christopher on my own while he does this. So, Christopher, calling from, again, the holy state of Virginia. I think I hear a plane going over there in Virginia, so, Christopher, are you there?

Christopher: Yes, I am. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we can hear you. What’s your question or your comment, Christopher?

Christopher: And forgive me for the background noise. I’m on a train.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, you are on a train. All right!

Christopher: Yeah, sorry about that. My question was about St. John the Baptist, and I recently was reading some work from a Catholic scholar who said that St. John the Baptist was part of the Essene community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls—not the same one, but of a similar community; that’s whom he was living with while he was in the desert, that he wasn’t alone. And I haven’t heard about him being with the angels like you guys were just now talking about, and that whole thing. Or it could be that he was living the angelical lifestyle like modern-day monks do, away in the desert. I want to get you guys’ comments on that, if that was a plausible interpretation of history and St. John the Baptist and the Dead Sea Scrolls and how that applies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, I think we’ve got Fr. Stephen back on, but the first thing I’ll just say is… I mean, in the Scripture it talks about him living… There’s no indication that there’s anyone else out there living with him, that he is alone, essentially. When it says that he… I’m going to look at the verse actually here. Yeah, it says, “The child grew and became strong in the Spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day of his public appearance to Israel.” That’s Luke 1:80. It makes no references to St. Elizabeth taking him out there and handing him over to a community that’s out there of human beings. The Church’s Tradition is that he was there, living the angelic life. But, Fr. Stephen, are you able to connect now? Are you there?

Fr. Stephen: Can you hear me now?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah! I hear you. All right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Good. So the question is about whether St. John was with a community? I missed a bit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, whether he was part of the Essenes is part of the question.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, right. So there’s a lot of vagary about who and what an Essene does. So Josephus refers to the Essenes, and, for example, most people now think that Qumran, the group at Qumran, the Qurman community, was part of the Essenes, but even that is questionable, because we don’t know that the Essenes was a big, organized group, and the group at Qumran, for example, was clearly not: they were a separatist group; they weren’t sort of in line with anybody else. They were sort of fundamentalists, and, ironically enough, Old Calendarists. That’s why they split. [Laughter]

But, yeah, so the idea of Essenes is historically tenuous. There’s a lot of… Most of what you read when you read about the Essenes is conjecture. It’s assuming certain groups were Essenes that were never explicitly called Essenes and didn’t call themselves Essenes. But, yeah, it was saying, when I reconnected here, there is no discussion of any “group” with St. John anywhere in the Scriptures or anywhere in the Tradition. But most of the Essene groups, and the group we have at Qumran, where we have a lot of information, the Dead Sea, that they represent sort of what an Essene was. There really aren’t a lot of things connecting St. John to that.

The Qumran community, for example, split over the calendar. They followed the Enochic calendar. They believed that the Pharisees were liberals for using sort of an updated calendar based on the old. And the Sadducees who used the Julian calendar were right out, because the Julian calendar was clearly a pagan Roman calendar for Jewish groups of the first century. That’s the main reason they split, and what they did was they went out in the desert as a community and reconstructed a version of Temple rites, because they said Herod’s Temple wasn’t legitimate, and they reconstructed the Temple rites there so that they could carry on the worship—not including sacrifices, but so that they could continue worshiping God themselves, that that community could be the faithful remnant, the only remnant that was saved. And they believed that following the calendar and conducting this ritual was the way it effectively oriented yourself toward God.

And there’s nothing about any of that with St. John. You [don’t] read about him doing any ritual worship, any calendar, feast days. So the things that were sort of centrally important… I mean, the book of Enoch… There are more copies of the book of Enoch [than any other] book, other than Genesis. The book of Enoch, that I believe it is… and the fourth is [Jude]. And a huge portion of Enoch is laying out the calendar they were using, “proving” that it’s divinely given. So there isn’t a lot of evidence to suggest that there’s any connection to that and St. John being…

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we’re unfortunately losing Fr. Stephen from his connection again. But, Fr. Stephen, hopefully you can hear me. I’m just going to ask you to call in on the regular 855-AF-RADIO, and hopefully we can get him on the phone, because it’s just been super, super choppy here this evening. All right, well, so is that useful to you, Christopher? I hope you were able to get something from some of that. I’m sorry about the bad connection.

Christopher: Oh, no, that’s fine. I know that it’s a relatively complex subject and that modern scholarly work we should take with a grain of salt, in terms of referencing it back to what’s always been known to the Church. I have a Catholic background, but I’m currently Orthodox, and so I understand a little bit between this current scholarly work and what the Church has always taught. [Inaudible]

Fr. Andrew: All right. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is just that what we see, actually see in Scripture, doesn’t indicate that he’s with anybody else. So conjecture can be interesting, but the Tradition that we’ve received just simply makes more sense, and actually makes better sense of what’s actually there in the Scripture.

Okay, so, Fr. Stephen, do we have you back on the phone now? Okay, John is still working on trying to get him on there.

So just to kind of roll along—thank you very much for calling, everybody. The last thing that we wanted to talk about with regards to St. John—and I think if you’ve been listening to what we’ve been saying about St. Elijah, then this will become very clear; you’ll kind of know where we’re going with this, and that is that St. John is part of the divine council. Now, we saw Elijah taken up on the chariot of fire to become part of the divine council and functioning as this guide now for the Forerunner, who comes in his spirit and power. So what does St. John do as part of the divine council? So he’s growing up in the divine council, but then, especially after his beheading, which, on the new calendar, we’re about to celebrate that feast in just a couple days here on Sunday—after his beheading, he takes up his place on the divine council.

And if you look at the iconostasis in most Orthodox churches, or if you especially look at an icon that is called the Deisis icon, what you see there is Christ on his throne—so he’s seated on his throne. At his right hand is his Mother, and we’ve talked about why she’s there at his right hand. There is an episode that we did late last year called “The Queen Stood at [Thy] Right Hand,” so go listen to that if you’re interested in that; it’s fascinating stuff. But at his left hand is St. John the Forerunner. At his left is St. John the Forerunner. Fr. Stephen, if you’re there, why would he be at the left hand? This is now the third connect, by the way, that we’ve gotten him with us! So why would he be at the left hand?

Fr. Stephen: This is how we celebrate— Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Okay, good. Can you hear me now now? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this is how we celebrate our one-year anniversary, is technical difficulties!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right? Yeah, but it brings me back.

Fr. Stephen: I kind of warned you this would happen due to the seasonal weather out here! So we talked about, in that episode, “The Queen Stood at [Thy] Right Hand,” about how the royal court of David in particular was an icon of the divine council, of the heavenly council. And so in the same way that we see the Queen Mother at the right hand of David, at the left hand of David is the prophet of the Lord who was there in the court. And we see several episodes… St. Elias was sort of Ahab’s prophet, or should have been—he did barge in, but, [Nathan] for example, would have had a more clear role, and Samuel before him. So we see St. John again taking that place as the fulfillment of that role is one reason why he’s there at the left hand.

And then there’s also the tradition within the Church that St. John, as he experiences theosis and takes his place in the divine council, replaces the devil, who fell. And the devil, as we talked about, way back when, is described as having been a cherub; we talked about how the serpent description is connected to the idea of a seraph, seraf being the Egyptian word for a serpent. And that is a throne guardian, a protector of the throne, someone who… and protecting it in terms of protecting the holiness; that’s why there’s a cherub at the gate of paradise, to protect, keep people out and protect them from the holiness. So we can see St. John taking that role near the throne of Christ, and what of course, once his ministry on earth was: “Repent, because the kingdom of God is at hand. You need to repent; you need to turn your heart back so that you will not face the wrath, so that you will not be destroyed by God’s holiness.” Not gatekeeping in the sense of trying to throw people out, but trying to prepare them to be able to come in. So his standing at the left hand of the throne is a continuation of that ministry as well.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, and we mentioned—I think we mentioned the angel wings. I’m sorry. I got a little discombobulated by the audio issues, but that’s okay. He’s depicted often with wings in many icons of him—not every icon, but certainly a lot of icons of him, he’s got wings. Often people say, “Well, it’s because he’s like an angel”—literally true, but it’s not that angels have wings; it’s that wings are used as a way to signal that the figure you’re looking at is a messenger, because a messenger is expected to go fast. So wings on a bird or whatever enable it to go fast, enable it to fly really quickly. So when St. John’s depicted with wings, it’s not to say that he has the same nature as the angelic beings; it’s that he’s functioning in the same role that they do, as one who is sent from God to speak on behalf of God. So that’s what’s going on with the wings. But, again, he’s closely associated with the angelic hosts because that’s what he’s doing: their task. He’s being one of them; he’s being part of the heavenly hosts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he is. Now, continuing to share in the life of the angels, but in the same way that we see St. Elias making this transition. We see Elijah who’s already living the angelic life on earth, already participating in the divine council, the spiritual world on earth; he comes to sort of the fullness of that as he goes into the heavenly places.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Beautiful. All right, well, we’ve now gone on for two hours and 20 minutes just about, so I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap up our conversation. I mean, there’s so much more we could say about this awesome, awesome saint, like the fact that, according to our Tradition, that he’s the Forerunner of Christ even into Hades and preaches the Gospel there to those, both to the departed righteous and also the wicked spirits that are in Hades, for whom it is not good news. It is good news for the righteous, obviously. But perhaps we’ll just have to save a lot of that for another time.

I wanted to make a few final comments, and it’s something we’ve been sort of hinting at a lot along the way but did not actually use the particular term, and that’s this question of patron saints. So we see this relationship between Elijah and John set up in the Scriptures. It’s demonstrated very, very well. You’ve got prophecies about St. John the Forerunner, talking about him being in the spirit of Elijah; that prophecy directly from the angel to his father, talking about him in this way. It’s brought up again and again in the gospels. He does the things that Elijah does. He’s clearly connected with him, and he’s not just meant to remind us of Elijah, but it’s clear that Elijah is part of his life, because he’s connected to the divine council where Elijah lives and functions.

This is a patron saint. This is how a patron saint functions. So if you have a patron saint, you look at elements from that saint’s life, and you try to imitate them—in the way that’s appropriate to you. But then also you look to them for guidance. They are there to guide you in the divine council, because they’re part of it. They’re there to lead the way for you, to show you what to do, sometimes to send you to do what it is that God would have you do. That’s why we have patron saints. We often bear their name. Right, now, St. John did not bear the name of Elijah—they don’t have the same name—but over and over again, he’s basically called Elijah in one way or another. So even though he didn’t literally have Elijah’s name, he comes in the name of Elijah in a very real and powerful sense.

Patron saints… Sometime when people become Orthodox, they… Acquiring a patron saint becomes kind of a difficult thing, like: “Oh, I like this one; I don’t like this one, or I feel attracted to this one or not this one” or whatever. Most people get their patron saints by simply being born and their parents assign, with the help of God—their parents assign that name to them, by naming them after that person. But can you have more than one? Yeah! You can have more than one saint who functions in this way for you. That’s definitely a thing. The idea of patron saints is a concept that existed in the ancient world, even outside of Christian theology and practice. You’ve got the ancient Roman concept of patronage, where an established person in the community has what they would call a client—we don’t use that word in quite that way in our time—but they would have someone, usually a younger person, who’s being introduced into public and civic life, and the patron helps to provide for them, introduces them into it, supports them. And then the younger person, by excelling, is a credit, then, to the patron. That’s the way that it works in the Roman world, and it’s clear that this kind of arrangement is happening with St. Elijah and St. John the Forerunner.

But you can have multiple patron saints. Many of us have multiple names—first name, middle name—and you might have a family patron saint at the same time. You have the saint who’s assigned to your church. You might have a saint who is the patron of your nation. All of these saints can help you. All of the angels and saints can help you, so it’s not that there’s just one. And, you know, people can actually have their main patron saint changed in their life. Like when someone becomes a monastic, their name is changed out, and they have a new patron saint assigned to them by the abbot when they get that new monastic name. So when you’re thinking about what the relationship of a patron saint to the Christian is, this is what you should think about. Look at this relationship between Elijah and John.

Now, most of us are not sent in the spirit and power of Elijah, but we are sent to be a credit to the saint that we’re named after, and we should look to them, and we should look to that name of theirs that we bear as being providential from God, whether it’s one that you chose when you became an Orthodox Christian, and maybe the priest said, “Okay, you can choose one,” or one that was assigned to you by virtue of being born and your parents being assigned to you, or, in many cases, people who convert to the Orthodox Church, the priest assigns it to them, or having it assigned to you if you become a monastic. These are all ways you can have a patron assigned to you. It’s just as much of a blessing. Sometimes the assignment is actually more a blessing, in some ways, than picking somebody, because you’re receiving that in humility and obedience.

So it’s a beautiful, beautiful relationship. That person does not get between you and God. That person is there to lead you to God. They are a guide in salvation, a guide in the divine council. They’re not someone who stands between you and God. That’s ridiculous, and they would never see themselves that way. It’s a wonderful, amazing, remarkable, powerful, helpful relationship that we as Christians can have, to have these guides, these patron saints to help us out along the way.

Fr. Stephen? Your final comments.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about… We brushed on a few places, including answering one of the questions we answered tonight, on the fact that even when we’re talking about people like St. Elias and St. John the Forerunner, who lived alone out in the wilderness for a good chunk of their life, they still experienced what they experienced and did what they did and were working toward the purposes of God in terms of a community, not just the community of the prophets that we talked about, that we saw that the Prophet Samuel was a leader of and that Elisha went to, but in terms of the people of Israel, the people of the northern kingdom who were apostates to paganism, essentially, but who— The Prophet Elijah’s whole purpose, and these great spiritual victories he wins are all in an attempt to win them back to their first love, an attempt to bring them back to Yahweh. They are the important thing, that community, the people, that remnant within the broader community.

And we tend very much as [modern Westerners] to not think in terms of community. We tend to think in terms of individuals, our self as an individual. When we think about family, we don’t think about a big extended family; we think about: mom, dad, kids. We think about the nuclear family, this small unit. And we have certain responsibilities within that small unit and nothing outside of it. Even when we approach salvation, even when we approach Church, we approach it as individuals, and sometimes even as consumers.

So for most of history, the church sat in the middle of a village, and the people who went to that church were the people who lived in the village. So their worship life, their ritual life, everything that happened in the church, was one with the rest of the life of the community. Everyone knew each other, and they were worshiping and praying together, and then doing business with each other and living next to each other as neighbors, participating in all the aspects of community life. We don’t have that any more in the United States. We live in cities—I live in a city with dozens of churches. Those churches are broken up ethnically, racially, economically. There’s different groups that go to different churches. We look at religion as sort of like a hobby that some people have and some people don’t, and what they’re into is different depending on who they are. And they go as an individual to the place of their choice—or nowhere if that’s their choice—and try to get what they want out of the experience, and then kind of come home.

But that’s not how salvation works, because that’s not how God works. God doesn’t work just with isolated individuals by themselves, unrelated to anyone else or anything else. The work that God is doing involves everyone. It involves the whole community. To experience salvation is to be part of something, and to become part of something. So our lives as Christians have to become part of the life of a Christian community, and that doesn’t just mean staying for coffee hour and chit-chatting a little bit; that means really getting to know the people in our church and having our church become a community, become people we talk to, not just on Sunday, not just when we bump into each other at church; people who we know what’s going on in their life and they know what’s going on in ours; people who, when they see our kids acting up, straighten them out for us, or when they see us acting up, straighten us out; that we’re responsible to all the time; that we’re in communication with all the time; that we love all the time—so that what we do in worship is the fulfillment of that relationship and that love and that joy that we share with each other all the time every day, everywhere we go, because God doesn’t save any of us as individuals, and he doesn’t save us as individuals as an end in itself. What

God did in the life of St. Elias, what he did in the life of St. John the Forerunner, was not just “Oh, he picked them to give them these special blessings and experiences and to have this role in heaven,” but he picked them to bless the world. He picked them to proclaim a message to bring salvation to countless people, to countless generations of people in the case of those two men. So if we’re working out our salvation and God is saving us and we’re being saved, it’s because God wants to use us to do a whole lot more than just try to get our own act straightened out. It’s to get our act straightened out, and to do that by blessing the world, beginning with our community, beginning with our churches. So that’s—if it was audible in its entirety, or near so—is my final comment. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. All right, well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d 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. We read everything, listen to everything, but can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you’re sending us an angry screed about why you’re not listening any more, in which case, don’t bother. [Laughter] 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.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and God bless you through the prayers of his Forerunner.