Fr. Thomas Hopko: Thank you very much for having me. You can thank Fr. Roberto, extra extra, because when I first got the invitation, I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t come,” because I had a big conference to do this past weekend and just finished on Sunday night, and then with the nuns—it’s a monastery of women, so with the nuns we had vigil on Monday for the angels, and then Liturgy yesterday, and I just thought I’m not going to be able to do it. I’m trying to cut back on these kind of things. But then I got one of the most memorable two-page, single-spaced letters that I ever received in my life! [Laughter] And so here I am, so you can blame Father.

I would like to just mention in the beginning that those catechetical books, called The Orthodox Faith, the handbook, they’re being expanded to six books. They were four; they’re now in the process of being expanded to six. The Bible and Church history is going to be two separate books, and there will be a new book just on Jesus Christ, reflecting on the 55 names and titles of Christ in the New Testament Scriptures. If you want a sneak preview of that, you could go on Ancient Faith Radio, and there’s 55 reflections on the radio—it’s through a computer—taking every one of the names and titles of Jesus and 27 books of the New Testament and reflecting on them and their relation to the Old Testament.

But tonight we’re going to speak about Christ and the poor. If you saw the title, I said, “Christ and the Poor: Why Not?” because when Father asked me to speak about it, I said, “Why not Christ and the poor?” So he wrote “Christ and the Poor: Why Not?” [Laughter] But I think it’s obvious that we have to— Father said that what he wanted was more of a theological foundation and theological vision for the kind of work that is being done here. So that’s what I’m going to do now. I’m going to try to present to you a kind of a theological vision of how we understand the relationship of God and poverty and the poor, the needy. That’s what I’m planning to do right now. Hopefully I’ll speak for a little less than an hour and we’ll have a chance to discuss.

I think this might be being taped. It’s fine if it is. But here I just would mention, there is a CD already on—it’s pretty much the same topic as tonight, which already exists. It was done for the International Orthodox Christian Charities a few years ago. They called the title “Almsgiving,” and that’s kind of a little bit misleading, because, as you know, in the English language, the center of the Christian Torah, the [Sermon] on the Mount, they say in English, “When you give alms, when you pray, and when you fast,” and those are the three things that go together. However, that expression, “give alms,” it’s not at all what it says in Greek or Slavonic or Latin or any other language; only in English it says, “when you give alms.” It literally says, “When you do acts of mercy. When you poies eleemosynen; when you do acts of mercy.” And we’re going to speak about this “acts of mercy” relative to God and Christ and ourselves.

So the title’s a little misleading, but I can leave these two with you, Father, and you can have them. If anybody would like them, you can get them through the IOCC most likely. Okay?

Okay, it’s certainly foundational, basic, essential teaching of Orthodox Christianity—the Scriptures, the Fathers, the saints, the services—that human beings, all human beings, whether they like it or not, know it or not, want it or not, are created in the image and according to the likeness of God. And that means that there’s no definition of human life without reference to God. But to the reference with the real God, the true God, the only God that there is. And in the Scripture the problem is not atheism; it’s idolatry. There’s many gods, many lords.

And according to our saints like Macarius of Egypt, everybody has a god. It’s either the God that made us in his image and likeness to share his divine life and to be by grace everything that God himself is just by being God. He gives to his people not all that he has but all that he is, and he really wants human beings to become divine and to live a divine life. So, as St. Paul writes to the Ephesians that the— to be a Christian— Well, Gregory of Nyssa calls it “an imitation of God.” Dionysian writers call it an imitation, a resemblance, and a participation in the very energies and life and virtues of God Almighty himself. And that’s what we are created for.

And if we are not living in the image and likeness of the real God, the true God, the only God there is, then we are in fact worshiping and you might even say living according to the image of the god that we create, the gods that we make up, which are no gods at all. Here it’s important for us Orthodox and people who are thinking about these things to know that some idols are pretty obvious. Nebuchadnezzar’s hunkety-bunk of junk outside the city wall, or the baalim stones and whatever. I mean, idolatrous gods. But the New Testament speaks about greed as idolatry. St. Paul says, “Flee philargyria which is idolatreia. Flee the love of money. Flee being mercenary. That is idolatry.” He also speaks about people whose god is their belly. John Cassian speaks about people whose god is another part of their body in the same general region.

So there’s all kinds of gods and many gods and many lords, but we Christians believe that everything has to do with Jesus of Nazareth; everything has to do with his God, the God that he reveals, who is his Abba Father, and whose divinity he shares from all eternity. Our God is the God of Christ. Our God is the God of Christ, and therefore it’s the God of the 27 books of the New Testament that we believe are the accurate teachings about Christ.

And you may know that at the time of Jesus lots of stuff was written. There were more spurious and false books written than the ones that we believe are true and dependable—and they’re making a come-back now. If you look at Discovery Channel, History Channel, we call them pseudoepigrapha, false writings, Gnostic writings, Gospel of Judas, Mary Magdalene, all those kind of things. For us, that is not a valid, true testimony. The true testimony are the books of the New Testament, 27 of them: the four gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul; then you have the letters of Peter, James, John, Jude; and then the Apocalypse of John. That’s foundational for us.

And those Scriptures interpret the Old Testament. They interpret the Tanakh of Israel: the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets. And we believe that every single word of the Bible, beginning with the first words of Genesis: it’s all ultimately about Christ. It’s all prefiguring, foreshadowing, being a pedagogy, preparing people for the coming of the Messiah Christ, Jesus the Messiah, who is the Christ. “Messiah” obviously means “Christ” in Hebrew, Aramaic; in Greek-speaking languages, it’s “Christ, Christos, the Anointed.”

So when we want to answer any kind of question that we would ask, we begin with the Christ who is crucified, raised, glorified, who reveals God to the world, the one, true, living God who is his Father. And he reveals that God when he’s crucified. Ultimately, that’s the ultimate act of revelation. The cross is not concealing God; the cross is revealing God, and that’s going to be very important when we speak about poverty and being poor.

So what we want to say is that we’re made in the image and likeness of God, and that image and likeness of God according to which we are all created is Jesus Christ. You know, sometimes people say it’s our soul. Some Church Fathers even say that. Forgive me, but I don’t think that’s accurate; I don’t think it’s true. Human beings have a rational, spiritual soul, and if you didn’t have it, you couldn’t be made in God’s image and likeness, but we just had the angels the day before yesterday and they are pure minds, pure spirits, but it’s not said that they’re made in God’s image and likeness. It’s said that they are God’s ministering servants for our salvation, and we will sit on thrones with Jesus, even judging all the angelic hosts. And our holy Panagia Theotokos is always sung as “more honorable than cherubim, beyond compare more glorious than seraphim,” and those are the highest orders of the angelic hosts and the angelic choirs.

St. Paul says it particularly. He says the light that shone for Moses on the mountain and so on now shines from the face of Christ, apo tou prosopou Kyriou, from the face of Christ, hos estini ton eikon tou Theou, who is the icon of God. And then he says in Colossian letter: He is the icon of the invisible God. In the letter to the Hebrews it says he is the exact image of the Father’s person. In St. John’s gospel in the prologue it says no one has seen God, but the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only-begotten God.

Then in St. John’s gospel again, when Jesus at the Supper is teaching the disciples directly—no longer in parables, but directly—Philip says, “Show us the Father, and we’ll be satisfied.” And Jesus says, “Have I been with you so long?” He’s kind of miffed, Jesus. Sometimes he gets angry. It proves that anger is not a sin. It just depends why you get angry and what you do about it. But in any case, he says, “He who sees me has seen the Father.” So for us, the ultimate, unsurpassable revelation of God on the planet earth is Jesus the Christ, particularly in his Passion, his suffering, his death, his victory over death, his exaltation, his being enthroned at the Father’s right hand. And that then shows us in the most perfect, final form—you might dare to say anything we really want to know about God, that’s the way that we have to come to try to understand.

So what we are going to do right now is to apply that method to the issue of the poor, the needy. You see, how is it that understood if you’re a Christian? The easy, for a little short talk like tonight—an easy way to go about it, a rather simple, direct way, is to say: How does God go about it? Because if we’re in the image of God, if Christianity is a mimeses of God, an imitation of God, if we’re supposed to be God-like, if we are supposed to actually become divine in our humanity by the activity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and the life of the Church, then we can say that we have to act the way God acts. That’s what we’ve got to do: we’ve got to act the way God acts; we’ve got to do what God does.

Basically, right from the beginning, we could say what that means, in its most simple and deepest, highest, fullest form, it means that we have to love the way God loves. Now, what we know, that in the Christian Scripture, the first letter of John, it says we love one another because he loved us first. And then it says God is love. You see? God is love. And how he loves, how he shows himself, is shown through what’s called his beloved Son or, in the Colossian letter, it would actually be the Son of his love, ho Yios tes agapes Theou, the Son of his love. And then the Holy Spirit—through the Holy Spirit, God pours his love into our heart.

So we believe that human beings become human when they love with the same love that God is, the same love with which God loves us in his beloved Son, and by the power of the Holy Spirit. And this we really believe—we’ll pick this up a little later—is we believe it’s really possible, that with God all things are possible. And God created us to be lovers and to love the way he loves.

Now, it’s very important also, just to get started here, that it’s got to be the way he loves. It has to be the way he loves, because who’s not for love? Everybody’s for love. I don’t know, Lady Gaga is for love. I mean, who’s not for love? Unless you’re a Satanist or something, you would be for love. Every philosophy on earth is somehow for friendship, for love, for benevolence or whatever. But for us Christians, you still have to ask the question: What is love like? How does love work? How does love show itself, especially among human beings on this earth? How is the love that is real love enacted among human beings, that it would really be the love that God is himself? The love with which he loves us is the love that he is, you see? God is love.

This love is revealed perfectly, unsurpassably, definitively, in his Son, the Son of his love, Christ, and very particularly in the incarnation of the Son of God in human flesh and his being crucified in the most vile, despicable, ugly, horrible death that any human being or certainly any Jew could possibly die. It’s written in Mosaic law, “Cursed is he who hangs on the cross.” And so in that self-emptying on the cross, we have the ultimate outpouring of the love of God so that we can see what it is. And then our task, by the Holy Spirit, is to live the same way.

I sometimes try to make this point by this story. Some of you have probably heard it more times than you care to hear. But I remember being once in a church, a Greek Orthodox church in California once. I decided to have some fun with the priest. During the break of the retreat, I called the priest in and his name was Tom, too, except I’m Thomas and he was Athanasios, but we were both “Fr. Tom.” I said to him, “Father—” Over his icon screen, the iconostas, the church had writing over the arch. And I said to him, “Father, that writing up there that’s in your church is not true. It’s not true. What’s written there is not true.”

We were by ourselves. I took him aside. Of course, I was having a little fun. He said, “What do you mean, Fr. Tom? It’s from St. John’s gospel! Those are the words there.” I said, “Father, it’s not true. What’s written up there is not true.” And then he got a little scared, and he said, “It was there when I came!” [Laughter] “I didn’t put it up there!” But then he said, “Why is it not true?” And I said, “Because it’s not the whole sentence.” If you read the Scripture, it’s very good to read it all, not the parts you like, and if you read a sentence, it’s important to read the entire sentence and to read it in the context in which it’s given.

Well, anyway, what was written up there was: “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another.” That’s all it said. Well, the commandment to love one another is not new. It’s in the law of Moses. The Sh’ma Israel is the main commandment that Jesus affirms in his teaching: “Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is God. The Lord is God; the Lord is one. And you will love the Lord your God with all your—” and in the Old Testament it says: “With all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And the second commandment is like it: You will love your neighbor as yourself, with your very own self.” Not: “You love your neighbor as you love yourself”; that’s not accurate. It’s “You love your neighbor as being yourself.” Your real self is found in the brother or the sister, and, as we’ll see tonight, especially the poor.

The sentence is: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you.” That’s the new part! We have to love as Christ has loved, and we have to love God, his Father, as he came on earth to do in order to save us, because the only human who ever loved God with all his mind, soul, heart, and strength is Jesus Christ. None of the rest of us do it. That’s what saves us; that’s the debt that he pays on the cross. It’s the debt of love. It has nothing to do with punishment; it has to do with perfect love for God and perfect love for the neighbor, including the worst enemy who’s spitting on you, beating you, killing you and whatever: you love him with the love of God, because that’s how God loves them.

This is the commandment we have. And by the way, a little interesting point. In Deuteronomy where this is first written, seventh chapter, it says, “You will love the Lord God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.” In the New Testament writings, the word “mind” is put in there: “You shall love the Lord God with all your mind, soul, heart, and strength.” The reason for that is the New Testament was written in Greek for Greeks. The Hebrews didn’t have a “mind.” [Laughter] That was separate. The heart was the thinking, willing, desiring central God-like quality of spirituality that makes a human being human, and so, the heart. Then the nefesh, the soul, which should be better translated, in my opinion, as “life”: “with your life” means your conduct, how you behave, what you do, how you act.

And then the strength—this is very important for our topic tonight, because to love God with all your strength, it didn’t mean go to the gym and get strong or something; it meant your possessions, it meant your money, it meant your property. It meant all the power that you have on earth, you’ve got to love God with it. Everything you own, everything you have: it’s not yours; it’s got to be used for the love of God as God would have us use it. And the only way you can prove that you’re keeping the commandment of God is if you are loving your neighbor, including your worst enemy, as your very own self. And that activity of loving the neighbor has to be proved in deeds; it has to be proved in acts.

But right up front I want to say, and I’ll develop this a bit: the act may not prove love. You could do acts of mercy, you could do acts of caring for poor, feeding poor, helping needy, you could fulfill Matthew 25 on which we are being judged—“I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was in prison, you came to me; I was naked, you clothed me; I was a homeless, you took me in”—you could do that without love. You could do that without love, and then it profits you nothing, according to St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. We’ll pick that up in a bit, but the point is the real love cannot be, as it says in 1 John, in word and in speech; it’s got to be in work and in truth, ta erga kai aletheia, in work and in truth.

So this loving, but it’s going to be loving the way God loves. This is what we are called to do. And that would mean the way Christ loves, the way God loves us through Christ, the way Christ reveals his activity of showing what love is, the love that God himself is.

Now, that’s our calling. That’s what it means to be not only a Christian; we would say that’s what it means to be a human being. That’s what it means to be a human being. If a human being is not loving with the love with which God is, by God’s own grace and power, that person’s not human, not really human, because to be really human is to be divine by grace. All the holy Fathers… I quoted this “imitation” word of St. Paul to the Ephesians; he said, “Be imitators of God. Ginesthe mimetai [tou] Theou.” But our Church Fathers go even beyond that! Basil will say, “Ginesthe theon, Become god!” Not just become the imitator of God, but become god, become divine, because by God’s energies and powers and splendors and glories and good will, by the Holy Spirit, through Christ, that is our calling. That’s what we are struggling to do and struggling to be.

Now, if we apply this vision to the issue of the poor, we can begin with the Scriptures of the Mosaic law, because the Mosaic law definitely teaches—and the Psalms and the Prophets and the Wisdom literature, it definitely teaches that we are to help the sojourner, the poor, the homeless, the widow, the orphan. And the expression “poor and needy, penes kai ptochoi,” I think it’s in Greek, is almost a technical term in the psalms, the poor and the needy. They’re everywhere. I would invite you to read the psalms just looking for that expression, the poor, the needy, and how they’re to be treated and how they are to be understood.

But without going too much into that, I would like just to make this point. Whereas most of us would know the New Testament St. John teaching, the Lord is agape, love—and agape love means the care for the neighbor. There’s eros love which means being in communion with another, and it doesn’t necessarily mean sex, by the way. There’s friendship love, philia; that’s where you get the word philanthropia, philanthropy. And then there’s storge, which is affection. There’s different words for love.

But the agape love, it seems to me—this may be incorrect. In fact, everything I say may be incorrect. It’s your problem. You’ve got to deal with it. [Laughter] You invited me. Blame Fr. Roberto. [Laughter] But I have a hunch that the agape of the New Testament is actually the hesed or the ashrei of the Old Testament, which is usually translated into English as “mercy, eleos.” Certainly in the Septuagint, the Old Testament translated by Jews before Christ, it’s eleos that’s the word there. In the more modern translations, for example, the Revised Standard Version, they don’t translate it “mercy,” they translate it “steadfast love.”

So if we were serving in English and that Scripture was fashionable at the time, we probably wouldn’t be singing in church, “Lord, have mercy,” or “Lord, mercy us”—because it’s a verb, eleison, “Mercy us, O Lord!”—but it would be, “Love us, O Lord!” You see, “Love us without qualification, without condition.” And every prayer that we say in church is a prayer that we believe God is doing anyway, even if we don’t ask him. We ask God to do what we believe he’s already doing, and we’re telling him: We want you to be yourself. We want you to do what you do to us. We want to be mercied. We want to be loved, and we want to have that love so we can spread it to the others. That’s where we find our life. That’s where we find our joy. That’s where we find our peace. That’s how we find and fulfill ourselves as human beings.

Here, I can’t resist saying, it’s a chronic problem, at least in the United States of America, to find yourself, to fulfill yourself. Well, the Scriptures are very clear. You want to find yourself? Lose yourself. You want to fulfill yourself? Empty yourself. You want to be great? Be the least. You want to be first? Be the last. You want to be rich? Become poor. You want to be wise? Become a fool. If you want to rule, become a servant. And really, Orthodoxy is paradoxy, all the way around. I mean, that’s just what it is, and we’ll work on that for the next 15 minutes or so and try to unpack, as they say nowadays, unpack that a little bit.

But in the Old Testament, the main word for the definition of God is that he is mercy-ful, merciful. Now, the problem in American English at least is that when people think of mercy, they think of an antonym of justice. They think you can be just and then you can be merciful. It’s sort of like letting sinners off or plea-bargaining or something like that. That’s not what mercy means at all. Well, I shouldn’t say not at all. Of course, it could mean being lenient and kind to people to let them off and to give them a chance to repent, but what it really means is to do an act of complete and total sharing and giving. That’s what the word means.

Your mission here, St. John translated here as “the Compassionate.” In fact, it’s St. John Eleimon, St. John Merciful, in Greek. That’s what it means. In Slavonic—there’s some Russians here—it’s Milostivyy, milosts is the word. Milosts, which means you act kindly. You give, you share, you care for the other more than yourself. You sacrifice from yourself to give to the other. That’s what it means.

And so in the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, the Proverbs, the most-repeated sentence about God is—I left my notes upstairs—is that that Lord is merciful, gracious, long-suffering, eleimon o Theos oiktirmon, Blogishev… we sing it in church all the time. So we said the Lord is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and mercy and faithfulness. “Faithfulness” could be translated “truth” also. God is true in the sense he’s a rock: you can depend on him. The main characteristic of God is that he is merciful, eleimon, and there’s icons of Christ, not only John the Compassionate, but Jesus Christ as Eleimon, the merciful One. So this is the Old Testament teaching.

Now, I want to connect that with the remark that I made about almsgiving, because in the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mountain of Matthew, which is the Christian Torah, it says, “When you (we say in English) give alms.” Sometimes, by the way, St. John is called in the old Latin tradition of the West, St. John the Almoner. And the place where that’s taking place, like your place would be called Eleemosarium or something, a name coming from it, where you have that word where you can receive mercy, where you can be helped, where you could be fed, where you could be clothed, where you could be pitied, where you could be loved, where you could be valued. This is what it means, because the mercy of God is everywhere.

But as I mentioned, it says literally, [poieis eleeomosynen], the one who does— that you do acts of mercy, and that’s a title of God in the Psalter. He is the one who does mercy. He’s the one who does mercy. He does merciful acts. And it’s interesting that when I was thinking about this some years ago, I was studying that, and I wondered what is “give alms” in Greek, and that’s when I discovered it said to make or to do mercy. That’s the literal translation, to do or to make mercy. Gee, how is it in Slavonic? Many of us are Slavs. It’s exactly the same: [tvorishi milostbinyu]. It’s exactly the same: to do an act of mercy. Then I thought: What is it in Latin? What is that? And it’s very interesting. It’s facit or facere, which means to make or to do, just like poieo in Greek; it’s the same word—but they use the Greek word!—eleomosynam. Just a Latin Scripture uses the Greek word, because that word is a loaded word, because it speaks about all these dimensions of being merciful that God is.

Now, very interesting also I think for our topic tonight, in the Sermon on the Mountain, where Jesus is saying, “It was written of old, I tell you, you should not kill, do murder, but I tell you, if you hate somebody, you’re a murderer. It was written of old you should not do adultery, and I tell you if you’re lusting you’re—” Then it says, “It was written of old, you shall not steal, but I tell you, unless you give and share what you have, you’re a crook!” And the Fathers say this all the time. St. Basil says if you’ve got two pairs of shoes in your closet, one of them belongs to the poor. That’s hard for me to swallow, because with five kids I never knew how many t-shirts, sneakers, and so on they needed to have. But how much is enough and what do you really need? That’s a huge problem that we all struggle with in the Western world, that’s for sure. We think we’re poor and we have a standard that even the poor is better than 80% of the planet earth. In any case, this is what you have.

And then that sermon, it ends finally with this sentence: “You, therefore, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” So that’s what we’re called to: perfection, divine perfection. And that word, “perfect,” is the same word that is the last word of Jesus Christ in John’s gospel before he dies. They translate it in English, “It is finished.” Most people think it means he’s going to die. That’s not at all what it means. It means it is perfected; it is now fulfilled. God has given everything he has and everything he is to us, and the final act is when the Logos incarnate, the corpse of a Jew, is dead, hanging on the cross, outside the walls of Jerusalem, between malefactors, spit upon, mocked, killed, and yet he says, “Father, forgive them,” and “Into your hands I give my life.”

By the way, that’s what theosis is really all about. Theosis is not about seeing lights and all of that. Theosis is when you’re all alone, abandoned by God—because he was abandoned by God on the cross—for the sake of our salvation. He knew what it was. And when you are rejected by everyone, including your own apostles and friends, and nevertheless you love God with all your mind, soul, heart, and strength, and you love your enemies including those who are killing you with the love of God. That’s perfection.

But it’s interesting that in the parallel text of Luke’s gospel, that text is not “You, therefore, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” The text here is: “You, therefore, be merciful as the Father in heaven is merciful.” So that tells us that perfection is mercy. Perfection is loving in the merciful way that God loves us in Christ. That is the teaching of the Scriptures.

Now, if we apply that to the issue of the poor, there’s two things that can be said, in my opinion, without any doubt at all. The first is we have to act like God, and God loves without discrimination and especially he loves the widows, the orphans, the poor and the needy, the outcast, the sojourner, and the homeless. That’s very clear from the holy Scripture. And he commands his people that they are to take care of those people. They’re to care for them. They’re to show the love of God for them in the very acts, and this was the Mosaic law. This was the Mosaic law. You were sojourners, you were homeless, I took care—now you have to do that! And not just Jews, but anyone who comes who is in this need.

This of course is picked up in the New Testament, and there’s three passages that anyone who’s ever going to meditate this topic [is] going to have to know. Well, let’s say five. I’ll do them right now. The first one is that, according to Christ, the final judgment is only on this. They’re not going to ask where you Orthodox or not; did you know the Nicene Creed or not; were you for the filioque, against the filioque. Now, here again, I’m speaking a little bit against myself. I taught dogmatics my whole life. [Laughter] And that’s very important, because the doctrinal teaching and the dogmatic is for the sake of loving properly. It’s for the sake of acting properly, not just thinking properly or speaking properly or rebuking, I don’t know, papists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or something. It’s so that we ourselves would have the proper relationship to God according to the truth of things so that we could live it the right way. But everything—every commandment, every exegesis of Scripture, every liturgy, every prayer—is so that we could love with the love which God in Christ loves us. That’s what it’s for. And that we would do it in concrete acts.

So, for example, you have in the letter of John where he’s speaking about God is love and loving one another, and those who do not love do not know God because God is love—I would suggest you read the first letter of John if you’re interested in this topic. But then you get to that sentence that’s very important. It says, “He who does not love abides in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer.” He didn’t say your Orthodox brother, your Christian brother, your white brother. Everyone is your brother, and you have here the good Samaritan parable and all those things, Samaritan woman and all that. But also it says:

No murderer has everlasting life abiding in him. By this we know love: that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or in speech, but let us love in deed and in work (that’s work, ergon) and in truth (in reality).

You find the same thing in the letter of James, where he’s speaking about faith—it’s a little bit of a polemic with the faith-alone people—where he says: How do you prove your faith? Not only how do you prove your love, how do you prove your faith? You prove your faith by your works. And, by the way, the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, the Proverbs, the letter to the Romans of all things, says we will stand at the judgment day according to our works—not our faith and not our good intentions, but what we actually do. So the letter of James is saying, very, very clearly, that faith is proved by these concrete works. So he says:

What does it profit my brethren if a person says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or a sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to him, “Go in peace. Be warmed; be filled,” without actually giving them the things needed for their bodies, what does it profit?

So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. And then he goes on and says, “Faith apart from works is barren, and faith apart from works is dead.” So it’s got to be expressed in concrete acts.

It’s impossible to prove the love of God except through the concrete acts. However, and perhaps this might even be almost the most important thing for us here tonight, those of us who actually do the work and the other guys who talk about it, like me, is that St. Paul, in the first letter [to] the Corinthians, the famous 13th chapter—

I can’t resist telling you how once when I went to my first parish when I was 24 years old in Warren, Ohio, and people hardly knew anything. It was in Slavonic; they didn’t understand anything. We started— The first thing I ever wrote was a little pamphlet about you’ve got to read the Bible, and everybody thought it was Protestant and all that kind of stuff, you know. [Laughter] But once I convinced the only college graduate in my parish of 400 people to come to an ecumenical meeting with me, with the Protestants and Catholics and Jew in town. We’re talking about things, and they’re telling about our different churches and trying to get to know each other. I said, “You’re going to speak. You’re going to tell about us, our church, St. John.” So she did as best she could, very nice. But then she ended by saying, “And I will end with the words of our new pastor,” and she quoted 1 Corinthians 13: “If I speak with the tongues of men and angels but have not love, it profits me nothing.” And everybody said— And I’m thinking, “Oh, gah!” And when it was over, many of the Protestants came and said, “Oh, that was beautiful.” [Laughter] They didn’t know it was St. Paul either! [Laughter]

But it says, “If I understand all the mysteries and all the knowledge, if I have all faith to move mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have and deliver my body to be burned, and have not love, I gain nothing”—which means you can have knowledge, you can have faith, you can give your body to be burned, and you can give everything you have to the poor—and it profits us nothing unless it’s done for the love of God and the love of the other person. Nothing.

Now, you could say, “Well, what about those activities? Aren’t they good?” Well, sure they’re good, and they really may help a lot of people, but they don’t help us unless we’re doing it out of love, because you can do it out of pride, you can do it out of vanity, you can do it out of judging other people that they don’t do it—“Where are all the other people tonight?” or something. We do that all the time. You go to church to see who’s not there. [Laughter] It’s got to be really pure-heartedly for love, for the good of the neighbor, with no self-interest, and certainly not paternalistically, and certainly not to get certain people to—how can you say—praise us or something like that. If that’s the case, then it’s not of God; it’s not of God at all.

And probably the most scary passage in the entire Scripture on that point is in the Sermon on the Mountain again in Matthew, where the Lord says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day, many”—it says many—“will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not cast out demons in your name? Did we not do many mighty works in your name?” And we could even add this: Did I not teach theology in your name? Did I not work at the mission in your name? We could say all of that, and we may hear from our Lord these words: “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evil-doer.’ ” I think that’s the most frightening text in the New Testament, frankly.

Now, it says not only who says, “Lord, Lord,” but not even those who do these acts! But you have to do the will of the Father in heaven, and the will of the Father in heaven is that we would love! Is that we would love and that what we would do would be inspired by love, not by anything else. And so there’s a lot of good acts that are objectively good, but the person could then be lost. And this is also said in the Corinthian letter about these spiritual gifts: the tongs, the charisms, the teachings. You could have all those things and it profits you nothing.

Well, an old Egyptian Father named Pachomius was once asked about this. He said, “Why would it be? Why would it be like that?” And Pachomius gave the classical answer of a Church Father first. He said, “That’s God’s business. That’s God’s business; he does it that way.” But then, of course, they go on to explain, you know, and he said this. He said, “Maybe God is using people who are proud, who are vain, who are judgmental, who are showing off, who are boasting about all the good works that they do for the sake of the people who receive the good works!”

So people may come, let’s say, to a place like this, and really have something good in their life. They’re included, they have some food, they’re helped in ways they need, and certainly God could use a person for that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that our heart is pure. It doesn’t. Now, sooner or later we’ll get found out even by those people. We’ll get to that in a minute. But in any case, we’ve got to be really, really careful that it has to be done out of love. And St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Augustine, they have fantastic sermons on Matthew 25 about this, that when Jesus says, “I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was naked, I was imprisoned,” he means himself, because he was all of those things, literally he was! And when you do it to anyone, you are actually doing it to him.

And by the way, this is also a very important point. We don’t love Christ in people. That’s psychological acrobatics that nobody can pull off. You say, “I shouldn’t love, I don’t know, this fellow, but I’ll love Christ in him.” What’s your name?

Elias: Elias.

Fr. Tom: Elias. “I don’t have to love Elias; I have to love Christ in Elias”—that’s baloney! I’ve got to love Elias, and by loving Elias as he actually is, that’s the way I love Christ, because Christ has identified with Elias. And he has identified with every human being and in the Passion and in the self-emptying and coming to save the entire world, he particularly identifies himself with the poor, with the needy, with the homeless. “I was imprisoned. I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was without clothes. I was sick.” And he really was.

And he became all those things— He became hungry so we could be fed by him as the bread of life. He became naked so we could be clothed in his divinity. He became a prisoner so we could be set free through him. He became homeless so we could be taken home to the house of the Father to live forever. “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place in this world to lay his head.” So he became naked so that we could be clothed—all those things are real, but a Christian has to do all these acts as Christ, for Christ, in Christ, out of the love of God, and in total purity of heart, with absolute thanksgiving of being able to do this, and in no other consideration whatsoever, otherwise it profits us nothing. It profits us nothing.

Now still, however, the Lord can use us. The Lord could use us. If a person’s hungry and we give them bread out of pride, they’re still happy they got the bread. If they’re on the street and we bring them in to say, “Ah, I brought them in,” they’re still happy to be brought in, and God still can work. It says in the Scripture, if the Lord can work and speak through Balaam’s ass, he can speak through any one of us and act through any one of us. I travel around with a little figurine of a donkey with me and look at it and say Balaam’s ass.

But in any case, what we have to see here is this very, very critical point. But Pachomius ended with almost another terrifying sentence. He said: And it may also be that God could give graces and gifts to people to cast out demons in his name, to do mighty works in his name, to prophesy in his name, to teach in his name, to be active in church in his name, to be involved in caring in charitable and philanthropic work in his name, he said, so that when they hear these words at the end, they have no excuse, because they had it all. They did those things. Why then did they not love?

And this is a very, very important point which can be applied to the people who do these things, how they relate to each other. We’re all out there preaching the Gospel and teaching courses and helping the poor—and we can’t stand each other! And then we get jealous of each other, then we get envious of each other, then we compete with each other. Well, then these are the words we’re going to hear; these are the words we’re going to hear: “Depart from me, you evil-doer. I don’t know you.” And all the people who did eat some bread or hear some good teaching or whatever will enter the kingdom, and we’ll be, you know, out. So this is what we find here.

The first thing that we have to say is this. The concrete actions have to be done, but they have to be done with love, and that’s the imitation of God. And God is loving the poor, the needy, the homeless, the orphan, the victim. Just read the psalms. Read it; you’ll see that there all the time. And this is what Jesus does when he begins preaching. He says, “I proclaim the freedom to those who are in prison.” The Gospel to the poor. The meek inherit the earth and so on. You can’t miss that! You can’t miss it.

And then he even says that— You know, it’s another little interesting point to think about is this. There’s only three times in the Gospel where Jesus uses the expression—not Jesus, but where it’s written in the Gospel: “With God, all things are possible,” or “[With] God, nothing will be impossible.” And we use that expression all the time. “With God, all things are possible,” and so on. But it’s interesting to remember the three times they’re used. One has to do with the incarnation of the Son of God from a virgin, and John the Baptist born in old age, where Gabriel says to Mary when she asks, “How will this be?” he says, “For with God, nothing will be impossible.” For the incarnation, the becoming human of Christ, the Son of God, is only possible to be from God.

A second time that it’s used is in the Gethsemane garden, when Jesus is praying in Mark, he calls God, “Abba Father.” You get the Aramaic words in Mark only in the New Testament, except for the Eloi, eloi, lamai—: that’s in Matthew, too. But also he says to God, “Father, all things are possible to you. Let this cup pass. Not my will, but your will be done.” And God says, “No, you’ve got to die. You have to die. You have to become poor, needy, outcast, in prison, beaten, naked, homeless, in jail. You’ve got to go through all these things to save the world.” And St. Paul will sum it up for our topic tonight when he said, “Although he was rich and possessed everything, he became poor for us, that through his poverty, we can have the riches of God.” The blessed exchange again.

But what’s the third time that you have that expression used? It’s in the event with the rich young man. The rich young man comes to Jesus and says, “What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus says, “How do you read?” And he quotes the “You shall love God with all your mind, soul, heart, and strength; love your neighbor as yourself.” Then he quotes, “You shall not do murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not—” And then he says, “Okay, I’ve done these from my youth. What yet is lacking?” And then Jesus said, “If you will be really perfect, then you will be really merciful! You’ll give everything you have to the poor, and you will come and follow me.” And then as you know, he goes away sad. He goes away sad, and Jesus doesn’t condemn him. It even says at the end. “Jesus loved him,” it said. And in some sense not everybody is called to that kind of perfection, thank God.

But in any case, when it was over, the apostles say to him, “Lord, who can do this? Who can do what you’re asking this person to do, to give it all for the poor and the needy, to become poor yourself, and then to follow me?” And that’s where Jesus says, “With man, this is impossible.” He didn’t say, “Try harder. Clench your fists and grit your teeth.” He didn’t say that. He said, “With God, all things are possible, but with man this is impossible.” So to have this kind of love, it’s really divine and it’s humanly impossible without this grace and power of God himself. But with it, it is possible.

So the first thing you could want to say is, if we are imitating and following God, then we are the lovers of the poor. The proverb says, “He who neglects the poor insults his Maker.” When you insult the poor, you insult God himself. And not just because God loves that poor and God wants us to do likewise, but because God himself became that poor man. God is identified with that poor man. So we have all these teachings about the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25 and what we read that we have to do these these works. Otherwise, we’re not loving and we’re not really believing. But we can do these works without really loving. That’s terrifying.

But then there’s a second thing when you think about the poor, and that is: God became poor. God became poor in Jesus Christ. He came into the world and emptied himself completely. He emptied himself completely, so that there is an identification of the incarnate Son of God, particularly in his Passion, with the poor, the needy, the lowly, the outcast, the neglected—the little ones, the ones nobody cares about. That’s the main identity of the Son of God. And who kills him? The rich people. James says that in the— And also, who kills him are— If you translated those four categories of high priest, elder, scribe, and lawyer, you could say who killed him were the bishops, the presbyters, the canon lawyers, and the theologians. They’re the ones who killed him. And the people who had it.

So here it’s not only that we serve the poor, care for the poor, share with the poor, but we are supposed to be poor ourselves. We’re supposed to be poor ourselves. Now, being poor doesn’t mean you’re lying destitute on the street or so on. You’ve got to work. St. Paul said unless you work you can’t eat. You’ve got to care for your own family. That saying, “charity begins at home,” is [in the] letter to Timothy. If you don’t love your own family, you’re worse than an infidel. So if you’ve got five kids and 16 grandchildren, you’ve got to do something about them when their mortgage goes down and their kid’s in the hospital and one has tumors in her brain. You’ve got to do something about that, and if you’re working you do it. If you could become a monk or a nun then you’re free from doing that, but then you still have to love totally and give your whole life to those people, even if you have nothing to give.

And the only thing that exempts us from giving is when we don’t have anything. But if we’ve got it, and we have to take care of our own needs first, very modestly, very—how can you say—not luxuriously and all that stuff, then the rest belongs to the poor. And then we should be the poor ourselves.

Now, the very first beatitude in Matthew is “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It means you don’t own anything of your own! “In spirit,” it means I don’t have— Before God, everything is of God; everything is a gift. In Luke, it simply says, “Blessed are the poor”; it doesn’t even say “in spirit.” “Blessed are you poor, for you will be filled.” So that’s very— That’s incredibly important, and especially the identification of God himself in the Person of his Son, the Messiah, who is the Suffering Servant, who is totally and completely self-emptying and totally poor.

It’s interesting that in the Scripture and in the early Church, “the poor” was a name for Christians. It was the name of the Judeo-Christian community in Jerusalem. The anusim, the ebionim. It was the poor. Paul was collecting from the Gentiles for the poor in Jerusalem. And they were really poor, because the Romans had come in, they destroyed the Temple, everything was off. People were eating their own babies and God knows what. So to be a member of Christ is to be identified with the poor. Our self-identification has to be like God’s: with the poor! That has to be how we understand our self. That’s how we have to see our self.

We have to repent when we are not living that way, when we are luxurious or having more than we need and all that. Now, you could get guilt-ridden; you could get all kinds of stuff that’s not recommended, but still we should be aware that everything is a gift. It comes from above. We are stewards of God’s graces. We use what we need, and the rest we share. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

And then there is no condition about sharing. In our Church, you don’t ask a person, “Are you Orthodox? Are you a Christian? Are you a believer?” If they’re needy, you help them. If they’re poor, you feed them. One of the wonderful texts on this I like is John Chrysostom, and you should read his book, On Wealth and Poverty. It’ll curl your hair, you know. But I have some still… But he says—you know the sentence where someone in the Church is not acting properly, he says you go to them secretly and you talk to them privately; you don’t go on a blog and go on the internet, you know. You go privately. And then if you don’t win them, you bring two or three others. And then if they don’t listen to two or three others, you bring them to the Church. It’s only one of the two places that the word “church” is used in the four gospels. You bring them to the Church. If they don’t listen to the Church, then it says you treat them like a heathen and a tax-collector! And you don’t get worse than that, right?

But then Chrysostom says: And how do we treat heathens and tax-collectors? He says, when they’re hungry, we give them food; when they’re thirsty, we give them drink; when they’re naked, we give them clothes; when they’re homeless, we take them in. There’s no condition for love, philanthropic, charitable love. None. There can be conditions for receiving holy Communion in church, because if you don’t believe it, you can’t really go and pretend you do or something; you’ve got to be totally given to the faith of the Church to be a communicant. You’ve got to know what it is, you’ve got to believe it, you’ve got to try to live it, you’ve got to repent when you fail. You’ve got to— You know, that’s part of it. But the welcome to the table of the food, that’s open to everybody. There’s no limits on that whatsoever, and that’s even one of the great missionary tools.

The earliest Christians were praised because— I mean, Diocletian’s last persecution was incredibly unpopular. That’s why Constantine had to finally give it up and de-illegitimatize Christianity, because the pagans were so thankful to the Christians. During famine, they helped them with their food, they nursed their sick, they visited them with no conditions whatsoever. And so to kill these Christians became very unpopular!

You know, compare Athanasius’s sermon at the beginning of the fourth century to Chrysostom at the end. Athanasius says, “The Logos must become divine. Arius is wrong! How do you know it? Well, you’ve got Antony the Great who gave it all up and prayed, and then you’ve got all these people who are martyrs and who died and who helped the poor and helped the needy and share everything they have, and they don’t expose their babies, and they do all this.” That was a witness to the truth that Jesus was the Son of God, God himself, and that the Gospel was true.

By the end of the century, you have Chrysostom saying, “You call yourself Christians? You call yourself Christians? You boast because you tithe? What’s tithing? Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, we’ll never enter Christ’s kingdom, Christ said.” So you can see what happened in that fourth century is crucial. But even then the great Church Fathers like Basil, Chrysostom, they had deaconesses, they had hospitals, they had almshouses, they had all these kind of things as an essential part of their Church life. It wasn’t extra. It wasn’t added-on. It was the proof that they were believers in the God of Christ, believers in Christ as God himself in human flesh, and they were believers in the Gospel. And they proved it not only by their help of the poor; they proved it by their being poor themselves. And then of course when they got power, the better ones then used the power for helping the poor also, like St. John when he was the archbishop of Alexandria. We’ll hear about him on Friday night in the sermon a little bit, this man, what he did.

So it was done institutionally, not just personally. It was done by Christian communities. It was done by what we call today dioceses. It was done in an organized manner, but it was not superfluous. It’s like mission: it’s not something added on; it’s essential to the very faith itself.

So the point is if this is the true God and Christ reveals him, and we do everything that we can to alleviate the pain and the suffering and the hunger and the thirst of human beings. And then we become our self that way to the measure that we can and that God provides and blesses us to do. That’s the vision I see. Okay? [Applause]