At the beginning of every Divine Liturgy, the deacon turns to the priest and says quietly, “It is time for the Lord to act.” I hope this sermon is part of the Lord’s action in my life and in your life. The sermon is called, “Get Ready to Grow Up!” Now, Great Lent doesn’t begin for another three weeks until Sunday evening, February 22nd. However, I think the tax collector in the Gospel we have just heard from Chapter 18 of St. Luke has some important advice for each of us, whatever our ages, about how we can prepare for Great Lent.

This gospel story is about two people a Pharisee and a tax collector—that is, a religious person, a Jew who is sure he has found God; and a crook who steals money from many people and who knows he is not what God wants him to be. This particular religious Jew does not wish to change anything significant in his life. He has, as the gospel says, “assumed a stance before God.” He fasts twice a week; and he gives one-tenth of all he has to his religious congregation. He thinks he is doing very well indeed.

Unfortunately, it is possible that many of us here today (me included) live our lives with a similar stance, with a similar attitude, to this devout first century Jew. We are Orthodox Christians. We think we have the Truth that is Christ and His Word and His Church. But what if the Lord has much more to give us than we are yet able to see or understand at this time? What if God wants to change our stance toward Him—not to change our religion, or our commitment to Orthodox Christianity or to Christ, but to teach us to behave like the tax collector who knows he is a sinner, and “stands far off and would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven”?

What is this tax collector seeing when he does not “raise his eyes to heaven” and says instead “God, be merciful to me a sinner”? He is looking at his own life. He is judging himself, not others. Earlier in the Gospel of St. Luke in Chapter 5, Verse 27, another tax collector, named Levi, was busy at work when Jesus Christ came by his office and said to him, two words—“Follow me.” That Jew, Levi, who was to become the apostle St. Matthew did indeed rise up from his work to follow Jesus Christ and later wrote the first gospel to advise us how to find and follow Christ. Also, last week in the Gospel of St. Luke, Chapter 19, Verses 1 to 10, we heard about another tax collector—a Chief Tax Collector, Zacchaeus—who climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus Christ and then serve Him and the poor.

Now, none of these three tax collectors made their big decisions to leave their profitable work, to be humble and to follow Christ on a sudden impulse. The Gospel of St. Luke, Chapter 3, Verses 12 to 13, tells us that “tax collectors . . . came to be baptised [by St. John the Baptist] and said to [the Baptist], ‘Teacher, what shall we do?’” In other words, these tax collectors knew that they were cheating people. The Baptist told them, ‘Collect no more than what is appointed for you.’ In other words, be honest with yourself and with others.

How can each of us do that now? How can we learn to be honest with ourselves and with others as we move through our lives? It’s difficult, isn’t it? I’m not OK; and you’re not OK; and that’s OK. We all have our faults, but often we do not wish to know what those faults are or how we acquired them. It may well be that many of our faults are passed down through the lives of our grandparents and parents, and the mistakes they made in raising us. So what! We cannot today continue to hold our parents and grandparents and their cultures responsible for the mistakes that we make now in our own lives and our own culture. We each have an inner child—an experience of childhood in which certain problems, certain relationships were perhaps not resolved as well as they might be. We often carry both the joys and the baggage of childhood into being adults; and if we have more baggage than joys, we are in trouble. We must learn to forgive. If we let the attitude of an inner child control our lives, we will look like adults, but inside we will still think and behave emotionally like children.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with behaving like a child when you are a child.  Children, what do you enjoy in life? What do you like to do? . . . Fine, and slowly you will grow up and have new interests, new things to enjoy. St. Paul makes the position very clear in First Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse 11: “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” In other words, as you grow up as a person, you become an adult and leave behind your childhood.

Let me share with you how I have grown up as a person. My father served the community well, both locally and nationally, but he seldom chatted with me and my brother and sister. When dad came home, he would often sit straight up in a wooden chair, start to read the newspaper and go to sleep within five minutes—without falling off the chair. He put so much of himself into his job that he lacked the energy and the vision to be an effective father. As I became the father of five children, I had to learn how to leave my own inner child behind that wanted a father who was often absent, and become a father to my own children. My goal was and is to be present in their lives—not to control them, but to guide them into understanding how to use their own free wills to grow up. Before I could guide my children to grow up, I had to grow up first as a person.

We all grow up in two quite different ways. We grow up as persons and we grow up as Christians. In the little book, How to Age, Anne Karpf points out that “ageing is a lifelong process, not something confined to its latter stages.” Ageing, she writes, “is an opportunity to develop . . . a time of immense [personal] growth. Perhaps that’s why it’s called ‘growing old” (pp. 2-4).

As I have mentioned before, one of my grandchildren at the age of four began a conversation with me with the words, “Some people grow up, but I’m not going to grow up.” I replied, calling him by name, “Everyone grows up. You are going to grow up.” But you know, he had a point. Some people grow up, but others choose not to grow up. Two choices appear to confront each of us:  Do I grow up as a Christian? Do I grow up emotionally and intellectually as a person? However, on reflection, that is a misleading stance. We can’t grow up as Christians, but not grow up emotionally and intellectually. It can’t be done. It is a serious mistake to think we can grow up as a Christian without growing up at the same time as a person. It is an equally serious mistake to think we can grow up as a person without growing up as a Christian. We need God’s help to grow up as persons and as Christians.  If we don’t understand ourselves sufficiently to face our own inner needs, we will find it very difficult to face God, to seek His help in prayer and reading the Bible and going to the Eucharist in order to find out what gifts He has for each of us, to find out how He would like us to live our lives.

Whatever our ages, that is the challenge which confronts each of us when we begin Great Lent on Sunday, February 22nd. How am I going to grow up as a Christian person? What new insights, what new ideas, what new visions am I going to pursue this Lent, as I pray, read the Bible, come to the Divine Liturgy and receive Holy Communion? Social psychologists say it takes six weeks to develop a new habit and anchor it firmly in our personalities. Six weeks! That is less than the 50 days of Lent and Holy Week. God gives us more than an extra week to face Him and to face ourselves. Lent is not a time for setting some impossible task. The real task before each of us is to make time in our busy lives to listen to God and to see how He would like each of us to grow up as Christian persons. This Lent, with the help of the Lord, let us each say to ourselves, “I am going to seek to grow up as a person and as a Christian, as a unified adult personality, who loves and serves the Lord Jesus Christ, with whatever talents—great or little—that He has given to me.”

Father Deacon Emmanuel Kahn