This past week, we began our Metanoia class with all the newest inquirers and catechumens who are seeking refuge in the calm haven of the Holy Orthodox Church. Like all of us who are still amid this journey through the Christian life, they will all face tremendous challenges on this pathway to holiness. Family and friends, out of love but with some ignorance to the Holy Church’s teachings, will give them strife, and innocently create barriers. The temptations and struggles they have fought with throughout their lives will double as the devil will seek to knock them off course. Life as a catechumen is difficult…and it is why we pray so hard for them by name at every Liturgy.
Over the past several years in talking to people about their growing faith, I have been asked this question countless times: “Does it get any easier once we are baptized/chrismated?” My response is always the same: “No…it gets even harder…and the crosses get heavier…but through the Church we are given the strength to bear them so that they don’t crush us.”
This past week, the Cross of Christ, the symbol of God’s love, is still in the center of Orthodox Churches throughout the world. At the Festal Great Vespers for the Exaltation of the Cross, before we brought the cross out to the center of the Church, we read from the Old Testament about the journey that was taken by the people of God out of Egypt in the book of Exodus. We remember how God led His people through the Red Sea, and then closed the sea upon the charging Egyptians who were seeking their destruction. After the sea closed in on the Egyptian armies, all of the enemies of God’s people had been destroyed. Israel was led out of slavery and into freedom. From the opposite shore of the Red Sea, Moses and the children of Israel sang praises and glorified God for their deliverance and their salvation.
What does this have to do with our struggle to live a Holy Life? One of the reasons it’s so important for us to read and understand the Old Testament, is because it offers so many teaching moments for what our own relationship with God is, and what it should be.
This entire period from the book of Exodus is really an accurate depiction of our lives as Christians. When we are born into this world, we are surrounded by enemies…demons, satan, sorrow, and death….all enemies that the world has no solution for. How does our Lord deliver us from these enemies?
Our journey begins like the Israelites journey…through the sea…through the waters of baptism so that we can come out the other side and begin life anew! For this new transformation….this new birth…we glorify God just as the Israelites did! How long do you think that joy lasted, before they realized that despite being delivered from their enemies…they still had to live in the midst of the wilderness? 3 days was all it took for them to complain and forget all that God had delivered them from.
This is our experience after baptism, and yes, even after a good confession. After this long journey battling with our sins in the catechumenate, once we are baptized, or for the rest of us, once we have renewed our baptism through absolution, we go out of the Church that day and realize that we are still living in the midst of a fallen world. There is still war. Our friends didn’t stop bothering us about saints and icons. Our president is still tweeting. There is still death. There is still sin.
For the Israelites, after their salvation from their enemies had been handed to them, it only took those 3 days to forget the power of God that stood behind them. They came to the waters of Marah, and wanted to drink from them to be nourished, but when they tasted the water, it was bitter. So, God directed Moses to cut down a tree and to throw it into the waters…and as soon as the wood hit it, the bitter waters were made into sweet and life-giving water.
God promised His people that day: “If you listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is pleasing in his sight, give ear to His commandments, and keep His ordinances, I will put none of the diseases on you that I brought on the Egyptians: for I am the Lord your God who heals you.”
This is the Christian Life my dearest brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes, we are all made new in the waters of baptism…and we receive the descent of the Holy Spirit through Chrismation…but that doesn’t mean that our journey is complete. What it does rather, is give us a strength and power we did not have before while living in the midst of the fallen world.
God gives us the Holy Mysteries, which the catechumens will spend this entire semester learning about, with which to continue our battle. We are given confession as a renewal of our baptism through tears of repentance. We are strengthened by the Holy Eucharist, like manna from the wilderness. And, from time to time throughout the Liturgical year, the Church brings out the cross from the Holy Altar, and throws it into the midst of the bitter waters of life, so that they can be made sweet once again…encouraging us to do what our Lord commanded of us in the Gospel today:
“Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
May we all be inspired and strengthened by the power of the precious and life-giving cross…Amen