A Christian Ending to Our Life
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
This photo is from a recent blog by the above title, depicting The Good Samaritan showing mercy to the beaten-up traveller while a Priest and a Levite are walking away. The author, Fr. Stephen Freeman wrote -
"The practice of medicine was largely a private matter for many centuries, with some 'clinics' of a sort being associated with particular temples, such as those of Asclepius. However, hospitals had to await the coming of Christianity. A name associated with one of the first such foundations was St. Basil the Great of Caesarea. He gave away his family inheritance for the needs of the poor, building a poorhouse, a hospice and a hospital just outside Caesarea. It was dubbed the 'Basiliad.' St. Gregory the Theologian compared it to the 'wonders of the world.'
"St. Sampson the Hospitable was a doctor. He found favor with the Emperor Justinian and asked for help to build a hospital in Constantinople. It served that city for centuries. His title, the 'Hospitable,' as well as our continuing use of the word 'hospital' are worth considering. In Greek, his title is 'philoxenos,' a word meaning the love of strangers – or kindness to strangers. Our word, 'hospitality,' still has this connotation. Its origin is from the Latin, hospes, which also has the meaning of the care for the stranger or guest.
"In the days following Christmas, I took part in the funeral of a 14 year-old boy who had died from sepsis ('blood poisoning'). It’s the sort of thing that strikes deep grief in the heart of parents and the wider community. Sepsis is more common than people realize, killing more people than cancer. A frequent remark I heard surrounding this particular funeral was how 'unnatural' it was – 'untimely' would have been a better word. The power of our technology has erected something of a dike against the always present flood of mortality. We forget that we are all going to die. Acknowledging death was a key in hospice care, both for the patients and the medical team. I have long marveled at the fact that most people in modern culture have never been present for the death of another human being, nor for an actual birth."
Read the whole article! BTW, I came very close to sepsis from a serious infection last July, so I know what he's talking about. He tells how we've become insulated against the real world of birth, sickness, and death. Much of religion does the same, singing about "The Sweet Bye and Bye" and preaching about pie in the sky. But real Christianity teaches against such fairy-tale notions: the "Seven Woes" in Mat. 23:13-36 tells how Jesus excoriated the Pharisees for their phony religiosity.
In another of his blogs, Fr. Stephen writes about "the great heresy of secularism." He says - "Secularism is not the rejection of God, but the assertion that the world exists apart from God and that our task is to do the best we can in this world. Fr. Alexander [Schmemann] suggests that the Church in the modern world has largely surrendered to secularism. 'The Church's surrender,' he says, 'consists not in giving up creeds, traditions, symbols and customs... but in accepting the very function of religion in terms of promoting the secular value of help, be it help in character building, peace of mind, or assurance of eternal salvation.'"
The "help" of a secularized religion is man-centered: "self-actualization," "realizing your human potential," and sometimes mixed with a dose of eastern mysticism or even occultism. It can also be using the church to lend a veneer of moralism over the self-serving goals of secular but pseudo-religious politicians, both in the West and in the East that allow the Gospel to be hijacked by Marxist "Liberation Theology." Sadly, many people fall for this ruse.
But the real, ultimate goal and purpose of our Christian faith is not to improve our lives on this earth or provide a fire escape from hell's flames; rather, it is to "be transformed by the renewing of your minds" into the likeness of Christ (Romans 12:2), to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts" (Romans 13:14) to become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). It's not fixing and patching up the old life, it's receiving an entirely new nature.
What exactly is secularism? In the article "Learning from Integralism" we read that the U.S. founding documents - The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights - are based on the principle that all people are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" of which the right to life is first, and that "Congress shall make no laws regarding an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Note the use of "an establishment" which refers to any one of the various established religions - Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, or Roman Catholic - that existed in the original 13 states: it does not state "the establishment of religion" meaning that the government must not make any laws that would establish a state church. Indeed, as this article states, "The constitutional settlement that endured for almost two centuries until it was abandoned by elites (including the Supreme Court) and uprooted in the 1960s was basically this: public authority could and should promote religion and partner with religious institutions for projects that are conducive to the common good, without coercion and without partiality toward any particular faith or sect."
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But what happened in the 1960s? First of all, God was put in a box and stuck up in the attic, in the "second story" of a universe where the first story was purely materialistic and secular. "Freedom of religion" was reinterpreted from freedom of expressing one's religious faith in public to mean "freedom to worship" once a week in a separate "box" called a church building, and leave it there - don't let it leak out into the public square, into your daily life and work. Secondly, now that religion was stowed away, the Sixties' Sexual Revolution let loose all those pent-up inhibitions, paving the way for The Pill and the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, the killing of innocent babies who were the result of uninhibited sexual behavior. Secularism became not the freedom to express and live out one's religious faith, but rather the license to scorn, throw out, and ultimately ban any religious expression of morality.
Why did things go wrong? As the last-mentioned article above states, the U.S. founding documents' "affirmations did not include sectarian tenets, theological speculation, or putatively revealed truth. They did include divine realities affirmed in the Declaration of Independence — a unitary God who created all there is, who providentially guided human events, and whose effects included naturally known moral truths — truths that could be known and were known by reason alone. These truths are elements of a 'natural theology' or 'natural religion,' really a branch of philosophy." But by defining religion too loosely, setting the boundaries too wide, by excluding revealed truth and including only what can be known from nature by reason alone, it started the process of secularization and the state's affirming only a rationalist, materialist worldview.
By now, Christians who believe in revealed truth and objective morality of right and wrong are in the minority. We need to gather together and regroup around a set of revealed truths that Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox can and do all agree on: the Nicene Creed. It is the only Christian creed accepted by all three streams of Christianity. We must publicly affirm and confess this Nicene Creed as the set of truths to live by, putting aside any public disputes about secondary or "sectarian tenets."
Secondly, we must form Christian communities where we can encourage one another and raise our families in an atmosphere that is not constantly being bombarded with godless materialism, secularism, and even the demonic in movies, television, and social media. We need to clean up our collective acts, take out the garbage and filth, and let the Lord sanctify our lives!
"Ascribe to the Lord, you tribes of the nations, Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength; Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to His name: Bring an offering, and come before Him: Worship the Lord in holy array. Tremble before Him, all the earth: The world also is established that it cannot be moved. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; Let them say among the nations, the Lord reigns" (1 Chronicles 16:28-31).
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!
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Nice to know you also read Fr Freeman's blogposts. They're always interesting, often thought-provoking and frequently spiritually refreshing. His writing on the "two-storey" universe gives a meetingplace for Orthodox and Reformed Christians, I think.
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