St. Michael Russian Orthodox Church

December 6, 2009

Living the Creed

Today we celebrate the repose of a saint who was recently voted the “greatest Russian” of all time in a number of 2008 polls. Yet the name ---St. Alexander Nevsky---is completely unknown to most Americans, and moreover my guess is that many Orthodox, even if they know the name, aren’t too sure of whether this legendary Alexander was a real person, much less whether he is also a saint. Well, icons of St. Alexander, including those in the chapel that bears his name in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, will tell you both—he was a real man---the Prince of Novgorod, a real city in the north of Russia, during the 1200s—who was glorified by the Church in the 1500s. My goal today is not to recount St. Alexander’s incredible life—there are many books and even movies for that, most famously Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 classic (you can get it on Netflix) with music by Sergei Prokofiev---rather I want simply to pique your interest in this great Saint, so that you can find out about him on your own, while continuing my goal today to talk about Russian movies.

So let’s go: “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to the church?” You can find this phrase on the back cover of the two volume grey colored calendar books that collect the daily Gospel readings for 2009 published in English this past year by our Patriarchate. {Our Russian Arts store has copies downstairs.} These words are so perfectly and simply stated, yet these words are obviously not from the Gospels. So from where did the Patriarchate find this phrase, you might ask? From a movie called Repentance, filmed in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s but censored and not released for a number of years. The line is spoken at the end of the movie by an old woman—a simple person, a babushka, but a simple person gifted with ultimate wisdom. The babushka asks whether she’s on the right street to get to the church. When she hears that she isn’t, she asks what is really the ultimate question about life: “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to the church?”

Some people say that our Church is unique because it has parishioners at both ends of a spectrum, or as one writer has recently put it “the Russian Orthodox Church attracts both the most educated and the most backward sections of the population. It especially appeals to urban intellectual youth.” While this might have been most true in Russia 20 years ago, because extreme political times result in extreme situations, we know that the Church today reaches all people, both in Russia and here at home. But what is it about Orthodoxy that engenders such a broad reach? Able to satisfy the most analytical people as well as the lease cynical. What is it about Orthodox Christianity that results in the conversion of someone like Dionysius the Areopagite by St. Paul. If you have forgotten that story, you can find it in the 17th chapter of the Book of Acts of the Apostles. Dionysius was a judge of the Areopagus, or the Mars Hill in Athens, one of the most learned men of his generation, who at first listened only reluctantly to the preaching of St. Paul, but was won over by the apostle’s clear logic, and went on to become the first bishop of Athens.

So what do Dionysius and the babushka from the movie have in common that binds them as Orthodox Christians, albeit at the extremes of the spectrum of believers? Some light may be shed on this by St. Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow during the mid 1800s, a man who wrote and preached extensively on the theology of the Church. The man who wrote the document that freed the serfs. According to Philaret, “none of the mysteries of the most secret wisdom of God ought to appear alien or altogether transcendent to us, but in all humility we must apply our spirit to the contemplation of divine things.” The modern Orthodox writer Vladimir Lossky has commented on these words saying: “To put it another way, we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us an as unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically.” Brothers and Sisters, what makes our religion so all encompassing is that we don’t, and don’t even try, to explain everything. The Orthodox Church is unique in its recognition of the difference between, and the importance of, mysticism (which is the personal experience of the divine mysteries) and theology (which is the dogma expressed in words and affirmed by the Church). The former cannot be expressed, only felt, only experienced. The Church expresses only what it can express, and in the most economical and understandable way-- the Creed. The Creed that satisfies ALL of the needs of the philosopher, but is simple enough for everyone to understand. And that can only be so because we recognize that it is impossible for us to describe in our puny language the unknowable mysteries of God. So we don’t even try, and that is the perfection of the Creed. It’s simple. It’s rather short, but to the point. In the Creed, there are five uses of the simplest number---“one.” But there are only four uses in the Creed of the most difficult word in our language--- “God.” Why? Because we Orthodox know we cannot explain God; instead, as St. Philaret says we try to live our lives to experience the divine mysteries— we can only experience, not understand, the God that St. John Chrysostom calls “ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible.” We hear those words every Sunday in the priest’s prayer during the Anaphora—words that tell us plainly that there are no words fit for describing God. Put another way, as Bishop Kallistos, the former Timothy Ware, has written: “The Creed belongs only to those who live it” or as Professor Jaroslav Pelikan has said: “the Creed is not in the first instance the business of professional and learned theological elite, it is meant to be prayed, right alongside the Lord’s Prayer as an act of adoration and worship.”

I read an article on the internet recently about a Russian Orthodox priest, a Father Georgy, who had ministered to the troops in South Ossetia. Father Georgy was quoted as saying: “I often met with Russian soldiers. I gave them crosses, bands with the 91st Psalm (“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High”). I spread more than two thousand of such bands. Soldiers confessed: This prayer helps us more than all the commanders’ orders and tank armor, because God is with us.” It’s those soldiers, Brothers and Sisters, who are real believers, even though they don’t have much more than the words of that Psalm to get them through the horrors of war. Those soldiers stand with that little old woman on the street in that movie at one end of the great spectrum of Orthodox believers. At the other end, stand St. Dionysius, St. Philaret, and the professors and philosophers. But both ends of the spectrum, and all of us in the middle, have something in common: All of us believe in One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Each and every one of us acknowledges one baptism for the remission of sins. And each and every one of us looks for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.