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The Silent Spiritual Killer

The Silent Spiritual Killer

Adapted from a sermon by Dr Adel Magdy

Passage Luke 7:28-35

In our lives, there are some sins that are very obvious. You fall into sin, and the manifestation is there immediately; murder, adultery, theft – the consequences are visible and immediate. We know instantly that we have sinned.

There are other sins in our lives that aren’t as obvious. They subtly creep into our lives, and eventually destroy us. These are the sins that are particularly dangerous because there are no warning signs.

In the field of medicine, there are some diseases that are known as, “silent killers,” for this very reason. They do not display symptoms until it is too late and the disease has completely ravaged the body.

The same applies to silent spiritual killers. They creep in slowly until its too late, because there are no pre-symptoms. The silent spiritual killer that we will focus on is the sin of judging others negatively and finding faults of others. This eventually consumes all our thoughts and feelings until we are drowning in sin.

The Lord highlights an upsetting passage and describes the Pharisees as such. They constantly degrade and judge those around them. Christ says,

‘We played the flute for you, And you did not dance; We mourned to you, And you did not weep. For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
Luke 7:32-34

No matter the circumstance, the Pharisees found a way to be judgemental. In the happy times, they were not happy. In sad times, they were not sad. When they saw someone fasting, praying, living a righteous life, instead of thinking thoughts of praise, they criticised and accused John the Baptist of being demon-possessed. When the Lord wanted to show them that He was One of us, immediately they criticised Him for being a Friend of drunkards and sinners.

This is a problem in all our lives, to some degree. Having a negative attitude, even silently in our hearts, can lead to our destruction.

I can typically tell when it is time for me to confess when I find myself critical toward others, or I look toward a situation and judge. Instantly, this is a reminder to confess and start fresh. The Lord lifts the scales from my eyes and I am renewed to an attitude that can make excuses for others.

If you consider someone in your life that is always negative and critical, it is exhausting to be around them. You can never please them. On a nice sunny day, they will complain of the heat. The next day is cold, and they complain that it’s too cold to even go outside. In the process of being critical, they destroy themselves spiritually.

The Lord is calling us to start fresh, and to look to others in a new light. To stop being critical and start trying to look through the eyes of the Lord. Today we can all promise the Lord to give the benefit of the doubt to those around us. When someone does something that I perceive as wrong, I make excuses for them. I stop judging them in my heart. Instead of being like the critical Pharisees, today I’ll start fresh. I’ll stop judging them.

When we look through the eyes of the Lord and we take away the hardness of our heart, we can no longer be critical of others. When we see people in the gentleness of the Lord, we grow in compassion for those around us.

How many times in the gospel did the Lord see a sinner? How many times did He condemn a sinner? Almost never. How many times did the Lord see the sinner and make an excuse, and not only that, but praise the goodness within them? He would take the one good thing and make them feel like they were the most special person on earth.

This is the message that we can take. That it is not our place to be critical of others, to be critical of the hierarchy, to be critical of my brothers and sisters. It is my place to be like Christ. To look at people with the same gentle and compassionate eyes of the Lord. To remember that when the Lord looks at my sins He doesn’t criticise me, so when I look at others I shouldn’t criticise them.

In Luke 5 we read the miracles of the leper who fell on his face before the Lord and implored Him saying, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” This is a beautiful expression, that shows a multitude of virtues in the leper. He comes to the Lord and complete humility and acknowledgement of His power. There is something more subtle that we see, and that is, the Lord makes a point of touching the leper.

There are so many instances that the Lord heals with His words alone. There was no reason why the Lord needed to touch to heal. To understand the significance of the touch, we need to understand what it meant to be a leper. Leprosy, in those times, meant death. As the leprosy rotted the body, the smell became tremendous and meant that their social network was taken away. A leper was deemed unclean and could no associate with their own family. They had to live your life away from people, they had to wear a bell so people knew they were coming and could move out of their way. More still, they had to yell, “unclean” so people would run in the opposite direction.

In the midst of this, he cries out to the Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean. The Lord would be expected to run away from the leprous man. For the very first, someone has taken a step toward him, instead of away from him. Instead of people throwing things in his direction, someone has drawn near to touch him, despite his leprosy.

This was a touch of, “I do not judge you, I do not criticise you, I love you.”

Instead of looking at people and seeing them as bad people, people that you’d rather run in the opposite direction of, I can make excuses from them. For the one that gives me a hard time, I promise that I will pray for them, instead of attempting revenge. I will show them love when I see them, even if it hurts. And I do this, for the sake of the Lord, because it is what I know He would do.

Sensitivity For Others

Adapted from a sermon by Fr Samuel Fanous

Passage: Luke 9:10-17

The words of the Gospel today from Luke 9 begin with a realisation about something that’s happened. The disciples had been travelling with Jesus and multitudes had been following to hear him speak. And then it says, “when the day began to wear away” – when the people were exhausted and the day had come to its close, the disciples said to Christ, “Send the multitude away, that they may go into the surrounding towns and country, and lodge and get provisions; for we are in a deserted place here.”

You hear those words – “send them away” – and they can sound arrogant. It almost sounds as if the disciples are annoyed – that they’ve had it with these people that they’ve been with for an entire day, even days perhaps, following them, serving them, caring for them. So in annoyance, they say: “send them away”.

But one of the most remarkable this is that this is not how the early church read these words. St Cyril of Alexandria in the fourth century spent almost an entire homily talking about these words, “send them away”. He said

“[the disciples] seized with love toward the multitudes, and beginning to have a concern for the people…”

They were beginning to have concern for them.

When they say, “send them away”, they aren’t doing it out of annoyance or frustration or arrogance – they’re doing it because they’re starting to feel people. They’re starting to become sensitive to the needs of people. So they ask the Lord to send them away to the surrounding towns before it gets dark so that they can go and eat and sleep – because this is a deserted place. It’s likely the multitude themselves hadn’t realised it – it had just started to get dark, and perhaps they were distracted, unaware of their needs that would come in just a few hours. So the disciples start to become very sensitive – St Cyril is very specific that they “seized with love… beginning to have a concern for the people”.

St Cyril goes on to say,

“for to draw near, and make supplication on the people’s behalf, is an act becoming to the saints”.

To be sensitive to people and their needs is the beginning and act of becoming to the saints. So from here, Christ commands the disciples: “You give them something to eat”. Christ could feed the multitude, but he wanted the disciples to share in that. They told Him that they had no more than five loaves and two fish, so He takes those, blesses them and gives them out to people in groups of 50, to feed perhaps 50,000 people – an event which we call the Blessing of Multiplication or the Blessing of the Little – a remarkable miracle which would’ve reminded people of the days of Moses when Manna would come from heaven and the people would eat from it.

All of this comes first in the beginning of sensitivity. Sensitivity to others, and not myself. It creates the space in which God can work, can heal and can love through us. But that sensitivity requires me first to move out of myself. It means I have to move out for my own lusts, desires, ambitions – I have to see others.

If we do not see others, we cannot be sensitive to them. We can’t feel them or their needs. If we see ourselves, we only care for ourselves. This is actually where the word “narcissism” comes from – it’s a word that we painfully throw around at others who are quite self-absorbed – but actually, the word “narcissism” comes from one of the Greek gods in mythology, Narcissus, a handsome young Greek man who was being chased by a woman, the nymph Echo, and rejected her.

He didn’t want to be loved or to love somebody else. She wasn’t beautiful enough for him. One day after hunting he came before a pool of water, and he sat down in front of the pool, as he went down to drink, he saw himself. He looked at that image, and couldn’t stop looking at it because it was so beautiful. Eventually, after hours of staring at his own image in the water, he realised he couldn’t consummate his love. He couldn’t embrace the person. And so after gazing, enraptured in his own image, he killed himself – because he couldn’t attain the object of his desire. And that’s where we get the word narcissism – somebody that was so self-absorbed, all they could see was themselves.

Yet Christ is the exact opposite. Something that always strikes me in the gospels is that if you pay attention to the words carefully you see how many times Christ sees people. How many times, the evangelists stop to make a point that He looks and sees somebody.

“And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers” (Matt. 4:18). He saw Nathaniel, and said, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” (John 1:48). With the paralytic man, it says, “When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”” (John 5:6). In Matthew, Jesus “saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). When Christ sees the rich young man and is asked how he can be saved, it says, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21). When Jesus looks up at Zacchaeus, it’s up in the sycamore tree, and he is hiding because he is so embarrassed as a tax collector to be seen by people. It says, “when Jesus came to the place, He looked up and saw him, and said to him, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” (Luke 19:5).

These are just a few examples – the gospels are littered with them. Christ sees us. He is sensitive to our needs. He feels our needs. He looks beyond himself, He sees others, and so He is sensitive to our needs. Sensitivity to others is the beginning of saintliness. It is the beginning of drawing near to Christ and becoming like Him.

Many years ago, perhaps when I was in my first year of university, I didn’t attend university very much. I was a very poor student – I was probably attending about half an hour a week – so I had nothing to do and took up many hobbies that no 18-year-olds do.

One priest had asked me to help him – so I used to pray one liturgy every Thursday morning from 5-7 a.m., and afterwards I would drive around this elderly priest to help him give people communion, sometimes for four or five hours, sometimes until 2 p.m.

And every time after we’d finished the liturgy, I would watch this priest take the Eucharist and put on his head, and I’ve never seen anyone do what he does. He would refuse to drive – he let me drive – and he would sit in the car with the Eucharist on top of his head for five hours, going from place to place with incredible reverence. Often I would drive in silence for hours because I didn’t want to disturb him, until we’d visit the very last person receiving communion, after which, I would try to go to the drivers seat but he would refuse to give me the keys and let me drive, and say the exact same words: “before you drove because you were driving Christ. But now it is Yohanna, and I cannot allow you to drive Yohanna.” He would refuse to let me drive him, ever – but I could drive when Christ was on top of his head. This went on for a year, every Thursday, until one Thursday we came to the last communion. He told me to park the car and stay in the car, because the person he was visiting had a personal issue that he didn’t want anyone to know about except for his priest.

So as I went to park the car, I went straight into a brick wall and knocked off the bumper bar. So I sat there for a nervous half an hour trying to find the way to bring the bumper bar up, so the priest wouldn’t notice that I knocked off his bumper bar, until eventually, the priest came after the last communion as I was down on the ground trying to fix it, and in just one glance, he saw what the situation was and he looked away. I opened my mouth to begin to apologise – but he just laughed and said, “it’s nothing”. He went into his pocket and threw me the keys, and said “quick, let’s drive”.

For a year, he refused to ever let him drive him after communion, because I couldn’t drive Yohanna, I could only drive the Eucharist. But after I crashed his car with the bumper bar hanging off, he threw me the keys just so I wouldn’t be upset.

He was sensitive. Because he feared that I would become upset or feel guilt or shame because I crashed his car, he gave me the keys and let me drive him. In that moment, I possibly receive the greatest lesson of my life.

To become sensitive to others. To feel them. And that means, forgive me, we need to look very carefully at ourselves. Do I see others or do I see myself only?

How many times each day do I see others? Do I feel for others? Do I live for others? How many times a day, if at all?

And yet if I don’t go out of myself – beyond my desires, needs and ambitions, and I cannot see or feel others, I cannot be sensitive to their needs or feel for them. And if I don’t live for them, I don’t live for Him.

But if I see others, if I feel their needs much more deeply than they themselves feel their own needs, and I live for them, then I live for Christ. And that is why St Cyril of Alexandria says, being sensitive to others is an act of becoming of the saints. It was the entire beginning of the Blessing of the Multiplication story, with the disciples becoming sensitive to others.

So let us all, as one church, especially in the coming weeks, let us train ourselves to become sensitive to others. To see others and to feel their needs. To look beyond ourselves and our needs, but to see others.

Glory be to God Amen.

How Much Does God Love Me?

How Much Does God Love Me?

Adapted from a sermon by Fr Elijah Iskander

Holy Week leads up to the crucial death of our Lord. If we were to summarise this week in one phrase, it is, The Cross. If the Cross was described in another way, that is love – The Cross is Love.

We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, ²⁴but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. – 1 Cor. 1:23-24.

To some, the Cross is foolishness, how could you believe in a god that would accept to be treated in this way? Others take it one step further and say that it is a stumbling block. I want to believe but I can’t.

To some it is weakness, agony, failure. Even some Christian denominations have this view; that Jesus was the victim.

To the Orthodox Christian, the Cross is victory and power, but above all the Cross is love.

If we knew how much God loved us, our lives would be different. If we knew the depth of His love for us personally, our lives would be renewed!

We meet so many characters in the Scriptures of Holy Week. All their thoughts and actions could be understood by asking one question – did you know how much God loved you?

We read about the Israelites in the prophecy of the sixth hour of Good Friday. After they saw the ten plaques, after the first-born of the Egyptians die, after the Red Sea is parted and they escape, after they receive manna from heaven, they then complain against God. We read, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us in the desert, For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this worthless bread.” The Lord Himself sent bread from Heaven to sustain them but even this, they did not like. (Numbers 21:5).

After everything the Lord had done for the people of Israel, the question becomes, did you forget how much He loves you?

If we look at Judas, a key figure of Holy Week, the question becomes, did you ever realise that Christ loved you? While other church fathers disagree, St John Chrysostom believes that Christ did wash Judas’ feet along with the other disciples. He did this to show him that He loved him. He wanted to give him one more chance. Maybe this would move his heart. Maybe this would have stopped Judas’ scheme. Maybe this would soften his heart.

If Judas knew how much the Lord loved him, would he have sold Him so cheaply for thirty pieces of silver? It would be impossible. If Judas knew how much the Lord loved him, would he have been able to go and betray Him with a kiss – an intimate, calculated and premeditated act? If Judas knew how much the Lord loved him then his life would have been very different. Perhaps the question for Judas becomes, did you ever know how much the Lord loved you?

If we look at the two thieves that were crucified with Christ, we see two different perceptions of the crucified Christ. In the right-hand thief’s creed of Good Friday, we say, “What did you see and what did you comprehend,” to be able to confess Christ as King?

The left-hand thief didn’t see or hear anything, we know this because we hear him blaspheme against the Lord when he said, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us” (Luke 23:39). If the left thief had known how much the Lord loved him, his words would have been very different. If he comprehended how much Christ loved him, perhaps he would have cried out like the right-hand thief, who could see how much Christ loved him. Even if every moment of his life had been away from Christ in not a negligent way, but intentionally for he was a robber, he was yet able to comprehend Christ’s love. He looked at Christ and saw how much He loved him. He saw that Christ could overlook what he had done. It was not too late for the boundless love of the Lord.

The sinner woman rushed into the Pharisee house uninvited, breaks the flask of alabaster oil, loosens her hair and wipes His feet with her. She made a spectacle of herself. She knew how much Christ loved her, she knew He would defend her, she knew He would honour her and say, “what this woman has done will be told as a memorial to her” (Matthew 26:13). Because she knew how much Christ loved her, her actions without words, were testament to her recognition of Christ’s love for her.

St Peter also, loved the Lord but in an impulsive moment he denied Him. If St Peter remembered in that specific moment how much the Lord loves him then it would be impossible for him to deny. There was a momentary lapse; a moment that his fear clouded his vision of Christ’s love.

Finally, St John the Beloved; the one whom Jesus loved. The one who knew how much Jesus loved him. He was unwavering in faith, standing at the foot of the Cross when all the other disciples had scattered. He could do this because he knew how much the Lord loved him, his words and actions were different. He was the one whom Jesus loved.

For us on Good Friday, we must reflect on these characters. I ask myself, in the midst of uncertainty, pestilence, plaque, setbacks in study or health, am I like Israel, forgetting what the Lord has done for me in the past? If I knew how much the Lord loves me, I will never be shaken.

Am I like Judas? If I know how much the Lord loves me, will I betray Him for a cheap lie? An inappropriate image or thought? An inappropriate relationship? If I know how much the Lord loves then my response to His love is an inability to do these things.

Am I like the right-hand thief? I know how much You love me, even if I have sinned and been far from You up until this day, I know it is never too late, I know You still have hope for me. I know that You can still accept me.

If we know how much the Lord loves us, our words, actions and lives will be different. Knowing the Lord is more than just information, we must have intimate knowledge of the Bible.

What if I don’t know the Lord loves me? Knowing the Lord runs much deeper than facts, but having intimate knowledge of the Bible. How then, can I remind myself?

The Cross. Look at the Cross. Contemplate the Cross. Sit at the foot of the Cross. Pray, Lord, I just need to remember, I just need to know how much You love me. This becomes easy, for we love for He first loved us.

“He bows his head, as if to kiss you. His heart is made bare open, as it were, in love to you. His arms are extended that he may embrace you. His whole body is displayed for your redemption. Ponder how great these things are. Let all this be rightly weighed in your mind: as he was once fixed to the cross in every part of his body for you, so he may now be fixed in every part of your soul.”
St Augustine

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