Today, Fr. Ephraim's Sunday Homily was posted to the audio files on the homilies page. The transcript of the homily is also provided below.
When I was a kid, my friends and I liked playing with water guns in the Summer. We would fill up water balloons and fill up all the water guns we could find. Then one half of the kids went to one side of the house, and the other half the kids went to the other, and we would have a water war. Even thinking about it makes me smile to this day.
What is particularly funny looking back on it, but was not funny at the time, was that I had this friend who every single time, at some point in the water war, would put down his gun and would get the hose, put the spray nosal on it, and use it as his water gun. Of course, we would all run out of water at some point, but he could just keep soaking us with the hose.
For the rest of us, we were limited by the amount of water our guns could hold. While he had unlimited water precisely because he wasn’t holding the water. His gun, the hose, was supplied by a constant source.
Now, I hated it at the time. Because there we all are standing there soaked while my friend just laughed. But, there is a spiritual lesson in it. We have the choice to go through life running on our own energy, our own willpower, our own talents and skills.
But, the Gospel of Christ calls us to trade in our limited life, to trade our will, for His will, our self, for His use, and to trade our energy for His energy. Like my friend, we trade our limited resources, for Christ’s unlimited abundant life.
Today Christ says, “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny Himself, take up His cross, and follow me.” So Christ describes how we make this trade.
He says, let him deny Himself.
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom explains it this way: “turning away from ourselves. And loving the other with all of our being.”
The Greek word in the Gospel literally means “disown ourselves.”
This means that we have to decide: Do we want Thy Kingdom to come or my Kingdom come? Is it my will be done or thy will be done on earth as it is heaven?
When we disown ourselves, we lay down our life and take up His life. Like my friend with the garden hose, we lay down our limitedness for his limitlessness. Our Orthodox faith is unique in all Christianity because we teach and know that if we make God’s will our will then He gives His life in place of our life. I’ll say that again. If we make God’s will our will, then His life pours into us and through us on those around us. This is true Christianity!
We can say with St. Paul, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in Me.” God is offering you and I a trade. We can go through life with our little water gun, always striving, always planning, always moving, but also always running out. We get run down, we get depressed, we get scared and anxious. What if I can’t make it? What if I am not enough? What if I fall behind?
As we go we try to conserve our energy and effort, but it only leads to more anxiety, more fear, and more grasping after things that slip through our fingers.
Christ says this isn’t how life is supposed to be. We were made to have abundant, everlasting life. We were made to share the life of God, but we have to lay down the one we are holding onto so tightly. I must lay down My will for Thy Will. My Kingdom Come, for Thy Kingdom Come.
This is the Cross of our life. As we struggle and strive to do His will, His life comes into us giving us His endless strength and His abundant energy to meet every challenge and to turn us into saints.
So how can we practically make this part of our daily life? What can we do to make this our own? The Church gives us three tools for this: Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving, but we will focus just on fasting today since the Feast of the Cross is also a fast.
Every Wednesday and every Friday our tradition teaches us to fast from meat and cheese and other things. Why? So, we can trade our will for His will.
By fasting in this small way, we train ourselves to choose His will over our will in a small but tangible way. Like practicing for a sport, fasting helps us practice putting His will above our will. Choosing his kingdom instead of my kingdom.
Fasting does not make God like us better, fasting makes us more like God. By fasting we lay down our will and do His will. We deny ourselves, but we take up His cross and follow Him.
Today we receive God’s kingdom in Bread and Wine, then throughout this week we can practice putting down the little bit of life we can carry, and trade it in for a limitless abundance of life, His Life, that wells up in us into an eternal limitless life from His Body and Blood within us.