Rendering to God

 

John Singleton Copley - The Tribute Money (1782) 

A few days ago, I wrote an article about Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church. In that article, I mentioned that the Russian government and the Church were collaborating together to establish a new order in Russia. Without resurrecting that horse, I feel that it is necessary for me to talk about the Church’s involvement in political affairs.

Metropolitan Jonah, retired Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, has been giving a series of lectures at St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Washington, DC. The lectures themselves focus on various aspects of the Orthodox faith and are very interesting. His Beatitude, however, recently talked about politics. In a discussion he delivered about Orthopraxy, he talked about the destruction of the inner city, libertarianism, and other aspects of current affairs that have no place in a discussion of Orthopraxy (practice of the Church).

Personally, I don’t mind it if bishops and priests have their own political ideas. I don’t mind if they discuss said ideas on the internet. What I mind is when politics is discussed from the pulpit and when the Church gets involved in issues that do not directly have anything to do with her.

Not so long ago, I was watching an interview with a traditionalist Roman Catholic priest out in California. His interviewer asked him if it was okay to preach about politics from the pulpit during an election season. Father X. pointed out that it was not his business to tell people who to vote for and what issues to vote on. From the pulpit, he was allowed to talk about the moral implications of said issues, but not to state outright how people should vote and what they should think.

You see, there is a massive difference between preaching about morality from the pulpit and gathering votes for your favorite candidate. A priest can talk about how immoral abortion is and what a problem it creates in terms of demography. However, he should not talk about which candidate he personally endorses for the Senate. A hieromonk can preach against homosexuality, but he has no right to tell people how to vote.

The problem I had when listening to Metropolitan Jonah’s lecture (since deleted from YouTube) was that he was telling his listeners and, by extension, the viewers what to think and how to feel. I told a friend of mine that if he endorsed monarchism as the Orthodox way of ruling, then I would shut down the thing. Mercifully, there was nothing like that.

The Church has never stated what the appropriate form of government should or should not be. Russian monarchists will tell you that monarchy works best. However, Russian history indicates that monarchy only works well when you have somebody ruling with a strong fist like Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. While those men were anointed by bishops to serve Russia as monarchs, the Church in no way has endorsed monarchy as being the right form of government.

You see, the Church is beyond politics. In the early centuries and for most of Church history, believers have tried not to stand out. If they held public office, they kept their faith personal. Only when they themselves were affected would they speak truth to power. For example, St. Demetrius was ordered by the governor of Thessalonica to persecute the Christians in the city. When he told the governor that he wouldn’t do it because it was against his religion, only then did he confess to being a Christian. Not before.

In the Gospels, Christ stated outright that we should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Caesar represents the government and the political life of the world in which we live. We are to fill out our taxes, vote, and do what is appropriate for us as citizens. However, we should not mix our spiritual life up with the political world in which we live. 

"In Christ, there is no Jew or Greek": Nationalism and Orthodox Christianity

Andrei Rublev - St. Paul.

In recent years, there has been a great deal of discussion about nationalism and Orthodox Christianity in America. If you look in the Yellow Pages or enter the word “Orthodox Church” and the name of your city, you will probably find a list of parishes. If you look closely enough, you will find that more than one of them will have some kind of ethnic group attached next to it (Russian, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian). This can be confusing to many Americans since the Greeks, the Russians, and the Bulgarians belong to the same Orthodox denomination, hold the same beliefs, and have a similar praxis of the Faith.

The main reason why countries of origin are thrown in next to the names of church has to do with church history in the United States. A little more than one hundred years ago, numerous immigrants were coming to this country from throughout Southeastern Europe and the Russian Empire. These groups of immigrants came together along national lines and built their parishes as a way to keep their communities together and preserve their ethnic identity. In the fictional city of Anytown that I like to use the Russians built St. George’s, the Serbs had St. Sava’s, and the Bulgarians built St. Cyril and Methodius.

For many reasons, the immigrant parish was an important place. It was where the children were taught about the faith, charitable committees were formed, languages schools were created, and so on. The parish almost exclusively served the local community in whatever ways it was needed. Very few people from outside ever joined and it was not until fairly recently that Americans have started converting to the Orthodox faith en masse.

Today, many of these parishes founded by immigrants still exist. As the parishioners have gotten older and depending on the jurisdiction, some of these parishes have become more Americanized. There might be English at the Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning. The priest might not be Bulgarian or Russian, but an American convert. Perhaps, most of the congregation wouldn’t even speak the old language or very few would if there haven’t been any immigrants from the old country in recent years.

Of course, there are places where the immigrant mindset is still alive and well. A good friend of mine has written a screenplay where a new choir director is register in the parish. He looks down at the form and says to the parish priest, “Native village?” The priest waves him off.  While this exchange may sound like a joke, it most certainly isn’t. How many people do you know that have shown up for services and been asked by some well-meaning older woman whether they were Russian, Serbian, or Greek? After all, aren’t those the people that go to this parish?

Paperwork aside, there is a nationalism that can infect parish life. In some Russian parishes, they like to celebrate “Victory Day” (V-E Day to Americans) with songs, dances, and films that come from the Soviet Union. However, Americans don’t celebrate “Victory Day.” The day on which Americans commemorate their war dead is Memorial Day.

Of course, the Russians also bring out their monarchism into a democracy. Indeed, it would seem that becoming an Orthodox Christian necessitates having an icon of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II in your icon corner, a Russian tricolor or Imperial flag on your wall, and a recording of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony playing on the iPod.

None of this, however, is what Orthodox Christianity is about. At its core, Orthodox Christianity is about our inward transformation into icons of Christ. It is a deeply relational faith and one that challenges us to struggle constantly against the old man in order to put on the new. This struggles has very little to do with Victory Day celebrations, monarchism, or having to learn a new language. Indeed, these things are outer trappings and white washing.

St. Paul writes that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, circumcised or uncircumcised.” The same applies to the Church. There is no Bulgarian, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, or Arab. We are all brothers and sisters to each other regardless of national origin and we are supposed to be transformed together. Putting our national differences at the forefront of our is not what it is about. Not at all.  

A Man in Full

Fr. Alexander Schmemann (+1983) in later years 

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate about the writings of Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983), the former dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York and one of the foremost Orthodox theologians of the 20^th century. There are many people throughout the Orthodox world who view him as a radical, ecumenist reformer who wanted to see something akin to Vatican II in the Orthodox Church. On the other side of the fence, there are those who believe that his writings are relevant to the way that we see ourselves and the Church today and that they should be used for restricting. I take neither of these positions.

I was introduced to Fr. Schmemann's writings when I was a teenager. My home parish had a bookstore that contained a little book called “I Believe.” This was the first in a three volume set of sermons that were broadcast into Russia by Fr. Alexander via Radio Liberty. I recall reading this book over the course of several days and finding that it resonated with me very deeply.

The main reason for why I found resonance with Fr. Schmemann's writings was that he made religion simple. As anyone who has worked in radio will tell you, it is necessary to get the message across in the most cohesive and concise way possible. When religion and theology is under discussion, that kind of advice can be difficult to heed. However, Fr. Schmemann was so good at what he did that he brought thousands of people to the Orthodox Church and received letters from all over the Soviet Union thanking him for his broadcasts.

In his radio sermons, Fr. Schmemann speaks from the heart about the hard truths of human experience. He does not begin his series on the Nicene Creed with the first words, but rather uses the idea of what faith is. He talks about a study conducted in France wherein believers were to defined to ask what faith was and how it worked in their lives. In one of his broadcasts, he examined several of the most popular answers and gently demolished those with which the Orthodox Church does not agree.

Obviously, there is a great deal that is lost in translation. Russian is a language that is lyrical and almost poetic. When listening to these broadcasts online, one not only feels the power of the message that is being conveyed. One also hears the bass baritone voice, a voice akin to that of the great operatic singer Chaliapin that is speaking directly to its listeners.

Fr. Schmeman wrote numerous theological books and articles. “For the Life of the World” is probably his most important. It is an examination of the Sacrament of Holy Communion and the Divine Liturgy from many different angles. It is also an attempt to make us see how important the Divine Liturgy and the Eucharist is to our daily lives. As a matter of fact, Fr. Alexander Schmemann was an extremely vocal advocate for frequent Holy Communion, which was not common during his first years in America and yet is more common today.

In order to understand Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s life, however, it is necessary to read his journals. In the volume set that was published in Russia and the excerpts that have been translated in America, one gets to know the man behind the curtain. For most of his life, Fr. Alexander struggled to reconcile the many different threads that made him a man in full. He struggled with church politics in America and yet he also participated in them, he was a Russian living abroad and yet he also tried as hard as he could not to be a Russian.

The tremendous struggle recorded in these personal diaries during the last ten years of his life allow us to see that he was neither the renovationist demon of the conservatives nor the radical of the liberal of the Orthodox Church. Instead, Fr. Alexander Schmemann was a man just like any other. Someone who was working out his salvation in fear and trembling and trying to figure out what it all meant. This is the man that we do not see in our constant debates over his legacy and yet this is the only version of him that matters. May his memory be eternal!