Posted by by Fr. Josiah Trenham, Ph.D. on 7/26/2006, 9:19 pm Diocesan Parish Life Conference in El Paso, TX - June 15th, 2006 Keynote Address I greet you with sincere affection in our common Savior, and bring the greetings of His Grace, Joseph, Bishop of Los Angeles and the West to all of you. I am greatly honored to be here in El Paso at the 2nd Parish Life Conference of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. I have the opportunity to speak to you on a subject most dear to my heart, and I believe to yours als the unity of the Orthodox Church in America. I have entitled my presentation, “Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America”, but before I begin please allow me to ask your forgiveness ahead of time for my mistakes and inadequacies, and to beg your indulgence. I do not speak from any position of expertise or authority on this subject, but as a concerned priest of the Church grasping for a way forward. Psalm 132 and the Unity of Israel. “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head, coming down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard, coming down upon the edge of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, coming down upon the mountains of Zion; for there the Lord commanded the blessing- life forevermore.” Psalm 132:1-3[1] Brothers are meant to dwell together in unity. That is the good life. That is the pleasant life. When men dwell in unity, they are invigorated with strength, and find their union producing immense fruits, exponentially greater collectively than the sum of what they could have produced as separated individuals. The union of all men, for which we pray in every divine service, is the will of God. All men united in Jesus Christ is the desire of the Lord. All earthly races united in the one heavenly race- which is the race of the New Adam, Jesus Christ, the Christian race, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.[2] This union of all men in the Holy Church is the will of God from all eternity and the purpose of the Almighty, which animates all of His redemptive acts. As a witness and demonstrable expression of the life of the renewed humans, who are Christians, is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The Church is a miracle of unity for it is the New Man, and as such is the only miracle of unity in the cosmos. In confronting the Church all men are to witness a living organism that defies and transcends human divisions. Sadly today, when most outsiders encounter the Church and hear we are Orthodox Christians, a question immediately follows, “Are you Greek? Are you Russian?” and so by our divisions we have fostered an earthly identification of ethnicity and nationalism that leads the observer to conclude our Church is designed only for particular groups of people, and not for them. When the holy Church is divided the prescriptive will of God is negated, the light of the holy Gospel itself is eclipsed, and the truth of the Lord is suppressed by man’s unrighteousness. Misdirected men, in their lack of proper priorities, hold down the unity of the Church only with great effort, like compressing a great and mighty spring. The unity of the Church, like a powerful spring, is always ready to leap forth, and even when compressed and smothered by men’s sins and indifference, this unity resists its suppressors. This is why division cannot last in the Church. It is like a cankerous sore to which the Body dispatches antibodies, and will not ignore until it is healed. Against this power of self-correction lie those who, at least by their actions, would like to make cankerous sores permanent fixtures of the body. “Behold how evil and miserable it is for brothers to dwell in division! It is like a sulphuric stench in the nostrils, coming down upon the eyes. It is like the odor of Babylon, coming down upon the parched plains of Sodom; for there the Lord commanded the curse- everlasting death.” Such is the glory of unity, and such is the horror of division. Sadly today such Davidic opinions of the value of brotherly unity appear to be shared by too few. Brotherly unity is esteemed little, and placed beneath many other pseudo-priorities such as the status quo, power, property, ethnic affinities, and national loyalties. Psalm 132 is one of fifteen Psalms of Ascent, chanted by the people of God as they made their way to the central sanctuary in Jerusalem to celebrate the feasts of the Lord.[3] The chanting was of a tangible unity expressed not just in faith, but also in the deeds of a common worship and a common pilgrimage. Can you imagine this hymn being chanted by the pilgrims in any meaningful way if when the pilgrims arrived in Jerusalem they were divided by their 12 tribes, and each tribe was made to go its own different way, to its own different temple, presided over by its own different high priest, sitting in different places for the feast and never experiencing tangible unity? The thought is ludicrous and grotesque, but has many parallels to contemporary Orthodox Christian life in America. Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to apply Psalm 132 to our present ecclesiastical miseries in America. We do not presently know the blessings of the unity described by Psalm 132. We do not enjoy the unity for which our Savior shed His precious blood. We do not experience the unity inspired by His Holy Spirit, established by His Holy Apostles, required by the Sacred Canons, and defended by the Holy Fathers. We have a measure of unity- for sure, but incomplete, mangled, and intolerable. We call the unity we possess by various names – a unity of faith sometimes we say, or a eucharistic unity. Some clergy even suggest that the only unity that matters is that various Orthodox in America can commune together. But this compromised and deficient unity does not satisfy our Savior, and is positively dangerous, threatening by its very inconstancy and instability to shatter the unity of faith and chalice that we do have. Orthodox Christians have never imagined historically that a unity of faith or communion could co-exist with a disunity of synod, praxis, and interchange. Two Sundays past we celebrated the Sunday of the Holy and God-bearing Fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicea. We celebrated a common Orthodox faith defended and confessed by a common Orthodox synod. In our present experience we have only half of the equation. We share a common Orthodox faith with our fellow Orthodox Christians throughout America, but we have no common synod. As a result nothing is defended or confessed as it should be, and we are weaklings in the face of encroaching secularism and heresy. Without a common synod we are sitting ducks to lose even our unity of faith. The Trivialization of Disunity. We trivialize our disunity but calling it simply a disunity of jurisdictions or an administrative division- as though the division we sustain is not a matter of the heart or essence or faith of the Orthodox Church. Jurisdiction and administration ring in our ears as merely external and relatively unimportant divisions, and so the tragedy of our division is belittled. As though our present divisions are merely the unfortunate turns of history, which we must benignly endure until they naturally go away. I beg to differ from such an appraisal. Such tamed and pacified descriptions of Orthodox disunity in America are untrue, inconsistent with Orthodox theology, mask the very serious nature and consequences of our present division, and steal the sense of urgency that the Spirit of God births in the hearts of the faithful in the face of disunity....
Board Administrator
Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of America
Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East
Introduction. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Your Grace, Basil, Bishop of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America; my dear brothers in the sacred priesthood; pious and Christ-loving Deacons; brothers and sisters in Christ:
“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!” Unity is life. Division is death. We might recite the antithesis of Ps. 132 in these words,...for the entire article, click on the link below...
