Most of us have seen and may even personally know a paraplegic or quadriplegic person. These people are paralyzed either from the waist or neck down depending on the type and severity of their afflictions. While many of us are not at risk of physical paralysis barring some kind of accident, we can be at risk of spiritual paralysis.
Spiritual paralysis is caused by sin. Our Lord came to cure spiritual paralysis by destroying sin and death by his own death and resurrection. The destruction of sin and death in our lives begins with our baptism. We are baptized by triple immersion in water; this triple immersion in the baptismal font reminds us that the font is both a tomb and a womb. It is a tomb where we put the old man sin to death and a womb where we put on Christ the new man and are reborn in a new life in Christ. This is the beginning of God’s many gifts of grace to us.
We become united as the Body of Christ, the Church through our baptism—a brotherhood of believers in the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. Unlike the Jewish laity who could not eat of the sacrifice of the altar, we partake of the Body and Blood of Christ—both clergy and laity since our Lord died once and for all to conquer sin and death in his flesh and freely gave Himself for our spiritual food and nourishment.
Our Lord is both human and God at the same time—unconfused and undivided. This fundamental Christian truth cannot be over-analyzed lest our analysis push the envelope of Christ’s divinity and humanity to extremes and exposing us to heresy. We commemorate the Fathers of the first six Ecumenical Councils on this day because they by their living examples and by their teaching navigated the intellectual landmine of over-analysis and presented the nature of Christ and the Holy Trinity, preserving and protecting the Church’s teachings from the extremes of heresy. The hymns at vespers are a lesson in the Church’s Christology. If we take Christ’s humanity to extremes as did Arius we run into the heresy of Arianism—a heresy which is alive and well in the cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If we emphasis Christ’s state of being and limit it to one state at a time, we can end up with a variety of heresies, including monophysitism and monthelitism—these heresies that are alive and well in the Mormon and several other faiths. One could go on and on as the first six Ecumenical Councils dealt with these and more heresies—Nestorianism, Sabellianism, just to name a couple more.
These heresies are a root cause of spiritual paralysis in mankind. Are these the only causes of spiritual paralysis in man? Perhaps not, but they are a starting point. Heresies are a cause of division in the Church which is why St. Paul exhorts the Church to try to get divisive people in the Church to reconcile themselves with the Church. However, if they refuse to reconcile then we have no choice but to cut bait so to speak and have nothing more to do with them. I am not talking about people who have differences of opinion due to the different local traditions within our Orthodox Christian jurisdictions. One set of local traditions is not necessarily better than another. One calendar is not better than another. What is important is that there is unity through this diversity of local traditions. We have a common core set of Holy Tradition and theology that is consistent across all of our jurisdictions. Harmonizing these local traditions is likely to take a couple of generations.
Are there other heresies that are looming over the horizon? I think there are—a very divisive one that has taken a particular hold in this country is that of phyletism. Several Orthodox metropolitans have expressed their concerns publicly by challenging and exhorting the world’s Orthodox Patriarchs to put aside politics and stop paralyzing the Orthodox Churches in America by allowing and encouraging them to become one autocephalous Orthodox Church in this country.
Such a united Orthodox Church could do so much more for the entire world—the social ministries that would be spawned are phenomenal and beyond imagination. We could begin to build schools, hospitals, old age homes, homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation facilities and so much more. A united Church in the United States would have the critical mass and power to provide financial support not only to its ministries in the United States, but tremendous support to the Mother Churches throughout the world. This would be a powerhouse second to none. However, as our metropolitan said, we and our Church’s leaders throughout the world have to continue to stand up against heresy and protect the Church’s teachings the way the Fathers of the first six Ecumenical Councils did and express our faith with conviction, boldness and power, which can only come from our Lord.
The challenges to creating an administratively unified Orthodox Church in the United States is made challenging by the difficulties in coming to consensus on our what the local traditions should look like. Do we make adjustments needed to make the church accessible to all given the realities of life in the United States? If the church as a whole decides to make adjustments, do they really compromise the faith or are we as Orthodox Christians afraid of taking the world by the horns and being effective Christian witnesses? These are difficult and thorny questions that need to be answered and these will take time to resolve—maybe a couple of generations.
The paralytic in the Gospel was healed by a combination of his own faith and faith of his friends. Curing our own spiritual paralysis as individual Christians and as a Church will take nothing less than the collective faith of each and every Orthodox Christian here and everywhere. The challenges to overcome seem immense, but the rewards to us and the Church are beyond imagination and our wildest dreams.