Righteousness -- How?

.
No declaration by God can make a person righteous. It’s like saying headache can be made to stop hurting by applying a bandage to your elbow, or it’s like thinking to give penicillin for osteoporosis, or building a dam by sucking a lollipop. The two just don’t have anything in common. The one is unable to have any effect upon the other. Declarations and righteousness simply belong to completely different categories, different spheres of operation.

It would seem, at first, more logical to argue that a declaration by God means God now regards a person as righteous. But that would be to assert that God, Who sees us keep on sinning, denies the truth, Who is Truth. So that doesn’t work any better. It’s not as though (as I read in some other blog yesterday) He shoots a perfect round of golf and then hands me His scorecard and lets me, a terrible golfer, falsify it by signing my name to it. There is no trickery with God, no sleight of hand, no falsity, no gamesmanship. He doesn't scam Himself. He does not pretend Christ's righteousness is mine or that my sins are Christ's. He knows better.

Righteousness doesn’t come to us sacramentally, either. Healing does, healing of our wounded, sick, sinful human nature. That is why we receive the sacraments frequently. They give us strength. They are concrete forms of God’s grace. Christ washes us, takes us with Him through death to life, anoints us, allows Himself to be ingested by us, enters into our bones and sinews, gradually sanctifying and deifying us. Yet we continue to sin daily, hourly. We continue unrighteous.

And God, Who is no fool, knows it.

Moreover, we want Him to know it, which is why we go to confession, because unless He is aware of our sins and burdens, how shall He help us with them? How shall He forgive them or heal us or give us the strength or wisdom to do better next time?

No, righteousness comes from trying hard, in communion with Christ, to do righteousness. That's what nobody much wants to do, try hard. A declaration would be sweeter, or so at least we imagine. “Be not deceived,” writes St. Peter, “he who does righteousness is righteous.” Righteousness comes from struggling for it.

At every point, the struggle is God’s work. We get no credit for it at all. (And even if we did get any credit, we could not exchange it for anything; it would be worthless as Monopoly money. This is because God cannot be bought or bribed with anything whatsoever.)

Yet that does not mean He does it all for us while we sit on our fat bottoms doing nothing. All the work is God’s, yes; and all the effort is ours. We call it synergy, and it is what St. Paul perfectly describes when he urges us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God in us, both willing and working. All the work is God’s, all the effort is our own. And much effort is required.

No, this struggle for righteousness does not earn us any merit or any brownie points, does not in the least put God in our debt or oblige Him to save us if we succeed. Righteousness does not entitle us to salvation -- or to anything else.

Instead, righteousness IS salvation. After all, to the extent you have become righteous, you have been saved from committing any more sins. That is what you wanted, isn’t it? Not really? It should have been. But oh, well, then, hold on, there’s more. To the extent you have become righteous, you have become Christlike! Still not terribly motivating? You love Him less than you thought, then, but never mind, because here’s the best part of all. To the extent you have become righteous, you are letting Christ live His own Life in and through your flesh, and there is no greater intimacy with another person than that. THAT is what union with Him means in its deepest sense. He is living His righteous life in you. That is how you acquire His righteousness. And remember that He, in turn, is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, so through Him, you have this ultimate intimacy of a shared life with the Holy Trinity, Whose life is immortal, too.

Can you achieve perfect union with Christ in this life? No. But if, by faith, you honestly struggle for it, God, in His mercy, will make up the difference in the end and perfect you. In and by your death, He will separate you from your remaining sins.

Or if you don’t struggle to do the right, to stop sinning, to become like Christ, to live in perfect union with Him -- in short, if you don't do the works of faith -- then you don’t actually have faith, which of course makes the whole issue moot.

More on Feel-Goodism

.
This is by no means one of Matthew Gallatin's best podcasts, but I liked the blurb: "If our choice of churches is based on how they make us feel, are we really interested in worship?"

And I liked these words, which I transcribed:

Unlike "personal fulfillment", true worship has no subjective element. It is a purely objective act. To worship Christ is to deny everything that I am. In the light of His overwhelming glory, I ignore myself. [In worship,] I am forgotten. He is the only life that I acknowledge.

Built-in Weapons!

.
Kathy (dear daughter-in-law) decided recently it was time to put the finishing touches on the twins’ potty training, time to get ‘em to do it the way Daddy does it.

So she stood them in front of the toilet, floated a Cheerio in the bowl, and told them to aim at it. (Is that the way you young parents do it these days, or was it her own, very ingenious, idea?)

Instant success! That Cheerio provided, in their father’s words, “An excellent incentive.”

But there were some unforeseen factors. First, these are twins. Second, the exercise was too easy. Almost immediately they sought and found numerous alternative targets. And of course the ultimate target, amid shrieks of laughter, was each other!

Kathy stood by, helpless from her own laughter.

She had a lot of cleaning up to do afterwards.

The Rock

Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. (I Corinthians 10:1-4)

And that Rock was Christ. Not Peter.

Divine Forgiveness

.
By God’s forgiveness, we do not mean He condones or blesses a person’s wickedness, nor prospers that person’s sinful designs. To the contrary, He foils the evil plots of the wicked, who work at cross-purposes to Him. (And He wins, ultimately at their expense.)

To say God is eternally forgiving also does not mean He winks at, and thereby becomes complicit in, evil. Again to the contrary, His own goodness counters evil in every way known to Him, and eventually His utter triumph over it is to be revealed.

Forgiveness just means God still loves the person just as much as He would have had the person never sinned. His perfect love abides, constant and true, through everything, eternally.

God’s forgiveness is not, fundamentally, something legal, not a declaration of innocence, not a “Not Guilty” verdict. Still less does it mean God blinds Himself to the wickedness in us, or that Christ somehow fools Him into not seeing it.

Forgiveness, at root, is ontological, meaning it is a function of God’s Being, of who God is. (Ontology: relating to or based upon being or existence) Forgiveness is rooted in God’s very existence, for God is love. Love endlessly forgives. (Matthew 18:22)

The thing is that God’s forgiveness has no effect whatever upon the unrepentant person. It in no way benefits him. God’s forgiveness although eternal, full, and unconditional, cannot reach a heart which is itself unforgiving. (Matthew 18:35)

God's forgiveness is not a reward for good deeds, nor yet for faith; it is only of His own goodness and compassion. Yet it can only be received by faith (and good deeds are the "outside" of faith, are what true faith looks like).

God’s forgiveness takes the form of giving us eternal life. That immortal Life is not a consequence of God’s forgiveness, but is the form it takes. The indwelling of the Lifegiver (Holy Spirit) in us is the token and pledge, the “earnest” of divine forgiveness (2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:5, Ephesians 1:14) just as the healing of the paralytic (Mark 2:9, Matthew 9:5, Luke 5:23) was the proof that his sins had been forgiven.

And the giving of life, in turn, takes the form of blood, and of flesh, given for us on the Cross and in the Cup, crucified, poured out, risen, ascended, made immortal, and making us one with the Immortal One if we receive with true faith and true love.

Hell

For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. (Matthew 16:27)

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7:23)

Most Christians, including Orthodox Christians, do not take either of these passages to mean that we are saved by our works, or can stand before Christ’s judgment on the strength of our works.

Similarly, Orthodox Christians do not take Matthew 7:23 to mean that our gracious Christ ever sends anyone to hell.

Thus, in both cases, despite the seemingly plain language, we need to avoid unspiritual ways of receiving these sayings. Such interpretations would stem from inadequate firsthand acquaintance with our Lord Jesus.

If you go to hell, it will be your own doing in every sense; by that, I mean, it will not be a punitive response of God to you or to your sins. It’s worse than that. For those who hate God, He Himself will be their hell, just as, for those who love Him, He is their heaven, and no other heaven do they need or desire.

But if you go to hell, it will be your sins that will make God repugnant to you, even a torment for you, for God in Himself is the opposite, is everything delightful and sweet and good. God is Truth, and when you are forced to acknowledge Truth, you will find it horrifying. God is pure, sacrificial self-giving, and when you are called upon to give your whole self away, the prospect, because of your selfishness, will seem to you like death. God is love, and if you are hell-bound, it is because the last thing you want is to be bothered with other people and their problems, their interests, their concerns, or their presence. You don’t care, or know how to care, of want to care, for anybody but yourself. God is good, and in His presence there is no evil, so all those things in which you took wicked pleasure will be gone. You will be delivered from them or deprived of them, depending upon your point of view.

In other words, if you go to hell, it will be because you made yourself a stranger to everything true, good, beautiful, and worthwhile. “I never knew you.” You shut Me out. You continue to shut Me out, more than ever when you see Me up close.

It is God’s Presence that will fulfill the saints’ every hope, but be the sinners’ worst nightmare. They will be “tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb.” (Revelation 14:10)

So what does it, mean, “Depart from Me”, if they are to be tormented in His presence? It means that God, in His infinite mercy, will allow you, if you find His very Presence a torture, to remove yourself a little distance (so to speak) and to crawl into your own, solitary, dark hole of regret and self-recrimination and sorrow and inability to accept the loss of all the sins for which you had lived. And that, to you, will seem preferable to joining the saints and angels in their never-ending, galling, intolerable hymns of praise to the One Who created you and allowed you the freedom to come even to this point.

Both verses mean that in the Last Day, you get what your heart (as revealed by your deeds) most wants and in whatever degree your heart is capable of receiving it – unless what you want most is your sins, or some temporal pleasure that passes away.

That’s perfect Justice.

And as for God, He will go on forever loving you with an infinite and unconditional love even if you are forever in hell, because He is love.

Checking In

.
No time to post for a while. I’m trying to spend as much time as I can with Barbara, who, having come down with pneumonia, no longer feels safe if left alone in the hospital. There have been times she felt she was going to drown

Mom hired a woman to sit with her nights. Barbara said it was a “creaky, squeaky old woman” who, for reasons unknown, set an alarm clock. The alarm clock was exceedingly loud, and when it went off, it terrified both Barbara and the sitter so much that the woman jumped up from her chair and fell over – backwards.

She’s okay, but we are glad she will not be needed more than three more nights, as by Monday the hospital is planning to transfer Barbara to some rehab facility, the hospital having done all it could for her.

Right now, I have insinuated myself into Barbara and Daniel’s home, to look after the girls and the dogs while Daniel visits Barbara, looks around at various nearby facilities to see where to put her, does his job-hunting, checks to see whether Barbara can get unemployment, now that she has been terminated from her job, etc., etc., etc. It seems he has dozens of things that urgently need doing – at a time when all he wants to do is be with Barbara.

I’m hoping he and I can alternate visiting her and being with the girls when they aren’t in school

There isn't time to post much right now. I'm trying to take care of my sister and her husband and their children and my Mom -- and visit my Dad sometimes.

.

More Christmas Pictures

.
Just for fun!





My daughter, Erin, little Sydney, Mom





Sydney, with her father, Jeff.







Ryan, opening a gift




Connor with new golf club (That's his dad, my son Mark, filming in the background.) But will Connor know it isn't for hitting Ryan with?






Kelly finds a Slinky in her stocking

Happy New Year!

.
This year, we had a toned-down celebration, but every bit as much fun as anything else we've done in recent years. We took Dickie and Frances, our next-door neighbors, to dinner at a restaurant, using the gift certificate they had given us for Christmas. We also invited our dear friend Vada, who will be 90 in June and looks and acts 20 years or so younger than that.

Afterward, we all adjourned to our house, where we sat telling stories for an hour.

Then, at 10:00 instead of midnight, we put on our party hats and blew our whistles and banged our noise-makers and hugged each other. "We've just added two hours to our new year," said Vada.

Then we sang "Auld Lang Syne". Then we went next door to take our pictures in front of Frances and Dickie's Christmas tree, fancier than almost any you'll ever see anywhere.



Dickie, Yours truly, Vada, Frances



Then we said goodnight and made an early evening of it.

Every one of us felt relieved not to have to wait up any later, and Vada got home well ahead of all the tipsy drivers.

Nothing to prepare, nothing to clean up, and a gift certificate to cover much of the cost. Now that's a great way to do it!

Christ is Born! Christ is Risen!

.
We all know it, but it's like watching the Twin Towers burn and crash on September 11: we can't quite believe it, no matter how many times we see it. Every person, no matter how young, no matter how beautiful, no matter how happy, no matter how important or special or holy or prosperous, every last one of us bears an invisible, and short, expiration date.

Christ, it seems to me, alone rescues that fact from making everything in life - and life iteself - meaningless. More than that, He and He alone transfigures death into new Life, into hope and consolation for us, and ultimately into joy.

Christmas Photos

Sydney, thrilled to have found candy in her stocking.










The whole gathering, photographed by me. Front: Jeff (son-in-law), Sydney, Mom. Back: Demetrios, Erin, Wendy, Mike (our brother)

Demetrios



Bliss: Sydney with her Grandma


My other grandchildren, who weren't able to be with us: Kelly and the Twins. No, I can't tell which is which in these photos, especially with their new, "big boy" haircuts. I believe the one in the red plaid shirt is Connor; the other, Ryan.

Not to Be Missed

.
Fr. Stephen hits the nail on the head again!

Our human problem is much deeper than anything forensic, and it cannot be cured by behaving well.

Check it out.

Farewells

.
Wendy flew back to California today. My poor sister had to say goodbye both to Dad and to Barbara without knowing ...

She is taking it with enormous grace and dignity. Her motto, from 1 Thessalonians 5:18, is, "In every thing, give thanks."

Oh, I already wrote that in a previous post, didn't I?

Well, it's worth saying again. In every thing, give thanks.

Dad

.
Now I find out that while we were in Greece, some decisions were made about my Dad. In short, “they”, whoever that may be, are just going to let him die. All his heart medications have been discontinued, including his Coumadin, a blood thinner. Without that, he is subject to a blood clot at any moment, which could go to his heart or brain or lungs and kill him instantly. His pacemaker, which used to be monitored once a month to be sure it was working correctly, is no longer being monitored at all.

I don’t know. I’m exhausted and grieving and at this point I don’t even know the rights from the wrongs of it. He is too far gone to be in any emotional distress; likewise he isn’t in any physical discomfort. It doesn’t seem right just to give up on him. On the other hand, he is doesn’t know where he is or what is happening, so there doesn’t seem to be much reason not to let nature take her course.

Not that any of this is up to me. It’s up to “them”, with Mom’s consent.

Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!