Harmony of Thunder, Program Eight, St. Basil the Great Hexaeramon, Homily 2
I spoke in the last program about the debate in our society around the issue of Creationism, or Intelligent Design, and evolution. Just recently, a lawsuit filed in 2007 by a student in California that charged a public school teacher with violating the First Amendment by calling creationism “superstitious nonsense” was decided in favor of the complainant. The student had copied down over twenty statements made by the teacher during one lecture, and then introduced them into a lawsuit as proof that the teacher had made statements that violated the rights of Christian students. Only two of the statements were admitted, the one I just mentioned and a second where the teacher said, “when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth.” The student asked for no monetary damages, and probably this particular matter will drop.
Certainly, this teacher stepped way over the boundary not only of constitutional rights, but of common decency. But why would he do that? He did it because he thought he could get away with it. He thought he could insult Christianity and everyone in the room would laugh, and the few Christians present would slink out of the room at the end of class and hope no one saw them. That has happened in schools all over our country in the past, but not in this case. The time when the only people who believed in a Creator God were either too stupid or too embarrassed to tell anyone is past.
Hi, you're listening to Harmony of Thunder, where we explore and enjoy the rich tradition of Orthodox preaching. I’m your host, Fr. David Smith. Each week, Harmony of Thunder chooses a sermon from scripture, from the works of a saint, or from a contemporary source, and we spend our time together looking at the style, the illustrations, and the spiritual message of the preacher.
Lord Jesus Christ, through the prayers of Your Most Pure Mother and of all the saints, bless your Holy Orthodox Church with great preachers and people who want to hear them. Amen.
St. Basil certainly didn't feel like he needed to apologize for his views when he preached his Hexeramon, did he? If you missed last week's Harmony of Thunder, the Haexeramon is a series of six sermons that looks at the six days of creation, and St. Basil, one of the great saints of the church, preached his own Hexaemeron during the fourth century. Like the high school student from California, St. Basil was not afraid to tackle controversy head on.
I'm going to read you the last line of a paragraph from his second sermon in the series, the sermon that we're looking at today. The paragraph talks about how certain heretics of the third and fourth century believed that God was the source of evil, and indeed that he created evil on the second day of creation, where it says, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.” St.. Basil says of them, “what grievous wolves, tearing the flock of the Lord, have sprung from these words to cast themselves upon souls! Is it not from hence that have come froth Marcions and Valentini, and the detestable heresy of the Manicheans, which you may without going far wrong call the putrid humor of the churches.” Here, the preacher refers to three gnostic heretics, who generally believed in a complex system of invisible beings, the complete evil of the body versus the complete good of the soul, that God had created evil as well as good, and normally, that our Lord is not co-eternal with the Father. St. Basil names them. He speaks specifically to their beliefs. He raises the questions that the churches struggled with in the public sphere, so that all would see, not only the courage, but also the truth of the gospel. Indeed, in a way, the first ecumenical council was the ancient equivalent of the lawsuit in California, since it consisted of the right believing arguing their case against error-mongers before a civil authority. I think St Basil would have been very supportive of the filing of that lawsuit.
And I'm almost tempted to make the phrase, “the putrid humor of the churches” our quote of the day. But I won't.
Recently I saw on the news a story about a Roman Catholic priest in a village in Pennsylvania. He had started a campaign against a statue that stood outside a furniture store in the village. You could tell that the TV reporter thought the whole thing was a joke, but the priest did not. Without actually saying so, the reported was subtly communicating that the priest was some kind of kook. A few weeks later, I was able to obtain a copy of that priest's bulletin from the Sunday after the airing of that news feature. In an article in the bulletin, the priest said that he knew people were making fun of him. He knew that even people in his own parish were saying, “for crying out loud, it's only a statue!” (I haven't heard anyone use that expression for a long time). But he also made it clear that he believed that it was wrong to have that statue visible to the public, and that he would not stop his campaign against it until the business took it down. I have a feeling that St. Basil would have liked Fr. Connelly.
So, in the second sermon of the Haexeramon, St. Basil tells us that God did not create evil, as the heretics believed. So where does evil come from, then, you might ask? He addresses this question as well: “recognize that evil, rightly so called, has no other origin that our voluntary falls.” This is what everyone needs to know and understand, especially those who try to poison school children's minds against the church and God, that evil does indeed have an origin, and that origin is themselves. When you, dear listener, or I myself, choose to live contrary to the will of God, the will of our Creator and Savior, then we become creators ourselves. Like God, we become creators, but we are creators of evil.
And actually, the creation of evil by mankind leads me to St. Basil's final focus in this sermon, the focus upon the word, “day.” He says that the reason the scriptures calls the first day “one day” and not “the first day” is because “Scripture wishes to establish its relationship with eternity.” In other words, God does not tell us the story of creation in order to simply give us the history of something that happened in the past, something that He did. Rather, the creation of the first day is the creation of time itself, and likewise therefore the creation of eternity.
The reason I say this relates to the issue of evil has to do with a heresy that St. Basil didn't know about, at least I don't think it was active in his time, which says that the punishment of the wicked in the afterlife has a temporal limit. This is the belief of some who call themselves Christians today. They go to the word “aionion” in the original text, a word that we translate as eternity, but which also may have an element of a fixed period of time associated with it. We get the word “aeon” from that greek word, and certainly in the English language, the word “aeon” refers to a fixed period of time with a beginning and an end. They believe that the word refers to both a quality and quantity of time.
St. Basil speaks to this false belief in his second sermon on the Hexaemeron when he says, “No; this day without evening, without succession and without end is not unknown to Scripture, and it is the day that the Psalmist calls the eighth day, because it is outside time of weeks. Thus whether you call it day, or whether you call it eternity, you express the same idea. Give this state the name of day; there are bot several, but only one.”
“There were evening and morning, one day.” Let's make that our quote of the day, these words from Genesis, “There were evening and morning, one day.” Until I had read this sermon of St. Basil I had never considered that here I am, and here you are too, dear listener, living in that same one day of creation. And we'll live in this one day forever. It's a comfort to know this if you know that God has saved your soul from death, and that the eternity you spend will be spent with Him. All that's needed is that we repent and believe in the gospel.
I'm glad you could join harmony of Thunder in our examination of this second sermon of St. Basil's Hexaemeron. Join us next week for sermon number three, for St. Basil's thoughts on how God suspended the firmament over the water.
Oh Lord, help us to hear and heed the words of the great preachers of Orthodoxy, that we may glorify you with our faith and lives, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Amen.
 |
.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
Subscribe to this comment's feed