Ready? Get Set. Go!

Passages: Is. 58:1-14; Rom. 13:11-14:26; Matt. 6:1-21
Ընթերցուածքներ՝ Եսայ. ԾԹ 1-14; Հռոմ. ԺԳ 11- ԺԴ 26; Մատթ. Զ 1-21

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen!

Ready? Get Set; GO!! Today we begin; today we take another step. Today all around the world, Armenian Churches, along with this week many of our Christian brothers and sisters, begin the journey of Great Lent. We begin the 7 weeklong period of communal fasting, prayer, and fellowship. From tomorrow until Lazarus Saturday evening, according to the tradition of the Armenian Church, we abstain from meats, dairy, alcohol and other such pleasures while at the same time spending our time and energy, focusing on our prayer life, our faith development, community service, relationships and over all lifestyles. It is almost like a New Year’s resolution reset.  I’m sure many of us make New Years resolutions to eat healthier, exercise, read more, spend time with family, etc. Some of us succeed in breaking old habits and forming new ones, while majority of us make it until the end of the month and fall off our plan. Thus today, the Church invites us to reset. However, this reset is not just about our physical health. We don’t fast from certain foods in order to lose a few inches, nor do we focus on our prayers to make us feel good.  Our Lenten journey is about healing by preparing ourselves, body, soul, and mind for Communion with God.

St. Gregory of Datev says that humans have 4 foundations: we are creatures of emotion, spirit, mental (mind) and physical (body). It’s no wonder why the greatest commandment as Christ reminds is to love the Lord your God with all your heart (emotion), soul (spirit), mind (mental), and strength (physical). A healthy individual is someone who takes care of all of these. Most of our New Year’s resolutions focus on one of these like emotional, physical and mental, yet, we might often neglect our spiritual health or we fail to see how all four are in fact connected. Yet, the Churches approach to Great Lent is to heal all 4. We are watchful about what we eat – taking care of our physical well-being. We are called to be more prayerful, taking time to pause, breathe, and reflect – taking care of our mental health. During Lent, we are called to be more merciful, compassionate and proactive in how we treat others – learning to control our emotions. And during Lent, we are invited to read our Scriptures more attentively, attend beautiful Church services, listen to the hymns and in Holy Confession, empty ourselves of our struggles – taking care of our spirit. Great Lent is not about giving up food, it is about letting go. It is about making room in our life so that we will utilize the tools that God has given His Holy Church to help His children (us) find healing by reminding us that this life, our relationships, our food, our bodies, our mind and our spirit are given by God.

When we sin, when we become unhealthy in these areas it impacts the rest of our being. And so God our Heavenly Father, in His compassion and love for each one of us, wants us to be healthy by remaining in Communion with Him, because it is only through Communion with God, a relationship with God, that we can take steps towards growing in our faith – healing. But those steps are not imaginary, allusive, or merely metaphorical. Just look at the Gospel reading today, Christ is instructing us how to pray, how to behave in public, how to do charity, etc. Christ is giving practical examples to us about living our faith. But we live our faith not because through it we gain favor with God, but because through it we begin to bring God into this world. St. Paul teaches us to follow Christ Jesus by imitating Him. Our Christian life finds healing in Christ Jesus by living as He did and becoming like God our Heavenly Father. Christ tells us to be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect. Naturally we are all sinners, we are not perfect yet, the path towards perfection, begins from being in Communion with God.

But I’ll be the first to admit, this is harder than it sounds. We all want to be healthy. We want healthy relationships, bodies, minds and spirits. But we struggle; we face temptation, we suffer from mental health, we see abuse of trust in our relationships, we battle demons and addictions. Yes, my dears, it is hard. St. John Chrysostom tells us that the Church is a hospital for the sick for this reason. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time in a hospital, I pray you don’t have to, but it is hard to work and be in a hospital, being surrounded by so much pain. Yet, it is in the hospital that the doctor is able to observe our ailment, follow up with our pain, surgically remove what is foreign to our bodies and provide a place of healing. It isn’t easy but when we leave the hospital, we leave free and cleaned from our sickness. The Church is a hospital, where we are under the constant observance of God, followed up by the priest, and where God removes the sin, the pain, the sickness in us – from where we step forward healed. The Church my dears is therefore, the place we take those first steps towards being healed and cleaned.

Cleansed by the blood of Christ; washed of our sins and healed. That is why the Church recognizing the difficulties we face also recognizes saints. The word saint means “holy.” Though only God is one hundred percent truly holy yet, because God gave us the Holy Spirit through our Baptisms and cleanses us of our sinfulness, we too can be like Him. The saints of the Church are not perfect people but rather saints are imperfect people of faith. They are those with a past; but those who through their life’s example show us what it means to endure, remain faithful and be cleansed by God. That is why the Armenian word for saint is – Soorp. Cleansed ones! And my dears, we are all called to be saints, as St. Paul teaches, “To the church of God…to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” (1 Corinthians 1) But to be a saint, my dears, begins with learning and taking our steps in faith. Great Lent is where we can begin to learn to walk, and a great way to learn how to take those steps is to learn about those the Church calls saints. People who in their faith journey, serve as examples for each one of us. Saints are Christians, like you and me, who believed in God and tried to serve Him, though they often made mistakes. That is why we know that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. We believe that when we live our life, seeking Christ Jesus, through the Holy Scriptures, through repentance, fasting, prayer and fellowship, we begin to find healing. We begin to journey towards not end of Great Lent but towards the presence of God – being in constant Communion with God, and thereby becoming a presence of God in this world.

And so, get ready, get set, let us go together towards God. Let us learn from our beloved saints what it means to struggle and remain faithful. Let us fast not by giving up food or social media but let us make room in our lives by fasting from evil words and thoughts, abstaining from wickedness and looking for healing in our Lord. May this season of Great Lent be for us a period where we resolve to grow in faith and be sanctified by our Lord. May this season of Lent be a reset and opportunity to learn how we bring glory to our Heavenly Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit not just by words or by coming to Church but through our entire presence – body, soul and mind. Ready? Get Set, Go!

Amen!