When the Homily is about Immunology

The Dead converting the Dead

Khouria Frederica's article on beliefnet about The Passion has generated alot of interesting comments there. Some are insightful and balanced, others are...well...ignorant. One which particularly struck me was made by someone calling themselves "contarini717" in which he lauded the "abundant life" of protestantism in contrast to "Orthodoxy, which has been as dead as Julius Caesar for the past 1600 years..."

No contact info was provided, and so I am forced to vent here. Feel free to move on to another post.

Hmmm... the world's 2nd most populated christian branch is dead and has been for 1600 years. Protestantism is not quite 500 years old...so ummm...anyone else see the gap here? And how on earth did a dead church manage to guess the right answer to that ever important question: What is and what isn't scripture? Or how did this dead church manage to stumble its way to the proper understanding of the Trinity or the Nature of Christ? How did this dead church survive the Roman persecutions - in particular those which took place AFTER Constantine - whose reign of course we know marks the historical dividing line between dead church and alive church (note sarcasm). Or how about the Islamic persecutions and the associated Turkish persecutions, OR the MUCH worse persecutions of the communists? (worse than ANY that the church has ever faced and that numerically make the holocaust look like child's play.)

But most importantly, how is it that this dead church is attracting and converting more and more people who find within her "tombs" a life they had never thought they could possibly find there? A rushing river of living water, where before they were dehydrated from the dripping water touted as being so alive by "contarini717."

Life is not discerned by the extent of its animation...ponder this: the longest living creatures on earth are without exception the slowest moving. Nature and science knows that the brightest burning flames burn out fastest. My experience in pentecostalism bears this out as well...though of course your mileage may vary.

We Orthodox may not do jumping jacks in our services, we may not clap, shout, or dance (though you might like to see us outside of our services where the liturgical celebration of life continues on in more freestylye form!). The life of our religion is found in less surface level reasonings. There is depth, there is longevity, there is solidity, there is Life.

To take a pulse you must reach out and touch...come and see before you put the coins on our eyes. The heartbeat is there. And the dead continue to be converted by the dead.