From the pulpit
Humility
Today we're very blessed to celebrate the Feast of the Apostles. We look at these men and see that they transformed the known world. Today about 30% of humanity identify as Christian, but when we look at their lives, we realise these men were very ordinary.
They were normal people like us. When they were going through Samaria, the Samaritans would not receive the Lord, and John and James said, "Lord, shall we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" They got angry.
They would argue numerous times about who would be the greatest among them. In the Garden of Gethsemane, our Lord asked them several times to stay awake, and they couldn't. They slept.
When our Lord was arrested, they all fled. Peter, the chief of the Apostles, denied our Lord three times. When the women came saying they had seen the empty tomb and angels, the Apostles didn't believe them.
In the book of Acts, Paul and Barnabas have a sharp disagreement and go their separate ways to do missionary work. In Philippians, St Paul urges two women of the Church, Euodia and Syntyche, to be of the same mind and resolve their differences.
So we see they were very, very ordinary people. What led these ordinary people to become extraordinary? I had actually written out a totally different sermon, but as I was sitting there, I looked at their lives to see what they were being taught by our Lord throughout His ministry. And it was humility.
A journey of humility
At the beginning of their journey, they have the Lord with them. They feel His love, they see His power, they see His miracles. They start to think, "Wow, we're pretty special. We're important. Who's going to be the greatest? Who's going to sit at His right hand or His left?" And then, as time goes on, they start to realise things aren't quite what they thought they would be with this Messiah.
He says there's going to be persecution. He says He's going to leave them. He says that He's going to be persecuted.
So He starts to take them on this journey of humility. He tells them, "If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you." He sends them out to preach, and they can't take anything with them: no money, no knapsack, no staff. He's constantly schooling them in humility.
Then, after three years, when many had political expectations of a Messiah who would come and free them from the Romans, they see their Lord taken prisoner and crucified. And then He leaves them, and all of a sudden they're scared. Their whole journey is this journey of humility, of being lost.
And then we see their lives after they receive the Holy Spirit. Again: humility, persecution from city to city, rejection by their own countrymen. St Paul, who perhaps preached the most and wrote almost half of the New Testament, was stoned, shipwrecked, lashed, and persecuted from city to city by his own countrymen, by the Romans, by everyone.
So we see that the Lord was able to use these men extremely powerfully, and change these ordinary men into extraordinary human beings, primarily through this virtue of humility.
Our weakness as fuel for humility
And then I think to myself, what are our lives like? Sometimes we think the Lord is not with us. We don't see Him; we don't have the same relationship, perhaps, that the Apostles had with Him.
But if we look at things through another lens, this can bring us to humility. I look at my life and I see weaknesses and sins. We look at the Apostles' lives, and they had weaknesses and sins too. So can we turn this into fuel for humility? Can we look at ourselves and say, "Lord, I am weak. I can't do anything right. All I see is struggle. I pray, I fast, I come to church, but I'm still impatient, I still get angry, I'm still frustrated. The years pass by and I still see weaknesses inside of me"?
If, instead of that leading us further away from God, or to despair and thinking there's no hope, we use it as fuel for prayer, we come to the Lord like the tax collector in the temple. We don't raise our eyes with boldness, but in humility we say, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." And a mystery takes place.
The mystery is that the Lord says that in those moments when we enter into this state of humility, this state of repentance, we are justified: we are declared righteous before God. The mystery, of course, is that we don't feel it. If anything, we feel our weaknesses and our sins, and we don't feel God in prayer.
But, my brothers and sisters, the key to His kingdom is humility.
Doing the little we can
So what we need to do is this: cling to the Lord in faith and do the little that we are capable of. Every day we spend a little time with the Lord in prayer, which is non-negotiable for Christians. If every day we read a little of His Word, if perhaps monthly we have confession, and weekly we come and have communion, then we are living a basic Christian life that, with patience and persistence, will lead to holiness.
This is why the Lord gave us many promises: because we do not feel the glory at the beginning. What we feel is our insignificance, our weakness, our inability to be holy. And the devil comes and whispers in our ear, "What's the point? Why pray? Why read His Word? Why go to church? Nothing is changing in your life."
But if I don't listen to that voice, and instead I look at the Lord's promises in His Word, what do I see? That I am one of His sons. That I am His daughter. That if I believe in Him, He has opened the path for me to eternal life.
I look at the lives of the saints and I see that there is not one who had an easy life. All of them suffered persecution, trials, sickness and suffering in one way or another. But those who persisted to the end of their lives entered into great glory.
Look at Joseph in the Old Testament. If you look at his life before he was raised to second in command to Pharaoh, you'd think nothing good was happening to him. He was sold by his brothers into slavery. As a slave he does well, then he's falsely accused by his master's wife and put in prison. What's going on for this man? But God had a plan for Joseph. And, my brothers and sisters, God has a plan for every single one of us who are here today.
The only thing that can get in the way of that plan is myself. Not another human being, not the devil, not temptation. Nothing can get in the way of God's perfect plan for my life except my own will. So I need to always look to Him, trust the Lord in His promises, and use my weaknesses, my sins, and all the things that might take my hope away, as fuel for humility, and turn them into prayer.
I say, "Lord, look at me, I'm impatient. Look at me, Lord, I'm weak. But Lord, You are strong. Help me, Lord, to overcome my impatience. Help me, Lord, to overcome my weaknesses."
Where humility is, there is grace
As the years pass, if we do the little we can, we fulfil our daily prayer more faithfully. We read His Word every day. We strive to obey His commands. As the years and the decades pass, our life is the school in which the Lord allows us to grow in holiness.
The struggles, the temptations, the difficulties and the challenges, if we don't let go of Him, refine us. It's in suffering that humility bears fruit in our lives. It's in suffering that I need to exercise faith and trust in God when there's nothing else to hold on to. It's in trials and tribulations that I have no choice but to exercise patience.
But if we cling to God, what are those things doing? Exactly what they're meant to do. I grow in faith. I grow in patience. I rely less on myself and my own abilities, and I learn to trust in God.
And the mystery is this: as we grow deeper in humility, so we grow deeper in our experience of God.
Where humility is, by necessity, there is grace. Grace is poured into the humble heart.
So the more we understand this mystery and try in every way possible to grow in this virtue, the more we will start to experience the power and the grace of God in our lives.
Because this is a journey, and we can't go from our normal state to true humility in a day or two, our whole lifetime is the school in which we enter into that humility. That's why every day, while it is called today, I do the best I can according to my strength, and tomorrow, and the day after. And as the years pass, we start to see the fruit of humility: all of a sudden, we start to experience the power of prayer.
Called to the same glory
Why did the greats of our Church, Pope Kyrillos, Tamav Irini and all these giants, battle sleep? St Bishoy tied his hair to the ceiling and slept, they say, about two hours a day. They didn't want to miss out on any time with God. These were monks, and all their time was with God. Not like us, at work, with so many things that come between us and God. Their whole life was prayer. But even then, they didn't want to sleep a little more, because that would take away from their time with Him.
We are not monks and nuns, but we have been called to the same glory and heavenly life that they were called to. And that's the mystery: if we persist and don't give up, we will likewise enter into this grace, where we start to feel the love of God and the peace of God, and we enter into the joy of the Lord. And then we realise that heaven is not something that starts in the next life.
No, heaven is something that starts now, as we die to our pride, our ego, our selfishness and our passions. Our life is a school in which we die in that way, simply living the best we can today and tomorrow and so on, so that we likewise are born again and re-created. We put off the old man with his sins and weaknesses, we put on the new man, who is Christ, and we also enter into the glory of these great saints. It looks a little different because we live in the world, we're married and we have families, but we have been called to the exact same glory.
And the promise is that if we do not give up seeking the Lord every day, if we do not give up the little we can do, and accept whatever comes in our lives along the way (the difficulties, trials and challenges), and don't turn away from God but turn all these into ways to get closer to Him, we likewise are promised a kingdom that doesn't start in the next life, but starts here.
We start to feel the presence of God, we start to feel His grace, and that is how the Lord can use us, the ordinary human beings that we are, to do extraordinary things like the Apostles.
May God help us, my brothers and sisters, to realise that when we look at our lives and see our brokenness and our weakness, this is not a bad thing. This is fuel for humility. We turn to the Lord in our weakness, we turn to the Lord in our brokenness, and we allow all the circumstances of our life to be fuel for prayer: to turn to Him, to know Him, to love Him. And we are assured through His Word that we will enter His kingdom, be used by Him mightily, glorify His name, and draw others into His kingdom.
Glory be to You, O Lord, forevermore. Amen.
