St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary - Events - 2003 Schmemann Lecture

The Father Alexander Schmemann Lecture
January 30, 2003

Thank you Dean Erickson and faculty of St.Vladimir’s Seminary for inviting me to give this twentieth annual Fr. Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture. Before I begin, I must make a brief confession. Back, many years ago when I was a young graduate student in Theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, I and two of my fellow students, Jack and Marty, used to add some humor to solemn occasions by pretending to be eminent theologians and to comment irreverently upon the situation at hand – in the voices of those theologians. Once a very abstruse lecture by the Jesuit theologian and philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, prompted our routine. Jack became Karl Rahner, Marty Edward Schillebeecx, and I, I decided to become Alexander Schmemann! We had read one of Fr. Schmemann’s books, Introduction to Liturgical Theology I believe it was, for a course on Sacraments, so I tried as best I could to comment on the Lonergan lecture from what I thought would have been his perspective. Now after all these years, I finally have the chance to make amends to Fr. Schmemann, by addressing a topic with which he was deeply concerned -- the relationship of the Church to Culture.

“In the World, but not of the world.” These words capture the antinomical relationship of the Church to human society and culture. On the one hand, the incarnational character of the Church establishes her in history, in this particular time and place and culture. On the other, the sacramental character of the Church transcends time and space making present another world, the Kingdom of God, which is both here and now and yet still to come. Throughout the history of Christianity, the temptation to relax this antinomy has led Christians to represent the Church as an ethereal transcendent mystery unrelated and antithetical to human society and culture. Or, on the other hand, it has prompted Christians to so identify the Church with a particular society, culture, or ethnicity as to turn Christianity into a religious ideology. Because we are “not of the world” Christians stand over against culture when its values and behaviors contradict the living tradition of the Church. Take one early and famous example: the refusal of early Christians to honor the emperor by offering a pinch of incense before his image. “Being in the world,” the Christian acts as a leaven within culture, trying to transform it by communicating to others the redemption brought by Christ. The early Christian apologists stood within culture as they attempted to explain the faith in the philosophical and cultural terms of their times and recognized, within the culture, foreshadowings or adumbrations of Christian truth waiting to be fulfilled. Notice the reciprocal tension between Christianity and culture, as eloquently stated in a second century document, the “Letter to Diognetus”:

...Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they do not use a peculiar form of speech; they do not follow an eccentric manner of life. This doctrine of theirs has not been discovered by the ingenuity or deep thought of inquisitive men, nor do they put forward a merely human teaching, as some people do. Yet, although they live in Greek and barbarian cities alike...and follow the customs of the country in clothing and food and other matters of daily living, at the same time they give proof of their own commonwealth. They live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land...They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.

It is this perennial tension of being in the world, but not of the world, with which Christians, including we Orthodox, continue to wrestle in 21st century America.

What is American culture? So pervasive and amorphous a reality is hard to describe or pin down – the sum total of assumptions, values, ideals, world views, expressed in economic, legal, educational, civic and religious institutions and articulated aesthetically in literature, art, and music. Often the first images that come to mind when we think of American culture represent popular culture, such as the global spread of McDonald’s golden arches, or the exportation of our media driven consumerism through movies, television shows, and pop music. Beneath this shallow but seductive façade lies a deeper and more profound dimension of American culture, a set of values that constitute the “American experiment.” I want to identify three overarching themes that express basic aspects of American culture on this deeper level: Encounter, Freedom, and Community. These three, while not exhaustive, have preoccupied the imagination of Americans of diverse origins as they sought to give meaning to their experiences of becoming and being American. Within these themes let us see if we may find points of congruence as well as conflict with Orthodox Christianity.

Diversity of origin is one of the major characteristics of the American nation. The slogan “E Pluribus Unum” has always represented a goal as much as a fact. America is a place and process of encounter of very diverse peoples and cultures. We are all immigrants (willing or unwilling) personally or ancestrally.

From the mid-fifteenth century on a series of sustained encounters between various European, African, and Indian peoples created a “new world.” Exploration, trade, conquest, colonization, enslavement, and missionary activity across the Atlantic Ocean initiated people of different cultures, religions, and races into a complex process of contact, conflict, and exchange. Initially, Europeans, Indians, and Africans peopled America, but over the course of four centuries, immigrants from every corner of the world arrived. And they are coming still. (Recently my daughter Emily described her experience teaching a poetry workshop to grammar school children in Queens. Half of her students speak little if any English. She can communicate with some in Spanish, but she’s stumped by the child who speaks only Farsi, just one of the thirty-four primary languages New York school children speak!)

The religious, ethnic, and racial pluralism resulting from immigration offers us the opportunity to understand the “others” we encounter and in understanding them come to a deeper understanding of ourselves. By listening to the distinct yet interlocking stories that constitute our national identity, we may come to an empathetic intuition of the experience of others. In so doing, we encounter difference not as something alienating, but as simply different. And, if we open the eyes of our hearts, we may perceive beneath the differences our common humanity and so be moved toward compassion for one another across the lines of division.

For many immigrants such experiences of cross-cultural understanding can be achieved only with difficulty due to the experience of immigration itself. Emigrating was a heart-wrenching uprooting from all that was familiar and a frightening journey toward something new and unknown, even when the old had become oppressive, dangerous, or impoverished. Whether it was Jews forced to leave their homelands by Christian pogroms, Irish fleeing the “great hunger”, Chinese seeking a living in the distant land they called “Gold Mountain,” Eastern Europeans escaping the brutality of totalitarian regimes, or Haitian boat people risking life for an uncertain passage out of poverty – all took a journey that changed their lives forever. And there were those tens of thousands, ripped from home, kin, and nation, shipped in chains from Africa to slavery on these strange shores.

Within many immigrant groups nostalgia for the homeland and its language, customs, and culture grew stronger among later generations than it was among the first. Ethnic customs became markers of identity and security for those who might have never visited the homeland. Religion itself became one of the strongest symbols of ethnic identity. The encounter with others and their religions seemed threatening and led during periods of nativism to outright conflict. Faith needed to be protected by preserving the language and the traditions of the homeland. Religion and ethnicity formed a tight, even seamless web. This is of course a familiar story to Orthodox Christians in America. More than a few Orthodox voices, including Fr. Schmemann’s, have warned of the dangers of ethnic identification for the Church, especially the danger of treating Christianity as a refuge for immigrant identity and so closing off the Church behind ethnic walls. (Similarly, Orthodoxy may become primarily an identity marker for converts and so be reduced to ideology.)

Fr. Schmemann also wrote cogently about the difficult crises -- jurisdictional, parochial and liturgical -- created for Orthodoxy by a pluralist America. He certainly recognized that the incarnational character of Christianity requires us to appreciate the particular cultures and nationalities in which the Church has become localized in time and space. And yet he firmly criticized the irregular situation of ethnic-based jurisdictions appointing multiple bishops in overlapping areas. And he questioned the relegation of mature American churches to the status of diasporic dependencies under metropolitan authority exercised from abroad. He also fearlessly took up the issue of translating liturgical services into English. He urged us to see these problems not only as practical pastoral problems, but also as issues that challenged our very understanding of the Church as liturgical mystery. I need not recapitulate his arguments here.

Another problematic result of American ethnic and religious pluralism that I do want to address, however briefly, is the issue of relativism. Contrary to common opinion, pluralism is not relativism, nor does it necessitate relativism. Pluralism means encountering the values and attitudes and beliefs of others with respect for those who hold them. Pluralism, when taken seriously as respect for difference, actually rejects relativism for avoiding the hard truth that we do indeed differ. Pluralism is not a denial of truth; it is the difficult road we walk to achieve a mature understanding of the truth and the opportunity to share that truth with others who are seeking it. Whereas relativism patronizes others by pretending that difference does not matter because everything is a matter of “to each his own,” pluralism appreciates diversity precisely because it challenges one’s own values, assumptions, and beliefs, including one’s religion. Pluralism challenges us to experience religion as more than cultural identity. It challenges us to appropriate, internalize, and live out the religious identity passed to us by family and society. It creates an opportunity to discuss and to argue for one’s own position.

Pluralism challenges us to argue not just with words, but with our lives as well. It is clear, for example, that Orthodoxy opposes abortion, one of the most debated moral issues of our time, on the grounds that life is a sacred gift from God. Our opposition takes on more persuasive force, however, if expressed in the context of commitment, a commitment similar say to that of a Mother Teresa who said about abortion “Do not kill the children; give them to us and we will raise them.” Her life spoke her devotion to the sanctity of life, as much as her words. Our defense of the sacred gift of life will be more persuasive, if we are consistent in applying it to a host of situations where it applies: to the hotly debated moral topics of our time -- reproductive technologies (cloning, stem cell research), war, capital punishment, physician-assisted suicide, poverty, to name only a few. Does our concept of sacredness of life extend to those whom our society devalues: the imprisoned, the impoverished, the disabled, the mentally ill, the alien, the enemy? Orthodox voices occasionally warn of the danger of reducing the church to a social service agency, but that warning should not displace the tradition of compassion calling us to serve those in need.

Do you want to honor Christ! Then do not scorn him in his nakedness, nor honor him here in the church with silken garments while neglecting him outside where he is cold and naked. Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when he himself is dying of hunger? First fill him when he is hungry; then use the means you have left to adorn his table...What is the use of providing the table with cloths woven of gold thread, and not providing Christ himself with the clothes he needs!

St. John Chrysostom preaching on Matthew 25. Or, to quote a modern Orthodox witness:
The way to God lies through love of people. At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked. Did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners? That is all I shall be asked. About every poor, hungry and imprisoned person the Savior says “I”: “I was hungry, and thirsty, I was sick and in prison.” To think that he puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need...I always knew it, but now it has somehow penetrated to my sinews. It fills me with awe.

The same passage from St. Matthew inspired these words of Mother Maria Skobotsova and led her to found Orthodox Action in Paris in the 1930s to carry out this gospel imperative. Houses of hospitality, hospice care centers, communities of caring to welcome the disabled, the orphan, the mentally ill, the abused, can be sites of sanctity in the modern desert of need, as the lives of Mother Maria and of Nun Gavrilia, an “ascetic of love” testify.

Pluralism challenges us to put our lives where our mouths say we are. In addition, pluralism offers us the opportunity not only to understand more deeply our faith in distinction from that of others, it also presents before us a “field ripe for the harvest”. In this time and place, no less than any other, the “Great Commission” – “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you,” applies. And it becomes an urgent imperative for us, not simply to counteract dwindling or stagnant numbers of members, but because Christianity is by divine calling inescapably missionary. If is true, as it appears, that current Orthodox Church growth in the United States is due primarily to conversion, that fact should renew within us the missionary zeal that is a fundamental trait of the Church.

Given then the pluralism of American culture, what truths do we hold in common? Upon what basic principles can our nation, made up of people of such diverse religious and moral values, reach consensus? One of the principles upon which most Americans agree is freedom.

Americans are a free people. We view our nation as an asylum of freedom for others from around the world. At it’s best the tradition of democracy celebrated in song, literature, and sermon valued the rights of the common man, the individual person to participate in the civic polity, local and national that governed his life. Of course, it took a long time before Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” actually extended to all the people and not just white men with property. It clearly did not include slaves who accounted for one-fifth of the population in the American colonies at the time of the Revolution. And, as one historian aptly observed one-fifth of the population is too large to consider as simply an anomaly or as exception to the story of American freedom. He was forced to conclude that the story should be entitled “Slavery and Freedom: the American Paradox.” I will have more to say about this paradox in a few minutes, but first, let us focus on the ideal of American freedom, the basic values associated with it, and what it might mean for Orthodox Christianity, negatively and positively.

Much more than the right to vote, freedom is an air, an ethos, a stance toward life. This attitude is centered on the rights of the individual person, but with the premise – more strongly observed at some times than others – that the respect due to the individual makes possible his participation in common, public, civic life. Freedom of conscience and freedom of choice enable individuals to participate in civil institutions, which exist to serve the commonweal. Various images of democratic community come to mind: Think, for example, of the opening scene of Aaron Copland’s ballet “Appalachian Spring” -- a community barn-raising and remember his adaptation of the old Shaker hymn: “Tis a Gift to Be Simple, Tis a Gift to be Free” in that same piece. Think of his “Fanfare for a Common Man.” Think of Mark Twain’s use of vernacular American speech in Huckleberry Finn, a book about a boy who decides to defy the laws of his society rather than betray his friend Jim back into slavery. Think of Lincoln’s reinterpretation of freedom at Gettysburg and his recognition of the War as God’s judgment on the entire nation for the sin of slavery in his Second Inaugural Address. Think of William Faulkner’s story, The Bear, which instructs us that man returns to his proper place in nature only by relinquishing possession. Think of Ralph Ellison’s comparison of jazz to the working of democracy in the way an ensemble of musicians breaks into individual soloists, each improvising in turn his own take on the piece, and then returning in ensemble to the common theme. Think of Marian Anderson, barred from performing in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. These cultural moments powerfully evoke the democratic tradition and demonstrate its capacity for self-criticism and renewal.
The democratic tradition defines authority as public service. It encourages participation and treasures the voice of each because you never know when it might be the voice of a prophet. This tradition is profoundly antithetical to status and power based on inherited aristocracy. So it is Mr. President, not Your Majesty or Your Excellency, titles rejected by our first president as inappropriately inflated. The democratic tradition encourages common folk not to be cowed by authority but to speak truth to power. What does this tradition have to say to Orthodoxy? Clearly Orthodoxy is hierarchical and is not about to adopt a democratic structure, though we do of course have meetings of bodies like the All America Council that function to involve the members of the Church in decisions of importance. But perhaps the democratic tradition does have something of value to say by way of criticizing clericalism, which reduces priesthood to a managerial profession. Respect for the common man may reinforce the Pauline insistence on the gifts distributed throughout the community for building up the body of Christ. The democratic definition of authority as service is certainly consonant with the gospels and is important for anyone in religious authority to constantly bring to mind.

It is also important to remember that freedom of religion (guarded by the disestablishment clause of the first amendment), despite the long-lasting cultural hegemony of Evangelical Protestantism, gave leeway to various religious groups to fight discrimination and to establish public worship and public institutions. And by so doing, they made politically viable in this nation the principle of freedom of conscience and resisted the age-old tendency of governments to enlist religion in defense of state ideology.

At its best, democracy balances the rights of the individual with responsibility for participation in the public conversations and common tasks that make civic community possible. However, the possibility of so stressing rights that we forget responsibility is a perennial threat to American liberty. Basically, the choice of privileging one over the other comes down to a simple, but profound question: “What is freedom for?” When Thomas Jefferson composed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence he copied from John Locke the famous list of inalienable rights endowed upon us by the Creator -- with one significant difference. Jefferson substituted for Locke’s “life, liberty, and property,” “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Tragically, Americans ever since have found it too easy to reverse Jefferson by turning the pursuit of happiness into the pursuit of property. To amass wealth is what freedom is for.
Precisely at this juncture, Orthodox Christianity levels a powerful critique of Americans’ addiction to materialism, the dangerous collective illusion that reduces persons to objects and demeans interpersonal relationship into manipulation and exploitation. Listen to the prescient words of Dostoevsky’s Elder Zossima: “Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display… And no wonder that instead of freedom they have fallen into slavery, and instead of serving brotherly love and human unity, they have fallen, on the contrary, into disunity and isolation.... They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.”

Orthodoxy offers a radically different vision of the person. We are created in the image and likeness of God. We are redeemed so that we may become more and more like the image in which we were made. In this process of theosis or divinization, we become by grace what God is by nature. A striking symbol of Orthodoxy’s opposition to the self-aggrandizement endemic to our society is our liturgical calendar in which roughly half the year consists of days of fasting. Self-emptying, not self-fulfillment is the purpose of Orthodox ascetical practice: “I must decrease so that He may increase,” we say with St. John the Forerunner. Or “Now I no longer live, but Christ lives in me,” with St. Paul. This is a very counter cultural prescription in a society that promotes, on just about every billboard and commercial, getting your fill. Individual rights have been turned into self-gratification. A spiral of ever expanding need, gratification, need, drives our consumer society.

It is easy to criticize the vulgar consumerism of mass media advertising. There is a more subtle form, however, that can turn religion itself into just another form of ego gratification – a kind of spiritual consumerism that focuses on having spiritual experiences to aggrandize the self -- spiritual hedonism, but hedonism none the less.

Orthodoxy reverses the preference for rights over responsibilities. Again in the words of Fr. Zossima: “the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.” These mysterious words, echoing the offering of the Holy Gifts to God in the Anaphora of the Divine Liturgy, allude to Christ’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross in which “He who was without sin became sin for us.” Fr. Zossima is saying that Christ’s self sacrificing way is the model for us. This same sense of self-sacrificial responsibility “on behalf of all and for all” also illuminates the lives of the monastic elders, who in their isolation become profoundly aware of the hidden connectedness of us all. The way to true freedom and to recognition of our interpersonal responsibility, they taught, is through obedience, fasting, prayer, and humility, which, with God’s help, liberate the spirit from the tyranny of habit and desire, from an inner compulsion that leads eventually to isolation and despair.

Without a doubt, freedom constitutes one of the basic values upon which Americans of diverse origins and religions agree, thus helping to create a common culture. Even those who have criticized America’s chronic failure to live up to the principle of freedom, do so to exhort the nation to do better. Yet, beyond allegiance to a set of shared principles, a prime source of America’s identity as a nation is historical memory. A mythic history made up of stories told, written, and ritualized in civic ceremonies establishes among us, as much as shared principles, a sense of common heritage, destiny, and purpose.

G.K. Chesterton once called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” He was referring, in part, to the habitual tendency of Americans to cast political and social events as scenes in the drama of salvation. From the start America’s story was a religious story. In the 1630s English Puritans represented their journey across the Atlantic to America as the exodus of a New Israel out of Old World slavery into a Promised Land of milk and honey. And down the centuries, the story of the American Israel (or in debased form, the Redeemer Nation) would serve as our nation’s most powerful and long-lasting myth. Except for the presence of another, a darker Israel in our midst. To black Americans the nation was not a New Israel, but the old Egypt, condemned to sure destruction, unless she let God’s people go. The existence of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and racism, they proclaimed time and time again, contradicted the mythic identity of Americans as a chosen people.

African-American Christianity has continuously confronted the nation with troubling questions about American exceptionalism. Perhaps the most troubling was this: “If Christ came as the Suffering Servant, who resembled Him more, the master or the slave?” Suffering slave Christianity stood as a prophetic condemnation of America's obsession with power, status, and possessions. African-American Christians perceived in American exceptionalism a dangerous tendency to turn the nation into an idol, and Christianity into a clan religion. Divine election brings not preeminence, elevation, and glory, but as black Christians knew all too well, humiliation, suffering, and rejection. Chosenness, as reflected in the life of Jesus, led to a cross. The lives of his disciples have been signed with that cross. To be chosen, in this perspective, means joining company not with the powerful and the rich, but with those who suffer, the outcast, the poor, and the despised.

In the suffering Christianity of African-American slaves and their descendents, we find a series of close affinities with Orthodoxy. (My list is much shorter, by the way, than Father Tom Hopko’s, who tells me that he once counted eighteen correspondences between Orthodoxy and African-American Christianity based on visits he made to black churches in Harlem.) There is a quality of sad joyfulness, a sense that life in a minor key is life as it is and an emphasis on the importance of suffering as a mark of the authenticity of faith. Both African-American and Orthodox Christianity view the person as embodied spirit and inspirited body. Both understand matter and spirit to be related, not antithetical -- hence the use of material and bodily gesture to reveal the presence of the spiritual to our bodily eyes. Both hold a profound trust in the healing power of ritual, which opens the door to the other world, revealing its presence within this world. Both understand the interpersonal nature of the self as shaped by a web of relationships stretching into the past and the future. Both criticize individual aggrandizement as destructive of the person. Notice that these beliefs, common to both Orthodox and African-American religious traditions, clash with dominant cultural attitudes and values. Given these affinities, why are there so few African-American Orthodox? Historical explanations are clear, the ethnic origins and identities of Orthodoxy have kept it at a distance from black America. Might this distance also be due to a lack of zeal, a failure of imagination, energy, and resources, a certain triumphalism that expects people to come to us rather than impelling us to reach out to them, a lack of confidence in our own mission? Of course there are exceptions: the presence of Ethiopians and Eritrean immigrants in some of our parishes remind us of the long history of Orthodoxy in Africa. The nine annual conferences on Ancient Christianity and African-Americans organized by St. Mary of Egypt Parish in Kansas City as a deliberate step toward bringing Orthodoxy to the attention of black Americans. I know there are other efforts as well. But the fact that the division between black and white Christians has been and remains such a central failure of American moral and religious life gives an added urgency to the Church here and now to strive to heal the divisions by bringing all nations into the Body of Christ.

The long encounter of black and white Americans, which began tragically under slavery and still proceeds under the long shadow of the plantation, remains the paradigmatic test of the nation’s identity. Can our national community, broken by hate, rage, and fear be re-knit, re-membered? Can there be rituals of honest remembering that move us beyond division and cynical estrangement from our professed ideals? Recently a number of people have begun to urge Americans to mourn what has never been mourned, the “original sin” of slavery and race hatred. Debates over reparations and apologies for slavery issued by President Clinton and the Southern Baptist Convention have not seemed adequate. The tenth annual conference on Ancient Christianity and African-Americans to be held in Kansas City, February 20-23, will be devoted to precisely this issue, “Healing the Wounds of Racism.” We hope that as a first step rememberance, that is, telling and listening to our stories about the experience of race, in the context of prayer and Divine Liturgy may help us to truly mourn, what our country has done and suffered. We hope to place our remembering within the Eucharistic anamnesis, so that it may be transformed in the memory of “all those things which have come to pass for us: the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Sitting at the right hand, and the second and glorious Coming.”

Christ is the transformer of culture because he makes present among us the Kingdom of God. The concept of the Kingdom of God was central to Fr. Schmemann’s theology, as it was for H. Richard Niebuhr, the eminent Protestant theologian, who wrote classic texts on Christ and Culture and the Kingdom of God in America. According to both, it is crucial for Christians to realize that the Kingdom is both here and now, but not yet. As Fr. Schmemann explains:
The Kingdom of God announced, inaugurated and given by and in Christ – stands at the heart of the early Christian faith, and not only as something yet to come but as that which has come, is present now, and shall come at the end. It has come in Jesus Christ, in His incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and in the fruit of all this – the descent of the Holy Spirit on the ‘last and great’ day of Pentecost. It comes now and is present in the Church, the “ecclesia” of those who having died through Christ in baptism can now “walk in the newness of life,” partake now of the “joy and peace of the Holy Spirit,” eat and drink at Christ’s table in His Kingdom. And it shall come at the end, when, having fulfilled all His dispensation, Christ will “fill all things with Himself.”
It is essential to hold sight of the reality of the Kingdom as present and as future to keep Christianity from being reduced to religion, that is, one more isolated compartment, among the many that occupy the modern person’s life. This, for Fr. Schmemann is the meaning of secularism. Secularism is not antireligious. It approves of religion by turning it into what Niebuhr called an “idol,” one among others suited to our self-gratification and self-fulfillment. Secularism, in this sense, robs the Church of its eschatological dimension. It is no longer our primary community, the source of our life and our joy, but one more activity in a busy week, competing with work, school, social life, and entertainment.

When the Church loses its awareness of the Kingdom of God then it loses its essential sacramentality. And there develops, Fr. Schmemann observes, “a peculiar divorce of the forms of the Church’s life from their content, from that reality whose presence, power and meaning they are meant to express and, as a consequence the transformation of those forms into an end in itself so that the very task of the Church is seen as the preservation of the ‘ancient,’ ‘venerable,’ and ‘beautiful’ forms, regardless of the ‘reality’ to which they refer.” The Church, in effect, becomes a museum of archaic artifacts and rituals, beautiful but inert. What is lost is the “very deep and essentially Orthodox experience of the Church as truly an epiphany: the revelation of, the participation in, a reality which because it is not ‘of this world’ is given to us – ‘in this world’ – in symbols. Hence the crucial importance of symbols in which we experience the reality of the Divine presence and action.”

The primary symbol of God’s transforming action in the world is the Eucharist. We offer the gifts of bread and wine, wheat and grapes transformed by human hands, to God, who returns them to us transformed by the Holy Spirit into the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here is the sacrament of the transformation of the entire world.

Now, we are perhaps closer to understanding the meaning of the antinomy with which I began. The antinomy of Christians being in the world, but not of the world is for the sake of the transformation of the world and its return as Eucharistic offering to God the source of all.

Given the confession with which I began, it is only fitting to close with Fr. Schmemann in his own words:

The Church is left in this world, in its time, space and history with a specific task or mission: ‘To walk in the same way in which He walked’ (1 John 2:6). The Church is fullness and its home is in heaven. But this fullness is given to the world … as its salvation and redemption. The eschatological nature of the Church is not the negation of the world, but, on the contrary, its affirmation and acceptance as the object of divine love... [T]he entire ‘other worldliness’ of the Church is nothing but the sign and the reality of the love of God for this world, the very condition of the Church’s mission to the world. The Church thus is not a ‘self-centered’ community but precisely a missionary community, whose purpose is salvation not from, but of, the world.