“The Lord created you in His image and likeness, and you are the image and likeness relegated to the piggy Bank of sins. How can that be?” Sermon of Archpriest Alexander Abramov of the week 27th after Pentecost.
Photo: spbda.ru
- “Called for me, Lord – I’m sick with the flu” – so why lie?
- We paved his soul and put it over the barbed wire
- Not ask Christ to leave, or do you also need “God in a box”?
- “The Lord has given a long-awaited child, thanks to a couple of months”
- We ask God questions about God and about ourselves
And he told them a parable: a certain rich man produced a good crop in the field; and he thought within himself, saying, what shall I do? nowhere to store my crops? And he said, this will I do: I break my barns and build greater, and there I will gather all my corn and all my goods, and I will say to my soul! many goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry. But God said to him, fool! this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose will those things be which you have prepared? So is he who lays up treasure for himself but is not rich toward God.
LK. 12: 16-21
Archpriest Alexander Abramov
Today’s gospel reading is a very sad and scary story, because the man in question, not to blame. He had barns and the grain in them. Grain became bigger barns were needed more spacious.
And now he thinks: it will carry ones, to build others, will collect his wheat. And all I have is soul, rejoice, eat, drink and be merry! And God said to him: bezumna, this night thy soul istiot from you: and the things which thou hast done, who will? “So is every one that concludes Christ — not who gets rich in God.”
The parable that Christ told in explanation of His cautions: take heed and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of his possessions (LK. 12: 15). “Not from an excess,” says about the Church Slavonic text. What does the life depend? If we are not from the excess of the acquired life, not from their efforts, then where are we in all this difficult structure of the universe? What does it mean we are just a grain of sand? Does this mean that over us all the time produces the action God, and we stand and wait for that action, or run away from him?
There are a lot of extreme positions. One of them — and it is often found in the Church very bad, because ridiculous and insincere: “I’m not rich, but their sins.” It’s not true! A man can have and the talents and gifts and ability to love, and the ability to receive love and to be loved, because that too is a gift. A person and not a sinful excess. Not only the sins of the rich man!
And to say that “I am rich only sin” — blaspheme against God. Because it turns out that the Lord created you in His image and likeness, and you are the image and likeness relegated to the piggy Bank of sins. How can that be?
It turns out that man and God are not able to be without excess each other. Christ says about eternal life: “I’ll give you life and give abundantly.” And why do we have life in abundance, if we have enough regular? Life in abundance is life surging, seething, superior to every human the dull waiting, the life of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Here we are on many stories for various literary works very often imagine heaven as something static, where everything is already decided, stopped, and nothing happens. Perfect image, I am convinced that it is not. There just raging life in abundance, free from the sinful mud and foam.
And than able to answer people? Also in abundance. Not abundance of possessions, not the desire for it, but bogateem in God, the aspiration of the abundance of eternal life. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Matt. 12: 34). The abundance of the heart is when a man can not share happiness from what he knows of God and that God is continuously merciful. From what he’s got at least one or two or three person family, and with them he is now able to share the warmth, which resembles that foretells what will be in the Kingdom of heaven. Because human warmth is not just some relationship that emerged on earth: man is not reducible to a form of existence of protein bodies, as we are trying to teach in his time. Human love, warmth, friendship, warmth — basting and signs hidden until the skimpy, but the signs of the Kingdom of Heaven which were to be in force.
Man is responsible to God to excess to excess. God promises abundance of life eternal, man responds with the ability to love. Because the ability to love and have human excess.
You can live your whole life without loving anyone, can thus be considered a successful person. You can go your whole life on the dotted line, never deviating, without trauma and suffering, but also the UPS and happiness, too.
Man is capable of the excess, man is capable of error, a person is able to love even there and then, which will probably be bad and painful. But he goes for it, because on this road, it will meet with God. God is absolutely improvident. God is temperamental and impulsive. A man who loves God to some degree God is likened, in his religiosity, he is also temperamental and impulsive. And love is the first religion of man, because God is Love. The person capable to love another, will certainly love God.
From the book “whosoever will may come. Conversations on Sundays and feast the gospel reading,” published in the publishing house “Nikea”