Whom Did The Lord Call?
18th Sunday after Pentecost
2 Corinthians 3:6-11; Luke 5:1-11
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians:
“He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully."
(2 Corinthians 9:6)
Usually, these words of the Apostle Paul are cited when people call for donations to the Church or for some charitable purposes, and this is true because the Apostle meant donations for the good and development of Christ's Church. But those words of the apostle are very much about our sowing, our contribution, our efforts to develop our Church in general, to raise our children to be true believers and professing Christians.
If we treat our membership duties in the Church of Christ, in Christ's community, indifferently, if we and our children attend church services occasionally, if we do not care that our children acquire knowledge of their faith, their native Ukrainian language, and knowledge of the history, geography, and culture of our people, then we are sowing sparingly and will reap sparingly, and we will have meager fruits.
“The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” (Matthew 11:12).
Without effort, without our labour, there will be no fruit. Back when Ukraine was a predominantly mono-religious, mono-national environment, an environment with centuries-old practices of customs and rituals, children could benefit from, could "reap" the spiritual harvest of their neighbours and the surrounding environment. Here, however, if we sow poorly, if we do not weed out the weeds, do not cultivate the soil of hearts, we will reap poorly.
Our trouble is that we, Ukrainians, do not yet have a perfect system of education in action; we still rely on the fact that somehow, on their own, within a foreign environment and upbringing, good young people, conscious of their faith and nationality, will grow up.
There are people who ignore the need for knowledge and education, but there are also people who put too much hope in education. If a son or daughter gets a university degree, people think that they will, as a matter of course, become good, better. Some people recall the old enlightenment slogan: “Education will pull us out of slavery”.
But this is also a mistake: education provides knowledge, a profession, and qualifications, but education does not teach love for God and neighbour, for father and mother, or love for one's nation. Only the teachings of Christ can make a person better, enhanced, if we instill them in our children not only through lectures and conversations, but also by practising them in life.
Christ had before Him ordinary people, most of them simple, but He saw their spiritual abilities and possibilities beyond their ordinary professions. He was a heart-reader...
Other people may not have seen Simon (Peter) as anything more than a good-natured, hot-tempered fisherman, but Christ saw him as a leading apostle. And he, Simon Peter, despite his hot temper, his haste to jump to conclusions, despite even denying Christ, was the first to speak on the day of Pentecost to three thousand people about the Lord Jesus Christ, and they were baptized and became members of the Church of Christ.
Matthew was a customs officer, a tax collector for the Roman state, and therefore was hated by his fellow Israelites, but Christ saw in Matthew a sincere desire to correct life's faults, sins, mistakes, and a desire to serve God for the salvation of people, and He called Matthew to be an apostle.
And Matthew not only served as an apostle, a leader of the faith of Christ, but also wrote the most complete Gospel, with the most detailed and consistent description of the actions of Jesus Christ, and passed on to us His divine teaching.
Young Saul persecuted the young, newly born Church of Christ with great zeal, and praised the murder of Archdeacon Stephen. One might think: What benefit could such a man be to the Church of Christ?
But Christ, already being in heaven after the Ascension, called to Saul:
“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" (Acts 9:4)
And Saul became, after baptism, Paul, the greatest preacher-missionary of the Christian faith, because Christ, spiritually felt that Saul was destroying his Church because of his spiritual blindness, thinking that he was "doing the will of God" and not because of the cruelty of his heart.
Christ also called the sinner Mary of Egypt, who served the Church of Christ in many ways and was glorified as a saint.
Christ also called the pagan Volodymyr, Great Prince of Kyiv, who became the baptizer of Ukraine, who plowed and tilled the soil and, through Christ's servants, priests and bishops, sowed the seeds of Christ's truth in our Ukrainian land for the salvation of his people.
The Lord Jesus Christ, who called the first disciples to be apostles, as we have heard in the Gospel passage, calls people to follow Him today - to serve God and for the salvation of their neighbours. A person must desire to follow Christ, to believe Him, and to be enlightened by the light of Christ's teaching. The Lord affirmed:
“He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness...” (John 8:12).
Our Church has great difficulty finding candidates who would like to study Orthodox theology. Perhaps the leadership of our theological school has taken an inappropriate yardstick to select candidates. People (in the 1970s and 1980s) were mostly focused on obtaining a "B.A." (or something similar) from secular universities.
In our case, people are mostly focused on connecting themselves with universities, which often provide programs leading to academic titles that have nothing to do with the recognition of God, Jesus Christ. Perhaps if Christ similarly had chosen His disciples by such criteria, He would have had difficulty finding suitable disciples. We should think about this and follow the example of our Lord Jesus Christ in the selection of disciples. Perhaps then we will find them more easily...
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
