Pearl - Orthodox Deacon Seraphim (Richard) Rohlin, PART ONE ｜THE SITDOWN,

00:00:00.000 Well, if they were coming to Orthodoxy for a get-out-of-jail-free card, they picked the wrong place to come.

00:00:06.300 I have a suggestion for marriage. What about 10 years of texts?

00:00:09.860 She has to submit 10 years of text messages to her husband.

00:00:13.560 So the question then becomes, how do we escape from the realm of death?

00:00:18.120 I believe that women are less than men.

00:00:20.920 Into the narthex of the church.

00:00:23.820 Yes, it is.

00:00:25.120 So the narthex is this space we're in right here with a kind of low ceiling.

00:00:28.500 that in there is called the nave narthex again means porch it is analogous in the old testament

00:00:35.140 tabernacle to the outer court sometimes called the court of the gentiles technically there were

00:00:40.180 three outer courts there was a court of the gentiles there's a court of women and there

00:00:43.700 was a court of men so you have gentiles and you have hebrew women and you have hebrew men

00:00:47.840 and then you have the holy place where only the priests are allowed to go and then the most holy

00:00:51.540 place where only the high priest is allowed to go once a year so you'll see that we've basically

00:00:57.880 still follow that structure but we move shift everything up one for very very important reasons

00:01:02.580 which i'll talk about so i always like to begin with this icon right here this is an icon of the

00:01:09.680 creation of adam that's christ in the robes the naked man is adam what you will notice though if

00:01:15.440 you look at the icon is that christ and adam have the same face okay so what are we saying with this

00:01:22.820 icon first of all icons are not photographs we're not trying to depict a photographic reality that

00:01:27.420 happened at a particular time or particular location we're trying to show us what is the

00:01:31.580 actual the deeper theological meaning of what happened in this place so here's christ making

00:01:41.100 adam adam just means man so the first human being and they've got the same face in the icon which

00:01:46.940 is a way of expressing what it says in genesis that god made man in his own image and his image

00:01:52.860 and likeness created he him male and female created he them so god starts by making man

00:01:58.780 and then later on he will split woman off of man but what it means to be a human being

00:02:05.180 is to bear god's likeness and god's image so obviously something goes wrong

00:02:13.420 and according to the tradition it goes wrong very quickly one of the things that people

00:02:17.740 in the middle ages were interested in figuring out uh was how long did adam and eve live in paradise

00:02:24.860 before they turned away from god and some people say it was three days some people say it was 30

00:02:31.420 minutes some people say it was three minutes okay the whole point is it didn't take long and

00:02:41.420 the the tricky thing is that it says she gave the fruit to her husband who was there with her

00:02:45.100 yeah yeah so when adam and eve are expelled from the garden man's image falls and what we would

00:02:55.240 not say and there are some christian groups that believe this but we don't believe this in the

00:02:58.880 orthodox church we would not say that the image of god in man is completely destroyed we would

00:03:04.400 say something more like it has been twisted or bent it's been warped out of shape so we're

00:03:10.400 constantly trying to get back to that. And a lot of our best attempts towards excellence

00:03:16.000 are attempts to move back in that direction, to try to recover the image of God, to try to

00:03:21.840 recover something of our primordial majesty. But we need a little help. So what God puts in place

00:03:30.000 is a pedagogical program. And that's what you see here in the rest of the narthex. The narthex is

00:03:36.440 part of the church i mentioned it corresponds each part of the church corresponds to a part

00:03:41.080 of the temple but you could say each each part of the church also corresponds to a moment of

00:03:46.920 revelation so the narthex correspond to the old testament so we have the burning bush and you'll

00:03:53.240 notice there's something a little unusual about the way that we depict the burning bush this is

00:03:58.920 another example of what i was calling typology so the type here is mary theotokos that's the mother

00:04:07.180 of god um she we see the burning bush as as prefiguring her why because she contained the

00:04:15.600 fire of god's divinity within herself and was not consumed by it so in the same way that the bush

00:04:20.320 burns is not consumed so uh you have this icon of her and it's sort of the the image there is

00:04:26.760 is this is a way of showing her pregnant or showing that she's conceived within her womb

00:04:30.300 Emmanuel God with us so here's Moses in the burning bush Moses receiving the tablets of the

00:04:35.160 law in Sinai and then over here some other moments from Genesis obviously God's creation of the world

00:04:39.960 creation of Adam Noah and his we assume he's holding a scale model of his ark because otherwise

00:04:45.340 what is this an ark for ants this is the a moment in of of Abraham at the oak of Mamre in the book

00:04:53.820 of Genesis, this is when God and two angels come to Abraham, and he basically spreads a table for

00:05:00.960 them. And this is when he's given the promises that he's going to be the father of nations.

00:05:05.360 Now, this is a very important moment for us. There's another version of this icon over here,

00:05:09.700 which I'll talk about in a moment, but it is paradigmatic of the way that we see what we're

00:05:14.220 doing when we worship God, which is to spread a table and to invite him to come and share a meal

00:05:19.540 with us. So worship for us is a very intimate thing. And then you have the sacrifice of Abraham,

00:05:25.740 Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. And then here on right above these two pillars, you have two

00:05:31.400 Old Testament prophets and poets, King David, who wrote most of the Psalms, and then Isaiah,

00:05:37.020 who wrote the longest book of the Old Testament other than the Psalms. Sometimes he's called the

00:05:41.620 fifth evangelist because his Old Testament prophecy is almost a gospel.

00:05:46.760 How do you guys pick what books you guys accept?

00:05:50.320 Because isn't that why there's a lot of division, like a lot of people disagree?

00:05:54.440 Like I heard the book of, I think it's Enoch or whatever, people disagree if that's in or out.

00:05:59.100 So how do you guys decide?

00:06:00.300 Sure, it's a good question.

00:06:01.720 So divisions are upstream of the differences in canon and not the other way around.

00:06:10.580 In other words, it didn't start out, people think, modern people typically think Christianity is a book-based religion.

00:06:16.760 Well, is it institution-based, like Catholics here, more?

00:06:20.620 Well, in the sense that we have bishops and we have churches and dioceses, yes.

00:06:23.980 Now, we're not nearly as organized as they are.

00:06:26.320 I always like to tell people, if you hate organized religion, you'll love orthodoxy.

00:06:30.520 But the different canons that you have, let's say, between the Roman Catholic Church and Protestants and so on,

00:06:37.100 those have more to do with the books accepted by the...

00:06:42.900 So let's say in the early church, you'd have had, if you were a Christian in Alexandria, which is in Egypt,

00:06:51.240 your Old Testament would just be whatever the Jews in Alexandria were using for their scriptures.

00:06:57.060 Well, they had a different list than the Jews in Jerusalem or the Jews in the East or the Jews in Gaul.

00:07:04.860 They had different lists.

00:07:06.040 And so basically, when you have differences in canon, it's not that we disagreed about the books of the Bible,

00:07:11.500 and so then a split happened.

00:07:12.360 And actually, for many centuries, the entire church was able to operate in a unified way

00:07:18.960 without actually having agreed upon canon of the Old Testament.

00:07:21.640 Because it's actually not hugely important, because Christianity is not a book-based religion.

00:07:28.500 Now, that's the way that Protestants would view it.

00:07:30.880 But what we would say is that the Word of God means Jesus Christ.

00:07:35.060 He's the word and wisdom of his Father.

00:07:37.420 right so the whole point of this faith is to have a direct encounter with him and all of those old

00:07:43.820 testament books so for instance the book of Enoch it's not in our bible but it's in the Ethiopian

00:07:48.300 bible but then if you ask an Ethiopian Christian well what does it mean that Enoch is in your bible

00:07:52.080 they don't mean by that something the same thing that Protestants mean when they say a book is in

00:07:58.220 their bible right there's a lot of difference in terminology what we would say is Enoch is a helpful

00:08:02.820 book good for reading in the home we don't read it in church and really for us the list of what

00:08:07.840 books are in the bible the canon of scripture is is down to what books we read publicly when we

00:08:14.100 gather together to to worship god so that's the short answer okay it's more complicated that's

00:08:19.960 the short answer so over these two pillars we have two old testament psalms uh poets and prophets

00:08:25.880 King David and Isaiah.

00:08:28.800 And the words written across here

00:08:31.080 is a line from the prophecy of Isaiah.

00:08:35.420 There shall be a root of Jesse,

00:08:36.800 which will stand for an ensign of the people.

00:08:39.220 To it shall the Gentiles seek.

00:08:41.820 So there's this idea that the line of David,

00:08:46.160 his descendants, would be cut off

00:08:47.720 and there would just be a stump.

00:08:50.520 And that stump was going to just kind of lay fallow

00:08:54.180 in the earth for a long time.

00:08:56.860 But one day there was going to be a shoot

00:08:59.120 that would come up out of that stump.

00:09:02.660 And it's like you cut a tree down

00:09:04.540 and then one day you come out

00:09:05.500 and there's a sprig of something

00:09:07.460 growing off the side of it, right?

00:09:09.460 So that is going to bring us into here.

00:09:12.580 So there's a chronological axis

00:09:14.320 that's happening here.

00:09:15.480 So this is like the Old Testament.

00:09:17.600 This is the Old Testament,

00:09:18.720 which would make this the New Testament.

00:09:21.320 That's right.

00:09:22.260 Now we would also say

00:09:23.160 this is the present age. There is technically no end to the New Testament. You're still living in

00:09:30.460 it right now, right? We'd say that Christ is ruling in the midst of his enemies. What's that?

00:09:36.900 No, it doesn't quite work that way. But again, the New Testament is not really a, it's not really a

00:09:42.640 list of books. It is a condition. So the thing that the Bible calls the New Testament is actually

00:09:48.020 the Holy Eucharist. Christ says, this cup is the New Testament in my blood, right? So when we say

00:09:53.660 the New Testament, what we really mean by this is the age of the church, and that's the age in which

00:09:59.060 we are presently living. So if that's the Old Testament, this is the New Testament, then

00:10:03.060 what's the room in the back? Well, we'll come to that. So I mentioned there's a horizontal axis,

00:10:09.860 but also we see the same thing happening in a vertical axis. So we have up there an icon of

00:10:15.120 Christ. This icon actually depicts Christ the way that the old Roman emperors would be depicted. He's

00:10:19.820 wearing like Roman senatorial robes. He's holding the gospel in his hand, which is the book by which

00:10:24.420 we will all be judged at the end of time. He's got his hand raised in blessing, and then around him

00:10:29.340 there's a verse that says, the Lord had looked down from the heights of his sanctuary. From the

00:10:35.100 heaven did the Lord behold the earth to loose those that are appointed to death. So I mentioned

00:10:41.760 all the way back in Genesis, we had a problem. And the problem is we are cast out of paradise

00:10:49.940 into the world of sin and death, which means things start to go wrong. For one thing, we start

00:10:56.920 to die. Another thing that begins to go wrong is our relationships with one another, right?

00:11:02.520 We depict Christ and Adam as having the same face, which is a way of showing every single human being

00:11:10.580 is actually an icon of Christ, and therefore

00:11:12.760 deserving of love and respect. So when I

00:11:14.800 fail to show that to you, then I'm

00:11:16.900 actually failing to honor the icon of Christ

00:11:18.860 that's in you, for which

00:11:20.740 I ask your forgiveness.

00:11:22.980 Okay? So

00:11:23.940 when we enter into the world of death,

00:11:28.060 we are enslaved

00:11:30.900 to it. And so you're born into it.

00:11:33.040 It doesn't really matter what you do.

00:11:34.980 You know, you could be born into it. You could live like a

00:11:36.840 totally perfect life and never make any mistakes at all

00:11:39.000 and you would still die at the end of it, right?

00:11:40.580 So this is a problem because, of course, Christ did not make us for death, and he did not intend

00:11:46.540 us to experience death either in a physical sense or in the spiritual death, the separation from God,

00:11:51.640 the separation from one another. And so what he does is he looks down from heaven at us,

00:11:57.520 and he comes to call us back. And so right beneath Christ in the dome here, there are Old Testament

00:12:02.580 prophets. So again, we see Christ coming through the Old Testament, and this is quite fun.

00:12:07.060 around the dome

00:12:09.260 there are some images, some of which you might

00:12:11.100 recognize, for instance, here's the

00:12:13.020 nativity of Christ, this is Christmas, right?

00:12:14.920 Jesus born in a manger

00:12:15.940 there might be

00:12:19.080 some details in there you're not familiar with, but that's

00:12:21.160 what that is

00:12:21.960 yeah, right, exactly, here's Christ's baptism

00:12:27.120 in the Jordan

00:12:27.660 there you go

00:12:30.200 yeah, Christ's baptism in the Jordan, Christ on the

00:12:32.980 Mount of Transfiguration, his crucifixion

00:12:35.500 and then his descent into the underworld

00:12:37.720 to break down the doors of Hades

00:12:40.080 and to bring the righteous,

00:12:42.040 including Adam and Eve, into paradise,

00:12:44.420 which is what happens on Holy Saturday,

00:12:46.560 the day before Easter.

00:12:48.140 Now, right here,

00:12:49.840 this is what we were celebrating yesterday.

00:12:52.300 This is Pentecost.

00:12:53.640 So we'll go through these in order,

00:12:56.120 but Christ is moving,

00:12:58.920 so we have Old Testament stuff up there

00:13:00.320 and then moving into New Testament stuff.

00:13:02.360 What you'll see if you kind of crane your neck

00:13:05.040 is that over each New Testament event,

00:13:08.640 there are two prophets

00:13:09.740 pulling a prophecy from their scroll,

00:13:12.200 a scroll from their prophecy

00:13:13.220 that is from the book of the Old Testament

00:13:14.960 with their name on it.

00:13:16.520 And they are,

00:13:17.700 it is a prophecy from the Old Testament

00:13:19.460 that prophesies the event of the New Testament

00:13:22.380 depicted directly below it.

00:13:23.780 So it's very intricate,

00:13:24.980 requires actually a high level of scriptural literacy

00:13:27.660 to kind of lay all this out.

00:13:28.960 How old is this church?

00:13:29.920 When was it like painted?

00:13:31.680 We finished painting this in 2009.

00:13:35.040 Yeah, we finished painting this in 2009.

00:13:38.140 So the original temple is now what is the parish hall across the alley,

00:13:44.220 where a bunch of interesting historical things happened,

00:13:46.280 if you're ever interested in the history of Dallas.

00:13:48.000 There's a bunch of weird stuff that happened over there.

00:13:50.200 Now, Christ moves down through the Old Testament.

00:13:52.660 So I mentioned there's a kind of a pedagogy, that is a teaching.

00:13:56.580 And the pedagogy is the Old Testament.

00:13:58.260 So the Old Testament is, you start out with everybody,

00:14:00.900 and then you narrow it down to just Noah's descendants.

00:14:02.920 And then you narrow it down to just Abraham's descendants, and then just Isaac's, and then just Jacob's, and then just Judah's, until we get to her.

00:14:11.400 So this moment, the moment of the Annunciation, depicts the mother of God.

00:14:17.280 It's a young woman.

00:14:19.400 She had been dedicated to a service of God in the temple.

00:14:23.060 And then, when she hit a certain age, she was sent away to live under the protection of the righteous Joseph.

00:14:27.700 and it is in that context you see she's got a little spindle in her hand or she's she's doing

00:14:32.580 some spinning that's because she was one of the temple virgins tasked with the role of weaving

00:14:38.640 the veil the temple veil and so she's there weaving the veil and that's the context in which

00:14:46.900 in the gospel according to saint luke the archangel gabriel appears to her and says hail

00:14:51.980 thou who art full of grace the Lord is with you and she opens herself up to God and she says yes

00:15:02.340 now there are lots of stories in the ancient world of God's impregnating women and none of

00:15:10.040 them was she ever consulted in this story she opens up herself to God she conceives of the

00:15:17.960 Holy Spirit, her yes becomes the means through which all of us can be saved. So this is why we

00:15:23.600 love her, and you'll see there's icons of her kind of all over the place, including back there in the

00:15:29.160 back, although you'll notice that with a couple of exceptions, pretty much every icon that you see of

00:15:34.120 her will show her holding Christ in her arms. This type of icon right here is called the one who

00:15:41.380 points the way. So what she's doing is she's presenting Christ to you and saying, he's the way.

00:15:47.240 So, the moment of the Annunciation in Luke chapter 2, and then the images kind of bounce

00:15:53.360 around and we move through the life of Christ.

00:15:56.180 So the question then becomes, how do we escape from the realm of death?

00:16:01.160 Well, in order to do this, what Christ has to do is untwist that image of himself that

00:16:09.900 has been twisted in us because of sin.

00:16:12.540 So the way that he does this is to come, and first of all, become a little tiny baby in Mary's womb,

00:16:18.480 and then grow, and then she gives birth to him in the normal way,

00:16:22.160 and at Christmas he's born, and then he begins his, and he grows, and he waits for 30 years,

00:16:28.460 and then he begins his public ministry.

00:16:31.560 And if you read the early apostolic fathers, so this is the generation of church fathers

00:16:35.980 who lived right after the apostles in about the, say, the late first and the early second century.

00:16:41.220 The apostolic fathers talk about something they call the doctrine of recapitulation,

00:16:45.740 which is to put a new head on something.

00:16:48.440 Paul hints at this, and Paul hints at this in the New Testament when he talks about saying,

00:16:52.020 as under one Adam, we all died.

00:16:55.840 So also, under a new Adam that is Christ, we will all be made alive.

00:17:01.760 For the first Adam was made a living being, but the second Adam is made a life-giving spirit.

00:17:07.680 So Christ lives through all the stages, that is, infancy, childhood, manhood.

00:17:14.380 He lives through all the stages of human life.

00:17:18.120 And in doing so, he takes each part of human experience and he joins it to himself.

00:17:23.160 Now, there are some things about human experience which do not properly belong to us.

00:17:28.300 One of them is suffering.

00:17:30.120 One of them is death.

00:17:31.420 So that's to say you weren't made to suffer.

00:17:35.060 You weren't made to die.

00:17:36.520 that's from the devil basically well no it's from sin i mean yes the devil is is involved

00:17:41.640 but the devil can't make things he just likes to twist and bend things okay what do you mean by

00:17:47.820 that so the devil the teaching church's teaching on the devil is probably familiar to you that he

00:17:53.840 was an angel and that he fell actually what we'd say um and this is a tradition you find again in

00:18:00.660 ancient judaism before christianity and it's been carried on in the orthodox church what we'd say is

00:18:04.040 that when God makes man in his own image, all the way back here, he commands

00:18:07.960 all of creation to give him honor. It is to give mankind honor. Why? Because

00:18:11.900 man is the image of God. And so even the angels are supposed to give

00:18:15.940 honor to Adam. And some of the angels are like,

00:18:19.720 that animal? I don't think so. And so they refuse

00:18:24.300 and their refusal is, are they refusing

00:18:27.920 just to give honor to Adam? No, they're actually refusing to give honor to God. Why? Because Adam

00:18:32.000 as the icon of God.

00:18:33.640 So over here I have icons

00:18:35.780 of various saints, Mother of God,

00:18:37.720 Saint Nicholas, Christ. So when I kiss them,

00:18:41.180 which was a

00:18:41.980 normal thing to do when we walk into a church,

00:18:43.780 I just walk over to an icon, I make the sign

00:18:45.920 of the cross, and I bow,

00:18:48.000 and the sign of the cross again, another bow.

00:18:49.960 So you guys do have saints here?

00:18:51.860 Yes, of course.

00:18:53.660 Well, it's an ancient Christian thing

00:18:55.600 that various strands of Christianity

00:18:57.860 Yeah, I know that's like one of the things

00:18:59.740 a lot of people argue about.

00:19:01.340 Yes.

00:19:01.740 Because I've interviewed a lot of different devoutly religious people, so that seems to be a point of contention.

00:19:07.680 I'll try to explain how we get there, because it is actually part of this answer.

00:19:11.100 So when I give honor to an icon, obviously I'm not actually giving honor to a piece of paint and wood.

00:19:15.800 In the same way that if you salute the flag, start playing the national anthem, you stand, face the flag, put your hand over your heart.

00:19:22.140 Are you giving honor to a piece of textile?

00:19:24.520 Well, no.

00:19:24.980 What are you honoring?

00:19:25.560 Well, you're honoring the country, or maybe the soldiers, or something like that, right?

00:19:29.520 So when I give honor to an icon, I'm giving honor to the person who's depicted in the

00:19:32.500 icon.

00:19:32.920 So when the devil refuses to give honor to Adam, he's not really refusing to honor Adam

00:19:37.300 because Adam is an icon.

00:19:38.420 He's refusing to honor Christ.

00:19:40.320 And so he falls out of his pride and envy.

00:19:43.220 And now what he wants to do is take us with him.

00:19:46.380 So this is where he gets involved in the temptation in the garden.

00:19:49.180 This is where he gets involved in the temptations that you and I face every day.

00:19:53.400 So.

00:19:54.160 And so you'd say because Jesus came down to earth and he had the human experience, he

00:19:59.200 of under you'd say like he understands what we go through not only would i say that but saint paul

00:20:04.160 would say that uh in the letter to the hebrews he says uh under the old law so back in the old

00:20:10.400 testament times the high priest had to be taken from among the people because you had to have

00:20:14.480 somebody how could you offer a sacrifice on behalf of people if you don't know what they're going

00:20:18.640 through you have to be one of them right so this is the thing we need someone to go and represent

00:20:24.320 us, but it has to be one of us. Well, who's going to be able to do that? Well, nobody but God. And

00:20:29.460 so we're in this bind, and this is what the, this is officially what we call the hypostatic union,

00:20:34.640 that is the personal union of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. So he

00:20:40.600 goes through the whole human experience, but then he also voluntarily takes on things which are not

00:20:46.440 part of the actual natural human experience as God designed it, such as suffering and death.

00:20:51.260 And so he consents to suffer and to die on the cross, and when he does so, he enters down into Hades, which is the realm of the dead, and he defeats death, and he defeats the devil, and he takes the righteous who are in Hades and brings them with him into paradise, and then he rises again on the third day, and he ascends in glory, right there above the altar.

00:21:13.760 So his ascension in glory is taking now actually my humanity and your humanity.

00:21:20.160 This is a human being with a nose and hands and feet and ears and hair

00:21:24.060 seated at the right hand of the power on high in whatever way.

00:21:29.020 You know, obviously I don't have any idea what heaven is like.

00:21:31.180 I don't think he's killing Jesus and then walking out and he's just sitting there.

00:21:34.520 Well, there are documented reactions, let's say, and it didn't go super well.

00:21:40.820 So he ascends in glory, and then at the end of that period,

00:21:44.400 so this gets us to what we're celebrating yesterday,

00:21:47.360 at the end of that period, after 40 days, or after 50 days,

00:21:52.280 he sends to guide the church while he is bodily absent.

00:21:57.160 Of course, always present with us.

00:21:58.460 We greet each other in the Orthodox Church by saying,

00:22:00.420 Christ is in our midst.

00:22:01.460 He is and never shall be.

00:22:03.420 But he sends the Holy Spirit,

00:22:07.500 which is the third person of the Godhead,

00:22:09.540 the third person of the Trinity. And he sends it upon the church as they're all gathered together,

00:22:14.000 all the apostles and the mother of God also, gathered together in the upper room. They're

00:22:18.100 praying together. The Holy Spirit descends upon them. They begin to prophesy. But at that point,

00:22:24.820 then the Holy Spirit becomes the vitalizing, liturgizing force in the church. So the Holy

00:22:31.240 Spirit binds us together with each other, but also the Holy Spirit means that the life of God

00:22:36.680 in me continues to be active as a Christian. So, all the way back in Genesis, we talked about the

00:22:43.820 fact that Christ made us to be in his image and likeness. The way that the fathers of the church

00:22:50.760 interpret this is to say that we have, we're made in image to grow into likeness. So, when somebody

00:22:58.980 grows into the likeness of God, they begin to be given some of God's rule, some of his authority,

00:23:06.060 some of his power over the cosmos, right?

00:23:08.720 Because God does things through his servants.

00:23:12.260 And when somebody does it to a certain level,

00:23:14.600 that's when we call them a saint.

00:23:15.920 That's what we mean by that.

00:23:16.840 We mean that this is somebody who now rules and reigns with Christ.

00:23:19.800 Christ says, I am not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.

00:23:22.580 So we believe that the righteous,

00:23:24.300 souls of the righteous are in the hands of God,

00:23:26.340 and that certain people, like the Mother of God,

00:23:29.300 like Saint Stephen the Martyr, like Saint Herman of Alaska, and so on,

00:23:32.360 these are all different saints who are important to this community

00:23:34.800 or important to the church in America, that those saints have the ability to act on God's

00:23:44.940 behalf in the world. Technically, you also have the ability to act on God's behalf in the world,

00:23:50.600 right? This is the place that we find ourselves in right now, where we can either choose to act

00:23:55.200 on behalf of God, or we can choose to act on behalf of the evil one, right? But when I try

00:24:02.860 to act on God's behalf, it's basically just localized to my very, very small sphere of

00:24:06.520 power and influence. When a saint does it, they're able to do it miraculously, right? More like the

00:24:13.080 way you see Christ operating and moving after his resurrection. What percent of saints were like

00:24:17.700 crucified? Specifically crucified? They're like killed because of their religion. Oh, martyred.

00:24:23.680 Sorry, yeah. Yeah. So a very high percentage of them. I would say the majority, though I don't

00:24:30.120 have the exact number. We have a book that's sort of all the saints of the church that we honor

00:24:36.620 throughout the year, but that's a very small percentage of the actual saints. The actual

00:24:40.580 saints are, you know, the whole list is known only to God. So we have a Sunday, it'll be this next

00:24:45.120 Sunday, called the Sunday of All Saints, when we honor and ask the intercessions of all those saints

00:24:51.460 who have shown forth in the various kinds of martyrdom, because the Christian life is always

00:24:57.160 martyrdom no matter actually how you end up dying. I'll explain this in a minute. But all the saints

00:25:02.540 who have shown forth in these different kinds of martyrdom, we honor them, those who are known to

00:25:09.700 us and also those known only to God. Sometimes we don't even know about a saint until many years

00:25:14.700 after they die, and then God reveals to us this is a holy person. So in the beginning, the earliest

00:25:21.960 saints were pretty much the apostles the mother of god and the martyrs so i have a question so how

00:25:28.200 do you guys differentiate because what i see a lot is people um i think they use paul he was the

00:25:34.900 murderer and then he converted right sure how do you differentiate someone with like good intentions

00:25:40.360 that really changed their life versus somebody that's like using christianity's kindness because

00:25:46.280 I do see that a lot you know like I don't know in particular Orthodox it's just my experience

00:25:52.040 in interviewing like very religious people like when you have people that come to your church or

00:25:57.120 something how do you differentiate them looking for like a get out of jail free card well if they

00:26:04.080 were coming to Orthodoxy for a get out of jail free card they picked the wrong place to come

00:26:09.580 the sort of evangelical you say a little prayer and then you're you're good to go

00:26:16.320 It's not how it works in orthodoxy.

00:26:18.980 So for us, salvation is a lifelong struggle.

00:26:23.160 It's one that we take on joyously because we love Christ

00:26:26.380 and we want to be with him and we love each other.

00:26:28.260 But it is something that's lifelong and you have to remain faithful.

00:26:31.980 St. John says in the Apocalypse, the book of Revelation,

00:26:34.340 the very last book of the New Testament, he says,

00:26:37.500 he that perseveres to the end will be saved.

00:26:40.940 Right?

00:26:41.280 So there's no get out of jail free card here.

00:26:43.420 is a constant struggle, constant failure, constant repentance, and we just kind of go over and over

00:26:48.180 and over again. So, you know, obviously one of the charges which could always be leveled against any

00:26:54.500 church is that churches are full of hypocrites. I am one of them. Absolutely yes. What would be

00:27:02.140 the point of a church if there weren't sinful people who needed to be saved? So the way that

00:27:07.440 we're saved is by, as now Christ has ascended into heaven, and he sent his Holy Spirit upon us,

00:27:14.360 the way that we're saved now is by participating in his life. Well, we do this in lots of different

00:27:20.040 ways, but the most important ways that we do this is through what are called the holy mysteries,

00:27:25.660 or the Western word would be sacraments. So baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, repentance,

00:27:32.660 marriage. These are all deep mysteries which prefigure something or show something, reveal

00:27:38.940 something to us about the life of Christ, but then they also allow us to live into and participate

00:27:44.660 in that life. So St. Paul says in Romans, as many, or in Colossians, as many as are baptized into

00:27:50.000 Christ have put on Christ. So when you're baptized into Christ, which we'll do back there at the back,

00:27:56.520 when you're baptized into Christ, then you are remade, actually recreated in his image.

00:28:02.020 And then you are now able to begin to move towards his likeness.

00:28:05.940 Well, I guess because my question is, what do you do if someone does the sacraments,

00:28:09.480 but they're still behaving in the same way?

00:28:12.020 So, like, I think half of pastors admit to affairs.

00:28:16.780 So this is like a common, you know, you put a guy in the front of the church,

00:28:20.220 you know, they love seeing men talk.

00:28:22.460 So it's like, and I'm not saying that's a problem here.

00:28:25.040 I don't know.

00:28:25.700 This is just my experience interviewing very religious, like, people.

00:28:29.160 is that like what do you do if somebody comes into the church and they're still behaving in

00:28:33.640 the same way that like a non-religious person would well in the case of a pastor like a priest

00:28:38.540 or a deacon yeah um for some you know if somebody is caught it could be a wife could be if somebody

00:28:44.500 somebody's in a certain sin like that yeah um they would be defrocked um and there's no return

00:28:50.320 after defrocking okay so it's taken pretty seriously fortunately it's a very small number

00:28:55.460 of cases. For other people, if somebody is obstinate in their sin, eventually they'll be

00:29:04.880 excommunicated. That is, they'll be cut off from the chalice. They'll not be able to receive

00:29:08.860 communion until such a time as they come to the church in repentance. Now, the exact role of

00:29:15.480 assigning this is basically up to their spiritual father. This is the person who hears their

00:29:22.020 confessions. So if you just don't come to confession at all for a while, you're sort of

00:29:26.720 de facto excommunicated because you're saying, you know, I don't need God, right? So at some

00:29:32.060 point, you have to say, all right, well, you're cut off from the chalice until you start to feel

00:29:35.200 the thing that we want. There's examples of this in the New Testament. But the thing that we want

00:29:39.060 you to do is to feel the absence of Christ and how deeply that you need him. So that's the short

00:29:45.180 answer is excommunication. How do you know they're not just going to lie? You know, like, it's not

00:29:50.000 like if someone's an immoral person expecting them to be moral would just be kind of silly you know

00:29:55.180 i think that if you live realistically if you live alongside enough people for long enough

00:30:00.620 then um and you're you know in community you know you you can't sort of cover your lie forever and

00:30:08.220 some people when they're excommunicated um they just never come back some people come back with

00:30:14.200 tears like genuine repentance and some people try to fake the repentance but you can always catch

00:30:19.260 the fakers out like it's just not that easy to fool people well i'm just wondering like um

00:30:24.600 i don't know because there is a girl there was like a scandal recently of a girl who like

00:30:29.880 um had her not this church but it was like the pope blessed this girl's marriage and she was like

00:30:35.340 cheating on her husband the whole time yeah i saw that you saw that on twitter you know that

00:30:39.140 probably deconverted like 10 of the people you know what i'm saying like because they came out

00:30:44.220 and they said i'm a representative of this religion the guys think well i finally found

00:30:48.520 my good woman and then she does the same thing you know what i'm saying like it's definitely the case

00:30:53.960 i think over a long period of time when you have case after case after case of that um like it kind

00:30:59.760 of demoralizes people because it's like why even you know why even go to church if it's the same

00:31:04.460 christ says to someone who where you're talking about specifically sin of scandal

00:31:09.880 now nowadays we're like oh scandalous or you know that has a different meaning now but the old

00:31:14.780 meaning for scandal is literally to cast a stumbling block. So you're trying to walk a

00:31:20.060 certain path and I throw a rock in front of you and I cause you to trip over it. And I make you

00:31:25.720 stumble. I make you turn aside from the path that you're walking. That's what it means to give

00:31:29.560 scandal. So to those who give scandal, Christ says, scandal must come because it's one of the

00:31:36.000 things that tests our faith. Like, do I have faith in the institution? Do I have faith in,

00:31:41.100 you know, just I really like this one priest or whatever, or do I really have faith in Jesus

00:31:44.920 Christ? So scandal must come, but woe to those by whom it comes. And then Christ says a little later

00:31:53.800 on, it would be better for that person, that person who causes a little one to stumble. A little one

00:31:58.820 could be somebody who's an actual little one. We have a lot of children at this parish. But it could

00:32:02.840 also be someone who is just young and new in the faith. And we'd say, Christ says, it's better for

00:32:07.340 that person that a millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.

00:32:11.940 So one of the things that this means is when scandal happens, it's, first of all, it's horrible.

00:32:19.920 It's a call for all of us to repent. It's a call for all of us to repent. Because one of the things

00:32:24.400 that I believe as an Orthodox Christian is that my sin affects everybody else, even people I don't

00:32:27.660 know. So when I pray, the Orthodox prayer, one of our favorite prayers is called the Jesus prayer.

00:32:33.540 It's very simple. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner. In this prayer,

00:32:39.800 what I'm saying is, I'm the sinner, Lord. It's just me. Let everybody else off. It's just me.

00:32:45.660 I'm going to work on my own sin. So when a scandal happens, it's called a repentance.

00:32:52.640 It's a call to re-examine, obviously, the conditions by which this happened on an

00:32:57.840 institutional level. You have to really take it very seriously and figure out, how do we let this

00:33:02.620 guy in how do we make sure that doesn't happen again right um but then also ultimately because

00:33:08.340 i believe in god i believe that he will judge either in this life or in the next yeah well

00:33:13.320 it's more um for me when that scandal happened i predicted it before it happened and my question

00:33:19.400 was more how did the hell how that sorry how the heck did the the pope bless this marriage and not

00:33:24.580 see it and i did well obviously the pope the pope when they say the pope plus they just looked at

00:33:29.300 like her social media or something like that it's like it would have been so easy yeah you know

00:33:33.340 yeah like if someone has their boobs out with a jesus cry i mean yeah you know i i guarantee you

00:33:38.920 that they just had a whole bunch of married people like newly married people and they were

00:33:42.980 just all lined up and the pope came one by and just like yeah he probably didn't know any of

00:33:46.840 those people my thing is if they let anybody in it just loses its like sacredness you know if you

00:33:51.840 just let anybody do it you know yeah so you agree with that disagree yeah sure of course and so but

00:33:58.420 how here do you prevent things like that happening?

00:34:01.040 How do we prevent?

00:34:02.520 Like men, because one of the issues you have in church

00:34:05.740 is like a lot of young, naive men.

00:34:10.140 Again, I can't speak to this one.

00:34:11.700 I'm just talking in general.

00:34:12.940 But a lot of women with crazy pasts come in.

00:34:15.340 So you got women that hooked up with a lot of guys in college.

00:34:18.940 You have women that did corn, like that sort of thing.

00:34:22.420 Then you have a young guy with no sexual experience.

00:34:25.560 She's going to run circles around him in manipulation.

00:34:27.720 and like church men are known for this um like being deceived by the women so like what is the

00:34:35.020 church doing to protect you know young men from women that are ultimately and i've been on the

00:34:40.720 other side like where i've interviewed men that are victims of like a divorce rape where this

00:34:45.220 really really destroys their life and they kind of bought into um like if they went to a latin

00:34:50.860 church or an orthodox church that you know they um like they would have a higher quality of woman

00:34:57.440 and it really like messed up their life for years to come.

00:35:00.640 So like how is the church protecting young men

00:35:03.120 from women with crazy pasts?

00:35:06.660 So there's kind of two parts of an answer here.

00:35:10.600 So the first would be to answer the question,

00:35:15.380 well, what about anybody's past, right?

00:35:18.580 What amount of sin is so much that you can't come to God?

00:35:25.960 And it's not a rhetorical, I mean, it's a rhetorical question.

00:35:27.660 Well, I think there's a difference between coming to God and getting a husband, right?

00:35:30.580 I think there is a certain...

00:35:31.540 Sure, but, but, but, well, but so what I'm saying is that first of all, somebody comes

00:35:35.440 to us, and they're honest about their past, and we have a long process of reception into

00:35:42.120 the church here, it takes about a year to become a new Orthodox Christian at this parish.

00:35:46.440 And during that time, we have classes, we're also doing lots of one-on-one meetings with

00:35:51.320 you throughout that period.

00:35:52.900 And then also if there is a boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, something like that,

00:36:00.140 then we're also doing premarital counseling during that period.

00:36:04.560 This is a long period of vetting.

00:36:06.140 It's a long period of, it's a lot of work to do if you're not serious.

00:36:09.740 So during that process, one of the things you do is you begin to meet with a priest

00:36:13.920 and to make your life confession.

00:36:16.160 And here in this parish, this is done over the course of several sessions.

00:36:20.600 and some of them can be quite long

00:36:23.080 and the point of the life confession

00:36:25.460 so I had to make one when I came to the church

00:36:27.180 so did my wife, so did our oldest daughter

00:36:28.960 when the point of the life

00:36:31.540 confession is to

00:36:32.740 go through your whole past

00:36:34.500 to go through your hurt, your pain

00:36:36.680 but also your sin, your wrong

00:36:38.960 your guilt and to lay all of that

00:36:41.320 at the feet of Christ and ask for his healing

00:36:43.180 at the end of that period

00:36:45.440 you're received into the church

00:36:46.980 now

00:36:48.080 we don't live in the middle ages anymore

00:36:50.520 which means that we can

00:36:54.340 strongly advise people about certain things

00:36:56.720 and we have certain things that as the clergy of the church

00:36:59.620 we have to protect such as the chalice

00:37:01.480 so we don't allow just anybody to take communion

00:37:04.940 you have to be an orthodox Christian who has come to confession

00:37:08.320 recently and is in good standing and not in conflict

00:37:11.340 with your brothers and sisters in Christ

00:37:12.920 and also you'll have to have fasted

00:37:16.780 to prepare yourself to receive communion

00:37:20.960 So typically speaking, it's fasting for midnight the night before until you receive communion the next day.

00:37:25.940 So when you think about this space full of about 400 people on Sunday morning, nobody's had breakfast, nobody's had coffee.

00:37:34.660 But we're all here for Christ.

00:37:37.040 So that's the first answer.

00:37:38.880 The second answer...

00:37:39.840 So you're saying that because it's a long process?

00:37:42.920 What I'm saying is that, first of all, the whole point of what Christ offers us

00:37:49.000 is that there is nothing he won't heal us from if we are willing to be healed.

00:37:54.460 There is a long process which is intended to make sure,

00:38:00.100 I like to talk about the catechumen period as a sort of engagement.

00:38:05.040 For some people, this can be a little bit shorter depending on what their life has been,

00:38:09.520 what their history was.

00:38:10.260 six months a year two years a year at shortest shortest a year yeah up to could be three four

00:38:17.020 years up to three or four years i we have a wonderful uh a man here pillar of our community

00:38:22.500 was a catechumen for 11 years before he was received into the church because you have a

00:38:26.820 process of like accepting people like we have a process of we have a process of uh one thing we

00:38:33.800 don't want to do is make you convert before you're actually ready so if you put a lot of pressure

00:38:38.220 I've never seen a quick conversion go well, just period.

00:38:41.540 Like, I've never seen it end well.

00:38:44.300 You want to give some time to kind of really struggle.

00:38:48.140 You want to give some time for things to really,

00:38:51.980 you need to experience some disappointments.

00:38:55.620 You get here and you realize, wait a minute,

00:38:56.740 all these other people are also sinful, right?

00:38:58.420 Those kinds of things.

00:38:59.460 Otherwise, you will be scandalized and then you'll fall away.

00:39:02.040 So it's a long period.

00:39:03.280 If you are coming from a particularly crazy background,

00:39:07.280 we will make it longer.

00:39:08.220 so okay but so she lies for two years three years what like what protects the men

00:39:16.300 so you know because i have to be honest one of the worst divorces i saw was from an orthodox church

00:39:21.720 like the like probably the worst horror story i've seen without without knowing the specifics

00:39:27.760 woman made it through like she can't be the only one you know people are people i don't think like

00:39:32.440 this church is special but you know i just think i just you know if we're saying that you can

00:39:38.160 there's no sin that's too great it's it kind of toes the line that like you have young naive men

00:39:43.280 that can be taken advantage of and i'm just wondering like what the church does to like

00:39:47.660 help those guys yeah it is we we have a life of repentance regular confession living together in

00:39:56.020 community that's the answer um does it mean that no sin ever happens would be awesome yeah if you

00:40:03.740 figured that out please come let me know yeah yeah well i just i think i think that's just a problem

00:40:11.720 and i don't i don't i don't have the answer to it but i'm just wondering if any of the churches

00:40:16.460 have thought about that okay well yeah um you have a very specific scenario which you're which

00:40:25.500 you're upset about um which is great um if somebody is well it's not just one scenario this is like

00:40:37.280 common no no i know what i mean is like this but the specific case that you have in mind right is

00:40:41.980 a very specific scenario um there's also all kinds of other sins that come in through the door

00:40:46.660 right the answer for all of these things is the same right which is repentance confession the

00:40:52.760 Holy Mysteries. And then sometimes we have to draw a line around and say, I'm sorry, you're not

00:40:55.920 welcome back. And we would have to do this if we had somebody, and this has happened here before,

00:41:00.260 which is why we have armed security. It's why we have a police officer in the driveway every Sunday,

00:41:05.520 because we had people who were dangerous. Like we couldn't have them around and we had to tell

00:41:11.020 them you're not allowed to come back. And then you have to be willing to enforce that. So we have

00:41:16.500 all these measures, but this is a family. This is a community. So how far do you go with someone

00:41:22.460 in love before you say listen you're really hurting people in this community can't be a part

00:41:27.220 of it anymore right that's that is a pastoral decision yeah well I think the issue you get

00:41:33.360 is the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior yes yeah and so it's just

00:41:40.240 and with other sins there's not such a big consequence like if a guy marries a girl that's

00:41:48.480 like the wrong one um the state you know you can say any like religiously like she should obey or

00:41:55.560 whatever but the state um assists her in leaving so um it's like he could be put on child support

00:42:03.600 for 20 years of his life that's like a long that's a big consequence and um it's not like the church

00:42:10.520 is going to be there when um like to pay his child support for him or deal with like restraining

00:42:15.360 orders or in this case this guy's kid got transitioned so um yeah i know i know the

00:42:21.040 people you're talking about yeah so i just um no i just wonder if like if there are like ways that

00:42:28.080 the church is addressing this because there are predatory women that will take advantage of

00:42:33.380 people's good nature you know i mean in any kind of case where somebody is acting in predatory

00:42:41.480 fashion. I have six children, so one of the things that's very important to me is protecting them

00:42:47.160 from people who are predatory, right? In any case where somebody's acting in a predatory fashion,

00:42:53.280 we have to definitely be on our guard. And so, you know, clergy do have training and things like

00:42:59.800 this. The process for vetting somebody who, for them to become a member of the clergy is, in my

00:43:05.200 diocese, very long and very strict. And one of the things that includes is things like, you know,

00:43:11.260 a full background check, psychological evaluation, things like this. Now, we do that for people who

00:43:16.040 want to serve on the altar. We do that for anybody who wants to work with children.

00:43:19.320 We don't do a full psyche vow on every person that walks in through the door.

00:43:25.140 I have a suggestion for marriage. What about 10 years of texts? She has to submit 10 years

00:43:30.700 of text messages to her husband. That would be a pastoral decision. It would be a pastoral

00:43:38.860 decision i am i am a deacon which is a greek word that means a servant okay so i'm not a policy

00:43:45.120 maker i'm a bouncer okay yeah cool yeah so the last stage is uh the last part of the temple

00:43:56.380 is what's behind that wall which i'm not going to open up for you because it's just for us okay but

00:44:02.900 this is the altar and this is where we have the holy table on which the sacrifice is offered

00:44:09.860 and what we do is we take this it's a very cheeky thing that we do with god we take this bread and

00:44:14.900 this wine and we put it on the table and we say send down your holy spirit same holy spirit that

00:44:20.900 came down on us at pentecost send down your holy spirit upon us and upon these gifts set forth so

00:44:26.740 holy spirit's coming on me and it's coming on the gifts and we say and make this bread the precious

00:44:32.020 body of your Christ, and that which is in this cup, the precious blood of thy Christ, changing

00:44:36.420 them by your Holy Spirit. And then we partake of communion. So here on the doors, the holy doors,

00:44:45.100 that whole area back there we call the altar, but of course it would correspond to the most holy

00:44:48.940 place in the temple. There on the doors we have basically two different sets of icons. One is

00:44:56.640 another icon of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel comes to the Virgin Mary,

00:45:00.740 and there's the four gospel writers Matthew Mark Luke and John so what you're seeing on the doors

00:45:06.760 here is two representations of the ways that Christ comes to us and that is he came to us

00:45:15.160 the first time by taking on our nature and our form and so that we could be made it remade into

00:45:22.680 his likeness and then the second part is the four gospel writers Matthew Mark Luke and John so the

00:45:28.500 second way he comes to us is in the holy scriptures in particular the four gospels which we have a

00:45:34.920 copy of a beautiful jeweled copy of on the altar which we process with which we kiss we love and

00:45:40.520 reverent the gospel but then what happens at the end of the liturgy is that these doors open

00:45:46.040 and one of the deacons maybe me or maybe somebody else comes out with the chalice in hand and the

00:45:54.160 chalice contains the body and blood of Christ

00:45:56.040 himself, which

00:45:57.720 we believe

00:45:58.800 purifies

00:46:01.080 and vivifies and divinizes

00:46:04.220 all who partake of it in a

00:46:06.180 worthy fashion. And you believe it actually

00:46:08.340 is the body and blood? Yes. I know that's

00:46:10.160 a good point. Yes.

00:46:12.480 And it's what everyone in the early church

00:46:14.000 believed, it's what the scriptures say, and it's what we

00:46:16.100 believe. So we come out

00:46:18.200 and we would say

00:46:19.020 the Holy Eucharist, being the very body and blood of Christ,

00:46:22.860 is reserved only

00:46:24.020 for those Orthodox Christians who have prepared themselves with prayer, fasting, a recent

00:46:28.240 confession, and have the blessing of their spiritual father to commune.

00:46:32.060 And how often did you say they have to do the confession? I think you said it earlier, I just can't remember.

00:46:36.400 Frequency of confession is, you could say there's a minimum,

00:46:40.660 and then a preferred minimum, and then

00:46:44.200 what people actually do. So the absolute minimum is that you should,

00:46:47.900 if you're going to be in communion with the church, you should come to confession during each

00:46:51.860 of the four fasting periods, we have Lent four times in the Orthodox Church. So you come to

00:46:58.840 confession during each of the four fasts of the Orthodox Church. Great Lent, Apostles' Fast,

00:47:03.380 which is coming up, Dormition at the end of summer, and then the Nativity Fast in the fall.

00:47:10.240 So that's the bare minimum. The suggested minimum, or let's say what is required in the Orthodox

00:47:16.140 church in America, which is one of many autocephalous intercommuning Orthodox churches around

00:47:22.100 the world, is that you should be coming to confession at least once a month. If you're

00:47:28.820 not coming to confession at least once a month, you should consider yourself excommunicated

00:47:34.260 until you do come and make confession. And then you can't get the body and blood, right?

00:47:39.080 Right. Yeah. So if that's communion, to be excommunicated would be to cut off from the

00:47:45.360 chalice yeah there you go now most people confess at this parish more often than this

00:47:53.420 some people maybe several times a week most people i would say at least once every couple of weeks

00:47:59.920 what are the most i don't know if you can say this you can say are there like common sins that

00:48:05.520 most people deal with for sure like what are the most like common ones well anger lust greed

00:48:14.660 pride, gluttony, drunkenness. Just like the old list. Not a lot changes. Not a lot changes.

00:48:25.260 So when we're gathered here together on a Sunday, for us, this is something we've been preparing

00:48:33.080 for for several days in some cases. We go to confession, we fast, we find all the kids' shoes,

00:48:40.240 which is harder than it sounds

00:48:42.320 we do all of this

00:48:43.860 and then we come here

00:48:45.100 for what is in there

00:48:47.380 which for us means

00:48:48.960 we will rise again with Christ on the last day

00:48:52.440 so

00:48:53.820 it's a very different

00:48:55.820 set of values from what's going on

00:48:57.600 out in the world especially in this part of Dallas

00:48:59.920 but it is

00:49:01.020 what we're doing here and it's what we believe is happening

00:49:03.840 so

00:49:05.060 I wanted to give you context

00:49:07.200 because to understand

00:49:09.420 any kind of an orthodox answer to any question you might have is always going to come in the

00:49:14.560 context of all of this. So I can, I can't, I almost can't answer any question without saying,

00:49:19.720 okay, back in Genesis, because we're always operating with, you could say, the full context

00:49:25.560 of what's sometimes called the divine economy. Economy is a fun word. Economia in Greek actually

00:49:31.720 means house rules. So it is the way that God is, you could say, ordering the household of humanity.

00:49:36.980 is the way that he's worked through time, through a lot of very imperfect people over a long period

00:49:42.940 of time, the way that he's worked in order to make salvation possible for us. So whenever we

00:49:50.400 operate in the Orthodox Church, we're operating with all of that context, as well as with the

00:49:55.060 sort of the practical realities on the ground. I'm a pretty practical person, despite, you know,

00:50:00.880 all of the mysticism, the practical realities on the ground of what, you know, a good example

00:50:09.760 would be something like divorce, right? Which the Orthodox Church absolutely prohibits,

00:50:17.780 but then it happens. So then what do you do? Well, do you have a way of bringing somebody

00:50:23.700 back into the community? Because the thing that we're always concerned about, or the thing we

00:50:28.920 should always be concerned about. Obviously, I get distracted and focused on the wrong things.

00:50:34.820 The thing we should always be really concerned about is the salvation of the soul.

00:50:38.240 We're not trying to create utopia. We're not trying to create a perfect society of perfect

00:50:41.740 people. Christ did not come to make bad men good. He came to make dead men live.

00:50:49.760 So the thing that I'm always concerned with or should always be concerned with as a clergyman

00:50:54.120 of the Orthodox Church is the healing and the salvation of another human person. And this

00:51:02.480 is a way in which I significantly failed you yesterday. So once again, I'm going to really

00:51:07.920 ask your forgiveness for a thoughtless, hasty tweet. And I can make all kinds of excuses. Not

00:51:16.740 going to do that. But the thing that we should always be concerned with is the health and the

00:51:22.760 salvation of the people. So for me, that's this flock, these people. So in the Orthodox Church,

00:51:28.760 we call our priests, we call our deacons, Father. And the reason we do that is because these are

00:51:34.640 our children. And we can be very sometimes protective of them. But ultimately, the thing

00:51:42.280 that we're going to, someday I'm going to have to stand before Christ, and I'm going to have to

00:51:47.140 give an account for certain things I've done with my life. How have I used the time, talents, and

00:51:52.440 treasure that he gave me to use to his glory. But also, he gave me a wife, he gave me six

00:51:58.460 wonderful children, and then he also gave me this flock. And I'm going to have to be accountable to

00:52:05.200 God for the way that I pastored them in a way that other people just simply will not.

00:52:11.840 Would you ever tell a woman who's been, like, divorced that she has to get back with her husband

00:52:16.140 in order to return would i ever sure no i'm i'm not i'm a deacon it's not my job to do that oh

00:52:24.260 sorry maybe not you but someone that's representative or like would have that authority

00:52:29.440 that has certainly happened okay um it would depend on the circumstance okay but it certainly

00:52:36.320 happened but like barring maybe abuse um outside of that would that be pretty much it i think

00:52:44.240 I mean, if you're just asking me personally, I'd say, if there's not abuse, then divorce is not

00:52:50.480 an option, so let's figure out what's going on, and if you're separated, I want to bring you back

00:52:55.380 together, right? Yeah, so that's, you know, again, the goal is always the healing, right? And all the

00:53:02.000 way back in the garden, right, God makes man one unit, and then he splits us into two. So

00:53:08.880 the rest of creation already has these masculine-feminine aspects, right?

00:53:14.760 We know this intuitively, you know, things like water is feminine, right?

00:53:18.180 The sea is never he, right?

00:53:23.300 Humanity also has these masculine-feminine aspects.

00:53:26.640 And for the health, salvation, and full flourishing into the image and likeness of God,

00:53:31.540 which is the goal of what we're doing here,

00:53:33.480 male and female are both necessary,

00:53:35.720 and they have to be properly ordered together.

00:53:38.200 It doesn't mean everyone has to be married.

00:53:39.860 We have a long, rich history for 2,000 years of monasticism, right?

00:53:45.520 Monks and nuns, right?

00:53:47.820 So there are different ways to live out these callings,

00:53:51.620 and it means something different for a man to be saved

00:53:54.280 than it means for a woman to be saved.

00:53:56.120 But in all of these cases, you need the image of the masculine,

00:53:59.260 the image of the feminine.

00:54:00.500 And this is, obviously, you see this here.

00:54:01.880 We've got Christ, and then we've got his mother.

00:54:03.560 Right, okay.

00:54:04.640 Yeah.

00:54:04.840 so in that case

00:54:06.960 what's good for the salvation of a couple

00:54:09.340 is for them to be

00:54:11.800 united

00:54:12.600 because that is where they're going to find their salvation

00:54:15.020 what if she refuses to

00:54:17.680 listen to him or she refuses

00:54:19.520 to obey

00:54:20.100 because there's nothing you can do

00:54:23.280 if someone doesn't like if you tell your wife to do

00:54:25.520 something and she won't do it

00:54:27.000 so like what happens then

00:54:29.680 can he divorce her if she like

00:54:31.500 just refuses to listen

00:54:32.620 amazon's off the chain you know how we are with the amazon boxes if uh if a husband came to me

00:54:40.520 and he said i'm thinking about my divorce of my wife because she's buying too much stuff on amazon

00:54:45.800 i would say no you're not allowed to do that it could be ridiculous like it could be because

00:54:50.660 he's responsible for her debt right so she keeps spending it's like a form of enslavement but i

00:54:55.180 would say legally he can't stop it the command in the scriptures so this is the orthodox teaching

00:55:00.460 on marriage. Are you ready for it? Here, it's very simple. St. Paul says, and we read this passage

00:55:05.260 literally at every Orthodox wedding, but you don't get your own wedding when you get married in the

00:55:09.060 Orthodox Church. You don't get to plan the wedding. We have one wedding service, and we do it for

00:55:13.500 everybody. We do it for emperors. We do it for peasants, and at this wedding ceremony, we read

00:55:19.180 the same epistle, reading every time, St. Paul in Ephesians, and he says, husbands, love your wives

00:55:25.440 as Christ loved the church

00:55:27.960 and gave himself for her

00:55:30.080 and washed her with his word.

00:55:33.680 Wives, honor your husbands in the Lord.

00:55:37.560 And then he reiterates that at the end of the passage,

00:55:39.720 just in case you, and he says,

00:55:40.760 this is a great mystery,

00:55:41.640 but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

00:55:43.040 In other words, my marriage with my wife,

00:55:45.260 this is his idea of the icon again,

00:55:47.340 my marriage with my wife is supposed to be an icon

00:55:49.000 of the relationship of Christ to the church.

00:55:50.920 Okay. Well, the thing that the masculine is for is to give headship, identity, protection. These

00:56:01.580 are all in that idea of love. What the feminine does is by giving honor to the head, gives body

00:56:09.900 to that intention. So you have this happening very, you know, obviously in reproduction and

00:56:15.960 childbirth. You also have it happening in the relationship of the church. Okay, what is the

00:56:19.660 church. Well, she's the bride of Christ, but she's also, says St. Paul in another place,

00:56:24.140 the body of Christ. So to whatever extent I am giving proper honor to my head and my bridegroom

00:56:30.200 who is Christ, then I will be giving body to his intention, that is his commands, and manifesting

00:56:36.780 them in the world. And if I ever stop doing that, my relationship with him is going to be broken

00:56:41.940 off. But it's the same thing in a marriage. So now Christ is a perfect, you know, we can't

00:56:49.480 posit a situation in which Christ does not give proper love and headship, but we can posit a

00:56:54.220 situation in which I will not do that. If I fail to give that proper love and headship, that

00:56:59.540 identity to be the spiritual leader and the priest for my home, to set a direction for the life of

00:57:04.940 my family and to set boundaries around things when if I fail to do that then I uh then then

00:57:13.940 there's the relationship again becomes broken there's there's nothing for her to embody

00:57:18.580 right but let's say you're doing all that and she still won't listen it's not going to happen

00:57:24.000 it happens all the time yeah but but I'm not talking about you two yeah but I'm talking about

00:57:29.360 in general but this is this is this is an important difficulty in our conversation though

00:57:34.260 is that as an Orthodox Christian, I'm never going to talk in general.

00:57:39.720 Like, it's just, it's, we worship a personal God, right?

00:57:45.440 We don't worship God in general.

00:57:47.160 Okay, well, when the Orthodox guy said, don't transition my kids,

00:57:51.460 he said, I'm going to do it anyway.

00:57:52.840 Yes.

00:57:53.380 Divorce?

00:57:55.160 In that extreme situation, absolutely yes.

00:57:57.660 Okay, but it starts with small things, right?

00:58:00.600 It usually, like, disobedience doesn't start with, like, one giant thing.

00:58:06.460 Like, it starts with her not, like, she spends too much money.

00:58:09.760 Women make 85% of consumer buying decisions.

00:58:12.860 So spending too much money, talking on social media, right?

00:58:17.380 Like, there's a whole heap, I'm sure you know them, of things that women don't listen to their husbands for.

00:58:22.580 And it can feel like enslavement if a guy has all of the responsibility of a wife but no authority.

00:58:28.780 so and he can't leave so what is a guy supposed to do if he and many times the women lie about

00:58:36.040 their pasts they get through the door somehow and now he's stuck now what so that's just yeah

00:58:43.700 you're obviously addressing real difficulties real pain real problems that are endemic in our

00:58:50.620 society for various reasons i disagree with you yeah um obviously there's all there's plenty of

00:58:56.340 other you mentioned a minute ago um parenting styles is another one people fight a lot about

00:59:02.500 you know dad wants to discipline she says no yeah you you mentioned a minute ago um the uh

00:59:09.640 that this is sort of the and this is not a i'm not trying to pick pick a bone with you you mentioned

00:59:15.600 you know this is like the worst sin you can think of is because you know all the child's important

00:59:19.120 pain i smiled a little bit when you said that because that is really bad but man there's so

00:59:24.200 many worse sins like there's so many worse sins i'm not saying it's good i am but what i what i'm

00:59:30.320 trying to to kind of point out is that what do you mean if there's worse sins than child support

00:59:36.120 no no what i'm saying is i'm yes if a woman leaves her husband and you know he gets stuck

00:59:41.560 in the child like it's very bad right it's devastating it's absolutely listen i know

00:59:46.440 people who've gone through this there are definitely worse things it doesn't make it okay

00:59:54.840 but there are definitely worse things four days a month with your kid worse things than that i think

00:59:59.200 that's death to a lot of men because that's standard every other weekend yeah any guy that

01:00:04.700 she dates has more access yeah yeah like can you listen i i have i've i've got people in my life

01:00:10.420 in these kind of situations. The thing that we can't do is to let the exception dictate the rule.

01:00:20.400 So the thing that I'm concerned with in a pastoral context is let's have a healthy marriage to begin

01:00:27.700 with. When the marriage starts to become unhealthy, then we start to say, what are the ways that we

01:00:34.600 can try to heal and put this back together? And at some point, the rupture can become too great.

01:00:38.300 if a man is beating his wife

01:00:40.180 we have to separate you

01:00:42.280 whether or not we're going to be able to put this back together

01:00:44.400 it sort of remains to be seen

01:00:45.500 if a woman is abusing her husband

01:00:48.100 we have to separate you

01:00:49.120 whether or not we can put this back together

01:00:50.300 remains to be seen

01:00:51.600 you're asking me

01:00:55.520 I think

01:00:56.340 to define a point

01:00:58.440 where we can just sort of say

01:01:00.360 in 100% of cases

01:01:01.900 divorce her

01:01:03.780 no I'm asking

01:01:05.360 what can a man do if his wife won't listen to him and she just will not listen what is he supposed

01:01:12.100 to do so in this scenario yeah are they going to go are they going to go to the are they going to

01:01:20.840 church together are they praying together every day as a family not working okay i've interviewed

01:01:25.120 a lot of these guys sure latin mass orthodox they they do the thing that she will not listen

01:01:31.480 stop drinking she drinks stop spending money on amazon she spends it um we want to parent the

01:01:39.200 kids this way she won't do it because legally you know like we can say he has authority but

01:01:44.920 it's not real if you can't enforce it and unfortunately you know yeah obviously like

01:01:49.780 i said we're not living in the middle ages right so the church can do certain things right so i'm

01:01:55.460 just wondering if there's ever a point where like divorce is on the table because she just will not

01:02:00.620 listen because if there isn't what is the incentive for good behavior let me give you a let me give you

01:02:07.220 a uh parallel example okay which will hopefully try to make my point so there's this rule you

01:02:14.700 probably heard of it thou shalt not kill okay obviously sometimes you have to kill people

01:02:20.040 self-defense protecting your country in a just war whatever that is um protecting my children

01:02:26.920 right like it might be necessary so then the question would be well what do you do when you've

01:02:33.120 taken a life now the western mind is says well we just have to say killing is always okay in these

01:02:40.920 cases and it's always wrong in these cases what we would say in the orthodox church is that killing

01:02:47.060 is always wrong in these cases and it's not great in these cases which means that if you have to do

01:02:51.500 it you're actually going to spend some time away from the chalice because you've wounded your soul

01:02:56.860 Maybe it was a necessary wound, but you've wounded your soul by the taking of a human life.

01:03:03.900 So, in the Orthodox Church, something gets to an irreparable place, and the couple is divorced.

01:03:11.300 Let's say the man stays in the church.

01:03:12.900 I mean, this is not a hypothetical situation, because I know people have gone through this.

01:03:16.880 The man stays in the church.

01:03:18.280 Well, what does he do?

01:03:19.880 What he begins is a period of repentance and healing on behalf of both of them.

01:03:26.860 Same thing if he leaves and she stays in the church.

01:03:30.080 And why?

01:03:30.560 Because we'd say something analogous to self-defense has happened,

01:03:35.400 but it's really bad.

01:03:37.960 And a deep wound has been made in you as a person.

01:03:42.220 And so now the thing that you need is healing and salvation.

01:03:46.200 What about if the wife won't sleep with her husband?

01:03:51.100 Is there a point where he can leave?

01:03:54.300 Historically, yes.

01:03:55.320 Okay.

01:03:55.520 which is ballpark

01:03:58.360 a year, six months

01:04:00.300 I'm not a canon lawyer, I don't know the

01:04:02.080 exact amount of time, but I mean

01:04:03.880 obviously failure to consummate is

01:04:06.300 grounds for an annulment in

01:04:07.580 every Christian civilization in history

01:04:10.140 that's a fairly easy one

01:04:12.420 now, again, what I

01:04:14.180 again, what I want

01:04:15.880 that

01:04:17.900 the union to break up, I say no, what I want to do

01:04:20.620 is bring you into

01:04:22.240 a more perfect union

01:04:23.460 right so it's it's there's always there's always a and so what we do in the orthodox church is if

01:04:31.680 we have a second marriage the second marriage is a penitential service we don't have a big

01:04:36.500 celebration we don't put crowns on your head but what we do instead of the second marriage

01:04:39.640 is to pray for the healing of these two people who are coming together in a broken world

01:04:44.980 the orthodox church is very realistic in terms of of acknowledging that we have realities that are

01:04:51.700 that are just not perfect, right? The promise was never, okay, if you come in here and you do this

01:04:57.640 list of rules, your life will be perfect and you'll be a good person. This is not the business

01:05:01.800 that we're in here. And this confuses people because that is more or less what a lot of

01:05:05.880 Western Christianity is focused on. We are, again, here focused on healing. This is mainly a clinic.

01:05:11.500 It's mainly a hospital. It's for sick people. And so when they have couples come together in a

01:05:18.380 second marriage, maybe it's his, maybe it's hers, maybe it's both of their second marriage.

01:05:22.660 I've seen this, by the way, in many cases where the second marriage was great.

01:05:26.380 Like, first one, huge mistake, things fell apart, couldn't do anything about it.

01:05:30.740 Second marriage, they've been happily married for decades since then.

01:05:34.700 And so it seems like something about that second, but the thing, what we'd say is, it's

01:05:39.260 not about who's allowed to do what, it's about the fact that this second marriage is now

01:05:42.840 actually what these two people need to come together for that healing.

01:05:46.920 So healing is always the goal.

01:05:50.120 That's why it's hard.

01:05:51.360 It's not because we're wishy-washy in practice on some of these things,

01:05:55.300 but it's because I've had a lot of real pastoral experience

01:06:00.120 with real people's situations, which obviously I can't talk about on the Internet.

01:06:04.580 But I think, well, in this one case, this medicine was good.

01:06:10.120 In this other case, this medicine was good.

01:06:11.820 In this other case, there was no medicine that would help, and we had to cut it off.

01:06:15.120 So that's just never going to be able to give you probably the answer that's going to satisfy you in this context.

01:06:20.480 But again, it is because what we're doing here, we're a hospital, we're a clinic.

Pearl - June 06, 2026

Orthodox Deacon Seraphim (Richard) Rohlin, PART ONE ｜THE SITDOWN,

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