From Dust to Glory - St. Basil's Map of Our Salvation

Welcome to Hill Country Homilies Weekly Homilies the Holy Anunciation

Orthodox Church in Liberty Hill, Texas. Holy Annunciation is an

old calendar Orthodox church sharing the faith of the Apostles

and the love of Christ with all who seek His truth. Now,

let's listen to this week's homily.

I'm the father and Son of the.

Holy Spirit, Lord of Jesus Christ, Brothers and sisters in Christ.

I've spoken a couple of times during this Great Lent about.

The differences in the literary things of Saint jo and

Christ is done in Saint Basil with grades, and in

particular the extensive prayers that the priest makes during the

liturgy of Saint Basery Great and last night as I

talk about Saint Mary of Egypt, and it's always good

to talk about Saint Mary. But today, instead of talking

about Saint Mary of Egypt, I want us to talk

about the Anaphora prayer of Saint Basil, the break, which I.

Say mostly to myself.

Sometimes when the music ends, I'll say it what's left

of it for you to hear. But I want to

talk about what is being said as we are preparing

the gifts for the concentration into the body and Black

of Christ. Because this is truly the most marvelous prayer

that I read at the altar, because in a few

lines about page of the service book, the Naphora prayer

of Saint Basil proclaims the whole story of our salvation,

from creation to the fall, to God's patience, guidance through

the Law and the prophets, and they ultimately the fulfillment

of all things in Christ.

And for those who.

Are preparing for reception to the Church, this prayer is

a clear teacher. It shows us what went wrong, It

shows us what God has done to heal it, and

how we participate in that human even in our divine liturgy.

A simple way to hear the antha An, AfterAll, is

just to notice its movement. It begins with who God is,

then what God has done, and finding how we as

a fallible humans respond. Is theology, but is also pastoral

because it teaches us how to pray and how to

repent and where we put our hope. I'm going to

breathe through the whole prayer as we go through this

peace of peace. The prayer starts with this invocation with

these blessed powers, O Master who loves mankind, we sinners

also cry aloud and say, Holy art Thou truly most holy,

And there are no bounds to the magnificence of Thy holiness.

So Saint Basil begins this prayer with the awe of God.

God alone truly is. He is eternally, he is holy.

He is the source of all life, And as the

scriptures tells, the angels sing before him, Holy, Holy, Holy,

confessing the earth and heaven to be full of his glory.

We begin that same prayer in that same manner, himming

his holiness three times. Prayer continues that are gracious in

all thy DEAs, for with righteousness and true judgment, thou

hast ordered all things for us.

The point is simple.

God did not create because he lacked anything. He created,

and then he later redeemed us because of who he is,

because he is love, because he desires communion with his creatures.

And this matters in our daily life.

For if God truly is the one who is, then

everything else success failure of proved anxiety stops being our

ultimate end, and that end becomes God. Worship doesn't become

an escape from reality. It becomes a return to the

true reality. When we say Holy, Holy, Holy. We're running humility.

We're creatures, and God is God. And when we proclaim

the providence of his care for us, that he has

ordered all things, we acknowledge our opinions on He who

is our source.

And precisely there.

We find humility, and humili enables us to find peace.

The prayer continues, When thou didst create man by taking

dust from the earth, and did honor him with thine

own image of God, Thou didst set him in a

paradise of delight, promising him eternal life and enjoyment of ever,

asking blessings in the observance of Thy commandments. That is

the creation story. Into paradise. God arashion humanity from the dust.

He honored us with his image and with his likeness,

and he placed Adam and Eve in paradise, asking them

to give him the trusting obedience. Our vocation from the

beginning was life with God, creation and creator in an

eternal growing from the union of love. Being made in

God's image is not a compliment that we have earned

or achieved. It is a gift we received from the beginning.

It means that we are made for communion with Him.

We are made capable of love, capable of capable of truth,

of self offering, but not perfect, which is found in God.

Com Paradise is not just a place for the past.

It is for us a sign of God's intention for

all of humanity. If ever we wonder what our relationship

to God is intended to be like, we don't need

to look anywhere beyond the scripture account of the Garden,

because that is what God entered for humanity, a life

where grace is normal, where thanksgiving is our first language,

and where obedience is not based on fear, but based

on trust and on love.

But what happened of prayer tells us. But when man.

Disobeyed me the true God, who had created him, and

was deceived by the guile of the serpent, becoming subject

to death through.

His own transgressions, Thou, o God, and thy.

Righteous judgment, did send him forth from Paradise into this world,

returning him to the earth from which he was taken,

yet providing for him the salvation of regeneration in thy

Christ himself. When humanity disobeyed and was deceived by the serpent,

death entered.

Our life by our actions, and we were exiled from Paradise.

Yet even In this judgment, God revealed his mercy for

mankind because he did not abandon his creation.

He promised a reverth He promised a.

Savior of Christ and Anah who would crush the serpent

and restore us to this rightful communion with our creator.

And notice what the fall looks like. It's not just

breaking a rule, but it was.

A turning of the heart of mistrust of God's goodness

and a grasping for life apart from him. Because what

happened when God returned? They hit, they hid, They knew

the sham, and the result is always the same relationships fracture,

shame increases, death, titans his great. But Saint Basil does

not let the story in there, because the first word

after sin is not abandonment, but it is mercy.

The prayer continues, for Thou did not turn away forever.

From thy creature, and thou it made or a good one,

Nor did thou forget the work of thy hands. Through

the tender compassion of thy mercy. Thou did visit him

in various ways. Thous did sins prophets that didst perform

mighty acts by the saints, who every.

Generation were well pleasing to thee.

Thou didst speak to us by the mouth of thy

servants the prophets for telling to us the salvation which

was to come. Thou didst give us the laws and

help thou disappoint angels as guardians. Saint Basil emphasizes here

God's long suffering with its re imbellious creation. He did

not turn away from your creation because across the generations.

This prayer tells us, as the Old Testament account does,

that God visited his people in many ways, through covenants,

through confets, through saints, through miracles.

He gave us the law as.

A guide as a creations a means to tamp and

down our prideful hearts.

And he sent angels to be our guardian.

All this that the hope of the union between man

and his Creator would remain alive, and that the world

would be prepared to recognize and receive their savior. Think

how God educates his people. He preserves Noah through the flood.

He calls Abraham out of idolatry. He delivers Israel through Moses.

He raises up kings and judges. He sends prophets to

heal a nation's memory. When forgets it again and again.

When people wonder, God pursues them not to win their

arcu not to win an argument with them, but to

save them, to call them back. That's why the Church

reads the Old testing not as background material, not for

expanding our knowledge of history, and not simply for the

transmission of the wisdom of God, but rather as a

record of God's faithful love for humanity. God's patience is

the thread that holds the whole Old Testament together. Sounds strange,

and we think of all the times that God has

come down in judgment, But that entire record of the

Old Conament is bound together with the threat of patience

and wrong suffering as God prepares his people for the.

Coming of the Siah, which is what the prayer turns

to next.

And when the fullness of time had come, Thou didst

speak to us through thy son himself, by whom thou

didst also make the ages, grooving the rays of thy

glory and the image of thy person, upholding all friends

by his word. And Tawn thought it not robbery to

be equal to thee, the God and faith.

He was God before the age, as yet he appeared.

On earth and lived among men, becoming incarnate of a

holy virgin.

He emptied himself, taking the form of the servant.

Being likened to the body of our lowliness, that he

might like us to the image of His glory. When

the fullness of time had come. This is the key

to our salvation. When the fullness of time had come,

God no longer spoke full prophets.

God no longer.

Said the law is not the wisdom, literagy, or liturgy

that would preserve.

And redeem anybody. Rather, it was God himself.

God spoke to us in his son, the eternal Word,

the True God born the Virgin Mary, and empties himself

to take on our humanity in its fullness, without ceasing

to be divined. He became what we are so that

he could heal what we are, so that he could

restore the image of God in us that we had darkened,

and could raise us into community with his Father. When

the prayer says he emptied himself, it doesn't mean he

stopped being God. It means that the Son accepted everything

in our weak without resistance, hunger, fatigued, tears, temptation, suffering

up to death in your father. Why, Saint Athanasius said

what is not assumed is not healed. God does not

redeem us from a distance, and comes close enough to

carry our very nature, food, death.

And out the other side.

His nativity in the flesh is the turning point of

our history. The Creator enters creation, heaven and earthly united

him the body of man. This is God's left for

man coming made visit, and this now Saint Basil gives

us the promise.

Where as by.

Man and sin entered into the world, and by sin death,

So it please, I'm only begotten son, who.

Is in the bosom of be the God and.

Father, who was born of a woman, the holy Faetopus

and ever virgin Mary, who was born under the law

to condemn sin in his flesh, so that those who

are dead and adam might be made alive in my

Christ himself. He lived in this world.

And gave us commandments of salvation, releasing us from the

delusions of idolatry.

He brought us to knowledge of the the true God

and Father. He obtained for us his own chosen people,

a royal priestoot a holy nation. Having cleansed us in

war and sanctified us with the Holy Spirit, he gave

himself to the ansom to death, and which were health

captives sold understand descending and through the cross into hades,

that he might fill all things with himself, he loosed.

The pains of death.

He arose on the third day, having made for all

flesh the path with the resurrection from the dead. Since

it was not possible for the author of life to

be a victim of corruption, so he became the first

groups of those who have fallen asleep, the first born

of the dead, that he might be made, that he

might be himself truly the first in all things.

Ascending to heaving. He sat down the right.

Hand of the thought of that Majesty on high, and

he will kind of render to every man. According to

his deeds. Christ taught us the way of salvation. He

formed a new covenant people. He cleansed us through baptism

and the gift of the spirit. And then freely, out

of love, he gave himself to death on the cross.

He descended in the realm of the dead.

He opened the path of resurrection to us all, and finally,

ascending glories of that our human flesh now dwells with

the heavening, and he will come again to judge the.

Living and the dead.

The Christ, brothers and sisters is not a tragedy that

happened to Jesus.

It is the love of God made concrete.

Christ offers himself for the life of the world. He

enters death freely so that death, when it meets the

true life, would be undone. And the resurrection is not

a spiritual metaphor, but it is a proclamation the last

enemy has been broken, and that our sorrows, our funerals,

our fears do not provile. And this is why the

Church calls us to repentance, not to shame us, but

to free us, to repent us, to come out of

hiding and to re enter it around their light and

for the newly illumined and soon to be newly illumined Baptism.

Baptism is the personal passage that we make through the cross.

Of the Resurrection. For the baptize, every confession, every act

of forgiveness, is a return to that same grace.

And the prayer concludes with the introductions of the gifts

as memorials of his saving passion.

He has reached us these things which you have set.

Forth according to his command, For when he was about

to go forth to his voluntary every memory of life,

creating that and the night.

In wishes, in which gave himself up from.

The life of the world, which took brad holy in

that good hands, and having shown it to be the

God and Father, having given thanks and how and blessed

it and broken it, he gave it to his holy.

Disciples and apostles.

This remembrance, that's not a recollection, but it is the

Holy Spirit accomplishing the saving work of Christ. Present with us.

We proclaim as death, he confesses our resurrection. And we

gather as one body not to be spectators of holy

history of these participants in the life of the risen Lord.

So let us hear Saint Basil's anaphora as the Church

intends it to be her. Here we see the Church's

rule of faith encompass in our rule of prayer. We

don't invent doctrine and then pray val it. We pray

the truth, and by that prayer we are told to

believe in it. This is what Saint Basil's anaphora is

intended to do. Lets around les gredined the law of prayers,

the law of the week. What we have prayed is

what we confessed one God in trinity, the creation, the

fall or salvation through the true incarnation of the Sun,

his saving cross, his life giving to him, and soon.

His glorious resurrection on the.

Third Day, and then his ascension and his great and

final com The Anathe of Saint Basil teaches the history

of God and Man in our.

Coming salvation rit small.

But not as an abstract summary, as a living concession

of what we believe. And in these prayers we proclaim

the entire econom of our salvation. So, having pray this faith,

let us hold it fast to us rejoice them with

one heart and with one voice.

We confess that the Church everywhere and always at Christ

has risen, that He is.

Truly present, that He hasn't worked with us, and that

the Holy Spirit gatherer says in to this morning the

Holy cap and apisolture. So may we, though we may

only pray this and there for ten domes a year,

that we should confess us we believe every single day

to Christy the glory of the minute fallbout Holy Spirit

now and after the age of the agents. I'll have I'm.

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