Luke 2:22-40
December 28, 2008
22 When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord"), 24 and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons."
25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. 27 Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, 29 "Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; 30 for my eyes have seen your salvation, 31 which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, 32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel." 33 And the child's father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. 34 Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed 35 so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too." 36 There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, 37 then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. 38 At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. 39 When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. 40 The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
I’ve just finished reading a book and it may be the best book I’ve read in years. That’s saying a lot because I’ve read a lot of great books over the past few years. It’s about a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Arseny. I came across the book after giving a talk to about 250 Methodist pastors in North Carolina. During my talk I spoke about how God seems to work through coincidence (or providence), and how many people of faith experience God in this way. While sitting outside with several pastors during our lunch break, one of them said to me, “What you are saying reminds me of Father Arseny.”
I asked him who Father Arseny was. He said, “He’s an Orthodox priest who survived a Soviet Siberian gulag for 20 or more years. During that time he had an amazing faith and cared for others in the camp, transforming their lives and opening them to God.” As I often do when people suggest books to me, I wrote down the information and, when I got home, ordered the book. It took me a while to work through my stack of other books, but once I read this book I realized that this man may have been one of the truly great Christians of the 20th century. And he was a man others dismissed.
Father Arseny was originally an art scholar who became an Orthodox priest. He ended up being sentenced to the gulag after writing several articles about the importance of faith even among communists. In Stalinist Russia, where atheism was the official religion and Christians were persecuted aggressively, to write pro-Christian articles in public papers and magazines was to speak out politically against the government. During Stalin’s reign, Christians were considered to be the worst of all political agitators because belief in God was a threat to the supreme rule of Stalin. As a result, something like 44,000 priests were killed during his reign, and over 150,000 monks and nuns. By the time Stalin died, only 200 priests remained. Remember that statistic the next time someone says that Christianity is responsible for more deaths than anything else. Under Stalin’s atheistic reign, over 25 million people were killed, and millions of them for being Christian. A significant number of them died in the gulags.
The gulags were designed to kill people slowly and with a lot of pain. In the winter, the temperature generally hovered around -15 or -20, and dipping at times to -30. During the summer, the water from the frozen ground was released, making it extremely humid, creating an Eden for mosquitoes, which spread disease. Either way, the majority of people sent to the camps did not return.
The camps were filled with both political prisoners (often highly educated scholars, artists, and reporters) and common criminals (thieves, murderers, psychopath). Both had nothing but disdain for people who were religious. The atheistic political prisoners hated them because they saw religious people as being willfully stupid and superstitious. The criminals hated them because they hated anyone with a sense of morality. The result was that both treated Father Arseny with contempt and brutality. Yet Father Arseny always responded with love, even when they abused and beat him. And I don’t mean that he responded with a weak-kneed love, but with a genuine love. He was a man who cared about people, and often his love brought about miracles.
Father Arseny was easily dismissed by others, especially by those who were smart, powerful, or just wanted to fit in. But being dismissed by others never seemed to bother him. All he cared about was serving God. After he died in 1973, stories about him were collected from those who knew him either in the gulag or elsewhere. That’s what makes this book so fascinating. They tell the stories of Father Arseny from the perspective of those who were transformed by him.
For example, one particular reporter, Andreyenkov, who was sentenced to the same Siberian gulag as Father Arseny, wrote about how Father Arseny saved his life and made him a Christian. Like most other prisoners, Andreyenkov was assigned to work in the quarries, breaking One day he unfortunately stepped on ice that broke, immersing his foot in water, causing his heel to freeze to the boot. His foot went numb, and eventually his body as hypothermic blood spread throughout his body. When he returned to the barracks, he was half-dead from exposure. He could not remove his frozen boot no matter how hard he pulled. He fell back on his bed, thinking that he would die overnight. As he swooned in some sort of daze, he could feel someone pulling on his boots. It must be one of the other prisoners stealing my boots, he thought. If he survived the night, he would be forced to go out barefoot, or in flimsy shoes, the next day, meaning certain death. Still, he could offer no resistance. He just lay there. Then he felt someone massaging his feet and rubbing a balm over the sores. He passed out.
The next morning he was awakened as the other prisoners scrambled to get dressed and line up in formation. He looked around for his boots, terrified that they were gone. He saw Father Arseny walking toward him with his boots, which had been dried along with his socks. He grabbed them from Father Arseny, put them on, and ran outside. The question nagged him, “Why would that ignorant priest have helped him so? What was his angle? What did he want in return?”
That night he collapsed again on his bead, weak from work and exposure. Again, he felt someone tug at his boots. He looked up. It was Father Arseny, who once again rubbed his feet and put a healing balm on his sores. Arseny did this for several nights in a row until the man was strong enough to care for himself. Father Arseny never said a word. Andreyenkov couldn’t figure out how Father Arseny was able to dry the boots each night. He knew that had he left them on the stove and went to sleep, the criminals would have stolen them. What he found out later was that Father Arseny had indeed dried them on the stove, and had stayed up for four night straights to guard them. And this despite the fact that Father Arseny also had to work each day. Why had Father Arseny done this? Out of love. Over time Andreyenkov was so transformed by Father Arseny’s love that he became one of his spiritual children and pledged his life to Christ.
Another time Father Arseny performed a life-saving miracle with a young prisoner named Alexei. Alexei was sentenced to the gulag at age 23. When the criminals saw him, they immediately made plans to beat the young man down. Young prisoners always fared the worst. Pretending to be his friend, they convinced Alexei to play cards with them, betting for clothes. They all colluded to cheat, and soon had won all the young man’s clothes. When they asked for them, Alexei told them that he thought they were kidding and that they wouldn’t relinquish them. Smiling, Ivan the Brown, the leader of the criminals, set upon him like a wolf on a lamb. He began to beat Alexei mercilessly, a beating that everyone knew would lead to Alexei’s death. Seeing this, Father Arseny (knowing that to interfere would lead to his own death) calmly walked over and grabbed Ivan’s arm, preventing him from hitting Alexei again. Ivan spun around to Father Arseny and said, “I’ll get to you soon, Pop” (“Pop” was a derogatory name for a priest). He pulled out a knife to slash Alexei, and Father Arseny hit him in the arm with a surprising force, thus causing Ivan’s arm to go numb and to drop the knife. Ivan didn’t know what to do, but he had lost face. Father Arseny picked Alexei off the ground and took him to the water basin to care for his wounds, telling him that no one would bother him anymore. Amazingly, he was left alone.
The next day the guards came in and grabbed Father Arseny and Alexei and sentenced them to 48 hours in the punishment cell. Ivan had falsely turned them in for fighting. Being put in the punishment for 48 hours meant certain death for both men. The cell was about 8 feet by 8 feet, and lined with sheet metal. There was one open window near the top with iron bars. Outside the temperature was -20, meaning that the temperature inside was very close to that. What did this mean in practical terms? A man might survive 24 hours if he managed to jump up and down for 24 hours, but no one could do this for 48 hours, especially an old man like Father Arseny or the half-dead Alexei. Didn’t matter. They were thrown in anyway.
What happened next was miraculous. Right away Father Arseny stood in the middle of the room and began mumbling something. Alexei asked him what he was doing. Father Arseny said, “I’m praying.” Alexei said, “What good is that, priest? We’re going to die here.” Father Arseny replied, “Well, if we are going to die then what better way to face death than with prayer.” Alexei didn’t know what to say, so he huddled in the corner and watched Father Arseny. Father Arseny prayed, O Lord God, have mercy on us sinners! Ever-merciful God! Lord Jesus Christ who because of They love became man to save us all. Through Thine unspeakable mercy save us, have mercy on us and lead us away from this cruel death, because we do believe in Thee, Thou our God and our Creator…. O, Lord our God, Jesus Christ! Thou didst say with Thy purest lips that if two or three agree to ask for the same thing, then Thy Heavenly Father will grant their prayer because, as Thou didst say, ‘When two or three are gathered in my name, I am among them.’”
As Alexei watched him, he noticed that Father Arseny’s garments changed to the dazzling white vestments of a priest. Soon, out of nowhere, two others in white vestments stood on his right and his left as al three continued the prayer. Alexei then noticed that he was breathing easier and the room had changed. They were in a church. He wondered if he was hallucinating. He felt warm. Listening to the three praying, he found himself starting to repeat the same prayers. Aware that Alexei was watching, Father Arseny told him to rest. Alexei did, and as he did he felt his mother’s presence next to him, holding him (he later found out that she had died while he was in the camp).
He awoke to see the three still praying. Suddenly he heard the sound of a door opening and then shouts. Looking back at Father Arseny, he saw the other two blessing him and Alexei as they disappeared, and Father Arseny was once again dressed in prison garb. A major came in shouting, “How could you have sentenced them to 48 hours? We will be punished for their deaths! What were you thinking…?” He stopped short as he saw Father Arseny and Alexei, both still alive. He had the doctor check them, who felt under their clothes and said, “They are both quite warm. I can’t explain it.”
The two men had survived for 48 hours in conditions that would have killed either you or me in six or seven hours. As you can imagine, Alexei became a Christian that day and stayed under the guidance of Father Arseny, even after both were released.
What Father Arseny’s story really showed is how easy it is for people to miss both how God is present and what God is doing in our midst. Even though we may have a measure of faith, we generally have a hard time knowing what to think about people like Father Arseny. We think of people like him as being too good to be true. But what made him special wasn’t any inherent talent. It was just his willingness to devote his life to prayer. In that way he is just like Simeon and Anna from our story above. What made them able to tell that Jesus was the messiah, while others merely saw a baby? The answer is that both Simeon and Anna were part of a small sect of prayer devotes called the Quiet Ones. They were people who lived near the Temple of Jerusalem, devoting themselves to a life of prayer. They weren’t monks or nuns, but lived normal lives. What made them special was that they brought prayer into everything, just like Father Arseny. The result is that they were able to sense and see things that others dismissed.
Would you like to have this kind of life? Would you like to sense and see God in everything? Would you like to be able to see and understand things that other dismiss? You can, but it takes a desire for four things:
First, we have to always make time for prayer no matter what. The truth is that no one is ever going to walk up to you and say, “Here, have some time for prayer.” Your kids won’t say that to you, your boss won’t, your co-workers won’t, your friends won’t, and your spouses probably won’t. You have to make and take time for prayer. And I don’t mean periodic prayer. I mean constant prayer, speaking to God as often as possible about whatever is going on in your life. If you are able to do this, it leads to the next step.
Second, we need to seek God’s will in each moment to the best we can, even if we aren’t sure what that will is. It’s the seeking that matters, even more than the finding. God wants to guide our lives, but we have to want to be guided.
Third, make worship central to our lives. I don’t know how much this resonates with people anymore. There are so many people today who call themselves spiritual but not religious, or Christian but not attending. Worship is central to the spiritual life. Why? Because worship, even when we find it boring, centers us in God. It is an activity that aims completely at being God-focused. Over time it opens us to God.
Finally, let this kind of prayer and worship lead you to act always in love. Prayer, devotion, and worship are not good if they don’t lead us to act in love.
All of these put together lead us to see and be what others dismiss. So here’s what I want you to do. Reflect on your life and ask a question: are you able to see and do what others dismiss? If not, why?
Amen.
