“The Incarnation, the Cross, and the Blueprint for a Truly Human and Holy Civilization”
Sermon for the Salutations to the Holy Cross with His Eminence, Metropolitan Gerasimos
Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Church; March 20, 2025
Introduction
It is good that we come together to pray at this time, here in this church of the Holy Cross, our two communities together, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic. It is certainly of the utmost importance that we come together to pray for the sake of Christian unity, as we try to build up closer bonds of communion between ourselves in the hope, according to God’s plan and timing, for complete unity. It is also good that we do so during this holy season of Lent, when we fast, pray, give extra attention to carrying out works of charity, and take on other types of penance as well, that we might learn ever anew the lesson our Lord teaches us and models for us of denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following after him.
Being Cancelled with Jesus
But it is especially important that we do so at this particular moment of history, when we see the world erupting in war all over the globe and are living through ever increasing strife and hostility within our own country – not a literal, physical war, but a war, you might say, on the moral level.
All of us who have a worldview formed by our faith in Christ are concerned about a culture in which people can no longer peacefully disagree, let alone seek to understand the point of view of the other, but simply attack those who have different views from their own. It is a phenomenon that some social commentators refer to as the “cancel culture.” Yes, we are living in an age of “cancel culture.” We are all painfully aware of this. But what exactly is that? The online “Urban Dictionary” defines “cancel culture” as:
A modern internet phenomenon where a person is ejected from influence or fame by questionable actions. It is caused by a critical mass of people who are quick to judge and slow to question. It is commonly caused by an accusation, whether that accusation has merit or not. It is a direct result of the ignorance of people caused [by] communication technologies outpacing the growth in available knowledge of a person.[1]
Now, if anyone thought that cancel culture was a new phenomenon with our time, such a one can stand corrected. The Church reminds us of this every year on Good Friday.
Was not our Lord ejected from influence because he posed a threat to the worldly power of the governing authorities and the leaders of his own people? Were not the people quick to judge without thinking things through, including even the scholars of the Law who should have known better? Do we not see here a growing mob mentality that erupts in violence against an innocent man? This is the story on the human level. And, increasingly so, on the human level for us, too.
We also can be targets of these attacks … and we’re not used to it. Most of us can recall a time when our culture still reflected enough of a Christian ethos that people of different, and even conflicting, religious and political perspectives could peacefully co-exist and even work together to try to better the world. That “the world” now hates people of traditional religious faith – in some sense, anyway, and to some degree; certainly not everywhere, but we do see hostility to religion that did not exist before in our country and throughout the West – and to the extent that this is the case it should not surprise us.
“If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.” Does that sound familiar? If not, let me help you by quoting the next sentence: “If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you.” This is what our Lord promised his followers at the Last Supper, as recorded for us by St. John in the fourteenth chapter of his Gospel.
We should not be surprised, then, that we are witnessing now even in our own time and place, a certain sort of a marginalizing of Christianity, greater and greater restrictions on our Christian institutions and our right to serve the needy, all the needy regardless of faith or lack thereof, in accordance with our moral and religious convictions. At the same time, I think we are all alarmed at a new resurgence of anti-Semitism in our country. Why is this? What are the protagonists of cancel culture really trying to cancel out?
The Blueprint for Christian Civilization
It is far more than those who disagree with them. Notice the senseless toppling of statues of such giants of our history as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, as happened in our own Golden Gate Park nearly five years ago now. And other great contributors to the history of this continent as well, especially with regard to the faith and morals that have defined our society here, such as Junipero Serra (also toppled in Golden Gate Park) – the Franciscan missionary who was the first to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the land of California and heroically defended the indigenous people against the abuses of his fellow Spaniards.
So we should not be naïve: the cancel culture wants to cancel out Western civilization. And since it is the Church that built Western civilization, the ultimate goal is to neutralize the Church, for it is the duty of the Church to serve as the corrective moral conscience of society – which those who don’t want to be corrected find repugnant. That means that when we behave like true disciples of Jesus Christ, we will find ourselves directly in the line of fire. Where, though, does it all begin, what is the blueprint for a Christian – that is to say, a truly human, and holy – civilization?
We see God’s blueprint for this plan right there on the day that those who sought to cancel out Jesus of Nazareth thought they had succeeded. St. John tells us in his Gospel that, when Jesus was crucified, “Pilate … had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews’ … and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.” Here it is: the essence of the plan of Western civilization, of the Church that would build a Christian civilization.
It begins with God’s original Chosen People. God gave them the Law, the Torah, through Moses. Not just rules and regulations to help people get along with each other, but the revelation of His higher truth. From this people the Church was born, to whom God gave the fullness of revelation in His Son Jesus Christ. As the Church began to fulfill the Great Commission and proclaim the Gospel throughout the known world of the time, she came more and more into contact with – as you know better than I – Greek culture. Your ancient ancestors were the predominant cultural influence in the world of the time. So this is the next step in building from that blueprint: Greeks being the great philosophers that they were, the early Church fathers understood how to translate Semitic thought into categories of Greek philosophy in order to bring the Gentiles to salvation in Christ.
Then, when Rome became Christian, the great Roman thinkers also added their genius to the development of Christian doctrine with the contribution of the Latin fathers of the Church. Moreover, the Church was able to avail herself of the physical and social infrastructure of the Roman Empire that had spread all throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East: the roads and the law and the governing models of the Roman Empire are what gave the Church the infrastructure she needed to build a common Christian community all throughout the known world of the time. Thus, the third stop in building from this blueprint.
Look to the Cross
But there is more to it than that; that is, something much more fundamental is necessary in order to build a truly human and holy civilization from that blueprint. Yes, Jerusalem, Athens and Rome; Hebrew, Greek and Latin: yes, these are the building blocks of a great Christian civilization. However, to see the most distilled essence of it all, of what truly is at the heart of it all, and must be at the heart of the life of Christian faith in all of its forms (institutional, parish, family life, etc.), we must look below the inscription; if we fail to do that, it will all be simply a façade. Pilate said, “Behold, your king.” We need to gaze upon Christ on the Cross, and truly behold our King, the one who gave everything for us, even though he had no need to receive anything from us. Jesus himself – not only his teaching, but he, in his death on the Cross – is the blueprint for a civilization of truth and love, a civilization imbued with a Christian ethos. And this is possible precisely because it is God doing it for us, as man.
Which provides yet another, even more timely, reason for our two communities to gather together in prayer tonight, for this year marks the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicea, that great Council which defended this fundamental truth of the Christian religion. The Arian heresy at the time threatened to undermine the Christian foundation of a growing renewed civilization by demoting the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity to a creature, thereby denying the fundamental truth of the Incarnation. It is not dissimilar to movements of thought today that would attempt to demote the Son of God to being simply a wise teacher, or good friend – helpful, but not someone who can make claims on our life. These are, ultimately, simply different forms of iconoclasm.
The truth of the matter is that, because of the fall of our first parents, we, corporate humanity, owe a debt to God. But it is a debt so great that we cannot pay it back ourselves; it was man who incurred the debt, and so man had to pay it back, but it is beyond our human capacity to do so. Only God could that for us, but fittingly do so as man. So that is the one thing the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity did need to receive from us, a human nature, so, as man, he could pay back what we could not without his divine nature. But he only “needed” this because he condescended to come to our rescue, not because he stood to get anything out of it himself. Therefore, keeping this truth always before our eyes, we sing to the Cross tonight: “With the purpose of saving the world, the Lord of the world ineffably descended into it, and submitted to the Cross; and being God, for us He accepted all that accords our state.”
The Incarnation: Everything Changes
This is the truth of the Incarnation, and it changes everything. We behold our King hanging on the Cross: he is truly “God from God, light from light, true God from true God; begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.” And this is the foundational principle of the uniquely Christian civilization. Which is why the poor, the sick, the lowly and the vulnerable carry such a high priority in a Christian culture: we see manifest in them the state of our souls before the intervention of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we find Christ himself hiding, incarnate, within them. This leads to the founding and flourishing of institutions and social structures dedicated exclusively to caring for the needing: hospitals, orphanages, schools and universities for the poor and marginalized, and a whole culture of philanthropy to support them. Christian institutions, taken together, to this day comprise the largest private provider of social services in the world
But there is more to it than this: hospitals and the Church’s other such organized endeavors to serve the poor are “service” in the authentic Christian sense – not simply giving from what one has left over to help someone else less fortunate, but solidarity with the poor. How else does one explain the flourishing of communities of consecrated religious founded not only to serve the poor, but actually to be poor: citizens with claims to wealth and nobility divesting themselves of such in order to be poor with the poor in service to the poor. Both east and west boast such Christ-like heroes, women and men alike, among their sainted lineage:
- St. Anthony the Great, the founder of monasticism, who came from a very rich family in Egypt, and when he inherited his fortune he gave it all to the poor and withdrew into the desert to seek Christ in solitude, simplicity and poverty;
- St. Nicholas of Myra, who famously used his inheritance to provide dowries for poor girls;
- St. Melania, a wealthy heiress who distributed her wealth to help the poor and to help with the building of churches and monasteries in and around Jerusalem, and likewise retreated into the desert to become a desert mother[2];
- St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the noblewoman who wore simple clothing and set aside time every day to bring bread to the poor and who, upon the death of her husband, assumed the life of a nun and used her wealth to found a hospital for the poor[3];
- St. Frances of Rome, the daughter of wealthy parents who, with her husband’s blessing, founded a community of women to serve the poor in which she participated, and, after exhausting all of her resources to help them in a time of plague, begged for alms door-to-door and opened up a part of her home as a hospital for the poor[4];
- And, of course, the patron saint of the city whose name is attributed to this entire Bay Area, St. Francis of Assisi, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant who forsook it all and lived in abject poverty in order to be more perfectly configured to Christ.
Conclusion
That is what the world looks like when a society builds from the blueprint that is the Cross, rather than try to cancel it out. However, there is one cancel culture our Lord did come to establish: canceling out sin. So we are happy to sing our praises and thanksgiving to the Holy Cross tonight, for it is by the Cross that he has done so. As we progress through this time of Great Lent, then, let us take our penance, prayer and charity seriously, that we may learn to take up our own cross, the cross which our Lord has prepared for each one of us for our own sanctification and eternal happiness. It will train us to turn away from sin in our own lives, that tendency within us that pulls us away from beholding our King and instead join the crowd in claiming, “We have no king but Cesar,” and shouting, “Crucify him!”
Our more perfect conversion to him will build up greater unity between our Churches, steel our spiritual stamina to charitably endure whatever hardship God wills for us to show our loyalty to Him, and, in the end, will make us capable of the happiness He wants for us – the happiness of peace of conscience in this life, and perfect happiness with Him in the communion of saints forever in heaven. May God grant us this grace. Amen.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cancel%20Culture.
[2] St. Melania: The Wealthy Heiress who Became a Desert Mo…
[3] St. Elizabeth of Hungary – Saints & Angels – Catholic Online