Sermon by Archimandrite Meletios (Webber)
during the Divine Liturgy on December 8, 2011, in St. Vladimir's Church in Miami, FL

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!

When I, as a Westerner, together with other Westerners, approach the Orthodox Church, one of the most difficult things that we have to confront is the fact that at the heart of the Orthodox experience of God lies Mystery. In the West, we very often think of Mystery as something that needs to be solved, in the sense of the PBS shows on Thursday or Friday nights: you have 45 minutes to solve a puzzle, and that’s the end of the mystery. But in Orthodoxy theology, the notion of Mystery is entirely different from that, because in Orthodoxy, we accept the very fact that God is a mystery, and the closer we get to him, the more mysterious He becomes.

When Moses entered the Cloud on Mt. Sinai and entered the Presence of God, the Cloud actually got darker and darker as he got closer and closer until at some point, the darkness was so dark that it was full of the Uncreated Light. And this paradox lives in the Orthodox Church as if it’s a normal daily occurrence. We hardly stop to think about it, but it’s always there. We must enter the darkness in order to see the light.

Today we celebrate the end of a feast in which we commemorate the life of the Blessed Mother of God as she was as a child, and how she entered the Temple and lived there for a number of years. This story is of a mysterious nature, since it is actually hidden from the eyes of history, but is alive in the memory of the people of God. The Temple in Jerusalem was quite a dramatic structure: people who went there were overawed by it, and it was essentially a series of courtyards in which other buildings were placed. There was an outer courtyard, an inner courtyard, and gradually you worked your way to the place where the men stood and the women stood to the place where only priests could go, and then eventually there was a little room, a cube of a room, covered with a cloth so that there was no light inside this room at all: perfect darkness. And our Liturgy tells us that it is into this darkness that the Mother of God was taken, and there she encountered the Uncreated Light.

The notion in Jewish theology is that the Presence of God, called Shekhinah (שכינה), is something almost tangible; and God chooses to place His Shekhinah wherever He wills. And from the time of King David onward, He chose to place His Shekhinah in Jerusalem; and it was to Jerusalem that every Jew had to turn in order to find the Shekhinah. But what we see in the Christian revelation is that, in order for that to become, as it were, ours, the Mother of God had to enter the Shekhinah herself. Because, as we know, she was to become (in due course) the Temple of the Shekhinah herself: she bore in her virginal womb for nine months the God who created Heaven and Earth. She entered the darkness and encountered the Light.

That Darkness in Greek was called, “ta ágia to̱n agío̱n” (τα άγια των αγίων), coming from a Hebrew phrase that means, “the Holy of Holies;” but, that doesn’t mean very much in English. In the Hebrew words suggest the most holy place possible, the very most holy place; and it was into that space the Mother of God entered. She went into the άγια των αγίων, the Святая Святыхъ. Just now, you and I have also entered that holy place. Not in a particular geographical location, because, when we meet God now, we don’t have to be anywhere in particular: God meets us wherever we happen to be; wherever we gather as Church, He is there. But just before we met Him under the form of bread and wine, the deacon invited the bishop to elevate the bread in his hands, at which time he says in Greek, τα Άγια τοις Αγίοις, Святая Святымъ: Holy Things are for the holy.

There has been a progression from God being present in one place to God being present in the Mother of God, a very necessary and indispensible part of our Christian faith, but now He moves on to be present not in any one person, but throughout His Body. That is to say, in each one of us, because, in the act of Holy Communion, each one of us becomes the Holy of Holies. It is for this reason that we need to be very reverential of the bodies which God gives us, because they are now in themselves God-bearing. Not quite in the same way that the Mother of God was, and is, but on the pathway where there is no separation between God and His Creation, God and Man, God and you.

In order to fully appreciate God’s Presence in the Church, we have to begin to learn to appreciate God’s presence in ourselves. That is the deepest humility which any one of the saints of God could reach, and God pleases to give us the strength and the endurance and the courage to find ourselves as the containers, the living containers of the Living God. Amen.

Media Office of the Eastern American Diocese