Saint Vladimir Seminary
September 8, 2023
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s feast is a harvest festival, a festival of holy fruit sprung from barren ground, the withered and parched ground of our common nature. Since Adam sinned by eating the fruit of knowledge out of season and was banished to bring forth food from the land by the sweat of his brow, our entire human nature, formed of the soil, had become barren, ‘a dry and trackless land where no water is,’ in the words of the Psalmist.
Nevertheless, Adam and many of his descendants did husband the soil of our nature with the sweat of their effort, bringing forth virtues before the Law and in accordance with the Law. We know the names of these virtuous laborers, and we honor them to this day as part of the Church: Seth, Enosh, Noah, Shem, Japheth, Eber, Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David, Zerubbabel.
The efforts of our forefathers were praiseworthy in the sight of men and God, and earned them a merited reward. As Saint Paul states and Saint John Chrysostom affirms, works indeed have their reward which is due them: ‘Now to one who works, his wages are not reckoned as a gift but as his due.’ This reward was friendship with God in the present age and falling asleep in hope of something better to come.
But no matter how any of these great saints of old worked, they could only bring forth individual virtues; they could not overcome our nature’s fundamental barrenness, the reality that we were sold under sin, given up to death, slaves to corruption, change, mortality, time. The forefathers died and were buried and took their rest in the darkness of Sheol, waiting for the Lord to act.
Only God could make the hard earth of humanity once more to bear good and lasting fruit. As David said, prophesying in his Psalms: ‘Thou makest springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills.’ And again: ‘He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water. And there he lets the hungry dwell, and they establish a city to live in.’
God desired to unite mankind once more to himself, to take away the flaming sword, to tear down the dividing wall. Thus he sent his Son into the world to unite humanity and divinity in his very person, making God present, incarnate, in the fallen world in order to save that world.
But in order for God to dwell among men, he required a house, a tent, a temple. To this end, he made fruitful the barren womb a righteous woman and brought forth a pure, perfect, and unblemished ark in which he might rest, a chariot-throne upon which he might roam and rule. This was the most pure and ever-virgin Mary, God’s free gift to mankind, and mankind’s perfect gift to God.
In becoming the dwelling-place of God, the most holy Theotokos also became a dwelling-place, a city of refuge for all Orthodox Christians. ‘Lo,’ says the prophet, ‘we heard of’ the house of God ‘in Ephratah,’ Bethlehem-Ephratah, and the Theotokos is the true Bethlehem, the true house of Bread where the hungry dwell. And this Bread, the flesh of the Lord, is not the product of our sweat, but of the dewy divine overshadowing of the All-holy Spirit and the complete purity of the divine Maiden.
Thus, today, we celebrate the entrance of God’s gateway, the descent of the heavenly ladder, the building of the city of God—the birth of the Virgin—and we celebrate the saving God who will enter time and space and embrace mortality through her at the time of his own conception and birth.
Today, barren mankind gives birth to a baby girl whose beauty is worthy of God himself, whose purity shall cause the cracked furrows of our life to run with springs of grace, whose holiness will cause Christ to send down rains of righteousness to make our deserted hearts into pools of divine love.
The birth of the Virgin, in other words, brings us back into the fertile land bounded by four rivers, back to the garden of Eden, back to paradise.
And as citizens of the divine garden-city, as inhabitants of paradise, as gardeners like Adam was in the beginning, it is our responsibility to cultivate and care for the garden.
True, we no longer rely on the sweat of our brow to bring forth the virtues; we rely on the boundless merits and mercies of Jesus Christ.
But Christ, in his love, wants us to contribute to the upkeep of paradise, and we can do so by following the way of his Mother, by making ourselves receptive to God, and this receptivity is exemplified by the practice of humility.
The word ‘humility’—like the word ‘human’—comes from the Latin word humus, meaning soil. Human beings are creatures of the soil, and humility means being close to the soil—in other words, acknowledging our origin and status as creatures of earth, whose pride and joy and meaning is to do the will of the Creator.
We are reminded of the delightful story of Abba John the Dwarf, who at his elder’s insistence watered a twig every day until it blossomed. Through humility, we must constantly make ourselves receptive to God’s will, not our own, and put ourselves at the wholehearted service of our brethren—not only our superiors, but our inferiors as well.
Then we, too, might become, by the waters of Christ’s grace, blossoming twigs in the renewed land of humanity. By humbling ourselves, acknowledging ourselves to be only dust and ash, we make way for God to water that dryness and desolation and bring forth good fruit in its season.
Through the prayers of the most holy Theotokos, may we all grow in a humility like hers, an earthiness, a faithful receptivity. Then might we bring forth fruit in advance of the final harvest, the end of the age, when the righteous will make their eternal entrance into the courts of God, a walled garden where rivers flow and trees flourish unto eternity, where all the elect will delight in the grace and refreshment God the Savior, the torrents of delight that cascade from the house of the Lord, partaking abundantly of the fruit of Christ’s victory. To him, the Son of Mary, true Lord and God eternal, is due all glory, with his Father and the Most Holy Spirit, unto never-ending ages.
Amen.
Most holy Theotokos, save us!