26th Sunday After Pentecost-- The Purpose of the Local Church

In the sixty-first psalm, the first verse reads, “Shall not my soul be subjected to God? In Him is my salvation.” We do not consider subjection or subjugation to be a good thing.  We desire and value freedom and independence.  Many rulers throughout human history have sought to bring other peoples and nations into bodily subjection, but nothing can subject the soul by force or coercion.  The soul must subject itself voluntarily to Good or evil.  Subjection to God is not like subjection to human powers, because, as the psalm says, subjection to God leads to salvation, which we believe is true freedom. 

     Naturally, to be subject to God is to obey His commandments.  But, in Christ, the life of the commandments is no longer the sum total of a list of abstract rules, but concrete participation in the identity of a Person.  Rather than a life that is hedged about by negative commandments, we share a life that is free in the pursuit of virtue.  It is concerning this life that the one hundred eighteenth psalm prophesies, when it says, “Set before me for a law, O Lord, the way of Your statutes, and I will seek after it continually.” The psalmist is asking that the Law of God be somehow, someway, held up for imitation.  This desire was fulfilled in the Incarnation of Christ.

     During the earthly lifetime of the Lord Christ, He drew imitators around Himself, those whom He chose for His Apostles and disciples.  He schooled them in the imitation of His Person, so that, with the Paschal Mystery completed by His Resurrection from the dead, they would be able to participate in His identity as the Christ of God.  These people, whom He gathered around Himself, and whom He subjected to the leadership of the Chief Apostle Peter and the other Holy Apostles, became known as the ecclesia, a word meaning “assembly,” which we conventionally translate as “Church.” There is another Greek word, which we translate in the same way. That word is kyriakon, which signifies the church building.  Nevertheless, when the Lord Jesus founded the Ecclesia there was no kyriakon, and it would be many years before the first kyriakon (church- building) was built.

     The Church, Ecclesia, is the assembly of those who share the identity of Christ, who through the Mysteries of Christ have become God, and the Son of God, by grace.  This is equivalent to saying that the Church is the Body of Christ.  The local church exists with the same mission and identity as the Universal Church.  The local church, as the assembly of those who are incorporated into Christ by His Mysteries, provides the environment in which Christian people can practice their faith and grow in it through prayer and the practice of the virtues.  In the context of the local church, we should be able to learn to have a deep relationship with Christ our God through prayer.  We should have the opportunity to learn the disciplines that are necessary for the Christian life, primarily fasting, and we should, together in the community, learn the practice of charity and deeds of mercy.  The church that does not provide this environment, and fails to meet these goals, is an unsuccessful church in the truest sense, for no one is conformed to Christ through its communion.   It is through the life of the local church that individual Christian grows in his or her faith and is more and more like Christ, through conversation about prayer, virtue and the spiritual life, through participation in the holy services, through teaching and study, through the prudent use of a library that contains books that give sound guidance in regards to issues in the Christian life, and through deeds of mercy. 

     The Holy Apostle Paul says in the epistle reading today, “Take heed how exactly you walk, not as unwise ones, but as wise ones, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” The way that we practice this wisdom is by living according to our faith in the midst of the Church.  Our church should give us the supportive atmosphere we need in order to be conformed to Christ, rather than being conformed to worldly things, like the unfortunate man in the Gospel reading today.  Shall not my soul be conformed to Christ? In Him is my salvation.