A Drought of Thankfulness

Father Josiah Trenham

A homily delivered on Sanctity of Life Sunday, January 2014

California’s drought

This week Governor Brown declared a drought emergency in our parched state as we experience the driest conditions on record. The predictions for rain from the Dept. of Agriculture are particularly bleak for the next six months. As a result we had this week, in mid-January- in the midst of winter, a local fire that we are used to seeing in late summer or early fall. Our snow-pack is at 17% of normal, and hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland will not be cultivated this year. We need rain desperately, especially the 21 million of us who live in Southern California whose water supply is so tenuous, and so at the conclusion of the Holy Liturgy today we will earnestly pray for it.

We take droughts with great seriousness because water is fundamental to our physical existence. We know that without it we cannot live. In the Great Euchologion, which is the priest’s prayer book, we have a special supplication for rain that concludes with a magnificent collection of seven prayers in time of drought. I will be reading one of these prayers each of the next seven Sundays. These prayers were written by St. Kallistos I, Patriarch of Constantinople in the mid-14th century.

Patriarch Kallistos had great concern for the earth and for the physical well being of all people, and this primal concern is reflected in his prayers for rain. He took drought seriously and he has led Orthodox Christians in our prayers for seasonable weather, and gentle showers unto fruitfulness for the earth for almost seven centuries. Patriarch Kallistos had an even greater concern for the spiritual well-being of all people. He himself was a monk of Mt. Athos, and a spiritual son of St. Gregory of Sinai from whom he learned unceasing prayer and thanksgiving. St. Kallistos presided over the great Council of Constantinople in 1351 that defended the hesychastic theology of St. Gregory Palamas against heresy. To put this in simple terms, St. Kallistos guarded, articulated and promoted the most important truth of all: the truth that human beings do not live on bread alone- or we might say by water alone- but by the organic union with God Himself that we call prayer and thanksgiving. Prayer itself is the life of the soul for it directly unites one to the living God. This is why is supreme amongst all the virtues. This is why it is called by the Holy Fathers the “deifying virtue.” Prayer is the human being plugging himself into the electrical outlet. It is the portal or conduit for divine energy, for a union with God by grace.

Our Greater Drought

There is therefore a drought of water that imperils our physical existence, and there is a greater and more ominous drought of prayer and thanksgiving that threatens our spiritual and eternal existence. We take a lack of water seriously because we know our lives depend upon it, but I wonder if we take a lack of prayer and thanksgiving seriously because we are not certain that we really depend on it.

Today, throughout most of our nation’s 450,000 churches – let me repeat that number – that would be 450,000 churches- more than all the convenience stores (146,000), fast food restaurants (160,000), and hotels/motels (46,000) combined – and certainly in the Orthodox parishes in America, Christians are commemorating Sanctity of Life Sunday. We are remembering that 41 years ago on January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court legalized the barbaric killing of unborn children in all three trimesters. Today Christians are praying for the safety of unborn children, for comfort and courage for the most unwed mothers who find themselves pregnant with a child they have not sought, and for an end to abortion.

We are not interested in condemning women who have abortions, nor for that matter in condemning the men who often demand them and override the objections of the mothers. We have no interest in condemnation, but in love. We also have no interest in justifying such heinous acts as abortion, nor do we have interest in lying to those who commit abortion and telling them that it is ever safe. There is no such thing as safe abortion. There are greater or lesser chances for physical safety for the mothers – at least for the near term. Scientific studies of women in Europe and Southeast Asia are flooding academic journals presently that document the atrocious connection between abortion and breast cancer, and some also documenting the politically motivated suppression of this connection by the zealous proponents of the sexual revolution. There are greater or lesser chances of physical safety for a woman procuring abortion in the near term. There is no chance for spiritual safety for a woman procuring abortion. And the great elephant in the room, of course, is the unmentioned unborn child. Those who like to talk about the myth of “safe abortion” studiously ignore the fact that every abortion leaves at least one dead and one wounded. There is no such thing as “safe abortion” for the unborn child.

The Witness of Mother Theresa

On Feb. 5th, just 17 days from today, it will be 20 years since Mother Theresa so eloquently and prophetically spoke to our nation’s civil authorities at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC. In her speech she uttered these profound words:

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And, by abortion, that father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. The father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

The Witness of Dr. Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrated, since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, by our nation tomorrow (the 3rd Monday of January- the closest Monday to King’s Jan. 15th birthday), as a national figure of inspiration, also spoke eloquently and prophetically against abortion. In many of his sermons he called abortion a form of genocide, targeting of a class (in this case the unborn) for extinction. It is true that he received the Margaret Sanger award in 1966, but at that time Planned Parenthood was still studiously hiding tits abortion intentions. In fact, PP was still publishing an official flyer against abortion in which they said this: “An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun. It is dangerous to your life and health.”Planned Parenthood did not embrace their radical abortion agenda until the 1970s. MLK also did not know, as we know today, that Margaret Sanger was a racist and a radical eugenicist with specific sites on decreasing the black population. Oh that MLK would rise from the dead today and give us a sermon about Planned Parenthood. It would be their demise.

Here are Dr. King’s words,

“The Negro cannot win if he is willing to sacrifice the futures of his children for immediate personal comfort and safety. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere...I say today that we as Christians must press on, in the conviction that we are "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, we must remain big in commitment...By our effort and example may God use us, as imperfect vessels that we are, to bring an end to such ancient evils as infanticide, abortion, racism and oppression.”

The Drought of Prayer and Thankfulness

You heard the Gospel as recorded by St. Luke this morning. The Gospel of the ten lepers who were healed: the 9 thankless ones, and the one thankful. This Gospel we read each year on the greatest civil holyday of our nation: Thanksgiving. It depicts, brothers and sisters, in the clearest of terms the most dreadful of all droughts. The drought of prayer and thankfulness. Our Lord came to heal the sick, to mend the brokenhearted, to forgive the sinner, to conquer death and to open the doors of paradise to all who seek it and trust Him. He embraced the untouchable lepers. He entertained their pleas. He offered His healing power. All benefited, but only one returned to the benefactor. Our Lord was amazed at the healed Samaritan leper who returned to give thanks to Christ and to worship Him, and the Lord said, “Were there not ten cleansed? But the nine- where are they? Was no one found who turned back to give glory to God?...And to the healed man the Lord said, “Go your way! Your faith has healed you.”

Brothers and Sisters- beware of the great drought, not of the water of the body but the water of the soul. Beware of the drought of prayer and thankfulness. It is the source of the great scourge of abortion – men and women who no longer are thankful for life, who no longer have a heart of thankfulness of what King David says in the Psalms that children are: a blessing from the Lord and a reward. No, we have lost our thankfulness for God’s blessings, and the result of this drought has been death in formerly unimagined numbers. May the Lord grant us to drink of the waters of prayer and thankfulness.