"ROSE" Servant of God

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

In the beginning, God created man in His image and likeness. He created us to have an intimate and eternal communion with Him, immortal and at peace, knowing the joy of participation in the very life of God. This communion with God included most importantly the ability and invitation to communicate with Him in the language of worship, prayer, praise and thanksgiving.

As rational creatures, made in God’s image, and having this God-given ability to communicate, we have devised amazing and incredible means of widening the scope and range of communication. Today, we live in the age of mass communication and technology. There is the phone, the FAX, E-mail, courier companies that promise same day worldwide delivery, cable, voice mail, post, Television, the information super hiway, satellite, fibre-optics. There are many other technologies that are only in their infancy which will provide new and unimaginable means of communications not only here but outward into space. While these crowning jewels of human creativity and technology may help men communicate with each other, none can bridge the chasm between God and man. This chasm caused by the fall has caused the divine/human communication gap.

People are always asking, "Where is God? Who is God? I've looked for God but couldn't find Him, why does God allow suffering, if God is good why is there evil in the world." Forever asking but never stopping to listen to hear what God might have to say. Can God get a word in edge wise?

If we would ever stop to listen, to pay attention with the ears of our heart, we might hear that God will give us something much greater than answers. God is not a soothsayer, sage or spirit guide. If that’s what you want, don’t ask God, call Jo Jo's Psychic Hot line!

If we want true communication and consolation, all we really need to do is turn to prayer, to praise and thanksgiving of All mighty God, our God, the God of all comfort who will create in us "a pure heart and renew a steadfast spirit within us." We will be His people and he will be our god. True conversation is dialogous, a give and take. We cry out to god and he responds with the comfort of his Word.

Let me ask you, how do we seek God? How can we know Who He is or even that He is? What are the appropriate and ultimate questions?

In our day many have turned from the God revealed in scripture. It is a non Christian mysticism that attracts the many who despair at the emptiness of the contemporary scene while rejecting what they perceive as an old and tired religion that is no longer in touch with today's problems.

They search for the quick fix, a spirituality that does not require them to face either their own responsibility as being human persons created in the image and likeness of God or even God Himself. They rather deny their accountability and responsibility for sin and for the brokeness of the human condition.

For them, any conception of God is impersonal. How could you communicate with an impersonal god? This is the age of secularism. Secularism is the religion that not only so much denies the existence of God, but sees him/her/it as unnecessary.

It is this view of God as a sort of supreme but impersonal being that breaks the lines of communication. A god who got the universe going but no longer has any association with or control over it. It is this thinking that has supplanted God and therefore eliminated the desire for and need for prayer let alone worship in our society and in our schools. We have replaced God with a new self-actualization and desire to deny the reality of sin and human brokeness. We have eliminated the need for repentance.

Shirley MacLean, the Matriarch of the demonical New Age Movement says in her books, "the sooner we all discover that we are god, the sooner we can take control of our life even exercising control over reality which is illusion anyway." Suffering and death is denied in this new philosophy because they are not seen as reality. But, my dear brothers and sisters of our Lord Jesus, death is not only real, but it is the "last enemy to be overcome." Christians however know that here in this life suffering is necessary but misery is optional whereas the pagan tries all sorts of helps to avoid suffering while all the time adding to their misery.

Those who escape into the fantasy world of non physical spirituality are ignorant of Christianity. They do not know the suffering and crucified God. They reject a religion that sanctifies suffering through participation in the death of Christ, opting for one that promises a false hope of glory here on earth.

Christianity always and necessarily entails suffering. Archimandrite Sophrony, born in 1896, a Russian Orthodox priest living through the Hell of atheist Russia in his book entitled "His Life is Mine", which he wrote while in a monastery on Holy Mount Athos, said; "through suffering we penetrate the mysteries of Being, remembering that 'the whole creation groans and travails in pain'."

It is exactly in the participation of Christ's suffering, experiencing the travails of pain, that man turns to God, listens for Him, seeks Him out and finally hears Him. The first suffering is the pain of realizing the void in us, the alienation from God. This is repentance. The penitent man seeks God, begging for His forgiveness and yearning for the reestablishment of communion and communication with Him. It is therefore only through repentance that men can be tuned to whom, what, how and why God is. That which was hidden from the wise becomes revealed to the penitent man. The lines of communication become open again. In the words of St. Gregory of Sinai, it is only in repentance that you can possibly "Become what you are. Find Him who is already yours. Listen to Him who never ceases speaking to you. Own Him who already owns you."

The line of communication is nothing other than prayer. It is conversation with God. It is the laying bear of our souls before God and listening in silence and meditating on His Holy and Eternal Word from which we receive the comfort of the Gospel message. In Philippians, St. Paul says: "Our conversation is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned as like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself."

This knowledge of the open line of communication is hidden from those who deny, despise, reject or ignore the reality of prayer--the line to God is for them, so to speak, an unlisted number. Yes, without the turning on and the tuning in to God in Christ through repentance, we are lost and alone, unable to hear the glorious Words of comfort.

For this reason, even our sadness, even our suffering and doubt become emotions for which we should thank God, because it is often as a result of pain and anguish that we are turned in desperation to the comfort beyond ourselves. We turn to God in prayer acknowledging "that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief," asking the same Christ to "have mercy on me, O God, according to Your unfailing love; according to Your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin." It is often suffering that urges us to this sort of prayer--the kind of prayer which is true worship.

Dear brothers and sisters, today we remember and celebrate the memory of a woman who not only knew God, but also clung to Him in times of happiness and in times of suffering through prayer, the language of worship. She fervently sought to keep the lines of communication with her Lord open. She listened to and listened for God in private and in church. For three years we would greet the day of Resurrection together saying; "Der yeteh zshurtoonus eem panahs, pehran eem yerkestseh zohrnootyoonus koh," or "O Lord if thou shalt openest my lips, my mouth shall declare Your praise." This was a woman of prayer and a woman at prayer. I know that fact personally, because I prayed with her and worshipped with her both at chruch and in her home on many occasions. She saw going to church and worshipping God not so much as an obligation but rather as a privilege, the opportunity to go and "make a joyful noise to the Lord," knowing that the Lord would "restore to (her) the joy of His salvation."

In many ways, we all have many things to be thankful for but mostly for me I am thankful that early in my ministry, God blessed me with a living example of a person who lived by faith, a woman who knew God through prayer, praise and thanksgiving, yes, a woman who knew the language of worship. It was perfectly clear to me and to anyone who knew her that she was devout in her trust in the Crucified God. She knew that He shared in human suffering even unto death on a Cross for all of us and for our salvation. Her devotion and service to the Armenian Holy Apostolic Church was a living symbol and fruit of her life of prayer, clinging to the washing of regeneration with which she was made "whiter than snow."

I am proud to have been her pastor and I will miss her, but, I will look forward to sharing with her again the opportunity to worship God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit not only in the mystery of the communion of saints, but in the resurrection, Amen.