Coming Home to Orthodoxy Pt. 2: I Was Robbed!

   Ever since I can remember church has been every Sunday’s destination. We go to worship God. And how do we worship? We quietly take our place in a pew and upon invitation, we stand and open our hymnals and sing as one body. Then we take our seats once again and are lead in prayer. We pray for a myriad of things and people and we invite the Lord to ‘join us’ in OUR worship. That being said, we sit back and (hope to) enjoy an inspiring and entertaining lecture commonly referred to as a ‘sermon’. As with most Protestant sermons, it is formulaic and designed to end in a timely fashion so as to avoid any tardiness on the part of the congregation to the local buffet (an awful sin!).

    So imagine my culture shock when I first experienced the Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Church. No entertaining lecture and the ‘Pastor’ rarely even faced the congregation! And while Protestant ‘sermons’  are as varied as the hundreds and hundreds of pulpits they are preached from, Orthodox liturgy is the same all over the world no matter the language and have been so for centuries. So the worshippers in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina are singing the same hymns, reciting the same creeds and prayers and offering worship to God in the very same manner as the ancient saints of Constantinople did so very long ago. Thru the Liturgy we transcend Time and unite ourselves with the Body of Christ throughout history!

   Protestants listen to winsome lectures and emotive (often repetitive mantras) hot off the presses of Modernity, while the Orthodox have kept the great chain of worship once prescribed by God, intact in SPITE OF Modernity.

   As I sheepishly walked into the sanctuary, I quickly sat down at the first available seat farthest away from the front.     “I’ll sit in the back and just observe and take it all in.”, I thought as I scanned the walls of icons, looking for a familiar face. But there was lots of standing. In fact, we were mostly standing! And there was lots of candle lighting and genuflecting. People were crossing themselves at every mention of the Holy Trinity. How could I hide amidst all this?I was lost and found at the same time.

    So, my first ‘visit’ led to a second visit and then another. But each time I entered the sanctuary I became less a visitor and more and more a worshipper.

     No, I wasn’t waving my hands in the air and shouting, ‘Amen!’ at every tonal inflection of the Pastor. And no, I wasn’t ‘entertained’ by the sermon or the mesmerizing performance of  an amazingly enthusiastic ‘worship team’. And there was no emotional ‘worship leader’ to whip us all into a charismatic lather just so we could all go home having had—‘an experience!’.

    No. MY ‘experience’ was realizing I’ve been robbed! Robbed of hundreds of years of tradition. Hundreds of years of heretofore unknown Saints and writings. Hundreds of years of history telling the mighty work of God’s Holy Spirit. Hundreds of years of Church testimony! I was robbed.

    I had homeschooled all six of our children and had taught Christian History several times using what I thought to be the BEST resources. But each time I had taken my kids through a curriculum that basically taught Christ’s reincarnation, Pentecost, Paul’s missionary journeys, Augustine rises to create Western civilization and then a monk in Germany kicks off the Reformation. Yes, we touched upon the ‘Great Schism’ but it simply amounted to an Eastern Church and a Western Church. One spoke Greek, the other, Latin. And they disliked each other. Immensely. 

   Imagine my dismay upon finding the deep, rich history of the Early Church and the calvalcade of saints and events that I and my ‘students’ had been deprived of as we had looked at Church history through a thoroughly Protestant lens.

     Just thinking of all the history I had missed, all the Saints I had never met, all the miracles I had never heard of both saddened and excited me. I hungrily dove into every book on Orthodoxy and Orthodox history I could find. I was struck by the strident, indefatigable work of the Holy Spirit. For surely God sent His Spirit to guarantee the success of His Church-and surely the Church has a testimony of this success. (1John 4:4) And that success is beautifully celebrated in the Divine Liturgy. 

    Through Orthodoxy I was now participating in the miraculous, determined, conquering Spirit of God thru His Church. All the Saints, the ancient prayers and liturgy, the feasts, the miracles, the promises were now mine. This is my history. These are my people. Where they go I will go. (Ruth 1:16)

      And when the Saints go marching in, praise God, I will be in that number. (Rev. 15:2)