Metropolitan Jonah: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven."

(HT: Koinonia)

Sermon of Metropolitan Jonah

St. Nicholas Cathedral

July 3, 2011

“Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven”

“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you.” These are words to live by. These are words by which we must structure our whole life. It is a call to constant repentance – a call to constantly turn back to God – a reassessing: what are we doing with our lives, what are we doing with our thoughts and our values. How are we living our lives. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God” means first and foremost means to completely restructure our life according to the Gospel. It means to try to live completely according to the Gospel, according to the teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It means not to let the values of this world, seeking for food and for clothing be the dominant things in our life. It is so easy in our culture to be completely consumed by the striving for position, for money, for recognition, for power – for money, sex and power, as one contemporary author summarizes it. All these things lead to the same thing, because there can never be enough to satisfy us. No matter how much we have, there is never enough. Really, the only thing that satisfies us – the only thing that will fulfill us is the Kingdom of God. It is that living communion with Christ, our relationship with Christ that enables us to share in the life of the Father through the gift of the Holy Spirit, so that our humanity becomes that living relationship.

We heard in the reading from St. Paul those words about “justification”. That has certainly been a major theme in Western culture over the past 500 years. But as Orthodox, we understand it differently. To be in that relationship of faith does not mean that we have been changed, as it were, from the category of the damned to the category of the righteous – or that it is some kind of vicarious justification.

What does it mean to be “justified”. It means to be righteous, which is what the Greek word means. The Latin word means the same, but it has changed over the centuries. The word “justified by our faith” means that we have found the way to a living relationship with God, by which our lives are being transformed and deified. It means that not only our minds, our hearts and our wills are being joined to the activity of God, but even our very bodies receive that Grace of God which is the very substance of what imparts faith to us. Because Grace is not simply God’s good favor to us, it is the very gift of God – His life, His energy, His presence, His activity in our lives.

Faith is not simply our subscription to a set of beliefs, but rather our faith is manifest in our actions. First and foremost, our faith is that living experience of the knowledge of God. Knowing that God is present and living according to that reality.

I think this is the very core of what it means to “seek first the Kingdom of God”. To make that experience, that awareness of His presence the fundamental cornerstone of every aspect of our life, that re-structures not only how we live, but even our consciousness. If we are conscious of God in everything that we do, at all times and everywhere, our entire life will be sanctified.

We can’t compartmentalize everything – work over here, church over here, school over here, and other things we don’t talk about over here, but rather it is all unified – so that we are the same person at work and at home and with our friends. It is the living awareness of the presence of God. That is the key factor in unifying that life.

But it is not only bringing that awareness in, which begins to sanctify our life, it is bringing our entire life into submission to Christ, bringing our entire life into cooperation – the Greek word is synergy – with God. It is that active union of His activity and our activity. “It is not only I who live, but Christ Who lives in me”. It is not only I who love, but God Who loves me. It is not only I who act, but God Who acts through me and I with Him.

This living synergy is what faith is all about. It is this type of faith – this living communion with God – which transforms us from being part of this world to citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is that experience of the Kingdom of Heaven that is no different than that living experience of communion with God, of that synergy with God that begins here in this life and continues on into All Eternity.

To seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness means that our life is lived not according to this world but according to the Kingdom. This tremendous wisdom of Our Lord Jesus Christ seems like absolute foolishness to the world, totally foolishness. Think about it, you don’t care about where our next meal is coming from, you don’t care about money, you don’t care about clothing, you don’t worry about all of these things. That’s foolishness in terms of the world. But according to that life lived in communion with God, a life lived in synergy and faith, we know that God provides everything we need.

Of course, we too enter into that action, because everything is synergy. It doesn’t mean you stop working and think God will provide. That’s not the case either. It is through God working through us and we working through God – that total life lived and focused on God, focused on the Kingdom.

What is going to happen with this? “Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake, rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in Heaven.” As a result of trying to live according to the Gospel, as a result of trying to live completely according to the Kingdom of God, the world will hate us and send tribulations and trials and persecutions.

And indeed, even within our self, St. Paul talks about that wall of sin within our members – this resistance to doing the will of God this desire to do our own will. I want to get what I want when I want to get it and how I want to get it. We can have this nice religion and put it in a nice little box and take it out every year – to seek out that lucrative position, or whatever, and not live according to the Gospel. Our own desires, our own lusts, our own inclinations are the source of those trials and tribulations.

But what does St. Paul tell us. The tribulations, all these trials, produce character. And character brings forth hope. And that hope does not disappoint. Hope and faith are so deeply related, because our hope and our faith are connected in one thing. Our faith is our living experience of communion with God, with Christ in the Holy Spirit. And our hope is the attainment of that Heavenly Kingdom which is the fulfillment of that life lived according to that communion.

In that, we are made righteous by faith. The Lord said “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness”. What kind of righteousness do we have other than our cooperation with God. That is the only true righteousness – it is obedience to the will of God. It is conformity to the will of God. It is submission to the will of God, cooperation with the will of God. That is our righteousness. So having been justified, having been made righteous by our faith, we have opened up to Our Lord Jesus Christ, which gives us the gift of His Love, which is His Grace, and which raises us up, transforms us and sanctifies us.

So, brothers and sisters, let us all remember these words. This is one of those really important verses to memorize and to think about every day.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.”