God willing, in September of this year the parish of St. John the Baptist in Washington, DC will prayerfully mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding by St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. This upcoming celebration provides the parishioners with the opportunity to consider the role of the Orthodox parish in their personal life and of society. The following is the first installment of excerpts from a presentation on this subject delivered by the parish rector, Archpriest Victor Potapov, at the IV All Diaspora Council of ROCOR, held in 2006 in San Francisco.
Photo: stjohndc.org
And now you are living stones that are
being used to build a spiritual house,
a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual
sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.
(1 Peter 2:5)
An old Latin saying reads: “A Christian alone is not a Christian.” You cannot be a Christian split off from other believers in Christ who are part of His Church. As Russian theologian Sergei. I. Fudel put it, “The Church is the end of solitude.”1
Christianity is community. The very word church, in Greek ecclesia, means “assembly,” “convention.” This word was used by the Savior Himself, founder of the Church, and later by His apostles.2 In this there is unquestionably a succession between the Old and New Testaments. From the day of Holy Pentecost, Christians felt they were the ‘new Israel,’ a people called and sanctified by God in Christ.
The New Testament knows no ethnic boundaries; its message is addressed to all people, whatever may be their heritage, language or prior beliefs and traditions. They enter into the Church of Christ, and it is membership in that Church, and not mere acceptance of New Testament teachings, which forms the foundation of their unity with Christ and one another.
The abstract notion of “Christianity” is unquestionably an idea that evolved with the passage of time. The central and fundamental concept was and remains the Church. From the very first days of its existence, the character of Christian teaching has been social, directed at human society. The core content of all the Church’s sacraments has always been communal. Their goal is to introduce a person to a new life in the Church and strengthen him in that life. The Church’s ultimate goal was and remains to embrace all of society, indeed all of humanity, to a renewing faith in Christ as Savior; for the Lord will have all men to be saved and to come unto the knowledge and the truth.3 To create the Church of Christ is to form society anew, recreating it on a new foundation.
New Testament teachings always stress the importance of unanimity in spirit and thought among Church members. Communal property and the absence of egoism came naturally to the early Church.4 The most ancient title Christians used was ‘the brethren’. The Church was called to be the created manifestation of the Divine principle: We distinguish the three persons of the Holy Trinity, but at the same time confess that God is one in His Divine essence.
The call to love God and man is the basis of our faith.5 This call to love, and the revelation that it is possible, forms an enduring theme throughout the Gospel. True love for God and a readiness to live by His commandments is a difficult task, and egotists are not up to the task. Love for God, the sensation of being a citizen of the Kingdom of God, excludes the thought of a purely personal salvation. The Christian strives not only to save and renew his own soul, but that of loved ones and of all creation.
As the Russian theologian S.I. Fudel writes:
“The Church starts where, as Christ put it, “two or three are gathered together in His name”. Not where there is one, for love begins where there are “two or three.” Two or three is the first unit of love, and where self and isolation end is where the Church begins.”6
The Primary Structure of the Catholic Church
The Church of Christ embraces the heavens and the earth, past, present and future, and has an earthly semblance: the parish church. The parish church may be called the primary structure of the Catholic Church.
If, as the Apostle Paul teaches, the Church is the mystical Body of Christ,7 then the parishes are the small component parts of that great church Body.8
Archpriest Victor Potapov A human body is composed of many parts with each, no matter how small, having its own purpose and carrying out its own function. All these parts are nourished by the same juices, all beat to the same rhythm and follow the direction of the same soul. They accomplish their purpose in unity and concord with the body as a whole. Just so, the members of a parish must live and act in close unity among themselves and with the whole Church, for our Lord is one: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.”9
In his epistle to the Christians of Ephesus, St. Paul writes of the Savior: For He is our peace, who hath made both one…10 that is joining that which was divided, that which was split asunder by sin. Uniting with Christ in the Church’s Sacraments returns a person to his original wholeness, making him, in the words of that same Pauline epistle: “of the household of God.”
We are “of the household of God” when we are in the Church, for Christ’s Church to this day does God’s work in the world. Thus, the Church, the body of Christ, is that living organism which stands alone on earth against the growing wave of chaos, evil and division. We—you and I—are members, organs, of the Body of Christ. When the various parts of an organism function smoothly and help one another, the body lives. If one organ standing on its own and forgetting that its purpose is to serve the others, opposes the others, then the whole body ceases to function and becomes a corpse.
The Parish Sanctuary
The sanctuary is the concentrated wellspring of living spiritual strength for every parish. On the holy Throne of this sanctuary the Very Son of God offers himself up constantly in a bloodless and redeeming Eucharistic sacrifice for both the quick and the dead. Here, in the sanctuary, before that holy Throne, the earthly Church unites in prayer with the celestial Church, those people and angels and saints who stand before the Throne of God. In partaking of the Holy Gifts, we unite ourselves with Christ, and through Him, with the Universal Church. “Unite all of us who partake of this one bread and cup to one another in the communion of the one Holy Spirit... And grant that with one voice and one heart we may glorify and praise Thy most honorable and majestic Name, of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”11
St. John (Maximovich) says this of mystical unity with Christ and through Him with His Church:
“The earthly Church unites all who are reborn through Baptism and who have taken up the Cross of the struggle against sin, and who follow after Christ the contest-master of this struggle. The Divine Eucharist, the offering of the bloodless sacrifice and partaking thereof, sanctifies and strengthens its partakers and makes those who receive of the Body and Blood of Christ true members of His Body, the Church. But only with death is it determined whether a man remained a true member of the Body of Christ to his last breath, or whether sin triumphed in him and drove out the grace binding him to Christ and received by him in the Holy Mysteries.
“He who, as a member of the earthly Church, has reposed in grace, goes over from the earthly Church into the heavenly Church. But he who has fallen away from the earthly Church will not enter into the heavenly, for the Church in this world is the way into the heavenly.”12
The real life of a parish arises from the depths of the human soul, forged into unity by shared spiritual experiences and conjoined in the sacraments and prayers carried out under the shared roof of one sanctuary.
It is possible to come to church often, even daily, to pray, even to partake of the sacraments, and yet remain aloof, concerned only with one’s own salvation and one’s own family’s welfare; through all of it not finding out what is going on in the parish community. But you cannot really call such a person a member of the church and its community.13
Fr. Alexander Shmemann proposes, among other matters, that the liturgy should be viewed as a “sacrament of gathering”:
“Remember, it should be firmly kept in mind that we do not go to church for individual prayer, we go there to gather in the Church. The visible sanctuary is but an image of the uncreated temple for which it stands. Therefore “gathering in the Church” is in fact the first liturgical act, the foundation of the entire Liturgy. Without understanding these all-subsequent sacramental actions are incomprehensible. And when I say, “I am going to Church”, it means that I am going to a gathering of believers in order to constitute, together with them, the Church, to once again become the one I was on the day of my baptism, i.e. a full and absolute member of the Body of Christ: As the Apostle says, Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular (1 Cor. 12:27). I go to demonstrate and realize my membership, to be present and to witness before God and the world the mystery of God’s Kingdom which is already “the kingdom of God come with power.”14
To be continued…
