Nov. 23, 2019 - Brother Nathanael
05:18
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| What's a nice Jewish boy doing in the Russian Orthodox Church? | |
| Some of you may be asking. | |
| Well, it shouldn't seem all that strange. | |
| For after all, the founders of the Orthodox Church were all Jews, beginning with St. | |
| Peter and St. Paul. | |
| But I wouldn't even begin to compare myself with them. | |
| My journey into the Orthodox Church is very different than theirs. | |
| It all started in my Bar Mitzvah class at the age of 13 when our teacher, Mrs. | |
| Schechter, made some very anti-Christian statements. | |
| We were studying comparative religions, and Mrs. | |
| Schechter taught us about every religion under the sun—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Baha'i—but refused to teach us about the Church. | |
| I'll never forget the scene for as long as I live. | |
| Mrs. Schechter, who was built like a bull, got up in front of the class and said, Children, we're not going to bother studying Christianity, for it's nothing but a fairy tale. | |
| It was started by a self-hating Jew named Saul, a man at the present, who hated his Jewishness so much that he changed his name to Paul. | |
| I said to myself, how could that which informed Western civilization for the past two thousand years be nothing but a fairy tale? | |
| One day, when I get away from the synagogue, I'm going to study it for myself. | |
| And that I did. | |
| When I was 21, I got hold of a New Testament and started reading the Gospels. | |
| I simply fell in love with Jesus Christ and was convinced that He was the Jewish Messiah who came to conquer death. | |
| Within me was formed a kind of permanent creed that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, closer to the heart, more human and divine than Jesus Christ. | |
| If someone were to tell me that he was just a myth concocted by mentally disturbed men, as Mrs. | |
| Schechter told us as children, I would answer, mentally disturbed men cannot fabricate that which is perfect. | |
| Men who are willing to die For that perfection. | |
| But back to my story. | |
| Soon after embracing Jesus Christ as my Savior, I joined the Jews for Jesus Messianic Jewish movement that proclaimed that Jews could remain Jews, yet still believe in Jesus. | |
| Now this movement is a Jewish supremacist movement, Zionist to the core, favoring Christ-hating Jews over Palestinian Christians. | |
| A bunch of neurotic messianic Jews who revel in having gullible evangelical Christians fawning all over them. | |
| That's why I call them Baptists with the Yamalkes. | |
| So by the time I was 37, I was a highly successful straight-commissioned salesman at the time. | |
| I pretty much got sick of it all. | |
| For when I saw that their telling that Jesus was a Jew ended up being a denial of his divinity, I decided to look elsewhere. | |
| First, I started attending a high Anglican church in Boston called the Church of the Advent. | |
| The church was dedicated to promoting traditional Catholic worship, complete with Renaissance-style masses. | |
| Oh, it was all very beautiful, religious, and quite moving. | |
| But it seemed to be more of an event, a show, than a life-changing experience. | |
| I was reading Tolstoy's War and Peace at the time, and one passage made a deep impression on me. | |
| One of the main characters, Natasha, goes to a Russian Orthodox Church to repent of her faithlessness to Prince Andrei, who she cheated on while he was away fighting Napoleon in the War of 1812. | |
| While in church, Natasha is pricked to the heart by the priest's sermon, who spoke in mild and quiet tones. | |
| A sermon given in mild and quiet tones, I said to myself, quite astonished. | |
| No shouting and Bible-thumping, as I was accustomed to? | |
| I've got to check this out. | |
| So I got out the Yellow Pages and looked up and down for a listing of Russian Orthodox Churches. | |
| I finally found one in downtown Boston called Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral. | |
| It was winter time in December of 1987 and I went to an evening service called Vigil for the Resurrection. | |
| All was very mysterious that cold, wintry night as I got off the T, Boston subway system, and began walking toward the church a mile away in a deep and dark December. | |
| As soon as I walked into the church with candles flickering their holy light, frescoes on the walls and icons of Christ and the saints everywhere, everyone standing, incense billowing upwards with inebriating pungency, the priest praying with soft voice. | |
| Let us attend, let us hear the Holy Gospel, and the standing choir chanting in mild tones the Psalms of David. |
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