This issue was, once again, inspired by our participants—we thank God for you! We had not yet started a November-December issue of the GNL and hadn’t planned a Thanksgiving card, but then we received the following letter:

“…It is the week before Thanksgiving, every day I read the words of a card you sent me some four years ago, “No one but You oh Lord can put together what has crumbled into dust. You can restore a conscience turned to ashes. You can restore a soul lost and without hope to its former beauty. With You there is nothing and no one that cannot be redeemed, You are love; You are the Creator and Redeemer. We praise You singing: Alleluia!” (Kontakion 10, Akathist of Thanksgiving)

The card has a rainbow over a lake. I keep it in my Bible. I read these words every day. Thank You. Every day I thank God for you and the people of St. Nicholas. In so many ways I am a better person for having you in my life. I don’t believe y’all completely understand the power of what you do. Dear God, for these people I thank You. O Lord, I thank You for enlightening the darkness of my heart. O God, I thank You for the chance You have given me to be a light unto Your Glory. O God, I thank You for the chance You have given me to know You, to walk in Your Way. O God, I thank You for the incredible depth of Your Love. That through Your Son we all may come to know Your Salvation. O God, You, who are sovereign of the universe, I thank You.

“The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should parish but that all should come to repentance.” (II Peter 3:9)

You and the work you do are part of this promise from God…”

I read this in church and it brought tears to many eyes. The donation jar miraculously filled up making this issue possible! This is a joint effort; together we (you included) are part of the working-together-for-good; it’s God’s doing and His fulfilling of His promises. We are thankful for your participation and beg your prayers. The card described above and the Akathist from which the quote on the card came, were sent out before several of you were a part of the GNL family.  Fortunately, the Orthodox have no trouble with repetition! In this mailing we will resend the Akathist of Thanksgiving and a new and special rainbow card with that same verse.

The rainbow is a sign of God’s mercy and love toward His creation, “us”. It is the visible sign that, after destroying almost all living creatures on Earth, He would not destroy life on earth by flood again. Did mankind learn its lesson? Maybe, but not for long!  We humans, both on global and personal levels, repeat the same mistakes over and over again. As individuals we learn from our mistakes, but then the next generation steps up and does the exact same thing! Those of us who have children can especially empathize. Lord have mercy!

Noah and the Ark

 

Just as God did not leave Noah without a plan, God didn’t abandon us to our own imagination of what His Church should be like. Through Jesus Christ, God gave us the Ark of Salvation, the Orthodox Church, and sent the Holy Spirit to guide Her! In the story of the Great Flood, the storm raged and there was no end to the hard work Noah and his family faced, even when safely aboard the Ark. When the flood was over and the waters receded, the hard work was just beginning—beginning again and never ending! Likewise, the Church is our refuge from the storms of life. Life is hard! We have to be willing to work at our salvation! We must fight against temptations and the evil one’s attempts to drag us back into sin!  Everything we need is in the Ark/Church and, as long as we are on board, we have the tools we need for a successful journey.

 

The Scriptures, Sacraments and Holy Tradition (services and historical records) are the main “tools” that come to mind.  There is much repetition in the cycle of services. Every day we say the same prayers, every service repeats important scriptures and every year we celebrate the same feasts, all to the Glory of God!  This repetition is not in vain; it is for our benefit and our salvation. The prayers and services are full of Holy Scripture and help us “hide the word of God in our hearts”. They teach every generation about the history of the Church, which is an ongoing history; there are new Saints and Martyrs even today. However, the teachings of the Church don’t change. Without this structure we tend to forget, wander in a wrong direction, come up with “new” ideas that are the same old ideas that failed 1,000 times before.

 

Although attempts to debunk all things Biblical have repeatedly failed over the years, many of us still hesitate to believe stories like Noah’s Arkdue to the fantastic claims for and the rhetoric against them. For example, the historical facts surrounding Christ, that He actually lived and died, performed miracles, and even that He rose form the dead, have been substantiated by investigations that were meant to discredit them.  Even so, we are bombarded with so-called experts claiming it’s all a fantasy. The same has happened with the historical “story” of Noah and the Ark.

 

One argument against Noah and the Ark is that there are several versions of the Great Flood story in different cultures around the world. The detractors argue that because there are slight variations, for example: which bird was sent out first and which returned with the olive branch, that the story is just a myth. As they say, “the devil is in the details”! Can you think of any story surviving unchanged for more than 6 months, let alone thousands of years? Instead of exposing the story as untrue, this multicultural world-wide corroboration of the event affirms that a flood of Biblical proportions really happened!

 

The actual Ark itself is said to have been found on Mount Ararat. There have been various expeditions since the turn of the century- 1993 being one of the most official dates of hands-on discovery that I could find. Teams from several countries have returned to the area and, in 07 and 08, a Chinese team discovered that the partially buried structure had large rooms inside. The dimensions seemed, from what they could see of the ship, to coincide with the Biblical account. Carbon Testing put the age of the artifact at 4,800 years, which matches estimates according to Biblical dates.

 

Of course, skeptics have alternative explanations as to how this huge structure came to be 13,000 feet above the ground near the peak of one of the largest mountains the world (tallest in Turkey) and how it tested to be less than 5,000 of years old and dating the Flood as much more recent than the estimated millions of years.  One theory I came across, which makes no sense at all, suggested that a group of early Christians built a replica of the Ark as a shrine. Bear in mind, this mountain is a huge snow-covered rock has no trees on it at all!  This picture on the previous page is of an actual replica of the Ark built by a Dutch carpenter. Another life-size replica can be found at the Ark Museum in Grant County, Kentucky.

 

The Church is our Ark of Salvation. When storms rage in your life, and you are threatened by the evil forces that want to drown you, call on Christ (Matthew 8:24, 25)! When you start to sink into a sea of sin or doubt His love for you, take Christ’s hand and get back in the boat (Matthew 14:22-33)! Although life is one storm after another, in Christ there is nothing to fear, not even death. The Ark of Salvation, the Orthodox Church, was established under the direction of Jesus Christ. This Ark doesn’t stop the storms of life but shelters us and guides us to the safe harbor of the Kingdom of God, which is not of this world (John 18:36)!

 

The Brotherhood of Saint Moses the Black Conference

 

More than once, one of y’all has asked me if there are Black Orthodox Christians. This is a topic we need to revisit as well. We did an issue for Mother’s Day a few years back with icons from around the world depicting Christ and The Theotokos as every race. When people around the world embraced Christianity, they accepted that they were made in the image of God, and logically God would look like them. This is where the white Jesus idea comes from— it’s a cultural thing. Being from the Middle East, Jesus and all the Apostles were medium skin toned, not white or black. Christianity doesn’t have, isn’t supposed to have, racial divisions (Galatians 3:28).

 

How then, did we get this idea? Do you remember the movie the King and I? It was about the King of Siam and the English governess he hired to teach his children. Quite the romance! The people of Siam thought their little country was the center of the world, a lie propagated by altered maps that showed the kingdom as huge compared to the rest of the countries. This illusion of grandeur had been perpetuated for centuries, and part of the plot was about undoing this misconception so that the Kingdom could participate in world affairs.

 

People, especially here in the US think of Christianity in the terms of the past 500 years. Maybe it’s because our country, which is barely 250 years old, was founded by Protestant Christians–white people from Europe. Ideas of imperialism and superiority had infected the religious beliefs of Europe and the US was founded on a rebellion against those ideas and on religious freedom. However, there was a centuries-long lack of accurate information about the origins and history of Christianity. As a result, the USA is, metaphorically, the oversized country on the map, with unrealistic ideas of our own importance and knowledge of the historical roots of the Christianity.

 

There are secular books, historical records, that were written in Greek and Hebrew that report on the life and miracles of Christ and the history of the Church.  There are hundreds and thousands of texts from the Early Church that have been translated into many languages over the years—they just haven’t gotten around to translating them into English yet (John 21:25)! Christianity was well established in Africa in the first century after the resurrection. Martyrs have been dying for Christ in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for centuries and are still being persecuted and martyred today. These Christians, like the millions that have gone before them over the past 2000 years, are prepared to suffer and die for Christ because they know the history of the Church and understand what the Scriptures say (Matt.10:16-25).

 

When the Apostles went out to all the countries of the known world, they established Churches with the local people. They didn’t force religion on them–they told them about Christ’s coming, His teachings and miracles, His victory over the evil one, and the hope of the life to come. People knew there was a Creator, they longed to know Him, and they welcomed the Good News! The Gospel was spread by the Church and was fueled by great enthusiasm for Christ in the Holy Spirit. Christians who were fleeing persecution spread the Gospel further and faster due to that very persecution. Every country’s Church was in their own language, filled with their own people, led by their own priests and Bishops.

 

The USA was on track to have its own church as well. The Russian Church sent missionaries to Alaska in the 1700s, establishing the first mission in 1791 among the native Alaskans.  The Church spread into the continental US, starting on the West Coast. Long story short; the World Wars broke out and various ethnic groups immigrated to the US, bringing their own priests and bishops with them. The result is that we have strong ethnic churches in the US– Greek, Russian, Antiochian, etc., that kept their native language and culture. It seemed that there was no interest in allowing others in. For example, in the early 80s I went to a Greek church, where everything was in Greek and was asked why I was there. I said I was “a convert”. They looked confused and one asked another “Can someone convert to being Greek?” Orthodoxy is so tied to culture that it is often inseparable. This is where BSMB comes in!

 

The Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black Conference was about love and caring for all God’s people and bringing racial harmony and reconciliation.  The Brotherhood attracts people of color, but it is not about race. It’s named after a great Black saint, but it is not trying to be a separate black thing—it is to unify us all. The evil one sows hatred and division- not Christ!

 

At the conference, I was able to share about what we are doing with this ministry and asked if anyone was interested in coming to a prison ministry workshop. When Fr. Turbo (center of this pic) a former Marine, once-upon-a-time a tattoo artist, and now a priest and father of 7, saw me at lunch, he switched places from the table where he was seated and came and sat across from Stephen and me. He took both my hands in his and shook his head and said “Mama-Jo, we have to do this prison ministry thing! You got to tell us what you’re doing.”

 

Later, I asked Fr. Moses (seated, right of center) if it were possible, as I had surmised in the last GNL, that St. Moses had come from a Christian family. “Absolutely!” he said and went on to say that some of the slaves who came to this country in chains were most assuredly Orthodox Christians! That makes so much sense! The ancestors of the priest standing to the left of Fr. Turbo, included an Orthodox priest who came here as a slave! Fr. Moses had relatives who were slaves in the USA as well. I put on his ancestor’s neck iron—LORD HAVE MERCY! As a young man, Fr. Moses, although born free in a free country, found himself a slave to sin and did time. As God wills, now he is a wonderful pastor to Christ’s flock and serves “all the flower’s in God’s garden”! As descendants of Slaves, they see that God’s hand was moving in the stormy events of their families for generations.  Glory to God for all things!

 

The Akathist of Thanksgiving

 

This Akathist was composed by Protopresbyter Gregory Petrov shortly before his death in a prison camp in 1940. It is a song of praise from amidst the most terrible sufferings.

This picture is of a rare lunar rainbow that, under the right conditions, occurs at night! This amazing sight brings to mind that God’s promises are for the best and worst of times.

 

Trisagion Prayer (the beginning prayers)