The Divine Anchor and the Precarious Ladder of Spiritual Transformation
Sermon preached by Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz on Sunday, March 26, 2023 at St. Mary Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA.
Christ is in our midst!
This is the final sermon for Antiochian Women’s Month. Our theme this year is “The Pilgrimage of a Christian: Our Walk with Christ.” On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, we heard Teva related her scholarly theological journey into catechetical work as part of her pilgrimage with God, and she reflected on our Lenten journey to Pascha. During the second Sunday of Lent, Andrea shared her spiritual experiences in Romania, how the impactful encounters she had at Epiphany transformed her life, leading her on a journey to the Church, and then she reflected on how Christ understands our limitations and finds ways to draw us unto and into himself.
Last Sunday, on the feast of the Holy Cross, Cassandra talked about the relationship between divine presence, nature, and pilgrimage, reflecting on her experiences in the Holy Land and Egypt. The harshness of the desert, both physical and spiritual, Cassandra reminds us, provides space for repentance, reflection, and spiritual growth in our cross-ladened lives. In the desert of the denial of the self, we grow. These sermons have built upon each other, showing us the different ways in which pilgrimage expresses itself in the spiritual life, and as I add mine to on this last Sunday of Women’s month, I reflect on pilgrimage as the lifelong spiritual journey of theosis.
Today marks our fourth Sunday of Great Lent, and liturgical calendar of the Church provides us with a moment to reflect on spiritual transformation—our hopeful aim for the Lenten pilgrimage—with the Sunday of St. John Climacus or the Sunday of the Ladder. Here we hold space in our liturgical time to recognize the importance of ascetism in our spiritual movement towards God. In the short time I have with you this morning, I want to reflect on two themes that that I find present our scriptural readings for today—both of which I see as linked to the idea of spiritual transformation. First, using the epistle reading, I want to think about Christ as our spiritual anchor. Then I want to turn to gospel to consider the precarious nature of spiritual transformation. Finally, I’ll talk about how these ideas, Christ as the anchor and the precarity of spiritual transformation, relate to this day on which we celebrate St. John Climacus, the author of the Ladder of Divine Ascent.
Our epistle reading draws us back into the story of Abraham from the Hebrew Bible, recalling God’s promise of offspring, of inheritors, to the patriarch as historical, spiritual reminders that God is stalwart in his support of the faithful. The author of Hebrews reminders readers of the letter that they have a hopeful anchor in Christ, who has become the forerunner into the heavenly holy of holies, interceding on their and our behalf. Christ as an anchor is key in the spiritual journey to theosis, a Greek term that refers to the transformative process of becoming like God over time, particularly through participation in the Holy Mysteries and the life of the Church. St. John Chrysostom, who’s liturgy we celebrate when we are not in Lent, gave a homily about this passage, in which he draws out the helpful and important imagery of Christ as our true anchor. Chrysostom writes, “For as the anchor, dropped from the vessel, does not allow it to be carried about, even if ten thousand winds agitate it, but being depended upon makes it steady, so also does hope.” We often think of the word hope as meaning a desire for something to transpire, to occur, but the more ancient, more archaic version refers to a feeling of trust. As we journey on the tumultuous sea of life, we find our anchor for the divine ascent in Christ. And yet the movement, the spiritual traction that we gain as we work toward salvation is in large part up to us. Given our human nature, the spiritual pilgrimage towards theosis is often uncertain, unpredictable, precarious.
The gospel reading for today reminds us that even Jesus’s disciples wrestled with their own spiritual concerns and anxieties. In the gospel, a young child is in need of healing. The disciples are unable to perform this healing, and the father cries out to Jesus for a remedy. Often the gospel account that we have read for today focuses on the faith of the father, a father concerned with the healing of his child. But I want to think about how Jesus’s disciples are portrayed, and how their spiritual incapability to participate in this child’s healing is part of the precarious ladder of divine ascent for them. The Gospel reading tells us that after Jesus heals the child he enters a house, and his disciples ask him private why they were unable to heal the child. Blessed Theophylact of Ohrid, a biblical scholar who lived during the Byzantine period, in his commentary on this passage suggests that the disciples were afraid they had lost the grace that God had given them because they were unable to heal the child. In confronting their fears over losing the ability to heal, Jesus replies to his disciples that “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting." In the course of his analysis of the text, Blessed Theophylact suggests that Jesus is helping his disciples on the way to spiritual ascent by guiding them through ascetic (fasting) spirituality (that would be expressed as prayer). He writes “When the one who prays is not weighed down by the effects of food, his prayer is not burdened and he ascends easily.” If we take this analysis of the Gospel text, we can see that Jesus anchors the transformation of his disciples in both spiritual and practical ways, showing them at least two elements of the spiritual pilgrimage toward theosis. In his larger assessment of this Gospel text, Blessed Theophylact suggests that in both the healing of the child and the advice to the disciples, Jesus offers divine help so that humans themselves can do good, and thereby begin that process, that pilgrimage toward divine ascent.
So, what is this ladder of divine ascent? To think about it, we have to understand who and what we are celebrating on this fourth of Lent. St. John of Climacus was a seventh century monk who lived in a monastery in Sinai. St. John’s writings for monks on the spiritual journey of theosis (becoming participators in the divine nature of God) offers a means of transformation that takes on the form of a ladder, with the book divided into steps. This monastic guidance urges monks to renounce earthly pleasures, bodily passions, focusing on confession, compunction, and humility. Most of us here are not monks and might never be members of a monastery. At the same time, St. John’s work, spiritually strident though it may be, has important theological practices that we can appreciate and utilize in our spiritual journeys to Christ. Many of you might have seen the icon of the ladder of divine ascent in which monks are climbing a ladder to heaven while they are assailed from the bottom of the icon by demons with arrows and guided from the top of the icon by angels. The ladder imagery is used to express how one may ascend into heaven by first renouncing the world and finally ending up in heaven with God. While it’s best to seek out spiritual guidance when utilizing some of the religious practices in the Ladder of Divine Ascent, there are also practical spiritual ideas, such as not lying, not stealing, not cheating, that are meant to remind readers of the fundamentals of Christian life, with the highest rung of the ladder being that of love, which is arguably one of the most challenging parts of being human.
As we embark on or continue on through this Lenten pilgrimage, we must recognize our own spiritual limitations. For me, I like to take the advice St. John Climacus in tandem with that of my favorite Orthodox Christian thinker this Lent, my daughter Clementine, who, in her own very autistic way, has reminded me recently that “It’s gonna be hard, a little bit do.” That short phrase sums up (for me) the spiritual pilgrimage towards theosis. It’s hard. It’s difficult. But little by little we can grow, we can transform, we can become changed in and through God.
At the end of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. John Climacus exhorts his readers, “Ascend, my brothers, ascend eagerly. Let your hearts’ resolve be to climb.” The question is how do we begin? Let us, rung by rung, step by step, minute by minute, take up the ascetical challenges of Lent and of theosis, which might look different for each of us. Our spiritual pilgrimages, while we sojourn and travel together through Lent, through the spiritual life of the Church, are all different. Let us keep our spiritual eyes fixed on our own ascent and not that of one another’s’. And let us remember, as St. John Climacus wrote, "Do not be surprised that you fall every day; do not give up but stand your ground courageously.” As we pilgrimage together towards Pascha, let us find our hope in the anchor Christ and remember that the spiritual journey, while often precarious, is God-directed. Amen.