101 Sermons
Los Angeles: Sebastian Press, 2023
Prologue
The sermon is a “ministry” or “priestly service” (Rom 15:16). The word of God differs from every kind of human word, because it aims at transmitting the will of God to man, to revealing and transmitting to man the message of God’s love, the assurance that “God is with us” throughout our lives. This is particularly true when the word of God is heard and offered in the context of the Divine Liturgy, in which the Word “takes flesh” and is offered to man for communion. In this context, the sermon must be offered with awe and care to not disturb the worship atmosphere created by the Divine Liturgy.
The sermon is interpretation. The goal of the sermon is to translate the message of the Gospel into the language and concepts of each particular era, centering it on the cultural context of a particular time and place. The foundation of the sermon must always remain the Scripture readings, both on Sundays as well as on the feasts of the saints. This is why the sermon is placed in the Divine Liturgy after the holy readings, as it has been throughout the Church’s history from the first centuries, when the catechumens would be dismissed after the readings, just as it is still done today in the Ecumenical Patriarchate as well as among the Roman Catholics and Protestants. Moving the sermon to directly before Holy Communion is an innovation within the Church of Greece, which was introduced only in the 20th century out of zeal for the sermon, which sacrifices the structure of the Eucharist for the teaching and missionary work of the Church. The Divine Liturgy, according to Saint Maximus, is the journey from history to the eschaton, and the sermon brings us again back to history. Thus it constitutes an overturning of the whole concept of the Divine Liturgy and should be corrected as quickly as possible.
The sermon is the “Word of exhortation and consolation” (cf. Heb. 13:22 and 1 Cor 14:3). The censorious sermon, which we hear from many preachers today, has no place in the Divine Liturgy; it disturbs the faithful’s peace of soul and focuses primarily on those who do not participate in the Liturgy or to society in general. The Holy Eucharist transmits and “incarnates” God’s love and mercy to all, even sinners. It is no accident that, in the eucharistic assemblies, the Apostle Paul says that “prophesying” contributes to “edification and exhortation and comfort to men.” The censorious sermon neither “builds up” nor comforts, nor does it transmit “peace,” which the celebrant continually calls for. (Saint John Chrysostom’s sermons, which are cited as a prototype of the censorious sermon, were delivered outside the Divine Liturgy.)
Finally, the sermon should focus on man’s existential concerns, and not the constantly changing news cycle. Life, death, love, freedom, and other similar questions which have occupied man for centuries must constitute the core of the sermon’s subject matter. The Gospel comes to answer these kinds of questions, and this represents the core of the Holy Eucharist, which according to Saint Ignatius is the “medicine of immortality, the antidote we take in order not to die.”
This volume contains one hundred sermons of the one thousand or more that I have preached over 35 years of hierarchical ministry. Some of these were preached at churches in Greece and others at the Holy Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Essex, England. They all represent the spoken word that was recorded—none of them were in written form. The Artos Zois publishers’ initiative to publish these sermons in the current volume was due to the publications manager Stavros Zoumboulakis, to whom I express my warmest gratitude. The fact that an intellectual and author of Stavros Zoumboulakis’ stature was interested in my humble offering to the ministry of the Church should constitute another opportunity to be grateful to him. For the not insignificant work of recording, my gratitude turns to Andreas Goulas, an invaluable friend in my life. May God richly bless him with His grace.
This volume is dedicated with gratitude to the Holy Patriarchal and Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, England, where many of these sermons were preached. The love of the sainted founder, of the fathers and sisters of this lively spiritual beehive were for me an invaluable support and a gift from God.
Metropolitan John of Pergamon
Athens, October 2022
Greek Publisher’s Preface
The sermon was not at the center of Metropolitan John of Pergamon’s theological thought and ecclesiastical praxis. His focus was elsewhere. He saw the sermon as expressing a missionary understanding of the Church, of Protestant origin, which emphasizes attracting followers or creating intentional Christians. According to this understanding, the weight of meaning falls on the pulpit or the lecture hall, to the detriment of the Holy Eucharist. This “pulpit-centric” understanding—as he called it—disturbs the Divine Liturgy and lessens its eschatological intensity. This understanding was brought to Greece by the pietistic organizations and cultivated with zeal. The movement of the sermon to the time right before Holy Communion, on the grounds that that’s when the most people are in the church—constitutes, according to Zizioulas, a brazen overturning of the structure and spirit of the Liturgy. He has expressed these views several times in his texts (and even more in discussions). I cite:
The sermon is not in view in the liturgical manuscripts. There was, of course, a tradition of giving sermons, but it was not considered obligatory in the ancient Church. Even the sermon must adapt to the eschatological atmosphere and not transpose us from the Kingdom of God to here on earth. Nor must we concern ourselves with the problems of the day, forgetting our real homeland and the real faith of the Church, the Kingdom of God. Personally, I consider the sermon to be very difficult and it scares me like little else. For if obstinacy can destroy the eschatological experience that the Divine Liturgy wants to give us, how much more so when the sermons are given as they are today right before Holy Communion, according to this new tradition introduced by the organizations. In my humble opinion, giving the sermon right before Holy Communion is an outrage, even though everyone has accepted it. It does violence to the structure of the Divine Liturgy, overturning it. For the Church is doing something else at that time; it is not teaching.[1]
I discussed this issue with him many times and there can be no doubt that His Eminence was not only upset with having the sermon right before Holy Communion, but more generally he was skeptical of the sermon. I agree that the sermon’s correct place is after the Scripture readings, although I don’t consider it an “outrage” to move it to another time. However, I believe, contra Zizioulas, that the sermon is extremely important and I even told him that the sermon is a mystery, the sacrament of the Word of God, and that its place par excellence is within the Divine Liturgy. Outside the Liturgy, it is a lecture or Bible study. Inasmuch as His Eminence attributed great significance—always or only recently?—to the post-Resurrectional appearances of Christ, I resorted to citing His appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-35), where He explained what the Scriptures said about Him, “starting from Moses and all the prophets.” The disciples recognized Him in the breaking of the bread because they had previously heard Him open the Scriptures to them and their hearts burned within them. The Word and the Eucharist are inextricably bound, the one not being understandable without the other. His Eminence was unmoved by my argument. He did not want to see the essence of the argument, focusing instead on the content and quality of the sermons heard in the various churches and the time during the Liturgy in which they were preached. Who can disagree that the overwhelming majority are unacceptable? Nevertheless, whatever His Eminence’s views on the sermon, he did not refuse to preach. He was not a systematic preacher and despite his unique episcopal ministry—without a see or flock—he nonetheless preached. During his years as a bishop, His Eminence estimated that he had given over 1000 sermons!
We met regularly at the house of his doctor and close friend Georgios Papageorgiou, where we openly discussed different topics. His Eminence relished the discussion and would get annoyed at those who had no objections to anything. He needed interlocutors rather than followers. One evening I proposed to him (without much hope) that we publish some of his sermons at Artos Zois in the “Sermon Library” series. After initially voicing a few reservations, he accepted immediately out of love for the subject, although he felt it would not win the proper attention. He gave me more than a hundred sermons, after which he began to kindly pressure me to publish as quickly as possible, without understanding how much work was needed to transform these rough drafts into a book. I selected the title “One Hundred Sermons” myself (which is why I rounded off the number), which he accepted without hesitation. I asked him to write a prologue, which he sent me on October 21, 2022, and which expresses his appreciation for the sermon to a greater extent than one would expect from Zizioulas. He accepted that the word of the sermon was a ministry that assured people of God’s love, particularly when “it is heard and offered in the context of the Divine Liturgy, in which the Word ‘takes flesh’ and is offered to man for communion.” He added that its purpose was to “translate the message of the Gospel into the language and concepts of each particular era, centering it on the cultural context of a particular time and place.” This prologue brought me great joy and I let him know that. Nevertheless, it would be a misunderstanding of my comments above to suggest that his positive evaluation of the sermon in the prologue was somehow due to my discussions with him. I don’t believe any such thing. I do believe, however, that it was due to the very fact of publishing his sermons. Publishing by itself was a recognition of the sermon and the prologue expressed exactly this appreciation.
We believe in a God Whom we speak to and Who speaks to us; He addresses us and we address Him. In the Liturgy, we hear the Word of God—or better—we hear the dialogue between God and man that exists in the Scriptures. The Scripture readings are located at a certain point in the Liturgy, and this alone means that the sermon has a liturgical place and value. This was believed by the early Church, to whom we owe the prayer that is read to this day before the reading of the Gospel—but which unfortunately is read silently in most churches—which asks God to “open the eyes of our mind that we may comprehend the proclamations of your Gospel.” The sermon comes precisely to aid this understanding. In one of the oldest liturgical books, the Sacramentary of Serapion (middle 4th c.), there is a prayer before the Scripture readings and another prayer “after rising up from the sermon.” I quote here an excerpt from the former (according to F. E. Brightman’s 1900 edition):
I pray you to send the Holy Spirit into our minds and grant us to learn the Holy Scriptures from the Holy Spirit and interpret them purely and properly, for the benefit of all the people here present.[2]
The Metropolitan of Pergamon, who himself attended to the Word of God because the Word held meaning first of all in his own life, interpreted it in his sermons “purely and properly” for us all, for the common benefit of the people of God. We are grateful to him!
Stavros Zoumboulakis
Postscript
The Metropolitan Elder John of Pergamon departed in peace on February 2, 2023, on the feast of the Presentation. He was not able to hold this book in his hands. His prologue has thus become a farewell. May his memory be eternal!
[1] Metropolitan John of Pergamon, Εὐχαριστίας ἐξεμπλάριον (Megara, Mazi: Holy Monastery of St. Paraskevi, 2006), pp. 126–127 [in Greek]. See also pp. 26–27, 85, 137, 220 (n. 58).
[2] Panteleimon E. Rodopoulos, The Sacramentary of Serapion, Thessaloniki, 1967, p. 116.
Afterword
The publication of 101 Sermons of the late Metropolitan of Pergamon John (Zizioulas) sheds a whole new light on his character and theology. As St. Gregory the Theologian in his sermons showed all the depth of theology that is confirmed in the holy mysteries, so also Metropolitan John confirmed his theology in his liturgical homilies. In this book we meet a shepherd who, with pastoral sensibility, humility, and attention to the needs of his flock, softens and nourishes their hearts. His logos was deprived of rhetorical excursus into non-ecclesial thematics and he always used the sermon with a warning: “The sermon must adapt to the eschatological atmosphere and not transpose us from the Kingdom of God to here on earth.” For him, place, time, matter, colors, speech, smell, hearing, etc.—everything in the Liturgy witnesses an iconic symbolism that is not a static tableau but a movement in time, containing the historical time of salvation within it. For this reason, he wanted to see the Church during the Eucharist as bathed in light and adorned with all available splendor.
Although every Liturgy is prima facie identical, everybody would be enthused by the Metropolitan’s exuded eucharistic ethos and style, his movements, vestments, and his gaze. As Rowan Williams noted, “to see him serving the Divine Liturgy was invariably to see exactly what that main thing was for him: the manifestation in Christ, present and coming, of what we hope for in ourselves, our related and interwoven selves, and in our interwoven world, crying out for reconciliation.” For this reason, the members of the community couldn’t take their eyes off him. But he, too, would regularly fix the congregants with a curious and communicative look—a mysterious, inexplicable, deep, and unfathomable gaze. After the dismissal and the distribution of the antidoron to the whole congregation, he would enjoy the time with everyone, by saying: “I cannot commune with God ‘vertically,’ in the absence of people, I only find God through others, I thirst for people, I am a horizontal person.” Maybe because of this personal “horizontalism,” Metropolitan John used to preach to the flock, believing that the pious people, who participate in the Eucharist, are a “royal priesthood” (1 Pet 2:9; cf. Rev 5:10) who faithfully keep and maintain the Tradition. I cite one passage from his essay.
Certainly there are still people—and many of them—who love the Church’s feasts and flock to celebrate them, as well as little old ladies—fortunately, there are still plenty of these too—who kiss priests’ hands, touch their vestments to receive grace, kiss the icons and holy relics with a faith that is almost “magical,” and generally preserve the traditions with piety. If they do not fall victim to wily clerics, these people are the only leaven, the little leaven available to us to preserve and restore iconic symbolism, purifying it from such magical tendencies as may exist.
Metropolitan John did not treat the liturgical space (the architectural formation and internal organization) as scenery for an individual’s search for metaphysical security. To reawaken within the Orthodox a true sense of the Eucharistic offering as something authentic, genuine, and truthful—a chaste fruit of a community experiencing Resurrection—he was deeply interested in seeing liturgical “dramaturgy” as an iconic representation of the Kingdom. To achieve this iconic ideal, he kept reminding the hierarchy of the correct understanding of the liturgical event and all aesthetic expressions embellishing the worship: melody, iconography, hymnography, lighting, reading and chanting, sermon. Liturgical typicon does not aim to captivate the individual with psychological appeals or to subordinate it emotionally. Rather, it seeks to include people in a liberated space-time where they will acquire freedom from individualistic priorities and become acquainted with the resurrected Christ through communion with the Spirit.
The editor and the publisher are grateful to The Artos Zois publishing house in Athens and Mr. Stavros Zoumboulakis for permission to publish an excellent English translation by Fr. Gregory Edwards of Metropolitan John’ 101 Sermons.
Bishop Maxim of Western America
Los Angeles, July 2023
