Homily for St. Plato s Day 2015

“Because everyone must be salted with fire! Salt is good, but if the salt goes dull, what will make it tasteful again? Hold salt within yourselves and be at peace!”

Dear friends,

one of the most supportive aspects of a Christian life in this world is stability. It is not easy to achieve, it demands spiritual strain from you, it demands prayers. But at the same time – oh, how many possibilities of flight do intelligence and experience offer us! At first it might seem that achieving stability in the absolute sense is an almost hilarious endeavor. Because intelligence speaks a different language. Our first excuse is from the outside – that the world itself is unstable. But with closer analysis, we’d tell we’re fools as a second excuse, trying to battle instability of the world by forcing balance in our society. After all, we live here and not on some other planet. We do not have the strength. We have to put up with all this, admit the life that time has molded, don’t we? And then, going a bit further we tell ourselves: “Look, soul, do you really think you puny thing can bring stability to anything?” As we look inside ourselves, we see with horror that our own inner balance is imbalanced and manifesting in turbid impulses in the outside world.

Things are not improved by the visible mass of history and the current upset with our own neighbours. When desperation, anger, unpredictability and commotion take a step towards our own lives, close enough to reach out and touch, then… then we may begin to make up situations and solutions in our heads that might find us peace. Then we may unknowingly become fatalists who just say: “All goes as it goes.”

Christ speaks to all who think and feel that way. Listen. He talks of the endurance of the soul. He uses everyday salt as the conduit of faith. In the kitchen of an Estonian farmstead, a little box of salt is a great constant. Grandmother’s hand goes in and out of it with the regularity of clockwork. And when the whole family sits down at the table, then in trust of His experience we feel the full taste of food.

Faith, that Christ will resurrect us to new life, currently designated as death, gives life its true taste. Faith, that He will bring us balance in an imbalanced world is the guarantee and support of our satisfaction and support. Christ salts us with the fire of faith. The fire of faith cleanses us of the slag around us. Cleanses us of foolish ideas, constructions of the mind and shortsighted beliefs that the history of the world is guided merely by the joint brains of men and women or the collision  of historical events. And finally – once we’ve found that balance, peace and dignity – only then are we ready to be salted with blood, like our holy martyrs. Like our martyr-bishop Platon, Vassil of Saatse and Stefan. Let them be an example to us in humanity and Christian faith.

Listen to Christ above rulers, bankers and war chiefs! Listen to Christ above maddened world-changing preachers! Listen to Christ above ethical revolutionaries, who suck you in with sugarsweet slogans, that demand no responsibility from you! The wisdom of Christ is the key of humanity’s endurance and faith in Him is the salt of our soul. May our blood stay salty and may peace of soul flow out of us like fresh water from a rock.

Priest Sacharias