In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’m going to begin this sermon with a statement that will probably surprise most of you, because it is a statement that appears to be true, yet it is not. And that statement is this: We celebrated the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos last Sunday.
Why is this an untrue statement? Because it is put in the past tense, as something that is over and done with. The majority of the Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church, however, are not events that are commemorated and celebrated on one single day, then put on the shelf again until the following year. Rather, they are followed by a period - of varying length, depending on which Feast it is - called the Afterfeast, culminating on the day known as the Leavetaking (Apodosis) of the Feast. During the period of the Afterfeast, hymns for the Feast continue to be sung at the services: Vespers, Matins, and Liturgy. On the Apodosis, pretty much all of the hymns which were sung on the day of the Feast itself - with a few exceptions - are repeated, causing the commemoration of the saint who is set in the calendar for that day to be bumped to another.
The Feast of the Dormition has a particularly long period of Afterfeast... not counting the day of the Feast itself, it is a period of eight days, so that the Church will be celebrating the Leavetaking tomorrow. In a very real sense, then, we are still celebrating the Dormition of the Theotokos even now.
This is an especially long period of Afterfeast, over a week, and particularly so when it is measured against the preparatory period which preceded it. There must be meaning in this, something especially significant about this Feast which has much importance for us.
There are several significant points that can be discerned from this, but one of the most significant lies in what was found, or rather not found, in the grave of the Mother of God. At the time of her death, all the apostles were gathered on clouds from all the ends of the earth where they were preaching the gospel and evangelizing the nations. All, that is, save Thomas. He arrived a week late and, sorrowful at having missed her funeral, asked to see the body. When they opened the tomb, however, there was no body. It was gone, taken up from the earth into heaven. That this is an extremely significant point is made by the fact that the following hymn is repeated on three separate occasions during the Afterfeast: In the aposticha for Vespers on August 17th and August 21st, and in the aposticha for Matins for August 22, that is, today. And this hymn goes: “Your body was not touched by the dust of the tomb; although it was buried in keeping with nature and its laws, nevertheless it remains incorruptible.”
When we all recite the Creed we confess that we believe “in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.” That her body was taken up from the grave is an assurance of this. It shows that she partakes of the first-fruits of theosis, of deification which encompasses the whole human person, both soul and body. In the Feast of the Transfiguration we are shown the reality of the hypostatic – that is, personal - union of the divine nature and the human nature in the one Christ which makes this possible, the glorification of our human nature and bodies through intimate communion with the divine. The post-Resurrection appearances of our Savior Christ recounted in the Matins gospels show us what our glorified bodies will be like, that is, truly physical... He could eat fish, could be touched... “A spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see I have.” He said.
The absence of her physical body from the tomb, then, is a great sign to us, the promise to us that this selfsame physical flesh and bone and body which we have now will not remain dead; we too will have such glorified physical bodies, in the transfigured New Creation after the final judgment, that we may live the life humanity was intended to live in Eden, ever growing into the likeness of God as human persons, soul-body unities. Amen.
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The Orthodox Church does not believe merely in the immortality of the soul, and in the goodness and ultimate salvation of only spiritual reality. Following the Scriptures, Orthodox Christians believe in the goodness of the human body and of all material and physical creation.
Thus, in its faith in resurrection and eternal life, the Orthodox Church looks not to some "other world" for salvation, but to this very world so loved by God, resurrected and glorified by Him, tilled with His own divine presence.
It is sometimes argued, however, that this world will be totally destroyed and that God will create everything new "out of nothing" by the act of a second creation. Those who hold this opinion appeal to such texts as that found in the
second letter of Saint Peter:
"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away ... and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up." (2 Pet 3:10).
Because the Bible never speaks about a "second creation" and because it continually and consistently witnesses that God loves the world which He has made and does everything that He can to save it, the Orthodox Tradition never interprets such scriptural texts as teaching the actual annihilation of creation by God. It understands such texts as speaking metaphorically of the great catastrophe which creation must endure, including even the righteous, in order for it to be cleansed, purified, made perfect, and saved. It teaches as well that there is an "eternal fire" for the ungodly, an eternal condition of their being destroyed. But in any case the "trial by fire" which "destroys the ungodly" is in no way understood by the Orthodox in the sense that creation is doomed to total destruction, despised by the loving Lord who created it and called it "very good" (Gen 1:31; also 1 Cor 3:13-1; Heb 12:25-29; Is 66; Rev 20-22).
--- From Fr. Tom Hopko's Rainbow Series (Vol. 1)
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