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Today, brothers and sisters, I’ll be doing something a little bit different. Today I’m doing a bit of show-and-tell.
This is an icon of the Holy Apostle Peter, of whom I am the namesake of. This is the first icon of St. Peter I ever owned, and in fact it is my very first icon, ever. And I received it as a gift, and this gift really and truly transformed my life.
The story goes something like this. I’m ten years old, a young catechumen in the Orthodox Church. At this point in my life, I did not have what one would describe as an “articulate” understanding of what I was getting myself into. I was excited to become Orthodox, sure, but that excitement was definitely tethered to my Mother, who had discovered the Orthodox Faith, and who was the main driving force in our family’s eventual conversion to Orthodoxy, from Non-Denominational Protestantism.
But hey, I was there, I was learning all these different traditions and rules and services. Being as young as I was, things felt far more exciting than overwhelming, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was still intimidated by some of the choices that lay ahead of me. Namely, I knew that I was to choose for myself a patron saint. And this was tricky. Often, folks will pick a saint with whom they share a name. But, there is no St. Jared (Jared being my name), though Jared was indeed an ancestor of Abraham, grandfather to Methuselah. But I digress.
There was also a St. Robért, from France (Robert being my middle name.) But I found myself disconnected from that idea, as St. Robért had little in the way of biographical information. I knew that whoever I picked, I wanted to be able to form a connection with that Saint. Because, I already had a lot of faithful people helping me to better understand the important purpose of Saints: these are holy individuals with whom we can cultivate real and tangible spiritual relationships, by praying to God through these Saints’ intercessions. They help us on our path to Christ.
And so, truth be told, I really had no idea what to do. It was difficult for me to commit to such an important relationship, when I had no clear path towards actually discovering who this patron saint was meant to be.
THEN, at a random Coffee Hour, Nick Sarris walks over to me. Nick was the classic, friendly, magnanimous “Greek Guy”, a founder of my home parish and a fixture of that parish’s community life. Nick was one of the sweetest, most generous, and most faithful people I ever knew. And, I don’t want to give him too much credit, so I will only say that he was perhaps, on many occasions “accidentally” clairvoyant. He seemed to always stumble into the right words, and into the right places, so that he could be a beautiful witness of God’s love and wisdom to so many people.
So, in any case, Nick comes over to me at Coffee Hour and simply places this icon into my hands, and he says “Here, I think you’re really gunna like this guy”. And, like any conversation with a 10-year-old, that was kind of it. Nick goes off, and I am left with not just a new piece of art, but a new person. Of course, this wasn’t literally St. Peter. He wasn’t trapped inside of this piece of wood. But now, I had for myself a very tangible window, an image that was encouraging me to better understand who this person is. Peter, a disciple of Christ. Peter, an Apostle of the Church. Peter, one of the most stubborn, most thoroughly rebuked, and most fundamentally unserious supporting characters of the New Testament.
Receiving this icon encouraged me to revisit St Peter’s life as revealed in Scripture, and I now had a face to this name, I now had his image present with me as I read about his life, about his failures and his successes, and how Christ used all of those things in order to perfect this person. As I learned about Orthodox prayer, I now had a holy person as a guide for me. I could look to this icon of St. Peter, as I prayed, and ask for his help, just as we would ask any elder in our Church, today.
And as I looked upon the halo that surrounds St. Peter’s head, an incredible truth was revealed to me.
At the end of the day, we humans know God only because he reveals Himself to us. For God, by his very essence, is inexpressible, invisible, incomprehensible. That is simply the reality of who God is. He is unknowable, too big and vast and complex, and paradoxically even too simple, for us to understand. And yet, at the same time, it is knowledge of this unknowable God, knowledge of our Creator, that transforms us and perfects us into that sanctified personhood that God intends for all of us. All of us our called to be saints, and that sanctity is accomplished by knowing our God. Now sin, by its very nature, obscures our ability to see this God. It makes us blind to Him. And because of our separation from God, through Sin, there needed to be a manner by which God could reveal Himself to us tangibly, physically, in a way that our fallen world and our fallen minds could actually understand and get a hold of.
And so, God sends His only-begotten Son, in the flesh. And that fleshliness of the Son of God is so important, to all of this. Because Christ shares in our human nature precisely so that we can then participate in his own Divine Nature. “God became man so that we might become like God.” Perfect. Pure. Holy. That is the intended destiny of every single person.
And Christ is the bridge that leads us to this knowledge of our unknowable Creator, so that we might be made holy.
And so, we depict Christ in our Church. We depict the face of our God. Icons are so important, so central to the theology of the Church, because they are themselves a proclamation of a central truth: that our unknowable God made himself known through his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and that this Jesus has a body, and a face, precisely so that we can know Him.
And likewise, we therefore depict His Saints, in the same manner. Because the saints of the church are themselves a proclamation of another truth: that God became flesh so that He might enter into the hearts of every man, and that we can know Christ through the holiness and piety expressed through other people, through these Saints. That halo around St Peter is not a symbol of his own holiness. It is a symbol that expresses how God’s holiness is shown through St Peter.
And so, just as icons are a window to the person that they represent, Saints are a window to the person that they are all images, icons, of: Our Lord and our God, Jesus Christ. This is why venerating icons is not idol worship, for we do not venerate wood and pigment, we venerate the God whose image is represented here before us. And we venerate the Saints not because we worship them, but because we worship the God who shines through them, through their miraculous works, through their wisdom, through their piety.
As Christians, we have these holy images of our Saints, as not just a reminder, but an encouragement. A mandate. We are all called to be saints. We are all called to be icons of Christ. Called to perfection, to immortality. These icons all around us are not memories of the dead. The Saints are present here with us in this Liturgy, they are alive in Christ. And we have these icons to express that truth. Here they are! With us, worshipping together. And all of you, sitting here, are also icons of Christ, in the same way. Standing together, in worship, joining together as one Body of Christ. Forming a perfected image of our God, perfected by God’s own perfect image, Jesus Christ.
We pray and serve together as we seek to be images of our God, icons of our Creator. So let us rejoice that God has made Himself known to us in this way, and that he continues to reveal Himself to us through his continuing work in this world, the work of His Saints, His Church, and each and every one of you: icons of Christ.
Glory to Jesus Christ!
