The Sunny Side of Life with Troy Thompson
The Sunny Side of Life with Troy Thompson
Long Division
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This week at Sunnyside, Troy weighs in on the Saints - not the football or minor league baseball team, but the actual saints and why he doesn't know very many of them. It takes a discussion about long division to sort out, but not the mathematical process, rather the never-ending division of the church. Was Luther the first protestant or was it the Bishop Rome in 1054. What sealed the deal in the 13th century? Why haven't we stopped splitting apart? Who is out there unchanged since the beginning?
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If you are interested in recording your family's stories, email troy@sunnysidefarmstudios.com
Hello, friends and neighbors. Welcome to the sunny side of life. Once again, it's been a heck of a week here. Lots of rain, which means, well, lots of studio time. And of course, last week we sent out our second newsletter, which many of you have subscribed to. And for that, I'm very thankful. The next newsletter is in the works, and I am looking forward to sharing with you videos on how our cows receive their new pasture, the installation of the gates on that sunny side hollow pasture, the lights we have decided to include on that pasture fence line, and why? The beginning of our home gym project and so much more that we've got going on. And if you're not yet a subscriber to our monthly newsletters, just know well, I think you're missing out. All the things that I talk about here on this program are also, well, at least in part, in video. And that's only to our newsletter subscribers each month via private and unlisted YouTube links. I hope you take the time to join our newsletter by simply clicking on the link in the show notes. And until then, thank you for coming once again to the Sunnyside of Life. And besides all the regular farm work, much of what I do here in the studios is dictated by my clients. And for the last few years, I've recorded the family stories for folks who recognize the value of hearing their grandparents' voice and telling the stories of their heritage, or their own stories recorded and produced in a professional studio right here at Sunnyside. I've recorded the stories and family histories of many people in their own words and then turned them into eternal keepsakes for the family. Now I call these recordings the sunny side of life biographies, and what I do is sit down with a loved one and record their stories, and then I turn them into a produced chapter in what amounts to, well, an entire audio book, if you will, of a family's history. Of course it takes time to do that, and it takes some skill and resources, creativity and openness to talk, well, just about anything. Sometimes the stories I can derive from a client comes from the fact that I well, I haven't heard it before, and that seems to add to the storyteller's excitement. A complete biography could take months to complete, depending on the number of interviews and the amount of production I decide is necessary. I've never had a complaint other than, well, I wish we had gotten more from grandpa or grandma. Take it for me, you don't get those opportunities back. Here's a sample of a chapter I recorded for a client where both husband and wife had input.
SPEAKER_03And so as I was doing my student flying, I would buzz her apartment. We had to stay 500 feet, but that 500 feet an airplane is still pretty loud as it's coming and going, right? So anyway, she'd come out and I'd dip my wings and you know, wave at her and and that kind of stuff. So you know.
SPEAKER_08And I made a play with the mop. I had a node top on my car, you know, so I could follow him around.
SPEAKER_02She'd wave with a mop. That she'd that she had seen me.
SPEAKER_08I gave you a cross that said Jesus pilot me, remember that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it just said pilot me.
SPEAKER_08Pilot me, but I talked to you about what that meant.
SPEAKER_03And I'd I'd leave, I would take things and leave them at your doorstep.
SPEAKER_08Give me you had something at my doorstep every day. Poetry, whatever, Christmas trees, whatever. It's just a something.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I was selling the deal.
SPEAKER_08Yeah.
SPEAKER_06I can tell you sometimes recordings like that don't become available ever again. Timing truly is everything, and because I care about timing, and to prove that most of the work in this studio doesn't come from these podcasts, I will occasionally break up this show with things that do pay the bills, like, well, my radio liner work, commercials, and more. I want you to know as a listener that the microphones here at Sunnyside Farm Studios are not orphaned once a week, but things stay pretty busy. Add to that my cow and chicken chores, community projects, and volunteerism, and I I think you get the idea. If you look at the digital dashboard and you see the numbers ticking upward, over twenty five thousand downloads. In the fast moving, high stakes arena of modern podcasting, that kind of steady and grassroots attention usually brings the corporate sales teams running to my door or anyone's door. The microphones go up, the ad space gets sold, and a spiritual endeavor quickly turns into a commercial enterprise. But if you hit play on this program, you will notice a striking intentional silence where the commercials ought to be. The show has never accepted a single financial advertiser. It's not that I'm against it. It's just that I guess I'm selective. Just recently, the quiet machinery of the marketplace tried to intercede. Two potential investors were parlayed toward this work, here's on his side, of life, looking to open up their checkbooks, but you see, when it came down to the wire, a man's words and his unyielding character in Christ stood squarely in the way, I think. The first investor came from a Roman Catholic group. The advisor was initially accepted by me, but once they took, I think, a closer look at the raw and maybe uncompromising conventions uh convictions spoken into this microphone, well, they understandably pulled back. The fit, I guess, was not right. The second investor came from a Jewish group in Florida, holding out a hand of partnership, but this time it was me, the guy behind the microphone who shook his head on absolute theological principle. I turned the money away, refusing to compromise the message of the gospel, just for a bottom line profit and uh what I saw as a marketing campaign for Israel. The corporate world looks at a move like that, and maybe they call that bad business. They point to the other successful high production podcasts out there, the ones anchored by world class scholars and premier subject matter experts, and they wonder why a small studio like mine wouldn't grab every dollar on the table to compete in a larger listening market. But I'm the guy holding the script, and I don't have any illusions of grandeur where I'm at. And I'll be the first to tell you that I do not possess the flawless expertise of those big market teachers. I don't consider myself worthy of an elite status or a massive commercial platform. I'm just a weathered soldier reading the text. And so I don't look for corporate sponsors to validate my work. Not against it, but I'm selective. I do look to you, to the current listeners who download these daily readings, who sit in the quiet spaces of their lives to let the word of God breathe, and who choose to walk this path together without a salesman anywhere in sight. So thank you for supporting what I think is my mission, for keeping the airwaves a little bit clear of the changing tables, and uh for being the most vital part of the sunny side of life. You may know me perhaps as a voice from the choir loft, or lending a rich baritone to the hymnals. You know me perhaps as the man behind this microphone laboring over a digital audio console to produce the sunny side of life, or the sunny side of life Bible in a year experience podcast, or even the Waldorf Gridiron Club Podcast, or as Mr. B's Dinner Parties Podcast Producer, so that absolutely anyone, anywhere, might hear the word of God breathe into the open air in one way or another. Now I've been a Protestant believer in Jesus Christ for fifty-one years. Can I say that? That's how old I am. I've been showered with a lifetime of unexplainable blessings, opportunities, and gifts that stretch all the way back to my childhood days. I've lent my voice to performances both inside the house of God and out there in the wide secular world under the bright lights of the stage. But if you pull back the curtain on, well, this man's soul, you will find that I am not an icon, no way, and I'm certainly not a celebrity pastor. I'm just a soldier. I'm a man deeply weathered by sin. I'm a soldier, profoundly sometimes disturbed by the shadows of what I may have done in the heat of a broken world's conflicts. I confess with a heavy and I think transparent heart that I am a child of the living God who has been incessantly wasteful of his divine directions. I'm a man who acknowledges his daily battle against the ancient clinging thorns of say gluttony, lust, addiction, and sometimes profane commentary. I know I'm a broken patient standing on the threshold of an ancient hospital entirely in need of major surgery from the master surgeon himself. And yet, despite the weight of my own fractures, I step up to the microphone with a singular, unyielding purpose. I try to speak the truth, not my own truth, mind you, and certainly not the comfortable market tested truths of a consumer culture, but his truth. So, as we begin this deep and sweeping journey through the grand fractures of Christian history today, from the flashy stages of American celebrity to the quiet monastic cells of the Eastern Orthodox saints, I ask only this of you. Forgive me for my sins, and consider all that I'm about to share, and may God bless you and keep you, and give you peace. So let's start with what has been going on in my head for a while. I've been thinking about the saints, not the New Orleans Saints or the Minor League Baseball team to my north, but the actual, honest to God saints. And it turns out I don't know them like I should, and I'm going to guess you don't either. So let's find out why that is. Let's talk about them. You see them on the glossy covers of magazines and flashing across your television screens, and we as a nation have always looked for someone to look up to. We cast our eyes toward Washington, DC, where Barack Obama and Michelle Obama command the heights still to this day of public favor, their polished charisma earning them record breaking runs at the top of the gallop poles. We look across the political aisle to Donald Trump. He's a polarizing lightning rod, who nevertheless holds the fierce, unyielding devotion of many millions. We look to Oprah Winfrey, the billionaire queen of media who built an empire on empathy, or Jimmy Carter, who walked away from the presidency, although unwilling, only to spend a lifetime building houses for the poor, which I think is his greatest accomplishment. And some folks look to Bernie Sanders for some reason, the rumpled senator from Vermont, who did capture the fire imagination of a younger generation. And we look to our past too, to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the twin architects, if you will, of the Republic, and to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, who marched and sat so a nation might stand upright. We marvel at the sheer intellect of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, or the tireless human rights crusades of Eleanor Roosevelt. And when we want to smile, well we turn to the silver screen, trusting the gentle gravity of Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman, the commanding presence of Denzel Washington, and the quiet generosity of Keanu Reeves, or the rhinestone saintly philanthropy philanthropy. Why is that a hard word to say? Nothing other than Dolly Parton, who gave books to millions of children, well, just because she could. God bless Dolly. But mankind does not live by bread or entertainment alone, so we turn now our gaze toward the heavens, seeking spiritual giants. Now in the Protestant and evangelical world, we look for a long time to Billy Graham, the lanky Carolinian who preached to hundreds of millions with an unblemished and scandal free humility. We read the brilliant imaginative apologetics of CS Lewis, or the thunderous nineteenth century prose of the Prince of Preachers Charles Spurgeon. In our own time, some mourned Tim Keller, the urban pastor, who brought a sharp and gracious intellect to the skeptics of New York City. We listened to John Piper, who told them that God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in him, and RC Sprawl, who demanded we reckon with the terrifying holiness of God. We turned to NT Wright to understand the historical Jesus, and to Rick Warren for crying out loud to find a purpose driven life, and to Tony Evans for a powerful, unifying pastoral voice. We tuned our radios to the grandfatherly wisdom of Chuck Swindle and Alistair Begg, marveling at Francis Chan, who walked away from a megachurch to find God in a living room, or Franklin Graham, who turned his father's shadow into a global relief empire called Samaritan's Purse, who we know from previous episodes remains an unaudited entity by anyone. And we drew tears from Joni Ericsson Tada, who from a wheelchair of some fifty some years showed the world what radical endurance looks like. But if you look closely at them all, what do they have in common? Well they are dynamic, they are communicators, they are authors with book deals, broadcasters with microphones, and leaders with massive platforms. They are personalities. Now, contrast that with say where the Roman Catholics look. Oh, they have their modern living figures, to be sure, they look to Pope Leo XIV, the reigning holy father who commands global devotion and tops modern newsmaker favorability polls. They watch the slick YouTube apologetics of Bishop Robert Barron, or follow Cardinal Pier Batista Vizabala, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, who offers himself as a living hostage for peace in a war torn land. They read the conversation and conversion stories of Scott Hahn, listen to the chart topping podcasts of Father Mike Schmitz, or look back at the media pioneers who paved the way, the witty, venerable Fulton J. Sheen, and the indomitable Mother Angelica, who built a global TV network from a cloistered monastery. But for a Catholic, inspiration doesn't stop with the living or the televised. They look to the saints. They look to the Blessed Virgin Mary and her silent, protective spouse, Saint Joseph, as the ultimate archetypes of humility. They admire Saint Francis of Assisi, who threw away his wealth to embrace Sister Poverty, and Saint Teresa of Lesoux. Did I say that right? Lesou? Anyway, she conquered the whole the whole world through her hidden little way of ordinary love. They lean on the towering intellects of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, or the mystical suffering devotion of Saint Padre Pio and Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the monk who stepped out of the starvation line at Auschwitz to die in place of a stranger. And then you turn your eyes to the ancient East, to Orthodox Christianity. Well, here the spotlight of celebrity completely burns out. The Orthodox do not care about charisma or book tours. They look to the Theotokos, the mother of God, who gave her silent assent to the universe's creator. They look to Saint Nicholas of Myra, the ancient defender of the poor, and Saint Seraphim of Serov, the nineteenth century hermit who lived in the brutal Russian woods, greeting visitors with a blinding, resurrected joy. They pray the words of Saint John Chrysostom, whose fourth century liturgy is still spoken every single week. That's the same liturgy for seven hundred years. What? No seventies improvements? The Orthodox reserve their deepest modern admiration for men who hid from the world entirely, the twentieth century elders of Mount Athos, men like Saint Piesos, the Athenite, and Saint Porphyrios, who lived in poverty, offering psychological and spiritual healing to a broken world from a distance. They admire Saint Joseph, the Hesachest, who spent his nights in absolute darkness, weeping and repeating a single prayer to revive a dying monastic mountain. They admire the ones who broke under the weight of history but never bent. Saint Nicarios of Egina, a bishop slandered and exiled by his own church, who chose absolute silence over self-defense. Saint Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who forgave her husband's assassin, became a nun and was thrown down a mineshaft by the Bolsheviks. Saint Luke, the surgeon, who saved lives on the operating table while enduring the frozen hell of the Soviet gulags. And Saint Maria of Paris, the smoking, unconventional nun who saved Jewish children from the Nazis, and willingly walked into a concentration camp gas chamber, so that another woman might live. And for the English speaking world, they looked to the ones who pointed backward, like Metropolitan Callistos Ware, who gently opened the door to the ancient faith, Father Seraphim Rose, who fled secular California to live as a radical ascetic in the mountain forests, Father Thomas Hopco, who parsed the deep mysteries in simple words, and Jonathan Pageot, who uses the digital age to show us that the ancient symbols still hold the keys to reality. You see, the American culture, and even much of the Western religious culture, looks to the loud. We look to the influential, the successful, the powerful, and the charming. We look to people who achieve. But perhaps, just perhaps, we have been looking for inspiration in all the wrong places. Because while the rest of the world celebrates the characteristics of the conqueror, the politician, and the movie star, the ancient traditions look to the characteristics of the broken, the hidden, the suffering, and the small. They look to the saints, the ones who conquered the world by dying to it. You know, we like to think of history as a series of sudden earth-shaking explosions. We look at the great divides of human history and imagine a single day where everything changed. But if you look closely at the story of the Christian church, you find that the grand fractures didn't start with a bang, they started with a slow, silent drift, and a quiet battle over who got to sit in the biggest chair. For the first thousand years the church was a vast, sprawling family of five ancient hubs Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. In the East, well they operated like a council of brothers, a college of bishops where everyone had a voice, but no single man held absolute final authority. They spoke Greek, they thought like philosophers, and they leaned heavily on the shared wisdom of the community. But over in the West, Rome was lonely. Left isolated by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the bishop of Rome, the Pope, had to become more than just a spiritual father. To survive, he had to become a monarch. Rome began to look at the church not as a family of brothers, but as a kingdom, and the king, they argued, sat in Peter's chair right there in Rome. Now the tension simmered for centuries until the summer of ten fifty four, a papal legate marched into the great cathedral of Hegia Sophia in Constantinople, slammed the decree of excommunication onto the altar, and walked out, shaking the dust from his shoes. The East promptly returned the favor. They called it the Great Schism. The Western Church walked away as the Roman Catholic Church, embracing a singular, centralized, imperial identity. The Eastern Church remained the Orthodox, anchoring themselves in ancient liturgy, synods, and the immovable traditions of the early saints. Once Rome cut ties with the Eastern brothers who used to keep her ambitions in check, well that imperial style grew by leaps and bounds, and by the late Middle Ages, the Vatican wasn't just a church. It was legitimately a global superpower. Popes commanded armies, crowned emperors, and lived like Caesars. But heavy is the head that wears the triple tiara, and expensive too. To fund gargantuan building projects like St. Peter's Basilica, the imperial machine turned to a new kind of fundraising the sale of indulgences. They were selling tickets out of purgatory. They were commercializing grace. And what is purgatory? Have you ever wondered? Well, to the modern mind, it sounds like an ancient mystical holding cell, but if you walk into a Roman Catholic church you will find it defined as a dogma of absolute reality. It is, they say, a place or state of final painful purification, a spiritual washing machine where souls that die in a state of grace but are still tracked with the muddy footprints of minor venial sins must go to burn away their worldly attachments before they are pure enough to step into the blinding light of heaven. But if you cross the street to a Protestant chapel or travel east to an Orthodox cathedral, you will find they want absolutely nothing to do with it. To them, it is just an invention. So where did the invention come from? If you open a standard Protestant Bible, you won't find the word purgatory anywhere from Genesis to Revelation. The theological roots Rome points to are the largely tucked away in a book called Second Maccabees, where soldiers offer prayers and sacrifices for the dead. But during the Reformation, the Protestants looked at that book and decided it didn't belong in the divinely inspired canon, so they tossed it out. Rome also points to cryptic words from the apostle Paul about a man's work being tested by fire and as and escaping as through fire. The Eastern Orthodox, it should be noted, have always prayed for the dead, but they drew a hard line at the Catholic version of purgatory. They rejected the idea of a literal subterranean prison of agonizing punitive fire where you had to pay off a legal debt to God. To the Orthodox The afterlife is a journey of ever increasing love and healing, not a divine courtroom. But in the Western Middle Ages, Rome took that legal ledger and ran with it. Purgatory became formalized, and its purpose over time transformed from a comforting hope of mercy into a terrifying instrument of control. You see, the imperial centralized style of the medieval Catholic Church was an expensive operation to run. They needed to fund massive cathedrals, maintain grand papal armies, and build the majestic St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And they realize that nothing opens a peasant's coin purse quite like the agonizing fear that their late grandmother is currently roasting in a purgatorial furnace. Enter the indulgence system, a slick ecclesiastical marketing campaign rolled across Europe. Preachers like Johann Tetzel went town to town with a catchy jingle, as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. They were selling pieces of paper signed by the Pope that promised to shave off thousands of years of purgatorial punishment. And that brings us to october thirty first, fifteen seventeen, when Martin Luther marched up to the church door in Wittenberg and hammered his ninety five dieses into the wood. He wasn't just complaining about bad behavior, he was looking at a profoundly broken character. The these exposed a systemic rot, an imperial church that had weaponized the afterlife, commercialized the free grace of God, and exploited poor, illiterate peasants to fill the Vatican's coffers. Luther asked the biding question, if the Pope has the power to empty purgatory out of holy love, why doesn't he just empty it for free? Why does he only do it for cash? The Reformation was the shattering explosion that followed that question, but remember what happens when you pull down a giant central pillar on any building. When the Protestants completely rejected purgatory and the authority of Rome, they swung the pendulum all the way to the other extreme. They declared sola fide, salvation by faith alone. They rightfully insisted that Christ's sacrifice on the cross was entirely sufficient, requiring no extra prison sentences in the afterlife to finish the job. Yet by cutting out any concept of a post-death process of purification and by abandoning the ancient, slow, demanding monastic pathway of holiness, still preserved by the Orthodox, the Western religious landscape was altered forever. Over the centuries, that revolutionary Protestant zeal began to degrade into what we see in many corners of modern evangelicalism today, a highly consumer driven, hyper individualistic spirituality. In discarding the legalistic terror of Rome's purgatory, many modern churches inadvertently discarded the ancient, serious discipline of deep soul purification altogether. Today, the fiery, soul refining journey toward the visual presence of God has in many places been replaced by comfortable, market tested Sunday morning experience. We ran away from the fear of a corrupt empire's prison and ended up in the casual indifference of a spiritual shopping mall. And that is when a young German monk named Martin Luther looked at the opulence of Rome, looked at his Bible, and realized that the bureaucratic centralized kingdom had lost its soul. In 1517, when he nailed his ninety-five protest to a church door in Wittenberg, he didn't want to shatter the church he came from, he just wanted to clean it up. But the singular imperial authority of Rome didn't bend to criticism. It broke. The Protestant Reformation was born. Luther claimed that every single Christian armed with a Bible could discern the truth for themselves. It was a beautiful and liberating idea. But it carried a hidden unintended side effect. Because I think once you declare that there is no central authority, no pope in Rome, no ancient council of bishops in the East, you have effectively mut every man his own pope. And once you open that door you can never shut it again. Luther fell out with Holdrick Zwingli over the bread and the wine. Zwingli's followers split from the Anabaptists over baptism. John Calvin carved out his own path in Geneva. When the Puritans felt the Church of England wasn't pure enough, they crossed an ocean to start over. And when those groups disagreed, they just crossed the street. The Protestants and evangelicals have spent the last five hundred years in a state of perpetual mitosis. That's the splitting of cells. Today, by some estimates, there are tens of thousands of distinct Protestant denominations and independent evangelical community churches worldwide. If a pastor changes his theology, or if a worship band changes its style, or if a faction of the congregation doesn't quite like a vote on church budget lines, they don't call a council, they print new bulletins, buy a vacant storefront, start a brand new church. They're still looking for that elusive, perfect purity. But if you step back and look at the grand tapestry, you see a striking contrast. The Protestants keep fracturing, chasing the newest, purest interpretation of the text. The Roman Catholics, steered today by figures like Pope Leo XV, maintain their massive, global, highly structured institutional continuity. Yet it is the Eastern Orthodox who have quietly sat in the corner of history, largely untouched by the tectonic shifts here in the West. While the Western world has spent centuries arguing over power and bureaucracy and modern relevance, the Orthodox have spent those same centuries looking backward. They don't look to institutional efficiency or market tested church growth strategies. They certainly aren't reading Rick Warren. They look to the quiet monastic cells of Mount Athos, to the unceasing prayer of the heart, and to the unchanged, ancient steps of the saints. Perhaps the tragedy of the modern seeker is that we have spent centuries looking for inspiration in the loud arguments of reformation and the large mechanics of empire. When the answer was always waiting in the absolute stillness of the desert. It seemed like a minor tweak for a local problem, but as that little word drifted across Europe it became a roaring theological wildfire. When the Eastern Orthodox in Constantinople found out, they were absolutely horrified. To the Orthodox, the Father is the sole majestic source, the fountainhead of the Holy Trinity. By adding the word filioque, they argued Rome was creating a monster with two heads. It demoted the Holy Spirit into a secondary citizen of the Godhead, changing the very nature of God himself. But more than the theology, it was a question of raw imperial authority. The East told Rome you cannot unilaterally rewrite the universal creed of the global church without a council. Rome, swelling with its singular, monarchical style, replied We are the share of Peter. We can do whatever we want. And that tiny word filioque became the ultimate breaking point of the Great Schism of ten fifty four. It was the theological wedge that cracked the Christian world in two, leaving the Roman Catholic Church to rule the West alone, while the Orthodox stood their ancient ground there in the East. If you walk into a modern Protestant or evangelical church today and ask the pastor about the word filioque, you will likely get a blank stare. And that is the great irony. What the vast majority of Protestants and evangelicals do not know is that when Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the later revivalists broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, they took the Filioque with them. When Protestants stand up on Sunday mornings and recite the Nicene Creed, if they ever do, or when they design their modern statement of faith, they're actually using the Roman Catholic version of the Trinity. I thought they broke away from that. They are unconsciously operating under a theological edit made by medieval popes centuries before the Reformation ever began. And the fallout of that blind spot is devastatingly visible in today's constant evangelical degradation. You see, by keeping Rome's filioque, but discarding the Pope, the Protestants inherited the structural flaw without the institutional anchor. The Orthodox always warned that demoting the Holy Spirit in theology would lead to an over reliance on a worldly human apparatus, because if the spirit is secondary, then the church must be run by human organization, corporate marketing, and the sheer charisma of a celebrity pastor. When that human apparatus inevitably fails or fractures, the evangelical world has no ancient, immovable foundation to fall back on. They don't have the rich, experiential, mystical relationship with the Holy Spirit that the Orthodox saints spent lifetimes cultivating in the deserts. Instead, they just have well, they just have an opinion, a Bible, and the right to start a new church down the street. We thought we left Rome's baggage behind at the Reformation, but we kept the very word that broke the church in the first place. And we've been splitting the difference ever since. But the schism over the Filioque was just the beginning. For nearly a century and a half after that fateful day in ten fifty four, the average Christian in the street, well, they didn't really think the church was permanently broken. They figured it was just another messy argument between high ranking politicians and theologians. The East and the West were still talking. They were still trading. But then came the year twelve oh four, and a tragic, bloody nightmare that would seal the fracture in stone. It's called the Fourth Crusade. A great army of Western knights wearing the cross of Christ on their armor set out with the grand intention of liberating Jerusalem from Muslim control. But crusades are expensive things, and the knights found themselves deeply in debt to the merchant kings of Venice. To pay their bills, they allowed themselves to be diverted into a messy, dynastic dispute over the imperial throne over there in Constantinople. When promised payments fell through and tensions boiled over, these Western Roman Catholic soldiers turned their weapons on the greatest Christian city in the world. For three horrifying days during Holy Week, the crusaders sacked Constantinople. And they didn't just loot gold, they desecrated everything the East held sacred. They smashed Orthodox altars, looted ancient icons, and carried off holy relics to enrich Western European cathedrals. They even installed a French nobleman on the throne and forced a Latin patriarch into the grand cathedral of Hegia Sophia. Pope Innocent III was utterly furious, and he excommunicated those crusaders. But the damage was done. And from that moment on, the great schism wasn't just a dispute over a word in the Creed. It was a blood feud. The Byzantine Empire never fully recovered, eventually leaving them weak and vulnerable to the Ottoman conquest that came centuries later. The East learned a bitter lesson, while they could no longer trust the Christian West. Fast forward three hundred years to the 1570s, the Protestant Reformation is in full swing, and the young Lutheran theologians at the University of Tubingen Tubingen? Anyway, some universities with an umlaut are feeling isolated. They have completely broken away from the Roman Catholic Pope, and well now they're looking for an ally. So they look across the map, past Rome, and see the Eastern Orthodox Church, an ancient, massive body of Christians who also happen to dislike the papacy. The Lutherans thought they had found the perfect match. They translated their foundational document, the Augsburg Confession, into Greek and sent it off to Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople, expecting him to well welcome them with open arms. They essentially said, Look, we both reject the Pope, we both reject purgatory, and we want to partner with you. But the alliance failed. It failed completely. And it didn't fail because of logistics, it failed because of the profound difference in how the two sides viewed the very nature of faith. You see, the Protestant reformers assumed the Orthodox were just like them, rebels looking to clean up a corrupt system. But the Orthodox weren't rebels. They weren't looking to reform anything because they firmly believed. They had spent fifteen hundred years flawlessly maintaining the exact faith delivered by the apostles. They didn't want to get dragged into what looked like a domestic political civil war inside Western European Catholicism. Patriarch Jeremias II wrote back several times with immense gentleness and respect, but his theological answers were a bucket of cold water. When the Lutherans explained sola fide, salvation by faith alone, the patriarch shook his head. To the Orthodox, salvation is a lifelong, cooperative, agonizingly beautiful process of transformation. It's not a one time legal transaction. When the Lutherans explained sola scriptura, that every man with a Bible could deduce the truth, the patriarch reminded them that scripture can only be properly understood through the shared historical lens of the early saints and councils. The Orthodox looked at the Protestant reformers and they didn't see an ally. They saw the exact same Western individualistic mindset that had caused Rome to break away in the first place. They realized that while Rome had made the Pope the ultimate authority, the Protestants were simply making every single believer their own pope. By 1581, Patriarch Jeremiah politely asked the Lutherans to stop writing him about doctrine, saying, Go your own way, and do not write to us further on these matters. You see, as has been proven up by history, the Protestants wanted a political revolution. The Orthodox were guarding an eternal repository. And because the Reformers couldn't anchor themselves to that ancient apostolic continuity, the Protestant world was left to drift entirely on its own, leading directly to the dizzying and endless fragmentation and consumer-driven degradation we see in the evangelical landscape today. It is a staggering paradox of the human story. When Christ stood before his disciples, he dropped a line of staggering prophecy. He told them that those who believed in him would go on to do greater works than these. We look at the history of the Western world and see a path of constant expansion, political muscle, and structural division, but if you want to see where the greater works of survival and immovable faith actually happened, well, you have to look into the dark, silent places of the earth. You have to look at the track record of those who never left the Apostolic Foundation. Long before the great fractures of Rome and the Reformation, the earliest Christians discovered that to keep the faith alive, they had to go down. Deep within the dusty volcanic plains of Cappadocia, in what is modern day Turkey, the early church faced the full crushing might of Roman imperial persecution. They didn't build cathedrals, they dug. Thousands of men and women and children carved massive, multi-level cities entirely underground. Places like Durunku dropped nearly three hundred feet into the earth, complete with ventilation shafts, kitchens, stables, and chapels. When the Roman legions marched across the surface looking to wipe out the name of Christ, the early Christians rolled massive circular stone doors shut from the inside. Sound familiar? They survived in the absolute pitch black, singing liturgies in the bowels of the earth, holding fast to the simple, raw truth handed down by the apostles. They knew that the church isn't a building, it's a body. That ancient blueprint of underground survival would be dusted off centuries later, not by the Romans, but by the modern machinery of state atheism. When the Bolsheviks seized power in the 20th century, launching the Soviet Union into decades of militant communism, they set out to completely dismantle the Russian Orthodox Church. They dynamited the great cathedrals, melted down the golden bells, and slaughtered thousands of priests and monks and bishops. But the Orthodox didn't bend. They went right back into the catacombs. A vast network known as the Catacomb Church formed in the shadows. Holy Communion was smuggled into Soviet gulags by doctors using tiny raisins and drops of wine. Secret liturgies were whispered in dark apartments and deep forests, while the secret police prowled the streets. For seventy years the Soviet Empire tried to bury them. But when the Soviet Union finally collapsed into the dustbin of history, the Orthodox emerged from the shadows, their ancient liturgies completely unchanged. The Empire was gone, but the church. The church remained. And that brings us to the heartbreaking reality of our world today, I think. Many Western Christians are completely unaware that some of the oldest, most continuous apostolic communities on the face of the earth reside where? In Palestine. The very dirt where Christ walked. And right now, the descendants of those ancient Christians are enduring an agonizing crucible. In the Gaza Strip, the historic community of the Gazan Christians, the vast majority of whom are Greek Orthodox, has shrunk to a fragile remnant of just a few hundred souls. Surrounded by intense geopolitical conflict and facing strict blockade and military operations, they have refused to leave. When the bombs began to fall, they didn't flee. They huddled inside the compound of Saint Porphyro Saint Porforius. Saint Porfurius, can I say it? Yes, they huddled inside the compound of Saint Porfurius, the oldest active house of worship there in Gaza. Dates back to the fifth century, that's around, you know, the four hundreds. Even when an airstrike struck the church compound, claiming the lives of eighteen Christians that were sheltering within its ancient walls, the priests and the faithful stayed put. Under extreme deprivation, facing a severe lack of food and clean water, and living under constant evacuation orders, the Orthodox leadership in Jerusalem issued a defiant statement, our clergy and our nuns will not leave. We will stay and care for the vulnerable. You see, the West has spent its history chasing influence, building empires, and endlessly fracturing into thousands of competing denominations over modern relevance and style. But while the West walked a path of institutional power and subsequent division, the Orthodox have spent two thousand years practicing the greater work of simply standing still under fire. From the deep dark caves of Turkey to the secret catacombs of the Soviet Union to the battered ancient stones of Gaza today, they have proven that empires rise, empires fall, kings lose their own crowns. But the faith of the apostles thrive best when it is buried in the dirt. You see, things on your television screens, you read it in the headlines, the baffling, tragic tale of two entirely different worlds claiming the exact same name. In the ancient East, the concepts of survival, struggle, and asceticism are not just historical footnotes, well, they are the very oxygen of orthodoxy. To an Orthodox Christian, the church was never designed to be a country club for the righteous, it was built from the dirt up to be a hospital for the broken, and we're all broken. They look at the human condition through a sobering lens that our hearts are deeply fractured by sin, entirely incapable of scaling the heights to know God by our own raw intellect or willpower. And so the saints they revere are not the smooth talking or the highly successful, they are the ones who spent lifetimes in the punishing desert, fasting, weeping, and enduring a lifelong spiritual war, not to escape suffering, but to let suffering burn away the ego until nothing was left but Christ. But then you look at us here in the West. Somewhere along the line, the Western religious machine walked away from the hospital and decided to open a shopping mall. We didn't want the struggle, we wanted the solution. We didn't want asceticism for crying out loud, we wanted abundance. And today, we see the bizarre spectacle of modern mega ministries demanding bigger churches, luxury estates, and private jets for their pastors, masking raw corporate greed under the guise of divine favor. We've taken a faith based on we've we've taken a faith that it's based on self-denial and flipped it on its head into a multi billion dollar merchant's changing table, catering entirely to our own selfish comfort and psychological validation. And nowhere is that Western disconnect more glaringly, tragically obvious than in our geopolitical blind spots. For decades, vast swathes of Western evangelicism, evangelicalism have poured unconditional billions of dollars and fierce political support into modern political structures right there in the Middle East. They do so while completely blind to the reality on the ground, ignoring how the ancient living stones of Christianity, the Orthodox, and the Catholic faithful who have lived in Palestine since the days of the apostles are being systematically squeezed out. Even when the ancient church of Saint Porphyreus in Gaza was struck, or when the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem issued desperate joint statements warning that military enforced mass displacement of civilians is nothing less than a death sentence, the response from many affluent Western pulpits was a deafening indifferent silence. We fiercely back a system that holds a deep historic theological hostility toward ancient Christianity while turning our backs on our own suffering brothers and sisters who are currently keeping the liturgies alive under fire. You see, we in the West traded the hard, slow, ancient path of soul purification for a transactional, customized religion of prosperity. We demanded a God who satisfies our desires, funds our private aircraft, and fits neatly into our modern political alignments. But while the West continues to play in the marketplace of consumer driven Christianity, the bleeding remnant in the East clinging to the crumbling stones of Gaza and the quiet monastic cells of the world reminds us what the church was always meant to be. It's not a platform for the powerful. It's a refuge for the wounded. Well, I think I've laid bare the deep heavy hache the heavy ache of the modern Western seeker. Hopefully I've illuminated the exact point where the heart begins to grieve for what was lost in the translation of faith across the centuries. You look back at the Puritan roots, the solemnity of a faith that genuinely feared God and sought his truth in the pages of Scripture. You know, I, like so many of us, admired the modern evangelical icons who spoke with such passion and clarity, but then you know I sat in the pew, I stood in the choir loft, and I lent my baritone voice to the music only to look down and realize that something fundamental had shifted. We sit down for liturgy, if we get it at all, treating the Word of God like a lecture to be studied, a classroom assignment. And then we stand up to sing, mistaking emotional stimulation and a well-rehearsed production for the ancient, terrifying, and beautiful act of true worship. The choir and the praise band, with the best of intentions, of course, end up standing right in the way of the altar, eclipsing the vision of Christ. The church becomes an auditorium, the altar becomes a stage, the congregation becomes an audience, and the pastors stop being shepherds and become pontificators. They're no longer checking wounds in a hospital, they're grading performances from a podium. Let me ask this abiding question. When did we stop seeking our own spiritual healing and start stacking ourselves by unsubstantiated points against our neighbors? When did we replace the grueling humble work of deep soul purification with a transactional ledger of moral superiority? I think we know the answer. We've pierced through five hundred years of historical smoke to find the exact origin of the flame. We're taught in the West that the spirit of protest began right there in 1517 when Martin Luther's hammer hit that door. But you see, the deeper truth Martin Luther was actually not the first Protestant. The first true Protestant, the first one to stand up and declare that a singular human will could override the historic collective consensus of the global church. Well, that was the Bishop of Rome in 1054. When the Pope decided that he knew better than the ancient college of his brother bishops, when he unilaterally claimed the absolute right to rewrite the universal creed with the Filioque and demand absolute submission to a single earthbound throne, he introduced the virus of division into the Western world. He established the devastating precedent that if you have enough power, enough influence, or enough conviction, you have the right to break the family apart to get your way. And once that imperial unilateral mindset was unleashed in the West, it became an inescapable genetic defect in all of us. Martin Luther didn't invent the idea of breaking away, he simply inherited it from the very Rome he was fighting. He looked at a corrupt system, decided he knew better, and fractured the West again. And then his followers decided they knew better than Luther. And they fractured it further. When we threw out the ancient apostolic accountability preserved to this day by the Orthodox, the shared wisdom of the saints, the humility of the desert, and a liturgy designed entirely to look toward God rather than at a performer, we made ourselves the ultimate arbiters of truth. We abandoned our humility because, in a tragic paradox, when we rejected the Pope in Rome, we didn't eliminate the papacy, because we all became popes. We became the absolute monarchs of our own private theological kingdom, sitting in judgment over our own congregations, our pastors, and our neighbors. We traded the slow, painful healing of the hospital for the self-righteous comfort of the courthouse, and we've been dividing the set the settlement ever since. Join us today as we listen in on a conversation between Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley while they fish together in a nice little pond in heaven.
SPEAKER_01You know who can fish the best.
SPEAKER_04Who?
SPEAKER_01Scandinavians.
SPEAKER_04I knew you were gonna say that.
SPEAKER_01I'm kind of a big deal in Scandinavia.
SPEAKER_05Yes, Martin, we know.
SPEAKER_04I see you've got a new tackle box, Coleman.
SPEAKER_05Indeed, Wesley. I've arranged it in four orders based on the type of fishing I'm doing.
SPEAKER_04I've also arranged my tackle box, but in quadrants.
SPEAKER_01Anyone for some music? Ah, I appreciate music. You know, you can thank me for improving the music in our churches.
SPEAKER_04Thank you, of course. But I did write seven rules on how to sing in church.
SPEAKER_05Of course you did, Wesley. Martin, how's Katie?
SPEAKER_01Oh, we are still so happy. Isn't marriage wonderful? Well, yes, I mean, you two never really got past the honeymoon phase. Well, it was a new experience. I was a priest. She was a nun. Good times.
SPEAKER_05Yes, that is my best friend. Never had a hindrance to me, but widows, hey John Wesley.
SPEAKER_04Well, with Molly, uh she comes and goes. Hey Martin, did you hear about the lawyer who tried to sue his way into heaven?
SPEAKER_05Haha, another lawyer joke. Heard it.
SPEAKER_04Really, Martin? It's barely noon. What?
SPEAKER_01I'm German. Besides, give me a break. After all, I started this Reformation stuff.
SPEAKER_04Oh, really? Hey, look, is that Jan Hoost? What? Where? Haha, come on.
SPEAKER_01Oh, very funny. What are you using for bait, Wesley?
SPEAKER_04Spicy cheese.
SPEAKER_01Hmm. How about you, Martin? Worms, of course. I believe a fish prefer a diet of worms.
SPEAKER_04Hey, Martin.
SPEAKER_01Will you share your bait with me?
SPEAKER_04Yes, Martin. Indulge him.
SPEAKER_01Oh, please. Take what you want.
SPEAKER_04Oh, in that case, I might as well change my bait. If you're gonna be generous.
SPEAKER_01Well, as you say, Wesley, free in all and free for all.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and thank you for bringing flowers to our fishing trip, Kelvin.
SPEAKER_05You're welcome, my favorite. Tools. Oh look.
SPEAKER_04Oh, I feel my heart strangely warmed. You alright? I I guess. I think it might be some of that spicy cheese I ate. Fuck um bad.
SPEAKER_05Ah, the human heart. It is a perpetual idol factory.
SPEAKER_01While humans are prone to sin. It is the world in which we live. It's probably better to change bait occasionally anyway. Keep things fresh.
SPEAKER_05Speaking of cheese, anyone for a sandwich? I've brought some, I've made them myself, and as you know, the bread is delicious. Not one for crackers, Calvin?
SPEAKER_04Ah, here we are. A nice big night crawler for Mr. Luther or my hook.
SPEAKER_05Oh, that could be the one, Wesley.
SPEAKER_04Yes, like a brand plucked from the fire.
SPEAKER_01Why that one?
SPEAKER_04Why not?
SPEAKER_01Calvin, is it true you gave over 200 sermons on Deuteronomy?
SPEAKER_05I like to work things from beginning to end. Very thorough.
SPEAKER_01That must have been incredibly boring for the church. It was, uh, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_05They suffered through it, though.
SPEAKER_04Well, as I say, to E. Because condemned, no man is in a state of salvation.
SPEAKER_01This from the best loved man in England.
SPEAKER_04Oh, I think I've got a bite.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's it.
SPEAKER_04Reel it in. Oh, I do love fishing just like the old days.
SPEAKER_05That's so much fun to bring in the catchy.
SPEAKER_04The actors have always been my preferred cattle.
SPEAKER_01Easy now. Bring him in.
SPEAKER_05Oh, that's a big one, Leslie. It was the bait. The bait made the difference. Oh, come on. That fish had to bite. What?
SPEAKER_01The bait was the a gift. The fish did not deserve it.
SPEAKER_04Luther just grabbed the net.
SPEAKER_01Oh man, how is it? I can't reach it from here.
SPEAKER_04Well move, Luther.
SPEAKER_01Here I stand. I can do no other. Fine. There it is.
SPEAKER_04That bait.
SPEAKER_05Oh my, what a beautiful fish.
SPEAKER_01Indeed. It was the free bait.
SPEAKER_05Luther! God clearly sent that fish to the hook.
SPEAKER_04Gentlemen, this fish still had to choose to bite.
SPEAKER_01Hmm.
SPEAKER_04Fair enough. Honestly, Luther.
SPEAKER_01Shall we throw it back? Are you crazy? Just kidding. Who's for a shore lunch?
SPEAKER_04Well, I am. Me too.
SPEAKER_06You know, we like to blame Sunday football, which colonized the autumn afternoons of the American psyche in the mid twentieth century, demanding that the pews be emptied before the one PM kickoff. But the truth, I think, runs deeper and further back than that. The one hour boundary didn't start with the NFL, it started with the industrialization of the human soul. When the industrial revolution strapped the clock to the human wrist, we began to view time not as a gift from the creator, but as a commodity to be managed. In the second century, the early Christians stood for three hours or more, lost in the mystery of the Eucharist. But when the Western mind adopted the corporate, efficient model of the assembly line, we applied it to God. We demanded a predictable, market tested schedule. We told the Holy Spirit he had exactly one hour to move because the cafeteria lines were filling up and the parking lot needed to be cleared out, and I have dinner in the oven at home. And when did we decide that our modern emotionalized music was more important than the liturgy? Well the early church lived and breathed the Psalms. The Psalms were the music, but they were music anchored entirely to the structural, scriptural word of God. The liturgy was designed to tell a story, the story of Christ's sacrifice and man's deep need for healing. But somewhere, somewhere along the line, the Western merchants table realized that emotion sells better than introspection. We swapped the slow, heavy scriptural weights of the ancient liturgy for high production sentimental anthems. We decided that if a song didn't give us goosebumps, well it wasn't worship at all, completely forgetting that the primary purpose of sacred music was never to entertain the congregation, but to humble them before the throne of God. And what about the Sabbath itself? When did we decide businesses should be open on Sundays? We tell ourselves it started out of pure necessity when we needed gas in our tanks to get to church or medicine from the pharmacy. But necessity quickly morphed into convenience, and convenience degenerated into outright consumerism. We dismantled the ancient blue laws that once kept the culture quiet on the Lord's Day. We decided that the economy couldn't afford to rest, and in doing so, we turned the day of holy stillness into just another day to buy, sell, and consume. And then and then came the youth sporting tournaments. We look at families spending their Sunday mornings sitting on folding chairs by a soccer field or a baseball diamond instead of sitting in a church pew and we wonder when did this shift happen? It happened the exact moment we quit keeping Sundays holy. Once that day was no longer set apart as sacred ground, it became empty real estate on the calendar, and the world is always looking for some empty real estate. The secular machine realized that if the parents didn't prioritize the altar, well the children would easily prioritize the trophy. And you see, there will be no quick relief from this spiritual division that began when Rome walked away from the Apostolic Council in 1054. When the West chose the path of unilateral innovation, it set off a chain reaction of individualism that has never stopped splintering. And it won't. We broke the ancient accountability, we turned the hospital into a theater, and we traded the grueling, beautiful struggle of ascetic holiness for the casual comfort of modern convenience. We have carved out a Christianity that fits neatly into our schedules, accommodates our sports, and funds our lifestyles, and we will continue down this road of endless division and compromise, step by comfortable step, until the world is completely deceived by the great adversary himself, convinced that we can serve both God and our own selfish needs. Well, those saints didn't have book deals, they didn't have microphones, and they certainly didn't have private jets. When the ancient church looked for leaders, they looked to the dark, quiet places of the earth for men and women who knew how to die to themselves so that others might live. If you want to understand what the greater works of the apostles actually look like, you have to bypass the stadium stages of the West, and look at the witnesses who gave absolutely everything they had to advance the faith. Consider Saint Polycarp of Smyrna, a direct disciple of the Apostle John. When the Roman Procouncil demanded that he curse Christ to save his own skin, the eighty-six-year-old bishop refused to budge, declaring, eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. He was burned at the stake, selling his pastoral ministry, sealing his pastoral ministry, rather, with his own blood. Consider Saint Anthony the Great, a wealthy young Egyptian who heard a single gospel verse, walked out of his mansion, gave every penny of his vast inheritance to the poor, and fled deep into the barren desert. He spent decades in absolute solitude and starvation battling the demons of the mind to pioneer the monastic hospital that would save the soul of the empire. Consider Saint Basil the Great. A brilliant academic who used his immense family wealth not for luxury but to build the Basiliad, the world's very first massive complex of free hospitals, poor houses, and hospices, literally feeding the starving with his own hands during a brutal famine while defending the true doctrine of the Trinity. Consider Saint Nina of Georgia, a young woman armed with nothing but a cross made of grapevine tied together with her own hair. She walked alone into the pagan wilds of the Caucasus Mountains, enduring freezing wilderness and fierce hostility, eventually converting an entire kingdom to Christ through her radical humility and prayers. I'm always amazed at the number of feminine saints in the Orthodox tradition. Here we are in modern America complaining about the alleged patriarchy, and you look to the saints in the Orthodox Church and find half of them to be women starting with the Virgin Mary. Get over yourself. Stop trying to figure out if you're a Martha or a Mary for crying out loud, as if they're the only two choices your your fate has provided. Not current enough for you, Joel Ostein worshippers? Fine. Consider Jane Saint John of San Francisco, a modern twentieth century bishop, who rarely slept on a bed, walked barefoot through the streets of Shanghai and California, and spent his nights scouring the darkest slums to rescue hundreds of abandoned orphans, feeding them and keeping the liturgy alive while enduring intense slander from inside his own church. Or consider St. Elizabeth, the new martyr, a Grand Duchess of Russia. After an assassin's bomb blew her husband to pieces, she visited the killer in his cell to offer him forgiveness, sold all her royal jewels, founded a convent dedicated to the poor, and was ultimately thrown alive down a dark mine shaft by the Bolsheviks, singing hymns to the very end. And consider Saint Cosmos of Aatolia, a monk who saw his homeland suffering under dark centuries of Ottoman oppression. He left the safety of Mount Athos to travel on foot through hundreds of remote villages, establishing over two hundred free Christian schools to keep the faith and language alive before being betrayed and strangled by Ottoman authorities. Or consider St. Herman of Alaska. Yes, I said Alaska, a humble monk who traveled across the globe from Russia to the frozen brutal wilderness of Kodiak Island. He spent his life defending the native Alaskan people from the cruel exploitation of fur traders living in a tiny wooden cell, eating nothing but a meal of moss and berries, and bringing the light of Christ through pure, unadulterated love. And let's consider St. Luke the surgeon. I mentioned him before, a world-class scientist who pioneered modern field surgery. Even when the Soviet regime threw him into the frozen hell of Siberian exile and tortured him for his priesthood, he refused to operate without an icon of the Virgin Mary on the wall, saving the lives of thousands of his captors while wearing his bishop's robes beneath his surgical gown. Or how about St. John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople? He possessed the greatest rhetorical mind of his age, but he used his golden tongue to denounce the decadent luxury of the imperial court and defend the poor. Stricken with illness, he was marched on foot through a scorching desert into exile by the Empress, dying in the dirt with the words Glory to God for all things. And then there's Saint Maria of Paris, an unconventional nun in Nazi occupied France, she turned her convent into a refugee house, smuggled Jewish children out of the city in garbage cans, and when she was finally caught and sent to the Ravensbrook concentration camp, she willingly took the place of another prisoner, walking into the gas chamber, so that a stranger might live. And also, Saint Paisos, the Athenite, who lived in a tiny primitive stone hut on Mount Athos with no electricity or running water. Stricken with agonizing cancer, he spent his final years standing for hours in the freezing cold, listening to the heartbreaks of thousands of pilgrims who lined up at his gate, taking their spiritual illnesses onto himself until his very last breath. But seriously, go on celebrating your favorite housewife, politician, actor, or sports hero. I'm sure they've done the same things for Christ as these twelve examples have. Come on. You see, when when the Western world spent the last millennium sprinting down a path of endless innovation, tinkering with the creed via the filioque, splintering into tens of thousands of competitive Protestant denominations, reducing worship to an hour-long musical stadium concert and surrender trading the Lord's Day to youth sports and corporate convenience, something extraordinary was happening in the East. They just stood still. The Eastern Orthodox Church has not changed its baseline since Peter, Paul, and the other apostles held office. If a Christian from the fourth century were to step into an Orthodox divine liturgy today, they would not find a theater or a lecture hall or a business venue. They would find home. Despite all the modern interruptions, noise, and compromises of the Western world, the Orthodox Church still smells the exact same way it did when the temple was dedicated. Thick, with a heavy, sweet smoke of frankincense. It sounds the same, anchored entirely to the unadorned, haunting beauty of human voices chanting the ancient scripture without a spotlight, a guitar, or a performer anywhere in sight. It still feels the exact same pangs of hunger, with the faithful regularly fasting from meat and dairy for nearly half the calendar year, refusing to let the modern refrigerator dictate the discipline of the soul. And yet this ancient fortress of apostolic continuity remains quietly shadowed, completely misunderstood by millions of modern Western Christians who think worship is something well something you watch, something you buy, or something you schedule between the morning soccer game and the afternoon kickoff. We here in the West built an empire of religious convenience, but we lost the mystery of the altar. We created thousands of new wings. Ways to speak about God, but we forgot how to sit in his presence in absolute stillness. The Orthodox didn't chase the culture. They didn't chase the market, and they didn't chase the clock. They just kept the fire burning in the desert. It's a quiet, haunting truth, I think, of our modern age. We look at the list of those twelve towering souls, men and women who lived in caves, face-down executioners, gave up massive fortunes, and walked barefoot into the freezing wilderness just to hold open the doors of heaven for a broken world. They are part of a cloud of witnesses that stretches back two thousand years, numbering in the thousands, and yet if you walk into the average Protestant or evangelical church today and say the names of St. Polycarp or Saint Anthony or Saint Nina, you'll be met with absolute silence. They don't know who they are. So you have to ask yourself, how did we manage to lose our own family history? Well, the answer I think is as simple as it is tragic. When the Western Reformation fractured away from Rome, the early reformers were so desperate to strip away the corrupt imperial abuses of the medieval Catholic machine that they threw the baby out with a bathwater. In their zeal to get rid of the Pope and the sale of indulgences, they entirely scrubbed the calendar. They dismantled the shrines, whitewashed the walls, and stopped telling the stories of the saints. By cutting themselves off from that ancient continuous lineage, the very timeline preserved by the Eastern Orthodox Church, the modern Western Christian, was left with a massive, empty void in their spiritual imagination, and human nature absolutely abhors a vacuum. We are hardwired by our Creator to look up. We are designed to admire, to emulate, and to seek out heroes. So when we stopped looking at the saints, we had to find someone else to put on that pedestal. And that brings us right back to the beginning of our conversation, to the modern, glossy list of America's most admired people, because we no longer have the eyes to see the quiet, hidden beauty of an aesthetic monk or a self-sacrificing martyr. Where would we even find him? We've become woefully, devastatingly misguided, I think, in our admiration for the wrong people. We look to Washington, D.C. and throw our emotional energy into political gladiators like Barack Obama or Donald Trump, forgetting that political empires are just they're just sand castles waiting for the tide. We look to the media elite like Oprah and or the silver screen to marvel at the charm of Tom Hanks or Morgan Freeman, mistaking a well-delivered script for a well-lived soul. Even within our own Western churches, we look to the modern corporate icons, to pastors with private aircraft, best-selling book deals, and massive digital platforms. We have been conditioned by a loud and consumer-driven culture to admire the characteristics of the achiever. We admire power, we admire wealth, we admire fame, charisma, and institutional success. But if you look at the track record of the human heart, you realize we are harvesting a crop of deep spiritual malnutrition. We are looking to the wrong people for our inspiration. We look to politicians who cannot save us, entertainers who cannot heal us, and celebrity teachers who cannot give us peace. While the real giants of human history, the saints, well, they're just completely ignored. We choose to stay blind to a treasury of thousands of souls from whom we could garner a vastly greater wealth of spiritual knowledge and worth. You see, the Western world teaches us to look up at a stage, but the ancient apostolic faith of the Orthodox reminds us that to find true worth we have to look back at the altar and down into the dust of humility. We don't need another political savior. There's no such thing anyway, another stadium, concert, or another charismatic pontificator. Look who's talking. We need to remember the ones who conquered the world by completely dying to it, the ones who traded the brief flickering applause of men for the eternal and quiet whisper of God. It's been a long and winding road through the centuries, a journey across blood-soaked battlefield trenches through deep, dark catacombs, and right up into the crowded parking lots of our modern Western churches. We have pulled back the curtain on the great fractures of history, and we are left standing face to face with the sobering reality of what we have done to the faith of our fathers. We look at the endless, dizzying landscape of modern Christianity and the illusions. Well, they begin to shatter. And so we know we are not. We are not individual popes. We have to finally confess that the great experiment of individual autonomy, the rebellious Western idea that every single believer with a Bible and an opinion can sit on a private theological throne has harvested nothing but chaos. We were never meant to be the absolute monarchs of our own private faith. We know the church has never stopped dividing, and that by the very verse and Christ's own words, a house divided cannot stand. We look at the tens of thousands of competing denominations and endless church splits over budget lines and worship styles and pastoral personalities, and we realize we are living inside a tragedy. The fracturing that began when Rome walked away from the Apostolic Council in 1054 didn't bring us closer to the truth. It tore the garment of Christ to pieces. We know that what we are doing on Sundays is upside down and wrong, whether it's in the pews standing for the most popular contemporary music, or on the field or court at our kids' game. We've replaced the slow and grueling, beautiful work of deep soul purification with an hour-long entertainment production designed to give us goosebumps. Or we have abandoned the altar completely to sit on folding chairs by a soccer field chasing a temporary trophy on the one day set apart as sacred ground. We have turned the Lord's Day into a merchant's changing table of convenience and self-interest. But beneath all the noise, the fracture, and the commercialized exhaustion of the modern Western landscape, the ancient hospital, it's still open. We know that there is a place to rest our human heart, broken and always in need of surgery from the master surgeon himself, Jesus Christ. That place doesn't have a spotlight, a guitar, a celebrity preacher with a book tour. It's an immovable repository of faith that still smells of ancient frankincense, still sounds like the haunting, unadorned chanting of the Psalms, and still measures time by the slow, demanding steps of the apostles. It is a place where the church is not a theater, but a refuge for the wounded, guarded by the timeless wisdom of thousands of hidden, self-denying witnesses. And so we are left at the ultimate crossroads of the soul. The question hangs heavily in the air, refusing to be managed by our busy schedules or our comfortable routines. Will we sit and wait? Will we surrender to an ancient true form of worship and veneration of true saints, committing ourselves to an education of truly valuable Christian souls as a regular, daily part of our lives, allowing their radical sacrifice to reshape our broken hearts? Or will we continue on this broad and comfortable path of self-popishness, endlessly dividing, endlessly consuming, and endlessly looking for inspiration on a stage until the world is completely deceived? Good news. The choice is ours. But history has already shown us where the roads lead. You might wonder how a person trapped in the frantic, exhausting wheel of the modern West can actually slow down enough to breathe the air of this ancient, immovable faith. It seems like a mountain too high to climb, but the secret to the ancient path is that it does not demand you climb the mountain all at once. It just simply asks you to change what you look at when you open your eyes in the morning. And it begins with the Synoxarion. That's the daily lives of the saints. Synaxarion. You see, you don't need a degree in theology to start. You don't need to read a massive leather bound volume or several volumes before the sun comes up each day. To begin reading the daily lives of the saints, you simply incorporate it into the very first moments of your day. Instead of reaching for your smartphone to check the morning headlines, the latest political drama, or the sports scores, you reach for the memory of the cloud of witnesses. You look up a date on the calendar, and you read the beef the brief not the beef, the brief, poignant story of the saint who stood their ground on this exact day centuries ago. By reading just one story a day, tasting the sacrifice of Saint Polycarp, the quiet endurance of Saint Herman, or the radical love of Saint Maria of Paris, you slowly begin to reeducate your soul. You reset your spiritual baseline. You begin to replace our culture's misguided admiration for politicians and performers and celebrity pastors with a deep and quiet respect for the ones who actually knew how to heal the human heart. But reading about the hospital, well, that's it's not the same. It's not the same thing as stepping inside. Tell if you take that step, if you want to, you can go directly to the digital doorstep of the ancient church. They have a digital doorstep. The Orthodox Church in America has laid out a complete spiritual treasury online. By visiting the official Orthodox Church in America website, the link will be in the show notes if you want it. You are given immediate free access to the OCA Daily Scripture Readings and Service Texts. There you will find the unchanging daily prayers, the scripture readings, and the full liturgical text for the Divine Liturgy, Mateens, and Vespers mapped out day by day. If your local schedule doesn't allow you to step inside a physical building, you can even connect with various parishes through the OCA live stream directory to watch and listen to those ancient services breathe into the air in real time. And if you do this, if you step away from the one hour commercialized productions of modern Christianity, if you close the book on the self-centered prosperity gospels, and instead anchor your morning to the ancient scripture, the sweet smoke of the liturgy and the memory of the true saints, an extraordinary thing I think will happen. The chaos of the modern world will begin to fade into the background. The anxiety of our endless divisions will lose its grip on your mind. You will find that your heart, broken and in need of the master surgeon, is finally resting in a hospital that has never closed its doors. It won't just change your routine, it will completely reorient your soul. It will become, I promise you, the sunny side of your life.
SPEAKER_07When the shadows fall and doubts begin to creep, remember together we're strong every week. Lift your neighbor up with kindness every day. Let your actions speak the words you want to say.
SPEAKER_06The sunny side of life is a weekly production about our life on the family farmstead here in Iowa, the liberties we prize, and the pursuits which make us happy. None of this is possible, of course, without Christ in our lives. For the Lord God is our stomach and our shield.
