You Cannot Give What You Do Not Have – Christ in Us and Others

In this sermon, Sub Dn Timothy Grace explores Christ’s call to serve others—not merely through outward charity, but from a heart truly filled with His presence. Drawing from St. Paul, St. Simeon the New Theologian, and the Orthodox tradition, he challenges us to first nurture Christ within ourselves before we can offer Him to others. A deep reflection on love, humility, and the true meaning of Christian charity.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the life of an English teacher, there are some books that just keep coming back again and again and will probably continue until the end of time. One is "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, and I can see smiles just spreading across everyone's faces with beautiful memories of Year 9 English, studying that book about an unjust trial of a black man in 1930s America. There's a scene that's always stuck with me, or always sticks with me when I teach it again, and that's when a ladies' missionary society is meeting, discussing the poverty and the plight of a poor African tribe, ironically unaware of their own lack of love and charity for the suffering people around them in their own town. Harper Lee is not alone in criticizing such an endeavor. Christian history, sadly, has many instances of people reading gospel passages like what we have today and wanting to help the poor but not really having the right motive or focus or foundation.

So how do we face such a demanding message as what we have today in our Gospel reading? How do we interpret Christ's words and put them into action? I'd like to focus on a number of different levels that we can do so today, in particular bringing in the writings of a particular saint, St. Simeon the New Theologian, to help us understand it.

The first way that we can really understand these words is just on face value, right? There's a connection to the letter of St. Paul in this, and he gives a really practical example. He says if I'm going to offend anyone by my behavior, then I just won't do that particular action. We might immediately say, "Well, I have the right. I have the right to act a certain way," and he preempts us thinking this by saying that he, as an apostle who, moreover, has had a vision of Christ himself, has every right to do whatever he pleases, and he could really lean on this status, but he doesn't. He says even that he will never eat meat if it would wound his brother—meat that has been offered to idols. You know, this flies in the face of current thinking around this. We think, "Well, I have the right. I have the right to express myself. I have the right to my opinion. I have a right to do as I please, to talk how I like, to dress how I choose, and if people have a problem with that, well, then that's their problem. It's not my problem," right? St. Paul says that when we behave like this, we've actually stopped acting in love. If we know that someone's spiritual equilibrium is going to be threatened by our freedom and we act regardless, he goes so far as to say that we can destroy our brother—that's his word. He echoes Christ's words in the gospel by saying that in acting this way towards others, we're really acting this way towards Jesus Christ himself.

But how do we get to a place where we act like this? I don't know about you, but I very infrequently think that I'm acting towards Christ when I interact with other people. Almost never does that cross my mind. So what does it truly mean to fulfill these words? Here, I'd like to turn to a teaching by St. Simeon the New Theologian, a saint who lived at the turn of the first millennium, and we're looking at his discourse number nine on works of mercy. He states that accomplishing these words of Christ means more than just satisfying the bodily needs of other people. He says that St. Mary of Egypt wouldn't be saved if all we had to do was give food to the poor and give water to the thirsty, and so on. He says not only did she not feed the hungry or clothe the naked, but she even led thousands to their own destruction, right? So are we to reach the absurd notion that St. Mary of Egypt was not saved? Well, of course not. So there must be something deeper taking place.

We remind ourselves that Christ was not merely a philanthropist of charity in the good that he did, taking care only of people's bodily needs, but he always went deeper. He was concerned for people's spiritual lives. He healed but also forgave sins. He gave bread to the masses but also fed them spiritually. So did the apostles, and so did the saints throughout the ages. Their work in doing good to others' material needs went hand in hand with feeding people spiritually. Actually, on this point, St. Simeon turns this whole notion of giving physical things to others on its head. He says that all things have been given by God for all humanity to enjoy, but us, in our greed and in our selfishness, have turned things into our own possessions—what belongs to me, what I own. So we think that we own things, that we own money, that we own these possessions—they belong to us. Then we approach charity as giving a bit out of our abundance, but the rest is really ours. Or we might give food and drink to the poor sometimes but give these things to ourselves all the time, and the mindset is the same: all these things are mine, and I'll do a good thing now and then to satisfy my conscience. St. Simeon says that that should not be the type of thinking that we have as Christians. Rather, we should see all that we have as God's, and he says cheerfulness consists in not regarding these things as our own but as entrusted to us by God for the benefit of our fellow servants. So we should by all means distribute our goods whenever possible as a way to provide a corrective to our covetousness.

He arrives ultimately at where we should truly be: so filled with God that all of our actions, all of our words, all of our presence—and not just when we're "doing a charitable deed"—but all of these things fill other people. That can be in a material but ultimately a spiritual sense, that the Christ that is present in us gives spiritual food and drink to the hungry Christ in others, that the Christ in us gives spiritual clothing to the naked Christ in them, that the Christ in us sets free the Christ in them, that the Christ in us visits the abandoned Christ in them. Think of how uplifting, life-giving, and encouraging it is to be in the presence of a truly holy person, a truly loving person. One is edified, one is uplifted, one can, in fact, have their entire life changed by contact with one whole person. They can bring what is dead in you to life.

This is where we see the gift that St. Mary of Egypt gives us, right? We read her story, and a part of us is fed, a part of us is filled and satisfied. We read her story, and a part of us that was naked is then covered—maybe our shame. We read her story, and a part of us was visited, a part of us was in shackles and imprisoned and was set free. Now, she can do this because she had Christ in her, and we can only do this if we have Christ in us as well. So we must have Christ before we can give Christ to the Christ in other people.

St. Simeon then says our first task, therefore, is to feed the hungry Christ in our own souls and clothe the naked Christ in our own souls. He says this: it is by fulfilling his commandments that we usually feed our Master and God, the Lord of all. For our holy fathers tell us that just as the demons are fed by our evil deeds and so prevail against us, so when we abstain from evil, they become weak through starvation and lose their vigor. So I think that he who became poor for our salvation is thus nourished by us and suffers hunger when we neglect him. So we feed Christ or clothe him in following his commandments and living the sacramental and ascetic life in the church. We can do this up until the point where we can reach what St. Paul says: it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

St. Simeon recognized this in himself in a very graphic manner in his hymn of divine love number 15. He points out that all parts of his body have been filled with Christ, and he says we are made members of Christ, and Christ becomes our members, and Christ becomes my hand and the foot of all wretched me, and wretched I become the hand of Christ and the foot of Christ. I move my hand, and my hand is Christ entire, for understand me, the divine divinity is indivisible. I put my foot in motion, and behold, it flashes as himself. Do not say that I blaspheme, but accept these things and fall down and worship Christ who makes you like this. For if you also wish, you shall become his member, and thus every member of us shall become a member of Christ, and Christ's our members, and he shall make all shameful things decent by the beauty of his divinity, and by his glory he shall adorn them. When we are united to God, we shall at the same time become gods, not looking upon the indignity of the body at all, but completely made like Christ in the whole body, and each of our members shall be the whole Christ.

This has to be our priority before we attempt any outward-focused activity. Something like St. Pio of Pietrelcina says that what makes for good children is the holiness of the parents. The parents have to have Christ first; they have to have fed him and clothed him in their own souls before they can give him to the starving Christ in their own children. The same goes for any vocation that we may have if we want to be truly effective.

Now, too often in the history of Christianity, we've put the cart before the horse. We've got it the wrong way around. Often, people go about their charity without having acquired what we are talking about. They make people into a project onto which they can then bestow their charity and their good deeds, and so there's a sense of calculation, there's a sense of a hidden agenda that people sniff out and reject as fakery or hypocrisy. Or people go into charitable endeavors aiming to attend to the physical aspects of one's life, but they haven't themselves been purified, they haven't attended to their souls, they haven't reached Christlike love, and so what is transmitted is not Christlikeness but something else, and sooner or later, the holes will be evident.

The American writer Henry David Thoreau, in his book "Walden," says, "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life," right? That's kind of the attitude, right? When we know people have made us like a target. Now, it wasn't Christian charity that he is criticizing; rather, it's this self-serving agenda that I'm speaking of. He follows this up by saying, "If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them." If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.

We see in the saints a certain innocence, a certain artlessness, a single-minded simplicity, like the actions of a child, right? When a child does a good deed, it is done spontaneously, without premeditation or pretense. This is also why in the Orthodox saints that we see as great examples of charitable giving and care for the poor—I'm thinking here of St. Olga of Alaska, St. Maria of Paris, St. Basil the Great, St. John the Merciful—they were also people of intense prayer and spiritual closeness to Christ. Their love is theocentric; it has God at its center, and that makes all the difference. This has been the defining nature of all Orthodox missionary work throughout history.

So to finish up, then, over the Sundays of the Lenten Triodion, we have seen a progression. We've seen in the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee the need for humility as a starting point. We've seen in the Sunday of the Prodigal Son repentance and return to God. Once we've returned to God, then our lesson today: we can take that love and give it to other people. This is a progression that builds on the previous step, and we have to go in that order. We must fall in love with Christ first, and then from that spring of living water, be able to then give out to other people until we reach this unity of love of God and love of neighbor that St. John makes clear in his first epistle, chapter 4, verse 20, that he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

The message today is that you cannot give what you do not have, and we cannot treat people as Christ unless we first have him within us. At the last judgment, it will not be revealed whether we've done this good deed or that good deed, but if we have Christ in us or not, if we have nurtured Christ in us in order to be able to serve Christ around us. So let us feed, then, what is hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned in us first, and from that spiritual health, like a spring of living water, then let us give to others around us.

I finish with a quote from St. Seraphim of Sarov: "The Lord seeks a heart filled to overflowing with love for God and our neighbor. This is the throne on which he loves to sit and on which he appears in the fullness of his heavenly glory. Son, give me thy heart," he says, "and all the rest I myself will add to thee, for in the human heart the kingdom of God can be contained."

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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