Sunday sermon on the Second Sunday of Great Lent (March 8, 2026)
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
Can we believe something we can’t fully explain? Do we even need to be able to explain it in order to believe it? Is it possible to know God or is knowing about God enough to have a real relationship with Him? What does it even mean to have a relationship with God?
These were some of the questions that came to the fore in the 14th century Orthodox Christian debates on understanding of creation and God’s interaction with His creation.
At the forefront of these debates were two men, both highly educated, both monks, both well respected by their peers, but each coming from a very different perspective at the questions of our ability to experience God.
One was Saint Gregory Palamas, who was born in Constantinople. Gregory’s father was a high-ranking official for the emperor but died early. The emperor saw potential in the young man and sponsored his education. Gregory was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps and serve in the government, but at just 20 years of age he realized that that lifestyle is vain and left for a monastery.
There the experienced and holy elders taught Gregory unceasing mental prayer, or the prayer of the heart. This kind of prayer requires practice, constant struggle, and perseverance. Monks who practiced it spent days in solitude, hence they came to be known as hesychasts (from the Greek hesychia – calm, silence, stillness).
God revealed His uncreated light, the same light that the apostles saw on Mount Tabor, to some of the monks who practiced this prayer of the heart. In other words, through silence and prayer monks were able to experience God; God revealed Himself to them.
Gregory’s opponent was a monk from southern Italy by the name of Barlaam. His education was as well-rounded as Gregory’s, but he focused more on philosophy and rationality. When Barlaam heard of monks practicing the prayer of the heart and their claims of seeing God’s uncreated light, he accused them of heresy and claimed that that light was a created thing by God. His main argument was that we cannot know God’s essence.
Barlaam could not wrap his rational mind around an experience that brought people in direct contact with God. For him, knowledge of God was an object of logic and reason. If Barlaam could not explain it philosophically, rationally, he rejected it.
In many ways he was a herald of the two periods that changed our culture at the core – the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when humanism, reason, and science conquered our views of creation, the universe, and life itself. These views are still very dominant in our day. We strive to explain away everything and treat with suspicion anything that is hard to explain or is unexplainable.
But, Orthodox Christianity has always been comfortable with gray areas. We are ok with the unexplainable because some things are beyond our ability to comprehend. For example, how can God be One, yet Three? We can describe the Holy Trinity in general terms, but whenever we get into details we almost always end up in heresy.
Or, how could an infinite and timeless and boundless God become a human being? Again, there are some general things that we can say, but we have no idea what it means to be timeless nor boundless nor infinite, so our explanations end with the obvious statements – God humbled Himself by descending to our level, taking upon Himself our human nature, so that we might ascend into divinity and become like God.
Is our inability to explain these truths a sign that they are not real? There are some who make such claims. But Orthodox Christians have not felt the urge to explain everything because we accept the mystery of God. And mystery is not some woo-woo belief. Mystery is a divine reality that’s revealed by God and experienced by us, even if or when we do not fully comprehend it with our limited mind.
That’s because the goal of Christians was never to explain how or Who or what God is, but to experience a relationship with Him. This was the main failure of Barlaam – he wanted to explain the incomprehensible and the mysterious. And he failed. Philosophy, reason, science, logic all collapse at the feet of the unconceivable and transcendent God.
But Barlaam was right about one thing – we cannot know God’s essence. Saint Gregory agreed with him on this, but he argued that we can know God through His energies. This is the most technical we are going to get today – God’s essence and energies.
Essence is God as He is in Himself, beyond all created knowledge or participation. Nothing created can know or experience God’s essence, not angels, not humans, not animals, nothing. Only God knows what it means to be God.
When we say that God is timeless, boundless, and infinite we attempt describe God’s essence, which is completely foreign to us. Even if we know what these words mean, we have no idea what it is to be timeless, boundless, and infinite for the simple reason that we are created in time, bound by our physical body and spirit, and mortal.
God’s energies, on the other hand, are an extension of Him, which means they are uncreated like He is uncreated, but which we have the ability to come to know. God does not “make” the power that hears our prayers, heals our wounds, forgives our sins, pours out mercy on us. It is God Himself, through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, Who hears, heals, forgives, and has mercy on us.
The word energy comes from the Greek energeia, which means operation or activity of God in His creation. Energy is how God acts, reveals Himself, and allows His creation to participate in Him, while His essence remains beyond all comprehension.
While we do not know what it is like to be timeless, but we do know what it is like to hear someone, to heal them, to forgive them, to have mercy on them because that’s how God interacts with us. God’s energies, His love and mercy, are not secondary to Him. These things are God; His energies are how we experience God.
God is not a distant supreme being sitting on His throne somewhere above and far from us, with Whom we have no direct interactions until we pass from this life into the next. He is a real presence in our life, in the here and now, Who desires to have a relationship with those who are willing to walk with Him.
We walk with God when we leave our sin behind through a life of repentance. We can’t know God unless we are willing to walk in His ways: to love as He loves, to be merciful as He is merciful, to forgive as He forgives.
And these are not easy to do – to repent, to love, to show mercy, to forgive. Rather, they are not easy to do if we rely on our own strength to achieve them. Much like Barlaam, who relied on his own intellect to explain away God, overreliance on our own abilities will only end in futility.
We do not have to be like Saint Gregory and other hesychasts, who spent days in solitude, practicing the prayer of the heart. What if instead we spent just a few minutes (three minutes seems doable) in silence and stillness? Put far away our little pocket demons, turn off TVs and radios, and focus our mind on the reality that at all times we are in the presence of God, and spend a few conscious minutes in that presence.
I’ve never given you homework before, but I’ll give one today – spend a few intentional minutes each day, till the end of Lent, in silence and in the presence of God. Focus on your breath and with each inhale repeat the simple, “Lord, have mercy.”
The intent is not see the uncreated light of God. Not every hesychast saw this light. But every hesychast did experience God and formed a relationship with Him through the prayer of the heart. Before we can walk with God, we need to know Him. We won’t know Him if we do not spend time with Him.
God is utterly unexplainable, but He allows us to know Him, to be with Him, and to become like Him, and to worship Him and to give glory to Him, always, now and ever and unto ages of ages.
Amen.
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Intro and outro melody:
Rule of Life
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https://uppbeat.io/t/brock-hewitt-stories-in-sound/rule-of-life
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