Hey everybody this is Steve, and what do you call...her?
Lots of people call this amazing saint the Virgin Mary.
Yet in the Orthodox Tradition, you see that most people call her either the Panagia,
which means the all-holy one,
or, even better, the Theotokos,
which means the one who gave birth to God.
We honor the Theotokos as the greatest the saint,
"more honorable than the Cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim."
And tomorrow, August 1st, we begin fasting for two weeks to prepare ourselves for the Dormition,
which we celebrate every year on August 15th.
And one way to prepare ourselves for this Feast is to better understand why the word Theotokos is so important,
and why some people find it to be so confusing.
I mean, God is uncreated, so He doesn't have a beginning.
And He's bodiless, so He can't be born.
So...how can God have a mother?
Before we answer that, remember:
the cool thing about saints is that it's not about them.
It's not about their honor or their glory.
We honor saints because of their union with Christ,
because they point us back to Him.
And that's why the word Theotokos is so important.
In the early church, there were some who didn't want to call the Virgin Mary the Theotokos.
Instead, they wanted to call her the Christotokos,
the one who gave birth to Christ.
And the Church was like yeah, duh, she gave birth to Christ. But who is Christ?
So in the year 431 the Church met in the city of Ephesus for the Third Ecumenical Council,
and affirmed that the Virgin Mary is, indeed, the Theotokos.
Because she gave birth to Christ,
a person who is both fully human and fully divine.
That's the mystery of the Incarnation, which we celebrate every Christ.
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You see, the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)
has always existed,
from before there was a universe, before there was time,
before there was a before.
He who is without flesh, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity,
true God of true God, put on flesh.
The Word of God, who existed invisibly before all time,
took on everything that makes us human:
body, soul, mind, emotions, you name it.
In other words the Son of God...
became human.
And just like all children are born to mothers,
Christ was born of a mother,
though her Son also happens to be the Son of God the Father.
The Theotokos played an incredible part in God revealing Himself to the world.
In fact, you can call her the greatest missionary of all time,
because she shared Christ with us...
literally.
We take the Theotokos so seriously,
and hold her in such high regard,
because the Incarnation is a really serious thing.
The wall of alienation between God and man has been shattered!
Nothing is as it was, salvation has come to the world!
And that salvation isn't abstract.
It's very real, and very personal.
Our salvation comes in being united to Christ,
in being a literal part of His Body.
As St. Paul said,
"All those who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ."
And we can see this truth laid out for us very clearly at the foot of the Cross.
In HIs Gospel account, St. John tells us of the moment when Christ looked down from the Cross,
and saw the Theotokos and His beloved disciple,
probably St. John himself, standing side by side.
"When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing by, He said to His mother.
"'Woman, behold your son!'"
"Then He said to the disciple, 'Behold your mother!'"
"And from that hour that disciple took her to his own home."
To be a Christian is to be incorporated into Christ's Body,
to be literally united with Christ.
And to do that is to gain the ability to call Christ's Father our Father.
And just as Christ's Father becomes our Father,
Christ's mother becomes our mother.
We honor Mary as the Theotokos because our salvation is real!
The Son of God has become human,
and has given to us the gift of never-ending life with Him
in His Kingdom.
He became human by being born,
just like all of us were born.
He was born to the greatest of saints,
a woman so loving and so humble
that we rarely see her in icons by herself.
She shared Christ with the world by giving birth to Him, the Son of God.
And she continues to share Christ with the world,
because every time we look at her
she points us right back to Him.
So let's be the bee,
and honor our mother, the mother of God.
Be the Bee, and Live Orthodoxy.
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I'll see you all next week.