Campus Ministry- University of Florida

As my first "hit" on a college campus since I was designated Associate Campus Ministry Secretary of the Northeast, I went out of jurisdiction and took my troopers to University of Florida in Gainesville. Attendance was good and hopefully they'll continue to meet for matins and Liturgy through the semester. I'm posting my talk which is very reminiscent of my OVBS lectures. Too much coffee for me meant I went through it very fast unknowingly but they got the point :)

UF Campus Ministry:

I’m glad to be here today in front of you all today. I was once exactly where you are today- 6 years ago to be exact! I was a freshman here at the University of Florida back in the year 2000. I graduated from here in the fall of 2004. So, basically, you could say I loved it here so much, I decided to stick around an extra semester. I was part of the group that helped restart the Orthodox Christian Fellowship here at UF, and I was vice-president of that surprisingly successful organization my senior year.

Currently, I’m studying at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, doing my graduate studies in Environmental Engineering. It was after I moved to the Northeast that our Diocese, and the current secretary of the Campus Ministry, Dennis Mathai, asked me to take on the position of associate secretary and help out with this new organization around the Northeast. We have brought Indian Orthodox Campus Ministry to universities around that region, including but not limited to Rutgers, New York Institute of Technology, SUNY Albany, Temple, Drexel, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, U Penn, University of Texas at Austin, and this coming year we’re looking to visit SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghampton, University of Maryland, and wherever else our students are.

I happened to be here in Florida for a month and I thought I’d be remiss if I didn’t get the students at my old alma mater involved. Also, I’d like to engage the students of the University of South Florida in my home city of Tampa in our Orthodox worship and spirituality.

We, the Indian Orthodox Campus Ministry, are extremely new- a work in progress, but bear with us. This is unprecedented that a group of people representing the Diocese has taken on the task of engaging our students at their college campuses. We recognize that for years this particular age group, the college students, have been neglected and not particularly integrated into the life of the Church. We have seen time and time again our students go to college, lose interest in our Faith, Orthodox Christianity, and then find their spiritual needs filled with some other spiritual group.

But, I do not dissociate myself from these people.

Why?

Because I perceive that our youth here in this country, have a sincere and heart-felt love for our Lord Jesus Christ. Somehow, in the midst of all these other “things”, whether it’s culture, politics, court cases, personal grievances, the lures of secularism and materialism, we have lost sight of the fact that, as Pope John Paul II once said,

"To understand himself, man must understand Jesus Christ

He can understand neither who he is nor what his truth may be, neither his vocation nor his final end, without the help of the Lord.

Therefore, Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. ... Christ cannot be kept out of this part of the world. To try to do this is an act against man."

We, who have been baptized, and chrysmated into the Church, have a profound longing to know Christ, and to love Him. In this very room, 3 years ago, Fr. Peter Guillqist, the renowned evangelist of the Orthodox Church told a multi-denominational audience that if nothing else was learned from hearing him speak that night, then all those in the audience should at the very least, commit themselves that day to the Lord Jesus Christ.” You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt 22: 47).

This is the point that I’d like to expound to you all this morning.

As I said previously, I sense that you are Christ-loving young people.

But remember that love for Christ, or proclaiming your love for Christ is not the end all of all Christianity. It’s important and crucial, but if love and adoration for the Lord were all that was necessary, then why did Christ suffer and die on the Cross? Was not the Holy Triune God worthy of love, praise, and adoration before the Incarnation? Before God, the Word, took upon Himself our humanity, was not God, in His eternal and unfathomable greatness, just as awe-inspiring? I’d like to submit to you that God was, and is, and always shall be worthy of our ceaseless praise, but since, we still live with the consequences of a fallen world, being ourselves sinners, we need a certain fullness in our worship.

Allow me to elaborate on this point further.

I said that we live in a fallen world. We all know this. We can turn on the TV and see a world of violence, poverty, famine, unspeakable evils all around us, and unfortunately sometimes we too are part of this. But remember that God did not make man and this world fallen from the very beginning. Do not put the blame for evil on God.

Adam indeed sinned in Eden. He disobeyed God, through his own free will, and went from that existence in Communion with God where the book of Genesis says he was “ walking with God,” to the existence outside Eden, where he is cursed to till the ground, and experience pain, and suffer, and die.

God does not experience time like we do in the sense that we know it. God knows from the instant man is banished from Eden exactly how man can be restored to being to that idyllic life in Communion with God.

St. Ireneaus refers to this as the “recapitulation.” Salvation for Christians is not a reality external to our experience. Rather, we are recapitulating that which was lost to us. Salvation is a process of restoration.

How is this accomplished?

God Himself, God the Word, would take flesh from the Virgin; take our very humanity, in the Incarnation. Where Adam used free will for disobedience, Christ used free will for obedience, for the vindication of humanity.

St. Paul writes to the Romans:

15 But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man’s offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many.

16 And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification.

17 For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.)

And later, he writes

“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”

Bishop Kallistos at Oxford University says that a suffering Christ is a suffering God. What you experience, especially you, the college students, who are experiencing things even I five years ago could not have fathomed, God has taken upon Himself in our flesh. He suffers and he dies. To say that God Himself dies is a profound theological issue, but nonetheless we can say that through death, Christ has trampled down death, and made it no more.

Christ fills this void of separation between man and God; and He is resurrected. We, His people, are called to partake in Christ’s Death and Resurrection. Don’t think that Christianity is just about “doing good.” Just like love, doing good deeds is indispensable to Christianity, but not Christianity in its fullness. Lots of religions say to do well to your neighbor and act properly, but Christianity is perhaps the only religion that preaches that this one particular person, Jesus, offers Salvation and that we should not only know about him but also partake in Him.

St. Paul tells the Corinthians that “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness” (I. Cor. 1:24)

And the even greater foolishness,

“He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me” (John 6:48-49)

Christ did not die on the Cross and Resurrect, while merely leaving us left in a world that still remains in turmoil. However, he himself has ordained the sacramental life of the Church as a means to being bound to Him in a very real, albeit mysterious sense.

Again, I refer to St. Paul’s letter to the Romans

“…do you know that as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection” (Romans 6: 3-4)

We are given Baptism, we are given Eucharist, we are given Chrysmation, and we are given the Priesthood by Christ in order that we shall have a realization in this life of partaking in Christ.

St. Peter writes that,

3 as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue,

4 by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

This does not mean that being part of the Church all of a sudden makes us perfect. Of course not! But it does mean that Christ’s resurrection has inaugurated the work of Salvation, which we await the consummation of in the Second Coming, the Resurrection of the Dead, in the New Life in the World to Come.

Why am I beating all of this into your heads this morning?

I believe that our love for Christ dictates that we get in touch, or back in touch, with the Sacramental life of the Church, as ordained by Christ, as written in the Gospels, as handed down to us through the hands of the Apostles, the martyrs, the confessors-our Fathers and Mothers in the Faith.

As college students, who have that internal fire burning inside all of you, I think you are all in the perfect position to learn, experience, and live Orthodox Christianity in terms more suited to you, for all intensive purposes, the American college student.

Our goal, as the campus ministry of the Indian Orthodox Church of the American Diocese, is to do whatever it is we can, to provide you all with whatever you need to make well informed and thoughtful spiritual decisions. In doing so, we hope to inspire the rise of new and passionate clergy and lay leaders for the future of the Orthodox Church here in America. Thus, I ask for you to pray for the well being of the Church, our Diocese, our Bishops and spiritual leaders, the newly formed campus ministry, and for me, who am perhaps the least of all people.

Thank you