Love as a Spiritual Lens Through Which to View the Gospel

We have been thinking about the role of love in the interpretation of the Gospel. It seems to us that the experience of love in the heart acts as a lens through which we perceive the lived experience of being Orthodox. Let us look carefully at this love. Diadochos of Photiki speaks of an intermediate stage where one has not attained to perfect love but one has an increase in love. This is a love given by the Holy Spirit. It is not a love of the flesh nor a natural (sentimental) love, although it may implicate elements of both.

Also, we are habitually praying with the mind in the heart, so this love is encountered in the heart consciously. So what we encounter is the experience of a partial love in a partially opened heart. Nothing is perfect. Much suffering has gone into the opening of the heart; there is no other way for the heart to open and without the heart being open this love cannot be lived. So we can consciously experience this love for others and for Christ. This experience acts as a spiritual lens through which we see the elements of the Gospel.

Let us look at some practical examples. Let us take the fundamental message of the Gospel: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” We all know the story. Adam and Eve in Paradise were created perfect but spiritually infant-like. Eve was tempted and fell; she gave the fruit to Adam; he accepted and fell. Original Sin. Guilt. “All fall short of the Glory of God.” This is very much an element of the Protestant, especially Calvinist, interpretation of the Bible. We are to acknowledge our sinfulness before God; he will save us.

Now the issue is not the core of the Gospel; it is what it is. The issue is how we understand the core of the Gospel. With the love we spoke of—or without. For viewing the Gospel through the lens of this love in the heart, we understand that God’s primary motivation is that he loves us and wants us to be happy. So yes it is true; we have sinned in Adam and by ourselves. But God’s ultimate intention in telling us this is not to punish us but to save us. It’s just a spiritual fact that we cannot be saved unless we confess our sins.

It is very very hard for a man to acknowledge his sins and in the hands of an unloving preacher a man can be destroyed at this point. The unloving preacher might turn the sinner into twice as much an authoritarian hater of man as himself. However, if a man have love in his heart then he recognizes that the confession of sins from the heart, from the inner core of one’s being, is not self-destruction but the door to life. And he also recognizes that the only possible way that he can receive the forgiveness of sins is if he himself forgives those who have sinned against him. So as we have said, it is not the core message of the Gospel that has changed but how that message is perceived and lived: with love or without.

Let us take another example. Someone is celebrating the Divine Liturgy. As everyone knows, the Orthodox liturgy is complex. Someone without love can see it as a set of external rigid rules to be obeyed and argued about. They might even think that the heart of Orthodoxy is the flawless external performance of the Liturgy. However, a celebrant with love in his heart sees the typikon as the structure of an encounter with God in love. He knows which mistakes in the performance of the liturgy are important and which can be overlooked and perhaps corrected at another time.

A priest or Elder is hearing confessions. Here of course the confessor or Elder with and without love is well known by his fruits. The priest or Elder with love in his heart is easily approachable and non-condemnatory—although again he knows what is an important part of the Gospel that must be obeyed and what is secondary; he knows the intentions of the heart. We are not in the least suggesting that this love in the heart relatives or “modernizes” Christianity so that what was sin is no longer sin. But again, the confessor knows that God’s intention is to save the wayward sheep in the wilderness not to kill and eat it.

In some respects this love in the heart changes our perception of the Gospel in the way that a performer changes the feel of a musical melody. The melody is the same but the interpretation of love gives a different feel to the music.

Let us take another example. A young person has been brought up badly. They have left school and family and are living on their own. This is not an ideal Christian life. They have made an effort to resume their education but spiritually they are among lost ones. Perhaps, however, less lost than many still in school. They have spiritual interests. However, the first obstacle to their conversion is the notion of sin.

Will they find someone with love in their heart to guide them to Christ? For let us look at such a young person’s encounter with the notion of personal sin. A young person sins—in this day and age, who knows how? But they have spiritual interests. In some way God is calling to them, to their heart. God is calling them to Life. But the first thing they hear is, “Repent!” In the hands of the unloving preacher this is the road to an authoritarian judgmental Christianity; in the hands of the loving Elder or confessor, this is the beginning of a conversion to an Orthodoxy that is not formalist but a mystagogy of Life and Truth.

The Mission of the Church

The mission of the Church. We all know that Christ sent the Apostles to preach to all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit:

All authority in Heaven and on earth has been given to me. Going, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I have commanded you. And behold I am with you (plural) all the days up to the consummation of the Age. Amen. (Mat. 28, 18–20.)

Of course the history of Christianity is intimately connected to the missionary activity of the various Christian denominations. What we would like to reflect on, however, is the nature of this mission of the Church.

Let us suppose that the Church is inserted into a city in the modern West the population of which is in part de-churched and in part dispersed among the various Protestant, largely, churches but also the Roman Catholic church. What is the mission of the Orthodox Church?

To a large extent, the various jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church view their mission as a ministry to the members of their ‘ethnic group of origin’. If it’s the Greeks, then they worry about the Greeks; if it’s the Russians, they worry about the Russians. If you’re not part of the ‘ethnic group of origin’ then we’re not interested. And to a large extent the mission is seen in ethnic terms: the Church is seen as a bearer of ethnic identity, even ethnic political identity. The church can even be seen as the bearer of a nationalist political ideal. Of course there are two major exceptions: the Orthodox Church in America and the Church of Antioch both have a consciously missionary orientation, largely Protestant influenced.

The Roman Catholic church on the other hand largely views itself in universalistic, transnational terms—although it is certainly not above getting mixed up in national or nationalist politics. It largely sees its missionary work in terms of developing an educational and/or health system that will bring unchurched locals into contact with the Catholic church in a positive way. In this model of evangelization, the long view is taken: the culture is to be Catholicized by the interaction of locals with the Roman Catholic services provided: the children who attend the Catholic school grow up with, hopefully, a positive view of the Roman Catholic church so that while those children might not themselves convert, the Roman Catholic church establishes a presence in the local society and eventually begins to make converts.

So far we have said nothing new, although some people might dispute our characterization of one or another Christian group’s practices.

What we would like to reflect on here, however, is the substance of St Paul’s remark in 2 Corinthians 5, 17-21:

If one is in Christ he is a new creation. The ancient things have passed; behold all things have become new. All things are from God who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, giving us the ministry of reconciliation. So that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning to them their sins and establishing in us the word of reconciliation. Therefore we speak on behalf of Christ, as interceding with God on your behalf. We beseech on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For he made him who did not know sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

It is perhaps not accidental that this message is at the core of those Protestant denominations that preach a born-again experience. And it is also true that as we have occasionally remarked that this Protestant born-again Christianity can be quite authoritarian, doing psychological violence to its converts.

It seems to us that the ministry of reconciliation of the Orthodox Church, which includes both its mission ad extra and its mission ad intra, is one of love. And the key to this love is not a sentimental love—a love which passes away—but the love given by the Holy Spirit. How is this love given? First of all this love is encountered as the presence of the Holy Spirit in the person preaching the Gospel. In the Orthodox Church, the transforming effect of the staretz or Elder is well known and well attested. In the West St Seraphim of Sarov is perhaps the best-known such staretz, although Elder Paisios of more recent times was very well known for the transforming effect of his love on his interlocutor. Although such startsy or Elders may perform miracles, it is their love which captivates and transforms the sinner, a love which is not judgemental nor of the flesh—a love which Elder Paisios himself called a Gospel love. This Gospel love is clearly the operation of the Holy Spirit in the staretz or Elder.

Now how do we appropriate that love for ourselves? Through Baptism. As we have been taught by the Fathers, it is baptism which grants us the forgiveness of sins, cleanses our soul and puts into our soul the Holy Spirit so that we are transformed. It is Baptism which makes us a new creation. It is baptism which reconciles us to God. However, as we have been taught, while Baptism grants us the forgiveness of sins, the restoration of the image of God in us and the pledge of the Holy Spirit, it is up to us to put into practice the word of the Gospel that the Kingdom of God is taken by violence: after baptism we must make an effort to restore our likeness to God by an essentially ascetical endeavour. This is true for all Orthodox Christians, not only monastics.

Moreover, since we are human and fallible, there is the ministry of reconciliation after our baptism through repentance, tears and the priest.

Although most Christian denominations maintain the same structure of belief as outlined here (except among Protestants concerning personal ascetical endeavour after Baptism), there is a quite different ‘flavour’ among various Christian groups as regards how this structure is actualized. The Roman Catholic church has historically been very rationalistic and legalistic; the various Protestant groups can be very sentimental or authoritarian. Here we want to emphasize the role of spiritual love in the Orthodox Church. Since this love is an operation of the Holy Spirit, it is not emotional but spiritual. Moreover, in the Orthodox Church, the encounter with Truth is neither humanly rationalistic nor humanly emotional. It is the encounter of the person with the Holy Spirit within. It is the Holy Spirit within us which bears witness to the truth of Orthodoxy, not the rational arguments of the Roman Catholic nor the emotional or authoritarian fixations of the born-again Protestant. Although love can perhaps be over-emphasized—sometimes the sinner should be reminded of the Judgement—in a healthy conversion or repentance it is ultimately the warmth of spiritual love which converts the sinner to Christ. For Christ is calling the sinner not to an authoritarian, emotionally violent and conflicted life but to participation in the inner life of the Holy Trinity through the Holy Spirit. Ultimately God is a God of love. It is for love that we were created. Our reconciliation to God is a reconciliation of the sinner to the love of God, to the love of the Father, so that the reconciled sinner loves God in return. And this love is a love to the Ages. A little earlier in 2 Corinthians 5, St Paul writes:

For we know that if our earthly dwelling of the tent [i.e. body] is dissolved we have a building from God, an eternal dwelling in the Heavens not made with hands. And for that reason we sigh in this dwelling, greatly desiring to be clothed with our dwelling which is from Heaven; and if clothed then we will not be found naked. And we who are in the body sigh, weighed down since we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal be swallowed up by Life. God is he who works us to this very thing, he who has also given us the pledge of the Spirit. Therefore seeing that sojourning in the body we are absent from the Lord we always take courage. For we walk by faith not by sight. But we take courage and rather look forward to departing from the body to sojourn with the Lord. And so whether sojourning or departing we act with a sense of honour so as to be pleasing to him. For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ, each to obtain that which is appropriate to what he has done, whether good or bad.

Christmas in Moscow & Sochi

By way of a Christmas card, here are some images from the Divine Liturgy of Christmas in Moscow and Sochi yesterday.

First, here is part of the congregation at the monastery in Sochi where President Putin worshipped.  They are a few metres away from President Putin.

Here is President Putin:

Here is a member of the choir:

Here is Prime Minister Medvedev. He is worshipping at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow. He is with his wife. We think the children must be theirs.  The group is standing in an apse just to the south of the solea (i.e. viewing towards the Royal Doors, to the right of the congregation).

Here is a member of the congregation at Christ the Saviour. This was taken after the communion service.

The following pictures were taken at Christ the Saviour before the communion service:

This congregant is reciting the ‘Our Father’ with the rest of the congregation:

This picture was taken at about the same time in the service:

This is Patriarch Kyrillos just before taking communion. Notice the priest in white vestments at the side of the altar to the viewer’s left. He is holding a paten with a piece of consecrated bread that has just been handed to him by the Patriarch as part of his ordination to the priesthood during the service.  The cleric standing next to the priest is the Archdeacon.

Here is another congregant:

Merry Christmas to all our readers.

Orthodox Monk

(These photos were also posted as an update to ‘Open Letter to Josh Whedon’.)

Open Letter to Josh Whedon

Dear Mr Whedon:

At about the 11:30 mark in the film, Avengers, for which you are credited as director, screenplay writer and co-author, there begins a scene serving to introduce Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson. The scene begins with a diesel train pulling into a rural train-station in Russia by night, then pans left to a ruined warehouse, where we find a scantily-clad Scarlett Johansson in distress, being tied to a chair and interrogated rather brutally in Russian by someone in a 3-star Russian general’s uniform. Then at about the 12:08 mark in the film, the camera cuts to a long shot where the interrogation continues in a mirror centered in the midst of a still life, thus:

We can see that the still life, which might be entitled ‘Still Life with Kalashnikov’, is a tastefully done still life with a 19^th-Century type mirror artistically draped with an off-white fabric. Chicly arranged to the left of the mirror are two icons and on the right behind the two AK-47 assault-rifle barrels a picture that we couldn’t identify but which reminds us of the 16^th-Century Dutch Masters (echo of Scarlett’s role as the girl with the pearl earring?).

We were rather curious about this composition. First of all, let us note that it adds nothing to the Avengers story-line. There is no further reference to icons—or indeed to Russia—in the Avengers. The only thing the scene can do is introduce Natasha, formerly Russian KGB agent and now agent of SHIELD. Nowhere further on in the film do we see Natasha’s dedication to icons or iconography, or even Natasha’s Russianness, since only in this scene does she speak Russian. So the question arises why the shot was included in the film. A case could be made that it is gratuitous. Moreover, the camera pulls back from the Still Life with Kalashnikov while at the same time keeping in focus the long shot in the mirror of Natasha being interrogated, so it’s a rather complex shot—unless of course it’s a digitally composited montage with the Natasha scene photographed separately and then digitally inserted into the space of the mirror. If the latter is the case, then the question arises even more strongly why the scene was included in the film: someone went to a lot of trouble to include Still Life with Kalashnikov in the film.

Let us look at the content of the Still Life with Kalashnikov.

First let us look at the icons. The main icon portrayed is a copy of this icon:

We say ‘copy’ because the original of ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Help’ is as follows:

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, also known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, is a title given to the Blessed Virgin Mary by Pope Pius IX, associated with a celebrated Byzantine icon of the same name dating from the 15th century.

The icon has been in Rome since 1499, and is currently in the church of Sant'Alfonso di Liguori all'Esquilino. In the Eastern Orthodox Church this iconography is known as the Virgin of the Passion or Theotokos of the Passion.

Due to the Redemptorist Priests who had been appointed as missionaries of this icon, the image has become very popular among Roman Catholics in particular, and has been very much copied and reproduced. Modern reproductions are sometimes displayed in homes, business establishments, and public transportation. The Redemptorist priests are the only religious order currently entrusted by the Holy See to protect and propagate a Marian religious work of art.

The icon has merited two Papal endorsements, one from Pope Pius IX who entrusted the icon to the Redemptorist in December 1865, and another from Blessed Pope John Paul II, who presented an icon to a Muslim cleric in May 2001 during his first-ever visit to the Umayyad Mosque.

A feast in honour of the icon was celebrated on 27 June and “novena” prayers are customarily held on Wednesdays. Today, the feast day of the Our Lady of Perpetual Help is celebrated on June 27 of the year, with novenas held every Wednesday of the weeks of the year.

(From Wikipedia, which is probably where we got the image of the icon. For a more strictly Roman Catholic discussion see the Catholic Encyclopedia)

So the icon has nothing to do with Russia. (Pope John-Paul II was Polish and Russians and Poles are almost the same, we know, but still it’s not a Russian icon.) Moreover, unless someone was going to steal the icon from its heavily guarded place in Rome, it’s not something that a Russian arms smuggler would have in his dilapidated warehouse in the Russian boondocks.

The icon above and behind Our Lady of Perpetual Help (still to the left of the mirror) is more difficult to identify. We at first thought the icon might be of St Nicholas, the patron saint of Russia (although we doubt he is the patron saint of Russian arms dealers), but study indicates the following. The icon is of a full-bearded male saint holding a very large Gospel book. The saint is depicted in roughly ¾ profile from his left side. The framing of the icon—a sort of clover leaf inside a square—reminds us of the icons of the Evangelists that are normally found on the Royal Doors of the iconostasis in every Orthodox Church, as do the small sub-icon above and to the right of the saint’s head—it could very well be the scriptural symbol of the Evangelist—and the ¾ profile.

The Royal Doors are the main entrance to the sanctuary; they are in front of the Holy Table (what Westerners would call the altar, though in the Orthodox Church the whole area behind the iconostasis is called the altar).

Normally the Royal Doors has two iconographical programs: the Annunciation of the Birth of Christ to the Mother of God by the Archangel Gabriel and, separately, the Four Evangelists. We were not able to find the particular icon portrayed in the Avengers and hence the Royal Doors from which it might have been taken, but the following should give an idea of what’s involved:

Above we see the Annunciation and below we see the Four Evangelists. St John the Evangelist is in the lower right corner; we can see that the portrayal of St John here is consistent, mutatis mutandis, with the icon in the Avengers, although here the iconography is undistinguished. The icongraphical portrayal of an Evangelist is fixed and it is relatively easy to identify an Evangelist if he is portrayed according to classical prototypes even if the name of the Evangelist on the icon is unclear. 

Here is a set of Royal Doors which while missing the Annunciation shows clearly where the Royal Doors are in an Orthodox church: the Holy Table can be discerned behind the Royal Doors. In this case St John the Evangelist is in the upper right corner.

Here is a clearer icon of St John the Evangelist, the composition of which might parallel the icon in the Avengers under discussion:

Our judgement is that most likely the icon above Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Still Life with Kalashnikov is taken from a 19^th-Century Royal Doors, perhaps of Russian origin. Moreover we are of the opinion that the Evangelist portrayed is St John.  Chances are that the icon was borrowed from a gallery for the shoot.

However, here is the Royal Doors from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow during the 2013 Christmas Divine Liturgy. We can see the Annunciation above and the Four Evangelists in two groups of two below. The 19^th-Century iconographical program here is more Renaissance than in the icon under discussion, which would suggest that the icon of the Evangelist from Still Life with Kalashnikov dates from an earlier period.

Presumably the evil-doers who are interrogating Natasha do one of the following:

• They pray before the Roman Catholic icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help when they’re not torturing the scantily-clad Scarlett Johansson;
• They smuggle icons when they’re not smuggling Kalashnikovs;
• They smuggle icons at the same time they’re smuggling Kalashnikovs (‘Get your free authentic Russian Orthodox Roman Catholic icon with any black market purchase of 1000 Kalashnikov rifles, offer valid while supply lasts’). Today, however, the usual black market for the Kalashnikov is the Muslim jihadi and Muslim jihadis would not be interested in icons. However, perhaps the smugglers are imitating Pope John-Paul II, above;
• Their business model includes a church supply business; or
• All of the above.

We couldn’t come up with anything on the picture to the right of the mirror, although it did remind us of the Dutch Masters, as we have said. Vermeer comes to mind although the picture does not appear in his catalog. The Lacemaker is similar in composition but it is not the same.

We are sure you will agree, Mr Whedon, that it would only be right to give those of our pious Orthodox readers who feel that they have a religious vocation that includes arms smuggling a brief summary of the range of Kalashnikov assault rifles available on the market for smuggling.

Of course, one can see that the Kalashnikov included in the Still Life with Kalashnikov is the classic AK-47:

 

We should point out that as the camera pulls back from Still Life with Kalashnikov, there are a number of what look like RPG rounds below the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help (not shown).

Moreover, it should also be pointed out that in terms of the rest of the scene, the phone-call to Natasha is incoherent: the speaker warns the General of an imminent F-22 attack on the place but describes the place completely differently from what we see and as being in a completely different location.

So the question arises, Mr Whedon, what it’s all about. What’s this stuff doing in the Avengers?

Now let us continue with the iconographical program of the Avengers. We’ve just dealt with the evil ones of the Avengers. Now here’s a superhero from the Avengers, Iron Man without his iron as portrayed by Robert Downey:

To be a little clearer about Iron Man’s casual-wear sartorial program, here’s his t-shirt in more detail:

As we can see it’s a t-shirt for Black Sabbath, the occultist rock group. So we have a strong contrast: in the Avengers the evil ones are gratuitously juxtaposed with Christian icons but the superhero is gratuitously identified with an occultist rock group. Hmm....

While we would be surprised to learn that you have an overt hostility to Russian Orthodoxy, Mr Whedon, you know as well as we do that this is how propaganda works. Sophisticated information operations juxtapose images that the perpetrators want the viewer to associate with evil with obviously evil persons, and they juxtapose images that they want the viewer to associate with good with obviously good persons. Here we see Christian icons gratuitously juxtaposed with obviously evil men; and an occult icon (Black Sabbath) gratuitously associated with obviously good men. The effect is, as they say, long-term and subliminal.

Let us look a little more at the context of this.

Here’s the casual-wear sartorial program of the evil Russian General:

There’s a flash on his left arm that shows the Russian flag and which reads ‘Russia’ in Cyrillic:

You can also see his three stars, so he’s a 3-star evil Russian General. The only thing missing in the Avengers portrayal of the 3-star evil Russian General is the open bottle of vodka. Must be your light directorial hand, Mr Whedon.

However, we can see this in the uniform of a genuine 3-star Russian General:

No Russian flag on the flash on his left arm. And this guy’s the real deal. He’s Russian Deputy Chief of General Staff Col-Gen Anatoly Nogovitsyn. Far more clean cut guy. 

Here Nogovitsyn’s boss, 4-star General Makarov, Russian Chief of General Staff:

Scary looking guy. Wouldn’t want to shoot a nuclear missile at his town.

Here’s an American 4-star General, General George C Marshall:

Wouldn’t want to shoot a nuclear missile at him either.

Here’s the guy who invented the Kalashnikov. He’s being presented with a medal by then-President Medvedev. His name, strangely, is Kalashnikov. He’s 90 years old. He’s only a 2-star general.

So why are we wasting our time on this, Mr Whedon? Here in its entirety is a recent article from the Independent, a London newspaper. We would ask you to read the article through to its conclusion despite the unseemly subject matter.

Get thee to a monastery... there's a brothel there

Roland Oliphant

Wednesday, 31 October 2012

The Russian Orthodox Church is furiously trying to calm a media storm after police uncovered a brothel on the grounds of one of Moscow's most prestigious monasteries.

The "hotel for lovers" was found operating out of a building belonging to the Sretensky Monastery, an ancient institution just up the road from the headquarters of the Federal Security Service. Two women, from Ukraine and Tajikistan, were arrested during a raid at the weekend.

The institution's seedy reputation was apparently well known. Local media reported that it rented out its seven rooms by the hour, at rates starting from 1,750 roubles (£35).

Founded in 1395, the monastery is one of the city's oldest religious institutions. Legend has it that it was founded on the spot where Muscovites met a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary brought from the neighbouring city of Vladimir to save Moscow from Tamerlane's marauding armies.

The monastery's Father Superior, Archimandrite Tikhon, is said to be President Vladimir Putin's personal spiritual adviser. Father Tikhon hit back at what he called a "media sensation" surrounding the brothel, telling a state-owned channel that the "lovers' hotel" was in a building the monastery acquired only recently, and that evicting the current business occupying the premises was one of the conditions of the sale. He even joked that the church was "lucky" the issue had finally been dealt with.

"Today's storm in the media is just one example of how people are willing to take any slander and not only make a vulgar joke out of it, but launch a very real information attack against the Church," he said.

Here we see another propaganda technique. The article, in a newspaper owned by a wealthy Russian emigre who is said to be a political opponent of Putin, starts off with the strong suggestion that a Russian Orthodox monastery is running a brothel. Only in the second-to-last paragraph do we learn that ‘the “lovers' hotel” … [is] in a building the monastery acquired only recently, and that evicting the current business occupying the premises was one of the conditions of the sale.’

The journalist, assuming that he is not just plain incompetent, seems to be banking on the fact that, as is well-known, most people read only the first few lines of a newspaper article, taking the gist from that. So most people would not read through to the ‘fine print’ at the end of the article that negates the first few lines implying that the Russian Orthodox Church is running a brothel in Moscow. Moreover, because the journalist has told the truth in the fine print at the end of the article he can’t be accused of lying—he’s told the truth even if he’s counting on no one reading it.

The article notes that the monastery is located close to the Russian security services. Since the monastery was founded in 1395, it’s no fault of the monks that they are located close to the security services. They’ve been there for 600 years. Again we juxtapose what we want people to think is bad (the Russian Orthodox monastery) with something people know is bad (the Russian security services).

What bothers us is the sense that there is a cultural war on Christianity. A cultural war on Orthodoxy. A cultural war on Russian Orthodoxy. We think that Archimandrite Tikhon is onto something:

Today's storm in the media is just one example of how people are willing to take any slander and not only make a vulgar joke out of it, but launch a very real information attack against the Church.

So we want to pose this question to you, Mr Whedon:  You are a wealthy man. Are you a good man?

Now why would people want to do this kind of thing? We don’t know your motivations, Mr Whedon, but here are some images from the Divine Liturgy of Christmas in Moscow and Sochi from 2013. We think that the faces themselves explain why people would fear the Russian Orthodox Church and make them want to slander it.

First here are members of the congregation worshipping a few metres away from President Putin at a monastery in Sochi:

Here is President Putin himself:

Here is a member of the choir:

Here is Prime Minister of Russia Medvedev worshipping during the same Divine Liturgy of Christmas but at the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow. He is with his wife. Presumably the children are theirs.

Here are members of the congregation at the same Divine Liturgy of Christmas at Christ the Saviour Cathedral:

Here is the Patriarch of Moscow Kyrillos celebrating the same Divine Liturgy:

Orthodox Monk