Peanuts fans are familiar with Linus' blanket. He drags it around with him everywhere. It's his source of security. The blanket is to Linus what liquor, cigarettes, drinking 25 cups of coffee a day or other habits are to adults. Linus goes into a severe depression every time his dirty old blanket is thrown into the washing machine.

In one strip, Charlie Brown asks Linus what he is going to do when he is too old to drag his blanket around anymore.

He thinks about it for a moment and then replies, "I've been thinking seriously of having it made over into a sports coat." Since World War II we have spent billions of dollars for armaments, yet are we more secure? How secure can we be when we are at the mercy of everything from microbes to drunken drivers, from the mistakes of surgeons to accidents on the back stairs? If all we have to rest on is a new car, a job, a television set or refrigerator, we cannot but collapse.

As Charles Allen says, "You can't meet a crisis with a Cadillac. You can't mend a broken heart with a new refrigerator.

You can't lift the burden of a guilty conscience with a new vacuum cleaner." We Americans are swapping our souls for more and more gadgets. Yet the more we accumulate, the less secure we feel.

Jesus told a parable about a man who built his house on a rock. When the winds blew and the storms beat against that house, it did not fall; it stood fast, for it was founded upon a rock.

Who is this "rock" but Jesus, the rock of

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assurance, and the rock of salvation.

There is a story about two Germans who wanted to climb the Matterhorn. They hired three guides and began their ascent.

The men roped themselves together in this order: guide, traveler, guide, traveler, and guide.

They had gone only a little way up the side when the last man lost his footing. He was held up temporarily by the other four, because each had a toehold in the niches they had cut in the ice. But then the next man slipped, and he pulled down the two above him.

The only one to stand firm was the first guide, who had driven a spike deep into the ice. Because he held his ground, all the men beneath him regained their footing.

Every person who has attached himself to Christ through personal faith and baptism can say, "I am like one of those men who slipped, but thank God, I am bound in a living partnership to Christ. And because He stands firm, I will never perish."

When St. John Chrysostom was banished from his position, a magistrate threatened him: "I will exile you." Chrysostom replied, " You cannot; the whole world is my Father's house. You can never send me away from His presence."

"I will slay you," threatened the magistrate. "You cannot," replied St. John, "for my life is hid with Christ in God. Death will only lead me into God's fuller presence."

St. John Chrysostom, one of the greatest Christian preachers of all time, preached the greatest sermon ever in that conversation with the magistrate. He showed us the source of real security in a very insecure world. He stood firmly on the rock of his salvation: Jesus.

The Rev. Demetrios A. Recachinas is pastor of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Bridgeport.