Sermons & Homilies
Continuing the theme of the Saints who have been persecuted and martyred through the rise of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution, today’s homily will focus on the Confessor Elder Sebastian of Optina.
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We have reached today the Third Sunday after Pentecost, the third Sunday after the feast on which the Holy Spirit was first poured out upon the apostles of Christ, and the great missionary work of the Church was begun. On the first Sunday after Pentecost we celebrate all the saints who have shown forth throughout the entire world, while the second Sunday is set aside for each local church to keep the festival of its own saints — in our case it is the Sunday of All Saints of the Church of Russia, the church which first brought Holy Orthodoxy to our land, and which still to this day leads and guides us [in the Russian Church Abroad] toward the Kingdom of Heaven as our loving mother. And today, on the third Sunday, we honor the saints who have spiritually labored right here, in our rough American soil, so that the same grace of the Most Holy Spirit which transfigured their own lives would also transfigure the lives of you and I and each and every person around us.
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We are on the doorstep of the glorious feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have already entered into the Forefeast, the hymns of which fill our ears with the joyous, timeless proclamation of the ever-new Birth of our Transcendent God in human nature.
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It is regrettable if we are unfamiliar with the saints who are significant to various peoples and places, but even doubly so if we are unfamiliar with that whole genre of writing dedicated to heralding the life and teaching of the saints of the Church, called hagiography.
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“Bless and curse not!” says St. Paul in today’s Epistle. We see both the fulfillment of, and the disobedience to, this command in today’s Gospel.
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