The Fate of Nations Rests on the Devotion of a Few Righteous Men - Sermon for the Feast of the Port Arthur Icon of the Theotokos (2026)

What is there in the life of a nation? What determines its fortunes in this world? What governs its rise and fall? Look up the Russo-Japanese War or the siege of Port Arthur in any book of history, and you won’t find any mention of the Port Arthur Icon. You won’t learn of the Virgin Mary’s miraculous appearance to a sailor in Kiev, or her prediction of war with Japan a year before hostilities broke out. You won’t hear of her promise that Russia would prevail if her Icon was painted and sent to Port Arthur. You won’t read about the commissioning and painting of the Icon, of its being entrusted to a Russian naval officer to be transported to Port Arthur, of the delay, neglect, and indifference shown to the Icon by those responsible for its safe passage. You’ll never be told of the elderly Russian man who courageously undertook the journey with the Icon after the Japanese siege had begun, or his eventual disappointment when he arrived too late.

Instead, you will find out about the competing interests that led to the conflict, the diplomatic failures that made war inevitable. You’ll hear about the conduct of the war, the number of ships sand sailors lost, the land battles and the size of the armies, the generals and their strategies. You’ll learn that the Russian defenders of Port Arthur had the supplies to hold out much longer than they did, and that the general who ordered their retreat was later court martialed and imprisoned.[1] You’ll read about the peace mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, the loss of the Russian Navy, the national humiliation suffered by Russia—the first time a modern European nation had suffered military defeat at the hands of an Asian power. You’ll discover the loss of faith in the Tsarist regime that followed the war, the civil unrest, the liberalizing reforms, the bloody harbingers of the calamity that was to befall Russia just twelve years later.

Could it be that all of this was the result of the neglect shown to an Icon of the Mother of God? What historian could ever make such a claim and find his work published, taken seriously by the academic community. And yet it’s just such a conclusion that today’s feast invites us to draw. It forces us to look at the fate of nations not with the eyes of the historian but with the eyes of faith.

This is not an exercise in idle speculation. No historical comparison is ever exact, but suffice it to say that our country, like Russia at the start of the 20^th century, is a great power facing setbacks abroad and unrest at home. What will our fate be, and how will it be decided? On the battlefield? At the ballot box? No, it will be decided in the heart of each one of us.

For there is nothing more to the life of a nation than there is to the life of a person. Our life is more than the sum total of our actions. Add up everything a man says or does in his lifetime and you will hardly scratch the surface of the man. For each one of us has a secret inner life known only to God, and this is where a man’s life truly takes place, where his fate is determined. All the visible and external dimension of our life is nothing but the manifestation and the working out of what’s hidden deep in the heart of man, whether good or evil. We may not always perceive it, we may not always understand it, we may scarcely ever wish to acknowledge it, but everything we do and everything that happens to us in our life is the result of spiritual causes that lie in the depths of the heart. God arranges all external events with an eye towards the heart of man, to reward the good and punish the evil, to perfect those being saved through trials, and to confirm them in faith, to leave the ungodly and unbelieving to their own devices, to reap the fruit of their own folly.

When the great Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn was a young man in the early days of the Russian Revolution, he heard some elderly peasants discussing why such calamities were befalling Russia. It was all because, they concluded, “men have forgotten God.” At the time, Solzhenitsyn thought this was a hopelessly naïve and simplistic answer. But after going through the ordeal of the gulag and encountering his own hidden depths open to the face of God, he too could affirm that these horrors had happened because “men have forgotten God.” He tried to warn the West 50 years ago, but it seems we have yet to hear.

If the forgetfulness of God is the source of all our troubles, what then is the remembrance of God? St. Mark the Ascetic defines it as “suffering of heart endured in a spirit of devotion.” Why is it so painful to remember God? Because He reproves our sin and restrains our selfish, earthly desires. The heart is constricted and suffers hurt when faced with external obstacles and difficulties that force us to turn our gaze upwards and remember that there is a God over us. But if we endure everything that befalls us in life with a spirit of devotion—no matter how painful and unpleasant it is—then we will remember God, that is, we will make Him once again a very part of ourselves, as man was intended to be by God, united to Him, illumined and deified.

It may be that greater calamities await our nation and our world in the near future. The world seems at the edge of a precipice, with wars and rumors of wars, and great upheavals portended by the advent of radical new technologies. However uncertain the future may be, this much is sure, that “God is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him,” (Heb. 11:6). So we must always “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” (Matt. 6:33) trusting in God to arrange the affairs of life for our temporal and eternal welfare. As it ever has, the fate of nations rests on the devotion of a few righteous men. God would have spared Sodom had He found among them but ten righteous men (Gen. 18:33). Though our Orthodox Church may be small in this country, let it be great in faith and righteousness and devotion. And let our little monastery help lead the way. We behold the Mother of God before us daily, her feet trampling upon the swords of conflict that ever threaten to engulf our land and the whole world. Let us ever run to her, for she always directs us to her Son (cf. Jn. 2:5). And though the mountains be carried into the heart of the seas, and the foundations of the earth be shaken, let us take to heart the words of the troparion for the Port Arthur Icon that we sing daily: “O Orthodox Christians of North America, preserve the Orthodox Faith, for this faith is your firm foundation.” Amen.