An Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, for St. Nicholas Day, 7534/2025, by Priest Paul Siewers, also on the occasion of the first anniversary of our worship services in our new Temple. Glory to God!

Our beloved Saint Nicholas of Myra and Lycia is known worldwide as the Orthodox Christian who helps those in need. And what is the definition of a human being but someone in need. We find our lifeboat in the Church of Jesus Christ, and by Saint Nicholas’ efficacious prayers to our Lord. He is our saintly grandfather in the faith who shows us by example the loving power of the unity of heart and mind in Christ.

The Carpatho-Russian song beloved in Pennsylvania’s coal region for generations of Orthodox Christians tells his story for children of all ages:

O who loves Nicholas the Saintly,
Him will Nicholas receive,
and give help in time of need..
O who dwells in God’s holy mansions;
Is our help on the land and oceans.
He will guard us from all ills,
keep us pure and free from sins…
Nicholas, tearfully we sinners,
Beseech you fervently in our prayers.
Help us in our tribulations,
comfort ev’ry Christian nation.
Holy Saint, listen to our prayers.
Let not life lead us to despair;
All our efforts aren’t in vain,
singing praises to your name…

Holy Father Nicholas! He was a Confessor for the Faith, imprisoned in the Diocletian persecution and released during the time when Emperor Saint Constantine established the Christian Faith in Roman society. A former prisoner himself, he helped the vulnerable in four main ways.

First, he helped the poor generously, including by fighting against what today we would call human trafficking. Famously, by helping provide gold coins to girls who were in effect to be sold off to husbands, he enabled them to preserve their chastity for Christ and to avoid a sad fate of commodifying love idolatrously, which we too often see today. Secondly, he secured mercy for captives, not forgetting those in prison. He reminds us that the Christian meaning of freedom is generosity, for free is a word linked etymologically to the word friend. We are all kindred in Christ as we also were even in Adam. He helped the vulnerable also by keeping the teaching of the Church pure and free from corruption. He is remembered at the Council of Nicaea when a Deacon for slapping Arius, and he repented but his action displayed a righteous anger against heresy that would deceive and endanger Christ’s little ones. Finally, he is also remembered for helping sailors, the travelers who were sometimes impressed into service and subject to cruel authorities, but who in their own vulnerabilities to the elements and the storms of life represent the condition of us all as sojourners on this earth.

Today in small ways our little Church in Northern Appalachia is reaching out unworthily to follow Saint Nicholas’ example. We are gathering Christmas presents for children in need. We had a delegation in Washington DC this week to support unjustly imprisoned Orthodox Christian believers in Ukraine and we are starting a new prison ministry. In Bible Study, in Orthodox classes, in our members who are attending the ROCOR Pastoral School, and most of all in our services, we proclaim the Gospel of Orthodoxy as received from our hierarchs and Church Tradition. In recent and upcoming baptisms, in our catechumenate, and in other mysteries of the Church most notably the Eucharist, we support our community of sojourners on the Earth, and pray for those who travel and pray for protection from the elements of this fallen world.

In all this, we seek to emulate Nicholas the Saintly, who is also one of the most revered saints of All Russia, of which tradition and diaspora our little Church is a faithful part too.

Truly in many ways Saint Nicholas was a counter-cultural Christian on behalf of the vulnerable, and in this we might say he was an outlaw in pushing back against the old law and legalisms that were fulfilled in Jesus Christ’s New Commandment to love our neighbor more than ourselves. Orthodox Christianity has what could be called an outlaw sense of natural law, exemplified in Saint Nicholas’ life.

Natural law in Western culture is often presented today as rigid, moralistic, and legalistic, even if it is in an atheistic or communistic way in relation to so-called scientific laws. However, the late Orthodox Christian bioethicist Herman Engelhardt, who visited us in Lewisburg some years back, wrote this:

Natural law is, after all, the spark of God’s love in our nature, not the biological state of affairs we find in broken nature. Natural law is not an objective external constraint, but the will of the living God experienced in our conscience…. Traditional Christians recognize the reference environment for humans to be Eden, and the goal of all adaptation to be the pursuit of holiness.

Engelhardt based his description of natural law on a statement by St. Basil of Caesarea that references “the spark of divine love latent within you,” to be enkindled by ascetic effort in synergy with grace, as the transfiguring and dynamic basis for our natural identity.

St. Nicholas exemplified this. He is in a sense the exceptional holy man who is also the Christian everyman as an example and prayer warrior for each of us and for children, students, the unmarried, the prisoners, and everyone in need.

In this he could be called the Sobornost Santa Claus, to use his familiar popularized nickname. For sobornost is the Slavonic word for solidarity, for our oneness in Christ in His Church, mystical and invisible yet connecting all our earthly living as well. In this unity we experience what Jesus Christ meant when He called on us to love one another more than ourselves.

Saint Nicholas gives the example for our lives, and also offers his intercession for us in storm-traveled seas, praying to God for us as a wonder-working Saint in theosis. For he accomplished the unity of heart and mind that is our goal in the Christian life. The mind or the nous, as the eye of the soul, kindles through God’s grace, the light in our heart, the sparkle that is the natural law of who we can be in God’s goodness, and which overflows to let our light shine as Jesus Christ commanded us.

Holy Father Nicholas, pray to God for us!

An homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers, for the 27th Sunday after Pentecost.

(Above) Russian icon of the Holy Prophet Nahum.
(Below) Painting of the Fall of Nineveh prophesied by the Prophet Nahum, by John Martin (1829),

Dear hearts, today we commemorate the Holy Prophet Nahum among other saints. He is one of the minor prophets we have been reading in Bible Study, so-called minor because their books are smaller, not because their message is less important. Holy Nahum is thought (based on the Septuagint text used by the Orthodox Church) to have been a contemporary of Isaiah, writing in the period leading up to the Assyrian exile of the Ten Tribes of northern Israel, back in the 700s BC by Western dating. This Sunday commemorating Nahum during the Nativity Fast, our Orthodox Advent, is also appropriate, because of how the Prophets and the Old Testament all bend toward the coming of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ in a cave in Bethlehem as a modest but glorious babe sung to by angels, adored by shepherds, and loved by his Mother the All Holy Theotokos.

The Holy Prophet Nahum also is traditionally regarded in the Orthodox Church as an intercessor for prayers for mental health. This is interesting because his short book of prophecy given to him by God is focused on the fall of the great imperial and commercial city of Nineveh, which would not happen for generations after his lifetime. In fact, first would come the conquest by Nineveh’s empire of Assyria of the northern kingdom of Israel, and their forced exile to that land. Then the fall of Nineveh would be one of the series of events leading to the return from Babylonia and a later exile of the people of Judah, the southern kingdom, after the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple.

Nineveh was one of the great cities of the ancient world, located in the so-called cradle of civilization in Mesopotamia or modern-day Iraq. Mere decades before, God had sent the prophet Jonah to preach in Nineveh, and the city had repented of its many sins. But then the city changed across a few generations from repentant piety to gross corruption, immorality, and idolatry. This too is a warning to us.

As an imperfect analogy to this change in Nineveh, consider how, during the 1950s, skyscrapers in New York City lit up for Good Friday and Easter with three massive lit up Crosses in their windows, in a time of public piety during the height of the Cold War against atheistic Communism. This is not to say that New York City then was necessarily pious and not a center of worldliness, and those expressing those signs were probably not Orthodox Christians although we can admire the Christian message. But today it would be very unlikely that such huge Christian displays dominating the skyline would occur in the great global city of America. Nahum’s message of the need for continual repentance for our spiritual health holds true for us today as much as in his time more than 13 centuries ago.

His name means “God consoles” or “comfort,” and this indicates why he is regarded as a saint to ask for prayers to God for our mental health. Although his message is one of God’s judgment on Nineveh, wrapped up in it is the call for repentance, and the assurance of God’s help for His faithful people of Israel, the Church. That is us, brothers and sisters, however unworthy and sinful we may feel, myself more than all. For in the Body of Christ we are in the full realization of Israel today for all nations, and sheltered by Him as we retain our spirit of humility, repentance, and an open heart to God’s grace. For in Orthodoxy we know that grace itself to be divine and it warms and heals our heart and soul, no matter what the circumstances around us, even if we face a seemingly overwhelming worldly care, such as the massive city and empire of Nineveh. God is in control and the lover of mankind in His Church. Let us shelter in this Church family, in which the Prophet Nahum is one of our relatives, in the mysteries of Confession, and the Eucharist.

To continue reflecting on the relevance of Nahum’s prophecy to our mental health, Elder Paisios of modern Greece has told us that it is worldly cares and material goods and worries that cause us great stress, as they did with the young rich man in the Gospel account today. Nahum’s prophecy shows that Nineveh, typifying such worldly cares, will fall, but the fall of that city suggests the rise of another in our hearts and in the Church, that of the New Jerusalem of God. Indeed, the meaning of the name of the town that was a base for much of Jesus Christ’s ministry on earth, Capernaum, is the village of Nahum, who lived in that area of Galilee long before.

The approach to mental health of the Holy Prophet Nahum in the Old Testament is fulfilled in Orthodox Christian teachings throughout the current Church era. For example, Saint Ephraim’s devotional writing reminds us of the mental health involved in Nahum’s prophecy by directing us to lift up our eyes to God’s city rather than man’s.

Living centuries after the Prophet Nahum but not far away, Saint Ephraim the Syrian wrote beautiful meditations and prayers that later were compiled by Saint Theophan the Recluse in Russia, and are presented to us in a little Orthodox devotional book called A Spiritual Psalter or Reflections on God. Brothers and sisters I encourage you to find this book if you have not already, A Spiritual Psalter by Saint Ephraim, as it is wonderfully healing to read a litte bit daily from it. Like all our Orthodox spiritual treasures, it comes across the ages and through the hands of different saints to us, all in the mystical unity or sobornost of the Church.

In one of his prayers, St. Ephraim writes:

“Know that the eight thoughts that lead to all evil—gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, untimely sorrow, despondency, vainglory, and pride—wage war against every person. If you wish to overcome gluttony, love temperance and fear God, and you will prevail. If you wish to overcome lust, love vigil and thirst, always think of death, avoid conversations with women [he is addressing men here]—and you will prevail. If you wish to overcome avarice, love non-acquisitiveness and frugality. If you wish to overcome anger, acquire meekness and magnanimity. Remember how much evil the Jews did to our Lord Jesus Christ, and yet, as the lover of mankind, He did not become angry with them but prayed for them, saying: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.’

“If you wish to overcome untimely sorrow, never grieve over anything temporary. If you are hurt by words, troubled, or dishonoured, do not sorrow but rather rejoice. Only grieve when you sin, but even then, keep it measured, lest you fall into despair and perish. If you wish to overcome despondency, engage in some handiwork, even briefly, or read, or pray often. If you wish to overcome vainglory, do not love praise, honours, fine clothing, or prominent places. Instead, love to be reproached and dishonoured, even falsely acused, and reproach yourself as being the worst of sinners. If you wish to overcome pride, never attribute anything you do to your own efforts or strength. Whether fasting, keeping vigil, sleeping on the ground, singing psalms, serving others, or making many prostrations, say: ‘This is done with God’s help and His protection, not by my strength or effort.’”

Then, in a following reflection, St. Ephraim adds, “Praise to Him [God] Who invisibly cultivates our spirit. Blessed is He who attuned the senses of our spirit so that it may always sing to Him on the lyre of its soul.” (Numbers 117-118; translation by Nun Christina)

Here St. Ephraim, as compiled by St. Theophan, tells of the healing nature of Orthodox Christianity for our mental and spiritual as well as physical health. God “attunes the senses of our spirit so that it may always sing to Him on the lyre of its soul.” In other words, the Lord gives us our harmony and grounding and freedom from stress, although we must be open to his cultivation of our spirit our nous, our heart. In this, to return to Nahum, we experience the New Jerusalem, and not Nineveh, in our lives. Brothers and sisters, as we joyfully anticipate the birth of God the Logos in Bethlehem, let us remember that logos, a word for Christ in Christian Scriptures, means not only the Word but also the Harmony, and let God harmonize us that we may always sing to Him.

Glory to God for all things!

***

Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§91 [18:18-27]

At that time, a certain ruler asked Him, saying, ‘Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said unto him, ‘Why callest thou Me good? None is good save One, that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery.’ ‘Do not kill.’ ‘Do not steal.’ ‘Do not bear false witness.’ ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’’ And he said, ‘All these have I kept from my youth up.’ Now when Jesus heard these things, He said unto him, ‘Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven; and come, follow Me.’ And when he heard this he was very sorrowful, for he was very rich. And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, He said, ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.’ And those who heard it said, ‘Who then can be saved?’ And He said, ‘The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.’

The Anticipation of Advent and the Joy of Christmas

Soon, as a Church family, we will gather to celebrate the most important birthday in all history, the birth of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. The modest little cave in Bethlehem housed the Incarnation of the Creator of the universe, a baby greeted by angelic songs, shepherds, and a loving Mother, but Who also soon faced the hatred of the world, even as an infant. Yet He gave the power of God’s love.

The Nativity Fast, Orthodox Advent, reminds us in this month to prepare for celebrating Christmas on the ancient and ongoing Church calendar’s Dec. 25 — Jan. 7 on the civil calendar. This is still known in American folklore as “Appalachian Christmas” or “Old Christmas,” as it was the way our American ancestors as well as Orthodox Church forebears observed the coming of Jesus Christ.

We are blessed to be able to focus on the true meaning of Christmas, Jan. 7 (civil calendar), apart from secularized “commercial Christmas.” Please plan ahead now for avoiding work and family scheduling on Tues. Jan. 6 (Christmas Eve) and Jan. 7 (Christmas) on the civil calendar. Worship Him Who is the reason for the season with your Church family! May the Lord give us good strength!

Note: Dec. 25 on the civil calendar is our feast of St. Herman of Alaska and a fish day. If you are gathering with non-Orthodox family, try to plan ahead to prepare a fish dish (salmon etc.) to keep the fast as much as possible. Breaking the fast should be something to confess before taking Communion, and while there can be allowances for travel and for the hospitality of others, it is best to keep our ancient tradition of fasting in honor of our Lord, and to get a blessing or confession for other circumstances. It can also be an opportunity to share the hope of our faith.

St. Nicholas Day services with Prison Ministry discussion. Thurs. Dec. 5/18 Vigil at 6:30 p.m. and Fri. Dec. 6/19 Divine Liturgy at 10 a.m. (Hours at 9:40) will mark the Feast of St. Nicholas of Myra. Liturgy will be followed by discussion about the Prison Ministry with Chaplain Adam from the Muncy SCI, who will be visiting. Traditionally the Feast of St. Nicholas is  a time for gift-giving to children on the Orthodox Church calendar!

Gifts for Children. Please bring any gifts (toys etc.) for children to Church especially Dec. 1/14 through 8/21, including St. Nicholas Day. They will be donated to Union County Children and Youth Services for children in need.

Nativity Fast and Confessions. The Nativity Fast is a time for joyful anticipation of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. During the Nativity Fast, we participate in a standard fare of “vegan plus shellfish” food, although there are more frequent fish and wine days than during Great Lent (please check the calendar). Orthodox fasting indicates how we strive with God’s help to be less carnivorous in our lives, less consuming of others and Creation, by partaking of food from lower-level beings, echoing the non-carnivority of life in the Garden of Eden and God willing in the life to come, while also hopefully living in a less “dog eat dog” way with family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The Church Fathers also found in their ascetic practice that eating less rich food also dampened down the passions. Fasting should most of all be from the heart in seeking through God’s uncreated energies to express His love in a self-sacrificing way, loving others more than ourselves as in our Lord’s New Commandment. Alms, mission work, and a spirit of repentance and humility (including the mystery of Confession) are central to the right spirit of the Fast.

Trip to Washington DC in support of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Fr. Paul, Reader Luke, and Cuthbert plan to participate in a national project blessed by Metropolitan Nicholas to acquaint members of Congress and their staff with the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and issues of religious freedom for Orthodox Christians. Dec. 2-4/15-17.

Prayers for the Sick and Keeping in Touch. Please remember in your prayers Mary (Sally), Innocent (Robert), John, and Michael (Misha) in their ongoing medical needs, and consider calling, writing, or visiting (contact Fr. Paul for details.

Catechumen Prayers, Dec. 1/14 scheduled for Aaron. Please keep him in prayer along with Catechumens Zach, Camron, James, Ryan, Scott. Also the newly illumined Nicholas.

Choir Rehearsals We will be holding short choir rehearsals this month in preparation for Nativity, during select coffee hours. Watch for details. Thanks to our Choir team leadership and all who can participate in this important work for building up our mission, glory to God!

Sisterhood News Please keep in touch with the Co-Presidents of our parish Sisterhood of St. Olga of Alaska, Michala Alexander and Matushka Olga, for details on plans for fellowship and cleaning parties. Sophia is handling scheduling food for coffee hour.

Brotherhood News
Our parish Brother of St. Alfred the Great will continue planning more “urban ministry” outreach for festivals and street fairs in the area during winter and spring. This follows our recent presence at the Selinsgrove and Mifflinburg Christkindl fairs.

Prison Ministry Monday mornings, 9 a.m. to 10:30, will be a regular time for visits to the Muncy SCI. Please keep in touch with Fr. Paul if you are interested in participating in this extension of our mission outreach, which is scheduled to begin Dec. 9/22. Note that Chaplain Adam from the prison plans to be with us on St. Nicholas Day, Dec. 6/19, to discuss after Liturgy the prison work.

Updates on Temple Building Work Please keep in prayer for our community and for the work on the Temple. Wehope that the Dome and Cross will be installed soon by our very busy installer.

Regular Weekly Schedule Asking for your prayers and participation, in worship of God and in love for one another. Please bring a friend, neighbor, co-worker, and/or inquirer too!
—Intro to Orthodoxy Class, 10 to 11 a.m., Bucknell.zoom.us/my/Kentigern/

—Saturday Vigil 4:30 p.m. and Sunday Liturgy 10 a.m. (Hours 9:40)

—Bible Study 2:30 p.m., Bucknell bookstore. Focus this month: The Minor Prophets

Wednesday Akathist, 7 p.m.

Parish Contact Info:  Father Paul, 570-863-9039, priestpauls@pm.me

Parish Website: stjohnthewonderworker.com

Parish Bible Study Resources:
https://ecosemiotics.com/bible-study/

FYI below are my latest thoughts as a journalist and former Scout on the journey of the Boy Scouts of America in our society today, published in The Federalist where I occasionally write on cultural issues and “signs of the times.” https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/08/boy-scouts-have-themselves-to-blame-for-losing-the-pentagons-favor

A young man I know was a fifth-grade Cub Scout when Scouting’s Boys’ Life magazine arrived in the mail for the first time with girls on the cover. He tossed aside the magazine unread, although he had been an avid reader before.

The gender studies era of Scouting’s “Great Awokening” had arrived. Our family’s generations-long involvement in Scouting ended soon after, for a combination of reasons involving the movement’s decline and its reinvention.

The movement, beset by sexual abuse cases and resulting bankruptcy, and declining sharply in numbers for decades, in the past decade expanded membership and leadership to openly LGBTQ youth and adults, prompting the rise of alternative groups such as Latter Day Saints Church programs and Trail Life USA for those seeking more traditional approaches to raising boys.

Now “woke” Scouting is back in the news, thanks to National Public Radio (NPR) obtaining leaked materials and attributing them to U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The draft memos conclude that preferential government treatment of the remnant of the Scouting movement should come to an end.

Currently, those who achieve Eagle Scout rank in what had been the Boy Scouts still get special treatment when joining the US military, with advanced rank and pay. In addition, the military provides equipment and support for Scouting events not available to other groups. Such perks date back officially to the 1930s New Deal era.

But the leaked memos call today’s Scouting reflective of the type of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology that the Trump administration seeks to root out of the military, government agencies, and higher education. They argue that this has contributed to lower standards in Scouting, undermining meritocracy and its original goal to cultivate “masculine values.”

The criticisms raise the question of whether, in today’s culturally divided America, a professed “one-size-fits-all” youth organization like Scouts can merit official treatment amid division over its direction, despite a legacy of enjoying official support for many years.

Opening the Floodgates

The formerly mainstay American institution has had a wild ride in the past two decades. From 6 million members at its height in 1969 as the Boy Scouts of America, what is now called Scouting America currently has about 1 million members, despite the U.S. population growing by more than a third in the intervening time.

Going back to the founding in 1910, Scouts pledged to be “morally straight,” “clean,” and “reverent,” and to maintain “duty to God.” That all was historically understood in straightforward moral terms, including discouragement of sexual behavior outside of traditional marriage, including masturbation and pornography use.

Indeed, the Boy Scouts in 2000 went to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue successfully for its right as a private organization to prohibit expression of gender identity in its units and camps. The central issue was not excluding openly LGBTQIA-identifying members and leaders, but the movement’s underlying definition of freedom as self-restraint rather than self-expression.

The underlying Christian emphasis on self-restraint was the traditional ethos of Scouting, not shaping boys into open heterosexuals or any other type of sexuals, in the Hugh Hefner mold or otherwise. But making condoms available at Scout Jamborees in recent years symbolized the change, alongside in 2016 allowing allegiance to humanism to replace “duty to God” in the Scout Oath.

Early 21st-century American establishment leaders helped to usher in the new era of Scouting sexuality.

Former CEO of Exxon and later Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as the national Boy Scouts of American President, helped lead a 2013 decision to allow openly LGBTQ youths to enter Scouting. Then, under his successor as Scouts President, former CIA Director Bill Gates, in 2016 the Boy Scouts allowed openly LGBTQ adult leaders to serve.

By 2017, the Scouts allowed openly trans boys to join. By 2018, girls were allowed to join Cub Scouts. By 2019, Scouts further shifted, allowing girls to become Eagle Scouts. Certain exceptions from new policies were allowed for objecting religiously sponsored groups. But fundamental changes brought about a name change from Boy Scouts of America to Scouting America. Critics alleged that physical and other standards for promotion and badges were diminished in the process.

Forgetting their Christian Roots

“The organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt no longer supports the future of American boys,” Hegseth reportedly wrote in the leaked draft material, suggesting that the movement had been infiltrated by leftist interests sowing “gender confusion” and undermining the Scouts’ original goal of cultivating “masculine values.” Grove City College political historian Paul Kengor has documented efforts across decades by Communists and “cultural Marxists” to change the Boy Scouts.

Scouting emerged from what is sometimes called the Third Great Awakening of public religion in American history, a rise of Mainline Protestantism often with a Social Gospel theme, which included the YMCA and Prohibition movements, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

President Theodore Roosevelt praised the movement as assisting a boy to learn to “master his fate,” and described it as “an asset to our country for the development of efficiency, virility, and good citizenship.”

“It is essential that its leaders be men of strong, wholesome character; of unmistakable devotion to our country, its customs and ideals, as well as in soul and by law citizens thereof, whose wholehearted loyalty is given to this nation, and to this nation alone,” Roosevelt said.

The early history of American Scouting was often tied to the so-called Seven Pillar denominations of mainline American Protestantism, although it became closely identified with American Catholic and Mormon communities also. One pillar, the United Methodist Church, historically a large sponsor of Scouting units, shows parallels both in liberalizing attitudes toward anthropology of sex and family, and decline in membership: From 11 million United Methodists in 1968 to 4 million today.

Scouting had a mixed background at its birth, with quasi-Masonic aspects in Order of the Arrow ceremonies, and “great Scoutmaster in the sky” language at camp chapel. It grew from Teddy Roosevelt-style nationalist progressivism and British Empire civics of the early 20th century. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book inspired Cub Scout ranks.

But it undoubtedly helped many American boys on their journey to becoming men.

In my Chicago neighborhood, I wore my Cub Scout uniform to school and trudged home to our basement den meeting, and over to the neighborhood Methodist Church for pack meetings and later Boy Scout troop meetings. Like many boys, I learned valuable lessons from Scouting, and however imperfectly kept respect for the virtues of the Scout Oath and Law tucked away with my old copy of the Scout handbook and Scout pocket knife in later years.

Our eldest son found a home in a small rural troop run by dedicated military and law enforcement veterans. I often went along on camping trips as an adult volunteer leader.

Our family’s relationship with Scouting ended around the time our younger son threw aside his Boys’ Life with girls on the cover. Our eldest lost his home troop due to dwindling membership. Dad didn’t want to send money to a national organization beset by scandal and changing mores.

However much America lost something with traditional Scouting, its legacy preferred treatment is difficult to justify today.

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Dr. Paul Kentigern Siewers is associate professor of English at Bucknell University and was the 2018-2019 William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life at the James Madison Program, Princeton University. He is also a priest at St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes on Christian literature and ideas of nature, and on literary resistance to totalitarianism. His views are his own.

Homily for the 26th Sunday after Pentecost, 7534/3035, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

Today we commemorate the Holy Great Martyr and Most Wise Catherine of Alexandria and her Companions the fifty Orators, the Wife of the Emperor, the commander Porphyrius, and the two hundred Soldiers. For such was the spiritual power of this great woman saint that she brought with her by example to martyrdom so many others. The early Irish Orthodox Christians in ancient times talked about red, white, and blue martyrdom. Catherine and her companions showed gloriously red martyrdom, violent death. White martyrdom is that of separation from the world in being a hermit or monastic through ascetic struggle leading to purity of heart. Blue martyrdom, really in terms of the original Irish color blue-green, is that to which we can all be called, even if not monastics nor meeting a violent death, the martyrdom of ascetic struggle in the world. The colors of martyrdom were also related by early Irish Orthodox writers to the colors of the winds as spiritual cosmic symbolism, so woven into life itself was martyrdom seen as witnessing to our faith in the Lord, related to the winds of the Holy Spirit breathing life into us, especially within us from Pentecost. Blue martyrdom was related to the color of the sea, and how the early Irish saints called the sea the desert, their version of the spiritual landscape of Egypt and the Holy Land, recognizing that like living in the sea in God we live and move and have our being in Him. The witnessing in our lives of blue-green martyrdom is a chrysalis process for us as Christians, like a caterpillar becoming a multi-colored butterfuly, as St. Anthony the Great described it in his teachings.

Let us first consider the red martyrdom of St. Catherine. She was a devout Christian who refused immoral advances by powerful men desiring her for her physical beauty. She dedicated herself to virginity in Christ. The young Catherine, although only college-aged by our standards, had already become a scholar skilled in apologetics, who refuted the pagan intellectuals of her day with the truth of Christ. The Roman Emperor Maximin in persecution of Christians was impressed by her abilities, and he gathered 50 of the best philosophers, orators, and logicians of the day at Alexandria to refute her arguments for Christianity. The Byzantine Synaxarion tells us, “Alone, but radiant with the grace of the Holy Spirit, [the young girl] was in no fear of them, having been assured by the Archangel Michael in a vision that the Lord would speak through her mouth and cause her to overcome the wisdom of the world by the Wisdom that comes from on high. In that strength, Catherine showed up the errors and contradictions of oracles, poets and philosophers. She showed how they have recognized for themselves that the so-called gods of the pagans are demons and the expression of human passions. She even referred in support of her arguments to certain oracles of the Sibyl and of Apollo, which dimly tell of the divine incarnation and life-giving passion of the Son of God. Overthrowing their myths and fables, she proclaimed the creation of the world out of nothing by the one only, true, eternal God, and the deliverance of man from death by the Incarnation of the only Son of the Father.” The intellectuals were dumbfounded and sought Christian baptism. They were martyred with Catherine, whom the emperor put on a special torture device constructed of four spiked wheels connected by an axle. Freed by an angel, while back in prison she converted the emperor’s wife, who was also martyred. Her body was conveyed by two Angels to Mount Sinai, and this is why the Orthodox monastery there, with the oldest surviving library, is named St. Catherine’s.

The wheel, her torture device that came to naught, can remind us of the works of a Western Orthodox Christian philosopher from early times, Boethius. He wrote of a wheel of fortune. He said we are all caught on it, tortured in effect, by the accidents of life as we spin around on the wheel. However, those who open their hearts to God’s grace and struggle for virtue, come closer to the center of the spinning wheel, which is God’s Providence and sustaining of us. The closer we get to the center, the less we spin. And we find our peace and safety spiritually with God, as did St .Catherine. The red martyrdom or martyrdom by death by St. Catherine exemplifies an ultimate of emptying ourselves in Christ. This is done in the face of persecution, such as that indicated by one of our Gospel readings. In patience possess ye your souls, our Lord said, in promising that the world, the realm of the devil, would hate us as Orthodox Christians. But he also said, be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.

Such persecution is happening today too on various levels. Ukrainian Metropolitan Arseniy has been held unfairly in prison for months in worsening medical condition. His plight and that of others in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are the focus of an upcoming gathering in Washington DC for religious freedoms of Orthodox Christians. In our Bible Study we’ve had discussions from a Nigerian visitor about the persecution of Christian believers in that African country. Many face workplace, social, and school problems on a sometimes small but hurtful scale as Orthodox Christians in the U.S.

St. John our patron weathered persecution in Communist China and in the U.S., a holy man and wonderworker who was a white martyr in his sacrificial life as a monastic, but also expressed blue martyrdom in all his work in the world. He faced harsh unfair criticism and legal action against him. But blue martyrdom is also to a degree for all of us, with our lives sparkling however unworthily with God’s uncreated grace, and asking the prayers of our patron St. John for good strength and by his example. This Nativity Fast, and as we in Church feature the blue color of the Virgin Mary today in the After-Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos, is a good time for us in the world to pray to God for the gift of blue martyrdom as the Irish called it, the ascetic struggle and witness to the faith of non-monastics in the world.

Here is another example of what we could call a true blue martyr. St. Alexander Nevsky commemorated yesterday. A descendant of Vikings, Alexander Nevsky was a ruler of the Russian principality-city of Novgorod. He protected the people there and although they were sometimes fickle about their relationship with him, they came to love him as a protector of his people. His last name was for one battle defending his fellow Orthodox Christians against the so-called Northern Crusaders, Catholics from Sweden trying to conquer the future Russia and turn her into a Catholic country. In 1241 he was called upon again to defend his Orthodox community from an invasion by the crusading Teutonic Knights of the Catholic Germans. Not many today realize that the Crusades were just against Muslims but were also waged against Orthodox Christians too, by the way. Anyway, he and his army stopped the invasion in a famous battle on the ice at Lake Peipus. Alexander thus stopped their eastward expansion for several centuries. Meanwhile, the Mongol-Tartar invaders swept the Russian lands, and reduced the former major city of Kiev to a small town. Alexander decided to protect his people he would need to submit and cooperate with the Tartars, which he pursued with humility. In this we can be reminded of how many biblical prophets advised Israel not to engage in geopolitical games with the superpowers of their day, Egypt and Assyria and Babylonia and Persia, but rather to trust in the Lord and not principalities and powers. He went repeatedly to negotiate with the Tartar rulers of Eurasia, humbly on behalf of his people. On his last such journey, he fell ill, and received the name Alexis when tonsured as a monk in 1263, the year of his death. With the virtue of courage he defended his Orthodox people, and helped them by humble submission also to the Tartars. His humble but courageous concern for his people led to his being made a saint in 1547.

Today we face troubling signs of the times. Persecution of Orthodox Christians reaching even to us in America. False ecumenism broadcast in the world, which news brings us even from within Orthodox circles beyond our faithful Russian Church Abroad. Yet we stand today also at the After Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple. This major feast, again with the heavenly blue color of the Theotokos calling us to blue martyrdom in the world, marks the opening for us of Orthodox Christian Advent, the Nativity Fast, in which our good struggle is in joyous anticipation of the coming of Christmas on the Church calender, not the commercial calendar. While Western Christians call this the Presentation of the young Theotokos in the Temple, we call it the Entry, because it was deliberate and intentional on her part even as a 3-year-old, filled as she was with the uncreated energies of God, the grace of the Holy Spirit, in anticipation of the Incarnation to come. She became the missing Ark of the Covenant in the Temple’s previously empty Holy of Holies. In the other reading from the Gospel today, Jesus Christ heals on the sabbath, and reminds us how Sunday has become the Christian day of Resurrection superseding for the Israel of the Church the old Jewish sabbath. For with Christ every day is the Eighth Day of Resurrection, as the baptism of Ian today reminds us.

So let us remember the example of the red, white, and blue martyrs of our faith, such as St. Catherine, St. John, and those struggling in the world. Those colors remind us of what America can truly be as an Orthodox Christian nation, clad in the martyric colors of witness to faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. This is also what it means to be a true American in the view of God, an Orthodox Christian bringing out the best in our country in harmony with God’s law of love. May we aspire that in our lives we may shine with one or all of those colors, red white and blue, as known to the ancient Celtic saints. For martyrdom or witness to the faith in any or all of those forms will be our true coming out like the butterfly emerging from the caterpillar’s cocoon in brilliant multiple colors like the colors of the winds of God’s Holy Spirit uplifting us in the Pentecost found in the mysteries of the Church every day. Glory to God for all things!

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§71 [13:10-17]

At that time, Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years, and was bowed down and could in no way lift herself up. And when Jesus saw her, He called her to Him and said unto her, ‘Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.’ And He laid His hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. But the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath day, and said unto the people, ‘There are six days in which men ought to work; in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day.’ The Lord then answered him and said, ‘Thou hypocrite! Doth not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?’ And when He had said these things, all His adversaries were ashamed; and all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by Him.

Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§ 106 [21:12-19]

The Lord said to His disciples, ‘Beware of men, they shall lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and into prisons, and you will be brought before kings and rulers for My name’s sake. And it shall turn to you to bear testimony. Settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate beforehand what ye shall answer. For I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist. And ye shall be betrayed both by parents and brethren and kinsfolk and friends, and some of you they shall cause to be put to death. And ye shall be hated by all men for My name’s sake. But there shall not a hair of your head perish. In your patience possess ye your souls.’

Perhaps as children we liked to open Advent calendars, a custom among Western Christians, window by window by surprise each day leading up to Christmas.

Today in the Orthodox Church we celebrate not just an Advent calendar window, but in a sense the whole opening up of the Advent season, the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple. Our Lord Jesus Christ tells us in the Gospel that he is the gate, the door, but before His birth, in anticipating His life on earth as fully God and fully man, and unto His appearance as a baby in Bethlehem, His Mother beckons to us in the open window to Christmas today.

For the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple marks the transition from the Old Testament to the New, and the realization of Israel as the Body of Christ, for all nations. The Mother-to-be of the God-man takes her place in the Holy of Holies, fulfilling the Ark of the Covenant which had vanished long before. For she contains the Incarnation of God in Her womb, and in her Entry filled the place left by the vanished Ark in the Holy of Holies.

According to the account in Maccabees in the Orthodox Bible, the Holy Prophet Jeremiah took and hid the Old Testament Ark of the Covenant before the destruction of the first Temple by the Babylonians. We are told that Jeremiah instructed exiles to care for the fire from the Temple, signifying the light from God, and not to err by going away after ornamented idolatrous images of silver and gold of the Babylonians. We live among such idols in our modern age, sadly. So Jeremiah’s words to the exiles also speak to us, to keep the law in our hearts. So did most of all the Virgin Mary.

We are then told that Jeremiah, warned of God of the impending destruction, with help took the Tabernacle and Ark with him into the mountain where Moses had climbed up to see the Holy Land, and the heritage of God. Finding a cave, Jeremiah hid there the Tabernacle and the Ark and the Altar of Incense, all of which had been made as shown to Moses by God in the pattern on the mount. And he sealed a door on the cave. Others tried to mark the location, but then could not find it. And Jeremiah blamed them for trying to do so. The prophet told them, “As for that place, it shall be unknown until the time that God gather his people again together, and receive them unto mercy. Then shall the Lord show them these things, and the glory of the Lord shall appear, and the cloud also, as it was showed under Moses, and as when Solomon desired that the place might be honorably sanctified.”

That time happened when the Theotokos entered the Temple, inaugurating the era of the fulfillment of the gathering of all nations in the Israel that is the Holy Church, the Body of Christ. When the Virgin Mary, the greatest among the saints and the first and foremost of our race to achieve theosis (oneness with God’s grace), came to the Temple she was only 3 years old. Yet the High Priest led her inside and into the Holy of Holies because of the uncreated light of God’s grace that shone through her. This was the fruit of her holiness grown from God’s plan in her family tree all the way back to Seth and Adam and Eve. Her holy parents Saints Joachim and Anna had vowed if God gave them a child in old age to dedicate that child to Him. So they did.

But the Holy of Holies she entered was empty, there was no Ark of the Covenan,t as it had been hidden away long ago. But as the Holy Prophet Jeremiah promised, it was revealed again in full when God gathered His people together in His mercy, and showed his glory as the cloud (the uncreated light of God) that came to Moses, and which was radiant in the Virgin Mary even more than in Moses. The Ark was then revealed as the Virgin Mary who would come to bear Immanuel, God with us, in her womb. As she grew, and prayed, an angel fed her with spiritual food. For just as the Ark had contained the tablets on which God had written the law, His words, so too she would contain the Logos, the Word of God.

Thus the Ark of the Covenant was found again, revealed in plain sight, yet a mystery.

St. Gregory Palamas writes of this:

Now, when Righteous Joachim and Anna saw that they had been granted their wish, and that the divine promise to them was realized in fact, then they on their part, as true lovers of God, hastened to fulfill their vow given to God as soon as the child had been weaned from milk. They have now led this truly sanctified child of God, now the Mother of God, this Virgin into the Temple of God. And She, being filled with Divine gifts even at such a tender age, being full of divine graces and not and not wanting in the perfection of her mental faculties, she, rather than others, determined what was being done over Her. In Her manner She showed that She was not so much presented into the Temple, but that She Herself entered into the service of God of her own accord, as if she had wings, striving towards this sacred and divine love. [In Western tradition this feast is called the “Presentation” and not the “Entry.”] She considered it desirable and fitting that she should enter into the Temple and dwell in the Holy of Holies.

Therefore, the High Priest, seeing that this child, more than anyone else, had divine grace within Her, wished to set Her within the Holy of Holies. He convinced everyone present to welcome this, since God had advanced it and approved it. Through His angel, God assisted the Virgin and sent Her mystical food, with which She was strengthened in nature, while in body She was brought to maturity and was made purer and more exalted than the angels, having the Heavenly spirits as servants. She was led into the Holy of Holies not just once, but was accepted by God to dwell there with Him during Her youth, so that through Her, the Heavenly Abodes might be opened and given for an eternal habitation to those who believe in Her miraculous birthgiving.

So it is, and this is why She, from the beginning of time, was chosen from among the chosen. She Who is manifest as the Holy of Holies, Who has a body even purer than the spirits purified by virtue, is capable of receiving … the Hypostatic Word of the Unoriginate Father.Today the Ever-Virgin Mary, like a Treasure of God, is stored in the Holy of Holies, so that in due time, (as it later came to pass) She would serve for the enrichment of, and an ornament for, all the world. Therefore, Christ God also glorifies His Mother, both before birth, and also after birth.

We who understand the salvation begun for our sake through the Most Holy Virgin, give Her thanks and praise according to our ability. And truly, if the grateful woman (of whom the Gospel tells us), after hearing the saving words of the Lord, blessed and thanked His Mother, raising her voice above the din of the crowd and saying to Christ, Blessed is the womb that bore Thee, and the paps Thou hast sucked (Lk. 11:27), then we who have the words of eternal life written out for us, and not only the words, but also the miracles and the Passion, and the raising of our nature from death, and its ascent from earth to Heaven, and the promise of immortal life and unfailing salvation, then how shall we not unceasingly hymn and bless the Mother of the Author of our Salvation and the Giver of Life, celebrating Her conception and birth, and now Her Entry into the Holy of Holies?

Now, brethren, let us remove ourselves from earthly to celestial things. Let us change our path from the flesh to the spirit. Let us change our desire from temporal things to those that endure. Let us scorn fleshly delights, which serve as allurements for the soul and soon pass away. Let us desire spiritual gifts, which remain undiminished. Let us turn our reason and our attention from earthly concerns and raise them to the inaccessible places of Heaven, to the Holy of Holies, where the Mother of God now resides.

Therefore, in such manner our songs and prayers to Her will gain entry, and thus through her mediation, we shall be heirs of the everlasting blessings to come, through the grace and love for mankind of Him Who was born of Her for our sake, our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom be glory, honor and worship, together with His Unoriginate Father and His Coeternal and Life-Creating Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

St. Gregory concludes (from his Homilies translated by Prof. Christopher Veniamin):

The all-pure Virgin threw off [social] ties from the very beginning of her life, and withdrew from people. She escaped from a blameworthy way of life, and chose to live in solitude out of sight of all, inside the sanctuary. There, having loosed every bond with material things, shaken off every tie and even risen above sympathy towards her own body, she united her mind with its turning towards itself and attention, and with unceasing holy prayer. Having become her own mistress by this means, and being established above the jumble of thoughts in all their different guises, and above absolutely every form of being, she constructed a new and indescribable way to heaven, which I would call silence of the mind. Intent upon this silence, she flew high above all created things, saw God’s glory more clearly than Moses (cf. Exod. 33:18–23),928 and beheld divine grace, which is not at all within the capacity of men’s senses, but is a gracious and holy sight for spotless souls and minds. Partaking of this vision, she became, according to the sacred hymnographers, a radiant cloud of the truly living water, the dawn of the mystical day, and the fiery chariot of the Word. (Homily 54)

Dear Brothers and Sisters, let us today allow our Mother in the Church, the Most Holy Theotokos, to welcome us to the Christmas Season, into the Temple that is the Body of Her Son, our Church. Let us open our heart to her love and intercessions for us, that we may give ourselves wholly to her Son. Thus we find the lost Ark of the Covenant opening to us, the greatest Christmas gift of all this Advent season, as we await joyfully the birth of our Lord.

Glory to God for all things!

Homily from St. John’s for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost by Priest Paul Siewers.

Today we stand at the end of the American Thanksgiving weekend and in the first few days of the Nativity Fast, in the entryway of our 40-day journey to Christmas. While the worldly American holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas too often condition us to gorge our senses, or indulge in idolatry of success and comfort, Orthodox Christian holiday seasons are deeply counter-cultural. Thus, we fast when much of the rest of society launches full-bore into the consumer anti-Christmas.

Why is our Advent also a fast? To show respect and love for our Lord Jesus Christ and His Mother the Theotokos as we approach his birth. For us we love the Nativity of Christ so much that we are willing to wait longer for Christmas, for the air to clear from the worldliness into which it is perverted by society at large, and we arrive at our Dec. 25 on the ancient calendar on Jan. 7 on the modern civil calendar. Like the slow food movement, in patience possess we our souls.

Our date for Christmas also is known in folklore as Appalachian Christmas or Old Christmas, because it is the time when our forefathers celebrated Christmas at the roots of American history. That’s doubly appropriate for us in Appalachia. It is a time for our Church family to come together, whose head is God, and with him our Mother in the Church, the Theotokos.

Let us not let them down or miss the deep joyful sorrow of our Lord’s birth. Let us plan ahead so that we can be with them in worship and with all of our Church family on Jan. 6-7. This is part of our preparation fast, too. Let us plan ahead so that work and family commitments do not get in the way, nor the worldliness of secular Christmas that comes earlier. Let us plan ahead so that if we are with non-Orthodox family on the civil calendar’s Dec .25, which is our St. Herman’s day, we bring fish and wine as allowed by the fast. Let us not be like the man in the Gospel parable who could not come to the wedding because he had home and work commitments and was too busy.

For just we would drop everything on our schedule to be at the wedding of a son or daughter or a brother or sister, at Nativity our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ came to earth to marry His people, the Church. Look around you. For everyone here today is the community, the Church family, of which you are a part, and with whom you are married to Christ. In our Church family we find our salvation with God’s help. Do not abandon her for otherworldly interests however dear they may seem, any more than you would abandon your household family in the world.

Remember as children the joyful anticipation of restraint at not opening gifts until Christmas. This fast is like that too. Restraint, submission, and obedience are not popular words in society today. But they are transformed for us by love for the Nativity of our Lord, His birthday.

The major holiday that marks the opening part of our Advent season is the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, which we will celebrate together Wednesday night and Thursday morning at Church. The 3-year-old Theotokos is brought to the temple by her parents as a spiritual offering to God. In her purity she gains access even to the empty Holy of Holies, by then devoid of the physical Ark, but she spiritually fulfills the Ark of the Covenant. The holiday in anticipation of Christmas marks the shift from the Old Testament to the New Testament through her faithful sacrifice and love for God, her offering of herself to Him. A model for all of us, she becomes our intercessor and help. She exemplifies how we prepare ourselves as a gift for our Lord’s birthday, Christmas.

It is more lenient than Great Lent, the weekends are fish and wine and oil days, as you can follow on the calendar. But still we are asked to be less carnivorous, in our eating, in our treatment of one another, of other beings and Creation, and in our passions; to leave behind eating meat and dairy and hold to a vegan diet without olive oil when fish is not allowed. We also are asked to devote savings from our less rich diets to helping those in need, to show how we can work more to love our neighbor more than ourselves. This is like practicing muscles of the heart, in that sense training with Jesus Christ.

We began our Thanksgiving on Wednesday night with the Thanksgiving Akathist, which is famous for having been chanted by concentration camp prisoners under the anti-Christian totalitarian regimes of the mid-20^th century. Some of us were busy partly over Thanksgiving in visits to two older Orthodox Christians hospitalized in Danville and Shamokin. Unworthily I also was in a meeting to establish a schedule for visiting the 20 women inmates at Muncy who are Orthodox and who have asked for spiritual help. When we consider those who are in concentration camps for the faith, those who are in the ICU alone over the holidays, those who are in prison, then what is preventing us from keeping the Nativity Fast? “I’ll put a pebble in my shoe,” a song says. As Bishop Luke tells it, if there is nothing else we can do in our spiritual lives in the world today, then let us shut our mouth. We can be quiet in prayer, we can follow the fast by not eating richly.

Consider this year’s juxtaposition of Thanksgiving with the start of the Nativity Fast. One of the most distinctive aspects of the full Christian theology of Orthodoxy is our belief in and ascetic struggle to participate in the uncreated energies of God. The uncreated energies of God mean that God’s grace is divine. It is all around us right now. What spiritual beauty and richness right here and now! Whatever seems to be a wilderness, like the physical wilderness that the Pilgrims saw around them at Thanksgiving, is really filled with God’s divine grace if we open our hearts and ask His energy to illumine us and struggle to keep our heart open and pure to receive it. So it is with fasting. It may seem a wilderness but like the desert where St. Anthony the Great went to live, it is really a great opportunity for spiritual growth.

The Gospel readings for today speak to us of the message of both true Thanksgiving and fasting in Orthodoxy. A certain rich man thought he would build a bigger barn and take his ease with his worldly profits and pleasures. But that night his soul was required of him. He died and all his worldly cares were for nought. “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” That is why we give thanks to God and also fast in the Orthodox Church.

All our riches, even our families that are such blessings to us, are nothing if not based in God. All worldly riches and idols pass away, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as Scripture tells us. But as Jesus Christ also told us, He is the Resurrection and the Life. This is the message our families need at all ages, and they need to see us modeling the self-discipline of fasting in all sense of that practice.

For Orthodoxy is a mystical and an ascetic faith, and it sets us apart from the world.

Consider also the second Gospel reading for today. Jesus gave His disciples power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of diseases.

Dear friends in Christ, that power is given to each of us in the Orthodox Church, in the Body of Christ, through apostolic succession going all the way back to Pentecost, which still burns brightly in our Church. The casting out of spirits and the healing of sickness may be in this life, and it may be in the transition to the life to come. But remember that Orthodoxy in its unique combination of thanksgiving and fasting is not a religion so much as a way of life that is a healing system.

Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils, our Lord tells us. This is the way to show our thanks and to keep our fast. First of all we must begin with ourselves spiritually, cleansing ourselves, reviving ourselves from worldly idols, healing the sickness of our hearts in their focus on career and personal idols, casting out demonic influences from ourselves, with God’s help. Then that illumination, letting our light shine as the Lord puts it, will bring all kinds of seen and unseen healing to our families, our communities, our country. Glory to God!

Ten years ago our little mission was formed with people from five households and we started meeting in the basement of a Lutheran Church and didn’t hold Vigil or celebrate major feasts. Today thank God we have a full calendar, currently six catechumens, a newly baptized former catechumen, and another adult baptism scheduled next week, God willing. We have members enrolled in the Pastoral School for training as potential clergy, and now have two Readers and two musically experienced anchors for our choir. We are starting up a new prison ministry. We have a new sisterhood and brotherhood and a new online class. What hath God wrought in under a year. This all has happened as we have moved into our new permanent tabernacle, through the prayers of all of us and with God’s help. Yet in keeping our zeal in the Holy Spirit, God willing, we must also keep our humility. That’s also where our willingness to submit to the discipline of the Fast is important. It is like practicing moves and exercising restraint in a martial art, but with the energizing strength of God’s uncreated grace moving us through.

Our Lord Jesus Christ said in the second Gospel to the apostles, “Freely ye have received, freely give.” Freedom is not the right to self-assertion. Freedom’s original meaning is generosity. The root of the word free in English is related to the word friend. Our Lord said no longer does he call us servants but friends in His Church, which is the full realization of biblical Israel. That is freedom in the Truth Who is Christ. That empowers us to love one another more than ourselves.

The Virgin Mary again in this is our champion leader and intercessor. She offered the greatest Christmas gift, herself. We commemorate this in Wednesday’s feast, the Entry into the Temple. Our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco noted that the “The righteousness and sanctity of the Virgin Mary was manifested in the fact that she, being ‘human with passions like us,’ so loved God and gave herself over to Him, that by her purity she was exalted above all other creatures. Mary was to become the Mother of God, the Theotokos, not because she was to give birth to divinity, but that through her the Word became true man, God-Man.” (The Life of the Virgin Mary, Theotokos, Holy Apostles Convent and Dormition Skete, p. 11)

Look around you brothers and sisters, for those in our Church family here in our parish, we are all on the road to salvation together, God willing. We all need each other for our salvation with God’s grace. For salvation is a team effort, in the Church. Let us support each other now on this glorious journey toward the Nativity of Christ, with love for one another. We have begun both with thanksgiving and fasting. Journeying like the children of Israel through the wilderness to the promised land of Christ’s birth, we are offered a great gift of fulfilling all the millennia of prophecy for the world, while realizing the spark of God’s love reborn in each of our hearts and holding up each other. We offer the gift of ourselves to our Lord and to one another. Glory to God for all things!

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§66 [12:16-21]

The Lord said this parable: ‘The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, because I have no room to store my fruits?’ And he said, ‘This will I do. I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there will I store all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years. Take thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry.’ But God said unto him, ‘Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. Then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?’ So is he that layeth up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.’

Holy Gospel according to Matthew,

§34a [10:1, 5-8]

At that time, when Jesus had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease. […]  These twelve Jesus sent forth and commanded them, saying, ‘Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. Freely ye have received; freely give.’

Tonight, on Thanksgiving Eve, our Church family gathered to pray together the Thanksgiving Akathist. It has become a tradition in many Orthodox Churches in America to worship together with this prayer at Thanksgiving time. It is a prayer service that was chanted by believers in concentration camps under the totalitarian anti-Christians of the mid-20th century. And it only gains in meaning across the years.

One of our catechumens, a military veteran and former state police investigator, after our service tonight spoke of his special love for the 12th Ikos of the Akathist:

What sort of praise can I give Thee? I have never heard the song of the Cherubim, a joy reserved for the spirits above. But I know the praises that nature sings to Thee. In winter, I have beheld how silently in the moonlight the whole earth offers Thee prayer, clad in its white mantle of snow, sparkling like diamonds. I have seen how the rising sun rejoices in Thee, how the song of the birds is a chorus of praise to Thee. I have heard the mysterious mutterings of the forests about Thee, and the winds singing Thy praise as they stir the waters. I have understood how the choirs of stars proclaim Thy glory as they move forever in the depths of infinite space. What is my poor worship! All nature obeys Thee, I do not. Yet while I live, I see Thy love, I long to thank Thee, and call upon Thy name.

Glory to Thee, giving us light
Glory to Thee, loving us with love so deep, divine and infinite
Glory to Thee, blessing us with light, and with the host of angels and saints
Glory to Thee, Father all-holy, promising us a share in Thy Kingdom

Glory to Thee, Redeemer Son, who hast shown us the path to salvation!
Glory to Thee, Holy Spirit, life-giving Sun of the world to come
Glory to Thee for all things, Holy and most merciful Trinity
Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age

I had come straight to the service from visiting and praying with two older Orthodox Christians, brothers by birth, who are now both hospitalized in a nearby medical center. Just the day before, I had been in a meeting about setting up our first prison ministry to meet the needs of a number of Orthodox inmates behind bars in need of spiritual support. To be able to give thanks to God even in the toughest struggles is hard but has a special deep beauty. The phrase “Glory to God for all things” featured also in the Akathist is famous as a last utterance by St. John Chrysostom, the famed fourth-century composer of the primary Liturgy used by Orthodox Christians on most Sundays and other services, while he was in exile under persecution.

When seasick, we can look to the horizon for grounding. Likewise in the storms of life’s troubles, we can look in gratitude to God’s rule for reassurance of his Providence and sustenance for us, in both this life and the life to come.

At times like Thanksgiving, we gather in families, and especially in our Church family, in the parish that is a small local fractal of the Church and humanity as a whole worldwide. Our parish is in a biblical sense a foundational little nation, while we pray for the big nation of America under God. In Church, the head of our family is God, and our Mother in the Church is the Theotokos, the Mother of God.

We should not separate our family activities from our Church family’s life. For while indeed God is everywhere, just as is water in the atmosphere, so too we go to the fountain of Living Water in the Church, the Body of Christ, to be with our Church family, as certainly as we look to home to be with our human family. The Church in our home flourishes on the vine with our Church family at Church.

Long ago, the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock. They were heterodox Protestants but sought a better life in a wilderness where they could worship God freely. Gov. Winthrop in his diary described their thanks. Having had a long hard sea-crossing behind them and a wilderness before them, they gave thanks to God in some stark worldly circumstances.

The Orthodox Church as always has deeper and broader perspectives. Going back to around the year 1000 on the Western calendar (around 6509 on the Church calendar!), we remember how an ancient text tells of Leif Erikson’s Viking mission to Christianize America. They landed around Newfoundland according to archaeologists, with priests in the group, and must have given thanksgiving prayers. Because this was prior to the Great Schism, they would have been Orthodox Christians, too.

While their mission (at the northern tip of what geologists consider the Northern Appalachians in which our mission today dwells) didn’t flourish across time directly as the West went into Schism, indirectly we remember it as the first coming of Orthodoxy to America, seen later in the Russian mission to Alaska, all the way up to our modest country mission in Winfield, Pennsylvania, glory to God! For tonight’s Thanksgiving Akathist was our first in our new temple as a Church, and our first Thanksgiving in our 10-year history not in a rental space, but in a permanent tabernacle. Glory to God!

Tomorrow we celebrate the American national day of Thanksgiving, a beautiful day but one that like American Christmas often gets lost in worldliness, in gluttony and greed and display of one kind or another, idolatries of matter and of family comfort and success apart from God. However, Orthodox Christianity offers Americans a path through to the authentic roots of Thanksgiving, and of our country in God. In particular, the ancient Christian emphasis on the uncreated energies or grace of God offers us a way of experiencing through our faith and the Church a sense of God’s presence with us even in the most forbidding wildernesses of our lives, and the opportunity to transfigure them into a blessed glimpse of Paradise–as for example St. Anthony the Great did in his desert dwelling.

The day after Thanksgiving we will start our Nativity Fast. It is 40 days to honor our God and His Mother leading up to Nativity, on December 25 on the Church calendar, which is January 7 on the civil calendar. We wait for our Christmas because it is worth waiting for, and we fast instead of engaging in the worldliness of the anti-Christmas. Because we love God Who taught us to love our neighbor more than ourself, part of our fasting should be in alms-giving and helping our neighbors. Like, even by this unworthy sinful priest, visiting those in the hospital and in the prison especially on holidays, and the struggling fellow members of our Church family far and wide. For Thanksgiving is an action word. It finds meaning in the original faith of our Fathers and Mothers in the ancient Church, who still stand with us in Church in our iconography and in our prayers and in their presence glorifying God with us–and even did so in concentration camps, too.

Glory to God for all things!

(which started 600+ years before the Pilgrims)

Come join us at the Thanksgiving Akathist prayer service on Thanksgiving Eve (Wednesday 7 p.m., 11/13/34 on the Church calendar, 11/26/25 on the civil calendar).

The Thanksgiving Akathist is a special short Orthodox Christian prayer service, whose history includes being said by prisoners in concentration camps during World War II.

We also not only mark the American Thanksgiving holiday as a time to thank God for His blessings, but also remember the first American Thanksgiving c. 1000 A.D. (about 6,509 AM on the Church calendar). This occurred about six centuries before the Pilgrims landed on Pilgrim Rock, when according to an ancient account the Viking explorer Leif Erikson led an Orthodox Christian mission to North America, including priests.

They undoubtedly would have given thanksgiving prayers after crossing the ocean. Archaeologists theorize he landed around Newfoundland, which according to geologists is at the tip of Northern Appalachia, in which our mission parish resides today.

While the original Orthodox mission to North America did not bear known permanent fruit, the later Russian mission to Alaska and subsequent mission efforts (including on a very small scale our own) have contributed to the growth today of Orthodox Christianity in America, glory to God! And the Vikings were part of a network of Orthodox Christian missionary work that stretched into Russia and Slavic lands, from which the Orthodox faith came to America again mainly in the late 18th century.

Come join us in giving thanks for all the beauty and gifts of God to us, including His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, as we enter the Church Nativity Season the day after Thanksgiving this week.

Those in the great totalitarian persecution of Orthodox Christians in the past century, in which millions perished together with many Church and monastic communities, prayed in the Thanksgiving Akathist: “Glory to God for all things!”

Truly the blood of the martyrs is become the seed of the Church.

Come and see!

Include a sample of Orthodox Christianity in your Thanksgiving tradition.

Glory to God for all things!

The Russian Orthodox contemporary artist Vladimir Kireyev in 2008 made a painting entitled “The Mirror: When the Son of Man Cometh will he find faith upon the earth?”, a painting which even drew positive comment from the Patriarch of Moscow. Picture a bustling crowd on the sidewalk of a big-city downtown, presumably Moscow, on a wintry snowy day. A man looks into a large store window that acts as a mirror, while he talks on an old flip-style cellphone. But he starts as he sees amid the mirrored crowd including himself an image of Jesus Christ walking in their midst. The figure of Christ is walking as if unseen by the crowd, head down, looking sideways in the direction of the man on the cellphone, his bloodied hands together as if in prayer.

This thoughtful beautiful painting, which I will re-post on my website if you care to look later, reminds me of the Gospel Reading today, in how Christ is mirrored in the midst of the many people busy on their daily way. For we hear today the Gospel of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Church Fathers regarded the Good Samaritan as Jesus Christ Himself.

But there is something more here to this Parable that we will explore briefly, along with the life of a twentieth-century saint commemorated this month, who followed Christ’s example of the Good Samaritan in his life in the modern world.

First, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Blessed Theophylact in his Orthodox commentary on the Gospel tells of how Jesus Christ in responding to the man’s question “who is my neighbor” indicates the oneness of human nature by focusing in the parable on the Samaritan. Such a man normally would be considered an outcast by the Jews, and a typology perhaps for the Gentiles and all nations of the world who would come to be part of the Israel of the Church. For we are all kin through Adam and Eve and Noah and his family.

In the parable, the traveling man beset by robbers is human nature. He is journeying toward Jericho, a low-lying hot place typifying the passions. The thieves signify demons. The priest and the Levite signify the law and the prophets who pass by without helping. The oil and wine represent our Lord’s actions as both fully man and fully God in helping us. The inn is the Church, and the two coins are the Old and New Testaments. In reading this commentary by Blessed Theophylact I am reminded again of the saying that Orthodox Christianity is not a religion but a healing system. When I first became interested in Orthodoxy, by the way, the parish priest told me “the Church is a hospital for the soul, and the monastery is the intensive care unit. You need to go to a monastery!” And so I did, and was brought into Orthodoxy by the prayers, teaching, and help of a very patient monk priest.

But back to the parable. One interesting aspect of the question and answer in the Gospel account is that the question is who is the neighbor. And the answer is the Good Samaritan. Yet He is also our Lord Jesus Christ. So to love our neighbor as ourself is intrinsically involved with loving our Lord. And we are told that we should love our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength and all our mind. So we empty ourself in God in our love for Him, and in loving our neighbor as ourself, we love him as we love God, into Whom we have emptied ourself, we love our neighbor as we love Christ, seeing in our neighbor the image of Christ our God. Yet since we have emptied ourselves in our Lord with all our love, we then end up with Christ’s new commandment, which is to love our neighbor more than ourself. The deceitful and arrogant lawyer who questioned Jesus cited verses from the Old Testament. Our Lord’s parable goes even beyond those words that He approved of, namely again to love our neighbor more than ourself.

The Saints follow this charge of our Lord and Master. We see this illustrated in the historical lives of many saints, but here is one who is on the Church calendar in November and who lived not too long ago. St. Arsenios of Cappadocia was the spiritual father in the twentieth century of St. Paisios. We can find information on his life in the Athonite Byzantine Synaxarion book updated by an account by Elder Paisios, printed in English by Holy Annunciation Convent (the account below draws heavily on the entry on pp. 90-93 of the November volume, translated by Christopher Hookway, published 1999 by the Holy Monastery of Simonos Petra in Greece).

Born around 1840 in Cappadocia, a heartland of the Church Fathers in ancient time but long under Muslim Turkish rule, St. Arsenios grew up in a long-conquered region that still had a surprisingly active Christian presence. Becoming a monk, he was sent back to his native village, Farasa to look after the education of abandoned children. For both Greeks and Turks, he became known as a well-spring of grace and of miraculous healings. In fact, he was called the Pilgrim by Muslims, a term of honor, because every 10 years he walked on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

He relied heavily on the Psalter for giving blessings of all types. Sometimes he also would simply put the Gospel book upon a sick person’s head for healing. We are told his miracles became so much a matter of course that there was no other doctor in his home area. People if they could not travel to him would send an article of clothing, he would read a prayer or write it out, and the cure would happen, although sometimes gradually for the good of people who needed to humble themselves and become aware of God’s love. He would never accept gifts or money. “Our faith is not for sale!” he said. Acting as a holy fool through eccentricities and pretended outbursts of anger to escape praise, and attribute his wonder-working to Christ. “In fact, when Father Arsenius lifted up his hands in prayer to God for someone, his very soul seemed to be breaking, as though he were clasping Christ’s feet and would not let go until the Lord granted his request.”

In such ways he followed the example of Jesus Christ, the model of the Good Samaritan, in praying for another more than he would pray for himself, the way that perhaps normally only a mother might do for a child, but for all in his life who needed help.

Living in a narrow cell with an earthen floor, two days a week and sometimes more he would stay shut in wearing a sack and lying on ashes, to be in contemplation. Some came to the door on those days and would take a little dust from the threshold and be certain to obtain a cure for ailments. He was hard on himself in fasting, vigils, and unceasing prayer, but all compassion for his flock, especially for those coming to confess sins. Instead of penances and rebukes, he used charity to heal sinners. He often went to keep vigils in lonely chapels, walking barefoot, and out of compassion for animals that he refused to ride. Often in Liturgy the faithful would see his countenance transfigured by the divine light as the Saints appeared ministering with him.

Gifted with clairvoyance, St. Arsenios predicted the expulsion of the Greeks from Asia Minor in advance, and organized the departure of the inhabitants of his hometown. Like a second Moses, in 1924, when the order came, he led his flock on a 400-mile exodus on foot through a hostile country. But as the Synaxarion notes, he never failed to extend divine loving kindness toward Christians and Muslims alike. As he also foretold, he only lived 40 days after the arrival of his flock in Greece. While in hospital during his last days, one of his relatives saw a louse on him and was going to crush it. But the saint exclaimed, “No don’t kill the poor thing! Let it eat a bit of flesh too! Why should only for the worms!”

Then he said to those with him as he lay dying, “The soul, the soul, take care of it more than the flesh, which will return to the earth and be eaten by worms!” He died two days later on this date in 1924. In decades following, numerous apparitions and miracles associated with the relics of St. Arsenius gave evidence of his close friendship with God. Truly he lived a life emptied in God, and as a result filled with the love of God for others who he saw as living embodied icons of Christ. The life of St. Arsenius shines with the light of the Good Samaritan Who is Christ. Giving his whole self in love to God, he loved his neighbor more than himself.

We ask for the intercession of Saint Arsenios, and of all the saints, who strove to follow, with God’s grace, the path of the Good Samaritan, Jesus Christ. Holy Saints pray to God for us. For He is a Good God and the lover of mankind. Amen.

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,  §53 [10:25-37]

At that time, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, ‘Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said unto him, ‘What is written in the law? How readest thou?’ And he answering said, ‘‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.’’ And He said unto him, ‘Thou hast answered right; this do, and thou shalt live.’ But he, wanting to justify himself, said unto Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ And Jesus answering said, ‘A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his raiment and wounded him and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way. And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was. And when he saw him he had compassion on him, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and he set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host and said unto him, ‘Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again I will repay thee.’ Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?’ And he said, ‘He that showed mercy on him.’ Then said Jesus unto him, ‘Go and do thou likewise.’