An Homily for Pascha 7534/2026 at St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers

Truly He is Risen! Dear brothers and sisters it is a joy to experience Pascha with you, the summation and beginning of our Church calendar, and of our souls’ redemption. For in Rising, our Lord Jesus Christ pulls us up too, if our hearts are open and willing, just as in the icon of Holy Saturday as he reaches out, the Good Shepherd, for Adam and Eve in Hades. We too live here in the land of the shadows, and Pascha is the burst of light that confirms what our Lord said: I am the Light of the World. To which always remember also that He added, You are the light of the world, let your light shine, so that others might know the love of God. In Him, the light of our hearts from God’s love shines as in this Resurrection feast.

I found a Pascha Epistle from the founding First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in 1930, Metropolitan Antony of blessed memory. I wanted to share it with you today for its historical and spiritual value instead of a homily–we’ll also hear the current epistle from our present-day Metropolitan soon, with its valuable spiritual lessons.

Metropolitan Antony in his turbulent time of exile from Communism emulated our Lord in being a man of sorrow yet also joyful in his faith, enduring persecution and exile while caring for his flock of Orthodox Christians through all kinds of troubles. Known as a kind pastor and a reformer, he has even been speculated to be the model for the memorable character of Alexei the young Christian in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karmazov, for as he as a youth had encountered Dostoevsky and his birth name was Alexei and his personality seems related.

Later, Providence intervened, so that, despite receiving the most votes to be elected the first new Patriarch of Moscow in Russia in centuries in 1917, the drawing of lots that followed the vote made the Saint Confessor Tikhon the Patriarch instead. God had something else in store for our Metropolitan Anthony, namely to preserve Russian Orthodox Christian tradition in exile. The Revolution made the faithful Patriarch St. Tikhon a virtual prisoner of the Bolsheviks, yet he did issue in effect a blessing for ROCOR to be started abroad by exiles. And in 1930, Metropolitan Anthony wrote this brief Pascha Epistle from his exile in Serbia, which is still relevant as we celebrate Pascha in our own day and age. It follows on the two pages below.

When Metropolitan Antony writes so directly in a Pascha Epistle about the persecutions faced by Orthodox Christians in modern times alone, it may seem shocking to us today on this joyful bright feast. But, pastorally, he balances that reminder of the Cross we bear as Christians by reminding us of how Pascha, despite all our personal or historical sufferings, is the bright and joyful gateway boosting us into a more real life of rejoicing in God, to which the Church and our faith leads us, a glimpse of that which is to come.

Personally, each one of us faces challenges, sometimes and eventually as deep as death. Historically, many holy elders in Orthodoxy regard the Russian Revolution to which our founding Hierarch refers in his Epistle as a sign of the times, marking intensified tribulations for the faithful in these latter days of atheistic rule by global technological influences, which evidence the spirit of Anti-Christ in their denial of the Incarnation of Christ and His institution of the Church.

Pascha reminds us, however, despite such intense challenges experienced by so many, of how life and resurrection ultimately find resolution in our hearts, illumined by God’s grace.

“Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” we can pray simply in the Jesus Prayer at any time and in any situation. And with it may we remember Pascha every day of the year with the motto:

“Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs–ourselves–bestowing life!”

Christ is Risen!

An Homily for Holy Saturday, 7534/2026, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ,

Deep in an earthly tomb and all the way to Hades and back, something wonderfully strange, a strange beauty, has stirred all the earth, even beyond any space expedition or world conflicts in the news.  Related to this, the Holy Fire reportedly appeared at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem this morning despite wartime restrictions, and is being sent to Greece and elsewhere in the world. This is a hidden deep stirring in our hearts and across the Creation, reminding us that in the truth of Christianity, the supernatural is the natural, in the quiet of today, Holy Saturday. Let us hear a short ancient Orthodox sermon attributed to St. Epiphanius of Cyprus, who lived around 400 A.D.

The ancient sermon is given the title “The Lord Descends into Hades.” Let us attend. It begins:

“Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and He has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hell trembles with fear.

“He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, He has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, He who is both God and the Son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the Cross, the weapon that had won Him the victory. At the sight of Him Adam, the first man He had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone, “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him, “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying, “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

““I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by My own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in Hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the Life of the dead. Rise up, work of My hands, you who were created in My image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in Me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.

““For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

““See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in My image. On My back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See My hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

““I slept on the Cross and a sword pierced My side for you who slept in Paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in Hell. The sword that pierced Me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

““Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly Paradise. I will not restore you to that Paradise, but I will enthrone you in Heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am Life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The Bridal Chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The Kingdom of Heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity. “”

Brothers and sisters, get ready. Pascha is coming, a story and a reality and a mystery larger than we can know, broader than the physical universe, and as deep as the spark of God’s love in our own hearts. The Bridal Chamber is adorned, the banquet is prepared. Let us be ready in these final hours, with our lamps filled with oil, prayer rope in hand, on our merry way as Pascha pilgrims. Let us go forth into the adventure of Pascha in God’s time beyond mind, into a deeper dimension of God’s nature, the Resurrection of love.

Glory to God for all things!

(From the Synaxarion of the Lenten Triondion and Pentecostarion, Fr. David and Mother Gabriela, eds., HDM Press, Rives Junction, MI, 1999 pp. 160-161.)

An homily for Holy Thursday (7534/2026) from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church by Priest Paul Siewers

Brothers and Sisters, Holy Thursday is a key crossroads of Holy Week, with four elements from the Gospels that are alive still in the Orthodox church: The Holy Washing of the Disciples’ feet by our Lord to give an example for all time of the need for our humility and His love. This act is repeated by our Bishops and Abbots in cathedrals and monasteries. This highlights its contrast with another element: The self-assertion of Judas. His love of money combined with the religious leaders’ envy and the Roman love of power to betray the God-Man to death, and that negative lesson is underscored in the Holy Week services of the Orthodox Church.

Two other events of Holy Thursday are entwined: The Lord’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which he sweated as blood onto the earth beneath Him, and prayed to God the Father “not my will by Thine be done.” He suffered for our sins there as in His Crucifixion. He showed His saving compassion for us. He also did so by founding the first Mystical Supper today, giving of Himself by His Body and Blood as also as at the Garden, embracing His voluntary Passion in loving us more than Himself as the Theanthropos or God-Man.

St. Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote of our Lord’s giving of Himself in the Mystical Supper, that when the Psalmist wrote 

“’Bread strengtheneth man’s heart’ (Ps. 103:17), the prophet foretold of a certain miraculous bread, which, unlike ordinary, material bread that strengthens the body, is to strengthen man’s heart. Our heart is in need of strengthening! It was frightfully shaken when we fell, and cannot by itself stop wavering. It is continually shaken by various passions. Fallen man in his blindness preaches to no purpose and in vain about the firmness of human will. There is no firmness: it is drawn along by the force of the sins that overcome it. Needed, much needed is this prophesied, miraculous bread in order to strengthen the wavering, weakened heart of man. 

“That bread which came down from heaven (Jn. 6:58, 48) makes the heart of man strong. This bread is our Lord Jesus Christ. He said, I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him (Jn. 6:51–56).

“‘This is an hard saying,’ they [the hearers] said, ‘who can hear it?’ (Jn. 51:60). From that time many of His disciples, who in vain bore the name, disciple, went back, and walked no more with Him (Jn. 6:66). Even now, doubt arises about this great Mystery amongst those who only bear the name Christian, who observe external Christian practices, but by their lives and the desires of their hearts, they are alien to Christianity. The saying would be hard if a man had pronounced it; obedience to the saying would be impossible if a man had said it. The saying was pronounced by God, Who out of His infinite goodness had taken on humanity for the salvation of people—therefore the saying must be filled with goodness. The saying was pronounced by God, Who had taken on humanity for the salvation of people, and therefore attention to the saying and judgment of it should not be superficial. Obedience to the saying must be accepted with faith, from the whole soul, as God Who became man must be accepted.

“God’s assumption of humanity is unfathomable for people; just as unfathomable are the institutions and actions of the God-Man; they make man, conceived in iniquities and born in sins—man, condemned to eternal death and eternal torment in the prisons and abysses of hell—like unto God, make him god by grace, raise him to heaven for eternal habitation, and for eternal blessedness in heaven. Whoever judges the saying and institutions of the God-Man and deny them, have judged and denied the Word—the spirit and life (Jn. 51:63), judged and denied the institution that is given to the disciple of Christ’s spirit and life. ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you,’ said the Lord, ‘except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you’ (Jn. 51:53).

“’It is meet to learn,’ says St. John Chrysostom, ‘the miraculous quality and effect of the Holy Mysteries: what are they? For what reason are they given? What benefit comes from them? We are of one body with the body of our Lord Jesus Christ; we are flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bone (cf. Gen. 2:23). A mysterious teaching! Heed what is said: We are united to the all-holy flesh of the Lord not only through love, but also through the sacrament itself. The all-holy flesh of the Lord becomes our food! He gave us this food, wishing to show the love that He has for us. He has mixed Himself with us, and has mingled His Body in us, so that we might be united with Him as the body is united with the head: thus is the quality of this unspeakable love. Prefiguring the Lord with himself, Job said of his servants by whom he was especially beloved, that they expressed their great love for him by saying, ‘Oh that we might be satisfied with his flesh!’ (Job 31:31). Christ has given this to us, leading us to exceedingly great love, and showing His love for us, allowing those who wish it not only to see Him, but also to touch Him, to partake of Him and unite with Him, and all our desires shall be fulfilled.’

“The Lord has replaced with Himself our forefather Adam, from whom we are born in death, from whom we are born to die. He is made our forefather, exchanging the flesh and blood we inherited from Adam for His own flesh and blood. Such an act of the Lord, at the pious contemplation of the redemption of people by God’s becoming man while yet remaining unfathomable and supernatural, also becomes clear and natural. The vile flesh and blood of our fallen and outcast nature must be replaced by the nature that the God-Man has renewed; by the all-holy flesh and blood of the God-Man. …

“Bread is an image of the heavenly bread, and wine is an image of the true spiritual drink. The effect of material bread and wine serves as an image of the action of the Body and Blood of Christ…. God fed His chosen people, the Israelites, with manna that fell from heaven, when they were journeying through the desert from Egypt to the Promised Land: And bread of Heaven did He give them. Man ate the bread of angels (Ps. 77:27–28; John 6:32). Christ has been transformed into this bread, feeding with His word (cf. Mt. 4:4), His Body and Blood, Christians who wander in the land of exile, traveling and ascending into the homeland on high, through many and various obstacles, sufferings, and hardships. Egypt symbolizes the state of man’s fall, the state of slavery to sin and to fallen spirits. The journey from Egypt depicts the rejection of a sinful life, the acceptance of faith in Christ, the entry into a life according to Christ’s commandments. The promised land is heaven; the journey through the desert is earthly life; the heavenly bread is Christ. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world (Jn. 6:33). Your fathers, says Christ to the new Israel of the old Israel, did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die (Jn. 6:49-50) the eternal death—not during earthly life, and not at the separation of the soul with the body at the body’s the death. Amen.” So wrote St. Ignatius.

Brothers and sisters, a writer once referred to the American South as “Christ-haunted.” It used to be and perhaps still is that many American homes had in them a print of the famous painting of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. There was something about what it represented that caught people’s fancy, even if, like my grandparents, who had one in their home, they were not particularly religious and did not receive even a heterodox type of communion. The sharing, the sustaining, the loving by God represented in a meal, also perhaps reminded people of the old-style family meal. Likewise pictures of Jesus kneeling in prayer at Gethsemane were common. These pictures were as if shadows. The Orthodox Church offers the reality, where the embodied and the symbolic unite. We don’t try to separate the real and the symbolic as Catholicism did in the Middle Ages, or as the Protestants did in the opposite direction in the Reformation—one group says the Eucharist is real, another that it is symbolic, but Orthodoxy proclaims both/and in a mystery. We accept the whole mystery of the Last Supper, and remember that it began on the same night that our Lord sweat as blood out of redemptive compassion for us in Garden of Gethsemane. So He also gave us His Body and Blood to sustain us.

It is time to fulfill the types and shadows of American heterodox Christianity with the fulness of Orthodoxy and our Lord’s Church. Let us redouble our mission work in the coming Pascha season to save more lives in Christ. In fact, let us invite others to our Pascha services and Paschal Sundays to come. Tell our neighbors, help is on the way! Pascha is almost here! Glory to God for all things!

Today is sometimes called “Spy Wednesday” after the snare set for our Lord Jesus Christ by His close Apostle Judas Iscariot. To this day the Orthodox Church remembers this betrayal with Wednesday being a fasting day usually throughout the year. There was an old English hymn, “Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose firm, and dare to make it known.” For us Orthodox Christians on Holy Wednesday, memory can stir different wording, along the lines of “Dare not to be a Judas”–not to be a spy in the sense of being a deceiver ultimately serving demonic interests against Christ Whom one claims to serve–for the sake of a love of money or worldly riches and benefits. Indeed, Judas was in effect the Treasurer of the Twelve.

Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of Blessed Memory has written of the account in the Gospels about how a woman brought very precious ointment and poured it on Jesus’ head as he sat at meat. We are told Jesus’ disciples were strangely indigant, arguing that it was wasteful, and the ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor. But Jesus said the woman’s action was one of loving reverence that would always be remembered with the Gospels and that “the poor you always have with you.” Judas after this incident we are told went to the chief priests and offered to sell Jesus to them by delivering him, and was given 30 pieces of silver. Hieromonk Seraphim wrote: 

“In this passage of Scripture, we read how, as our Lord prepared for His Passion, a woman came and anointed Him with very precious ointment; and it is very touching how our Lord accepted such love from simple people. But at the same time Judas—one of the twelve who were with Him—looked at this act, and something in his heart changed. This was apparently the “last straw,” because Judas was the one in charge of the money and he thought that this was a waste of money. We can even see the logical processes going on in his mind. We can hear him think about Christ: ‘I thought this man was somebody important. He wastes money, he doesn’t do things right, he thinks he’s so important…’ and all kinds of similar little ideas which the devil puts in his mind. And with his passion (his main passion was love of money), he was caught by the devil and made to betray Christ. He did not want to betray Him; he simply wanted money. He did not watch over himself and crucify his passions.

“Anyone of us can be exactly in that position. We have to look at our hearts and see which passion of ours will the devil hook us on in order to cause us to betray Christ. If we think that we are something superior to Judas—that he was some kind of a ‘kook’ and we are not—we are quite mistaken. Like Judas, everyone of us has passions in his heart. Let us therefore look at them. We can be caught with love for neatness, with love for correctness, with love for a sense of beauty: any of our little faults which we cling to can be a thing that the devil can catch us with. Being caught, we can begin to justify this condition ‘logically’—on the basis of our passion. And from that ‘logical’ process of thinking we can betray Christ, unless we watch over ourselves and begin to realize that we are filled with passions, that each one of us is potentially a Judas. Therefore, when the opportunity comes—when the passion begins to operate in us and logically begins to develop from a passion into betrayal—we should stop right there and say, ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!‘

“We must not look at life through the glasses of our passions, nor see how we can ‘fit’ life into being what we would like it to be—whether this is a life where there is peace and quiet or where there is a lot of noise and excitement. If we try to make life ‘fit’ like this, a total disaster will result. In looking at life, we should accept all the things which come to us as God’s providence, knowing that they are intended to wake us up from our passions. We should pray to God to show us some God-pleasing thing that we can do. When we accept what comes to us, we begin to be like the simple woman in the Gospel who heard the call from God and was thus able to be His minister. She was proclaimed to the ends of the world, as our Lord says, because of the simple thing she did—pouring out the ointment upon Him. Let us be like her: sensitive to watching God’s signs around us. These signs come from everywhere: from nature, from our fellow men, from a seeming chance of events… There is always, everyday, something that indicates to us God’s will. We must be open to this.

“Once we become more aware of the passions within ourselves and begin to fight against them, we will not let them begin the process which was seen in Judas. Judas started from a very small thing: being concerned for the right use of money. And from such small things we betray God the Saviour. We must be sober, seeing not the fulfillment of our passions around us, but rather the indication of God’s will: how we might this very moment wake up and begin to follow Christ to His Passion and save our souls.”

So wrote Hieromonk Seraphim. Brothers and Sisters, the Good Book tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil, for it relates to all greed and lust for power and sins of idleness including gluttony and lust. It also relates to modernistic revolutionism whether of the political Left or Right, which places a drive for power and money ahead of faith. For money when loved and made into an idol is seen as the source of worldly power. But remember the Book of Revelation’s graphic portrayal of the fall of Babylon, the great world harlot. Let us as Father Seraphim Rose urges us be watchful and simple like the Virgins at midnight, keeping our oil for our lamps well-supplied by the alms-giving we do for others. For as our Lord said, even as we navigate the struggle of Holy Week, we are the light of the world because He is the Light of the World, even in the utmost darkness of Spy Wednessay. Glory to God for all things!

***

Source for Hieromonk Seraphim’s words: https://pravoslavie.ru/78550.html

A sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation, 7534/2026, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

Dearly beloved in Christ,

Today we have the special blessing of celebrating a second of the Church year’s 12 major feasts just two days after another. Today the Feast of the Annunciation follows almost immediately after Palm Sunday or Holy Sunday. 

There is a connection between the two. Our Lord Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Sunday fulfilled Old Testament prophecy as he rode on the colt of an ass, symbolizing the Gentile peoples unused to carrying God so to speak, who would be engrafted in the Church into Israel. Our Lord brought the proclamation of the kingdom of God, not a human kingdom.

With the Annunciation came a fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies of the Virgin Birth and the coming of the Savior of humanity, overcoming the sin of Eve and also of Adam. The Virgin Mary who grew up in the Temple at Jerusalem would become the God-bearer, the mother of the God-man, and she would help nurture the early Church as the Body of Christ after Jesus’ Ascension.

In Isaiah, we see the prophecy that a virgin will give birth. It is worth knowing that this prophecy is clearest in the Greek Septuagint. In the Hebrew Masoretic text the passage is best translated a young woman will give birth. The Greek text pre-dates the Masoretic text and is the Old Testament primarily used in the Orthodox Church, as it was the version used by the Apostles and in the Gospels. The translators of the King James Version followed the Hebrew Masoretic not understanding the historical nuances. But they did keep the translation from the Greek for “virgin” in that prophecy. However, the friction indicates what historically has been a great source of the devil’s attack on Christianity, and that is on the virgin birth.

You even see this in the King James Bible’s choice of English words in the Gospel of Luke. It quotes the Archangel Gabriel as greeting the Virgin Mary as “thou that art highly favored.” But the Greek is best translated “thou full of grace.” There’s a difference there. Full of grace encompasses more the synergy between the most pure life of the Theotokos and the grace that made her the Mother of God. She is not just highly favored. She is the most holy and most pure, as we describe her in Orthodoxy. That is an important lesson of the Annunciation. She was full of grace because her heart was open to the uncreated grace of God that came to her from the Holy Spirit as announced by the Holy Archangel.

Seeing the Virgin Mary as a privileged good person in some way goes along with the trend toward trying to treat Jesus Christ as a good person and teacher but not the God-man. Sadly, both the key American founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams rejected the Virgin birth. They both considered Jesus a great moral teacher but evidenced in this what the Evangelist John called the spirit of Anti-Christ, rejecting that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh as God-man. That faulty foundation is part of the problem with American history. But help is on the way! The Orthodox Christian mission to America is here, and with God’s help, will make America Orthodox over time.

A central chapter in the Book of Revelation by Jesus Christ to the Evangelist John illuminates this. In Revelation 12, the Woman bearing a Child is opposed by the Serpent of Genesis, symbolizing Satan, who has grown into a great dragon. He pursues the Woman and her Offspring. Church Fathers have described this Woman as prefiguring the Church in the latter days of Tribulation before the Second Coming of Christ. However, she is also identified by them with aspects of the Theotokos. The Woman in Revelation is protected by God and in giving birth has been compared to the Church bringing forth the faithful in baptism. Thus we too have a part in the Annunciation of course, for our salvation is based in the redemption given us by our Lord Jesus Christ, and a great help lies in the intercessions of His Mother in the Church, as our prayers state. We are coming forth, God willing, as part of the Body of Christ, born again in the Orthodox Church, through the Holy Spirit in the mysteries of Baptism and Chrismation. So as our prayers always say, Let us be attentive as we celebrate the great mystery of the Annunciation, and not denigrate it by mortal reason which only dimly sees the truth and is open to demonic confusion and distraction. The Annunciation is central to our faith, and the world’s denial of it only marks the limited dimension of fallen human thought—like trying to understand another dimension in quantum physics through Newtonian physics.

 St. Nikolai Velimirovic of Serbia and Pennsylvania offer us thoughts for today’s feast. He writes,(https://orthochristian.com/130050.html), “The Sun is reflected in pure waters, and heaven is reflected in a pure heart.God the Holy Spirit has many habitations in this vast universe, but a pure human heart is the habitation of His greatest joy. It is His true habitation, and all others are only His workshops.

“The human heart can never be empty; it is always filled—either with hell, or with the world, or with God. The contents of the heart depends on the purity of the heart. Once the human heart was filled only with God; it was the mirror only of divine majesty, a harp made only to praise God. Once it truly was in God’s hands, and was out of danger. But when man in his madness took it into his own hands, many beasts attacked the human heart, and from this began the state, which, if you look from within, is called the slavery of the human heart… the history of the whole world….

“Like a pillar of fire in the deepest darkness was God’s descent to man. And the story of this descent by God to man begins with the angel and the Virgin, with a conversation between heavenly purity and earthly purity…. The Most Pure Virgin Mary was the first to hear these glad tidings, and the first of all human beings to tremble from fear and joy. Heaven was reflected in her heart like the sun in pure waters; the Lord was able to bow His head beneath her heart and clothe Himself in flesh—the Creator of the new world and Renewer of the old world….

“….when all the great prophecies had caught up with each other in their fulfillment; when the time foretold by Daniel had passed; when there were no more princes from the generation of Judah; when the frail human race had heaved a sigh along with frail nature around him, no longer expecting salvation, neither from man, nor from nature, but from God alone….

“….since there is a living and omnipotent God, it means that everything is possible; especially since God is not bound by the laws of nature, which He Himself laid down.  Man expects a miracle from God, and when the miracle comes he doesn’t believe in it. Nature has become a tree of temptation for man. Having hid himself out of nakedness in the shadow of nature, man would like to have God visit him, but also fears God’s visitation. When God does not visit him he complains, and when He does visit him, he doesn’t recognize it. Just as Adam in Paradise was placed between two trees—of life and of knowledge—so the descendants of Adam are again placed between two trees: God as the Tree of Life, and nature as the tree of knowledge. ….

“….Gabriel calls the Virgin Mary full of grace, for her soul, like a temple, was filled with the life-creating gifts of the Holy Spirit, heavenly fragrance, and heavenly purity…. Eve first fell into sin, and in bright Paradise at that, where everything was in place to prevent her from sinning; Mary first conquered all temptation, and in the dark world at that, where everything is in place to push one into sin. Therefore the weak-willed Eve gave birth to her firstborn on earth, the fratricidal Cain; while the ascetical laborer Mary gave birth to the Ascetical Laborer of all ascetical laborers, Who brought out of the dungeon of sin and death the fratricidal human race—the race of the disobedient and impure Eve…. the Most Holy Virgin applied gigantic labors in order to exalt her soul to God, and the grace of God met her on this path.

“….Never has any spring water been such a pure mirror of the sun as the Most Pure Virgin Mary was a mirror of purity. … The morning light that gives birth to the sun would also be ashamed before the purity of the Virgin Mary, Who gave birth to the Immortal Sun, Christ our Savior. What knee does not bow before Her, what lips do not cry out: “Rejoice, Thou Who art full of grace! Rejoice, Dawn of mankind’s salvation! Rejoice, More Honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious than the Seraphim! Glory to Thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Father and the Holy Spirit—the Trinity One in Essence and Undivided, now and ever, and throughout all times, unto the ages of ages. Amen.”

Thus end St. Nikolai’s words. Brothers and sisters, as the Good Book tells us, “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” Let us rejoice in our new birth. Instead of excusing sins with the equivalent of “I was born this way,” let us be born again in Christ, in the spirit of the Annunciation, at this time of the Bridegroom Matins of Holy Week, keeping watch at midnight, getting our mind into our heart, seeing the empty tomb and meeting our Risen Lord.

An homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, for Holy Great Sunday, 7534/2026, by Priest Paul Siewers.

This is our Holy and Great Sunday (aka Palm Sunday or Pussy Willow Sunday), keeping the ancient calendar of the Church alive continuously, while much of the Western non-Orthodox Christian world celebrates Easter. Our Church calendar also is essentially that of old American Appalachia as well. Today we join in greeting our Lord Jesus Christ to Jerusalem with pussy willows found in Appalachia as they are in Russia. We process with Him around our little country Church. For our humble mission is a little fractal and portal of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, connecting through unfathomable dimensions of our God beyond time to biblical days and places directly through these royal doors, from which comes to us the Body and Blood of Christ.

Hosanna we cry as He is brought through the byways of our land. He is welcomed as a triumphing king but let us not make the same mistake twice.

Israel as the Church is not any specific nation. A country is only as spiritually great and truly strong as her heartfelt, humble, and struggling true embrace of our God, not in merely emotional self-asserting ecstasy, but by the beautiful struggle, the joyful sorrow, of Orthodox life. Our sorrow entering Holy Passion Week is joyful because, God willing, we follow His pathway to resurrection, sorrowful because of all our own sins, and the sins and sorrows of humanity, in such dire need of Him. Bearing the Cross with Him this Holy Passion week, we must resolve to carry it on beyond Pascha into the whole Church year by our mission work. As our Lord tells us, His yoke is easy and His burden is life. Let us who are weary and heavy laden come unto Him.

(Above: Faithful at St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, commemorating Holy Sunday today.)

The Church fathers tell us that the colt of the donkey ridden by Jesus Christ on Holy Sunday symbolize the previously unyoked children of the Gentiles grafted into Israel in the New Testament Church. His kingdom is not of this world. Waving pussy willows we feature a local plant symbolizing the spring, which thrives in waters symbolizing the baptism of the Living Water of the Holy Spirit. Today begins the final great movement of the Gospels through Pascha to Pentecost and beyond, blowing us forward in the wind of His breath imparted unto His apostles, to forgive sin in His Church, and then through Pentecost, to bring the Gospel to all the world, and to save countless lives for Him.

Passion Week reminds us that our mission work is a life and death matter, for us and others. What would we not do as Orthodox Christians and good community members to save the life of a child or family member in need, whether in a burning building or some other calamity? Yet so are we called to save the souls of one another as children of God. Our Lord leads the way in parade today. Tomorrow it will be superseded by the sufferings of the trials of Passion Week. Yet the Bridegroom Matins that begin tonight remind us that this week we are to be married as a community, as the Church, to our Lord. Today’s procession is also a wedding parade.

Today is a warning not only of the fickleness of mobs, but also is a procession to a wedding. At Russian Orthodox weddings during the reception you hear calls of “gorky,” or bitter, as the bride and groom and guests drink of the wine, as did those at the Wedding of Cana did at the start of Jesus’ public ministry. So it was at our wedding.

Yet now, at the end of His public ministry before His death, our Lord leads us in our own wedding march. It reminds us of the bittersweetness of marriage, the Cross of commitment with the joys of mutual grace and love, and also of how the Cross to come will be for us a stairway to heaven, together holding the hand of our dear Lord our Bridegroom, through all His sorrows unto death this week, just as the Bride and Groom in the Orthodox wedding service together hold onto the Priest in the Dance of Isaiah, with the Priest symbolizing Christ in the service.

As the old American Gospel song says, Take my hand, pre­cious Lord, Lead me home. Yet in Orthodoxy we also know that we must engage in beautiful struggle and seek His outstretched hand, to hold onto it, like the bride and groom at the wedding service. Come unto me, He tells us, and I will give your rest. Brothers and sisters, let us take our Lord’s hand in this Palm Sunday marriage procession in and around the Church. Knowing the sufferings and the hate that the vista of joyful sorrow in Passion Week involves in the world, let us still press onward to the prize of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ of Pascha. Amen. 

Saint Gregory Palamas said on this day:

“The commemoration of Christ’s saving passion is at hand, and the new, great spiritual Passover, which is the reward for dispassion and the prelude of the world to come. Lazarus proclaims it in advance by coming back from the depths of Hades and rising from the dead on the fourth day just by the voice and command of God, who has power over life and death (Jn. 11:1-45). By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, children and simple people sing praises in advance to the Redeemer from death, who brings souls up from Hades and gives souls and bodies eternal life.

“…. Since, however, the virtues seem more difficult to us because of our love of comfort, let us force ourselves. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, it says, and the violent take it by force (Mt. 11:12).

“Everyone needs diligence, force and attention, but not to the same extent. Those exalted in honor, wealth and power, and those who concern themselves with words and the acquisition of wisdom by means of them, even if they wish to be saved, are in need of greater force and diligence, since they are less obedient by nature. Exactly this can be clearly seen in the reading from Christ’s Gospel yesterday and today. The miracle performed on Lazarus openly proved the one who did it to be God. But whereas the people were convinced and believed, the rulers at that time, that is to say, the scribes and Pharisees, were so far from being persuaded that they raged against Him even more, and resolved in their madness to hand Him over to death, although everything He had said and done plainly declared Him to be the Lord of life and death. No one can say that the fact that the Lord lifted up His eyes at that time and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me, was an obstacle to their regarding Him as equal to the Father, since He went on to say, I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they might believe that thou hast sent me (Jn. 11:41-42). So that they might know He was God and came from the Father, and also that He did not work miracles in opposition to God, but in accordance with God’s purpose, He lifted up His eyes to God in front of everybody and spoke to Him in words which make it clear that He who was speaking on earth was equal to the heavenly Father on high. In the beginning when man was to be formed, there was a Counsel beforehand. So now also, in the case of Lazarus, when a man was to be formed anew, there was a Counsel first. When man was to be created the Father said to the Son, Let us make man (Gen. 1:26), the Son listened to the Father, and man was brought into being. Now, by contrast, the Father listened to the Son speaking, and Lazarus was brought to life….

“In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female, nor Greek, nor Jew, but all, according to the holy apostle, are one (Gal. 3:28). In the same way, in Him there is neither ruler nor subject, but by His grace we are all one in faith in Him, and belong to one body, His Church, whose head He is. By the grace of the all-holy Spirit we have all drunk of the one Spirit, and have all received on e baptism. We all have one hope and one God, who is above all, and through all, and in us all (Eph. 4:6). So let us love one another. Let us bear with one another, seeing that we are members one of another. As the Lord Himself said, the sign that we are His disciples is love. When He departed from this world, the fatherly inheritance He left us was love, and the last prayer He gave us when He ascended to His Father was about love for one another (Jn. 13:33-35).” End quote.

Brothers and sisters, the procession today, like a wedding celebration, is a transition, a bridge, a connection from Great Lent to the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord. It runs from the Resurrection of Lazarus the Holy Righteous Friend of God to the Bridegroom Matins and to all the pain and the love beyond. Today the hand the Savior extends to us in this wedding dance is love, the bridge, the meaning, His way forward for us. 

St. Gregory Palamas concludes by telling us that just as those in the Palm Sunday celebration “spread their garments in His way[, in] the same manner, let us all, rulers as well as subjects, lay down our natural garments before Him, by making our flesh and its impulses subject to the spirit, that we may be made worthy not only to see and worship Christ’s saving passion and holy resurrection, but to enjoy communion with Him. For if, says the apostle, we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection (Rom. 6.5).” End quote. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Love is strong as death, the Old Testament tells us.

Love never fails, says our Lord’s New Testament, and goes beyond death to God Himself.

For Christ gives us the Way, Himself, to love our neighbor more than ourselves, and for us like Him to take our Palm Sunday parade as a triumph. even knowing all the betrayal and mortal limits that will mark our path to Pascha on this earth.

As the Akathist sung in prison campus during World War II tells us: “Glory to God for all things.”

[The Holy Sunday Homily of St. Gregory Palamas is translated at: https://orthochristian.com/92790.html ]

An homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church by Priest Paul Siewers.

The first time I remember hearing the account of Lazarus being raised from the dead by our Lord Jesus Christ I was probably in eighth grade decades ago, on a couch in our family dining room in a modest Chicago neighborhood, watching our portable black and white TV set. Ours was a loving but not a Bible-reading home. We went to a Unitarian-Universalist Church where we did not receive instruction in the New Testament but learned about other faiths. There I was, watching the Easter broadcast TV rerun of the biblical Hollywood epic The Greatest Story Ever Told, my only exposure to Holy Week and Easter.

The actor Max van Sydow played Jesus and wept for Lazarus’ death and then at the tomb intoned “Lazarus come forth!” Music based on Handel’s Messiah poured forth. Wholly surprised I wept and wept at the terrible beauty of it all, hiding my tears from my agnostic family. It was so overwhelmingly a sense of something so deeply profound and moving and utterly foreign to me, what we call joyful sorrow in Orthodox Christianity. I wept with Jesus and His tears were of compassion for all humanity including me, like His sweat as blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. They imparted a taste of the Living Water of the Holy Spirit of Baptism, of the water with blood that He shed for us on the Cross. In those tears was the salt of the earth. It was like what the Communion prayers say that even part of a tear shed in repentance is known God.

So great is the power of the Way, the Truth, the Life that is our Lord that He touched me even through that screen. To think, although we lived in a fairly modest neighborhood of Chicago, we were part of the greatest and most prosperous supposedly Christian nation, and while were not important people in any way, we still fancied ourselves well-educated, a house of teachers, attending what we thought was an elitely intellectual Unitarian congregation with old connections to the founders of the historically Protestant nation of America. Yet I had never known the account of Lazarus before. (I should add that at the time my sister was ill with what became a fatal illness that affected us all.) It took me many years sinfully and willfully to enter the Orthodox Church by God’s grace, but He was there to welcome me home so unworthily still.

In Orthodox Christianity we are blessed with beautiful struggle, an ascetic yet transcendent faith, as we have experienced God willing a taste of during Great Lent. Now we stand at the exit of Great Lent in our own tomb. Our Lord says to us to come out with His friend the Holy Lazarus. We stink, we have so long been in our sins and in the death of our soul. Yet He reaches out to us in the darkness of our tombs. Now, at the end of Lent, we feel His touch bringing us out unworthily into the even deeper joyful struggle of our Lord’s Holy Passion Week leading to Pascha.

St. Nikolai Velimirovich of Serbia and Pennsylvania, a friend of our Russian Church Abroad founding leader Metropolitan Antony, wrote: “Our Lord is not only the Resurrector of the body, but also the Resurrector of the soul. During His life on earth, He resurrected only a few human bodies, but countless souls, to demonstrate that the resurrection of the soul is much more important than the resurrection of the body. Almost all human souls were dead when He came into the world, and He resurrected countless souls by His power, and imbued them with His life. Both the Jews and the pagans were dead in soul, and He enlivened the one and the other….

O Lord Jesus Christ, our only Resurrection and life, help us by Thy power and Thy mercy, that we may be resurrected and enlivened by Thee, unto salvation and eternal life.”

St. Nikolai wrote how after the raising of Lazarus, “’the chief priests plotted to kill Lazarus too’ (St. John 12:10). They agreed among themselves to first kill the Maker and then His work. For Lazarus was the work of Christ. What is the use, they nefariously thought, to kill the Miracle-worker and to leave a living witness of His greatest miracle? For then, the people would be inflamed at them as evil doers! But, nevertheless, it happened that they killed Christ and missed Lazarus. And then? And then, they and their think alikes – killed scores of His apostles and missed hundreds. Then they killed thousands and missed hundreds of thousands. Then, they killed hundreds of thousands and missed millions. Finally it became clear that behind their backs, even the slain were resurrected to life as mown grass and those designated to be killed before the faces of the murderers, grew as sown grass. In vain did the wise Gamaliel say: ‘But if it comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them” (Acts 5:39). Those who wage war against God throughout the centuries in vain did they hone their own helplessness to mow down the crop of God. The more they cut down, the more the crops of God grew luxuriantly…. For that let it be to You O Almighty and irresistible Lord glory and thanks always. Amen.”

In the past century St. Nikolai with Metropolitan Antony and the founders of ROCOR faced the death of their homelands and the loss of their home life, and often as they did imprisonment and death for their faith. Yet they came forth from those tombs of persecution, to spread the Orthodox Gospel and Church throughout the world. Our mission stands testament to their labors. The spiritual warfare that tumultuously followed the raising of Lazarus reaches our lives too. But like Lazarus we must force ourselves with God’s grace to move on to service to our Lord and the missionary work given us by Him.

St. Nikolai also teaches of Lazarus in his Prologue of Ohrid (for February 5): “The Lord of life calls death “sleeping.” O what an inexpressible comfort that is for us! O what sweet news for the world! Physical death, therefore, does not mean the annihilation of man rather only sleeping from which only He can awaken; He Who awakened the first dust to life by His word…. Whenever the Lord cried out to someone who was dead in the body all of them awoke and arose. But, everyone did not awaken and arise among those who were dead in the soul when the Lord cried out to them. But, for this awakening, for this resurrection, the agreement of the will of the deceased is necessary… In truth, deeper is the sleep of sin than the sleep of death and the one who is asleep [in sin] does not easily awaken. O Sweet Lord, awaken us from the sleep of sin; awaken O Lord! To You be glory and thanks always. Amen.”

Brothers and sisters, the opening rock of St. Lazarus’ tomb is the opening door for us to Holy Week and Pascha. We are in the tomb coming out with Lazarus from Lent to Pascha. We know we shall die again but we also know that we shall rise again with Jesus Christ. The raising of Lazarus calls us to Holy Week with faithfulness and obedience. The stone is rolled away by Christ and He summons us like Lazarus to come forth, as His friend. Let us be faithful and obedient friends of God this week. Some elders say if only we can hold on to obedience in these latter days, that will be enoughIn raising Lazarus, Jesus Christ in His public ministry left Bethany and then Jerusalem in an uproar with the news, for Lazarus was well known.  I Am the Resurrection and the Life, he declared. He already had caused the Jewish leaders to want to kill him for saying “Before Abraham was I Am.” Now again as several times in the Gospel of John he declared his identity with the “I Am the Existing One” of the Old Testament, the “I Am He Who Is”  or “I Am that I Am” of His theophanies to Moses and others before the Incarnation.Lazarus’ sister Mary so dedicated in following Jesus’ teaching seemed most despondent at her brother’s death while the dutiful handmaiden of the Lord Martha received Christ’s words that “I Am the Resurrection and the Life.” Perhaps this is a reminder that both the qualities of Mary and Martha are needed for our salvation, both the listening-learning of Mary, and the simple dedication to good works exemplified by Martha. It was good for Mary to have chosen the better part of listening to our Lord, not being weighed down by worldly chores and affairs. Yet perhaps Martha had learned from the rebuke, to then bring her practical sense of duty to her faith, so that she could receive first Jesus’ teaching: “I Am the Resurrection and the Life.”

According to our Church Tradition, Lazarus after his rising from the dead was made a Bishop in Cyprus by the Apostles Paul and Barnabas, and is said to have worn an omphorion woven for him by the Theotokos herself. According to tradition, Lazarus never smiled during the thirty years he lived after his resurrection, because of having seen unredeemed souls he had seen during his four-day stay in Hades. The only exception happened when, seeing someone stealing a pot, he smilingly said: “the clay steals the clay.” Medieval Western tradition claims that he also became first Bishop in Marseilles in what is now France, where he went with his sisters Martha and Mary after they were set adrift on the sea by vengeful Jewish leaders. A relic of his, probably brought from Constantinople to a monastery in Pskov, Russia, helped keep him in the minds of our Russian Orthodox forebears. Now may the holy resurrected Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha pray to God for our missionary work here in Northern Appalachia.

As an old English hymn tells us, God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, He plants His footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm. He waits for us to waken like the Apostle Paul, not the heart-hardened Judas. He brings back into the fold the Apostle Peter, a betrayer of Him like us, who yet wept with our Lord for his own sins as Jesus did sadfully for each of us at Gethsemane and cried out upon the Cross for us. Let us in this Holy Week that opens to us today be obedient and faithful like Lazarus reborn, soberly assured of the Resurrection to come, called to evangelize those who do not know the Lord present for us in His Church. Truly He Is the Resurrection and the Life, the friend of man. He calls each of us by name, as He once did in little Bethany: Lazarus come forth! Amen

A book review and brief reflection on Orthodox Christian anthropology in Orthodox Life.

A Lenten homily for St. Mary of Egypt Sunday from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church by Priest Paul Siewers.

(Above) Saint Zosimas gives communion to St. Mary of Egypt after her desert sojourn.

Throughout Great Lent the Church in her wisdom has reminded us of God’s goodness in spurring us to forgive and repent. On the first Sunday the Church reminded us of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, and how the restoration of the icons led us to venerate and humble ourselves before the holy icons and to ask our Lord, His Mother, and the saints for their help. Then the second Sunday she reminded us of St. Gregory of Palamas and how grace is the connecting point directly of the divine with our physical embodied existence, an important reminder for our repentance in Lent. At the middle Sunday of Lent we venerated the Cross as a reminder of how it is the bridge given us to heaven, through the beautiful struggle of ascetic repentance.  Then on the Fourth Sunday we remember traditionally the Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus, the ascetic self-emptying steps that lead us to put God and our neighbor first, not our own will.

Today, the last regular Sunday of Great Lent in this year 7534 on the biblical calendar, 2026 on the civil calendar, is the memory of Saint Mary of Egypt. An highlight of Lent is the Standing Saint Mary Service we offered here Wednesday night, with the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete read with all its marvelous examples from Scripture of repentance and faith, and the Life of St. Mary. Now at Divine Liturgy we prepare to partake of the Body and Blood of our Lord while commemorating her and asking for her prayers for our Lenten journey toward Pascha.

Saint Mary we know was a great sinner, who today might be labeled a sex addict or even celebrated as a kind of pro-sex feminist. However, while she had a successful crafts business to make money, she was obsessed with sensual pleasure and identified with her passion so there seemed to be nothing else to her life but that identification. It was as if every day was a Pride Parade for her, wrongly essentializing her life as her passion. In Orthodoxy we should never identify with or essentialize our passion, we seek to self-empty in Christ, not to self-assert. That is the new Commandment our Lord gave us, to love as He loved, even to die for others.

Maybe our own life may seem less extreme than St. Mary’s, but consider how we may identify with our passions nonetheless. Career. Comfort. Pleasure. Seemingly simple indulgence on the internet or in an encounter with another. We often are immersed in such seemingly invisible supposedly small sins as if were living in a giant MyPillow and trying not to notice. But encounters in our Church ministries can sometimes help put this in perspective—in our parish prison ministry, in hospital visits and visits to shut-ins. Consider volunteering to help with these Orthodox ministries. The things that bother and stress us often are related to our living lives apart from God, in a kind of bubble of lies about ourselves and others. Even a simple negative encounter in traffic or at the grocery store, someone hogging the aisle or maybe us forcing another to wait as we rush ahead, is an opportunity hopefully for self-reflection and repentance. 

All these indulgences of our passions and identification with them in seemingly low-key ways enmesh us in the idea that Jesus Christ has not really come to save us, which the Apostle John says is the spirit of Antichrist. Remember our Lord’s message to the Church at Laodicea in the Book of Revelation, which Father Seraphim Rose suggested could be a message to these latter days. Our Lord said, “I wish that you were either hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will spit you out of my mouth.” This is in its own way even more dangerous than St. Mary’s sinful state, and we may be in it every day. But her example encourages us to heroism with God’s help. Struggle and humility are two great virtues in Lent preparing for the resurrection of Pascha.

St. Theophan the Recluse devoted himself to prayer of the heart, examining his sins, and communicating truths of our faith as a help to others in 19^th-century Russia and worldwide. Let’s hear a brief selection from his homily for St. Mary Sunday. St. Theophan writes: “What we can learn from the conversion of St Mary of Egypt, or about the veils of sin…. The example of the repentance of Saint Mary of Egypt is so comprehensive and so instructive that the holy Church especially wants to impress it on our hearts.…. Let us hearken to this lesson… in order to point out how each one of us can and should dispose ourselves to be worthy of the same grace.

“You will see that she was completely immersed in sin and did not even think of abandoning it. But grace comes, and, by its striking action, awakens her from the slumber of sin. Awakened, she sees the calamity of her condition and resolves to change it for the better. It was as if someone was immersed in a mire and an outsider came and with his strong arm pulled him out of its depths and set him down free on solid ground…. 

“…But what must we do to ourselves in order to deserve this grace of conversion?… I will briefly show you. Let us take a person in such a situation that only one simple thought came to him: whether or not to take care of himself and think about correcting his life.…. do not cast it away, but take hold of it at once and begin to perform operations, so to speak, on yourself that would give this thought the opportunity to take possession of all the powers of your being…. Sin entangles the soul in a multitude of snares, or hides itself under various veils, because in itself it is ugly, and would repel anyone at the first sight. These veils are: the deepest and nearest veil to the heart, which is composed of self-delusion, insensibility, and carelessness; higher above it and closer to the surface of the soul lies the veil of distraction and the concern for many things; then follows the upper veil—the predominance of the flesh and the surface order of external life, permeated with sins and passions…. First, curtail your usual affairs and relationships. The eyes, ears, and tongue are the widest channels for sinful sustenance…. Second, take hold of the body: deny it not only pleasures, but also reduce the satisfaction of the necessary demands of sleep and food….This is what prudent fasting accomplishes. Third, solitude and fasting make it easier for the soul to turn to itself. But, entering inside itself, it encounters terrible confusion there, caused by the concern for many things and scattered thoughts…. Here we need to suppress them and cast them out of the soul and heart, even if only for a short time…. For this reason, it is necessary to gather the scattered children—the thoughts—into one, as a shepherd gathers the sheep or as a glass convex collects the scattered rays of the sun, and turns them all toward yourself. This is accomplished by attention, or sobriety. Fourth. Allow the concerns to finally subside, the thoughts to calm down, the mind to gather itself …. You now stand next to your heart. Before you is your inner man, immersed in the sleep of carelessness, insensibility, and blindness….

“…. To make the effect of all these thoughts more sure, enclose all of them in a single image and bear it in your mind as a constant stimulus. …. Now the sinner is revealed to himself; he is not insensitive to his dangerous situation and often wants to arise and go, but this is not all done. What is clearly missing here is the main thing: a grace-filled awakening. Labor has been used, what was sought has been discovered, but all this constitutes only attempts, efforts to attract grace on our part, but not the very thing that we are seeking. We seek and knock, but the gift is in the will of the One Who distributes “to each one individually as He wills” (1 Cor 12:11). 

“…. Pray both in church and at home, compelling the Generous One to grant you, as your daily bread, grace-filled help for salvation. Thus labor and strain, ‘seek and you will find.’ Thus ‘knock and it will be opened’ to you (Matt 7:7)…. It will come, that is, what was given freely to the holy Mary of Egypt! … This is why the example of [her] is now offered to us within the season of Lent… to turn us toward a careful analysis: did we prepare as we ought to have. Anyone who has properly prepared should feel awakened, revitalized, and ready to exert effort in the matter of salvation. His goal is not just to go to Church and fast, but to acquire grace, or to recover what was lost, or to strengthen its fire which had begun to fade. And this outer order is needed, but the main thing is the change of inner disposition. If one has been made worthy of this, give thanks to the Lord; if not, then there is still time…. The Lord is near. Draw near to Him, and there will surely be a union between the Lord, the lover of fellowship, and your soul, created in His image and likeness, sought by Him and possessed by Him.” (From Now is the Accepted Time.)

Dearly beloved in Christ, today is also the feast of the Holy Aristobulus of the Seventy, a very early apostle to the deserts of Britain. Let us also ask his intercession for our Lenten struggle, that coming through Pascha, we as a mission family will be strengthened for missionary work in the coming year. Holy Saint Mary of Egypt and Saint Aristobulus of Britain pray to God for the conversion of our hearts each day, so that our light may shine before men for Christ. Amen.

“Come and see”

At St. John’s Russian Orthodox Christian Church, 92 St. John’s Lane, Winfield, Pa, with the Bucknell University Orthodox Christian community. See details at stjohnthewonderworker.com. All are welcome! Note: There will be no online classes or Bible Study on Lazarus Saturday through Pascha Sunday, but those will resume Sat. 4/26 and Sunday 4/27, God willing

Friday 4/3, Matins for Lazarus Saturday, 7 p.m.

Saturday 4/4, Lazarus Saturday Liturgy, 10 a.m. (Hours 9:40)

Vigil for Holy Sunday, 4:30 p.m.

Holy Sunday 4/5, Divine Liturgy 10 a.m. (Hours 9:40) Bridegroom Matins, 6:30 p.m., Confessions

Holy Monday 4/6 Vigil, 6:30 p.m., Confessions

Feast of the Annunciation, Holy Tuesday 4/7
Hours and Typica followed by Vesperal Liturgy, 8:30 a.m.

Bridegroom Matins, 6:30 p.m., Confessions

Holy Wednesday 4/8 Hours and Typica with Presanctified Liturgy 9:30 a.m. Matins for Holy Thursday, 6:30p.m., Confessions

Holy Thursday 4/9 8:30 a.m. Hours, Typica, and Vesperal Liturgy. Matins for Holy Friday (12 Passion Gospels), 6 p.m.

Holy Friday 4/10 Royal Hours 9 a.m. Great Vespers and Small Compline 3 p.m. Matins of the Lamentations, 7 p.m. Followed by the Guarding of the Tomb and Reading of the Psalter.

Holy Saturday 4/111 Hours, Typica, and Vesperal Liturgy 9:30 a.m. Followed by the Reading of the Acts of the Apostles preceding night-time Pascha services.

Pascha Services 4/11-12 11:15 p.m. Midnight Office, Paschal Matins, Paschal Hours, and Pascha Liturgy, followed by banquet.

Sunday 4/12. 1 p.m. Agape Vespers, followed by Lewisburg Pascha procession.