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, keeping the ancient calendar of the Church alive continuously. It is also the old calendar of American Appalachia. We join in greeting our Lord Jesus Christ to Jerusalem today 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.

The Church fathers tell us that the foal and the donkey 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, 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. 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.”

[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.

The End and Means of Orthodox Christian Anthropology

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 Typical 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 8 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.

An homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent 7534/2026 from St. John Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

Dearly beloved in Christ, today we commemorate the Holy Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, whose famous feast day in Church history falls on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, which is usually reserved for St. John Climacus and the Sunday of the Ladder. But the two are related in what is often called the “beautiful struggle” of Lent. Last Sunday we commemorated the Cross at the halfway point of Lent. The Ladder, a classic book by St. John reflecting his ascetic life at Mount Sinai, tells of how to climb the Cross in unworthy emulation of our Lord, as a stairway to heaven. This is what the Holy Martyrs of Sebaste did in what is now eastern Turkey.

There in 319 they were subject to the persecution of the pagan Romans, the precursors to our modern persecuting secularists and occultists. These 40 Roman soldiers faithful to Christ were put outdoors in freezing waters for refusing to renounce their faith. Witnesses described a glow of heavenly light, the uncreated energy of God, around them as they were received into Paradise by our Lord. Within living memory, St. Basil the Great, who wrote our Liturgy today, commemorated them in a homily at Constantinople. Today, some 1800 years later, we ask for the prayers of the Holy Martyrs for our mission in America. There were 40, just as there are 40 days of Lent for us, reminding us of the 40 days of Noah and his family surviving the Flood, and Jesus’ 40 days being tempted in the wilderness. The numeral 4 involves a sense of the cosmic (as in the Four Evangelists, the four seasons, the four directions, etc.), and the number 10 a sense of the wholeness of God’s law now fulfilled in Christ, multiplied together in the symbolism. Even in the Orthodox wedding ceremony, the Forty Holy Martyrs are invoked in a prayer , that the bride and groom crowned with the crown of martyrdom may be as faithful.

Their witness to Christ stands as a reminder that all of us as Orthodox Christians are called every day to the joyful sorrow of asceticism, or denying ourselves in Christ, so as to open our hearts to the uncreated light. This is the message, too, of St John Climacus’ The Ladder. Some say wrongly that St. John’s book is only for monastics and not for those of us in the world. But the Church in her wisdom has made it a regular standard of Great Lent, usually on this Fourth Sunday, and today presents the example of the 40 Martyrs for our urgent attention. Truly while there is a difference between what we in the world and what the holy fathers and mothers of our monasteries can do, qualitatively there is no difference in the kind of govenie or ascetic focus and attention that we should give to our faith each day as we say the “Jesus Prayer” and fast during Lent, even in the world.

The secret prayers in our Liturgy remind us of this, too. At the Clergy retreat I attended this past week, we were reminded of how those prayers are meant to be said by the priest out of earshot of the congregation. This is in line with our Orthodox hesychastic tradition of inner quietness in prayer. Not all the mystery is explained aloud during the service. The choir may fill in, and there may be moments of silence.  Worshippers bear that silence in prayers in your hearts, as with the Jesus Prayer silently, “Lord Jesus Christ mercy me.” We “mind the gap” so to speak of the silence, and contemplate more deeply the hymns. Bishop Luke reminded us also to remind worshippers to pray along silently with the priest in your hearts when he says prayers aloud in the service. We’re not meant to be passive in worship and in prayer, but to participate, in synergy with God’s uncreated energies, in worship as in our salvation, to share the joyful burden of active love, which is true asceticism in Orthodox Christianity–the beautiful struggle.

Such focus on inner quietness and dedicated devotion must also include radical compassion, because these are all together as the effect of God’s uncreated grace received in active love. In the collection called the Ancient Patericon of sayings of the desert fathers, compiled by St. Theophan the Recluse, there is the story of a monk who was ejected from a monastery for sin. As the monk was leaving, he saw the abbot who had ejected him walking out the door with him. Father, he said, where are you going? The abbot said, I am  leaving with you, because I too am a sinner.

There is a famous icon of the Forty Martyrs in the ancient Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Yet today, that holy temple built by Emperor-Saint Justinian, the site of our Lord’s tomb and of the Holy Fire, is sadly closed due to war. One of the prosecutors of that war this week told the world that Genghis Khan was more correct than Jesus in his appraisal of humanity, in asserting the raw worldly power of this world. We as Christians reject this spirit of the antichrist wherever it comes from, because it rejects that Jesus Christ our God has come in the flesh with all power, and we must start by doing so in our own hearts, rejecting the desire for power and wealth and comfort just as did the Forty Martyrs and St. John Climacus.

This rejection of the world must include secular heroes and celebrity, however appealing. This week in the news also saw the death of the American pop culture hero Churck Norris, an action movie hero who later in life turned to heterodox Christianity. Norris once said that he didn’t want to be a movie star but wanted to be a figure that kids could look up to as he as a child without a dad had looked up to the movie star John Wayne, who in turn had been been inspired as a young man by having the real-life cowboy hero Wyatt Earp as a mentor. In my early years as a university professor and long before my ordination, the few who knew wondered why I liked sometimes in the evening to watch Walker Texas Ranger reruns starring Norris. I found them often humorous relief from the anti-Christian nihilism I found in American higher education. But for all his vaunted and joked-about strength, Norris was not able to evade death, and none of us shall, and his beliefs however positive in a general way were not Orthodox Christian and thus ultimately could mislead. Our real action heroes as Orthodox Christians must be the Holy Forty Martyrs of Sebaste and all the holy martyrs, and ultimately our Lord Jesus Christ who conquered death for us. Our real protection is in the Orthodox Church, which is the Body of Christ, not in any mythology, American or otherwise. May they inspire us in our own action heroism, our active love in beautiful struggle, in contributing to the conversion of America to Orthodox Christianity.

Brothers and sisters, as our Lord said, we hear of wars and rumors of wars. But let us pray for wisdom and discernment that we not deny our Lord to Antichrist. As the Evangelist John said, the spirit of Antichrist is the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. That too is a denial of the Body of Christ in the Orthodox Church, which is the true Israel today.

A beautiful custom in Slavic Orthodoxy lands for today is to make Skylark pastries in the shape of birds, to honor the 40 martyrs, that the birds who sing to greet the springtime today may also represent the joyful reception of the 40 Orthodox martyrs in heaven. Thanks to Scott and Kris for making those for us today for coffee hour.

Let us join in the song of the skylarks welcoming the spring and the Lent that leads us into Resurrection, as it did so long ago with the Holy Forty Martyrs. They are with us today as we worship in Appalachian America. May they pray for our souls and for our mission. Amen.

*** 

Gospel of the Sunday, and that of the Martyrs — 

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark,

§40 [9:17-31]

At that time, one of the multitude came to Jesus, bowing before Him and saying: ‘Master, I have brought unto thee my son, who hath a dumb spirit. And wheresoever he taketh him, he teareth him; and he foameth and gnasheth his teeth and pineth away. And I spoke to thy disciples that they should cast him out, and they could not.’ Jesus answered him and said, ‘O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him unto Me.’ And they brought the boy unto Him. And when the spirit saw Him, straightway he tore the boy; and he fell on the ground and wallowed about foaming. And He asked his father, ‘How long is it ago since this came unto him?’ And he said, ‘From childhood. And oftentimes it hath cast him into the fire and into the waters to destroy him; but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us and help us.’ Jesus said unto him, ‘If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.’ And straightway the father of the child cried out and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!’ When Jesus saw that the people came running together, He rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, ‘Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him and enter no more into him.’ And the spirit cried, and rent the boy sorely and came out of him; and he was as one dead, insomuch that many said, ‘He is dead.’ But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. And when He had come into the house, His disciples asked Him privately, ‘Why could not we cast him out?’ And He said unto them, ‘This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting.’ And they departed thence and passed through Galilee, and He would not that any man should know it. For He taught His disciples and said unto them, ‘The Son of Man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill Him; and after He is killed, He shall rise the third day.’ 

Holy Gospel according to Matthew, 

§80 [20:1-16]

The Lord said this parable. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, who went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and said unto them, ‘Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you.’ And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing idle, and said unto them, ‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’ They said unto him, ‘Because no man hath hired us.’ He said unto them, ‘Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.’ So when evening had come, the lord of the vineyard said unto his steward, ‘Call the labourers and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.’ And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny. But when the first came, they supposed they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the master of the house, saying, ‘These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us who have borne the burden and the heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them and said, ‘Friend, I do thee no wrong. Didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take that which is thine and go thy way. I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?’ So the last shall be first, and the first last. For many are called, but few are chosen.’ 

Homily for the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, 7534/2026, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Christian Mission Church, by Priest Dr. Paul Siewers.

We are halfway through Lent, and can see the pattern of meaning laid out for us in the tradition of our Lord’s Church. It is a path of forgiveness and repentance that leads to the Resurrection.

First we had the Sunday of Orthodoxy, commemorating how we venerate and humble ourselves before the icons of our holy saints and ultimately of the Mother of God and our Lord Jesus Christ. The icons are otherworldly windows giving us strength in our journey of Lent. Then came the Sunday of St. Gregory of Palamas, reminding us of his brilliant defense of the Orthodox teaching that God’s grace is uncreated yet engages us physically.

Today the Sunday of the Cross reminds us of the Cross we need to bear, and how it also is our ladder to Pascha, and our life preserver. “Lent” is an old word for springtime, and we must during Lent like a seed die in the wintry ground at first in order to come really to life in the spring of Pascha. The Cross is the Tree of Life that springs from the deep soil of Lent. It lifts us up in joyful sorrow, closer to God and to one another in the branches, while we suffer to put off our sins.

The goal of Lent is the achievement of the Cross, to empty ourselves in Jesus Christ, not to assert ourselves. As the classic Orthodox book Unseen Warfare, whose final editor was St. Theophan the Recluse, tells us of the Way of the Cross:

“A man who is moved toward doing one thing or another purely by the consciousness of God’s will and the desire to please Him never prefers one activity to another, even if one is great and lofty and another petty and insignificant, but he has his will equally disposed toward either, so long as they are pleasing to God… for he has but one intention and one aim to the exclusion of all else—to please God always and in all he does, whether in life or in death, as the Apostle says: Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted by Him. Therefore, beloved, be ever watchful over yourself, be collected within, and strive by all means in your power to direct all your activities toward this single aim… to please God by obeying His will, since it is in God’s wish that you should go ot heaven rather than be cast into hell.

“None can fully conceive how great are the strength and power in our spiritual life of this motive and aim,” Unseen Warfare tells us, “to please God. For even if some activity is in itself quite simple and unimportant, if it is done for the sole purpose of pleasing God and to His glory, it becomes in the eyes of God infinitely more valuable than many other great and glorious deeds performed without this aim….

“This inner task, which you must practice in anything you do—the task of directing your thoughts, feelings, and actions only toward pleasing God—will seem difficult at first, but will later become easy and light, if, firstly you constantly exercise yourself in this spiritual effort and, secondly, if you constantly keep warm your yearning for God, sighing for Him with a live longing of the heart….  The more often this search for limitless good in God is practiced in our consciousness and the deeper it penetrates into the feeling of the heart, the more frequent and warm will be the actions of our will I have described, and the more quickly and easily shall we form the habit of doing everything solely through love of the Lord, impelled only by desire to please Him, since He is the most worthy of all love.” (Robert Edwards’ translation)

This warming of our hearts that the manual Unseen Warfare describes, brothers and sisters, touches in on the compassion of our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane where he sweat as if blood for our suffering human nature. This is the Way of the Cross we commemorate today.

Metropolitan Antony, the first primate of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, wrote that our Lord “was oppressed with the greatest sorrow on the night when the greatest crime in human history occurred, when God’s ministers—with the complicity of Christ’s own disciple, the former through envy, the latter through greed—decided to put the Son of God to death…. One must suppose that during that night in Gethsemane, the thought and feeling of the God-man embraced all of fallen humanity—numbering many millions—and wept with loving grief over each one individually, as only the all-knowing Divine heart could….having suffered in His loving soul over our imperfection and our corrupt will, the Lord poured into our nature a wellspring of new, vital strength, available to everyone who has ever or will ever desire it, beginning with the wise thief.”

This is the way set forth to us fully and finally on the Cross. Yet the Cross offers in reality but a ladder to the Resurrection. Brothers and Sisters, let us clamber up the Cross this middle of Lent, as we look forward to next week’s Sunday of the Ladder. By our death to self on the Cross with God’s help we are healed, and we find our salvation and redemption in the Lord Who in his suffering poured forth compassion upon us, died for us, and lived again to save us, and showed us the Cross as the way home. The Cross is our life preserver, and our way home.

Amen

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark,

§37 8:34-9:1]

The Lord said: ‘Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel’s, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever, therefore, shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when He cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.’ And He said unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, that there are some of them that stand here who shall not taste of death till they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power.’ 

Lent is a time to help those in need. And St. John’s members Innocent (Robert) and John Sam need your prayers and help with donations and volunteer assistance for their current housing transition.

If you can donate to help, please do so on this link, and write “housing assistance” in the memo field: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=RNEGFXJNUBAX4 Your donation will be used entirely to assist them, with no administrative costs, and will be tax deductible in going to our Church (St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church, a tax-exempt religious organization) to make the disbursements on their behalf as part of our charitable efforts. There will also be a basket for donations to help them in this transition at St. John’s at the candle table.

The Sam brothers have both been in Grand View Nursing Home in Danville for a few months, after health issues required that they leave their apartment (they are no longer able to climb the stairs there).

Due to changes in their insurance situation, they may need to vacate their old apartment in Williamsport by May 1, and this will require renting a dumpster and possibly moving help to empty out their former home, as well as volunteer assistance with storage and with care for their cat Buster.

But there also may be an opportunity for them to stay if proper medical care can be worked out through insurance, and in that case funds would still be needed for cleaning and potentially transportation. (Please also keep on the lookout as a backup for an affordable ground-floor or elevator apartment, preferably not far from St. John’s in the Selinsgrove-Sunbury-Northumberland-Lewisburg area.) Please look for updates on this page as details become available, and again keep them in your prayers.

Later this spring we hope to have a work party at their old apartment in Williamsport to help with cleaning up, please keep in touch with Fr Paul at 570-863-9039 by text or calls if you an help. Thanks!

Dearest to Christ,

This month of March on the Church calendar (which begins March 14 on the civil calendar) includes the most glorious Feast of Feasts, the Pascha or Passover, Orthodox Easter, commemorating the Resurrection of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ!

(Above) The Holy Fire in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday (photo from the Seattle Times).

The Sundays of Lent lead us through this springtime of our souls, from the commemoration of the triumph of the icons before which we humble ourselves and venerate the holy saints of the Church and most of all our Lord’s Mother and our Lord Himself, then to the Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, which reminds us of the physical presence of the uncreated grace of God in our repentance and devotions, and then this month the Sundays of the Cross, the Ladder, and St. Mary of Egypt, all progressively reminding us of the transfigurational power of repentance and forgiveness in our lives with God’s help. As our Lord says “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24).

Lent culminates in Passion Week and finally in our beloved Pascha, the Day of Resurrection of our Lord, and for ourselves in His Body the Church, God willing. This year after Agape Vespers we’ll plan to have a brief but joyful Pascha procession on Market Street in downtown Lewisburg, weather permitting. Please note also that this year the Feast of the Annunciation will be on Holy Tuesday, and we will have a Liturgy for this major feast of the Church on that morning.

We’ll update this newsletter schedule here online if there are any changes in the service schedule, and we’ll also be updating as needed the calendar on the website, stjohnthewonderworker.com, also.

In other news, please keep our faithful member Mary (Sally) Strayer in your prayers as she has surgery on March 18 on the civil calendar; we will have a Moleben for her after Liturgy on the upcoming Sunday of the Cross. Also, please see details here, https://ecosemiotics.com/2026/03/13/helping-with-a-housing-need/, about efforts to support our members Innocent and John and their transition hopefully toward attending Church with us again and moving from their nursing home into a new apartment later this spring. We will be accepting gifts to help them with their expenses in moving; please consider donating as part of your Lenten alms-giving (this will be done via the Church PayPal link; please include “housing assistance” in the memo of donations).

Our prison ministry at Muncy SCI continues, and we ask for your prayers for that as well, for our Orthodox inmates Rachel, Tanya, and the Ethiopian Orthodox inmate Helina, and also for your donations for prayer ropes for them and others among the 20 or so inmates who come to our prayer and discussion group weekly. A basket will be at Church to help support the prison ministry, or check with me.

We look forward to two baptisms next month during the Paschal Season, of Zachary on Thomas Sunday, who will be taking the name of Saint Zachary of Rome, the last Byzantine pope of Rome in the 8th Century, and Ryan, who plans to take the name of Saint Isaac the Syrian, potentially on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women. Please pray for them and also for other catechumens who also will be preparing for baptism in coming months.

The latest news on improvements for our Church Temple include that our dome installer Francis now says he plans to install our rooftop onion dome and Cross the end of April, so at least the construction work won’t interfere with Holy Week and Pascha services. Let’s keep in prayer that this may be completed soon, God willing, as we want to move on to other beautification projects once that expenditure is complete and budgeted: Upcoming projects will include the iconostasis, altar table, and possible benches for the side walls. A storage shed and further work on the closets/kitchenette are also potential items, along with a new set of covers for the altar area and icon stands. May the Lord help our efforts to beautify His Temple, with the prayers of St. John!

In addition, we’re working on new altar server robes, and will be taking measurements for those this month.

Please keep in touch as always with any needs, and remember that you should have confession this Lenten Season and before Pascha. Also, please bear in mind appropriate traditional attire for services during Lent, Holy Week, and Pascha, including long sleeves and pants for men, and long dresses or skirts for women, with head coverings especially when communing.

After Pascha, we hope to continue with plans for the Orthodox film festival for outreach, as well as for the Brotherhood Retreat at the Sportsmen’s Club and new Sisterhood activities. The Sisterhood as usual will be helping to coordinate cleanup and food for Pascha this month.

In asking for the intercessions of the Holy Saints for our mission work, we remember also this month two pre-eminent Celtic saint days, for Saint David of Wales (Sat. March 14 on the civil calendar) and also for Saint Patrick of Ireland (Monday March 30 on the civil calendar). May the patron saints and evangelists of Wales and Ireland pray to God for our mission work in North America, that our land may be converted as was theirs, and that the Orthodox faith endure in America until the Lord comes.

Wishing you all good strength, with God’s strong grace and tender mercies, this Lenten and Holy Week season, culminating in the Resurrection of our Lord, and asking for your prayers as you are in my unworthy supplications.

With love and prayers,

Father Paul

***

Services and Events this Month for the End of Lent, Holy Week, and Pascha (Dates are given with the Church Calendar date first then the Civil Calendar date.)

*Please note that Online Orthodoxy Classes will continue, God willing, until a break for Lazarus Saturday and Holy Saturday, and are usually on Saturdays 10 to 11 a.m. Please contact Fr. Paul for the Zoom link and details.
*Also, Bible Study will continue on Sundays at 2:30 p.m. at the Bucknell bookstore except for a break for Holy Sunday and Pascha Sunday. Those weekly events are not noted below.
*Vigil each Saturday at 4:30 p.m. unless noted otherwise. Akathists will not be served on Wednesday evenings during this part of Lent.

March 2/15 Sunday of the Cross. Procession. Pascha Choir Rehearsal after Liturgy. Molten for Mary (Sally) Strayer. Sizing for new altar server robes.

No Presanctified Liturgy on Wednesday morning; Fr Paul at Clergy Conference at Jordanville.

March 9/22 Sunday of St. John of the Ladder

Wed. March 12/25 Presanctified Liturgy, 9:30 a.m.

Wed. March 12/25 Great Canon of St. Andrew with Compline and reading of the Life of St. Mary for the Fifth Week of Lent, 5:30 p.m.

March 16/29 Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt

March 19/April 1 Presanctified Liturgy, 9:30 a.m.

Friday March 21/April 3, Matins for Lazarus Saturday, 7 p.m.

Saturday March 22/April 4 Lazarus Saturday, 9:30 a.m.

March 23/April 5, Holy Sunday

March 23/April 5, Bridegroom Matins, 6:30 p.m. Confessions.

Holy Monday March 24/April 6 Bridegroom Matins, 6:30 p.m., Confessions

Feast of the Annunciation, Tuesday March 25/April 7, 8:30 a.m. Start of Hours, Typica, then Vesperal Liturgy.

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

Holy WednesdayMarch 26/April 8 Presanctified Liturgy 10 a.m. Matins for Holy Thursday, 6:30p.m., Confessions

Holy Thursday March 27/April 9, 8:30 a.m. Hours, Typica, and Vesperal Liturgy. Matins for Holy Friday (12 Passion Gospels), 6 p.m.

Holy Friday Royal Hours March 28/April 10, 9 a.m. Vespers 3 p.m. Matins of the Lamentations, 7 p.m.

March 29, April 11 Holy Saturday Hours, Typica, and Vesperal Liturgy 9:30 a.m.

March 29-20, April 11-12 Paschal Services 11:15 p.m. Midnight Office Midnight, Paschal Matins, Hours, Liturgy

March 30/April 12. Pascha Sunday. Agape Vespers 2 p.m., followed by Pascha procession in downtown Lewisburg.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today the Church in her wisdom urges us to remember the example and teaching and role in the Church of St. Gregory Palamas. Following up on the Church Fathers who resisted the heresy of those attacking the icons, as we remembered last week, this week we remember the saint who stood for one of the most distinctive teachings of Orthodox Christianity: That of the uncreated energies of God. Think of it, that the energies or activity of God, also known as grace, are themselves divine and reach us here and now in Creation even as fallen human beings. It is so important that the work of St. Gregory Palamas, expressed in various Church councils in the 14th century, is sometimes called the Ninth Ecumenical Council. This teaching of the uncreated energies is one no heterodox forms of Christianity whether Protestant or Catholic or other fully share. It is our great gift from our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Church, the Body of Christ, which is our great living inheritance as Orthodox Christians from the Apostolic Church, we who have been fostered into the true Israel today.

Psalm 50 in the Orthodox Bible, written by the holy Prophet David, in his great repentance for adultery and murder, tells us of God’s tender mercies, which are working in us in the Lent of His Church. God’s tender mercies are His grace, His uncreated energies, for which St. Gregory stood against the lies of the heretics who claimed that those tender mercies were created. The heretics argued that God’s tender mercies are more like thunder bolts sent randomly. St. Gregory stood for the Orthodox teaching that they are all around us, like a field alive with sparkling energy that is God’s love for us and can unfold in our hearts with our ascetic Lenten-style attention.

There is a movie called Tender Mercies made by the late Robert Duvall that seeks to depict this in symbols. It is not an Orthodox film but it echoes aspects of the spirit of Christianity in our flawed culture today. In the film, a man has fallen into a shipwreck of his life, but finds redemption through God’s grace, in the ascetics of marriage inspired by Christian tradition, with renewed attention to faith and others in his life. This is a symbol of what St. Gregory taught in the Orthodox tradition of hesychasm, that God’s grace, those uncreated energies, those tender mercies, manifest themselves physically in our lives. This is also what we commemorated last week in the triumph of the Orthodox teaching of the icons. On Wednesday, God willing, our Church will go on pilgrimage to see the myrrh-streaming icon in Taylor, Pennsylvania. It is a reminder of the physical effects of our faith defended by St. Gregory and the Church.

Another example of those physical effects of our faith is how marriage and monasticism are two great ways of life in our Church’s tradition that stand against our society’s apostasy from truth. A New York Times article this week reported how even the abomination of polyamory is gaining legal recognition in America. But Great Lent is a great medicine for us Orthodox Christians living amid such delusion. It reminds us and challenges us how with the divine grace of God in our lives, Orthodoxy must be lived and embodied. It is our springtime, preparing us for the Resurrection of Pascha.

The Russian saint and ascetic Theophan the Recluse has written about this in his homilies for Lent, including one for today. He writes: 

“Here, let us consider the parts of our nature, the attacks on them, and what weapons we have against them. Let us begin to sort out the composition of our nature part by part and appropriately arm it. We have a body. The life of the body is sustained by the harmonious action of its various parts and functions. Satisfying the needs of the body is a law of nature, but when the passions approach, it loses proper measure and form and becomes sin. Our body must be nourished. The organs of nourishment are the palate, the throat, and the stomach. The passions that attack this part are overeating, sweets, luxury of the table and its seasonings, gluttony, and drunkenness. The weapons that must be used to guard this part are abstinence and fasting. Our body has senses. The organs of sensation are the nerves with their feelings. The passions that attack this part are manifold. Each sense has its own temptation: the eyes—their own, the ears—their own, the taste—its own. Everyone has a common passion for the pleasant stimulation of the senses, or for sensual pleasures. The weapons, which it is necessary to arm this part, the holy Fathers call the preservation of the senses, especially the sight and hearing, from all seductive impressions, most of all through solitude and avoidance of encounters with tempting persons, places, and things. Our body has movement. The organs of this movement are the muscles, the arms, and the legs. The passions that attack this part are, on the one hand, laziness and drowsiness, on the other frivolity, restlessness, the passion for games and amusements, dancing, acting, fights, and so on. The weapons to protect this part are: labor, vigil, bows, and moderate regularity of movement. The body has a tongue, the organ of words. The passions that attack it are: empty speech, idle talk, gossip, quarrels, blasphemy. The weapon with which to protect it is prudent silence of the lips. Such is our body, such are its passions, and such are the weapons against them. The holy Fathers call the totality of these weapons bodily ascetic labors. This is how the body must be taken in hand and taught to live a godly life. ‘And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’ (Gal 5:24).

“Let us move on to the soul. Here in the first place is the imagination with the memory—the storehouse of the soul with an index of its treasures. The passions that disturb this faculty are: reverie; absent-mindedness, or the plundering of the mind; and fantasizing, fueled by reading novels and empty conversations. The weapons against them are attention, sobriety, and watchfulness of the spirit. The imagination is followed by the intellect and reason, whose work it is to identify everything. The enemies that act unfavorably on them are curiosity, doubt, pride, trusting only in one’s self, stubbornness of opinion, and lack of conviction. The weapons with which to arm them are: reading the word of God and writings of the Fathers, conversation with people experienced in spiritual life, personal reflection in submission to the voice of the Church. Alongside the intellect is the will, the active capacity of desires and undertakings. The passions that torment it are the following: excessive cares, self-interest, willfulness, insubordination, impudence, and licentiousness. The weapon against them is an all-around obedience, or submission to legal orders and regulations: worldly, civil, ecclesiastical, and those given by one’s spiritual father. Next in the same row is taste—the capacity for aesthetic pleasures. The passions that overcome it are: fashion, dandyism, and a passion for entertainment, balls, and theaters. The spiritual weapons to protect it are: spiritual hymns, icons, and especially going to church, which provides the most complete satisfaction of the needs of uncorrupted taste. Such is the soul, such are its passions, such are the tools against them. The totality of these weapons is the range of spiritual ascetic struggles, through which we glorify God ‘in our spirit’ (1 Cor 6:20) and save (Heb 10:39) and purify our souls (1 Pet 1:22).

“Finally, above the soul is the spirit, the power turned toward God and things divine. The enemies here are: unbelief, forgetfulness of God, fearlessness, burning of the conscience, dislike of the sacred, despair. The weapons against them are: faith and love devoted to God—enlivened by hope and active in walking before God, unceasingly turning the mind and heart to God, and unceasing prayer. I will shorten these instructions in order to give freedom to your tired attention, which has been led through an unfamiliar field of subjects. Rather, I will only enumerate in succession all the instruments of our spiritual warfare, namely: faith, prayer, going to church and abiding in all the orders of the church, all-around obedience, reading the word of God and the holy Fathers, lively conversation with experienced people, godly reflection, sober attention to ourselves, bodily labor, vigil, bowing, solitude, guarding the senses, silence, abstinence, and fasting. The same weapons, not in letter, but in spirit, are also indicated by St Paul, when, having commanded Christians to put on all the weapons of God (Eph 6:11), he then lists them. “Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints” (Eph 6:14–18)…. Thus, do not refuse but force yourself to pass through everything prescribed. God will be your Helper, only begin and continue without omission. Now is Lent, the most favorable time for such practice. He who has prepared has already used all spiritual weapons, and those who are preparing will also use them. All that remains is to apply a little force to yourself by starting to keep up with them. And then, God willing, you will like these weapons so much that you will never want to part with them. One has only to cleave a little to ascetic struggles, and they will more and more turn into our need, will nourish and delight us. They are not contrary to our nature, but are akin to it in its purest form, which vouches for their success in prevailing over us.” (Translation from Now is the Accepted Time.)

Brothers and sisters, let us never forget as Orthodox Christians the physical touch and warmth in our heart of God’s tender mercies, which are themselves uncreated and divine energies, yet which reach us here, sparkling and energizing us. Let us nurture them in our heart from the spark of God’s love in us, so that like kindling a winter campfire in Lent, they may warm us and shine out in time for Pascha bonfires, to fill our Lord’s words that we are the light of the world. Amen.