(Above) The miracle of the Holy Fire on Orthodox Holy Saturday at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Despite popular fiction and occult desires, the situation of the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament is described in II Maccabees, chapters 1 and 2. Of course you won’t find this in most Protestant Bibles, which have excised the books “worthy to be read” that are part of Orthodox Christian Scripture, including the books of the Maccabees. (Known as the Apocrypha in the 1611 King James Version, and as the Deuterocanonical books in Catholic bibles, they are segregated in Western compilations of Scripture and kept separate at the end of the Old Testament. However, in Orthdoxy they are woven into the regular order of books, with the Maccabees for example at the end of the series of historical books. Those “readable” books as they are known–primarily surviving in Greek and not part of the Hebrew biblical canon of Judaism–are distinguished in Orthodox Christian Tradition as in a sense non-canonical but edifying scriptural books providing context, and are sometimes used in liturgical cycles).

In any case, in Maccabees 2:2 we learn how the Holy Prophet Jeremiah took the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant, in anticipation of the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians in 4922 AM (587 BC), and hid it in a cave, in the “mountain where Moses had gone up and had seen the inheritance of God” (II Mac. 2:4). He would not reveal the precise location, saying that God would reveal it in a later age: “The place shall be unknown until God gathers His people again and shows His mercy. Then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord and the cloud will be seen, as they were shown to Moses, and as Solomon deemed it worthy that the place should be specially consecrated” (2:7-8), going on to talk about Solomon in his wisdom offering sacrifice for consecration and completion of the temple Then the account indicates how these things are reported in the records and memoirs of the Prophet Nehemiah, who founded a library.

The Incarnation of Jesus Christ fulfilled the Old Testament promise of the tabernacle, with the New Testament Church as the Body of Christ and Israel. The Most Holy Mother of God, as commemorated in the Church’s feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple, marked that fulfillment, and herself is often identified by the Church Fathers and Tradition with the Ark of the Covenant. (Note that the Monophysite Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which has an ancient history of Christianity originally Orthodoxy back to the apostolic era, with an earlier ancient Jewish presence in Ethiopia, claims to have the physical relic of the ark secured in one of her churches, speculatedly related to Jeremiah’s later forced exile to Egypt with its connections to Nubia and Ethiopia, but that does not affect the Orthodox tradition of the full realization of the Ark in the Incarnation and Resurrection and true Pentecostal Church.) The Ark is mentioned as appearing again in the Book of Revelation, as the “thousand years” of the Church ends with tribulations marking the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

There is another related thread of this account in II Maccabees 1. There the text tells of the joining of the Feast of Tabernacles (or Booths), commemorating Israel’s deliverance from Egypt and receiving the promised land from God, with the Feast of Lights, Hanukkah, commemorating Judas Maccabeus’ restoration of the Temple. The feast of the fire then is described as related to taking fire off the altar of the Tabernacle and bringing it in exile in the Persian empire to hide it in a sealed dry well. The Prophet Nehemiah then at the time of return to the land of Israel ordered the descendants of the priests who had hidden the fire to get it. They found a thick liquid, which he commanded them to dip out and bring. Then when sacrifices were offered again to God, “the sun, which had been clouded over, shone forth, a great fire flared up, causing everyone to marvel.” Then the prayer of Nehemiah recorded there was offered (II Mac. 1 and also Neh. 1:5-11). The account then tells of how Nehemiah ordered the remaining liquid should be poured onto large stones, a flame flared up, and when light from the altar shone, the flame went out, suggesting the sanctification of the altar. Meanwhile we are told that the king of the Persians, hearing of this, and enclosed the place where the liquid had been found, “and made it sacred.”

The beginning of Chapter 2 then tells of how the Holy Prophet Jeremiah, as reported in the records, ordered those migrating (presumably into exile) to take some of the altar fire. “The prophet also gave the law to those migrating and commanded them not to forget the Lord’s ordinances, nor be led astray in their thoughts when they happened to see [in Babylon presumably] the gold and silver statues and their adornment. He also spoke other such words and urged them not to depart from the law in their hearts” (II Mac. 2:2).

These instructions apply also of course to ourselves, by our own modern waters of Babylon.

As Orthodox Christians we recall also how it was at the same Feast of the Tabernacles and Lights that our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ revealed “I Am the Light of the world” (John 7-8). His Incarnation and Resurrection fulfilled the pattern of the tabernacle revealed to Moses on the Mount, marking its realized return in full effect. The “place” of the Ark and the Temple became the Body of Christ, in which the faithful Orthodox participate in the Eucharist today at so many Churches around the earth. Indeed, today the Holy Fire is known to Orthodox Christians coming from the tomb of our Lord on Holy Saturday on the Orthodox calendar.

Glory to God!

(Note: Much of this would not be known to those non-Orthodox who only read the expurgated Bible of the modern West, which leaves out the books of the Maccabees in many English-language versions, even though II Maccabees was included in the Authorized/King James Version of 1611, from which version it is usually removed today. It is considered one of the “readable” or “worthy to be read” books by Orthodox Christians and included at the end of the sequence of historical books in the Orthodox Old Testament, the Greek Septuagint which survives as the oldest extant manuscript, although also known as not in the canon of Hebrew scripture.)

One frequent topic of discussion in American heterodox (Protestant) religious history is the millennium. I stopped in a Protestant bookstore in a small town near us, and there was a foldable plastic reference chart for sale, explaining the different varieties of premillennialism, amillennialism, and postmillennialism in American Protestantism.

But this Protestant concern with a potential utopian divine reign of 1,000 years on earth prior to the Final Judgment has also influenced the development of spinoffs of premillennialism in modern secular techno-paganism in the so-called “Global West.” The prominent disparate “mix and match” families of these false utopian beliefs (with precedence in early Anabaptism and Puritanism) have proliferated today to include not only Freemasonry and Marxism, but strains of New Thought and New Age and Perennialist syncretic occultism, with neopagan options such as Wiccan, and techno-gnostic and Neoliberal Progressive-Pantheism on both the Right and Left socially, and in usury-fueled corporate and administrative-state establishment centers.

These all partake of what the Church identifies as the heresy of chiliasm, tracing back to misinterpretation of Revelation 20 and a faulty sense of ecclesiology involving false ecumenism in the past century and today. These errors permeate the modern Global West’s techno-paganism, a kind of vague umbrella spirituality for all of the above heresies, traceable back again to Deism, Unitarianism, Universalism, and Pantheism, all re-packaged today into what the Lord God’s vision to the Prophet Jeremiah highlighted as the people’s invention each of their own idolatrous gods. The resulting delusional spiritual “buffet” ends in the type of atomization of souls that leads to a new techno-totalitarianism in our current age. Together these related heresies remind us of the warning to the Apostle John the Evangelist in Revelation about the “synagogue of Satan” in the letter to the Church at Philadelphia. Many Church Fathers interpret that letter as particularly to the era of the Church penultimate to the Last Judgment, relevant to the roots of our own age, in these latter days.

Orthodox Christian teaching sometimes is described as amillennialist. But Orthodoxy really participates in or reacts to none of the Protestant schools of thought, but stands grounded as always on continuing apostolic tradition, in the Truth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is Truth. As the American traditional Orthodox biblical teacher Fr. John Whiteford (my own honored instructor in Scriptural Studies at the ROCOR Pastoral School) put it, the premillennialist tradition wrongly presupposes a release of Satan after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which contradicts the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of the Church, and runs counter to the Church’s understanding of the Gospel of our Lord.

In looking to Orthodox Christian teaching on Revelation 20, helpful modern sources that compile Church Tradition are Archbishop Averky’s book now published as The Epistles and the Apocalypse by Holy Trinity Publications in Jordanville NY, and formerly just as The Apocalypse: In the Teachings of Ancient Christianity, a collection of essays by the Archbishop, of blessed memory, first compiled by Father Seraphim Rose of blessed memory. This volume is based on the commentary on the Apocalypse (Revelation) by St. Andrew of Caesarea in the seventh century. In addition, the five-volume series of commentary by Archimandrite Athanasios Mitilinaois, is also a guide to Revelation in Orthodox Tradition. For this short commentary, I’ll be relying on the third of these modern English-language traditional commentaries, Explanation of the Apocalypse by Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev, although all three, drawing on Church Tradition, agree in their commentary on Revelation 20.

Priest-Martyr Daniel writes of the “more correct interpretation” vs. that of chiliaism “severely condemned by the Church” (and countered in the Nicene Creed by the phrase “His kingdom shall have no end”):

“…there is a Kingdom of God, th ekingdom of the martyrs, and its existence betan at the moment when Satan was bound (at the descent of Christ into hades). And only at the very end of time will he be freed–during the rule of the antichrist on earth. The Lord bound Satan to prevent him from deceiving the people, and bound him not by any external forces, but by the preaching of the apostles and the blood of the martyrs. A person who suffers for Christ’s sake, who battles fo rthe name of Christ, actually bridles the powers of evil. And the bloo dof the martyrs extinguishes the altars of the idols, in the literal sense of the word…” (p. 270)

Priest-Martyr Daniel quotes St. Andrew of Caesarea as indicating that the number “one thousand years” is meant to indicate “a great many or perfection,” similar to other references in Holy Scripture (such as Ps. 104:8). This indicates perfection because of Christians being called into “perfect manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Thus, St. Andrew concludes, this is “the time from [the year of] the Incarnaiton of the Lord until the coming of the Antichrist…. [left] to God alone, who knows to what extent His forbearance is expedient for us,” as with the duration of life. “After which [one thousand years] the Antichrist will disturb the entire world, containing in himself the activity of the Originator of Evil, and pouring out the crop of his poisonous wickedness among people, since he sees the unalterability of his own punishment.”

Priest-Martyr Daniel notes that the biblical phrase, “After that he must be loosed a little season” (Rev. 20:3) “refers to the freeing of the devil during the reign of the antichrist, when Satan will delude all the nations without restraint, in accordance with the will of God. Why is this the will of God? In order to reveal what is actually taking place in the hearts of men, and to eveal who will remain with Christ and who will not receive Him.” (p. 272)

Although Revelation 19 refers at its end to the overthrow and defeat of the beast (the Antichrist) and false prophet, Revelation 20 is understood in Church Tradition as referring to the period following the Gospel era of the Pentecost-inspired Church fulfilling Israel, for a “thousand years,” a number that is a mystery in God’s time but nonetheless present in history. It tells of the freeing of Satan at the time of the reign of Antichrist earlier, and the ultimate triumph of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ at the end of time. It is not an invitation to human will and the utopianism of gobalization, which but open up an apostate Christendom to the temporary but terrible reign of Antichrist.

To the work of the above authors is added the voices of many other traditional Orthodox hierarchs, fathers, and teachers. Three others in particular, in addition to the article by Fr. John Whiteford already referenced, were featured in a very helpful four-part series explicating the heresy of chiliasm and the Orthodox teaching on Rev. 20, putblished on the Orthodox Christian (orthochristian.com) website edited by Jesse Dominick, a former Pennsylvanian now in Moscow. Bishop Alexander (Mileant) of blessed memory adds that, “In the 20th chapter of Revelation, St. John consoles the faithful with the thought that those who were killed for Christ did not perish. Instead, they reign in Heaven with their Savior. Archimandrite Cleopa (Ille) notes that chiliasm would involve a “third resurrection” contrary to the Gospels. The other article in the four-part series, by Father Michael Pomazansky, also includes an Orthodox critique of the “rapture,” a 19th-century doctrine that has become part of false Protestant beliefs of a chiliastic nature, but conflicts with the Gospel: “It is based on a misinterpretation of 1 Thess. 4:17, which teaches that at the very end of the world believers will be ‘caught up in the clouds,’ together with the resurrected dead, ‘to meet the Lord’ Who is coming for judgment and the opening of the eternal Kingdom of Heaven. The Scripture is quite clear that even the elect will suffer on earth during the ‘tribulation’ period, and that for their sake this period will be shortened” (Matt. 24:21-22).

Of the “thousand years,” and of all the prophecies of Revelation, the Orthodox Church offers from illumined saints and elders in the Body of Christ across centuries the ark of safe interpretation, without prying into the secrets of time and manner known only to God. Revelation ultimately is a book of hope, and Orthodox Christians need to approach it with prayer, and with the guidance of the Church Fathers and Tradition. The three currently published English-language volumes mentioned above are indispensable guides to us in the Orthodox mission to American for our reading of Revelation, which because of its mysteries was not included in regular liturgical readings of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church, but does hold an important place in our canonical Scripture, as the final book of the Orthodox Bible.

Homily on Nov. 16, 7529 (Nov. 29, 2020, civil calendar), at St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco Russian Orthodox Mission Church, Lewisburg PA

Today we commemorate the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew, whom our Lord and Savior and God Jesus Christ called from his work as a publican tax-collector to become one of His Apostles and ultimately one of the writers of the four Holy Gospels.

For this calling to proclaim the good tidings of salvation, the Evangelist had to leave his lucrative and secure if unpopular work as a collector of taxes for a system that ultimately supported what today we might call religious and colonial oppression, the rule of pagan imperial Rome, which existed precariously alongside and over the self-righteous religious elite of the Jews at the time, as seen in the way that our Lord was sentenced to death by a combination of those powers.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN PARABLE AS A CALL TO SPIRITUAL WARFARE

In happy parallel, the commemoration of St. Matthew today also coincides with the Gospel reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which indicates to us today how we should carry ourselves in relation to our neighbors who may be caught up in oppressive systems of thought and life apart from the Church in America today, which has become a veritable “land of giants” in biblical imagery.

The Church teaches us that the Good Samaritan of the story is a type or in effect icon of our Lord, and in icons is often depicted as Him. For our Lord picks us up and binds our wounds, physical and spiritual, as he in effect did with St. Matthew also. Our Lord releases us from captivity to the worldly flesh and gives us true freedom in service to truth, in His person as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Late-18th-century Russian icon of The Good Samaritan

An interesting feature of this story is how it expresses what St. James in his Letter called the royal law, to love our neighbor as our self, which is predicated on the other Great Commandment, to love the Lord with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind.

For our Lord asks his disciples, who was neighbor to the man in trouble? They reply the Good Samaritan. He says, do likewise. Literally, if the Good Samaritan is our neighbor to love as ourself, and if He is seen as our Lord, then we love our Lord with all our heart and soul and mind as our self, and so our neighbor in Him. This indicates that in our neighbor as in ourselves we should see an icon of our Lord, as each of us is made according to the image of Him, with the potential to be fulfilled through His grace to be in His likeness also. As Matthew’s Gospel records the words of our Lord, inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to Me, meaning that our service to our neighbor is also service to Him.

GIGANTOMACHIA

I was reminded of this Parable of our Lord’s message and its call to us to do likewise in considering a recent podcast on Ancient Faith Radio entitled “The Land of Giants,” an interesting discussion about the topic of the giants in the Old Testament, a now-perennial favorite topic of online discussion.

The core of the lengthy podcast involved how, symbolically and actually, accounts of wars with giant clans in the Old Testament (gigantomachia in Greek) involve God-inspired battle against demonized communities who (to combine comments by the podcast co-hosts Fathers Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen DeYoung) “are in communion with demons, and who are engaging in demonic fornication rituals, in order to produce demonized human beings, who have supernatural abilities.” This involved battle “against communities engaged in mass enslaving of people, murdering those people, sacrificing them to these demons, in cannibalism and drinking their blood.”

Although the laws in Deuteronomy established certain rules of warfare, requiring the opportunity for communities in the promised land to surrender to the children of Israel, presumably to become joined ritually to Israel by acceptance of her rituals, in a type of the Church to come, at the same time it makes exceptions for communities identified with the type of demonic dominance mentioned above. In those cases, we see God-inspired warfare that wiped out those communities in the Book of Joshua.

Our Lord’s Church is not Israel in the sense of a territory, but the fulfillment of Israel as a people dedicated to God, His Body, the spiritual Israel today that is also an historical presence, as in our mission worship space this morning. We war, the Apostle Paul tells us, against principalities and powers, names for ranks of angels and presumably fallen angels or demons, indicating the spiritual nature of our warfare today. The giant clans arguably were types of what we face today in such spiritual warfare. We face in our own country today the most egregious combinations of idolatry (in the sense of objectification of people and things and ultimately the self, in what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the “permanent lie” of an alternative virtual reality), sexual immorality, demonic uses of technology, mass abortion and abuse of children, and spiritual murder and enslavement. Nihilistic identitarian networks based in all these gross sins form around a devilish assertion of autonomous individualism–rather than the self-emptying in our Lord Jesus Christ in which the Church protects us.

The recommended English translation of Dostoevsky’s Demons

Fyodor Dostoevsky, a Russian Orthodox Christian writer, wrote about the demonic tendencies of modern nihilism, especially in his book Demons, about how demonic ideas possess people and whole communities in modern times, much like the ancient giant clans of old. We see for example the effort to encourage polysexualism, new forms of supposedly progressive racism driven by atheistic revolutionary ideology, transhuman super-abilities claimed through technology, and a hyper-consumer mentality toward children and the earth, all coming together in an atheistic revolutionary cultural movement called cultural Marxism by some advocates and critics both. This is a new Western version of the demonic madness that overtook Russia a hundred years ago amid great persecution of the Church, and which still enslaves today the most populous country in the world, from which came our current global medical plague. Arrayed against our Lord and His Church today are the forces of transnational capitalism, transhuman technology, atheistic and anti-Christian systems of education, media, finance, commerce, and social conformity in historically Christian lands, coupled with new forms of loneliness and terror, all leading toward a new kind of totalitarianism. Truly the spirit of anti-Christ, denying the Incarnation of Christ and seeking to erase His Church, is abroad in our own land and is at our very doorstep.

But our Lord assures us that the gates of hell cannot prevail against His Church. The Blood of the Lamb is on our door frames in this Passover, the Pascha that we commemorate and participate in through our worship as the Body of Christ.

We are called today in America to a spiritual warfare, a New Testament version of gigantomachia, or the battle against the giant clans, in our lives as Orthodox Christians today. This spiritual warfare begins with our own lives, with our home prayers, our participation in worship in the Church, with our study of Scripture. As our Lord says in the Gospel of Matthew, ye do err not knowing the Scriptures and the power of God.

Jan Saenredam, David with the Head of Goliath, Dutch 1600

In terms of being well armed spiritually for today’s battle with the giant clans, let me also put in a plug here for our weekly Bible Study at 2 p.m. each Sunday, in the New Testament under the guidance of Archbishop Averky’s commentary based in the Church Fathers. The author of the text we currently are studying, the Apostle James the Just, according to Church tradition first translated from Aramaic into Greek, the Gospel of the Evangelist Matthew whom we commemorate today. So the Church works together across the ages.

And so the Parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that we should “do likewise” in service to our Lord, for our neighbors in Christian love. If our society is hostage to giant clans, we should then for the sake of our neighbors take up spiritual arms daily as warriors for Christ, to give them the opportunity to be free, and to do God’s will and be witnesses for it with his grace, on earth as it is in heaven. The Judge Samson was unworthy in many ways. But God gave to him the power to witness to the freedom of Israel and be a type of Christ among the Holy Forerunners recognized by the Church. How much more can we, however unworthy, I speak for myself, witness as those baptized and washed clean in the Lamb, witness to the freedom of the true Israel, the people to whom we belong in the Body and Blood of our Savior, even in the land of the giants today.

In our inspiration let us look to the tradition of the martyr’s death of St. Matthew and how it bore fruit. At the end in a strange pagan land of cannibals he was put to death by the tyrant king. But that king afterward was converted to Christianity through the relics of the saint.  The king took the name of Matthew in baptism, and by written instructions prophetically left by the evangelist later himself became bishop of the very land that once had killed the apostle in defiance of Christ under the former king’s own hand. That former tyrant himself on his repose entered into the rolls of the saints of the Church. May the Lord similarly bless our unworthy land and bless the evangelism work of our mission and our spiritual warfare against the giants, through the intercessions of our patron St. John, and the Holy Protection of our Lady the most Holy Theotokos, under whose patronage our mission was founded.  In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Emperor of Emperors

From a homily given after the Thanksgiving Akathist at a service at St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco Russian Orthodox Mission in Lewisburg, PA, on Thanksgiving Day, the Feast of St. John Chrysostom, Thurs. Feb. 26, 2020.

The Thanksgiving Akathist of twentieth-century Orthodox Christian tradition, also known as the “Glory to God for All Things” Akathist, was found in the effects of a Russian Orthodox priest killed in a concentration camp in 1940, one of millions of often unknown new martyrs and confessors of the Orthodox faith in the twentieth century.

Glory to God for all things! We thank Him for all the gifts He gives to us, even in times of severe trial.

The story of the American Thanksgiving is linked to the story of the Akathist of Thanksgiving through that Christian experience of joyful sorrow as exemplified in the Orthodox Church. Joyful sorrow or bright sorrow comes from our training as athletes for Christ, and our embrace of self-emptying in Christ, rather than self-assertion, as the source of identity, the realization that freedom and justice lie in the love found in sobornost, or spiritual unity with Christ in His Church. There we find our true identity in relation with Him.

There we find the union fulfilled in God’s reality that is typed by the union of the American republic, as defined by Abraham Lincoln as one nation under God, associated with Thanksgiving Day, and the earlier story of the American Pilgrims going back to their landing 400 years ago this year, and the later American Declaration of Independence stating that our rights come from God, and George Washington’s first American Thanksgiving proclamations.

The 400^th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower Pilgrims in America this year coincides with the 100^th anniversary of the founding of our Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, by those faithful fleeing Bolshevik Totalitarianism, giving thanks for their deliverance and holding up the standard of the Church for pious Christians everywhere to rally around in the latter days afflected by the spirit of Anti-Christ. Of course, our Lord’s Orthodox Church goes back across millennia, even in prototype rooted in the Old Testament days of yore, even to the Creation, when the first man Adam must have exclaimed in gratitude and wonder, “Glory to God for all things!”

President Lincoln wrote in his Thanksgiving Day proclamation in 1863, founding the modern American holiday:

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

1914 Painting of the First Thanksgiving by Jennie A. Brownscombe

In the 1600s, John Winthrop wrote in his diary of his experience among the Pilgrims who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America that:

But hear I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amased at this poore peoples presente condition; and so I thinke will the reader too, when he well considers y^e same. Being thus passed y^e vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembred by y^t which wente before), they had now no freinds to wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure. It is recorded in scripture^] as a mercie to y^e apostle & his shipwraked company, y^t the barbarians shewed them no smale kindnes in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they mette with them (as after will appeare) were readier to fill their sids full of arrows then otherwise. And for y^e season it was winter, and they that know y^e winters of y^t cuntrie know them to be sharp & violent, & subjecte to cruell & feirce stormes, deangerous to travill to known places, much more to serch an unknown coast. Besids, what could they see but a hidious & desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts & willd men? and what multituds ther might be of them they knew not. Nether could they, as it were, goe up to y^e tope of Pisgah, to vew from this willdernes a more goodly cuntrie to feed their hops; for which way soever they turnd their eys (save upward to y^e heavens) they could have litle solace or content in respecte of any outward objects. For sum̅er being done, all things stand upon them with a wetherbeaten face; and y^e whole countrie, full of woods & thickets, represented a wild & savage heiw. If they looked behind them, ther was y^e mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a maine barr & goulfe to seperate them from all y^e civill parts of y^e world. … What could now sustaine them but the spirite of God & his grace?

May not & ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: 

Our faithers were Englishmen which came over this great [97]ocean, and were ready to perish in this willdernes; but they cried unto y^e Lord, and he heard their voyce, and looked on their adversitie, &c. Let them therfore praise y^e Lord, because he is good, & his mercies endure for ever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of y^e Lord, shew how he hath delivered them from y^e hand of y^e oppressour. When they wandered in y^e deserte willdernes out of y^e way, and found no citie to dwell in, both hungrie, & thirstie, their sowle was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before y^e Lord his loving kindnes, and his wonderfull works before y^e sons of men.

The story of America is writ large in the story of the Bible carried by her founders into a wilderness. However imperfect their practice of Christianity in that day, amid the heterodoxy of Puritanism, and in alternating hostilities and friendships with Native Americans, the story of American Thanksgiving is one of gratitude and piety, extended across a republic by Washington’s proclamation and across a nation by Lincoln’s. It echoes through God’s word of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, in which we worship today at our Russian Orthodox Mission in rural Pennsylvania, welcoming all of all backgrounds. A few generations after the Pilgrims, missionaries would be establishing the first Orthodox worship communities among Natives in Alaska, and among immigrants in the American South and on the East Coast.

Truly, Thanksgiving is a holiday that remains properly more a verb than a noun, and carries with it greater meaning than conventions of family dinners alone. We can remember the history of faith extolled by the Apostle Paul from the Old Testament to his day. We remember those sufferings of the ancient martyrs and trials of Church Fathers, such as St. John Chrysostom, whose memory we also celebrate today. And in modern times severe trials like those of Protopresbyter Gregory Petrov in the prison camp in 1940, and the song of praise amid terrible suffering he left behind.

This is the day the Lord hath made, let us be glad and rejoice therein.

Glory to God for all things.

Amen!

In Genesis 9, Noah in the aftermath of the flood cultivates the earth, becoming in effect apparently the first farmer, and becomes focused on vineyards and on drinking wine, which apparently became an art for the first time. We are told that he becomes drunk, and that his son Ham (Cham), seeing his drunken nakedness in his dwelling, then goes out to mock him. The result is that Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan by saying that he will be a slave to his sons Shem and Japheth. This passage has been used in the non-Orthodox modern West to justify enslavement of Africans by Europeans, following when especially during the Enlightenment the descendants of Ham were identified with Africans by Protestant scholars in “scientific” biblical study. However, Canaan’s descendants were identified with the Middle Eastern land of Canaan, and included the Ninevites, who repented after hearing the words of the Prophet Jonah. So any specific identification with Africans alone, or a kind of curse in perpetuity, would be wrong, especially also by Christian standards of redemption. St. John Chrysostom in commentary on Genesis 9 noted the repentance of the Ninehevites and their salvation from prophesied destruction in this regard. In addition, the descendants of Ham, as mentioned in the so-called “Table of the Nations” in Genesis 10, included Nimrod, traditionally associated with construction of the Tower of Babel, which in turn is identified with Babylon, as a type of cosmopolitan globalization in the Book of Revelation’s description of the Whore of Babylon, given her relation to world commerce. So any specifically racial identification of the curse in question does not ring true from the standpoint of Orthodox Church Tradition including Holy Scripture.

There has been much speculation on the nature of Ham’s sin, but the Church Fathers avoided prurient details, and indicated that it was a betrayal by Ham of his father, by shaming him in his drunken nakedness, and thus a type of those hypocrites and self-righteous who would delight in exposing and ridiculing other sinners for their own carnal sin. The result is servitude for the offspring. Since Ham had already been blessed by God after the flood, it is thought that Noah placed the curse on his son, as just as efficacious (Ham also was considered by the Church Fathers to have not maintained a fast from sex while aboard the ark during the flood, as the rest of his family had done, thus leading to his wife to conceive Canaan.) In any case, the account arguably can be taken allegorically as a type of the idolatrous and back-sliding leaders of the Jews, whose nations were destroyed and exiled, and who finally rejected Jesus Christ. In this it is a warning, too, to Christians and Christian nations, of the end result of such self-righteous hypocrisy, lack of respect for parents and basic decency, and prurient sensuality, in slavery to Anti-Christ in the latter days.

St. John Chrysostom in his homily on Genesis 9 wrote of Ham’s sin:

“After all, if the man who drew attention to obvious nakedness rendered himself liable to a curse and by forfeiting the respect he shared with his brothers was condemned to serve them (if not himself in person, at least all his offspring), what fate awaits those who draw attention to the sins of their brethren, not merely not concealing them but even making them more conspicuous and by this means blowing the sins up out of all proportion? You see, whenever you publicize a brother’s fault, you not only make him more shameless and perhaps more lethargic in his progress towards virtue, but you also render the listeners more indifferent and encourage [267] them in their sloth—and not merely this, but also the fact that you are responsible for God being blasphemed. Still, no one is unaware how heavy the punishment this brings those who are responsible. So let us, I beg you, avoid Cham’s example, and instead imitate the sense of shame shown by these respectful sons in regard to their father’s nakedness; let us in that fashion keep under cover our brethren’s sins, not for the purpose of encouraging them to indifference but that we may thereby in particular provide them with an even better occasion of ridding themselves promptly of that terrible affliction and of returning to the path of virtue. You see, just as such return is rendered easier for a sober person by the fact of having not many witnesses of his private failings, so when a person has passed the point of blushing and sees that the whole world knows him to be guilty of evil, it is not easy for him to reform; instead, like someone falling into the depths, submerged under countless waves, he will have greater difficulty in managing to emerge, but rather then sinks into despair and gives up the effort to return.”

(John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 18–45, ed. Thomas P. Halton, trans. Robert C. Hill, vol. 82, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 208–209.)

A photo of our cat Callie the Calico or Camo Cat, who loves Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary it seems. Or maybe was bored reading it, as a family member suggested. Or both. Meanwhile, remember that the St. John’s Bible Study continues on Sundays, now at 2 p.m. at the Jackass Brewery restaurant outdoors (heated canopy), reading the New Testament epistles with Archbishop Averky’s commentary based in the Church Fathers and Russian Orthodox tradition. Just bring a Bible and yourself, no homework needed. Dostoevsky would approve. Callie won’t mind if it’s during her nap time.

New Bible Study: Finding Spiritual Healing in Scripture
Sundays 2 to 3 p.m. at Jackass Brewery and restaurant
Route 45 just west of Lewisburg at Brook Park Farm, along the Bike Trail and near the Library

Have you wanted to study the Letters of Paul and other Apostles in the New Testament in an informal way to gain insights into how to better your life, while learning from insights of the Apostles’ own Church on those writings? Then join the St. John Russian Orthodox Church of Lewisburg’s new community Bible Study!

It’s open to all, with no previous knowledge or homework needed. Jump in any time, we’re starting with the General Epistles. Bring a Bible if you can. We’ll also refer to lectures from the New Testament study course at Holy Trinity Seminary, by Archbishop Averky Taushev, which draws on commentary from the early Church Fathers. It’s not necessary to own or read the commentary book to participate in the study, but it’s available on Kindle here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BB36541/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

We will maintain social distancing and Covid precautions in accord with restaurant rules, and meet outside as weather permits. May the Lord bless and we hope to journey with you in this study of Scripture!