A homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Church in Lewisburg-Winfield PA, from the Sunday of the Kursk Root Icon, Sunday Nov. 27, 7532 (Dec. 10, 2023 on the Civil Calendar).

Today we commemorate the Russian Church Abroad’s signature icon, the Kursk Root Icon, which was also the standard of General Wrangel’s White Army that fought the Bolsheviks and retreated with our Synod to Crimea and then Constantinople in 1920. The icon’s history and meaning connect well with our two Gospel readings today. Significantly, we have had the blessing of having the Kursk Root icon with us once back in November 2015 soon after our founding as a mission, and again when now-Metropolitan Nicholas visited us as Bishop to bless our building site in 2021. Each week we have a copy of the icon that is with us over the altar, and also it is portrayed in the icon of our patron, the Holy Hierarch and Wonderworker John of Shanghai and San Francisco, which today is replaced by the larger copy of the Kursk icon in our midst.

The Gospel readings today connect us with the history and meaning of the icon as well. The first Gospel reading tells of the woman with a spirit of infirmity, bowed down for 18 years, so she could in no way lift herself up. When our Lord and God Jesus Christ saw her, He called her to Him and said unto her, ‘Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.’ And He laid His hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. Jewish religious leaders of the day objected, because they said Jesus’ healing of the woman violated the law of the religious establishment. How could God violate the religious law? It may remind us of Dostoevsky’s fictional story of the Grand Inquisitor, when the Catholic official tries to arrest Jesus for heresy. No, He looses her from her infirmity, after what must have been a hard wait of 18 years.

The second Gospel reading, for our commemoration of the icon, also indicates a freeing from burdensome waiting. It tells us how Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things. But one thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” By this he meant to lift Martha from material worries, to recognize the primary significance of attending to Christ in our lives. How much we need this reminder when we find our daily schedules elbowing out time for prayer, for Scriptural and spiritual reading, for attending Vigil and other Church services, and for loving our neighbor. That Jesus’ words were transforming is indicated in how it is Martha who actively goes to meet and faithfully talk with him when he arrives at their house again after Lazarus has died, whom Jesus raises from the dead.

Both these accounts involve faith and patience important in our lives as Orthodox Christians. The woman with the spirit of infirmity, physically bowed down, endured for 18 years. Martha perhaps for years has struggled with burdens. Both are answered, and their lives transformed, by Christ. The word patience derives from a Latin word that has meanings of bearing suffering with resilience. Patience and passion are words sharing the same root, meaning suffering, and suffering that is worthwhile. Little is that known today, when passion is usually used in a superficially positive way, such as the “follow your passion” talk common at graduations. For passion is the term also applied to Jesus’ suffering on the Cross for our redemption. It indicates the self-emptying in Christ that Orthodoxy indicates is the nature of realizing our true selves, as opposed to self-assertion that passion often is wrongly valued for today. In the mystery of Confession in the Church we confess our passions, because that which we suffer willfully or ignorantly that would remove us from God should be seen as suffering that is only worthwhile in our repentance and in the absolution of our sins in the mysteries of the holy Church, the body of Christ, which we experience fully in the Eucharist following proper preparation and ascetic struggle with God’s grace. “In your patience possess ye your souls,” the Savior tells us..

Faithful patience is also woven into the history and wonderworking nature of the Kursk Root Icon. First, note how it is surrounded by prophets, who perhaps are the “measure” referenced in the inscription at the bottom of the icon’s frame, “The representation and measure of the Wonderworking image of the ‘Sign’ Most Holy Mother of God ‘Root-Kursk.'” These are the Old Testament Prophets who wrote about the birth of Christ: King Solomon, the Prophets Daniel, Jeremiah, Elijah, Habakkuk, Judge Gideon, and the Prophets Isaiah, Moses, and King David. They foresaw the coming of Christ and with the faithful of Israel waited patiently for the Messiah in the fullness of time. And according to the tradition of the Church such righteous people of the Old Testament were freed from Hades by Jesus in his descent to hell. Then in the center of the Kursk Root icon is the Mother of God with the baby Jesus in a form that is known as the Most Holy Theotokos of the Sign. This was the sign of a virgin giving birth to a child, Emmanuel or God with us, that Isaiah foresaw in a vision from God. More than 1,000 years later, St Seraphim of Sarov was healed from an illness as this icon passed by his home in his childhood. St John of Shanghai and San Francisco died in Seattle while kneeling in prayer before the icon in 1966.  Both were patiently faithful in their trials. Saint John our patron fled the Bolsheviks to China, caring for orphans and exiles there, and then bringing his flock to the United States, where he reposed peacefully before the icon, having accomplished much to help establish Orthodoxy in North America and to renew the veneration of the early Western saints in the Orthodox Church. And this icon has visited our mission, where we converts venerated her in our struggle faithfully and patiently across years to build our new Church home, which had its foundation completed this past week, glory to God.

You see, as Clarence the Angel said in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, so many lives touch so many others. In Russian Orthodoxy we call that sobornost, the deep spiritual unity of the Church.

The Icon is called the Root because it was found in 1295 at the root of a tree, according to tradition, by a hunter during the Tatar occupation of Russia, when the city of Kursk was in ruins, its countryside devastated. He was hunting for food and saw her, and no sooner had the hunter picked up the sacred image than there immediately gushed forth with great force an abundant spring of pure water in her place. There were many miracles associated with it from the start. In 1383 Kursk was subjected to a new invasion of Tatars, who tried to burn the chapel where the icon was housed, and it would not burn. Then they cut the icon in two and the chapel finally caught fire, and they carried off the priest as prisoner. The priest kept in prayer for the Mother of God’s help, and emissaries of the Tsar passed by and heard him and ransomed him. He returned to the site of the chapel and found the pieces of the icon. According to tradition the pieces straightway grew together as their pious keeper picked them up. The pagan Tatar conquest ended after a long test of patience for the faithful, and later the icon was deployed as spiritual protection against invasions by Poles and then by Napoleon. The icon survived a terrorist attack by revolutionaries aimed at destroying it, and theft at the time of the Revolution. It was brought out of Communist Russia to inspire the survival and spread of Orthodoxy abroad by its new keeper Bishop Theophan of Kursk, who reposed following trials in his last years in World War 2, but the icon he saved made her way to America. Prayers continued to be said before the icon for generations for the intercession of the Mother of God for an end to godless Communism in Russia, which became, with all its problems and controversies, surprisingly the world’s only major power overtly Christian in civil culture by the 2010s. Bishop Alexander Mileant of ROCOR compiled recent miracles associated with the icon, including the healing of a young woman named Maria, infirm with tuberculosis, whose fiancée prayed for the intercession of the Mother of God before the icon on a visit by the icon to San Francisco in 1953. Maria was healed despite her hopeless diagnosis.

So much patient faith, as brought out in today’s gospel accounts, is embedded in the life of this icon, which we venerate to ask the intercession of the Mother of God to her Son, our Lord and God and savior Jesus Christ. The icon is a Sign of how much patient faith is embedded in the Body of Christ, the Church, in which we all dwell as Orthodox Christians, through the Eucharist and our ascetic struggle with God’s grace. To each of us Jesus Christ comes and says, through His Church, as heard in last week’s Gospel: “ Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Each day let us as Orthodox Christians follow our passion in the true sense of suffering that is worthwhile. For with faithful and patient losing ourselves in Christ. we will find ourselves. Seeds will be sown, which only God may know of how they will grow and help others, even in generations to come, as a tree for them to dwell in. Another image given us in the iconography of the Church of the Mother of God is known as the Tree of Jesse. It shows the family tree of Jesus Christ through the Theotokos all the way back to Jesse the father of King David, a genealogy that goes beyond Jesse too of course. In spiritual terms, the Kursk Root icon could be said to have been found at the root of the Jesse tree. They remain connected, illustrating how the Church embraces and covers us with both her protecting roots and branches, with all the patient long-suffering faith signified by a tree and those who plant it, like our little temple taking shape this past week in the countryside near us, a church home for those of us who wandered in the wilderness for years.

Through the prayers of His most pure Mother and of all the saints, may our Lord Jesus Christ our God give us good patience and faith today.