Homily for All Saints Sunday, the First Sunday after Pentecost, at St. John’s in Lewisburg, Pa. June 17, 7532 (June 30, 2024 on the civil calendar).
(Above) Vladimir Kireev, “The Mirror”
If we exclaim, “All Saints pray to God for us!” then the whole heaven will immediately pray for us, “O Lord, help them!” So said Elder Barsanuphius of Optina.
Think of it, all the saints known and unknown throughout the history of the Church, of the Old and New Testament Church back thousands of years to our fallen but redeemed forefathers Adam and Eve, in prayer for us.
When I was an extremely heretical Protestant, there were healers or practitioners in my denomination to call for help. Other Protestant friends had prayer-warrior grandmothers or prayer circles to call when things were rough. Today as an Orthodox Christian and sinful priest I will phone our family’s spiritual father for prayer in special circumstances, ask family and fellow clergy for prayers, and put out a prayer request on our parish group chat.
But in the Orthodox Church the host of saints are always with us, around us, the blessed ones who in a place in the afterlife where in righteousness that is oneness with God they can hear and intercede for us at any time. So is the greatest of the saints, the Holy Mother of God the Theotokos, our Mother, even when our human mothers may have passed from sight or apart from us.
Today as we commemorate All Saints of the Orthodox Church, we can remember also in particular our patron, Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, whose feast day we will celebrate tomorrow night at Vigil and Tuesday morning at Liturgy, and again next week with our annual parish picnic on the third Sunday of Pentecost, when, God willing, we will commemorate our local saints of North America, known and unknown, many of whom have come through Pennsylvania. This is a very special week for us.
There is a wonderful new book from our monastery press, Glorified in America, which has short but deeply insightful lives of the American saints and missionaries. It is upon their work and that of all the Saints of the Church that our little mission humbly rests, more than on any of us today, as much as we may appreciate the work of all of us sinners. The prayers and noetic light of the holy ones of the Church, like the Apostles in the book of Acts, have built our dwelling with God’s grace, expressed in our new temple taking shape in the countryside.
As we mark the Feast of All Saints this weekend, we may also reflect on how this is in effect the weekend of the Orthodox Christian Halloween or All Hallows Eve, last night. In Western Christianity, even long before the Schism when the West was still Orthodox, All Saints Day developed in the autumn. It was seen as a time on the edge of life and death when different worlds were close so to speak. Still today for example the Day of the Dead is celebrated in Catholic Mexico where perhaps pagan and old Christian traditions have mixed.
The old Western idea of All Saints Day at the evening of the year, in the fall, looks ahead to the new day to come in the Incarnation and Resurrection, the evening and the morning being the day of the year so to speak, and has a twilight beauty, although Halloween has been corrupted in Western culture at large today as a neopagan worldly holiday in effect, Lord have mercy!
But the way the tradition of All Saints in early summer in the East survived as a living fully Christian tradition in the Orthodox world is enduringly beautiful and alive, because it is linked directly to Pentecost and the blooming of life in summer symbolized by the greenery of Pentecost. Just as Orthodoxy emphasizes more the continuity of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, so our Feast of All Saints reminds us in its place on the Church calendar, the day after the leave-taking of Pentecost, of the continuity of the life of the saints with the life-giving Holy Spirit of Pentecost. That is the core of our life in the Church, the Pentecost of bright warm uncreated energy of God in which we, with the help of the intercessions of the Mother of God and all the holy people of the Church who have passed on before, known and unknown, can bask in the perpetual eighth day of the Resurrection. Their prayers help us to grow.
It is not that the Western twilight date of All Saints was wrong or not beautiful, but it is the tradition of All Saints linked to Pentecost that remains the most vibrantly Christian and has lived in the fullest glow of the faith of the living Orthodox Church to this day, for us to partake therein. For as Pentecost originally marked the giving of the law of God to Moses in the Old Testament, so too it now has marked for us the full realization of the law in the Gospel.
But still we are reminded in the Gospel reading (pasted at the end below) that the path of holiness that is righteousness for unworthy sinners such as ourselves, of whom I am first, must be a path of carrying the Cross and forsaking the worldliness and idols that we hold dear, even the comforts of people whom we would make into objects in our life. Instead, we learn the paradox, following the saints, of losing ourselves in Jesus Christ to find ourselves, not to assert ourselves, and thus to love those in our life more than ourselves, in Christ.
The lives of holy ones in the Church continually remind us of this. Let us very briefly consider three, one in China, one in Russia, and one in Britain, as a kind of brief spiritual family album.
First, St. Jonah of Manchuria was a contemporary of St. John of Shanghai our patron. They both were Russian monastics who took refuge in China during the Russian revolution to pastor their flocks, and assisted orphans there. In exile hiking across deserts and mountains into China, in work with orphans and the sick and poor in Manchuria, St. Jonah forsook the world for Jesus Christ. A ten- year-old boy, Nicholas Dergachev, who was crippled, had been suffering from an inflammation of the knee joints. Efforts to straighten his legs caused unbearable pain. It was impossible for him to stand, much less walk. Early one morning he had a dream. A hierarch vested in white appeared to him and said, “Here, take my legs. I don’t need them anymore. And give me yours.” The boy woke up, miraculously healed. From a photograph he identified the hierarch in his dream as Bishop Jonah, who had died that very night in 1925.
Blessed Pracovia the Fool for Christ
Then there was blessed Prascovia Ivanovna the Fool for Christ, born into a serf family in the early 19th century. She had a hard early life, and after losing her husband, was unfairly severely beaten by her masters. She eventually was tonsured as a monastic, and then wandered the village where she had lived like a lunatic for several years, eventually going to live in a cave she dug for herself in the Sarov forest. People saw her visage like that of the otherworldly desert mother St. Mary of Egypt, and came to her for prayer and advice before she move into the Diveyvo Convent founded by St. Seraphim. Known for her clairovoyance as well as her eccentricities, people from all walks of life visited her, including the royal family, who valued their communication with her. It is said that she told Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II prophetically but lovingly “come off your throne, tsar,” and prophesied near the end of her very long life in 1915 that soon he would become either a monastic or a martyr.
A 10th-century Cross near the ancient yews at St. Brynach’s Church site in Nevern, Wales.
Finally in our brief spiritual family photo album, there is Saint Brynach of Wales, the namesake of our Brynach. A sixth-century Welsh saint, he forsook the world, and was led by God to a place to live in the country, where his holiness attracted through God’s grace a group of young men whom he trained in the monastic life. He was known for his friendly relations with wild animals, for his holy presence in Christ must have reminded them of the friendly relations in the Garden of Eden before the fall of man and all creatures. An arrogant king was healed of his pride while staying with the saint through Brynach’s miraculous holiness. Later when he died his body was placed beneath the Church he had founded in the beautiful place that still can be seen in Nevern in Wales among ancient yew trees, still a very holy place. I visited there before I was Orthodox, and I’m sure his influence helped my journey to Orthodoxy.
They are all in our spiritual family, our Orthodox Ancestry.com, St. Jonah of Manchuria, Blessed Prasovia the Holy Fool, and St. Brynach of Wales, even as the icons with us today here in Church are our Church family portraits. Our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, in his holiness has touched those in our community directly and through his spiritual son the Blessed Seraphim Rose, whose writings also helped bring me the worst sinner into Orthodoxy. St. John said this of the holy people of the Church who intercede for us and affect us in Church:
“The most important thing for us, the most precious, the greatest, is holiness. Holiness is not just righteousness, for which the righteous are honored with the enjoyment of bliss in the Kingdom of God, but such a height of righteousness that people are so filled with the grace of God that it flows from them to those who associate with them. Great is their bliss that comes from seeing the glory of God. Being full of love for people, stemming from love for God, they are responsive to human needs and their prayers, and are intercessors and representatives for them before God.”
All Saints pray to God for us!
Below: Our mission’s patron, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco
***
The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew,
§ 38 [10:32-33, 37-38, 19:27-30]
The Lord said to His disciples: ‘Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him will I confess also before My Father Who is in Heaven. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father Who is in Heaven. […] He that loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me. And he that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me. And he that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me.’ […] Then Peter answered and said unto Him, ‘Behold, we have forsaken all and followed Thee. What shall we have therefore?’ And Jesus said unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, that ye that have followed Me, in the regeneration when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone that hath forsaken houses or brethren or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit everlasting life. But many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first.’