A homily from St. John’s for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, 7533/2025, by Priest Paul Siewers.

St. Nikolai Velimirovich of Serbia and America, who reposed in Pennsylvania, offers a summary of the tradition of the Seven Sleepers:

There was a great persecution of Christians during the reign of Decius [249-251 AD]. The emperor himself came to Ephesus and there arranged a boisterous and noisy celebration in honor of the lifeless idols as well as a terrible slaughter of Christians. Seven young men, soldiers, refrained from the impure offering of sacrifices and they earnestly prayed to the one God to save the Christian people… When they were accused before the emperor, they retreated to a hill outside Ephesus called Celion and there they hid in a cave. When the emperor learned of this, he commanded that the cave be sealed off. However, God according to His far-reaching Providence caused a miraculous and long-lasting sleep to fall upon the young men. The imperial courtiers, Theodore and Rufinus, secret Christians, built in that wall a copper sarcophagus with lead plaques on which were written the names of these young men and their martyr’s death during the reign of Emperor Decius. More than two hundred years then passed. During the reign of Emperor Theodosius the Younger (408-450 A.D.), there was a great dispute about the resurrection. There were some that doubted the resurrection. Emperor Theodosius was in great sorrow as a result of this dispute among the faithful and prayed to God that He, in some way, would reveal the truth to men. At that time of turmoil in the Church some sheepherders of Adolius, who owned the hill Celion began to build folds for the sheep and removed stone after stone from that cave. The youths then awakened from their sleep young and healthy, the same as when they fell asleep. The news of this miracle was spread abroad on all sides so that even Theodosius himself came with a great entourage and with delight conversed with the youths. After a week, they again fell into the sleep of death to await the general resurrection. Emperor Theodosius wanted to place their bodies in gold sarcophagi but they appeared to him in a dream and told him to leave them in the earth as they were laid out.

Their names were Maximilian, Iamblicus, Martinian, John, Dionysius, Exacustodianus (Constantine) and Antoninus. The cave where they slept was also held to be the tomb of St Mary Magdalene who reposed in Ephesus, in the same community where John the Theologian had also reposed miraculously. (Ephesus is also the first of the seven Church communities mentioned in the Book of Revelation, typifying the apostolic Church.)

St Nikolai wrote a hymn of praise based on their lives. Here are a few verses from it:

Time walked by a wide step
One morning, from the east, the sun dawned
And the Seven from their deep sleep awakened.
And Jamblichus the youngest, to Ephesus hurried
To see, to hear, about everything he inquired….
But behold, what kind of miracle: this is not the gate!
And even the town is totally different!
Everywhere, beautiful churches, domes, crosses,….
There are no persecutions; there are no martyrs.
Tell me brethren, the name of this town,
And tell me the name of the emperor, who now reigns?…
The entire town was perplexed,
Everyone, to the cave hurries.
And saw the miracle, glorified God,
And the resurrected servants of Christ the Resurrected One.

The Church Fathers spoke of different types of time that interact in this miracle. One is the natural time of the seasons and the plants and animals and so forth. Another is human social time, what we might call “cell-phone time” today. Another is the created eternity known to the angels and demons, and the human soul. Yet beyond, around, above, and through all those different times is the beyond-time of the divine, the everlasting of God’s uncreated energies or grace at work in our lives and throughout Creation.  The intersection of that grace with all the other times mentioned marks the spot where the miracle of the seven holy youths occurred. We have analogies to this kind of odd happening, in worldly secular terms, with quantum entanglement—about other dimensions that connect aspects of life that we can’t fully grasp, when time folds in unexpected ways.

The account reminds us that no matter how long a situation we may in may seem to last, “a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” God has the power to fold time as it were, and to draw us out of it, as He will with the Resurrection of us all at the Lord’s Second Coming. It is up to us, with His grace, to be watchful in our faith and ascetic struggle in the Church, to be patient in Him in our awaiting awakening.

The Gospel account we heard today (Matthew 14:14-23) also relates to this. There is the nightmare of the afflicted youth who often falls into the fire or the water, two of the four basic elements in ancient science. We see how God protects the faithful from those elements in the history of the holy youths in the fiery furnace in Babylon, and how they were delivered from fire. Also, the Holy Ghost appeared like tongues of flame to the early Christians. So He enlightened them and still does us through the prayers and mysteries of the Church. In terms of water, we see examples in Holy Scripture such as the parting of the Red Sea, and how the Apostle Peter fell into the Sea of Galilee but Jesus pulled him up out of drowning.

Consider also God’s Providence for the faithful regarding two other of the four worldly elements in Classical terms: The earth to which we are consigned after death by the Fall from which Jesus Christ has redeemed us, and the air, in which the demons move but through which a bright highway to heaven was cleared by our Lord when He ascended, the air also being transformed in the Holy Spirit by the establishment of His Church, for the Greek pneuma for Ghost or Spirit means also breath and wind.

In this case with the young man, Jesus gave an example of divine protection Himself. He told His disciples that prayer and fasting were needed to drive out the kind of demon afflicting the lunatic son, to wake him from the delusion afflicting him.

This is an opportune time for this Gospel reading, at the start of the Dormition Fast. The Dormition ends with a falling asleep that like that of the Seven Youths ends with a glorious welcoming into Paradise and heaven. May the Lord help us likewise to abide in Him, to sleep peacefully as it were in His embrace, and to awake in Christ. The Holy Youths under God’s protective care were in a miracle-working sleep that served as a sign of His protection and an encouragement to us today. Today we walk in a different kind of sleep, online and dazed, sins of the passions that occupy us as if in a coma But not so do we walk in Christ, and we walk in Christ through His Body, the Orthodox Church.

Finally, we see an example of God’s sheltering us from the accidents of worldly history in His Church, in what the Apostle Paul said in the Epistle read today:

Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it; being defamed, we entreat. We are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day. I write these things not to shame you, but to warn you as my beloved sons. For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet ye have not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel. Therefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me as I am of Christ.

Did you know that that last phrase from the Epistle that we heard in the service today, “I am of Christ,” is not in most English Bibles? It was preserved in Church Tradition and in Slavonic Bibles, from which our service book is translated. But it is not in the King James Bible, the NIV, the ESV, or even in our beloved Orthodox Study Bible, which is published by Thomas Nelson using the New King James New Testament for American copyright reasons. Yet a scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament shows that phrase, in which Paul said to be followers of him as he follows Christ, was in the original Greek.

Why is that phrase preserved in the Orthodox Church Tradition of Scripture important? It is because even for the Apostles, their illumination comes from the uncreated energies of God that kindle the spark of divine love in our hearts, and that kindling comes through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit to our Lord’s Church, His body. This is the source of our preservation, even as it was for the Holy Youths, and our awakening, as with the afflicted youth in the Gospel reading.

And, as if to illustrate that, the very phrase “as I am of Christ” in today’s Epistle reading is preserved by the Tradition of the Orthodox Church and not by modern commercial Bible publishers in English. The tendency to veer in the direction of just following the Bible without Church Tradition, or making up alleged Church Tradition as we go along, is a common trait of Western religions, Protestant and Catholic respectively. Such approaches can just continue the delusion of self-centered dreaming that we struggle with today. Sola Scriptura (Protestant views that the Bible alone as ultimately self-interpreted matters to salvation and that Christ’s Church historically has somehow been “lost” by God) and Scholasticism (the Catholic approach to rationalizing Tradition and ultimately revising it according to human thinking by the papacy and intellectualism) alike lead away from Christ’s Church into vain dreaming.

But for the Holy Youths of Ephesus, the message received was clear, that of which the Apostle Paul also wrote:

“Awake thou that sleepest, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”

Amen.