Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, on Sunday, Oct. 13, 7534 (10/26/25 on the civil calendar), by Priest Paul Siewers.
Dearest to Christ, Today we commemorate the Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, which is the crowning glory of the original Seven Councils celebrated throughout the Orthodox world. Teachers have long have told students that success in communicating depends on a simple rule, “show don’t tell.” The old cliché that tells us that a picture is worth a thousand words is in many ways true. This is why icons are such a unique part of the Orthodox Church, and the Holy Fathers of the Seventh Council showed the way. For it was their Council that upheld the veneration of icons, the images of our Lord and the holy ones of the Church, which are with us in our Temple like family portraits, both windows into a spiritual realm and at the same time a kind of reverse mirror in which the holy reaches out to us.
There was an old TV show called the Man from UNCLE in which the entrance to a secret headquarters was made through a tailor shop. Agents walked in to a fitting room and a mirror swung around to send them into the hidden complex. Well, we as members of the Body of Christ, His Church, are agents for our Lord in this fallen world. And we enter into the hidden yet present Kingdom of our Lord with help from the icons that embrace us here at Church and in our little Churches at home.
Art historians sometimes say that traditional Orthodox icons have an inverse perspective, that they express a kind of pop-out effect, a bit like a spiritual hologram, based in a simple yet holy ancient technique. In this way they are mirrors that reflect outward, in which we experience a glimpse too of ourselves not egostistically or pridefully, but as existing in Christ, in the divine light shining from the holy ones in the icons. Icons are sanctified by the texts or letter symbols on them, and in this way icons are often also referenced as written and not painted. They are a kind of text of our King the Logos, often through His saints. Logos means Word but it also means Harmony, and in the icons we can experience the harmonies of the Harmony, the Logos Jesus Christ. St. John of Damascus said that in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ the Logos, the Word, thickened into image, or icon.
Orthodox icons are not idols because they are not objectifications, but spiritual mirror-windows made possible by our Lord Jesus Christ’s Incarnation. His being fully God and fully man made possible the depiction of God, and through our Lord, of the holy ones who honor and follow Him, often unto death as martyrs, in a spiritual yet embodied light. The greatest saint depicted is the Theotokos. Icons are both windows into another realm and embracing mirrors of theosis, or oneness with God through His uncreated energies, reminding us of how we too are made according to the image of God, with the potential through His grace of becoming His likeness. In this the holy icons are utterly distinctive to Orthodoxy, to the Church founded by our Lord, the Body of Christ, the Orthodox Church.
The Seventh Council can be called the last of the Christological Councils focused on the great questions of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity, through the Church inspired by the Holy Ghost to articulate the teachings of the Church from the beginning, to counteract the heresies with which the devil sought to mislead the faithful. Today much of the American religious world is still sunk in the heresy of iconoclasm or opposition to icons. The walls of worship halls are stripped of icons still in much of Protestantism. In Catholicism the icons lack the fullness of uncreated grace in the Orthodox tradition of iconography, and today often reflect the ugliness of modernity and of objectifying statuary and paintings. The stripping of the places of worship can be seen down the highway at Rooke Chapel at Bucknell, a beautiful structure that however is devoid of iconography, in the destruction that Protestantism wrought in the effort to establish a false utopia on earth. It purposedly does not even bear a Cross atop it.
Other revolutionary and radical secular projects have followed in these efforts to in effect wipe out the holy icons of Orthodoxy, notably Communism but even in the way our modern online world would cancel them out through false images. Many of us live much of our lives online with images that offer only delusions, objectifications of our world as a virtual reality that we think we can control but that are really controlled by corporations and governments.
Our modern world tries even to make Orthodox icons into museum pieces, objects. You can walk through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and see holy Orthodox icons displayed like booty from a looted colony, trophies of the modern Western world, like items from some conquered indigenous culture. The icons there are out of their worship context in the temples and homes of Orthodox Christians. Yet even there we can press up toward the exhibit glass, Cross ourselves, and venerate as best we can. Some day we pray those icons will be free again. But right here in rural Winfield we keep this counter-cultural ancient Christian tradition alive.
Truly the great iconographers of our Tradition in Orthodox networks worldwide are spiritually dedicated to their craft and approach it prayerfully asking God’s help. As Bishop Luke told us while he was hear for our summer feast day, seven full years of apprenticeship are a basic groundwork for this sacred art in Orthodoxy. If this is the dedication evidenced by the writers and artists of holy icons, let us as their venerators be grateful and appreciative for them, and for the Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council who bravely stood up for them, despite the harsh attacks of the heretical iconoclasts.
Nicholas Zernov, a Russian Orthodox exile writer who escaped from the ruthless icon-destroyers of Communism, after the Revolution described what icons had meant in Russia before the Communists sought to destroy them or turn them into mere museum pieces: “Icons were for the Russians not merely paintings. They were dynamic manifestations of man’s spiritual power to redeem creation through beauty and art. The colors and lines of the [icons] were not meant to imitate nature; the artists aimed at demonstrating that men, animals, and plants, and the whole cosmos, could be rescued from their present state of degradation and restored to their proper “Image.” The [icons] were pledges of the coming victory of a redeemed creation over the fallen one…. The artistic perfection of an icon was not only a reflection of the celestial glory — it was a concrete example of matter restored to its original harmony and beauty, and serving as a vehicle of the Spirit. The icons were part of the transfigured cosmos” (The Russians and Their Church, pp. 107-108).
Yet this is a living tradition, unconquered if often hidden from the world. As St. John of Damascus put it: “The icon is a song of triumph, and a revelation, and an enduring monument to the victory of the saints and the disgrace of the demons” (On Icons, 2, 2 [P.G. xciv, 1296b]).
I remember being told as a new Orthodox Christian by the priest in the Greek Church where I was baptized that we can have a relationship with an icon or icons, and should. That means that in venerating icons we make them a part of our daily prayer lives. So may God give us the light from these windows and the embrace from these inside-out mirrors so that we may spiritually feel the holiness of the saints, the love of the greatest of the saints our Lady the Theotokos, and the ineffable yet human touch of our Lord in the living symbolism of the icons of His Body the Orthodox Church. Our humble mission parish has many icons around us with which we as a community have a relationship. We have the icon of the Holy Protection of the Mother of God, for example, which has a history with us from the beginning. And one, above the high place, the east wall over the altar area, is the Kursk Root Icon of the Mother of God. It is both the icon with which our patron St. John reposed, and also the icon that was the standard for the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad since its founding in 1920 in exile from Communism.
The Kursk Root icon is an example of how icons work miracles in the lives of nations, Church communities, families, and ourselves, and how we can have a relationship with an icon and do. This is from our diocesan website: “In the 13th century, during the dreadful period of the Tartar invasion of Russia, the devastated province of Kursk was emptied of people and its principal city, Kursk, became a wilderness. Now, the residents of the city of Rylsk, which had been preserved from invasion, often journeyed to the site of Kursk to hunt wild beasts. One of the hunters, going along the bank of the river Skal, which-was not very far from ruined Kursk, noticed an icon lying face down on the ground next to the root of a tree. The hunter picked it up and found that it was an icon of the Sign [a type of icon showing our Lord in the womb of the Mother of God]…. At this time, the icon’s first miracle was worked, for no sooner had the hunter picked up the sacred image than there immediately gushed forth with great force an abundant spring of pure water…. The hunter constructed a small wooden chapel and… the icon was glorified by miracles all the more.”
After its priest-protector Bogoliub was taken hostage by Tartars, he returned and found the icon shattered into two halves. He took them, prayed, dew appeared in the crack, and they miraculous grew together where the sign of the split remained. Brought to Moscow after its renown grew, the icon was placed in a silver-gilt frame depicting the Lord of Hosts and prophets of the Virgin birth. Later the icon would evidence protection during other invasions, including by Napoleon. It survived an effort by revolutionary anarchists to destroy it with a bomb, and protected many during World War II and in exile. Today the icon’s home is at the Synod Cathedral; it has visited our mission in person twice, and is both in a copy above our altar and depicted in the icon of St. John by our entrance, and copies of this miracle-working icon are in many of our homes with our families. In Orthodox Christianity, the secret lives of icons are also our own. Glory to God for all things!