Homily for the 26th Sunday after Pentecost, 7534/3035, from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

Today we commemorate the Holy Great Martyr and Most Wise Catherine of Alexandria and her Companions the fifty Orators, the Wife of the Emperor, the commander Porphyrius, and the two hundred Soldiers. For such was the spiritual power of this great woman saint that she brought with her by example to martyrdom so many others. The early Irish Orthodox Christians in ancient times talked about red, white, and blue martyrdom. Catherine and her companions showed gloriously red martyrdom, violent death. White martyrdom is that of separation from the world in being a hermit or monastic through ascetic struggle leading to purity of heart. Blue martyrdom, really in terms of the original Irish color blue-green, is that to which we can all be called, even if not monastics nor meeting a violent death, the martyrdom of ascetic struggle in the world. The colors of martyrdom were also related by early Irish Orthodox writers to the colors of the winds as spiritual cosmic symbolism, so woven into life itself was martyrdom seen as witnessing to our faith in the Lord, related to the winds of the Holy Spirit breathing life into us, especially within us from Pentecost. Blue martyrdom was related to the color of the sea, and how the early Irish saints called the sea the desert, their version of the spiritual landscape of Egypt and the Holy Land, recognizing that like living in the sea in God we live and move and have our being in Him. The witnessing in our lives of blue-green martyrdom is a chrysalis process for us as Christians, like a caterpillar becoming a multi-colored butterfuly, as St. Anthony the Great described it in his teachings.

Let us first consider the red martyrdom of St. Catherine. She was a devout Christian who refused immoral advances by powerful men desiring her for her physical beauty. She dedicated herself to virginity in Christ. The young Catherine, although only college-aged by our standards, had already become a scholar skilled in apologetics, who refuted the pagan intellectuals of her day with the truth of Christ. The Roman Emperor Maximin in persecution of Christians was impressed by her abilities, and he gathered 50 of the best philosophers, orators, and logicians of the day at Alexandria to refute her arguments for Christianity. The Byzantine Synaxarion tells us, “Alone, but radiant with the grace of the Holy Spirit, [the young girl] was in no fear of them, having been assured by the Archangel Michael in a vision that the Lord would speak through her mouth and cause her to overcome the wisdom of the world by the Wisdom that comes from on high. In that strength, Catherine showed up the errors and contradictions of oracles, poets and philosophers. She showed how they have recognized for themselves that the so-called gods of the pagans are demons and the expression of human passions. She even referred in support of her arguments to certain oracles of the Sibyl and of Apollo, which dimly tell of the divine incarnation and life-giving passion of the Son of God. Overthrowing their myths and fables, she proclaimed the creation of the world out of nothing by the one only, true, eternal God, and the deliverance of man from death by the Incarnation of the only Son of the Father.” The intellectuals were dumbfounded and sought Christian baptism. They were martyred with Catherine, whom the emperor put on a special torture device constructed of four spiked wheels connected by an axle. Freed by an angel, while back in prison she converted the emperor’s wife, who was also martyred. Her body was conveyed by two Angels to Mount Sinai, and this is why the Orthodox monastery there, with the oldest surviving library, is named St. Catherine’s.

The wheel, her torture device that came to naught, can remind us of the works of a Western Orthodox Christian philosopher from early times, Boethius. He wrote of a wheel of fortune. He said we are all caught on it, tortured in effect, by the accidents of life as we spin around on the wheel. However, those who open their hearts to God’s grace and struggle for virtue, come closer to the center of the spinning wheel, which is God’s Providence and sustaining of us. The closer we get to the center, the less we spin. And we find our peace and safety spiritually with God, as did St .Catherine. The red martyrdom or martyrdom by death by St. Catherine exemplifies an ultimate of emptying ourselves in Christ. This is done in the face of persecution, such as that indicated by one of our Gospel readings. In patience possess ye your souls, our Lord said, in promising that the world, the realm of the devil, would hate us as Orthodox Christians. But he also said, be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.

Such persecution is happening today too on various levels. Ukrainian Metropolitan Arseniy has been held unfairly in prison for months in worsening medical condition. His plight and that of others in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are the focus of an upcoming gathering in Washington DC for religious freedoms of Orthodox Christians. In our Bible Study we’ve had discussions from a Nigerian visitor about the persecution of Christian believers in that African country. Many face workplace, social, and school problems on a sometimes small but hurtful scale as Orthodox Christians in the U.S.

St. John our patron weathered persecution in Communist China and in the U.S., a holy man and wonderworker who was a white martyr in his sacrificial life as a monastic, but also expressed blue martyrdom in all his work in the world. He faced harsh unfair criticism and legal action against him. But blue martyrdom is also to a degree for all of us, with our lives sparkling however unworthily with God’s uncreated grace, and asking the prayers of our patron St. John for good strength and by his example. This Nativity Fast, and as we in Church feature the blue color of the Virgin Mary today in the After-Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos, is a good time for us in the world to pray to God for the gift of blue martyrdom as the Irish called it, the ascetic struggle and witness to the faith of non-monastics in the world.

Here is another example of what we could call a true blue martyr. St. Alexander Nevsky commemorated yesterday. A descendant of Vikings, Alexander Nevsky was a ruler of the Russian principality-city of Novgorod. He protected the people there and although they were sometimes fickle about their relationship with him, they came to love him as a protector of his people. His last name was for one battle defending his fellow Orthodox Christians against the so-called Northern Crusaders, Catholics from Sweden trying to conquer the future Russia and turn her into a Catholic country. In 1241 he was called upon again to defend his Orthodox community from an invasion by the crusading Teutonic Knights of the Catholic Germans. Not many today realize that the Crusades were just against Muslims but were also waged against Orthodox Christians too, by the way. Anyway, he and his army stopped the invasion in a famous battle on the ice at Lake Peipus. Alexander thus stopped their eastward expansion for several centuries. Meanwhile, the Mongol-Tartar invaders swept the Russian lands, and reduced the former major city of Kiev to a small town. Alexander decided to protect his people he would need to submit and cooperate with the Tartars, which he pursued with humility. In this we can be reminded of how many biblical prophets advised Israel not to engage in geopolitical games with the superpowers of their day, Egypt and Assyria and Babylonia and Persia, but rather to trust in the Lord and not principalities and powers. He went repeatedly to negotiate with the Tartar rulers of Eurasia, humbly on behalf of his people. On his last such journey, he fell ill, and received the name Alexis when tonsured as a monk in 1263, the year of his death. With the virtue of courage he defended his Orthodox people, and helped them by humble submission also to the Tartars. His humble but courageous concern for his people led to his being made a saint in 1547.

Today we face troubling signs of the times. Persecution of Orthodox Christians reaching even to us in America. False ecumenism broadcast in the world, which news brings us even from within Orthodox circles beyond our faithful Russian Church Abroad. Yet we stand today also at the After Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple. This major feast, again with the heavenly blue color of the Theotokos calling us to blue martyrdom in the world, marks the opening for us of Orthodox Christian Advent, the Nativity Fast, in which our good struggle is in joyous anticipation of the coming of Christmas on the Church calender, not the commercial calendar. While Western Christians call this the Presentation of the young Theotokos in the Temple, we call it the Entry, because it was deliberate and intentional on her part even as a 3-year-old, filled as she was with the uncreated energies of God, the grace of the Holy Spirit, in anticipation of the Incarnation to come. She became the missing Ark of the Covenant in the Temple’s previously empty Holy of Holies. In the other reading from the Gospel today, Jesus Christ heals on the sabbath, and reminds us how Sunday has become the Christian day of Resurrection superseding for the Israel of the Church the old Jewish sabbath. For with Christ every day is the Eighth Day of Resurrection, as the baptism of Ian today reminds us.

So let us remember the example of the red, white, and blue martyrs of our faith, such as St. Catherine, St. John, and those struggling in the world. Those colors remind us of what America can truly be as an Orthodox Christian nation, clad in the martyric colors of witness to faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. This is also what it means to be a true American in the view of God, an Orthodox Christian bringing out the best in our country in harmony with God’s law of love. May we aspire that in our lives we may shine with one or all of those colors, red white and blue, as known to the ancient Celtic saints. For martyrdom or witness to the faith in any or all of those forms will be our true coming out like the butterfly emerging from the caterpillar’s cocoon in brilliant multiple colors like the colors of the winds of God’s Holy Spirit uplifting us in the Pentecost found in the mysteries of the Church every day. Glory to God for all things!

The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§71 [13:10-17]

At that time, Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years, and was bowed down and could in no way lift herself up. And when Jesus 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. But the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath day, and said unto the people, ‘There are six days in which men ought to work; in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day.’ The Lord then answered him and said, ‘Thou hypocrite! Doth not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?’ And when He had said these things, all His adversaries were ashamed; and all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by Him.

Holy Gospel according to Luke,

§ 106 [21:12-19]

The Lord said to His disciples, ‘Beware of men, they shall lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and into prisons, and you will be brought before kings and rulers for My name’s sake. And it shall turn to you to bear testimony. Settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate beforehand what ye shall answer. For I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist. And ye shall be betrayed both by parents and brethren and kinsfolk and friends, and some of you they shall cause to be put to death. And ye shall be hated by all men for My name’s sake. But there shall not a hair of your head perish. In your patience possess ye your souls.’