An Homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, for St. Nicholas Day, 7534/2025, by Priest Paul Siewers, also on the occasion of the first anniversary of our worship services in our new Temple. Glory to God!

Our beloved Saint Nicholas of Myra and Lycia is known worldwide as the Orthodox Christian who helps those in need. And what is the definition of a human being but someone in need. We find our lifeboat in the Church of Jesus Christ, and by Saint Nicholas’ efficacious prayers to our Lord. He is our saintly grandfather in the faith who shows us by example the loving power of the unity of heart and mind in Christ.

The Carpatho-Russian song beloved in Pennsylvania’s coal region for generations of Orthodox Christians tells his story for children of all ages:

O who loves Nicholas the Saintly,
Him will Nicholas receive,
and give help in time of need..
O who dwells in God’s holy mansions;
Is our help on the land and oceans.
He will guard us from all ills,
keep us pure and free from sins…
Nicholas, tearfully we sinners,
Beseech you fervently in our prayers.
Help us in our tribulations,
comfort ev’ry Christian nation.
Holy Saint, listen to our prayers.
Let not life lead us to despair;
All our efforts aren’t in vain,
singing praises to your name…

Holy Father Nicholas! He was a Confessor for the Faith, imprisoned in the Diocletian persecution and released during the time when Emperor Saint Constantine established the Christian Faith in Roman society. A former prisoner himself, he helped the vulnerable in four main ways.

First, he helped the poor generously, including by fighting against what today we would call human trafficking. Famously, by helping provide gold coins to girls who were in effect to be sold off to husbands, he enabled them to preserve their chastity for Christ and to avoid a sad fate of commodifying love idolatrously, which we too often see today. Secondly, he secured mercy for captives, not forgetting those in prison. He reminds us that the Christian meaning of freedom is generosity, for free is a word linked etymologically to the word friend. We are all kindred in Christ as we also were even in Adam. He helped the vulnerable also by keeping the teaching of the Church pure and free from corruption. He is remembered at the Council of Nicaea when a Deacon for slapping Arius, and he repented but his action displayed a righteous anger against heresy that would deceive and endanger Christ’s little ones. Finally, he is also remembered for helping sailors, the travelers who were sometimes impressed into service and subject to cruel authorities, but who in their own vulnerabilities to the elements and the storms of life represent the condition of us all as sojourners on this earth.

Today in small ways our little Church in Northern Appalachia is reaching out unworthily to follow Saint Nicholas’ example. We are gathering Christmas presents for children in need. We had a delegation in Washington DC this week to support unjustly imprisoned Orthodox Christian believers in Ukraine and we are starting a new prison ministry. In Bible Study, in Orthodox classes, in our members who are attending the ROCOR Pastoral School, and most of all in our services, we proclaim the Gospel of Orthodoxy as received from our hierarchs and Church Tradition. In recent and upcoming baptisms, in our catechumenate, and in other mysteries of the Church most notably the Eucharist, we support our community of sojourners on the Earth, and pray for those who travel and pray for protection from the elements of this fallen world.

In all this, we seek to emulate Nicholas the Saintly, who is also one of the most revered saints of All Russia, of which tradition and diaspora our little Church is a faithful part too.

Truly in many ways Saint Nicholas was a counter-cultural Christian on behalf of the vulnerable, and in this we might say he was an outlaw in pushing back against the old law and legalisms that were fulfilled in Jesus Christ’s New Commandment to love our neighbor more than ourselves. Orthodox Christianity has what could be called an outlaw sense of natural law, exemplified in Saint Nicholas’ life.

Natural law in Western culture is often presented today as rigid, moralistic, and legalistic, even if it is in an atheistic or communistic way in relation to so-called scientific laws. However, the late Orthodox Christian bioethicist Herman Engelhardt, who visited us in Lewisburg some years back, wrote this:

Natural law is, after all, the spark of God’s love in our nature, not the biological state of affairs we find in broken nature. Natural law is not an objective external constraint, but the will of the living God experienced in our conscience…. Traditional Christians recognize the reference environment for humans to be Eden, and the goal of all adaptation to be the pursuit of holiness.

Engelhardt based his description of natural law on a statement by St. Basil of Caesarea that references “the spark of divine love latent within you,” to be enkindled by ascetic effort in synergy with grace, as the transfiguring and dynamic basis for our natural identity.

St. Nicholas exemplified this. He is in a sense the exceptional holy man who is also the Christian everyman as an example and prayer warrior for each of us and for children, students, the unmarried, the prisoners, and everyone in need.

In this he could be called the Sobornost Santa Claus, to use his familiar popularized nickname. For sobornost is the Slavonic word for solidarity, for our oneness in Christ in His Church, mystical and invisible yet connecting all our earthly living as well. In this unity we experience what Jesus Christ meant when He called on us to love one another more than ourselves.

Saint Nicholas gives the example for our lives, and also offers his intercession for us in storm-traveled seas, praying to God for us as a wonder-working Saint in theosis. For he accomplished the unity of heart and mind that is our goal in the Christian life. The mind or the nous, as the eye of the soul, kindles through God’s grace, the light in our heart, the sparkle that is the natural law of who we can be in God’s goodness, and which overflows to let our light shine as Jesus Christ commanded us.

Holy Father Nicholas, pray to God for us!