An homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, for the Sunday of All Saints, 7534/2026, by Priest Paul Siewers.
Today we commemorate All Saints, known in the West as All Hallows. In the Orthodox Church, following ancient tradition in the East, we do this on the Sunday following Pentecost, to indicate how the Holy Spirit fills the winds of the sails of the Church, so to speak, by inspiring and transforming holy people. They are part of our Church family, and the family pictures are around us on the walls of our modest country mission temple here. They surround us with what the Apostle Paul called a cloud of witnesses, spiritually around us, helping us, answering our prayers for their help in interceding for us to God. If many reach out to prayer warriors in their family such as grandmothers, we as Orthodox know also to reach out to the saints, and they respond, starting with the greatest of the saints, our most Holy Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary.
In traditions of the West, All Saints Day or All Hallows comes at the start of November, and is the basis for the popular superstitious or even occult practices surrounding Halloween, All Hallows Eve. But today’s commemoration in the Orthodox Church is brighter, full of the light of Resurrection shining through Pentecost to today, reminding us of how Jesus said “I am the Light of the World,” but also said to his followers, “Ye are the Light of the World.” For in Orthodoxy, it is the uncreated light of God, the divine light, that shines through our saints as seen in the light around their heads in the iconography, and often seen around them in real life, as in photography we may have seen of the light shining around our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco while he served Divine Liturgy. It reminds me of my impression when first visiting Orthodox services: They seemed to me more full of the Resurrection than my impression of darker Catholic services. Of course we include the Crucifixion too, but in the light of the Resurrection.
In the West, the teaching and experience of the uncreated light diminished and became lost, as the light of God was increasingly seen as merely created, and more distant from Him and from us, and as first Catholicism and then Protestantism split off from Orthodoxy.
But today in the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church we rejoice in the full relation from the Resurrection, to the Ascension, to Pentecost, and now All Saints Day, across this springtime of the Church calendar. It is a time of new life for all of us, and inspiration to struggle with God’s light for the salvation of our souls, and as part of that to reach out to our friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers to bring them into the Orthodox Church. Indeed, for our young people, our hope should be that they will become saints in the Church. Tomorrow we begin the Apostles Fast to remind us of this struggle with God’s help, to bring the Orthodox Gospel, the fullest and deepest experience of the Gospel in His Church, to America.
Recently I was blessed again to be in the presence of the myrrh-streaming icon of the Hawaiian Iveron Mother of God at our Mayfield Cathedral. This time I felt even more blessed because it was a sign of God’s love to our Orthodox Church that I needed to feel especially then. This sign came through an icon of the highest of saints, our Lady.
But I had experienced I am convinced the influence of the saints in my life before. Most significantly perhaps was in coming into Orthodoxy. I had spent a year in a foreign land doing academic historical and literary work. As part of that, because it focused on early times, I was visiting different sites associated with early saints from before the Great Schism, who were Orthodox saints in that land. Although I was not Orthodox at the time, that experience I can see, looking back, prepared me for Orthodoxy, because of just being in the presence of those holy places associated with the saints. I was reading the lives of those ancient saints, not as a believer, but as an academic, yet the beauty and the power of those accounts of their lives influenced me also. Their prayers and influence affected me, on a deeper level than any social media influencer for example could, of course. And when I came into the Orthodox Church some 27 years ago in baptism, I had gone from that experience to openly experiencing the beauty of Orthodox services and the iconography of the saints and their relics in our living tradition of what I had just glimpsed and felt unconsciously as it were from ancient times before.
Here is another smaller example. Our family was visiting St. Nektarios Monastery in the southern Catskill mountains in New York State. One of the monks had taken us with our then little son Nick on a ride on a Gator vehicle around their large farming grounds, of many acres. We bumped and rode and enjoyed the ride. But when we returned, as the sun was setting, and I needed to get back to work the next day as a young professor at Bucknell, I realized that I did not have our car key. We were in a remote area. It must have fallen out of my pocket as we rode the Gator. The monk responded with faith: “I will tell the abbot and he will say an Akathist to St. Menas.” St. Menas in Greek tradition is known as a saint who especially helps with prayers to God for recovery of lost items. Then he took me out in the Gator again. It seemed like finding a needle in a haystack, so large were the grounds and so small the key. But I too prayed to Saint Menas. And suddenly, I saw the key, lying in the grass, near where we were driving seemingly randomly. Thanks to God and to the saint’s intercession! As some of you know, Saint Menas’ intercession is also credited on a greater world stage of history. The second battle of El-Alamein in North Africa in 1942 was a great turning point in World War II. Some Greek soldiers were involved in the Allied force facing off against the troops of the legendary Nazi general Rommel and his tanks in the desert. It is reported that Saint Menas appeared the night before the battle in the German camp near the ruins of his ancient church in Abu Mena, leading a caravan of camels as depicted in local frescoes, and the apparition caused confusion and panic. Winston Churchill said, “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.” The Allies in thanks offered the site to the Patriarchate of Alexandria to rebuild the Church of Saint Menas.
Such are the friendships of the saints who are with us in our Church family. They pray for us as a grandparent would as prayer warriors. As always, each day on the Church calendar has a tone set for us by God’s grace in the lives of the saints of the day, the Gospel reading, feasts and services, and so forth. Today’s saints for this specific day include one of special significance to those of us in the English-speaking world, that is the Venerable Bede. He was an early monk-priest-scholar in Anglo-Saxon England, who around 731 AD wrote a famous History of the English Church and People. So closely he identified the Church and the people of England in his day, when they were Orthodox. His work stands as a window into the early saints of what became our English-speaking culture. Reading the Venerable Bede’s Life of Saint Cuthbert, the saint of one of our recent converts, offers a glimpse into the lives of the many saints he recorded in his works, and the early era of holiness in the blossoming of Orthodoxy in early England. He tells of how Saint Cuthbert healed others, protected sailors through his prayers, instructed and brought comfort to many in the faith, and even himself was comforted by otters and obeyed by birds. Again, I felt the influence of this saint Bede, whom we commemorate today, when I picked up a small paperback copy of his history years ago while in junior high school. It was in the basement of an old bookstore in downtown Chicago. I encountered Bede’s writing as if it was enchanted in a sense. I was not Orthodox, but I was transported away into an ancient world of saints and struggles in early England. His work influenced my becoming an academic. I was so far as a youth in a basically agnostic family household from Orthodoxy, but again a saint as an unknown influencer made a difference. At the same time in the same bookstore basement I had found a copy of classic ancient Welsh stories known as the Mabinogion. Later I would research and write about the influence of St. Gregory the Dialogist on the framework of those stories as a teaching of virtue. Again, indirectly, a saint’s influence had affected me across years.
How blessed we are today to be at Orthodox service in worship with our Church family including the saints, and to know their names and that we can reach out to them to ask for their prayers. In the warmth of a heart of love we feel their presence and know we are not alone, and as we ask them to reach out to God for us, we feel ourselves in the symphony of the Church. How far this was from my earlier academic pursuit of the saints, yet how they drew me in. As the Venerable Bede wrote, “Better a stupid and unlettered brother who, working the good things he knows, merits life in Heaven than one who though being distinguished for his learning in the Scriptures, or even holding the place of a doctor, lacks the bread of love.”
Brothers and sisters, let us remember also the devotion of our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco in helping to restore the saints of the lost old West in the Orthodox Church, such as the Venerable Bede. Soon, appropriately on Saturday July 4, we will commemorate St. John’s feast day, our parish feast, and celebrate with a parish picnic. July 4th will also be another anniversary in the secular world, of the 250th anniversary of the freedom of the United States, yet how deeper and more transformative is the freedom offered by our Lord in His Church, the freedom from sin and the freedom voluntarily to serve Him, the Way the Truth and the Life, with all His Saints. Please plan ahead to be with your Church family on that day to celebrate along with all the Saints. All ye saints pray to God for us! Glory to God for all things!
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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.’