Happy Vidovan to our Serbian Orthodox brothers and sisters. That’s the day of remembrance today in the Serbian Orthodox Church for Saint Tsar Lazar the Great Martyr and the Serbian holy martyrs who fell during the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Empire in 1389 (on St. Vitus’ Day, which is the source of the name Vidovan). Kosovo was the greatest battle of the late Middle Ages in all Europe, and marked the fighting to mutual destruction of two great armies, of the Orthodox Christian Serbs and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire.

Known as a pious and virtuous noble youth, Lazar rose to prominence as the kingdom of Serbia seemed to collapse in the face of pressure from the Ottomans and internal fragmentation. He became Tsar of Serbia, and was known to be a leader who brought people together by his Christian qualities, including becoming a patron of many churches and new monasteries, hostels, hospitals, and Orthodox schools. His royal court was known as a refuge for scholars, iconographers, and craftspeople fleeing Ottoman oppression in the south. (This account of his reign here draws on that of St. Elisabeth Convent, Minsk: https://obitel-minsk.org/en/kosovos-hero-tsar-lazar-choosing-faith-over-throne.)

In the lands of Greece and southern Serbia, cities were burned, monasteries and churches destroyed, and rivers described as flowing with blood, in a holocaust of the faithful. St. Justin Popovich wrote that the invaders “were no longer satisfied with the payment of tribute and taxes by the Christians, but sought to completely subjugate and enslave all Christian peoples.” But fallen human nature and demonic spiritual warfare against the land of Serbia as a bastian of Orthodoxy kept bringing internal strife and betrayal to Tsar Lazar. A gold cross he wore prevented a stabbing by an assassin. An historical account tells of how Lazar’s own people continued “sinning and not turning to the One who changes all things.”

Meanwhile the Ottomans gathered a decisive force to overwhelm the remaining independent Christian lands. Lazar in response uttered a stirring proclamation: “Whoever is a Serb and of Serb birth, And of Serb blood and heritage, And comes not to the Battle of Kosovo, May he never have the progeny his heart desires, And let him be cursed from all ages to all ages!” But not all responded, partly out of fear and factions. Western Christians did not respond either, although Lazar was fighting to stem the tide of a Muslim invasion of Europe. As a history by St. Elisabeth’s Convent puts it drawing on traditional accounts, “Prophet Elijah visited Lazarus as a grey falcon on the eve of the final battle, offering him a choice between an earthly or heavenly kingdom: keeping his throne by surrendering to the Ottomans or suffering a bloody defeat on the battlefield. Lazar chose the eternal, declaring to his soldiers, ‘We die with Christ, to live forever.’”

His final battle broke out this day in 1389. A Serbian commander stole into the Turkish Sultan’s tent, killing him and causing chaos in the Turkish ranks. This was the first time a Turkish commander had been slain in a battle against Christians. The Tsar Lazar fought courageously, “bear[ing] sixteen wounds when he mounted his third horse, as the first two had been slain beneath him,” according to one chronicler. Yet the Turkish leader Bayazid, taking command from his slain father, captured and beheaded the Tsar and many Serbian commanders. Monks in the Church of the Ascension in Priština buried the fallen hero. Nearly a year later, his sons Stefan and Vuk, along with the clergy and the people, found his body incorrupt and emitting a beautiful fragrance. This was proof of his martyrdom for Christ, his godly life, and his sanctity. He was a ruler who in his philanthropy, unselfed leadership for his Christian people, and martyric death, indeed put aside all earthly care, as the Cherubic hymn urges us during Liturgy. His life reminds us of our Lord’s injunction to “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you,” meaning all things needed for our salvation and sanctification. (Matthew 6:31).

As we approach our own Feast Day for Saint John this coming weekend, and America’s 250th birthday, this milestone in the Orthodox Church worldwide has important lessons for us here today in our country mission in Appalachian America.
First, our Serbian brothers and sisters have a special love for the Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition and for our Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and we for them. The Serbian Church hosted ROCOR from the 1920s through the 1940s when it needed a home. I have experienced such warm friendship unearned from a Serbian priest in Pennsylvania, for example. Our ROCOR knew the joyful sorrow of worldly defeat and resurrection, like the Serbian Orthodox, in the Russian civil war and in exile and revival of Russian Orthodoxy in the diaspora and then after generations at home.

The Battle of Kosova is also a reminder to us that in Orthodoxy there is no offensive idealistic just war or Crusades as in the heterodox West, but that sometimes there are necessary defensive3 wars that must be prayerfully discerned to help the vulnerable and the faith, and pursued in repentance and piety. But it is a reminder too that there is always spiritual warfare for us as Orthodox Christians, in which we must be willing to empty ourselves into our Lord Jesus Christ, not to try to assert ourselves, for that is what our true enemy the Devil would wish. Putting our battles on a spiritual level transforms them with God’s help. Father Michael Pomazansky of blessed memory, a great teacher from the founding era of our seminary at Jordanville, wrote of how the historical books of the Old Testament feature much violence and warfare. Yet he said the Christian New Testament, the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, transforms that Old Testament warfare by placing it on a spiritual level. It needs to be read first and foremost spiritually by us as Orthodox Christians today, just as we understand the fulfillment of biblical Israel to be the Orthodox Church, the Body of Christ, one holy apostolic and communal Church for all peoples, of which our humble country mission offers one fractal gateway.

The Southern Orthodox writer Walt Garlington has even made a comparison between the Battle of Kosovo and the Battle of Chancellorsville in relation to the fate of the American South during the Civil War. The Serbian Orthodox chose the heavenly kingdom, in his view, and the Southern Americans ultimately the earthly kingdom, and so in his view the death of Stonewall Jackson under friendly fire at Chancellorsville was a kind of providential sign of a secular destiny of defeat. https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-battles-of-kosovo-and.html

The Battle of Kosovo was also a foreshadowing of the passing of the baton of the civilizational nurturing of the Orthodox faith from Byzantium to the Slavic peoples. Less than a century later, Constantinople would fall. Soon Moscow would become known as “the third Rome” in her place. Today the Orthodox Church also commemorates Metropolitan Jonah of Moscow, who served in that position from 1438 to 1461. Metropolitan Jonah stood for the truth of our Lord’s Church against a false unity with Rome that led to the downfall of Constantinople to the Turks. In turn, he was elected as the first autonomous Metropolitan of Moscow, without approval from the Ecumenical Patriarchate, although the place of what became the Moscow Patriarchate was later recognized by all Orthodox churches. His role marked the start of the Russian Orthodox Church as a distinct local Church in world Orthodoxy, which today is the largest Orthodox Church in the world.

Let us consider lessons from Kosovo in our own personal spiritual lives. Reading the signs of the times is something our Savior enjoined upon us, and as Orthodox Christians this means especially the signs of our own lives, praying for self-discernment in humility, for wisdom, understanding, and counsel are all biblical virtues of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. A secular analogy lies in n the movie Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, originally Godfather III, a classic American film. The title character, heir to a gangster family, has reached what he felt was the apogee of success in the elite worlds of business and heterodox Western religion. Yet he faces repeated efforts to destroy his struggle to become respectable, which come from layers of conspiring forces. At one point he says, “Our true enemy has not yet shown his face.”

This is something to remember in our Orthodox Christian life. When we face a personal or family or career battle, or even some challenge we feel in our relation to Church, stop in prayer and remember, “Our true enemy has not yet shown his face.” Whatever the situation that presents itself to us, the actual enemy ultimately is the devil and our own sin. The devil may be too busy to attend to us, but our own sin will. Thus even the Battle of Kosovo was not so much marked by the enemy the Turks as by a spiritual attack on the heart of Orthodoxy.

In Orthodoxy we are all at least partly responsible for each other’s sins. What we see in our friend or our seeming enemy, whether a family member, work colleague, community member, or even someone from Church, is really spiritually related to our own sin. That is the self-sacrificial spirit, the spiritual meaning, of the Battle of Serbia and the martyrdom or witness to the faith of Great Martyr Lazar and the holy martyrs of the Battle of Kosovo so long ago. Their self-sacrifice was the ultimate, for their country, for one another, and most of all for their faith, and in it their witness lay down a spiritual foundation in Christ for the resurrection of their country in Christian terms.

Let us consider as we approach the 250th Fourth of July and the celebration on the same day of our patron St. John, missionary to America, and renewer of Western saints, the true nature of freedom as the self-sacrifice in Christ evidenced by Great-Martyr Lazar. Our Lord taught us to love our enemies, because they bless us with our struggles, and because they as human beings are made also according to the image of God, Christ, and even the demons, while we fight to be free of their foul wiles, they are blessings in disguise. Like holy Prince Lazar and his army of Orthodox faithful warriors, let us daily go down in defeat with the Cross to the world, brothers and sisters, so that we may rise again in the Kingdom of God in the world to come and in the eighth day of God’s resurrection each day now and ever and unto the ages of ages Amen.