Year 1994

Sunday of All Saints

Bishop Seraphim : Homily
Reasons for celebrating this Feast each Year
Sunday of all Saints
27 June, 1994
Hebrews 11:33-12:2 ; Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38 ; 19:27-30


In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

If we look at our calendar of saints, we will see that there are many listed every day. Sometimes we can find dozens of saints on a particular day. In fact, there are so many that usually, when we are serving, we only mention a few of them – the more “significant” ones.

We can ask the question : “Why, then, do we have today’s commemoration of all the saints ?” Indeed, there are two such Sundays in a row, and the second Sunday keeps the memory of the local, regional saints. For us, that means all the saints of North America. We are starting to get more and more of them. By the end of the year, the number could be probably ten or eleven officially recognised saints. There are still three more who are going to be glorified this year.

Three weeks ago, we glorified Saint Alexis Toth (Toft) of Wilkes-Barre. Saint Alexis was a priest 100 years ago, who came from Presov in what is now Slovakia. He came to North America as a Greek-Catholic priest. Like very many of these Greek-Catholic people, he considered himself to be Orthodox, and was somehow trapped into the situation, shall we say. When he came to North America, he found re-establishing life very difficult. The local Latin bishop was not very friendly to these Greek-Catholics, and tried to persuade them to become regular Latinate priests and deacons. That opened a door of opportunity to return to Orthodoxy. This they willingly did.

The return to Orthodoxy began first in Saint Mary’s Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it continued later in Holy Resurrection Church in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Do you know where Wilkes-Barre is ? It is a mostly absorbed suburb of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Saint Tikhon’s Monastery is a half-hour’s drive over the mountains from this. Saint Alexis personally brought about 30,000 people back to Orthodoxy (and indirectly, over 100,000). However, that is not the main or only reason why he was glorified as a saint in The Orthodox Church of America three weeks ago. People have considered him to be a holy man anyway. Personally, he was holy. He was a God-lover, and he suffered a great deal for his Orthodox Faith. That is why he is called a Confessor. He confessed the truth of Jesus Christ against all sorts of oppression.

Saint Alexis is also significant to us here in Manitoba because the first priests who served Winnipeg and rural Manitoba at the turn of the century in this area came from Minneapolis, from that very church and mission whose head was this very Father Alexis in those days. This began in 1898-1899 when the first Divine Liturgies were served in this area.

Saint Alexis, lying in his tomb, remains mostly incorrupt to this day, after about ninety years. Such incorruption is traditionally, for us, a sign of a person’s holiness, a sign for us from the Lord to pay attention and to turn to the saint’s intercessions. In fact, Saint Alexis’ intercessions have accomplished quite a bit for us already, and will continue to do a lot more. He is not going to play an insignificant role in the history of our Church. It is our job to remember to remember him and ask him for his prayers.

Towards the end of the year, in the middle of October, in Anchorage there will be the glorification of another holy priest-missionary, Jakob Netsvetov. God willing, I am going to be there. These things are necessary. He was a co-worker with Saint Innocent. He brought to the Faith many of the Yupik people. Do you know who Yupiks are ? (The Americans call them Eskimos, but we Canadians would never dare to use that word in this country.) The Yupiks are an Inuit people who live on the very far southwest coast of Alaska. He was himself half-Aleut and half-Russian. His Mama was Aleut and his Papa was Russian. Because he was himself an Aleut, and he came from the island of Atka in the Alaskan chain, he first began his mission amongst the Aleuts and converted many. He then went on to convert the Yupik people. Father Jakov finally setted around Sitka (which should be the west coast of British Columbia) amongst the Tlinkit people.

In the first part of October, there will be two other glorifications, but they will not happen in North America, even though they are our saints. These are two priests (this is a year of priests’ glorifications). One of them is John Kochurov from Chicago, and the other is Alexander Hotovitsky from New York. They were serving as priests in the Russian Mission (as it was then called) in North America. In 1917, they went back to Russia because there had been convoked an All-Russian Sobor. After the Revolution, the Church in Russia had a window of opportunity to gather and make some decisions. Amongst the first was the election of the now Saint Tikhon to be the patriarch. These two priests rushed back to Russia to participate in this Sobor on behalf of the Church in North America which had sent them. They never came back.

Father John was the first of the priest-martyrs after the Bolshevik October Revolution. Father Alexander suffered frequently and for a long time, until his death in a camp in 1937. The Russian Church and the OCA share these two priests because at that time we belonged to that Church, and because they died on Russian territory. Because their bodies are there, we asked the Russian Church to glorify them for us. Our Metropolitan will go there in October and participate in that glorification. In fact, there is a pilgrimage in October of those going with the Metropolitan to participate in the glorification.

We have numerous saints. The question may be asked : “Why do we need to have this particular Sunday to remember them all again ?” The question can be answered : “Why not remember them all again ? Why would it be difficult ? We love them”. The fact is that we do not know who all the saints are, anyway. There are many holy people who have never been recognised by the Church, by the Faithful. This is because of their humble service of the Lord and their being satisfied with complete obscurity. We do have plenty of saints – there are hundreds of thousands, even millions. There are the forty martyrs of Sebaste, who were frozen to death, and the 14,000 infants who were murdered by Herod, and the 20,000 who were killed in Nicomedia. There are the 10,000 and the 40,000 martyrs of Antioch, the 100,000 killed in Tbsilsi, and the innumerable martyrs of the 20th century in the Soviet territories. There are still innumerably more that we do not know about.

If we knew what the Lord knows about sanctity, we would be astounded at how many people are really holy people, and they pray for us. Even though we never think to ask for their prayers, they pray for us and support us because they love us. Because of the mercy of God, we can turn to them and rely on them in these times particularly, especially here in North America where it is really tough to be an Orthodox Christian. Therefore, we remember them all : the ones that we know, and the ones that we do not know. We give thanks to God for their witness and for their prayerful support.

Another reason for today’s commemoration is that the Lord has told us from the very beginning of His revelation of Himself to us in the Old Testament times : “Be holy; for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (3 Moses [Leviticus] 11:44). This reminds me of a certain Christmas pantomime (skit) that I once saw. Some happy-go-lucky subdeacons were adjusting a popular song, and exhorting us : “Don’t worry ! Be holy !” Be holy because God is holy. Be good, because God is good. Yes, it is God’s call for you and for me to be holy : to live a life of repentance, turning away from sin and selfishness, turning away from darkness and turning to light, obedience, to serving everyone else with selfless love, to being like Jesus Christ. That is the purpose of our Orthodox Church in Canada. That is why we are here.

We are to be holy, to be signs of the love of Jesus Christ to everyone around us ; to serve other people just as Jesus Christ does and did, and not demand to be served ; to be holy because our life is in Him. He is holy. He makes us holy. He makes us worthy. The Lord calls us to be holy because He created us to be sharers in His Kingdom, sharers in His life, sharers in His own activity. He calls us human beings to a special relationship with Him which none of His other creatures has. He calls us to be like Him. He even gives us the freedom to ignore Him. Such is His love for us that He does not turn us into robots and slaves. Instead, He gives us the freedom to fall on our faces (and other parts) and to make mistakes. Our behaviour often suggests that we do insist on exercising the freedom to fall. The Lord is always there to pick us up and to help us to carry on in the right way.

It is necessary that we understand that there are many saints recognised and unrecognised, and we are called to be like them. Not only are there saints around the whole world, holy people of all sorts, all ages, known and unknown, but there are also actual saints close to us – next door. We Canadians, living in our scatteredness, living in our separation, and sometimes our Eeyore-like “woe is me” attitude, often are tempted to believe that all the saints in all the “real” Church life are not here, but are somewhere else faraway where people can “do it right”. However, that is not the case. Holy people are here amongst us. Real Church life is here amongst us. It does not require all sorts of apparatus : large Temples, very expensive and big episcopal palaces. It requires you and me, without all sorts of fanfare and tra-la-la, to serve Jesus Christ, ourselves.

Brothers and sisters, the Lord calls you and me to serve each other, to love each other, to suffer for each other, to pray for each other, and build each other up in Jesus Christ. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Don’t worry too much about yesterday. Don’t worry about anything. Be holy. To do that, we have to do one thing. It is important that we remember every day what Saint Herman says to you and to me : “From this day, from this hour, from this minute, let us love God above all and do His holy will”.

Love your Enemies

Bishop Seraphim : Homily
Love your Enemies
17th Sunday after Pentecost
2 October, 1994
2 Corinthians 6:16-7:1 ; Luke 6:31-36


In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The society in which we live is a society that “wants to have its cake and eat it, too”. That is the old saying we are taught when we are young. Our society wants both to eat the cake and keep it. Why is this ? It is because of a loss of direction, a loss of purpose. The only purpose our society seems to have is to satisfy every imaginable passion and desire. Our society is like a spoiled child. “No” has never been said to that child, and every time there is an obstacle that child throws a terrific tantrum. This is what we have become. Take, for instance, the fact that in our society in North America crime is rampant. People lament that there is no order, and things are going to pieces everywhere. At the same time, this very society at every opportunity lambastes Christianity, which is at the foundation of North American culture.

In these days it is not “in” to be a Christian. In these days, if you are a Christian, then you are “out of it”. You do not fit in. You are fanatical, and they say you are a hypocrite. So what ? We are all hypocrites. Who is so honest as not to be a hypocrite ? Who is so righteous as not to be a hypocrite ? It is hard to find such a person. Greek philosophers went around looking for honest people, and did not find them. No-one finds them. Why ? Because we are all enmeshed with sin.

North American society is trying to deny the existence of sin. Therefore, our society is full of crime, and we have uprooted the source of righteousness in our society. We cry and lament. We recognise that in our society we have done bad things to each other. We say : “Oh, but that is not sin, and it is not my fault either. Someone was bad to me ; therefore, even if I steal your purse, take your life, rip your eyes out or destroy your reputation, I cannot help it. Thus, we give people in society the ammunition to say that it is everyone else’s fault (except mine) that I do bad things – that I misbehave, that I steal, that I kill, that I do horrible things, that I lie, that I cheat”. We say : “It is someone else’s fault, not mine”. W S Gilbert may have already comprehended this attitude when he wrote the aria : “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one” in his lyrics for the operetta “Pirates of Penzance”.

Our society in the face of all of this becomes very defensive. We do not want people abusing us in various ways. We do not want to be the object of theft, slander, rape, murder, pillaging, and looting. We want to be protected. So, what do we do ? We really do not lead people into repentance any more, because repentance does not exist in our society any more. We punish. Because we are afraid, we enact legislation. When people do bad things we put them behind bars, and then let them out again in a couple of months. All of this is nonsensical and irrational if we pay attention to it.

We want order, but we rebel against order. We want morality, but we rebel against morals. We want joy and happiness in life, but we uproot that very source of joy and happiness. We want people to be good to each other, but we make ourselves so afraid of each other that we do not dare to be good to each other, in case we get sued (that is coming to our country, too). Day by day, we fall deeper and deeper, subtly, into this crazy mire. Our own Christian foundation, our Orthodox Christian foundation gets eroded and eroded because the society in which we live is so pressuring and so subtly persuasive that it is very hard to stand firm.

The Lord has very clear things to say to you and to me about this. The fact is that things have not changed. We think that here in almost the twenty-first century, we are so modern, so up-to-date, and so far ahead of anyone before us. However, the fact is that what we have done is conveniently to forget all about history. We like to think that everything was naively rosy before (or primitively stupid), and that people did not know how to live until now.

The fact is that all those primitive people did know how to live. Where they are still alive in the world (and where they have been left more or less alone to themselves), they do know how to live. We do not. Perhaps we can hear the Lord say to you and to me, as it were : Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your consolation with your big houses, your “electric everything”, and every imaginable comfort, and you got it on the backs of the poor around the world. Maybe we do not get it on the backs of the poor right next door, but we have surely extracted it from the poor overseas. Because we are so comfy and cosy now, we cannot expect to be so comfy and cosy after this life.

The Lord says : “Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger” (Luke 6:25). Probably we will find ourselves hungry in this life. As a result of the unleashing of deadly passions around the world, societies which have been relatively stable and self-sufficient are ripped apart, and people are dying of starvation on land that could perfectly well sustain them, and meet every need. However, because they are filled with such hatred, and killing each other, and stealing from each other, no-one except the most evil has enough to eat. “Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep”(Luke 6:25). The first part of this next one is what runs our society : “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets”(Luke 6:26). What happened to the false prophets ? They went down with the society that they were pretending was all right (but it was dead).

We live in a society that is full of hatred and fear and self-interest. What does our Lord say to you and me ? He says the opposite : Do not kill or put in prison your enemies. Love them. Do not sue and do not put in prison those who do bad things to you. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you” (Luke 6:27028). How far are we going to get with trying to do this in society these days ?

In fact, people laugh at us about what the Lord says next. He says : “To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either” (Luke 6:29). Here is another good one : “Give to everyone who asks of you” (Luke 6:30). By contrast, we are nowadays told : Do not give to those who beg, because they might use it to buy a drink or drugs. By contrast to that judgemental cynicism, Bishop Gregory of Alaska gave me a reminder last year. Talking about these Dominical directives, he said : “I do what my father and my uncle said : ‘If the person asks something from you, then he must need it’. Who am I to ask what he needs it for ? If I start to say : ‘I am not going to give’, then I am judging him. Maybe I will give something to the person begging on the street, but I do not simply give ; I give with God’s blessing”. If this person is misusing that gift, then with that blessing will come God’s ruler on the knuckles, as it were. The conscience will prick that person (if there is any opening) when we give to that person who is begging ; and if there is any possibility of good coming from it, then some good will come.

This following directive is even harder to take : “From him who takes away your goods do not ask them back” (Luke 6:30). His next words are ones that some make fun of, and twist around, because they cannot stand the Truth. The Lord says : “Just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). There is no person with any sort of real sanity, half-sanity, quarter-sanity, eighth-sanity who says : “Go ahead and beat me up ; I do not care. I just love it”.

People want to be loved. They want people to care about them, to pay attention to them, to respect them as creations of God. That is why, as we have just heard, our Lord says, in effect : Do to others what you would have others do to you. We want people to love us, to care for us ; but we cannot wait for them to love and care for us first. We have to be ready to do this first, because (as we will sing a little while later) : “We have seen the true Light; we have received the heavenly Spirit”. We have been filled with the love of Jesus Christ. We have to be the example.

This is what the Apostle is saying to us this morning. The world thinks, in its cynicism and hatred of Christ, that it is the weak and flabby way to go, to be a Christian. In a sense, I do not blame them, because some people who call themselves Christians have namby-pambied themselves into a lump of stale Jello. This is a distortion of the love of Christ. The love that Jesus Christ is talking about has nothing to do with warm, fuzzy, gutless, shapeless, formless feelings. It has to do with raw courage, acts of the will, determination, love with no strings attached, willingness to suffer even unto death for the sake of Christ. That is not wishy-washy, fuzzy emotionalism. That is life-giving, no-strings-attached love.

The Apostle Paul said to his disciple, Timothy, what is said to all the clergy, but which is especially applicable to every last one of us : Be an example to the faithful. Be an example of love (see 1 Timothy 4:12). Have the intestinal fortitude to do what Jesus Christ said and did, and be like the saints. Be powerful. Be strong. Be defenders of the Truth. Be those who live the Truth. Reveal Jesus Christ in your lives in the way you love so that by your example others will see and believe, and become completely a part of the Way.

Our first responsibility here, today, is to ask the Lord to come into our hearts more deeply, more fully, with greater power by the Grace, the inspiration, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In this way, despite our sins, despite our shortcomings, despite our selfishness and our brokenness, others will see His love, will be touched by His love as we live our lives, and they will come to be united with Him. Then, they too, will have the same joy, the same hope, the same power, and the same victory that you and I have, and that we participate in.

In two more weeks, God willing, there will be in Alaska the glorification of Saint Jakob Netsvetov. Yet another of the courageous saints of North America, he is the first half-Russian, half-Aleut priest to be glorified as a saint. He was not the first of the mixed-blood priests, but he is the first to be glorified as a saint. He was a co-worker with Saint Innocent of Alaska, and with him, translated Scripture and the Divine Liturgy into the Yupik and Athabaskan languages in south-west Alaska. The legacy of these great warriors for Christ is that the Yupik and Athabaskan peoples are the most stubbornly faithful Orthodox people in all of Alaska. If we think we have it hard now, then let us then read the lives of these holy men, sailing all over on the stormy North Pacific and Bering Sea waters, freezing half to death, starving part of the time (and lacking an electric anything). What Saint Innocent and Saint Jakob accomplished in their lives !

Later this year, God willing, two more saints will be glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church, since they were part of the original Russian mission. One priest, Father John Kochurov, was a great builder of the Church. If you go to Chicago and see our Cathedral, it was built in his day. This man, together with Father Alexander Hotovitsky (also a priest brought here in the time of Saint Tikhon, a co-worker with Saint Tikhon), worked in the Chancery in New York City. They then went back to Russia in 1918 as representatives of the Church of North America at the Assembly of the whole Church of Russia. This assembly was prayerfully deliberating while the revolution was in progress. Father John Kochurov became the first Priest-Martyr of the Revolution when he was killed by a mob during one of the revolutionary riots. Father Alexander Hotovitsky was not able to leave Russia again, and he died in a labour camp fifteen years later.

Can you imagine the strength of such persons ? What would it be like to be a First- Martyr, like Father John Kochurov, and refuse to deny Jesus Christ, and to die ; or to be like Father Alexander Hotovitsky – to serve, love, and witness to Jesus Christ as a slave labourer in Siberia ?

Perhaps the Lord does not call you and me to such outstanding and heavy tests of our commitment to Jesus Christ. However, He says the same to you and to me as He said to Father Jakob, to Father Alexander, to Father John, and to all the others : Be an example. Reveal Christ. Show by your love to Whom you belong. Show by your love to what Kingdom you belong, and let us all do as Saint Herman, the first and foremost among North America’s saints, teaches : “From this day, from this hour, from this minute, let us love God above all, and do His holy will”.