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”.