1st Sunday after Pentecost; All Saints

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So yesterday we celebrated our parish feast with St. John the Russian. Metropolitan Nicholas was here, and he was very joyful and very beautiful in every way. And very consoling. Metropolitan Nicholas is a very wonderful and warm man. And he notices everything and he gave forth all kinds of praise for the beauty of the church and the cleanliness of the church and the wonderful meals that were made by the parishioners, which was wonderful. And this morning, at 12:15 a.m. while I was fast asleep, he sent a note and thanked us for our hospitality and congratulated everyone for all of the wonderful work that they had done to make the feast so beautiful. So, glory to God. And it's a wonderful thing to know your hierarch and to know that he loves you and he supports you. So we're very, very blessed in that regard.

So today is the Sunday of All Saints in the calendar. Many, many years ago—I have had the blessing of having been a priest for 47 years, and it's a blessing because you have more and more experience and more and more people that you've known, and you can bring this together—many, many years ago, Bishop Gregory Grabbe, who before he was ordained a Bishop was George Grabbe, came here. He used to come actually fairly frequently. And here he was, absolutely steeped in Russian tradition and customs and so on, but he was multilingual and he spoke English very beautifully and perfectly, which is good for us. And he was always available. I remember as a very young priest, you know, calling him up at 10 o'clock at night, and he would receive the calls with joy, almost. He was so thankful that we were communicating and getting advice and so on. And he came to us on this day of All Saints many years ago and he said that All Saints are those who are not in the calendar.

That's an interesting thing. So we have all the Saints who are in the calendar, but those that we remember are obviously the great Saints, but he says that it's for all those who are not in the calendar. And it was very beautiful. And those who serve the Holy Church silently and quietly and who are blessed by God. And those who care for their children and teach them the ways of life in the world in the name of Christ, through the Christian perspective, and teach them how to behave in a gracious way, which you learn in the Church. Because the Church has special habits of how we think and how we behave and so on. The behaviors that we learn here in the Church, of course, are applicable in our everyday life in a very wonderful way, and it gives strength and joy to our children because they can have this experience of knowing when to smile and how to greet people and knowing how to behave and so on. And it's very beautiful, and so these are joys that come. And so among us are those who are being sanctified and purified in the name of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.

And we have been blessed from time to time to have people in our midst, whether here or locally. And I remember—and I always love to tell this story—but Efersinia Zakharova Popova came here. She had been born in Russia and she was married at the age of 18, which was just two or three years after the revolution. And she married a person who was from a family that had an estate and land and so on. And when the revolution came to her area, her estate, the family owner, was collectivized. And it was a big house and mansion, and she and her husband were assigned one room in the mansion. And they lived there, and they were in captivity in this way for seven years. And during that seven years—and she said with such humility and beauty—she said, "Father, you know we were just young, we had just married, and of course we had to comfort one another and to hold one another." And she bore seven children, and two of them lived. She said, "The children who were born in the spring lived because we were able to get out and collect greens and roots and things and feed the children, but the other five passed because I had no milk in my breast; I was unable to feed them."

And so after they were released from that captivity, they were sent to Moscow, and both of them were educated, and they became teachers in Moscow. And she told stories about how they lived and how one of the greatest pains of her life was that she was afraid that if she taught the children too much about the faith, that when they went to school or in public places, they might make the sign of the cross and then be identified as Christians. And she said in many cases, people who were identified as Christians, teachers and so on, they would then be sent off into some remote place. And so she grieved tremendously from the depths of her heart that she feared to teach them many things that could be seen publicly. Nevertheless, her children were very orthodox in terms of how they survived. And so when the Germans retreated at the end of World War II, thousands of Christians in Moscow actually retreated with the Germans. They left with the Germans and went to Germany. And she went to Germany, and they came through New Jersey and finally was in Jordanville where she and her husband spent many, many years.

And so when she was a widow and she was elderly, she came here to Ipswich because it was hard for her to live in the Jordanville area without any support, and she had a daughter nearby in Gloucester, and so she settled here in Ipswich. And it was a very beautiful time; Matushka, I'm sure, remembers the beautiful time we had with our beloved Ephrysinia. And she was a woman of prayer, remarkable prayer. She would come to the church—she lived at very just walking distance—so she would come to the church in the morning and she'd come to our steps. We lived actually in the building in the back, and she came to the steps and she would say a prayer for the steps for our family. And then she would go to the well and she would pray for the well. And then she would go home and have a little lunch and rest for a while and come back and say prayers for the icon of St. Nicholas. So she was continuously offering prayers. And there's no question that there were remarkable and notable fruits from the prayers that she said for our family, for our children, and for the whole parish. And she's not in the calendar. So she's one of, I believe with all my heart, definitely one of those whom we remember today, the beauty of her spirituality and her love for God.

And she suffered; it was just unbelievable. The first apartment she had, the building caught on fire. And it was six o'clock in the morning and one of our parishioners was driving to work and saw the smoke coming out of the building. And he ran into the building and went to the second floor. And the first door he opened was flames. And then he went to another door with smoke, and he went to her door. And there she was standing in front of the icon of the most holy Mother of God that she brought with her, miraculously brought with her, actually, and praying. And she had, which older Russians would understand, she had all her documents in her hand. This is very, very important to have the documents. And so this parishioner took her and brought her to our home, and she actually lived with us for, I don't know, three or four months before she was able to get a new apartment. And she lost everything. She lost her Kazan icon of the Mother of God, which burned. She lost all of her clothing. She lost wedding rings that she didn't have on when she was sleeping. And I was just, I mean, how much can you lose? How much difficulty can you go through? And she made this happen. She said, "Father, I came into this world with nothing, and I'm going to go out of this world with nothing, glory to God."

So, once again, these dispositions that are so deeply rooted in the heart are these dispositions that are given by the Holy Spirit of God. You cannot have these remarkable gifts that she had without the Holy Spirit. And so she was one of those. And we met people, when Matushka and I went to Russia, we met different people who were really remarkable. One of the most amazing stories is we went to Tsarskoye Selo in Pushkin. And we first went to the St. Theodore Church, which was—we went in '93, and it was just after the coup—and St. Theodore Church, which had been built by Tsar Nicholas for his family, a beautiful big church, was in significant ruins. And here it was just a very short time after the government had changed. And when we went to the church, there were elderly people in the church literally digging because the floor had completely collapsed and so on. They were digging and leveling the area and doing cleaning. All the plaster and frescoes had fallen from the walls and so on. And they were cleaning everything up, getting ready for the hope that someone, professionals, would come and renovate the church. And you see these people working and you say to yourself, they're doing this out of the love for God. And they're doing this because of their faith. And here they are laboring to try to bring restoration to something that has fallen in great decay.

And so we witnessed these things. And we went to Suzdal. And on one of the days, there's a great church, Uspenski Sobor Church there, which is very ancient. And there was a father—right this minute, I forget his name—there was a father there that we went about four o'clock in the afternoon. He was closing the church up and it was very rainy that day, which in Suzdal actually, rain is a beautiful thing. It's such an amazing town and so much beauty. And so the priest led us into the—he had just left the church. We met him on the walk as he was leaving. He opened the church for us and with candles in our hands, we went and they had many, many remarkable artifacts from the past. Suzdal was a place where many nobility and people would go for the summers, you know, in these beautiful houses. The town of Suzdal, which is probably not as big as this, had 54 churches, which are all dedicated to different saints. So it was an amazing, amazing place. And this father, with great love and joy, explained so many things to us, which what I remember is the love in the doing most of all. I can see the atmosphere was one of holiness and prayer.

And then after we were done, he said, "You must come to my home." And this, of course, it was white nights when we were there. It's really beautiful. Actually, we saw the sun setting at about, just about midnight on the horizon one of the nights. And so we went to his home and we had to, of course, eat, and they had a meal. They had cows and they had chickens and so on, and they had a great garden. And so everything came very naturally. And so the father and his matushka and they have several children. So we had dinner with them. And here we are, and dinner is over and then, "Now we must take a walk." And so after dinner, we walked and went across a little bridge and up the side of a hill and down the back side. And it was quite a distance, up and over. And then we came down the back of a hill and about midway up the hill there was a church. And it was obvious that the church had been in great disrepair, but it was being worked on. And we came around the one side of it and it was a flat area in the hill. And there were two elderly men working, bringing tiles into the basement church. And I think many of you know that in the wintertime, they would always have a basement church with a fairly low ceiling because they could heat that and have their divine services in the basement. In the summertime or great feasts, they would celebrate upstairs in the cathedral.

And so these two elderly gentlemen had these tiles, which were beautiful tiles. And not as Christmas commercial tiles are today, so they had to kind of, you know, there was something very natural about them. It was a beautiful deep green tile. And they were bringing them into the basement of the church, and about probably a third of the basement had new tiles. And they were leveled out and they were ready to lay more tiles. And they explained to us the church and they explained to us what they were doing. And it was a brief conversation. And then we started to leave, and as we left, they were going to the pile to bring in more brick and more tiles. And this elderly gentleman looked at us with tears in his eyes. And he said, "In our youth, we destroyed this church. And today, in our old age, we're restoring it."

And so you see these events, you hear these wonderful... I mean, for us to experience this. And these are the saints that are not in the calendar. These are men, in this case, who repented of their childish foolishness and repented. There are just so many people we've been blessed to know. One of the most important people to us was a Greek nun in Boston. Her name was Mother Stephania in a small little convent. And we had a child who had spina bifida. And she had scheduled the surgery at the age of seven months. And we would bring our daughter to Mother Stephania very frequently. Not every Sunday, but many Sundays. And Mother Stephania would put her on the ambo before the royal doors. And she'd pray and pray and pray. And then when my daughter was brought to her surgery at seven months, the doctor felt she was strong enough to endure the surgery, but not because—if she waited longer, more damage would happen. And so what happened is, literally, miracles happened. The surgery was very, really, relatively speaking, not anywhere near as drastic, and she was able to live a normal life.

And what happened to us two weeks before the surgery, St. Nectarios of Pentapolis appeared to me in a dream. And he said that she had a fibrous tumor and then a bone reconstruction. And St. Nectarios said to me that, "I have removed the tumor, but you will have to have surgery for the reconstruction of this bone." And I went to my spiritual father and I said, "I mean, does this happen? Do people have dreams like this?" And of course I hadn't experienced that before. And lo and behold, when we brought her into the—Juliana is her name, she's a chanter in our choir, of course—and we brought her into the hospital for the surgery, we brought her in in the morning, and they did a complete re-evaluation. We met with the doctor at 6 p.m. and he came into the room where we were waiting for him. We had to get the news of what was going to happen the next day. And he had a big smile on his face, and it was a very joyful gait. You could just tell by the way he was walking. And he was just an amazing man, actually, a truly amazing man. And so anyway, he said, "I have good news for you. There's no fibrous tumor." He said, "Thank God, because the removal of the tumor from the lower back would be nerve damage. We would try to limit it, but there would definitely be nerve damage. So that's not good. All we need to do is reconstruct the spine, and we can do that with the expectation no functioning nerves will be disrupted." So Mother Stephania is in the book of those who are not in the calendar, but she's in our hearts and with our love.

So there are many, many people. One of my last comments is the whole question. For example, Matushka and I grew up in New Hampshire, and we literally had not heard about the Orthodox Church, and we were Episcopalians, Protestants. And yet through many years, God brought us to the Holy Church. But there were people along the way, and I've witnessed this, that just were remarkable people. And my Matushka's grandmother was a remarkable person. There was an elderly woman that I knew through a family. I'd worked in the summertime at a boat yard, and the family, there was a grandmother. Her name was Ivy, but they called her Grandma Ivy. And she was just one of these beautiful people who had faith in God, and truly faith in God. And some years later, maybe 10 or 15, probably 15 years later, I was driving near, maybe 10 miles away from where the family lived. I thought, "Oh, I'm going to go see the family." And I went to see the family that I'd worked for, and Grandma Ivy was upstairs in bed, and she was awaiting her repose. And she greeted me with joy and love, and wished every good thing that God could give upon me.

And this is a very interesting problem, because clearly she was not an Orthodox Christian. But I think that God is everywhere present and filleth all things, and there are some who God goes to. And can you imagine, no Orthodox churches, people haven't even heard of the Orthodox Church, and yet here was an example. And I've met a few other people who were remarkable. And I love this quote from St. Seraphim of Sarov. He says, "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved." "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved." It is necessary that the Holy Spirit enter our hearts. Everything good that we do, that we do for Christ, is given to us by the Holy Spirit. But prayer most of all, which is always available to us. So we must pray unceasingly. This is one of the very, very important teachings of the Holy Fathers. Learn to pray unceasingly. In English we say, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me." And we can repeat that. And not only do we pray on the one hand, but we try to block out all of the chaos that is around us and just focus on our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. And pray to him continuously that he will fill our hearts with faith and with joy and the spirit of God and that our lives can bring sanctification to the lives of those around us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.