The Crown of the Spirit

A Homily on the Sunday of All Saints

Through this past week, the holy Church closed the Paschal season and kept the feast of the Holy Pentecost — that glorious day upon which the Holy Spirit descended in tongues of fire upon the Apostles assembled in the Upper Room, and when, in a single morning, three thousand souls were added to the nascent Body of Christ. The Spirit came, and the world was not merely instructed: it was set alight.

And now, scarcely a week later, the Church bids us turn our eyes from that luminous descent to behold what the descent hath wrought. For today is the Sunday of All Saints — the first Sunday after Pentecost — and herein lies a profound theological wisdom which the Holy Fathers, in their infallible guidance of the liturgical year, have placed before us. Pentecost is the cause;  All Saints is the fruit. The Spirit descended — and Saints arose.

It is as though the Church says to us: Behold what the Holy Spirit does! Behold what Divine Grace works in human clay! You have seen the fire come down from Heaven. Now see what it has kindled.

“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (St. Matthew 5:14–16)

These words our Lord spake in the Sermon on the Mount — and how literally the Saints have fulfilled them! From every age, from every nation, from every condition of human life, the Spirit hath raised up lights, and the Church sets them today upon the candlestick for all to behold and give glory unto God.

Let us ask a question which may seem simple, but which pierces to the very heart of the Gospel: What is a Saint?

In the common understanding of the world — even among Christians who ought to know better — a Saint is imagined to be some extraordinary, rare, and perhaps eccentric figure: a hermit in the desert, a martyr upon the rack, a wonder-worker calling down miracles. And indeed, the Saints are all of these. But if we think that Sainthood is therefore remote from us, that it pertains to another species of humanity entirely, we have understood nothing.

Saint John Chrysostom whose liturgy we offer every Lord’s Day, declared plainly:

“Nothing hinders us from being saints but our own negligence and sloth. For God is always ready, and the Spirit standeth by, ever willing to cooperate with those who are in earnest.”

Mark the words of the Saint: nothing hinders us but our own negligence. The obstacle to holiness lies not in the difficulty of the path, nor in the scarcity of grace, nor in the particularity of calling. The obstacle lies within: in the will that chooses comfort over the Cross, familiarity over transformation, the Egypt of our passions over the Promised Land of the Spirit.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians — a community riven by divisions, marred by pride, troubled by sin — and addresses them as “them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Corinthians 1:2). Called to be saints! Not merely called to be decent. Not merely called to be respectable. Called to be saints — which is to say, called to full union with the Living God, to theosis, to that participation in the Divine nature of which the holy Apostle Peter also speaks (2 Peter 1:4).

A Saint, then, is one who hath responded to this calling. A Saint is one in whom the Holy Spirit hath been received not merely at Baptism and Chrismation as a gift deposited and thereafter ignored, but as a Living Presence which hath gradually transfigured the whole man — soul, mind, and body — into the likeness of Christ Jesus our Lord.

Today the Church celebrates all the Saints — not merely those whose names fill the Menologion, not merely the great hierarchs and monastics whose icons line our walls, but all who have pleased God from the foundation of the world. The righteous of the Old Testament, the Prophets, the Patriarchs. The Apostles and Martyrs of the first centuries. The Holy Fathers who defended the Faith at the Ecumenical Councils against the assaults of heresy. The monastics who fled the world that they might truly find it. The simple and unlettered peasants, the mothers and fathers, the children, the craftsmen — all those hidden ones who lived and died in the Faith and whose names are known only unto God.

The Apostle Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, rehearses the great deeds of the righteous — Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, David and the Prophets — and having done so, cries out:

“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:1–2)

A cloud of witnesses! See how the Apostle depicts the Saints — not as remote and inaccessible figures sealed away in some heavenly vault, but as witnesses who surround us even now. The Saints are not dead. They are more alive than we are. They behold the Living God. They intercede for us before His throne. They are the elder brethren of the household of faith — and they have not forgotten those who still labour here below.

This is why the Orthodox Church doth not merely venerate the Saints as past heroes of a departed age. We commune with them. We address them. We ask their prayers. We place their holy icons before us that we might contemplate in human faces — transfigured human faces — what the grace of God does to a man or woman who willingly submits to it.

The great theologian of the twentieth century, Saint Justin Popovic of Chelije, writes:

“The Saints are the proof that the Gospel is true. In each Saint, the Lord Christ hath achieved a new victory over death, over sin, over the devil. A Saint is a miracle — the greatest of miracles — for he is a human being wholly transformed by the energies of the All-Holy God.”

Brothers and sisters: behold today what God does! These are not myths. These are not legends. These are human beings — of the same flesh, the same passions, the same temptations that beset us — who chose God above all else and were made new.

Yet we must not be deceived into thinking that the path of the Saints was easy or without suffering. Our Lord Himself told us plainly:

“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” (St. Matthew 7:13–14)

Today’s Epistle, drawn from the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the Revelation of Saint John the Theologian, holds before us the vision of the hundred and forty and four thousand who stand with the Lamb on Mount Sion, and the great multitude which no man could number, of all nations and kindreds and people and tongues, who have come out of great tribulation and have washed their robes white in the Blood of the Lamb. White robes washed in Blood — what a startling image! The Saints were not spared suffering; they were purified by it.

The Holy Martyr Ignatius the God-bearer, Bishop of Antioch, who was fed to the lions under the Emperor Trajan, writes as he journeys toward his death:

“I am the wheat of God, and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.”

This is not the language of defeat. This is the language of triumph — the triumph of one who has seen through the thin veil of earthly suffering to the imperishable glory that lies beyond. Every Saint has, in one fashion or another, passed through this crucible. The martyrs by blood. The monastics by the daily death to self-will. The faithful layman or laywoman by the patient endurance of illness, poverty, bereavement, misunderstanding, and the ten thousand smaller deaths that constitute a life wholly offered to God.

Saint Seraphim of Sarov was asked by Nikolai Motovilov what is the true aim of the Christian life. And the Saint answered with words that have rung through the Church ever since:

“The true aim of our Christian life consisteth in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God. As for fasts, vigils, prayer, and almsgiving, and other good works done for Christ’s sake — these are merely the means of acquiring the Holy Spirit of God.”

The means — not the end. The end is the Holy Spirit Himself dwelling within us. The end is union with God. The end is what the Saints have attained, and what the Church setteth before us today as not an impossibility but a calling — our calling, given at the font, sealed with the Holy Chrism, nourished at the Holy Table.

I would be remiss in this homily not to pause and give thanks for the Saints of the Russian Church in particular — that host which our tradition has raised up across ten centuries of Christian witness, and whose prayers are our special inheritance as sons and daughters of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.

From the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Princess Olga and her grandson the Great Prince Vladimir, who baptized the Russian people at the Dnieper in the year 988, to the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia who poured out their blood in the fields and cellars and prison camps of the Bolshevist persecution — the Russian Church has been extraordinarily fruitful in holiness. The Paterikon of the Kiev Caves, the Troitsa of Saint Sergius, the radiant face of Saint Seraphim, the pastoral fire of Saint John of Kronstadt, the child-martyr Tsarevich Alexis and his holy family,— the list stretches to the horizon and beyond.

These were not people of another world. They were people of this world — Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Serbs, Romanians, Greeks, and peoples of every tongue who found in the Orthodox Faith the pearl of great price — who proved that the Holy Spirit doth not withhold Himself, that Heaven is not far, and that God’s grace is sufficient for every generation.

And so also for us. We are their inheritors, not merely of a tradition, a typikon, a liturgical language — but of a living relationship with these holy intercessors. When we come to the Divine Liturgy, we do not come alone. We come surrounded by the Saints, who have gone before us and who even now pray for us before God.

Let us then hear the summons of this holy day. The Church doth not set before us the Saints as objects merely of admiration. She setteth them before us as mirrors — that we might see in them what God desires of us, and what God is willing, if we but open ourselves to His grace, to accomplish in us.

The Lord God spoke to Moses, saying:

“Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 20:7)

And the holy Apostle Peter repeats this command in his Epistle:

“But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:15–16)

Be ye holy. Not: aspire to holiness in some vague and comfortable sense. Not: do better. Not: be a little less sinful. Be ye holy — for I am holy. The standard is nothing less than God Himself. And yet the command is not a mockery, for God does not command what He will not Himself provide the grace to fulfill.

How then shall we begin? With humility — which the Holy Fathers unanimously declare to be the foundation of all the virtues. With prayer — which is the breath of the soul, without which it suffocates in the atmosphere of the world. With fasting — the great weapon of the Saints against the tyranny of the passions. With repentance — that daily return to God which the Lord Himself calls metanoia, a changing of the mind, a turning of the whole man toward the East from whence cometh the Light. And above all, with participation in the Holy Sacraments — the Eucharist, wherein we receive the very Body and Blood of our Lord, and are made, as Saint Cyril of Jerusalem saith, “Christ-bearers.”

Let no one say: I am too great a sinner. The Saints themselves were sinners who repented. Saint Mary of Egypt spent seventeen years in the most degraded sin before she heard the voice of the Theotokos and was transformed into one of the most luminous ascetics the Church has ever known. Saint Moses the Ethiopian was a murderer and the leader of a band of robbers. The holy Apostle Paul, before his conversion, breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the Church of God.

The one thing needful is the will to turn. And even that will, as the Saints teach us, is itself a gift of grace, if only we ask for it.

“The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” (Revelation 22:17)

Brethren, let us then depart today with the Saints before our eyes and their intercessions warming our hearts. Let us depart resolved that the same Spirit which descended at Pentecost and which made holy the Martyrs and the Hierarchs, the Monastics and the Righteous, doth dwell in us by virtue of our Holy Chrismation — and that we are therefore not without resource, not without help, not without hope.

May Almighty God, through the prayers of all His Saints, and especially of our Lord’s most holy Mother, the Ever-Virgin Theotokos, grant unto us all the grace of the Holy Spirit — that we, having run our race in faith, may be accounted worthy to stand in that innumerable company which even now surrounds the Throne, crying without ceasing:

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.”

(Revelation 4:8)

To God be the glory, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.

Amen.

Delivered by Fr. Thomas Frazer on the Sunday of All Saints

The First Sunday after Holy Pentecost