Homily Second Sunday after Pentecost

The Synaxis of All the Saints Who Have Shone Forth in the Land of Russia

The Reading is from the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, 4:18–23

And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him. And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them. And they immediately left the ship, and their father, and followed him. And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

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

Brethren and sisters in the Lord,

There is a word in this morning’s Gospel so small that the ear passes over it, and yet upon it the whole narrative turns: “straightway.” The Evangelist does not record that Peter and Andrew weighed the matter, that they consulted their father Zebedee, that they reckoned what might become of their boats, their nets, their trade, their kindred. He records only that, hearing the word “Follow me,” they straightway left their nets and followed Him. Here is obedience that does not pause to deliberate, because it has recognized, in an instant, the voice of Him for whose sake all things may rightly be left.

Consider, too, whom the Lord chose to address in this manner. Not the scribes, learned in the letter of the Law; not the elders, honored in the seats of the synagogue; but fishermen — men of the shore, whose hands were hardened by cord and oar, whose world was bounded by the waters of Galilee. The Lord does not first make a man worthy and then call him; He calls, and in the calling confers a worth that no school of this age could bestow. “I will make you fishers of men” — the same skill, the same patience, the same endurance of cold and labour and disappointment that had served them upon the sea, He would now employ for a far greater catch.

 I think it no idle arrangement of the calendar that the Holy Church appoints this very Gospel for the day on which she keeps the Synaxis of All the Saints who have shone forth in the land of Russia. Last Sunday we kept the feast of All Saints universally — the great host gathered out of every nation under heaven, the fruit of the Pentecostal fire poured out upon the Apostles. Today the Church, as it were, narrows her gaze to a single field of that vast harvest, and bids us consider how the selfsame call — “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” — sounded again and again across the centuries upon the soil of Rus’, and was answered, “straightway,” by men and women of every rank and condition.

Consider the Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir, who, having sent his envoys to behold the splendor of the Liturgy at Constantinople, did not linger long in indecision, but cast down the idols of Perun and Volos into the Dnieper and led his people to the font. Consider the holy Passion-bearers Boris and Gleb, who, when the net of royal power — and the sword that might have defended it — lay ready to their hand, chose rather to leave that net entirely, suffering death without resistance, that they might not lift a hand against a brother. Consider the Venerable Anthony and Theodosius, who, withdrawing beneath the hills of Kiev, dug with their own hands the caves from which would spring forth the great lavra, and so became fishers of men in the most literal sense — drawing up out of the darkness of paganism and worldliness a multitude of souls who would never have beheld their faces.

Consider, above all, the Venerable Sergius, who left the comfort of his father’s house for the trackless forest of Radonezh, content at first with no companion but a bear and no church but the trees themselves; and from that solitary net cast into the wilderness, the Lord drew forth a catch that filled the northern forests with monasteries, each one in turn a net let down for the gathering of souls. And consider the Elders of Optina, and the great Seraphim of Sarov, who in the silence of the cell and the stillness of the forest became, by the working of the Holy Spirit within them, fishers whose net was unceasing prayer, and whose catch was the multitude of troubled consciences that streamed to their doors from every part of the Russian land.

And consider, in the fulness of time, the New Martyrs and Confessors — bishops, priests, monastics, and laity of every estate — who in the days of the Church’s bitterest trial were asked to leave not merely their nets and their boats, but house, kindred, freedom, and at the last, life itself; and who, in multitudes beyond our counting, did so “straightway,” remembering the word of Him Who said, “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Their blood, watering the same soil that had received the relics of  Sts. Vladimir and of Sergius and of Seraphim, has proved once more the truth of the Apostolic word, that the Church is built upon such foundations, and that the gates of hell do not prevail against her.

What, then, is asked of us, who stand this day beneath the intercession of so great and so near a cloud of witnesses — near not only in the communion of the saints, which knows no distance, but near also in blood, in tongue, in the very soil and snow and forest from which so many of them arose? We are not asked, perhaps, for the martyr’s portion, though none of us may presume to know what is laid up for him. But we are asked for the same “straightway.” Each of us has his net: some habit of sloth, some attachment to comfort or to opinion, some petty kingdom of the self that we have spent years in mending and casting and hauling in, content with its small and familiar catch. The Lord, walking even now by the shore of our lives, says to each of us: Follow me. He does not promise an easier labour, but a transfigured one — the same patience, the same endurance, the same fidelity to a daily task, but bent now toward the gathering in of souls, beginning with our own.

Let us, then, entreat the prayers of all the Saints of the Russian land — princes and paupers, bishops and fools-for-Christ, scholars and the unlettered, martyrs of the eleventh century and martyrs of the twentieth — that we, who have inherited so great a cloud of witnesses, may not be found unworthy of it; but that, hearing the same Voice that called them from their nets, we too may rise up “straightway,” and follow.

To Christ our God, glorified in His Saints, be honour, dominion, and worship, together with His Unoriginate Father and His All-Holy, Good, and Life-Creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.