A Homily of the New Hieromartyr, Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, 1
Given when he was Bishop of the Aleutian Islands & North America The Sunday of Orthodoxy, the First Sunday of Great Lent, 1903
A Call to True Orthodox Missionary Work
THE HOMILY that follows was delivered over a hundred years ago by St Tikhon and when he was Bishop in America, yet it remains pertinent to this day and within the church-life of this country. Many of the matters the Saint addresses need to be addressed again today, and many of the excuses that he suggests the devil prompts people to make are those he is using now.
THIS SUNDAY, brethren, begins the week of Orthodoxy, or the week of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, because it is today that the Holy Orthodox Church solemnly recalls its victory over the Iconoclast heresy and other heresies, and gratefully remembers all who fought for the Orthodox faith in word, writing, teaching, suffering, or godly living.
Keeping the day of Orthodoxy, Orthodox people ought to remember it is their sacred duty to stand firm in their Orthodox faith and carefully to keep it.
For us it is a precious treasure: in it we were born and raised; all the important events of our life are related to it, and it is ever ready to give us its help and blessing in all our needs and good undertakings, however unimportant they may seem. It supplies us with strength, good cheer and consolation, it heals, purifies and saves us.
The Orthodox Faith is also dear to us because it is the Faith of our Fathers. For its sake the Apostles bore pain and laboured; martyrs and preachers suffered for it; champions, who were like unto the saints, shed their tears and their blood; pastors and teachers fought for it; and our ancestors stood for it, whose legacy it was that to us it should be dearer than the apple of our eyes.
And as to us, their descendants - do we preserve the Orthodox Faith, do we keep to its Gospels? Of old, the Prophet Elias, that great worker for the glory of God, complained that the sons of Israel have abandoned the Testament of the Lord, leaning away from it towards the gods of the heathen. Yet the Lord revealed to His prophet, that amongst the Israelites there still were seven thousand people who have not knelt before Baal (3 Kings 19). Likewise, no doubt, in our days also there are some true followers of Christ. “The Lord knoweth them that are His” (2 Tim. 2:19).
We do occasionally meet sons of the Church, who are obedient to Her decrees, who honour their spiritual pastors, love the Church of God and the beauty of its exterior (sic), who are eager to attend to its Divine Service and to lead a good life, who recognise their human failings and sincerely repent their sins.
But are there many such among us? Are there not more people, “in whom the weeds of vanity and passion allow but little fruit to the influence of the Gospel, or even in whom it is altogether fruitless, who resist the truth of the Gospel, because of the increase of their sins, who renounce the gift of the Lord and repudiate the Grace of God” (a quotation from the service of Orthodoxy).
“I have given birth to sons and have glorified them, yet they deny Me,” said the Lord in the olden days concerning Israel. And today also there are many who were born, raised and glorified by the Lord in the Orthodox Faith, yet who deny their Faith, pay no attention to the teachings of the Church, do not keep its injunctions, do not listen to their spiritual pastors and remain cold towards the Divine Service and the Church of God.
How speedily some of us lose the Orthodox Faith in this country of many creeds and tribes! They begin their apostasy with things, which in their eyes have but little importance. They judge it is “old-fashioned” and “not accepted amongst educated people” to observe all such customs as: praying before and after meals, or even morning and night, to wear a cross, to keep icons in their houses and to keep church holidays and fast days. They even do not stop at this, but go further: they seldom go to church and sometimes not at all, as a man has to have some rest on a Sunday (...in a saloon); they do not go to confession, they dispense with church marriage and delay baptising their children.
