In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!
Our land is vast and seemingly boundless, and what riches doesn’t it have! The whole world knows this and recognizes this, and we also know what riches, depths of earth and beauty have been bestowed upon our land. We have it all! There are precious stones, and mineral deposits, gold, energy, water, and nature. Such wealth has the Russian land been given.
But material wealth often leads to man’s destruction. People are not always able to use it wisely—neither their own beauty and strength, nor the beauty and riches of their own land. How many examples there are around us of how our land’s riches have caused both our nation and our souls to perish.
But we also have riches that bring us only salvation, only joy in Christ, only the grace of the Holy Spirit and the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven. This wealth is incorruptible and inexhaustible. It is the saints of the Russian Land—those who have shown forth in their lives and after their repose with God’s glory, who laid down their lives to find true riches—the Kingdom of Heaven.
And these people, holy people of God, never leave us. They have not left their Motherland, our country, our nation—even during the terrible times of horrifying atheism and mockery of Christ and His Church, they continued to pray for us. And people who lived during those spiritually difficult times also felt this in their hearts. The famous poet, Constantine Simomov, wrote during the soviet era in his poem entitled, “Remember, Alyosha, the roads of Smolenschena?” the following remarkable lines:
And as if from behind each villager’s fence,
Guarding the living with the sign of the cross,
Our ancestors pray, from hither and thence,
For descendants whose faith in their God has been lost.
This is the love that motivated the Russian saints. “Time would fail me” (Heb. 11:32), said the apostle Paul in today’s epistle reading, to number of the works and podvigs of Saints Sergius, Seraphim, Alexander Nevsky, John of Kronstadt, Xenia of Petersburg. There isn’t enough time to tell of it all. The main thing is that there be sufficient sincerity and purity in our lives and hearts to receive divine grace, which they acquired in their earthly lives, and which they adjured us also to acquire.
We have such a cloud of witnesses around us and yet we live so impurely and impiously. Such wealth has been left to our nation, but can we make use of it wisely?
The apostle Peter said to the Israelites and new Christians, Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God (1 Pet. 2:10). Let us think for a while about these words. If we will not be the people of God, then we will not be a people at all. We will be a mindless herd with no will of its own, sinners and slaves to the devil. But freedom in the Holy Spirit, which the Russian saints left to us as an inheritance, is stronger than any forces or circumstances of this world.
Let us look upon the example of our ancestors, and the glorified saints, and those whom the Church has yet to glorify, and those men and women of prayer known only to God, our forebears, thanks to whose prayers we all stand here, live, and breathe the grace of the Holy Spirit.
The saints of Russia pray for us and await our response—the response of our lives, our faith, and our strength of spirit in the struggle against the devil and his servants, that we might win the Kingdom of Heaven
Amen.