Newsletter 5 – Sunday, 3 July 2011

3rd Sunday after Pentecost:
Sunday of the Saints of these Isles

Troparion of the Sunday, Tone 2
When Thou didst descend to death, O Life immortal, / Thou didst slay hell with the splendor of Thy godhead! / And when from the depths Thou didst raise the dead, / all the powers of heaven cried out: / O Giver of life, Christ our God, glory to Thee!

Troparion of the Sunday of the Saints of These Isles, Tone 4
Ye enlighteners and teachers of these Northern isles, who have shed the light of the Truth of God abroad in the land, pray for us unto Him, we beseech you, that He will have  mercy on us and teach us in singleness of heart to glorify Him.

Kontakion of the Sunday, Tone 2
Hell became afraid, O Almighty Savior, / seeing the miracle of Thy Resurrection from the tomb! / The dead arose! Creation, with Adam, beheld this and rejoiced with Thee! / And the world, O my Savior, praises Thee forever.

Kontakion of the Saints of Britain and Ireland, Tone 3
Saints of God, ye Apostles, Martyrs, Virgins and Confessors, all ye who have illumined the land with the bright beams of the Truth of God/ Fearless in the face of death/ Spurning earthly kingdoms ad their glory for the love of Christ/ And witnessing to the Apostles’ tradition of faith/ May your prayers for us be heard on high/ That, following your example and upheld by the mercy of God/ We may praise and serve Him all the days of our life.

Magnification for the Saints of Britain and Ireland
We magnify, we magnify you, all ye saints glorified in these islands/ And we venerate your holy memory/ In that ye pray for us to Christ our God.

Epistle Romans 5:1-10

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perserverance; and perserverance, character; and character, hope.
Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one day die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love towards us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more than then, having now been justified by His Blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

Gospel Matthew 6: 22-33

The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
No-one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lillies of the filed, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
Therefore, do not worry saying, “what shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?”. For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.

Calendar for July and August

Thursday 7th July: NATIVITY OF THE HOLY AND GLORIOUS PROPHET AND FORERUNNER JOHN, BAPTIST OF THE LORD
Saturday 9th July: Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God (1383)
Tuesday 12th July: THE GLORIOUS AND ALL-PRAISED LEADERS OF THE APOSTLES, PETER AND PAUL (67)
Wednesday 13th July: Synaxis of the Glorious and All-Praised Twelve Apostles
Monday 18th July: Venerable Martyrs Grand Duchess Elizabeth and Nun Barbara
Thursday 21st July: Appearance of the Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God at Kazan (1579)
Tuesday 26th July: Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel
Thursday 28th July: Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal-To-The-Apostles (1015)
Sunday 31st July: Commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils
Tuesday 2nd August: Holy Prophet Elijah (9th century BC)
Thursday 4th August: Holy Myrrh-bearer Mary Magdalene, Equal-To-The-Apostles


Times of the Next Liturgies
Sunday 7th August
Sunday 4th September

Parish news

Parish Pilgrimage to Romsey Abbey
We are thinking of organising a pilgrimage to Romsey Abbey, probably on Saturday Aug. 6th. Please inform Paula if you would like to participate.


First celebration of All Saints of the British Isles - Sunday 9 July 1978

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

From the first day of its existence the Church has reverenced, and loved and sung the praises of its saints, of those people who have been heralds of the love of God, and who have testified to their faithfulness, to the steadiness of their love not only by words, but by their whole life, and by their whole death. The first martyr, Stephen, and after him so many martyrs and witnesses, and all those who have lived and shone, and been on earth the resplendence of God, the shining of His love, the tenderness of His compassion, the purity of His message have been remembered with deep gratitude. Some of these saints are known, many names have fallen into oblivion, but all are remembered and all are in our midst, and it is their faith, their faithfulness, their message that has made it possible for us to belong to the Body of Christ, to enter onto that path which they have followed so gloriously. Some of these Saints are known throughout the world, some are venerated locally, either in one country or another, or simply in a limited district where they have shone; and where their memory is kept with veneration.

One of the first Saints of the West that called for the reverence of the Russian Orthodox emigres in Western Europe was Saint Genevieve of Paris, and when I say that she called us to pay her veneration, to remember her together with the many Orthodox Saints of the West, I am using the words advisedly. In one of our poorest and smallest communities in Paris a woman saw a dream that she was somewhere in the thickets near a wood, that she was impelled to look at what there was within it; she found a gate, walked further and was confronted with the statue of a woman, who was holding in her hands a book and a sheaf of wheat, and this woman looked at her in sorrow and said: How is it that the people of my city, who share my faith pay me no honour. The woman awoke, there was no name she could attach to the vision; she spoke of it, but she had no answer, until a few weeks later, going to a small place not far from Paris, called Sainte Genevieve des Bois, she recognised the place of her dream, the thicket; she entered it, found a gate and was confronted with the same statue, but this time an inscription revealed to her it was Sainte Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris together with Saint Denis. And she brought the news, and in our small community we began to pray to her, later we created a parish in her name, and this was the beginning of French Orthodoxy.

This opened our minds and our hearts to something which we had overlooked, because having lost our Country and all we loved we had a tendency to be immersed in our Russian life, remembering only our Russian ancestry, both spiritual and material, the country we loved, the people who were our kin, and the saints who were the glory of Russia. And now we suddenly became aware that we had come into the West, not in a part of the world that was strange and alien to us but in a part of the world which for nearly a thousand years had shared with us the same faith, the same plenitude of oneness, the same joy of belonging together with all the Christian world. We began then to pay attention to the saints of the West and in all countries now this awareness has grown, and when we come to a country of the Western world., we know that beyond a thousand years of separation we meat the memory, the prayers, the names and the presence of those Saints of Orthodoxy who are and were its glory, its resplendence before God, we come to our own people; and this is something which is so wonderful and for which we are so deeply grateful. We are no strangers in this land, thousands and thousands of men and women have shared our faith; we are strangers in no land because the oneness of the Church hundreds of years ago unbroken make us the kin of those who are their resplendence and their glory.

Later we wrote about it to one of the greatest men of the Russian Church, to Patriarch Sergius at the time when he was still 'Locum tenens' of the Seat of Moscow and. of all Russia; he encouraged. us, he called us to recreate, to call back into life the Orthodoxy of the West; he called us to translate the services, to celebrate in the language of the country, to make Orthodoxy alive and. available to those who had lost it and yet longed for its plenitude. And this we have done in all the countries in which Russian Orthodoxy has bean brought by the tragedy of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent years.

And now, for the first time we have celebrated here, after the Sunday of All Saints appointed of old to be kept after Pentecost, after the Sunday of All the Saints of Russia, that is celebrated as a consequence of a decision of the Council of I9I7-I9I8 at the moment when the revolution was breaking all that had been standing, we have kept now the Sunday of All the Saints of the British Isles. Today, unbeknown to the world, we have began a tradition which will not die, we have resurrected the memory of all those who are our brothers in the Faith, examples for us to follow in our lives, those people on whose prayers we can count, who are at one with us. Let us never forget this oneness of the Church of God, let us not forget the way in which the Saints of the West have addressed themselves to us, challenged our faithfulness in the person of Sainte Genevieve of Paris, let us never forget the loving wisdom of Patriarch Sergius, who called us to be like seed sown in the West which is bound to die, because our generations are growing thin, and those who were children are now among the old who came out to Russia. Let us remember faithfully, lovingly, and build on the foundation of the Saints, on the foundation of the faith once delivered to them, Christ being the cornerstone, a Church whose mark will be love, offering of self, readiness to die that others may live, full of joy, open, tender and true. Amen.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh