God's Love in Action

As you know, the life of the liturgical year is one that is rich. The calendar of the Church year is extensive. Each and every day has a saint or saints whose lives are celebrated, and there are feasts and fasts and the celebration of a wide variety of events. Some of the saints, and some of the feasts and fasts and events are well known to us all, and we look forward to that day, and to come to church to come into the presence of the Lord in a special way, to be with Him and to celebrate the Divine Liturgy and the offering of His most precious and holy Body and Blood for us to eat and drink, so that our wounds in body, mind, and spirit may be healed, and that our souls may be saved. The bread and the wine that become, by the grace of God, the Body and Blood of Christ are real food, essential food, with our physical bodies being nourished through the material elements of bread and wine, and our souls refreshed by the grace of God, so that the life of Christ given to us in our baptism may grow strong, and be seen in us, bearing fruit unto salvation.

The saint we celebrate today is not the first choice on the liturgical calendar. This is not to say that our holy father Anthony the Roman is not worthy of our attention – far from it! The story of his life and ministry have much to teach us about who we are, and about what we may do, if we will embrace the life of the Church, as the fathers have taught us. Our holy father Anthony was born in the city of Rome in the year 1086, some 32 years after the Patriarch of Rome excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, who returned the favor, in this way bringing into its fullness a division of the Church, east and west, that had been developing for over 200 years, and that has persisted to this day. (If you think it was difficult to restore unity to the divided Russian church after 80 years or so of separation – and it wasn’t easy! – imagine what will be needed to restore the unity of all Christians…) As a result of the split, those who remained faithful to the Orthodox Church and faith were persecuted, including our holy father Anthony, whose parents had raised him through their own pious way of life to love the Lord and to serve the Church. He gave away all he possessed – and his family had been wealthy – to help those in need, became a monk, and went to stand on a rock in the sea, to pray to God in an Orthodox manner. As he prayed, the rock was separated from its lower layers, and, by the grace of God, the saint was carried across the sea, and up the river to the city of Novgorod the Great. There our holy father Anthony built a temple in honor of the Mother of God, and established a monastery in which many monks were found. He served as the abbot for many years, and proclaimed the grace and mercy of God through many miracles, before he departed this life in the year 1148.

There’s another reason why he is celebrated today – a personal reason. Our holy father Anthony the Roman is the saint for whom our late archbishop Antoniy was named, the saint Vladika Antoniy revered. Now, I have to be honest and say that the story of the saint sailing across the ocean on a stone as if it were a boat is one that my mind, shaped by the rationalism and skepticism of our culture, must struggle to accept; and there is no explanation apart from the grace of God, the Worker of miracles. But although that aspect of the life of the saint is distant, the same is not true of the faith of the saint who fled from this earthly life and spent 14 months in prayer on a rock, and whose love for God and for those made in the image of God was so great that he found the wealth of this world to be useless unless it served the glory of God and met the needs of God’s people. How do I know this? I know because I saw the same love, the same devotion, the same humility, and the same charity in Vladika Antoniy. He loved the services of the church; he loved to be in the church to pray; he looked after his flock with love and care; and he repented of his sins with humility. He lived a simple life, and kept much of his devotion to God a secret – including the fact that he was a monk of the Great Schema, which made his ministry as a bishop all the more extraordinary, as the task of being a shepherd of the flock entrusted to him by God kept him from retreating into the life of a recluse, which is what monks of the Great Schema typically do. He found a way to fulfill his vows as both a monk and as a bishop; and those of us who had the privilege of knowing him, and of serving with him are rich because of his example in our lives. I believe that the last person he ever ordained was me, when he made me a deacon; and I pray, for his sake, that he did not make a mistake when he did so.

I am telling you these things about Vladika not to praise him, but to remind each of you that we all know of someone like him: someone who lives the Orthodox faith and life in a way that touches us in our hearts, inspiring us to do more – for, among other things, they show us what is possible when we live in and through and for Christ our God, and not for ourselves. We are called to do the same: to accept God’s love for us, taking His love into ourselves as we take the bread and wine of His Body and Blood; and sharing that love in serving others, teaching in words and by example the way of life that we share with the angels, if we are willing. So, let us give thanks to God for the life and ministry of our holy father Anthony the Roman; and let us also give thanks for those who, in our sight and in our hearing show us God’s love in action in our own lives as well.