We must cultivate this love in our souls
“It is easier for feeble straw to resist a mighty fire than for the nature of sin to resist the power of love. We must cultivate this love in our souls, that we may take our place with all the saints. For through their love for their neighbor, they were all pleasing to God.” These words are made all the more powerful since they were uttered by none other than Saint Elizabeth the New Martyr, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, convert to Orthodox Christianity, and founder of an urban convent in Moscow. She was brutally martyred by the Bolsheviks in 1918, even after she and her nuns had used their nursing skills to minister to these same Bolsheviks, during the bloody battles of the Russian Revolution. It was love that activated their commitment to bring aid to even those who were destroying churches and monasteries, murdering bishops, priests, and monastics, and who ultimately would murder all of them. It is this same love, given birth in Christ, that empowers us to love even our enemies.
With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon
Tuesday August 23, 2016 / August 10, 2016
10th Week after Pentecost. Tone eight.
Dormition (Theotokos) Fast. By Monastic Charter: Food without Oil
Afterfeast of the Transfiguration.
Holy Martyrs Archdeacon Laurence and Pope Sixtus, Felicissimus and Agapitus, deacons, and others with them (258).
Blessed Laurence, fool-for-Christ at Kaluga (1515).
New Hieromartyr Viacheslav priest (1918).
New Hieromartyr Athanasius priest (1937).
Uncovering and Translation of the relics of Venerable Sabbas of Storozhev or Zvenigorod (1998).
Martyr Romanus, soldier, of Rome (258).
Six Martyrs of Bizin (Greek).
Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of Solovki.
Scripture Readings
1 Corinthians 15:29-38
Effects of Denying the Resurrection
29 Otherwise, what will they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise at all? Why then are they baptized for the dead? 30 And why do we stand in jeopardy every hour? 31 I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. 32 If, in the manner of men, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me? If the dead do not rise, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
33 Do not be deceived: “Evil company corrupts good habits.” 34 Awake to righteousness, and do not sin; for some do not have the knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.
A Glorious Body
35 But someone will say, “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?” 36 Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. 37 And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain—perhaps wheat or some other grain. 38 But God gives it a body as He pleases, and to each seed its own body.
Matthew 21:23-27
Jesus’ Authority Questioned
23 Now when He came into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people confronted Him as He was teaching, and said, “By what authority are You doing these things? And who gave You this authority?”
24 But Jesus answered and said to them, “I also will ask you one thing, which if you tell Me, I likewise will tell you by what authority I do these things: 25 The baptism of John—where was it from? From heaven or from men?”
And they reasoned among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ He will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 26 But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the multitude, for all count John as a prophet.” 27 So they answered Jesus and said, “We do not know.”
And He said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.