In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Our celebration of
Pentecost and the activity of the Holy Spirit
in the Church continues on this Sunday with our
commemoration of all the saints that have shown
forth in our land, in America, the saints of
our local Church. The activity of God towards
His creation is always the same. It is love.
And love requires freedom. The Beloved must be
free to love in return or to reject it. This
is the wonderful feeling one has when one realizes
one's love for another is returned. It replaces
the torturous and tumultuous uncertainty of attraction
with joy. And all of this, if it is to last,
must happen in the spirit of truth. The beloved
must be free to be him or herself. This is true
even in our relationship with God. In order to
really love God, to share his divine life, God
had to make us free creatures. free to accept
his love and free to reject it. We heard it in
this morning's Gospel when Jesus invites Peter
and Andrew to come with him. Follow me and I
will make you fishers of men. It is an invitation,
not a command. And they freely followed Christ,
leaving their former lives behind them. When
we refuse to give the object of our love freedom,
the freedom to be who and what he or she is,
and only his love perverted into selfishness,
but the beloved is crushed and in a real sense
destroyed. There's a show on television called
Smotherhood, which is about that kind of relationship
between mothers and their children. Let me give
you an example. There's probably no bond of love
that is stronger than that which exists between
a mother and her child. But when that bond is
ironclad and the child is unable to grow independently,
the child suffers psychological damage. The child
is smothered to death by its mother's love. To
really love a child means one must be willing
to let that child go and become who and what
he or she needs to become. And the gift of freedom
can be painful. Today we celebrate, as I've said,
our local saints. None of them are cookie -cutter
clones of anyone else. Each saint, in order to
become a saint, had to develop uniquely as a
human person. The saint had to express his unique
humanity and fulfill his or her calling from
before the world was to be the object of God's
love. There may be similarities between one saint
or another, but there are no two who are exactly
the same, just as there are no two human persons
who are exactly the same. Even identical twins,
while being very much the same, are in fact two
distinct persons, and at the heart of their being,
different from each other. So are local saints.
while they have certain traits that are similar
to other saints, martyrs with martyrs, ascetics
with ascetics, and so forth. Each individual,
each person is unique. So we are also celebrating
the uniqueness of our local saints and of our
American church today. As the youngest of the
Orthodox churches, we can almost name each of
our officially canonized saints by heart. St.
Herman, St. Innocent, St. John of San Francisco,
St. Peter the Aleut, and so forth. They are not
all the same. They reflect our local culture.
They are of different ethnic backgrounds, Native
American, Russian, Carpatho -Russian, Serbian,
and Arab. This is a reflection on who and what
we are as a local church, because we are made
up of Serbians, Russians, Carpatho -Russians,
Arabs, and Native Americans as well. Some of
these saints were educated hierarchs. Others
were simple monks and priests. There's a layman
among them. There are several martyrs. Again,
the choir of saints reflects the diversity of
our church, its members, and our land. Saints
in our Orthodox Church are revealed to us by
the Holy Spirit. We do not have the same formal,
almost legal system the Roman Church has for
proclaiming saints. Rather, in our church, they
rise to the top in a rather difficult to describe
fashion. We sing the righteous shall be in everlasting
remembrance, and they are. They are never forgotten
by God himself, and their lives as Christian
witnesses, often unexplainably live on after
them. As it says in the Wisdom of Solomon, in
the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died,
but they are in peace. For though in the sight
of men they were punished, their hope is full
of immortality, because God has tested them and
found them worthy, he will shine forth. Saints
make God present among us through their ability
to empty themselves of all that is not God -like
within them. God's holy ones, his saints, are
still being revealed to us today. They are still
lampstands that shine the light of God's grace
and love into this world. So we give thanks to
God on this day for the saints he has revealed
among us, saying today it's possible, even in
our time, as it has been every other time. Amen.