In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Today, the first Sunday of Lent, we celebrate the fact that we’ve made it through the first week, and we also celebrate the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which historically was when the icons were restored for the last time after the final outbreak of iconoclasm. One thing about Orthodoxy that we should understand, however, is that we didn’t have just a couple of bishops that fought that fight and won that fight over the iconoclasts; it was the entire body of the Church that resisted this heresy.

In 1848, there was the encyclical of the eastern patriarchs which was a reply to Pope Pius IX, who had written a letter to the Orthodox, calling upon them to return to the Catholic fold from his perspective, and they wrote this reply which is not just a document that has some historical interest, but it’s a document that the entire Church affirmed at the time, has affirmed ever since, and so it has doctrinal weight to it. And it says that the people are the guardians of piety. So each and every one of us has a job to be a guardian of piety, and we need that more now probably more than ever, because we’re beset on the outside by many enemies of the Church and we’re also dealing with many people from the inside of the Church that are trying to subvert the Church with a number of modern heresies.

So it’s very necessary that you be a guardian of piety, but how can you do that? Well, one crucial thing has to happen for you to be a guardian of piety, and that’s that you have to actually live out that piety. That piety has to be something that’s become a part of you. You can’t defend a piety that you don’t really have. Now, the way we go about that is, of course, we want to read the Scriptures, we want to read about our faith, and there are many good books that I would recommend, and of course reading the lives of the saints—but reading books or watching podcasts on YouTube or whatever, that’s not where it ends. If your understanding of Orthodoxy remains in your mind and it doesn’t enter into your heart and into the way that you live out your life, then you’ve not really acquired the piety that we’re talking about.

Our faith is a lived faith, and there are many things about our faith that you can’t learn simply from reading books. If you’ve been in the Orthodox Church for a while, you’ve probably learned that, because I converted in a parish that was mostly convert; there were a few people who had grown up in the Church, but not very many, and so there were a lot of things that, in the time I spent in that parish, I didn’t pick up until I spent time at St. Vladimir’s here in Houston, which was the only ROCOR parish in the area at that time. Their liturgies were more Slavonic than English, and so it wouldn’t have been my first choice of a parish if I’d had an option, but I didn’t. But one of the good things that came out of my time there was I got to get to know and spend a lot of time with people who had grown up in the Church and [for whom] the Orthodoxy wasn’t just something they had read about, but it was something that they had lived all their life and their ancestors had lived.

The only way that you’re going to be able to get to the point where you’re living out the Orthodox life in your home, where you’re waking up in the morning and you realize that you need to make the sign of the cross and you need to begin the day with prayer, the only way that you’re going to be able to do that is if you get this into your heart and you have many people around you who can be guides in this respect, but this requires that you get to know them. Our faith is a communal faith, and you can only really learn it by having relationships with others that are deeply rooted in that faith.

I recently just ran some quick numbers to try to see what percentage of the adults in our parish are converts and what percent grew up in the Church. It’s normally been roughly half and half, sometimes maybe a little bit more than half that were raised in the Church. Right now it’s 45% of the people in the parish grew up in the Church and about 55% are converts. And that’s a pretty good mix, because you have an opportunity to influence each other, because there are things that both can learn from the other.

But I want to talk about an example of a person that I got to know, and this was after we moved— my wife and I, we moved to Houston. We had been Orthodox for about a year at that point. I actually, for the first three months, went to Jordanville, because I was trying to see if it was economically feasible to go to seminary there—it turned out that it wasn’t, but it was a good experience. And I had to pursue my preparation to the priesthood in different ways. But there was about three months where my wife was going to St. Vladimir’s by herself, and being a newcomer, being Asian in a parish where not everyone even spoke English, she felt kind of like a fish out of water. But there was a woman in that parish by the name of Anastasia Titov who was from China; she actually was born in Harbin. In that time, before the Communists took over China, you essentially had pre-Revolutionary Russia re-created in Russian communities in China, and that’s the context that she grew up in.

She got to know my wife, and she referred to her as her compatriot, because they were both Chinese, although not in the exact same sense. I got to know her when I moved back down here, which is where I met my wife, by the way. This is where I was raised, but I went to college in Oklahoma. And this woman grew up in this context where her life centered around the Church. When she was an adult, she became— she was on the administrative staff of St. John of Shanghai in Shanghai. I once referred to her as the secretary of St. John, and she got very irritated by that. She said, “No, a bishop’s secretary has to be a priest. This has to be a man.” So, properly speaking, that’s the case in terms of the ecclesiastical role of a diocesan secretary, but that’s essentially— A secretarial kind of role was essentially what she was fulfilling.

She loved St. John, and St. John got to know her very well. When it was time for St. John to lead his flock out of China, she didn’t go, because her parents were still elsewhere, and she had siblings she wanted to get out of the country. So she stayed behind, and St. John said that he would pray for her. So she got to experience what life was like under the Communist Chinese for a period of time. It was very repressive. She told me that if she had a chicken on the pot and people could smell it, a soldier would knock on her door and ask, “Where did you get that chicken?” and then write down the answer. “Where’d you get the money to buy that chicken?” and then write down the answer. Basically, they would go around and check out everything that she said to see if she said anything that wasn’t true, because if she had they would have arrested her.

One night she got a knock on the door from a Chinese deacon, Fr. Photi, who said, “I have a set of antimins and holy vessels, and I need you to take them.” And she said, “I can’t! I’m a woman.” And he said, “If you don’t take them, the Communists will get them.” So she took them, and she kept them for one day. He came back the next night and took them away, and she never heard from him again. He perhaps is a new martyr.

She was able to get her family out of China. She wound up going to Brazil because all the consulates in Shanghai at that time were closing. She went to the last one that was closing down, and they were telling her, “It’s too late. We’re closing down,” and she just began to weep. I saw a picture of what she looked like back in those days. I met her when she was 77, but when she was young she was quite a beautiful woman. Apparently that played on the heartstrings of the ambassadors that were there, and they went ahead and gave her a visa to Brazil.

She spoke many languages. When I met her, she spoke English, with an accent of course, but very fluently. She could translate Slavonic into English perfectly, as I found out on one occasion, because it was the feast of the Dormition, and I was singing in Slavonic as best as I could, and when there was an opportunity for her to talk to me, she said, “You’re putting an emphasis on the wrong words,” and she started explaining the meaning of the hymn. It was such a pious explanation! I was looking at the festal menaion in English and seeing she was translating it exactly perfectly, but the explanation was such a pious explanation of the meaning of this hymn and you should put the right words into it that I was almost in tears, just because I was so moved. It didn’t help me to sing in Slavonic any better, but it did help me to appreciate the hymns of the Church a lot better.

As she got older, she eventually wound up in the hospital before she died, and it just so happened that hospital was on my way home from work, so I would stop and see her as often as I could. I found what an interesting woman she was. Just out of the blue one day, she said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I met the Emperor Haile Selassie?” and I said, “No, you didn’t!” And there were many stories like that where she would tell me these fascinating stories about her life. She finally reposed. I got to serve her funeral with several other priests, and I got to hear from many people who had been touched by her life and found that many people had special relationships with her; I wasn’t the only one. She had touched so many lives in different ways.

Her family gave me some of her religious items after she passed away, including her prayer book. Her prayer book was a Jordanville prayer book in Slavonic, and it was falling apart. I remembered when I was singing in the choir at St. Vladimir’s, she would often whip that prayer book out to point to a hymn that was needed because, back in those days, printing wasn’t as easy as it is today. But this prayer book was worn out, and I could see all the things that she had put into this prayer book and see what a pious woman— This prayer book was a testimony to how deeply rooted she was in the faith.

Now, the number of people who knew St. John of Shanghai is decreasing as every year passes, and so your opportunities to meet them are diminishing although our archbishop is one of those people. But there are many living saints that haven’t yet been glorified, and there are still people in the Church that have known those people, people whose lives have brushed up against holiness and can talk to you about the faith. What you need to do is to get to know these people, and you have to take the time to do that. You’ll find especially older people, it’s not hard to get them talking if you just give them an opportunity and to talk about the past.

The closest thing you’ll ever have to being able to get into a time machine and go back in history is to talk to an old person who lived it and to hear their wisdom, but especially those that are Orthodox, to hear about their life in the Church and to hear what they have to say and to give them an opportunity to get to know you and to maybe correct you in some areas.

Those who are raised in the Church, on the other hand, can benefit from getting to know people who are converts, because converts have a lot of zeal. Together, they can balance each other out in good ways, to where you get the best of both, because if you have only one you can have a church that’s not doing a whole lot in terms of reaching out to people, but if you only have the other then you can have zeal without knowledge, which is obviously not something we want to have. We want to have zeal, but we want to have knowledge to go along with it.

The key to all this is having humility and coming to love the people in this parish, to love each other so that we can see the good that’s in each person. We should be like St. Anthony the Great who would go from one person to the next and gather the nectar from that flower, to gather the good things. When you meet people raised in the Church, you might see that maybe there are some areas where they’re not as pious as you think that they should be, but even people who are less pious that were raised in the Church, there are things that you can learn from them. But the thing is, you don’t emulate their shortcomings; you emulate their virtues, and that’s what you want to try to do, is to get to know them, to learn from them what you can. And if we do that as a local parish, we can help each other to walk the walk of faith and to finish the journey. Amen.