In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. You heard the following names this evening. These are the names of those who were killed in the bombing of the prophet Elias Church and this past Sunday. They gathered to worship God and ended up offering Him the greatest sacrifice to their own blood.
Lots of feelings have surfaced among the faithful in our patriot, fear, anger, confusion, especially among our brethren in Syria. But as Orthodox Christians, we know that this is inevitable. Our Lord said, “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.” I say this not to downplay the suffering or pretend that it isn’t real, but to remind you, as Orthodox Christians, we don’t look away from the cross, but we embrace it. And for this reason, His beatitude patriarch John the 10th proclaimed, “This day is not a day of mourning for us.” We must understand that persecution isn’t something new.
The Orthodox Church has always been a church of martyrs. From the time of the apostles to the present day, the faithful have been killed simply because they belong to Jesus Christ. It is their blood, the blood of the martyrs that waters the soil of the church. That means every time the church is attacked, she doesn’t die, she grows, and she bears more fruit.
And we have seen this time and time again through the witness of the church in times of persecution. When the evil one tries to silence her, she bears greater witness to the world. When he tries to extinguish her, she shines more brightly. The death of our brothers and sisters in Syria was not meaningless.
They are now a part of that great cloud of witnesses who give their lives to the Lord and their souls cry out from under the heavenly altar as we read in the book of Revelation. Martyrdom is not defeat, it is victory. As the patriarch said, “Those who died were not just victims or casualties. They were victorious martyrs, they did not lose, they were crowned.
They died in the house of God, bearing the name of Christ. And such a death is a crown of glory, not the end but the beginning of eternal life.“ We must also remember something very important. The church is the body of Christ, and when one member suffers, we all suffer. These people may have lived in Syria across an entire ocean, but they are not strangers to us, they are our family.
We say in the creed, “I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church.” We drink from the same chalice. We have the same blood, the blood of Christ running through our veins. That means their suffering is our suffering. So what do we do with this, and how do we respond, first and foremost, we pray.
We just sang the paraklises service for the living victims, and we ended with the trisagging for the departed, and we should pray for the departed for the next 40 days. But we should also pray in our personal prayers for our enemies, for those who persecute us. This is a heart saying, but it is commanded by Christ, “Love of enemies is what distinguishes us as Christians, forgive them, O Lord, and do not hold the sin against them.” We must also use their courage as our example. Three of those names that we prayed for, Jidias, Ephshara, and Butros, three young men who threw themselves on the bomber, sacrificing themselves in order to save the lives of many.
If they can offer the ultimate sacrifice and die for Christ, the least that we can do is live for Him by denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and dying to our sins and passions. If they sacrifice their lives to protect others, the least we can do is lay down our comforts, our egos, our laziness for the sake of our families, our friends and our church. That part of the world is living in so much war, strife, uncertainty, and need while we here live a life of relative peace and abundance. The least we can do is repent of our sins.
The least we can do is cultivate the virtues and do what is well pleasing to God. In a world that is growing colder and more hostile to the gospel, the Holy Church calls us to this type of courage so that we can be a light to the world, and this is how we honor those who are killed in the Church of the Prophet Elias, not by mourning them, but by imitating their faith, imitating their love, and imitating their sacrifice. We honor them by living a life worthy of the name of Christ. May their memory be eternal, and may we be worthy of their witness, and may Christ, or God, who is the resurrection and the life grant them rest with the saints, where there is no pain, no sorrow, no sign but life everlasting.
May their memory be eternal, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.