In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit the Paraclete!
Today
we celebrate a feast of lofty purity and chastity. Every feast of the Mother of God is a feast
of glorification and wonder at her virtues of blamelessness and chastity. That is why the Holy Church ordains that for
all of the feasts of the Theotokos the clergy wear blue vestments, because that
color according to liturgical symbolism represents lofty purity and
blamelessness.
Today
we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, or the Conception of Our Lord Jesus
Christ. The Slavic word “Blagovest” is a
translation of the Greek word Evangelismos, that is, the Gospel, and the
Gospel, according to St. Gregory Palamas, is the coming of the Son of God, His
Incarnation, and the granting to those who believe in Him eternal, unending
life. Today God sends the Archangel to
the Galilean city of Nazareth, to the Virgin Mary, who possessed purity in its
fullness, being a virgin in body, soul, and the powers of her soul. There was
nothing within her deserving of reproach.
She was like the closed treasury doors and sealed book which preserves
sacred writings hidden from human view, as the Old Testament Prophets wrote of
her, “This is the sealed book,” and “the doors will be shut and no one shall
pass through them.” She virginally
conceived and in a divine, miraculous way bore the Lord of all, without the
least harm to her virginity. In Orthodox
icons of the Mother of God, you can notice three stars: one on the forehead and
the other two on the shoulders of her clothing.
These three stars symbolize this great mystery of virginal conception
and birth: she was a virgin before, during, and after birthgiving. Let us remember the curse spoken to our first
mother Eve, “In pain will you bear
children.” Today we hear something
entirely different: “Rejoice thou who
art full of grace! The Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women!” With this comparison we can perceive the Most
Holy Virgin’s participation in the mystery of our salvation, for as through the
old Eve death entered into the world, so through the New Eve, the Most Holy
Theotokos, life entered. When the
Archangel Gabriel came to convey God’s will to her, to these glad tidings she
replied for all of us, “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be according to thy word.” Furthermore, this is the very opposite from
that which the old Eve did when God commanded Adam and her not to eat of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Behold, with this unquestioning obedience and acceptance of the will of
God, she became worthy to become the mother in the flesh of God Himself, Our
Lord Jesus Christ. With this she ensured
all of us salvation. What is more,
today, the feast of the Annunciation, is her feast, and today we especially
prayerfully glorify her, offering various divine service hymns and praises, and
as the pinnacle of gratitude, this holy Liturgy.
The intercessor
of the Christian race, as the Church and Christians from antiquity have called
her, the Most Holy Theotokos, keeps watch over us day and night, and helps us
along our thorny way through this world, on the cross-bearing way to the
Heavenly Kingdom. The Most Holy
Theotokos and all of God’s saints listen to our prayers with especial care on
the feastdays dedicated to them. That is
why, today, with an especial plea, we prayerfully turn to her to accept all of
our prayers, all of our sighs, all of our bitter tears and sufferings, to help
our much-suffering Christ-named Serbian nation, lost and far away from
faithfully serving Her Son Our Lord Jesus Christ. We beg her to help our people return to the
way of true Svetosavlje, and to return to consciousness, to come to their
senses from the delirium and darkness of the godless Jewish achievements of
Communism, Democracy and the most soul-destroying heresy of Ecumenism, and to
realize that a Serb without true, patristic, St. Sava’s Orthodoxy and an
Orthodox Autocracy is nothing and no one, the most miserable creature on planet
Earth, and as such deserves God’s every chastisement. We must know this, especially in these
unfortunate and fateful times when the already spiritually and physically
destroyed and fragmented Serbia has been given an ultimatum by the great world
powers to comply with the bloody occupation and theft of her centuries-old,
historical region, the heart of Serbia, Kosovo and Metochia. We must know that one is only Serbian, a Serb
blessed by God, when he is a loyal servant of Christ and when he believes in
the Lord Jesus Christ, when he strives with all his might to live according to
His evangelical commandments in unwavering loyalty to Holy Orthodoxy and holy
Svetosavlje.
Yes, this is the only reality of today’s fatal
events for our people and our fatherland.
If we labor for the salvation of our souls and the pursuit of the
Heavenly Fatherland, the Lord will bless and save not only us, but also our
earthly fatherland. If we do not fulfill
the first condition, then the second can never be fulfilled. And to fight for the second without the first
is a futile work which is doomed from the start for complete destruction. These are unchangeable laws of heaven of
which every Serb must be aware. Maybe it
is unrealistic to expect that our people will come to a national repentance; but
it is completely realistic for everyone
to work on his own spiritual rebirth, and thus in a mystical way those around
us will be converted. Let us remember
the story of the fall of Constantinople and the vision of five fingers which
the Sultan had, and the interpretation which the enslaved patriarch gave him: If there had been only five Christians in
Constantinople faithful to Orthodoxy and right-living, the City would not have
fallen, that is, God would not have allowed the City to be destroyed. Of course, the number five is symbolical and
shows us that it would have been pleasing to God, and that He would have
defended the Constantinople, only in the case that one part of the
Constantinopolitans, even if in comparison to their fellow-citizens a small
number, had remained faithful to Orthodoxy and right-living. So, let every one of us strive to remain
unwavering in right faith and give all we have for our personal spiritual
rebirth, so that we might be numbered in that “five” who changed God’s
punishment into His blessing, that the Serbian nation be saved, and Serbia
defended from complete, final destruction.
Through
the prayers of Our Most Holy Theotokos, may the Lord grant that as many Serbs
as possible be delivered from the beastly claws of the great apostasy, and be
deified, unite, and multiply, so that the Lord would then bless us with every
good blessing, heavenly and earthly, and thus blessed, we may thank and
glorify, already here on earth, and also in the Heavenly Kingdom, the Most Holy
Trinity Our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit the Paraclete, now and ever and
unto the endless ages of ages, Amen.
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