All Saints of America 2020 Archbishop Benjamin

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.