UKRAINIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IN AMERICA
PASTORAL LETTER ON THE FEAST OF PASCHA 2015
+IOAN
By God’s Mercy Metropolitan Archbishop
of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America
To Our beloved Brothers in the Episcopate,
beloved Presbyters and Deacons, Monastics, Seminarians and Faithful
entrusted to Our spiritual care throughout the world:
PEACE, THE DEEPEST FRATERNAL LOVE AND APOSTOLIC BENEDICTION!
Христос Воскрес! Воістину Воскрес!
Christ is risen! Truly, He is risen!
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...
What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.”
There is not a Divine Liturgy during which time when I make the commemorations of both the living and the deceased, I do not recall the moments of those commemorated which were both moments of great distress and suffering for them and also those moments which were moments of great joy, of true resurrection.
The proclamation of today’s Holy Gospel is, indeed, Good News, the Good News of our salvation. The writer of the Gospel of John takes us to the beginning of time, even further beyond time than Genesis 1 which John echoes, and we are made to see the Word, Jesus Christ, as the creative force, sitting with the Father and calling all creation into being.
So it is with our lives, my beloved Brothers and Sisters. From the moment when the Word, Jesus Christ, called us into being at the moment of of our conception, He predisposed us to see beyond the superficiality of this moment and beyond the pain one may be enduring at a particular period in his/her life.
I often think of each of you who have entered into my life or those of you who have asked for my prayers. It is often with tears that we have shared our lives. Yet, when I recall all the graces and blessings which you have experienced in your lives, often despite great distress and horrendous sacrifice, I see the joy of Christ’s Resurrection, “the light that shines in the darkness,” and it is you who witness to the prophecy and to the reality of Christ’s promise that we will all rise to eternal life with Him and with each other.
In recent months, we have witnessed the martyrdom of so many Christians at the hands of fundamentalist lunatics. Christians must resist the persecution which they suffer without violence, and we must support persecuted communities with love and goodness and generosity. These martyrs, too, are caught up in the resurrection: their cruel deaths, the brutality of their persecution, their persecution is overcome by Christ himself at their side because they share his suffering, at their side because he rose from the dead. Because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead the cruel are overcome, evil is defeated, martyrs conquer. Again, despite great suffering, these men and women have overcome death and witness to the hope of resurrection and great joy.
The Resurrection is not dependent upon “calendars.” Christ rose from death once, yet each of us shares in His resurrection each new day of our lives.
May the joy and peace of this Paschal season be with each of you!
+IOAN
Metropolitan Prime Bishop
Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America
PASTORAL LETTER ON THE FEAST OF THE NATIVITY 2015
+IOAN
By God’s Mercy Metropolitan Archbishop
of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America
To Our beloved Brothers in the Episcopate,
beloved Presbyters and Deacons, Monastics, Seminarians and Faithful
entrusted to Our spiritual care throughout the world:
PEACE, THE DEEPEST FRATERNAL LOVE AND APOSTOLIC BENEDICTION!
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is born! - Glorify Him!
During this most sacred season, in song, sign and Word, we look to the place where Jesus was born and the subsequent lands where the first followers of Jesus settled. As depicted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we expect these places to be peace-filled and tranquil. Instead, we find lands of conflict and utter devastation - lands where, as in early Christian history, Christians and other innocent people are being persecuted, tortured and put to death because of their belief in Jesus Christ.
At a time when this death, violence and oppression hover around us, the celebration of the Christ, God-become-man, becomes not only necessary but essential to our understanding of human nature and the freedom and dignity of the human person.
Perhaps, the true meaning of the Incarnation lies in the words of Paul in his letter to the Philippians (2:3-8) which was written nearly two decades before the Gospel accounts of the Nativity:
“3 Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, 4 each looking out not for his own interests, but [also] everyone for those of others. 5 Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, 6 Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. 7 Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, 8 he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
Do you and I truly believe in the miracle of the Incarnation? Do you and I truly believe that God took-on human flesh and completely embraced the human condition with all the joys and hardships which such an “emptying” assumes? Do you and I truly believe that through the Incarnation, God demands that each human person be treated with the highest respect and dignity?
And, my brothers and sisters, do you and I rise out of our complacency and empty ourselves of our human nature and its limitations in order to rise to become more God-like, as did our Lord, God and Savior, Jesus Christ as taught by the greatest Church Fathers?
It is in the uncertainties of our own lives, that is, in the heartbreaks and tragedies that fall upon all of us, both rich and poor, powerful and vulnerable, that the Lord Jesus Christ is born. He is present to us, person-to-person, when we receive and embrace Him in the Eucharist.
God became man so that man might become divine in the sense of our embracing the Incarnate Christ and becoming Christ in our presence and ministry to the persecuted, orphans, widows, the homeless, the mourning, the displaced, immigrants and all in need.
We need not bring gold, frankincense or myrrh to Christ incarnate in the wounded. We must simply bring ourselves, and the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ, through us, will be made present in today’s society.
Given at Solus Christi Skete of the Monks of New Manjava, Milwaukee, WI, this 7th day of January, 2015, the feast of the Nativity of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, in the eleventh year of Our Episcopate and the tenth year of our election as Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America.
+IOAN
Metropolitan Archbishop