13th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Miracle of Archangel Michael at Colossae

• Holy Prophet Zacharias and Righteous Elizabeth (1st c.), parents of St John the Forerunner.

• St Maxim (Sandovich), martyr of Lemkos, Czechoslovakia (1914) (August 24 OC)

  Maxim Sandovich (1886–1914), priest of the Lemko highlands, is the protomartyr of the Carpatho-Russian return to Orthodoxy — a young Lemko who left the Uniate Basilians for the Orthodox monastery of Pochaev, was ordained in 1911 for the villages of his own mountains, and served them under constant Austrian prosecution: two years in a Lviv prison on charges of "Russophile treason" ended in acquittal in the great trial of March 1914, and five months later, the World War having begun, he was seized again and shot without trial in the prison yard of Gorlice on 6 September 1914, crying with his last breath, "Long live the Rus' people, long live Orthodoxy!" His pregnant wife, father and brother were sent to the Talerhof camp; his posthumous son became a priest. The Church of Poland glorified him at Gorlice in September 1994.

• Archippus of Herapolis

  Archippus of Herapolis (Hierapolis in Phrygia) was the sacristan of the church of the Archangel Michael at the healing spring near Colossae, which he served for sixty years from the age of ten in a life of severe asceticism, catechising the pagans who came to the water. When his enemies loosed the joined flood of two rivers against the church to destroy both shrine and sacristan, his prayer was answered by the appearance of the Archangel Michael, who cleft the rock and swallowed the torrent — the Miracle at Chonae commemorated with him on September 6. He is not to be confused with the apostle Archippus of the Seventy (Colossians 4:17), commemorated February 19 and November 22.

• David of Hermopolis

  David of Hermopolis was the leader of a band of robbers in the Egyptian desert who, moved in old age to reckon with his crimes, forced his way into a monastery — threatening, when the abbot judged the life beyond his strength, to return and sack it — and there outstripped all the brethren in ascetic zeal. The tradition relates that the Archangel Gabriel announced God's forgiveness to him, and, when David could not believe that so great a sinner was so soon pardoned, left him mute except for the prayers and services of the church. He received grace to heal the sick and cast out demons, and reposed in peace, in the sixth century by the Greek reckoning. He is commemorated on September 6.

• Eudoxius, Zeno and Macarius

  Eudoxius was a high military commander under Diocletian and his successors, a secret Christian who laid down his rank rather than sacrifice to the idols and was martyred at Melitene in Armenia about 311–312, in the last great persecution before the peace of the Church. With him suffered his friend Zeno, who confessed Christ at his execution, and his household steward Macarius, who came forward after a vision of the martyr; his wife Basilissa, who sought but was denied a martyr's death, buried him. More than a thousand soldiers are said to have cast down their military belts in confession of Christ at his trial. The three are commemorated together on September 6.

• Bega of Copeland

  Bega (Bee) is the patroness of St Bees in Copeland, the coastal district of Cumbria whose headland and village still bear her name. The medieval tradition makes her an Irish king's daughter of the seventh century who fled a marriage to a pagan prince, crossed the sea, and lived as an anchoress at the headland later called St Bees; the York calendar styles her virgin and first abbess of Copeland. No contemporary record of her survives: her cult rests on the place-name, on the priory of St Bees, and on a famous bracelet-relic on which oaths were sworn in medieval Copeland. She is commemorated on September 6.

• Felix and Augebert

  Felix and Augebert were English youths sold as slaves in Gaul and ransomed at the direction of St Gregory the Great, who had captive Anglo-Saxon boys bought and placed in monasteries to be trained as missionaries for the conversion of their own people. Felix was in time ordained priest and Augebert deacon; but before they could be sent to England, both were killed by pagans in Champagne, about the beginning of the seventh century. Their whole record is this one notice, transmitted in the Western hagiographical compilations; they are commemorated together on September 6.

• MacCallin of Lusk

  MacCallin (Mac Cuilinn, Macculind) was bishop of Lusk (Lusca) in the north of the present County Dublin, one of the founding generation of the Irish church in the age after St Patrick. The Annals of Ulster record his death under the year 496; the traditional date, following the hagiographer Colgan, is 497. His name stands in the earliest Irish martyrologies, and a Scottish parish (Macallan, in Moray) preserved his veneration in Scotland. Beyond this the record is thin: the surviving Acts attached to his name are late and legendary. He is commemorated on September 6.

• Magnus of Füssen

  Magnus (Magnoald, Mang) is the apostle of the Allgäu, the Alpine country of south-western Bavaria, and founder of the monastery of Füssen on the river Lech, which bore his name (St Mang) until its dissolution. His Life places him in the circle of the Irish missionaries Columbanus and Gallus and dates his repose about 665 — so the York calendar styles him "disciple of St Columbanus" — though the Life is a ninth-century composition whose chronology is internally contradictory, and scholarship places the historical Magnus in the mid-eighth century. He reposed on September 6, his feast in Germany and in the York calendar alike.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings