9th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Prophet Micah

  Micah of Moresheth is the sixth of the Twelve Minor Prophets, a Judean countryman from the Shephelah who prophesied at Jerusalem in the last third of the eighth century before Christ, a contemporary of Isaiah, Hosea and Amos, under the kings Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. His seven short chapters hold two sayings that the whole Church knows by heart: the demand that reduces all religion to its root — "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8) — and the prophecy that named the birthplace of the Messiah centuries before the event: "And thou, Bethlehem Ephratha… out of thee shall come forth unto me he that is to be ruler in Israel" (Micah 5:2), the verse the scribes quoted to Herod and the Church reads at the Nativity. His memory falls on August 14, the last day of the Dormition fast and the Forefeast of the Dormition. He is a different man from Micah, son of Imlah, the ninth-century prophet who withstood Ahab, with whom the synaxaria have long confused him.

• Translation of the Relics of St Theodosius of the Kiev Caves

  Theodosius (Feodosy Pechersky, †3 May 1074) is the father of Russian monasticism: the second founder, with Antony, of the Kiev Caves monastery, and the man who turned a company of hermits in a hillside burrow into a cenobium governed by a written rule. Born at Vasilev near Kiev and raised at Kursk, he baked the prosphora for his village church as a boy against his mother's violent opposition, escaped to Kiev in his twenties, and was received by Antony into the cave above the Dnieper and tonsured by Nicon. As abbot he procured a copy of the typikon of the Studion monastery at Constantinople and imposed it on the brotherhood — common table, common property, unbroken obedience — so that the Caves became the mother and model of every monastery in the land of Rus'. He raised the community from a handful to a hundred, built the wooden and then began the great stone church of the Dormition, gave a tenth of the monastery's income to the poor and maintained a hospice for the sick and the mutilated, sent a cartload of bread each week to the prisoners, and rebuked the Grand Prince Svyatoslav to his face for usurping his brother's throne. His Life, written by Nestor the Chronicler, is one of the founding works of Slavonic literature; his relics were uncovered on 14 August 1091, and in 1108 he became the first monastic saint of Rus' to be formally canonised. Not to be confused with any of the six other saints named Theodosius already in this corpus, and above all not with Theodosius the Cenobiarch (†529), the founder of the coenobia of the Judaean desert. See Disputed questions below.

• Hieromartyr Marcellus, Bishop of Apamea (389)

  Marcellus, bishop of Apamea on the Orontes in Syria Secunda, is the hierarch whom the historian Theodoret of Cyrrhus remembered as the model of the bishops who dismantled the temples of Syria in the reign of Theodosius the Great. Born on Cyprus of a distinguished family and holding high civil office there, he left wife, children and rank about the year 375 for the monastic life in Syria, and was chosen bishop by the people of Apamea while visiting the city on business. Armed with an imperial rescript, he threw down the great temple of Zeus at Apamea — the tradition adds that when fire would not take hold of the props beneath its columns, he served the blessing of water and had the beams sprinkled, and they burned at once. About 389, standing at a distance while soldiers demolished another temple near Aulon, he was seized by the pagans of the place and thrown into the fire. When his sons prepared to avenge him, a council of the province forbade them, ruling that such a death was matter for thanksgiving, not for revenge.

• Arcadius of Novotorzhok

  Arcadius (†13 December 1077) was a young man of Vyazma who left his home to follow the Hungarian nobleman Ephraim, founder of the monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb at Novy Torg (Torzhok) on the upper Tvertsa. Before his tonsure he lived as a fool-for-Christ, begging his bread and sleeping in the forest or on a church porch; after it he was known for an obedience to his elder so complete that the Russian tradition holds it up as the pattern of the thing, and for silence, fasting and unbroken attendance at the services. He outlived Ephraim by nearly a quarter of a century. His relics were found in 1572 and enshrined in 1677, and he is kept with Ephraim as one of the two patrons of Torzhok and among the saints of Tver and Smolensk.

• Lucius the Soldier

  Lucius is a soldier-martyr commemorated in the Greek synaxaria on August 14 of whom the tradition preserves a single sentence: he was martyred by fire. Neither his country, his date, his judge, nor the occasion of his passion has come down; the notice is one of the shortest in the calendar, and the entry below does not enlarge it.

• Nazarius of Kutaisi and Companions

  Nazarius (Lezhava), Metropolitan of Kutaisi-Gaenati, was shot with four of his clergy and a layman in the Sapichkhia forest outside Kutaisi in 1924, on the night following his consecration of a village church. His crime, in the eyes of the Soviet power, was that he had hidden the treasures of the cathedrals of Sioni and Svetitskhoveli under the porch of his own residence when the Red Army entered Georgia in 1921, and that when the court demanded to know for whom he had hidden them he answered: "For the Church and the Georgian people." With him died the priests Herman Jajanidze, Hierotheos Nikoladze and Simon Mchedlidze, the archdeacon Besarion Kukhianidze, and a layman. The Georgian Church glorified them in 1994, and in the same act proclaimed all who had died for the faith and for the freedom of their country under the totalitarian regime to be the New Martyrs of the Georgian Church.

• Symeon of Trebizond

  Symeon, a goldsmith of Trebizond working in Constantinople, was hanged under a plane tree in the imperial city on 14 August 1653, refusing to save his life by accepting Islam. He had been caught up in a street affray between Christians and their neighbours, accused of stabbing a man who afterwards died of the wound, and offered by the judge the standard Ottoman escape from a capital sentence — apostasy. His recorded answer, "Though you give me ten thousand deaths, I will not be parted from the faith and the love of Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God," is the reason the Church numbers him not among the executed but among the new martyrs. His passion was written down by the Constantinopolitan scholar John Karyophylles, which makes him one of the better documented of the mid-seventeenth-century martyrs.

• Tarcisius of Rome

  Tarcisius was a boy of the Roman church in the persecution under Valerian and Gallienus, about the year 257, who was entrusted with carrying the Holy Mysteries from the assembly to Christians in prison awaiting execution. Set upon in the street by a pagan crowd who demanded to see what he was carrying in the fold of his garment, he refused, and was beaten to death rather than give up the Body of Christ. When his killers searched him, the Gifts were gone — the tradition says they had vanished — and only the cloth that had wrapped them remained in his hands. The Christians took up his body and laid it in the catacomb of Saint Callistus on the Appian Way. He is the patron of those who carry and serve the Mysteries, and one of the very few Roman martyrs whose memory passed into the Greek synaxaria in later centuries; the Church keeps him on August 14.

• Ursicius the Tribune

  Ursicius was a tribune — a commander of a cohort — in the Roman army in the reign of Maximian (286–305), a native of the town the Greek synaxarion calls Sibentos in Upper Illyria. He was denounced to the emperor as a Christian by a man named Valens, and handed over for interrogation to the eparch Aristides. Ursicius confessed Christ without hesitation, endured a long and varied torture, and, refusing to the end to renounce the faith he had held in secret while he served, was beheaded. His memory is kept on August 14, the last day of the Dormition fast.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Fachanan, abbot of Ross Carbery (c.600)
• St. Werenfrid, disciple of St. Willibrord among the Frisians (c.760)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings