23rd Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Prophet Nahum

  Nahum the Elkoshite, seventh of the Twelve Minor Prophets, prophesied in Judah in the seventh century before Christ, and his short book is a single sustained oracle — "the burden of Nineveh." Where Jonah had seen the Assyrian capital repent and be spared, Nahum, more than a century later, announced its final doom: the great city that had crushed Israel and blasphemed the living God would itself be swept away, and so it was, falling to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 BC. His name means "comfort," and his message of judgment on the oppressor was heard by his own people as consolation. The Church commemorates him on December 1, the first day of the December menaion, keeping his memory within the Nativity Fast. He is not to be confused with Naum of Ohrid, the ninth–tenth-century disciple of Cyril and Methodius and enlightener of the Bulgarians (commemorated December 23), whose name is the same "Naum" in the Slavonic books.

• Saint Philaret the Merciful of Constantinople (762)

  Philaret the Merciful (c. 702–792) was a wealthy landowner of Amnia in Paphlagonia whose boundless almsgiving reduced him and his family to poverty, and who is honoured by the Church as the very pattern of Christian charity. As raiders and his own open-handedness stripped away his herds, fields, and stores, he gave to the last of them, enduring his wife's reproaches with the patience of Job and keeping the hospitality of Abraham, trusting the promise that the righteous would never be forsaken. His trust was answered when imperial envoys, searching the Empire for a bride for the young emperor Constantine VI, lodged in his emptied mansion and chose his granddaughter Maria of Amnia for the throne — whereupon Philaret received back fame and riches and at once gave them away again to the poor. He died at ninety in a monastery of Constantinople in 792. His life, written soon after by his grandson, is one of the treasures of Byzantine hagiography, and his feast falls on December 1.

• Our Venerable Father Eligius (Eloi), Bishop of Noyon (660)

• Ananias of Persia

  Ananias the Persian was a martyr of the Church in Persia, put to death for his confession of Christ in the fourth century, during the long persecution of Christians under the Sassanid king Shapur II. The one saying preserved of him belongs to the hour of his torture: seeing what his tormentors could not, he cried that he beheld a ladder reaching to heaven and radiant men calling him up to a shining city of light — and so, in that vision, he gave up his life. He is commemorated on December 1 among the many martyrs whom the Persian church offered up in the fourth century, whose sufferings under the fire-worshipping empire rivalled those of the early Church under Rome.

• Botolph of Iken

  The Anglo-Saxon abbot of Icanho, whose monastery the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records him beginning to build in 654 — a fixed point in a century that gives historians very few. Botolph was formed as a monk on the Continent, returned to East Anglia, and settled with his brother on a tract of marsh and heath on the tidal Alde in what is now Suffolk, where he governed a community for some quarter of a century until his repose about 680. The near-contemporary Life of Ceolfrith — the best witness to him, written by someone who had no reason to flatter — calls him a man of unequalled life and learning, full of the grace of the Holy Spirit. When the Danes came, his relics were carried inland and eventually divided between Thorney, Ely and Westminster; from the churches at the gates of London that bear his name he became the patron of travellers, and the town of Boston — Botolph's stone — carries his name still.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Grwst of Llanrwst (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings