Synaxis of Archangel Gabriel

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Synaxis of Archangel Gabriel

• Holy Martyr Golinduc of Persia (6th c.)

• Saint Julian, Bishop of Cenomanis (Le Mans) (1st c.)

  Julian is honoured as the first bishop of Cenomanis — Le Mans, on the Sarthe in what is now western France — and as the apostle of the Cenomani. The tradition received in the East makes him a disciple sent into Gaul by the Apostle Peter himself: he preached to a wholly pagan people, healed the sick, brought water from dry ground by striking it with his staff, gave sight to a blind man at the gate of the local prince, and after a fast of three days baptised the prince and his household, so that idolatry was uprooted from the country. He reposed in extreme old age, and the great cathedral of Le Mans bears his name to this day. Historians, working from the ninth-century episcopal chronicle that is the earliest witness to his life, place him some two or three centuries later than the tradition does. The Byzantine calendars keep his memory on July 13; the West keeps him on January 27.

• Repose of Photios Kontoglou (1965) (June 30 OC)

• Marcian of Iconium

  Marcian was a young Christian of Iconium — the city of Lycaonia where Paul and Barnabas preached and where the Church had stood since the apostolic generation — who preached Christ so openly that the pagans of the city, unwilling to make a martyr at home, sent him away into Cappadocia. There the governor Perennius tried first persuasion and then threats to make him deny the faith; Marcian answered by denouncing the governor's own worship of idols, was tortured savagely, and was at last beheaded while at prayer, in the year 258. His memory is kept on July 13.

• Sarah of Sketis

  Sarah is one of the three women — with Theodora and Synkletike — whose sayings were gathered into the alphabetical collection of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and she is the sharpest voice of the three. An ascetic of Sketis, the settlement in the salt desert west of the Nile Delta that was the classical home of Egyptian monasticism, she lived some sixty years in a cell above a river without once turning to look at it; fought the spirit of fornication for thirteen years without ever praying that the war should stop, but only for strength to fight it; and, when two celebrated anchorites came to humble her, answered them with the single sentence for which she is remembered — that she was a woman by nature but not in her thoughts. The calendars commemorate her on July 13 and title her, following an old geographical usage, "of Libya."

• Serapion the Martyr

  Serapion is a martyr of the persecution under the emperor Septimius Severus, put to death about the year 205 by burning. The synaxarion notice which is all that survives of him relates that he was arrested and tried before a judge named Achilles, endured his tortures with an open confession of Christ, was thrown into prison broken by them, and was there healed by Christ himself; that when he was produced a second time and found sound and whole, the court, taking the healing for contempt, condemned him to the fire; and that he gave up his soul in the flames. His memory is kept on July 13.

• Stephen of Mar Sabbas

  Stephen the Sabbaite, called the Wonderworker, was the nephew and spiritual heir of John of Damascus. Brought as a boy of about ten to the Great Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the Judaean desert, he never left it: for some sixty years he divided his life between the community and the naked wilderness beyond it, spending the working week alone in the desert and returning to the Lavra for the Saturday and Sunday services. He was given the gifts of healing, of driving out unclean spirits, and of reading the thoughts of those who came to him, and he foreknew the day of his death, which fell in 794. His life was written down by his disciple Leontius of Damascus — one of the earliest and most substantial works of Arabic-speaking Melkite hagiography — and the Church keeps his memory on July 13.

British Isles and Ireland

• Hieromartyr Dogfan of Dyfed (6th C)
• St. Mildred, abbess of Minster in Thanet (c.700)
• St. Just of Penwith (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings