Prophet Amos; St Jonah, Metr. of Moscow

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Prophet Amos

  Amos (8th century BC) was a herdsman and dresser of sycamore figs from Tekoa in the Judaean hill-country who was taken from behind his flock and sent north, into the rival kingdom of Israel, to prophesy against its wealth, its shrines and its cruelty to the poor. He was the first of the prophets whose words were gathered into a book, and the sharpest: he denounced the selling of the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals, the beds of ivory and the summer houses, and the crowded festivals of Bethel that God, he said, hated and would not smell — demanding instead that judgement roll down like waters, and righteousness like an unfailing torrent. Expelled from the royal sanctuary by its priest Amaziah, he answered that he was no professional prophet but a herdsman whom the Lord had called. The tradition transmitted in the Lives of the Prophets relates that Amaziah's son struck him on the temple with a club, and that he was carried home to Tekoa and died there two days later.

• Saint of the day

  St Jonah, Metr. of Moscow

  Jonah (†1461) was the last Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia to be styled by the old title and the first to be consecrated in Moscow by Russian bishops alone — the hinge on which the Russian Church turned from dependence on Constantinople to self-government. Tonsured at twelve in a monastery of his native Galich, and afterwards a monk of the Simonov monastery at Moscow, where the Metropolitan Photius found him asleep in the bakery with his right hand set in the gesture of blessing and prophesied that he would be a great hierarch, he was made Bishop of Ryazan and Murom, was twice passed over for the metropolitanate, and finally received it in 1448 after the Russian Church had deposed Isidore for accepting the union of Florence. He governed thirteen years, was credited with the deliverance of Moscow from the Tatar raid of 1451, and reposed in 1461; his relics were found incorrupt in 1472 and lie in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin. He was glorified by the Council of 1547.

• Saint of the day

  Holy Prophet Amos (8th c. BC)

• Holy Martyr Vitus, with Modestus and Crescentia (303)

  Vitus was a boy of a great pagan house of Sicily or Lucania who was brought to Christ in secret by the two servants who had charge of him — his tutor Modestus and his nurse Crescentia — and who suffered with them about the year 303, in the persecution of Diocletian. The passion relates that his own father tried first indulgence and then torture to break him; that the three fled by sea to Lucania in southern Italy; that Vitus, brought before the emperor, cast a demon out of the emperor's son and was for that repaid with the cauldron and the lions, from which he came out unhurt; and that the three at last gave up their souls together by the river Silarus. In the West Vitus became one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages — patron of Bohemia and of Saxony, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, invoked against the nervous disorder still called St Vitus's dance. In Slavic and Byzantine usage the three are kept on May 16, and in the West on June 15.

• Blessed Augustine, bishop of Hippo (430), and his mother Monica (387)

  Augustine (354–430), Bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, is the most consequential writer of the Latin Church: a provincial rhetorician of great gifts and disordered life who passed through Manichaeism and academic scepticism to Neoplatonism and at last, at Milan under the preaching of Ambrose and the prayers of his mother Monica, to baptism in his thirty-third year. He returned to Africa a monk, was made priest and then bishop of Hippo against his will, and for thirty-five years preached, judged, wrote and fought — against the Manichees, the Donatist schism and the Pelagians — leaving the Confessions, the City of God, On the Trinity, and some hundreds of other works and sermons. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on June 15, with the epithet blessed rather than the fuller style of a father among the saints in most Greek reckonings: a real veneration, and a real reserve about parts of his teaching on grace and predestination, and about the later Western appeal to him for the filioque.

• Holy Martyr Lazar, Prince of Serbia (1389)

  Lazar Hrebeljanović (c. 1329–1389) was the ruler who held the Serbian lands together in the generation after the collapse of the empire of Stefan Dušan, and who died on the field of Kosovo on 15 June 1389 — Vidovdan — fighting the army of Sultan Murad I. Raised at Dušan's court and married to Milica of the Nemanjić house, he governed Moravian Serbia from Kruševac, reconciled the Serbian Patriarchate with Constantinople after nearly thirty years of schism, and endowed churches and monasteries from Ravanica to the Russian house of St Panteleimon on Athos. Wounded and taken prisoner in the battle, he was beheaded on the orders of Murad's son Bayezid, the Sultan himself having been killed in the field. His body was laid at Priština and translated to Ravanica in 1391; his cult was established at once, and Serbian literature has never since been able to speak of the nation without speaking of him. He is honoured as Great-Martyr.

• Doulas of Cilicia

  Doulas was a Christian of Praetoriada in Cilicia who suffered in the persecution under Maximian, between about 305 and 313. Arrested and brought before the provincial governor Maximus, he prayed before the hearing began that words might be given him to expose the emptiness of the idols, and then argued the case against the gods of the pagans so effectively — turning their own mythology, with its adulteries and murders, against them — that the governor, unable to answer him, fell into a rage and had him tortured through several interrogations. At the last he was beaten until his lower jaw and his knees were broken, then tied to the governor's chariot and dragged until he died, signing himself with the Cross as he went. His body, thrown into the river, was carried down to his own city, where it was found and guarded by shepherds' dogs until Christians could bury it.

• Doulas the Passion-bearer

  Doulas was a monk of one of the Egyptian monasteries whose whole ascetic labour lay in being wronged. For twenty years he bore the mockery, insult and contempt of some of the brethren, at first with difficulty and at last with such freedom from passion that he pitied his detractors and prayed for them; and when church vessels were stolen and the real thief accused him, he did not defend himself but said only, Forgive me, holy fathers, I am a sinner. He was stripped of the habit, chained, handed over to the secular court, tortured, and sentenced to have both hands cut off; at the place of execution the thief's conscience gave way and the truth came out. Doulas returned to the monastery, forgave those who had accused him, thanked them for the opportunity of suffering guiltlessly, and three days later was found dead on his knees at prayer. When the brethren came to bury him, only his clothes and his sandals were in the church.

• Ephraim of Serbia

  Ephraim (c. 1311 – 1399/1400) was a Bulgarian hesychast who became Patriarch of the Serbs twice, and both times against his will. Trained in the ascetic life on Mount Athos and afterwards abbot of the Serbian house there, he was drawn into Serbia and was elected to the patriarchal throne of Peć in 1375, in the year of the reconciliation with Constantinople, and it was he who anointed the prince Lazar. Longing for silence, he resigned after some four years and withdrew to a cell at the monastery of the Holy Archangels near Prizren, where he lived nine years unknown; after the ruin of Kosovo in 1389 and the death of his successor he was brought back and took up the throne again, crowning Lazar's son Stefan, and resigned a second time in 1392. He died at Peć in extreme old age and was buried in the patriarchal church; his feast is kept, with his prince's, on June 15.

• Gregory and Cassian of Avnezh

  Gregory and Cassian were ascetics of the Vologda forest country who founded a monastery of the Holy Trinity at Avnezh, on the waters of the Sukhona north-east of Moscow, in the generation of Sergius of Radonezh, when the Russian monastic movement was pushing north into the wilderness. Gregory was its abbot and Cassian its cellarer. On 15 June 1392 a Tatar raiding party fell on the house and killed them both, and the monastery was destroyed. Their relics lay forgotten until 1524, when they were uncovered and healings began at the place; the account of their lives was written in 1560 by Barlaam, abbot of the Makhrishche monastery, with the blessing of the Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow. They are honoured as venerable martyrs.

• Jerome of Stridon

  Jerome (c. 347–419/420) was a Dalmatian-born scholar, ascetic and presbyter who gave the Latin West its Bible. Educated at Rome, baptised there in his twenties, drawn eastward to the desert of Chalcis beyond Antioch where he learned Hebrew among the Syrian monks, he was ordained priest at Antioch by Paulinus, heard Gregory the Theologian at Constantinople, and served as secretary to Pope Damasus at Rome before the enmity of the Roman clergy drove him out for good. From 386 he lived in a cave at Bethlehem beside the birthplace of Christ, where in thirty-odd years of relentless labour he translated the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew — the version that became the Vulgate — wrote commentaries on most of the prophets, and conducted a series of ferocious controversies, most damagingly the Origenist quarrel that set him against his oldest friend Rufinus of Aquileia and against Melania the Elder and John of Jerusalem. The Orthodox Church keeps him on June 15, honouring the scholar and ascetic while recording, without evasion, the violence of his pen.

• Michael of Kiev

  Michael (†992) is venerated as the first Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia: the hierarch who, by church tradition, came to Kiev with Prince Vladimir after his baptism at Korsun (c. 988–989), baptised the people of the newly converted land, made missionary rounds of the Russian towns founding the first churches and schools, and set the Russian hierarchy on its foundations — the old Kievan and Novgorodian records call him "the initiator." He reposed in 992 and was buried in the Tithe Church of the Theotokos in Kiev; his relics were later translated to the Kiev Caves Lavra. His principal feast is June 15; September 30 commemorates the translation of his relics, kept in the Russian and OCA calendars.

• Theodore the Sykeote

  Theodore the Sykeote (†22 April 613) was the greatest of the holy men of Galatia: born in the village of Sykeon, the son of an innkeeper, he was given from childhood to the martyr George, at whose hill-shrine above the village he became first a boy-ascetic, then a hidden cave-dweller, then the founder of a monastery whose fame filled Asia Minor. He was ordained priest at eighteen, tonsured a monk at Choziba in the Judaean desert, and was at last dragged from his cave to be made Bishop of Anastasiopolis, a burden he bore for some years before obtaining release from the Patriarch to return to his cell. He stood in an iron cage through the winter fast, weighed down with irons; he stopped plagues, locusts, hail and rivers; he cast out demons across the Galatian countryside; he foretold the throne to Maurice and the coming of ruin upon the empire, and blessed Heraclius on his march east. His Life, written by his disciple George of Sykeon, is one of the richest documents of provincial Byzantine society that survives.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Trillo of Gwynedd, companion of St. Cadfan (5th C)
• St. Vouga the Hermit (6th C)
• St. Edburgh of Winchester (960)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings