27th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Prophet Habbakuk

• Holy Martyr Myrope (Myropea) of Chios (251)

  Myrope was a young Christian woman of Ephesus who, during the persecution of Decius in the mid-third century, withdrew with her mother to the island of Chios. When the soldier-martyr Isidore was beheaded there and his body set under guard, she secretly took it away by night and buried it; and when the guards were condemned to death for its loss, she gave herself up rather than let innocent men die in her place. Confessing Christ before the governor, she was savagely beaten and cast into prison, where at midnight, as she prayed, the martyr Isidore appeared to her amid a company of angels and she surrendered her soul to God, the whole prison filling with a sweet fragrance. Her name, from the Greek for sweet-smelling myrrh, was joined in life and death to the anointing of the holy dead.

• Our Holy Father Athanasius "the Resurrected," Recluse of the Kiev Caves (1176)

  Athanasius, called "the Resurrected One," was a monk of the Near (Antonian) Caves of Kiev in the twelfth century. After a long and grievous illness he died, and was prepared for burial; but on the third day, when the abbot came to bury him, the brethren found him alive, sitting up and weeping. To all their questions he would say only that they must seek salvation, obey the abbot, repent every hour, and pray without ceasing — and then he shut himself into a cave, where for twelve more years he lived in total silence, in tears and the strictest fasting, before reposing in peace about the year 1176. He is venerated among the wonderworking fathers of the Kiev Caves, at whose relics healings were worked.

• Saint (Stephen) Uroš, King of Serbia (1367)

• Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1991) (Nov. 19 OC)

  Porphyrios (1906–1991), born Evangelos Bairaktaris, was one of the most beloved elders of the twentieth-century Orthodox Church: a poor shepherd boy of Euboea who ran away to Mount Athos at twelve, was granted the gift of clairvoyance while still a young monk, and spent more than half a century — thirty-three of those years as a priest at a polyclinic in the heart of Athens — as a spiritual father, confessor and healer of souls and bodies. Blind and often gravely ill in his later life, he directed the building of a monastery at Milesi, then returned in secret to his beloved hut at Kavsokalyvia on the Holy Mountain to die, breathing his last with the words of Christ, "that they all may be one." He was canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2013, and his simple, luminous teaching — that the soul is won to Christ not by struggle against evil but by love of the good and the beautiful — has made him one of the most widely read of modern saints.

• Habakkuk the Prophet

  Habakkuk is the eighth of the Twelve Minor Prophets, who prophesied in the kingdom of Judah in the last decades before the Babylonian captivity. His short book of three chapters wrestles, more openly than any other, with the problem of divine justice — why God should use the wicked Chaldeans to chastise his own people — and answers it with the words that Saint Paul would make a pillar of the Gospel: "the just shall live by his faith" (Habakkuk 2:4). His third chapter, the "prayer of Habakkuk" — "O Lord, I have heard thy report, and was afraid" — is the fourth of the Church's biblical canticles, sung as the fourth ode of every canon, and its vision of God coming forth "from the South" is read as a prophecy of the Incarnation. Tradition adds the marvel, from the Greek additions to Daniel, of the angel who carried him by the hair to feed Daniel in the lions' den. He is not to be confused with Habakkuk the New Martyr, who bore the same name in its Greek form (Ἀββακούμ) and suffered at Thessalonica in 1628 (August 6).

• Joannicius of Devič

  Joannicius (Serbian Joanikije, popularly Janićije) was a Serbian hermit of the first half of the fifteenth century who withdrew from the world as a young man into the gorge of the Ibar, lived in a cave above the Crna Reka — the Black River — and afterwards buried himself deeper still in the forests of the Drenica in Kosovo. There, tradition says, the despot Đurađ Branković brought him a daughter afflicted in her mind; the hermit healed her, and the grateful prince built on the spot the monastery which took its name from the healed maiden — Devič, "the maiden's place." Joannicius reposed there, by the received reckoning on 2 December 1430, and his relics remained in the monastery church, where for five centuries they were sought above all by the mentally ill and the possessed, Serbs and Albanians alike. He is one of the last of the medieval Serbian ascetics, and his shrine became in the twentieth century one of the most bitterly contested holy places in the Balkans. The wider Orthodox calendars keep his memory on April 26.

• John, Heraclemon, Andrew and Theophilus of Egypt

  John, Heraclemon, Andrew and Theophilus were four young hermits of the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, known from the Life of Onuphrius the Great. Boys who had studied together in the city of Oxyrhynchus in the Upper Thebaid, they left the world together in their youth for the love of God, were led by an angel to a desert elder, and after his death remained in a hidden oasis, living on the fruit of the trees and the water of a spring. There the monk Paphnutius, having just buried Onuphrius, found them; and on the Sabbath and the Lord's Day, as was their custom, an angel came and communed them — and Paphnutius with them — from the Holy Mysteries. Their brief, luminous story is one of the treasures of the literature of the desert.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Trumwine of Abercorn, (late 7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings