Homily for the Great Feast of Pentecost in the Orthodox Church

 

Acts 2:1-11; John 7:37-52; 8:12 

Today we celebrate the Great Feast of Pentecost at which the Holy Spirit comes upon on the Apostles as they are gathered together in obedience to the command of the risen Lord.  The same divine breath which first gave us life from the dust of the earth now comes as a mighty, rushing wind.  The divine glory beheld by Moses in the burning bush now rests upon each one personally as flames of fire.   The divided speech of the tower of Babel is now overcome by the miracle of speaking in different languages as a sign that all peoples are invited to share in the life of the Lord.  This great feast manifests the fulfillment of God’s gracious promises for the entire world and every human person in the Body of Christ, the Church born at Pentecost.  Today we celebrate the restoration of our true unity in God through the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter sent by the risen and ascended Savior Who is seated at the right hand of the Father in heavenly glory. 

The sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit empowers the Church as a living icon of the common life of humanity in which our divisions and resentments are healed.  He enables us to become persons in communion united organically as members of the one Body of Christ instead of isolated individuals obsessively choosing sides over against one another due to the fear of death.  The Persons of the Holy Trinity share a common life of love, unity, and holiness; by the power of the Holy Spirit manifested at Pentecost, we participate by grace in Their eternal communion.  Our journey to theosis calls us to nothing less than being united in and with God such that we become radiant with the divine energies in every dimension of our being, like an iron left in the fire of holy glory.

As those who bear the divine image and likeness, we become both more truly human and more like God as we find healing from the passions that divide and separate us, and instead embrace our life together. That is why St. Paul wrote, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Gal. 5:22-23) That is why St. Silouan the Athonite taught, “One can only love one’s enemies through the grace of the Holy Spirit.” And “He who does not love his enemies, does not have God’s grace.”[1]

The Lord said, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’”  He uses the image of living water to describe what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit, even as He did with St. Photini, the Samaritan woman at the well.  Our risen and ascended Lord did not send mere theological ideas, moral instructions, or spiritual practices to His followers.  After His Ascension, the Savior sent the Holy Spirit to quench the deep thirst, the primal longing, of all the broken, confused, and alienated people of the world for sharing personally in the eternal life of God, for nothing else can truly satisfy us as those who bear the divine image and likeness.  So much of our pain and misery stems from obsessively seeking fulfillment in created things that can never provide it.  Doing so only enslaves us further to our passions and separates us from one another.

Wind, fire, and water are powerful realities that escape our control. At Pentecost they convey the profound mystery of what it means to be drawn into the divine life in ways that transcend even the best rational definitions:  As living members of the Body of Christ, we may truly know and experience God from the depths of our hearts and in our common life as did the Apostles.

 In order to celebrate this great feast with integrity, we must mindfully open ourselves as fully as possible to the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit.   In order to do that, we must live faithfully each day through the spiritual strength that we gain from participating in the sacramental and ascetical life of the Church.  The Holy Spirit came upon Christ’s followers as they were gathered together in obedience to the Lord’s command, and we must never fool ourselves into thinking that the spiritual life is an individualistic endeavor that caters to our preferences, prejudices, or feelings.  Pentecost calls us to get over the pride that divided the tongues of humanity in the first place and to gain the humility to find our true personhood as members together of the Body of Christ, where the distinctive beauty of our souls will shine evermore brightly as we partake of the same living water as did the Apostles.  

Indeed, Pentecost calls us to become so receptive to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit that we overflow with His living water, becoming channels of blessing that enable our neighbors and world to flourish with the peace, joy, and holiness of God’s Kingdom.  As the Savior said, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’” We must turn away from all that separates us from being filled to overflowing with the life of our Lord in His Body, the Church, if we are to know such blessedness.   We must kneel in prayer and live in humility as we forgive our enemies, share our resources with the poor, and take up the daily struggle to purify our hearts of all that would keep us enslaved to self-centered desire.  We must refuse to define ourselves or our neighbors according to the categories of the fallen world (such as nationality, race, or social standing), for the Holy Spirit has healed such divisions.  To do so is to miss the point of this great feast, for Pentecost is the reverse of the divisions of the Tower of Babel in which language and culture become spiritually irrelevant as we share by grace in the life of God.

At Pentecost, let us turn aside from all that would keep us from true unity in Christ as “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light…” (1 Pet. 2:9) That is the only way to be illumined by the One Who said, “I am the light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Our calling is nothing less than to overflow with the gracious divine energies poured out abundantly for the salvation of the world on this great Feast of Pentecost and to live accordingly each day of our lives.

  

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[1] See Jean-Claude Larchet, “On the Love of Enemies According to Saint Silouan,” https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2020/10/on-love-of-enemies-according-to-saint.html

 

Homily for the Sunday of the After-feast of the Ascension with Commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council

 

Acts 20:16-18, 28-36; John 17:1-13

 

            Forty days after His resurrection, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ ascended in glory into heaven and sat at the right hand of God the Father.  He did so as One Who is fully divine and fully human, One Person with two natures. He ascended with His glorified, resurrected body, which still bore the wounds of His crucifixion.  Our Lord’s Ascension displays our calling to participate by grace in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity and share in His fulfillment of the human person in God’s image and likeness.   We may experience such blessedness even now by uniting ourselves to Christ even as we live and breathe in the world as we know it.

We also commemorate today the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, which met 1,700 years ago in AD 325.  They rejected the teaching of Arius that Jesus Christ was not truly divine, but a kind of lesser god created by the Father.  The Council declared, as we confess to this day in the Nicene Creed, that our Savior is “the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all worlds. Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by Whom all things were made.”  The Fathers of Nicaea saw clearly that the One Who brings us into the eternal life of God must Himself be eternal and divine.  No mere creature could ever enable us to become radiant with the gracious divine energies as participants in heavenly glory.    

Had Christ been simply a great religious teacher, He could not have conquered death or brought us up to heaven through His Ascension. Those who claim to admire the Savior as merely an excellent human being actually reject Him, for they deny the true identity of the God-Man Who unites humanity and divinity in Himself.  Only He could say to the Father, “Glorify Me in Your own presence with the glory which I had with You before the world was made.”  Only He can bring those made of the dust of the Earth into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity.   

            The divine brilliance of Christ’s Ascension is entirely different from the illusion of trying to raise ourselves up according to the standards of a world that remains estranged from the joy of the heavenly Kingdom.  We so easily give in to the temptation to hope in the passing things of this world that can never truly satisfy those called to become like God in holiness.  God created all things good, but no mere creature has the power to heal our souls.  The more that we give our hearts to even the noblest human endeavors as ends in themselves, the more enslaved we become to false hopes that distract us from embracing our true fulfillment in God.   Since we bear God’s image and likeness, to ground our lives in anything other than Him will lead ultimately only to sorrow and bitter disappointment.

            Doing so will make us blind to the glory of our ascended Lord, Who went up to heaven only after dying on the Cross, being buried in a tomb, and enduring the ultimate descent to Hades.  He rose from the dead because He had humbled Himself to the point of accepting rejection, torture, and crucifixion as a blasphemer and a traitor purely out of selfless love and compassion for His broken and suffering children, who had enslaved themselves to the fear of death through sin. 

Christ endured all this as the eternal Son of God Who spoke the universe into existence. The unfathomable humility of the Savior destroys popular assumptions about God and about what it means to find fulfillment as a human person.  He does not ascend by taking vengeance upon His enemies, causing those who opposed Him to suffer, or serving Himself, but by suffering the consequences of their sins, of which He was in no way guilty.  The divine glory of His Ascension shines brilliantly in contrast to the illusions of those who assume God must be just like them in their pride, self-centeredness, and cruelty.   If we dare to identify ourselves with Christ, we must open the eyes of our souls to the light of His heavenly glory and refuse to live as those who keep wandering further into the darkness.  In order to celebrate the Ascension with integrity, we must rise up with Him into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity even as we remain in a world marred by the sorrowful brokenness of the children of Adam and Eve.

By rising into heavenly glory as the God-Man, Christ has shown us what it means to become truly human in the divine image and likeness.   In order to unite ourselves to Him, we must reorient our desires away from the false gods we have welcomed into our hearts and toward the One Who overcame the very worst the corrupt world could do in order make us participants in the eternal day of His heavenly reign.  The contrast between the heights of heaven and the mundane realities of our lives is obviously very great. That is not because we are ordinary people with ordinary problems and temptations.   It is because we have not united ourselves to Christ to the point that every aspect of our life in this world has become a brilliant icon of His salvation.  There is so much in each of us that has refused to ascend in holiness with our Lord.          

Our calling to rise with Christ into heavenly glory is obviously high and we may never claim to have fulfilled it.  God is infinitely holy and the journey to become perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect is truly eternal.  No matter where we are on that path, we must all grapple seriously with what holds us back from embracing the fulfillment of the human person made possible by our Lord’s Ascension.   We must conform our character to Christ’s such that His radiant glory shines through us as we embrace the challenges of finding healing for our souls from the disordered desires that can so easily become the driving forces of our lives.     

In order to ascend with Him in holiness, we must abandon the hypocritical spirituality of those who corrupt Christianity into a way of raising ourselves up in this world over our neighbors.  Nothing will keep us wedded to the spiritual decay of the fallen world more than perverting the way of our ascended Lord into a justification for crucifying our brothers and sisters in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Our Savior calls us to rise up from the corruption of the world, not to fall even deeper into it through delusions of spiritual pride and hypocrisy.    

In order to ascend in holiness with Him, we must reject all the fantasies and obsessions that distract us from true faithfulness in the present circumstances of our lives as we take the small steps toward the Kingdom that we presently have the strength to take. In our families, friendships, and workplaces, and also in our parish, we must humble ourselves by putting the needs of others before our own desires.  We must refuse to allow thoughts that tempt us to self-centeredness or resentment to take root in our hearts, for they will make it impossible to become like Christ in self-emptying love for our neighbors.  The only way to ascend with Christ is to unite ourselves to Him in humility from the depths of our hearts.    

Christ prayed to the Father that His followers “may be one, even as We are one.”  Contrary to popular opinion, it is not possible to pursue the Christian life as an isolated individual on the basis of emotion, beliefs, ideas, morality, politics, or anything else.  The Church is Christ’s Body and we are members of Him together.  He is the Vine and we are the branches.  The Lord ascended with His Body and, by His grace, we will too as we serve Him together in His Body, the Church, by doing what needs to be done for the healing of our souls, the flourishing of our small parish, and the good of our neighbors.  Our unity is not in our opinions or affiliations concerning the projects and agendas of this world.  We must “lay aside all earthly cares” as we lift up our hearts to become “one flesh” with our Savior in the Eucharist.  He has already ascended and brought our humanity into heavenly glory.   Now we must go up together with Him each day of our lives as we come to share more fully in the salvation that only the God-Man could bring.  Even as we live and breathe in this world, let us rise up with Christ in holiness, for that is what it means to become truly human in the image and likeness of God.   

Homily for the Sunday of the Blind Man in the Orthodox Church

 2 Cor. 4:6-15; John 9:1-38

  Christ is Risen!

            On this last Sunday of Pascha, we celebrate that the Risen Lord has brought us from the spiritual darkness of sin and death into the brilliant light of His heavenly Kingdom.  Even as Christ restored sight to the man born blind in today’s gospel reading, He illumines our darkened souls.  That is how the Lord enables us to know and experience Him as “partakers of the divine nature” by grace. 

Before the God-Man’s healing of our corrupt humanity, grave spiritual blindness was the common lot of the children of the first Adam, who were enslaved to the fear of death as the wages of sin. When the Lord spat on the ground to make clay for the man’s eyes in today’s gospel reading, He showed that His healing is an extension of His incarnation in which He has entered fully into our humanity as those made from the dust of the earth.  The blind man regained his sight after washing in the pool of Siloam, which is an image of baptism, which illumines us and restores our spiritual sight.  The man did not really know Who the Lord was when he first encountered Him, thinking that He was merely a prophet.  After the restoration of his sight, the Savior revealed Himself as the Son of God; then the eyes of the man’s soul were illumined to know Christ in His divine glory. “He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped Him.”

The good news of Christ’s resurrection is even more extraordinary than the unprecedented restoration of sight to the man blind from birth, and it is not simply a religious teaching or a point of history.  Through His victory over the corrupting powers of sin and death, He opens the eyes of our souls, enabling us to know, experience, and be united with Him from the depths of our hearts by grace.   In order truly to confess His resurrection, we must become participants in the eternal life that He has brought to the world. We must become radiant with the light that shines from the empty tomb and illumines even the darkest corners of our lives.   

When Christ was asked whose sin was responsible for the man being born blind, He answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”  The Savior rejected the common assumption that such a terrible malady must be a punishment for a particular sin.  We simply do not know why many things happen in this life, but we may always respond to even the worst circumstances in ways that open our hearts more fully to the light of Christ. The Risen Lord has illumined even the tomb itself, making it an entrance into eternal life.  Our participation by grace in the joy of His resurrection is not a reward for morality, legality, or religiosity; it is no more a matter of getting what we, as opposed to others, deserve than was the healing of the blind man.  We stand in need not of justice, but of the infinite healing mercy that enables us to behold the glory of God.  If our spiritual blindness is being healed, then we will become radiant with the light of His mercy, providing a sign of hope to our neighbors in our darkened world.        

  In order to gain the spiritual clarity to do that, we must shut our eyes to all that would keep us stumbling in the darkness of sin and enslaved to the fear of death.  Because the eyes of our souls are not yet fully transparent to the light of the Lord, none of us has perfect spiritual vision.  We do not yet see or know God, our neighbors, or ourselves clearly, but in ways that are deeply distorted by our passions.  That is why we must struggle to become fully receptive to the brilliant divine energies of our Lord through the healing found in the sacramental and ascetical life of the Church.   As those who were born spiritually blind and have been illumined through the washing of baptism and the anointing of chrismation, we must remain vigilant against the persistent temptation to fall back into the comfortable ways of corruption.  There is so much within us that would prefer to hide in the darkness rather than to be illumined in God. The more that we are fully present to the Lord from the depths of our hearts, the more clearly we will know Him and ourselves. That is why we must pray daily, fast and confess regularly, serve our neighbors (especially those we find it hard to love) at every opportunity, and refuse to worship any of the false gods of this world (especially those we find most appealing). 

The blind man did not respond to Christ’s instructions with questions and reservations driven by fear or anxiety about the future course of his life.  He simply obeyed, washed, saw, and then moved forward to encounter challenges he could never have anticipated.  His example reminds us to cultivate the spiritual simplicity of obedience.  If we want healing, we must not allow anything to distract us from attending to our one essential calling of doing what it takes to open the eyes of our souls to the brilliant light of Christ.  Doing so is not simply a one-time experience but requires persisting in the eternal journey of becoming radiant with the divine energies of our Lord as we become more like Him in holiness. None of us can ever say that we have completed this infinite calling.  The Savior has conquered even death itself in order to illumine every dimension of our darkened souls with the light of heavenly glory.  The more receptive we are to His light, the more we will be aware of the darkness that remains with us.  That is not a moment to be discouraged or paralyzed by fear but instead simply to obey Christ in humility as did the man born blind.

As we conclude this season of Pascha, we must mindfully resist the temptation to allow the blindness of a world still enslaved to the fear of death to obscure our spiritual vision.  Those who criticized Christ for daring to heal on the Sabbath were so concerned with trying to use religion to serve their proud desires for position and power that they refused to open their eyes to the Light of the world. We must be on guard against the subtle temptation to identify ourselves with the Savior while welcoming darkness into our souls every bit as much as they did.  We may still mouth words about His resurrection and call ourselves Christians as we wander further into the dark night of entrusting ourselves to the false gods of this world.  If we are making money, possessions, physical appearance, food, drink, sex, the approval of others, or anything else to which we have a passionate attachment the driving purpose of our lives, then we are living as though Christ were still in the grave.  If we condemn any set of our neighbors and hope fundamentally in some arrangement of earthly success that promises to raise us up above the people we love to hate, then we are shutting the eyes of our souls to the brilliant light of the Lord, regardless of how religious or moral we may claim to be.

Our Lord, Who died as the innocent victim of violence at the hands of corrupt religious and political leaders, calls us to become living witnesses of His victory over even Hades and the tomb in the world as we know it today with all its appalling tragedies and bitter disappointments.   Nothing can keep us from doing so other than our own stubborn choice to persist in spiritual blindness.  As we prepare to bid farewell to the season of Pascha this year, let us persist steadfastly in the struggle to enter as fully as possible into the new day of the Savior’s resurrection as we turn away from darkness in all its forms and embrace the Light of the world from the depths of our hearts. Let us redirect the energy that we so commonly invest in gratifying our passions to repudiating the darkness as we open the eyes of our souls as fully as possible to the brilliant light of the Lord.  Let us become radiant with the divine light that shines brightly from the empty tomb, always keeping the joy of Pascha in our hearts. For that is truly the only way to live each day as those who know that their only hope, and the only hope of the world, is in the resurrection of our Lord, God, and Savior, for Christ is Risen!       

Homily for the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman in the Orthodox Church

 

Acts 11:19-30; John 4:5-42

Christ is Risen!

The good news of our Lord’s resurrection challenges our deepest assumptions about life in this world.  If the God-Man has entered fully into death and conquered it, making even the grave an entrance into eternal life, then reality is radically different from what we typically assume.  If death is not an inevitable and complete loss from which we need constant distraction in order to avoid being overcome by despair, then the basis for anxiety and misery driven by fear of the grave has been destroyed.  Life is no longer a zero-sum struggle of this group over against that for the fleeting and scarce resources of power and status.  By leading us back to Paradise through His resurrection, the Savior has destroyed the foundations of the enmity and resentment between people that first appeared when Cain murdered his brother Abel.   

Today we commemorate how our Lord’s salvation extended to someone who was on the wrong side of many such divisions in first-century Palestine:  a Samaritan woman who became the Great Martyr Photini.  In that time and place, she was a very unlikely candidate to become a great evangelist of the Messiah’s salvation.  Most obviously, she was a Samaritan.  The Jews viewed the Samaritans as heretics who had corrupted the faith and heritage of Israel, and they had nothing at all to do with them.  As well, Photini’s conversation with the Savior reveals that she had had five husbands and was then with a man to whom she was not married.  She had known great personal trauma and perhaps went to the well at noon in order to avoid encountering other women in her community who viewed her as an outcast. Moreover, a Jewish man would not strike up a conversation with a woman in public and certainly would not ask a Samaritan woman for a drink of water.  This scene is truly shocking and scandalous according to the sensibilities of the day.   

            How interesting, then, that the Lord’s talk with Photini is His longest conversation in any of the gospels. In it she showed far greater spiritual understanding than had the Pharisee Nicodemus, a man and a law-abiding Jew, in his conversation with Christ in the previous chapter of the gospel according to John.  And unlike most people, Photini had the humility to made no excuses about the brokenness of her life.  When the Lord told her that He knew about her five former husbands and current relationship, she said, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet” and then continued the conversation.  She did not become defensive or leave due to hurt pride or embarrassment.  Instead, she confronted hard truths about herself as her eyes were opened to behold the light of Christ. She refused to give in to the temptation to think that because she was a woman, a sinner, and a Samaritan that she could not or should not open her heart to the good news brought by the unusual Jewish man who spoke to her not as a hated foreigner or a bundle of impurity, but as a beloved daughter.   Photini was deeply transformed by this encounter with Christ to the point that she even preached to her fellow Samaritans, which must have taken tremendous courage, for her neighbors surely did not think of her as a spiritual teacher.  Photini found healing for her soul, becoming an evangelist and ultimately a martyr together with her sons and sisters.  

            We cannot tell the story of our Lord’s resurrection without mentioning the uniquely blessed role of the women who were the very first witnesses of the empty tomb.  Mary Magdalene was the first preacher of the resurrection, for she proclaimed the good news to the apostles.  Photini bore witness to her neighbors about this unusual Jewish Messiah so powerfully that many Samaritans believed and the Lord stayed with them for two days. The Church honors both Mary Magdalene and Photini as being “equal to the apostles” in proclaiming the good news.

            As St. Paul taught, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  (Gal. 3:28) He rose in victory over all the corrupting influences of sin, including the domination, strife, and sorrow characteristic of the often-troubled relationship between men and women. In Him, the spiritual status of the sexes is the same; the differences between men and women concern the body, not the soul.  Male or female, the saints are examples for us all of how to share fully in the life of our Savior.  Absolutely nothing in the biological differences between males and females excludes or excuses anyone from the calling to become radiant with the divine energies as a living icon of God, for we all bear His image equally. We must not allow differences in the roles fulfilled by the sexes in any time or place, or in the life of the Church, to obscure that fundamental truth.  Even as that is true of the God-given distinction between male and female, we must be on guard against the temptation to allow divisions of any kind between groups of people to determine whether we treat each person as a living icon of Christ who is called, no less than we are, to enter into the joy of His resurrection.  The differences between races, ethnicities, and other groupings that seem so important in our world of corruption have no spiritual significance at all in our Lord’s Kingdom.

There was no small controversy in the early Church about whether Gentiles could become Christians without first becoming Jews. Today’s reading from Acts describes the establishment of the first Gentile church in Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians.  Especially as Antiochian Orthodox Christians, we must remember that our faith is not the property or servant of any nation, ethnic group, or ideological faction.  Christ’s Kingdom subverts the categories of our fallen world and calls our social assumptions into question. He died and rose up in order to fulfill His gracious purposes for all He created to become like God in holiness as “partakers of the divine nature” by grace.  There is no ethnic or national test for sharing in His life.  He empowered the Myrrh-Bearing Women to behold and proclaim His resurrection and enabled a Samaritan woman with a broken personal history to become a powerful evangelist and martyr.  He has drawn Gentiles into His Body, the Church, as a sign of His fulfillment of the ancient promises to Abraham for the salvation of all peoples through faith in Him.  His great victory over sin and death destroys the basis of judging the spiritual prospects of anyone according to the conventional standards of this world.  In order to enter into the joy of Christ’s resurrection, we must refuse to think, speak, and act as though we were still held captive to the fear of death, which is at the root of our pathetic inclination to view and treat people, no matter who they are, according to worldly divisions that contradict the good news of our salvation.

            Christ said, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:32) No one other than the Savior would have looked at Photini and seen a future saint who would shine with the light of holiness. Her transformation shows that there truly is hope for us all in the mercy of Christ.  Nothing but our own pride can keep us from humbly opening our souls to the Lord for healing, as she did.  Even as we must entrust ourselves to the Lord’s mercy as “the chief of sinners,” we must not view anyone else as a lost cause before God.  Christ warned the self-righteous religious leaders who rejected Him, “Tax-collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God before you.” (Matt. 21:31) Even as we pray for the Lord’s mercy on our sick souls, we must pray for His blessings for our neighbors, especially those we are inclined to despise and condemn.    If our Risen Lord can make a great saint out of the Samaritan woman at the well, there is hope for us all to be set free from the enslaving ravages of sin.  We must place no limits on the saving power of the One Who conquered death itself for our salvation.  If we do so, then we will have failed to appreciate the radically good news of the resurrection, which extends literally to all, calling us to embrace our restoration and fulfillment as human persons in the image and likeness of God who are not blinded by the divisions of our world of corruption.   

St. Photini has shown us what that looks like, and she invites us to follow her into the life of a Kingdom that remains not of this world.  She was an unlikely evangelist in that time and place, but her courageous and steadfast faith did not allow fear of any kind to stop her.  Let us embrace the joy of the resurrection so profoundly that we put aside all worries driven by the fear of death and bear witness to the Lord Who has liberated us from slavery to sin and the grave through His glorious resurrection on the third day, for “Christ is Risen!”