Today, we remember St. Innocent, Enlightener of North America, the first bishop in this land, a lover of the native American peoples of Alaska, planter of the True Faith on these shores, a tireless evangelist, pastor, and spiritual father to his flock and forebear of our Church.
Christ our Great High Priest has left us through His Church the Apostles and through their successors, the bishops of the Church, the continuation of their Apostolic work through the ages. St. Innocent embodies so well the meaning of this word, “Apostle”, which in the Greek means, “sent.” He was sent by the Russian Church to pour out God’s love and the truth that liberates all people. The fruit of his work was seen first in Alaska, but has spread through all North America.
Some of you may have seen the television show, “Deadliest Catch,” which depicts the harrowing exploits of Alaska’s fishermen. Despite access to all the modern technology and conveniences, they still risk peril every time they’re on the sea. Picture for a moment Alaska in St. Innocent’s day in the mid 19th-century: a few dirt roads and almost all transportation by boat. Imagine the cold of Alaska winters and the infinite darkness without electricity.
St. Innocent could identify well with St. Paul’s words in today’s Epistle: “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed –always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”
St. Innocent undertook all such perils, visiting remote villages and all the habited Aleutian islands on those deadly seas, often in no more than a canoe. He faced severe conditions and served at great risk to life. But listen to the fruit of his work: he baptized ten thousand people, he built numerous churches—many with his own hands and those of his spiritual children, he founded schools and he himself taught the fundamentals of the Christian life. He learned six dialects of the native languages of Alaska and translated the Gospels, the divine services, and much of the hymnody of the Church into those native languages and dialects.
St. Innocent’s spiritual descendants, the native peoples of Alaska first and we second, particularly those who have come to embrace the Orthodox Faith as converts, can identify so well with St. Paul’s words in today’s Epistle, when he affirms, “The same God who commanded light to shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Embracing Christ and His Church, we too have come to the light and the true faith.
What motivated St. Innocent? What drove him to risk his own life and limb countless times? It was the love of Christ. He desired more than anything that these people, left in the darkness of paganism, should embrace the light of Christ and find new life in Him through His holy Church. St. Innocent didn’t come to make them good Russians, he came to make them Christians, followers of Christ. This is evidenced by the fact that he undertook the daunting task of learning their native languages and translating the divine services into their native languages.
In other words, St. Innocent followed the pattern handed down to him through 2,000 years of the Church. Through him, we see a faithful model of the Orthodox Church’s missiology in keeping with what we see in the New Testament and throughout the Church’s history: He came to baptize the culture with the truth of Christ, not to obliterate it or bring 19th century Russian culture to it.
St. Innocent’s example is a good one for us to follow as well as the Church in America today. We don’t seek to become like the culture, nor do we seek to obliterate the culture; instead, we seek to bring the light of Christ into the darkness that otherwise threatens to swallow up this culture and everyone in it with secularism, nihilism, and neo-paganism; we baptize this culture, one person at a time, to transfigure it with the light and truth of Christ found in His Church.
As I preached last week and bears reiterating today, it isn’t just the bishops and priests who are called to evangelize, witness, and share their faith. All of us as baptized Orthodox are called to witness to the truth of Christ, to interject His light into those around us by the faithful striving we undertake to live out the truth of our faith—to attend the divine services, to pray daily, to confess and participate in the Sacraments, to give to the upbuilding of the Church, to love our neighbor: the more faithfully we do so, the stronger our witness and effect for the Kingdom of God will be.
We may not face the physical perils that St. Innocent did: we may never have to endure an Alaskan winter without electricity or travel by canoe on deadly ice-cold sees, or travel by land weary of Grizzlies, in order to preach the Gospel and share our Orthodox Faith, but what do we do to live out the Gospel and the Orthodox Faith for those around us?
Do we love and pray for our neighbors, our co-workers, are fellow students, the people we know in town or who we run into time and again at the post office or the grocery store? Do we make the sign of the cross when God prompts us as a witness to His truth and presence? Do we call on God in times of anxiety and temptation? Are we preoccupied with our own problems to such an extent that we are inward focused or are we focused on the needs of those around us?
We’re reminded here of St. Paul’s words to us today, “we have this treasure in earthen vessels”, in other words, we who are God’s adopted children are frail, we’re weak. But in confessing our weakness before God we receive and grow to rely on His strength and not on our own understanding. Instead of pride and self-reliance, we choose to embrace humility and love, we allow God to work in us and through us to His glory. We acknowledge and embrace our weakness and rely on God so that “the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”
This truth is key to the effectiveness of our own personal witness and that of our Mission. The extent to which you and I—all of us as this local body of Christ allow God to work, learn to rely on Him and His power and give sacrificially of ourselves to build up this church, our missionary mission, just as St. Innocent did for the building up of the Church in Alaska, the more fruitful our efforts will be to bring the light of Christ to bear on the darkness around us.
Many are the struggles with our culture today and those who taste of its nihilism. For those who face antagonism from others for their faith in Christ or who face grave temptations and struggles from the demons, we find encouragement from St. Paul, “we are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed: we are perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed. Why? Because we remember we are earthen vessels—we die to self and to this world that we may remember our true life hidden in Christ. He has overcome this world and risen from the dead to eternal life and we will too if our trust is in Him.
St. John Chrysostom puts it this way: “As we endure His dying now, and choose while living to die for His sake: so also He will choose, when we are dead, to beget us then into life. For if we come from life into death, He will also lead us by the hand from death into life.”
Nothing is too great for God; no temptation, no spiritual sickness, nothing that this world can do to us, can rob us of the love of God and our communion with Him if we’re willing to struggle, to die to self, and come outside ourselves to live for God. As we die to the world and live for Christ, we give others hope that they too can overcome this world. As we live out our baptism into Christ, we give others hope that they too can be baptized and put on Christ, and step by step, we follow in the footsteps of St. Innocent as his spiritual descendants, baptizing the culture around us with the light and life of our Lord God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday, 6 October 2013
Commemoration of St. Innocent, Enlightener of North America
Epistle: Hebrews 7:26-8:2; II Cor. 4:6-15
Gospel: John 10:9-16; Luke 7:11-16
