Schedule of Services:
Saturday, Great Vespers, 6:00 pm
Sunday, Reader's Typica Service or The Divine Liturgy, 10:00 am
Wednesdays, 6:00 pm: Vespers
-Holy Days as Announced-
O foremost in the ranks of Apostles,and teachers of the world, Peter and Paul, intercede with the Master of all to grant safety to the world,and to our souls the Great Mercy.
Prokeimenon. 3rd Tone. Luke 1: 46-48.
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Verse: For he has regarded the humility of his servant.
The reading is from St. Paul's Letter to the Hebrews 9:1-7.
BRETHREN, the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly sanctuary. For a tent was prepared, the outer one, in which were the lampstand and the table and the bread of the Presence; it is called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain stood a tent called the Holy of Holies, having the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant covered on all sides with gold, which contained a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant; above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat. Of these things we cannot now speak in detail. These preparations having thus been made, the priests go continually into the outer tent, performing their ritual duties; but into the second only the high priest goes, and he but once a year, and not without taking blood which he offers for himself and for the errors of the people.
4th Sunday of Matthew
The Reading is from Matthew 8:5-13
At that time, as Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, beseeching him and saying, "Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, in terrible distress." And he said to him, "I will come and heal him." But the centurion answered him, "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this,' and he does it." When Jesus heard him, he marveled, and said to those who followed him, "Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth." And to the centurion Jesus said, "Go; be it done for you as you have believed." And the servant was healed at that very moment.
Saint Juvenal was (together with Saint Herman; see Dec. 12) a member of the first mission sent from Russia to proclaim the Gospel in the New World. He was a priest-monk, and a zealous follower of the Apostles, and baptized hundreds of the natives of Alaska. He was martyred by enraged pagans in 1796.
During the reign of Leo the Great (457-474) two patricians and brethren on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land lodged with an old widow, a Christian of Jewish descent. Seeing the many miracles wrought at a small shrine in her house, they pressed her until she revealed to them that she had raiment of the most holy Theotokos kept in a small coffer. Our Lady had had two virgins in her lifetime who attended upon her; before her holy dormition, she gave each of them one of her divine garments as a blessing. This old widow was of the family of one of those two virgins, and it had come through the generations into her hands. With the permission of God, that this holy relic might be had for the profit of many, the two men took the garment by stealth and brought it to Blachernae near Constantinople, and building a church in honor of the Apostles Peter and Mark, they secretly enshrined the garment therein. But here again, because of the multitude of miracles that were worked, it became known to the Emperor Leo, and a magnificent church was built, as some say, by that same Leo, but according to others, by his predecessors Marcian and Pulcheria, and enlarged by Leo when the holy raiment was found. The Emperor Justin the Younger completed the church, which the Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes raised up immediately again after it had burned in 1070. It burned again in 1434, and from that time it remained a small house of prayer together with the renowned holy spring. After the seventh century, the name Blachernae was given to other churches and monasteries by their pious founders out of reverence for this famous church in Constantinople. In this church John Catacuzene was crowned in 1345; also, the Council against Acindynus, the follower of Barlaam, was convoked here (see the Second Sunday of the Great Fast).
The Holy Hierarch John Maximovitch was born in the Kharkov region in 1896, and reposed in Seattle in 1966. In 1921, during the Russian Civil War, his family fled to Belgrade, joining the ranks of Russian exiles in Serbia, where he later became a monk and was ordained priest. In 1934 he was made Bishop of Shanghai, where he served until the Communists came to power. Thereafter he ministered in Europe, serving as Bishop first in Paris then in Brussels, until he became Archbishop of San Francisco in 1962. Throughout his life he was revered as a strict ascetic, a devoted man of prayer, and a truly wondrous unmercenary healer of all manner of afflictions and woes. He served the Divine Liturgy daily, slept little more than an hour a day, and kept a strict fast until the evening. It is doubtful that any one man gave so much protection and comfort as he to the Russian Orthodox people in exile after the Revolution of 1917; he was an unwearying and watchful shepherd of his sheep in China, the Philippines, Europe, and America. Through his missionary labors he also brought into the Church many who had not been "of this fold." Since his repose in 1966, he has been especially glorified by God through signs and miracles, and his body has remained incorrupt.