202. Слово на освящение храма Пресвятыя Богородицы, в честь иконы Ея Иерусалимския, в городе Бронницах, совершившееся февраля в 3 день 1846 года

(Printed in the Works of St. Ot. 1846 and in the collection of 1848) Only in the place where the Lord your God will choose, in one of your tribes, call His name there, and call, and you will seek and go there. (Deut.12:5). Many times, brothers, I visited your city: and each time I felt dissatisfied; because I participated in only a short prayer with you, in your ancient church, being soon carried away by the other demands of my service. Therefore, your desire met my own desire, so that we could have more abundant communication with you in congregational prayer, with the grace-filled mystery of the consecration of the church you created. Well, if even now what I want cannot be fulfilled, and I must say with the Apostle: “I longed to come to you, and was forbidden” (Rom. 1:13)? Let us not be embarrassed or upset by the failure to fulfill our humble desires, if, according to the destinies of God, the apostolic desires are not always fulfilled! Let us say with the psalmist: “Does not my soul submit to God” (Ps. 61:2)? The work of sanctification is the work of God. Grace equally accomplishes it with one or another instrument, according to the order established by it. I want to do what I can: talk with you, if not personally, then at least through other lips. With consolation, I recognize in your newly built and consecrated church the work of your pious zeal, quite great for your small city, so that perhaps it will not be unjust to testify about you, as the Holy Apostle Paul testified about the Christians of Macedon, that you, like them, appeared “according to power, and more than power of goodwill” (2 Cor. 8:3). With the consolation of faith, I think that the sacrifices you made in building the house of God are pleasing to God, of which you have a sign in the very fact that He granted your undertaking completion, and accepted your dedication to Him, giving it His sanctification. With hope I accept for you the blessing from the lips of the prophet: “God of hosts, turn now, and look down from heaven, and see, and visit this vineyard, and cultivate what Thy right hand has planted” (Ps. 79:15-16)! Truly, Lord God of hosts, this people of believers are Your spiritual grapes; You have planted him with Your sovereign right hand: turn therefore to him now and in the time to come by Your grace, as he turns to You by faith and prayer; look upon him by Thy providence; see, the All-Seeing, his true needs, obvious and hidden; and visit him with Your bounties, establish him in Orthodoxy; protect from thieves who climb or undermine Your sacred fence - from heresies and temptations; grow in the knowledge of Your truth: fertilize with an abundance of good deeds, according to Your holy commandments; perfect every virtue for complete salvation! Turning again to the consoling subject of this celebration, in order to make the present consolation more solid and complete, I find it timely to offer you some thoughts about what good we acquired when we acquired the consecrated church of God. You can, and should, pray in every place, as the holy Apostle teaches. “I want,” he says, “for men to say prayers in every place, lifting up their holy hands, without anger or reflection” (1 Tim. 2:8), that is, without having anger at their neighbors during prayer, and without embarrassing themselves with wavering thoughts about the reality of prayer. And the Lord Savior himself commands everyone to pray in their own church, whichever one has, only in a solitary and silent one. “Whenever you pray, go into your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret” (Matthew 6:6). Be faithful to the commandment of the Lord; pray in solitude. Keep to the apostolic teaching: pray in every place. Especially when you wake up from sleep in the morning: think that God is giving you a day that you could not give to yourself, and set aside the first hour, or at least the first quarter of an hour of the day given to you, and sacrifice it to God, in grateful and benevolent prayer. The more diligently you do this, the more you will sanctify your day, the more firmly you will protect yourself from the temptations that you encounter every day. Likewise, when you go to sleep: think that God gives you rest from your labors, and take away the firstfruits from the time of your rest, and dedicate it to God with pure and humble prayer. Its fragrance will bring the Angel closer to you to protect your peace. Exercise in these and similar types of home and solitary prayer is necessary and beneficial for our soul: but this is not all that we need, and what God requires of us. In the book of the Acts of the Apostles it is written: “Peter and John together went up into the sanctuary to pray at the ninth hour” (Acts 3:1). What does it mean? The apostles heard the Lord’s command to pray in a solitary church: why are they not content with such prayer? Why do they go to pray in the sanctuary, that is, in the Jerusalem Temple, which is still holy, although it was soon to give up holiness to Christian churches? Why is this? - Because, in addition to home and solitary prayer, we also need public prayer, church prayer, in the sanctuary, in the church, which has received special divine consecration; and this kind of prayer is also based on the command of God. This commandment in the book of Moses reads like this: “only in the place where the Lord your God will choose, in one of your tribes, you shall call His name there, and call, and seek, and go in there.” That is: God does not want the public invocation of His name, or, in other words, church worship to be performed in some simple, unconsecrated place, but this should be done only in the place that God chooses and sanctifies for this; and everyone should come to this God-chosen and consecrated place and there call on God. King David undertook to fulfill this command of God, and King Solomon actually fulfilled it, creating a temple in Jerusalem, in the place that God had chosen and indicated through an Angel. The high priest and the priests consecrated this church, bringing into it a sacred ark in which the commandments written by the finger of God were kept; the glory of God overshadowed him; God gave him the high promise of His gracious presence: “My eyes and My heart will be there all the days” (1 Kings 9:3); and after this, God repeatedly expressed His indignation through the Prophets at those who offered sacrifices to the true God, but not in His holy church, but in high places, arbitrarily chosen and unsanctified. The Temple of Jerusalem, as Old Testament and transformative, was abolished by the appearance of the foreshadowed truth, that is, Christ the Savior, and the dispensation of the New Testament. The Apostles received from Christ the Savior, and handed over to their successors, the power to build Christian churches in every city and village. But the divine rule that the church should always be a place chosen and consecrated according to God’s order has been preserved in the Christian Church. Therefore, the rules of the Ecumenical Councils do not allow the construction of a church otherwise than with the blessing of the bishop, who inherited this power from the Apostles (IV Ecumenical Council pr. 4), and they prescribe that it be consecrated with sacred chrismation, and with the placement of the relics of saints (VII Ecumenical Coll. pr. 7). According to the power of this God-given sanctification, the ancient promise of the special grace-filled presence of God fully belongs to the Christian church: “My eyes will be there, and My heart will be there all the days.” The promise of Christ also primarily belongs to him: “where there are two or three congregations in My name, I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). If the Christian church is compared with the Old Testament, then we can easily see that both the initial sanctification and the constant subsequent shrine are characteristic of the Christian, not only on an equal basis with the Old Testament, but also to the highest degree. The great shrine of the Old Testament church were the commandments written by the finger of God; Don’t we also have a divine, and more abundant, shrine on the throne of our church in the Gospel, which contains the direct word of God the Word, written through the Evangelists by the Holy Spirit? There at the table is the showbread, a type of the bread of the animal coming down from heaven; here at the meal is the very bread of the animal, according to the word of the Lord: “The bread that I will give, my flesh is, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:51). There are bloody sacrifices, wordless, imperfect harbingers of the one universal Sacrifice, all-saving suffering, death and resurrection of Christ; here is the bloodless Sacrifice, verbal service, the everlasting renewal of the living Sacrifice of Christ the Savior, in the sacrament of His body and blood. There were guardian angels of the church; why, when the Temple of Jerusalem was about to be abolished and destroyed, the voice of invisible Powers was heard in it: “Let us leave from here”: Angels will also serve us here and protect the shrine that dwells here. So Abba Leonty, in the Lavra of St. Theodosius, having come to the church on Sunday to receive the Holy Mysteries, saw an Angel standing on the right side of the throne, and as the elder, fearful, turned to run to his cell, a voice came to him from the Angel: since this throne was consecrated, I have been entrusted to abide with it (Alphabet. Patericon. Zn. L. Ch. 4). What has been said so far, I hope, is enough to show you, brethren, that, in addition to home and solitary prayer, the immutable word of God and our very salvation require from us also church prayer, in the church according to the sacred rite consecrated by God; so also what benefits the holy Christian Orthodox church contains and offers to us. In it we find the special grace-filled presence of God, divine light and the saving power of the Gospel, sincere union with Christ in the sacrament of His body and blood, heavenly angelic help, the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, abiding shrine, and sanctifying those who enter with reverence and faith. Let us glorify the Lord, the generous Giver of so many blessings! “Let us love the beauty of the house” of the Lord, “and the dwelling place of His glory” (Ps. 25:8)! May we flow into the house of God willingly and with love, like children into their father’s house! With simplicity and humility of heart, with silence of mind, with the putting aside of all worldly cares, let us here surrender to the action of the Spirit of God, who animates the divine service! Let us not be negligent in purifying and sanctifying ourselves with the sacraments! Let us be careful not to bring the stench of unclean life into this place of the fragrance of holy things! At the same time, one cannot help but remember with regret those who either avoid the holy church for a long time, out of negligence, or move away from it completely, because, as a result of sinful opinions, they want to pray not in the holy church, but in a place that God has not chosen and which no one has sanctified. What benefits are they depriving themselves of! And what an answer they expose themselves to before God! Churches moving away from the shrine 671 say that they are doing this according to the old faith. It's amazing how people can distort the truth if they so desire. Where did they find the old faith without a hierarchy and without consecrated churches? This belief is very new; Two hundred years have not yet passed since it arose. The truly old faith, from the beginning of Christianity, had and has had a continuous hierarchy and consecrated churches. I know an old example of moving away from the holy church and from the hierarchy established by God, with the thought of the old faith: but it, of course, will not be pleasing to those who in our country proclaim themselves followers of the old faith. The Samaritans did not want to go to the Jerusalem temple and obey the local hierarchy; they built for themselves something that looked like a church, but not its shrine, on Mount Garizin; some priests ran to them from the Jerusalem Temple, and a new unblessed service opened. In order to gain some trust from the people for this illegal action, the innovators said that they were doing this according to the old faith, and only old books were accepted, namely, the five books of Moses; and they rejected the other books of the prophets as no longer old. Not having an ancient church shrine, they boasted that they had an old well from which Patriarch Jacob drank. Specious references to antiquity and the mention of the deeply respected name of Patriarch Jacob captivated a considerable number of unreasonable ones; and the most prudent of the Samaritans, the wife mentioned in the Gospel, although she felt the weakness of this teaching, nevertheless doubted whether it would not be truly better to pray in the mountain of Samaria rather than in the temple of Jerusalem. But so that no one would be carried away by such seductions, Christ the Savior said to the Samaritan woman: “You bow down to him who you do not know; we bow down to him who we know; for there is salvation from the Jews” (John 4:22). That is, you are praying in the mountain of Samaria, not knowing to whom; We, who pray in the Temple of Jerusalem, pray to God, Whom we know, and from Whom we have the promise of salvation. I do not want to offend anyone by comparison with the Samaritans: but to you, obedient children of the new Jerusalem, to you, prayer books of the church consecrated by God, I set before your eyes the example of the Samaritans, for your caution, so that you “keep away from those who create strife and strife,” who, as the Apostle says, “with good words deceive the hearts of the gentle” (Rom. 16:17-18). “Words” apparently speak “good”: but in fact they “deceive” and lead away from the truth. Old faith, old books, patriarch - beautiful words; but with these words, deceptively used, the Samaritans were “deceived” and moved away from the true church and from the path of salvation. Be careful and protect each other, so that no one’s heart is deceived by such improperly used words. Adhere to the ancient, or, better to say, eternal Orthodox dogmas of faith, which are equally preached in both old and new books: and at the same time adhere to the hierarchy established by God and the church consecrated by God. Keep yourself in constant, sincere communion with the grace and holiness that dwells in the holy Church, in which, according to the divine word, “the glory of Christ Jesus abides and will abide to God throughout all generations of ages, amen” (Eph. 3:21)! To the department. edition: "saints". You might be interested in: