Acts 3:19-26 (Epistle)
19 Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord,
20 and that He may send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before,
21 whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began.
22 For Moses truly said to the fathers, ‘The LORD your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren. Him you shall hear in all things, whatever He says to you.
23 And it shall be that every soul who will not hear that Prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people.’
24 Yes, and all the prophets, from Samuel and those who follow, as many as have spoken, have also foretold these days.
25 You are sons of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
26 To you first, God, having raised up His Servant Jesus, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from your iniquities.”
John 2:1-11 (Gospel)
1 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.
2 Now both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding.
3 And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.”
4 Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.”
5 His mother said to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.”
6 Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece.
7 Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” And they filled them up to the brim.
8 And He said to them, “Draw some out now, and take it to the master of the feast.” And they took it.
9 When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom.
10 And he said to him, “Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!”
11 This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed in Him.
Apostles Jason and Sosipater of the Seventy, the Virgin Kerkyra, and those with them
The Apostle Jason was from Tarsus (Asia Minor). He was the first Christian in the city. The Apostle Sosipater was a native of Patra, Achaia. He is thought to be the same Sosipater mentioned in Acts 20:4. They both became disciples of Saint Paul, who even called them his kinsmen (Rom 16:21). Saint John Chrysostom (Homily 32 on Romans) says that this is the same Jason who is mentioned in Acts 17:5-9. Saint Jason was made bishop in his native city of Tarsus, and Saint Sosipater in Iconium. They traveled west preaching the Gospel, and in 63 they reached the island of Kerkyra [Korfu] in the Ionian Sea near Greece.
There they built a church in the name of the Protomartyr Stephen and they baptized many. The governor of the island learned of this and locked them up in prison, where they met seven thieves: Saturninus, Iakischolus, Faustianus, Januarius, Marsalius, Euphrasius and Mammius. The Apostles converted them to Christ. For their confession of Christ, the seven prisoners died as martyrs in a cauldron of molten tar, wax and sulfur.
The prison guard, after witnessing their martyrdom, declared himself a Christian. For this they cut off his left hand, then both feet and finally his head. The governor ordered the Apostles Jason and Sosipater to be whipped and again locked up in prison.
When the daughter of the governor of Kerkyra (Korfu), the maiden Kerkyra, learned how Christians were suffering for Christ, she declared herself a Christian and gave away all her finery to the poor. The infuriated governor attempted to persuade his daughter to deny Christ, but Saint Kerkyra stood firm against both persuasion and threats. Then the enraged father devised a terrible punishment for his daughter: he gave orders that she be placed in a prison cell with the robber and murderer Murinus, so that he might defile the betrothed of Christ
But when the robber approached the door of the prison cell, a bear attacked him. Saint Kerkyra heard the noise and she drove off the beast in the name of Christ. Then, by her prayers, she healed the wounds of Murinus. Then Saint Kerkyra enlightened him with the faith of Christ, and Saint Murinus declared himself a Christian and was executed.
The governor gave orders to burn down the prison, but the holy virgin remained alive. Then on her enraged father’s order, she was suspended upon a tree, choked with bitter smoke and shot with arrows. After her death, the governor decided to execute all the Christians on the island of Kerkyra. The Martyrs Zeno, Eusebius, Neon and Vitalis, after being enlightened by Saints Jason and Sosipater, were burned alive.
The inhabitants of Kerkyra, escaping from the persecution, crossed to an adjoining island. The governor set sail with a detachment of soldiers, but was swallowed up by the waves. The governor succeeding him gave orders to throw the Apostles Jason and Sosipater into a cauldron of boiling tar. When he beheld them unharmed, he cried out with tears, “O God of Jason and Sosipater, have mercy on me!”
Having been set free, the Apostles baptized the governor and gave him the name Sebastian. With his help, the Apostles Jason and Sosipater built several churches on the island, and increased the flock of Christ by their fervent preaching. They lived there until they reached old age.
The Importance of Patiently Letting Down Our Nets in Obedience
By Priest Philip LeMasters
If there is any virtue that seems completely foreign to our culture today, it is patience. From fast food to cell phones, from transportation to losing weight, we want instant results and think that something is wrong if we do not get what we want immediately. Thoughtful people learn, however, that disappointments and delays are often actually good for us. They inspire us to see ourselves and the realities of life more clearly. But when impatience becomes a settled habit, it blinds us to the necessity of humble persistence in facing life’s challenges, both small and great.
Peter, James, and John were professional fishermen who had worked all night and caught nothing. They knew that it was time to wash their nets, go home, and try again tomorrow. But the Lord said, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” Peter answered in a way that showed his frustration: “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at Your word I will let down the nets.” When they did so, they caught so many fish that their nets broke and their boats began to sink. That was not only an unlikely and amazing scene; it also opened Peter’s eyes at least a bit to where He stood before the Lord, as he said to Christ, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” The Savior responded, “Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men.” Then Peter, James, and John left their boats and nets behind as they became the first apostles.
Though Peter became the head disciple, he struggled mightily in faith. He denied the Lord three times before His crucifixion and had earlier heard the stinging rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan!,” when he had rejected the message that Christ would be killed and rise from the dead. After His resurrection, the Lord restored Peter by asking him three times if he loved Him and commanding him to “feed My sheep” in fulfilling his ministry. (Jn. 21: 15-17) Peter was the first bishop of the Church in Antioch and in Rome, where he made the ultimate witness for the Savior as a martyr. He surely did not get everything right the first time. At many points in his discipleship, he must have been as frustrated as he had been as a fisherman who had worked all night and caught nothing. But despite his many failures in understanding what kind of Messiah he was following, Peter did not allow pride to keep him from accepting the Lord’s forgiveness and restoration. From the time the Savior first called him to the end of his earthly life, St. Peter kept letting down his nets and surely being shocked beyond belief that the Lord was still with him and working through him despite his less than perfect faith.
Saint Paul reminded the Corinthians that “now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” He meant that we must not put off faithfulness to Jesus Christ until we think that our faith is perfect or that the circumstances of our lives are as we would like them to be. He described the ministry of the apostles as requiring “great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger…in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”
By the conventional standards of this world, people like Sts. Peter and Paul were failures who acquired no wealth or power. They threw their lives away out of devotion to an obscure rabbi of first-century Palestine. There would never be an ideal time to be faithful to Him, for the Lord’s Cross would always remain foolishness in the eyes of the world. But had Peter not obeyed the command on that particular day, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch,” he would not have opened himself to receive the blessing of the great catch of fish. Remember that it was this shocking scene that awakened in Peter’s soul at least a partial awareness of who he was before Christ, for he said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” That is how he gained the measure of spiritual clarity that he needed in order to begin the long and difficulty journey of serving Christ.
Too often, we have less patience and faith before the challenges and disappointments of our lives than Peter did. Too often, we convince ourselves that it is pointless to persist in obeying Christ as best we can because our nets apparently remain empty of the blessings that we want for ourselves, our loved ones, and our world. Too often, we impatiently conclude that there is no point in persisting in the difficult struggle of faithfulness to the Lord because we are not getting the quick results that we want. To view the Christian faith in that way, however, is to make it a path for serving ourselves, not the Lord Who reigns from a Cross and an empty tomb. We will never enter His Kingdom by refusing all that does not operate on our schedules or according to our preferences.
Our calling, like that of Peter and the first disciples, is simply to obey Christ’s command to follow Him. When we stumble in doing so, we must cultivate the humble recognition of Peter, who said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” When we recognize that we have distorted the way of Christ into a path for serving ourselves, we must offer the Jesus Prayer from the depths of our hearts as we reorient ourselves toward true faithfulness. When we are tempted to abandon any of the basic practices of the Christian life because they do not appear to produce the results that we would like, we must humbly persist in them out of obedience and grow in our awareness that sharing in the life of Christ is not a magical path to achieving any goal of this life.
There is no guarantee of a net full of fish, of course, and the point of that miracle was not to make Peter successful in his line of work. It was, instead, to call him, James, and John as apostles who would become “fishers of men.” It was to draw them into the ministry of the Kingdom of God for the edification of the Church and the salvation of the world. They had to leave everything behind and endure profound trials, which revealed their need for greater spiritual strength. Our vocations are far humbler than theirs, but we must trust that Christ is preparing us to become “fishers of men” through our own struggles in ways that we do not fully understand. We can give up and say that there is no point in pursuing a religion that does not quickly solve all our problems in life, but to do so is to refuse to accept that “now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation,” regardless of how well we think that things are going. Now is the time to let down our nets, even though we have fished all night, caught nothing, and would rather simply go home. We do not know the particulars of what God will do when we offer ourselves to Him in patient obedience, but we must trust that doing so will enable us to share more fully in the healing of the human person that Christ has brought to the world.
Looking to the example of the apostles, let us persevere in the daily struggle to be faithful even as we know that we are sinful people who can ask only for the Lord’s mercy. The greater awareness we have of our own brokenness, the more patient trust we will have that God is filling our nets as they need to be filled for our salvation and that of the world. Let us persist in letting them down for a catch today and every day of our lives. That is the only way that we will grow in our participation in the life of Christ and become those who draw others to the blessedness of His Kingdom.
This week’s calendar reminders:
Monday 4/28: Matins 8:30 a.m.
Tuesday 4/29: no services or events
Wednesday 4/30: no services or events
Thursday 5/1: Matins 8:30 a.m.
Friday 5/2: Matins 8:30 a.m.
Saturday 5/3: Great Vespers 6 p.m.
Sunday 5/4: Divine Liturgy 9:15 a.m.
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Christ the Savior Orthodox Church is located in Southbury, Connecticut, and is part of the New England Diocese of the Orthodox Church of America.
Mailing address: Christ the Savior Church, 1070 Roxbury Road, Southbury, CT 06488
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Fr. Moses Locke can be reached at frmoseslocke@gmail.com