Sermon on the feast of the holy Royal Passion-Bearers Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!
Today we have gathered to honor the memory of the seven Royal Passion-Bearers and, as we heard in the troparion, “a united domestic church”.1 Indeed, for us the Royal Family is a true model of the most important family values of one Church. The people who killed the Emperor and his family knew perfectly well what they were doing. Maybe not all those who committed this crime, but those who were behind it, waited for it and instigated it in every possible way for decades—those villains knew perfectly well what exactly they were doing.
The basement of the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg where the Royal Family was executed, 1918
In fact, it was not just a ruler who was killed, but a family. It was the terrible and demonstrative murder of a Russian family. They stormed into a domestic church and smashed everything inside, flooding everything with blood, desecrating everything, and then the history of our people in the twentieth century was stained with this blood. True, there were many various accomplishments, discoveries, and victories, but if we take the history of Russia and the Russian nation over almost a century, what have we come to? There is an impression that our people just went to zero. It seems as if the century existed and did not exist.
And then, when our country began to disintegrate, it became even worse—there were fewer and fewer of us. And it is clear that our weakest point is not the lack of some technological means or the right policies (as everyone keeps saying), but the most terrible wounds are our “domestic church”, our family. And many of us, too many, know this from our own lives. But if there is no family, no real “domestic church”, then there will be no one to build the Church, which is why we have so many problems. When you look at the biographies of individuals who provoke schisms in the Church, you see how much comes from the family. There are narcissism and vanity here—people to do everything for their own selves, and not for someone else. The reason is that they have never seen a real example of a “domestic church”, and it is difficult for them to build the Church of Christ in the right way, to sacrifice themselves for their neighbors.
In this sense, the Royal Martyrs are the real patrons of our Christian family. Since relatively recently we have had a new national holiday on the feast of Sts. Peter and Fevronia of Murom (July 8),2 but I believe we should especially pray to the Royal Martyrs, because Tsar Nicholas II was indeed the last true Christian ruler of Russia, and his family was an ideal one. You can criticize the Emperor for some flaws in his policies (he is criticized both from the right and the left), but certainly no one can dispute that it was a genuine, good, beautiful, Christian family. The Royal Family and the families, or rather some semblance of families that the subsequent rulers of our country had, are beyond comparison.
Gather teenagers aged between ten and fourteen and take them to some center where photographs of the Royal Family hang. It is hard to imagine that there will also be photographs of the families of Communist leaders hanging there, although those people were married in church as well, especially the first generations. But if you look at their lives from this perspective, then, of course, it’s a complete nightmare and a tragedy.
The “New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church” Exhibition at Moscow Sretensky Monastery
The Royal Passion-Bearers are the patrons of Russian Christian families, and we must pray to them. And those who do it see that it really helps. As a famous missionary priest wrote in an essay: Tsar Nicholas II is even stronger now than he was in his lifetime. And he really is. Now no one obstructs him—not politicians, nor newspapers, nor the Russian aristocracy, which hated him perhaps more than the working class. After all, corruption came from there. Interestingly, it is still seen among descendants of the White emigrants—not all of them are sympathetic to the Royal Family. They are more loved here, in their motherland, where Communism ruled minds. Descendants of those Communists are doing more for the Royal Family, expressing their love for them more actively. They are building churches in honor of the Royal Martyrs, studying their biographies, writing books about them, and so on.
We must especially pray to the Royal Martyrs in our family adversities, in troubles (if you have an incomplete family, or if some mistakes were made, etc.) so that Tsar Nicholas II as a real father would not forsake us. When he was an Emperor, the people who lived on the territory of the Russian Empire did not fight with each other and did not kill each other. And once the Royal Family was killed, the Civil War broke out, and the twentieth century became a chain of terrible, tragic events. And the country ever shrunk, we were divided all the time, because our father whom the Lord had appointed was taken away from us and we wanted something else. And this “something else” was very bloody and dreadful. We lost our own face.
Let us ask the Royal Martyrs for their prayers, patronage, protection over us, and for enlightenment, so that the remnants of Christian morality in our people may not disappear, but be revived, and new generations can be better than us in this sense and have a better knowledge of the Royal Family, their struggles and their lives, and can be more like them than we are. Amen.
