Saturday Reading

Acts 5:21b-33
When the high priest and his companions arrived, they convened the Sanhedrin, the full senate of the Israelites, and sent to the jail to have them brought in. But the court officers who went did not find them in the prison, so they came back and reported, “We found the jail securely locked and the guards stationed outside the doors, but when we opened them, we found no one inside.” When they heard this report, the captain of the temple guard and the chief priests were at a loss about them, as to what this would come to. Then someone came in and reported to them, “The men whom you put in prison are in the temple area and are teaching the people.” Then the captain and the court officers went and brought them in, but without force, because they were afraid of being stoned by the people. When they had brought them in and made them stand before the Sanhedrin, the high priest questioned them, “We gave you strict orders (did we not?) to stop teaching in that name. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and want to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles said in reply, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our ancestors raised Jesus, though you had him killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as leader and savior to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins. We are witnesses of these things, as is the holy Spirit that God has given to those who obey him.” When they heard this, they became infuriated and wanted to put them to death.

John 16:1-4
“I have told you this so that you may not fall away. They will expel you from the synagogues; in fact, the hour 1 is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God. They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me. I have told you this so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you. “I did not tell you this from the beginning, because I was with you.

Prayer of the Faithful, vol.III
Ramsho – First Prayer (page 142)

In your infinite goodness, O Lord,
grant a place among the saints in the dwelling of life and joy
to our parents, brothers and sisters and teachers who have gone
to you in sincere faith and hope fo gladness.
Grant us to share with them in the inheritance of the saints.
Our Lord and God, to you be glory forever.
Amen.

Saint of the day: Martyrs of Chalcedon
Three well educated Christian men (Manuel, Sabel, and Ismael) were sent as ambassa-dors from King Baltan of Persia to the court of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate to nego-tiate peace between the two states, and an end of Julian’s persecution of Christians. Julian who had left the Christian faith and was the last pagan emperor of Rome put the three ambassadors in prison and executed them after their refusal to participate in false pagan worship.

Meditation:
The ministry of the bishop in the early church was intimately tied to the eucharist. The eucharist was the sacrament that, “made the church,” and all her other sacraments and all her ministries flowed from the eucharistic liturgy. St. Ignatius of An-tioch writes in his Letter to the Philadelphians, “For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to show forth the unity of his blood; one altar, as there is one bish-op.” St. Ignatius sees the bishop as the one who guarantees the unity, the truth, and the catholicity of the Church. We see in his Letter to the Smyrnaeans, “Let that be deemed a proper eucharist which is administered either by the bishop or by one to whom he has entrusted it”.
In the third century, a century after St. Ignatius, we find in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, that the bishop was ordained to “shepherd the flock” and “to offer Thee [God] the gifts of the Thy Holy Church”. In the same vein the Syriac writing usually re-ferred to by its Latin title Didascalia Apostolorum, states “that the eucharist is offered only through the bishop who for this reason occupies ‘the place of God’ in the church”.
In the New Testament the word for church, “ekklesia” is used close to eighty times and fifty-seven of those times it refers to a specific concrete “gathering”. The ex-perience and understanding of the church for early Christians was simultaneously lo-cal and universal because of the eucharist, presided over by the bishop who simulta-neously affirmed the unity of the concrete gathering and their unity with the universal (catholicity) gathering of all true believers. This liturgical-theological truth was so en-grained in the mind of the early church, that even with the advent of the Constantinian period and the interfacing of church governance with Imperial Roman governance, could not destroy its memory. So in making the bishop a territorial administrator with priests to preside at the eucharist of numerous parishes, with the church’s population exploding after Constantine; to signify this ancient sense of unity a portion of the bish-op’s consecrated bread would be taken to his parishes reminding them that he is still their eucharistic presider.