On 1 July 2016 the head of the Central Asian Metropolitan District, Metropolitan Vikenty of Tashkent and Uzbekistan, celebrated the festal Divine Liturgy in honour of the Bogolyubskaya icon of the Mother of God at the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in the city of Jizzakh. A special gift for the parishioners of the Jizzakh church was that His Eminence brought with him, for the veneration of the faithful, a reliquary containing a particle of the relics of St. Nicholas.
Concelebrating with His Eminence at the Liturgy were the dean of the Gulistan Deanery, Archpriest Pavel Sergeev, the dean of the Samarkand Deanery, Archpriest Roman Zagrebelny, Priest Nikolai Klimenko, Priest Igor Babakov, Priest Vladimir Skornyakov, Hierodeacon Mikhail (Stolyarov), Deacon Alexander Kolotovkin, Deacon Oleg Daushev and Deacon Fortunat.
At the end of the Divine Liturgy Metropolitan Vikenty addressed the faithful with a sermon in which he greeted them on the feast of the Bogolyubskaya icon of the Most Holy Theotokos, briefly recounting how this copy of the image of the Queen of Heaven came to be glorified, and that it appeared in Rus’ almost two centuries after the land had received Orthodoxy: “Not much time had passed after the Baptism of Rus’. And already the Most Holy Theotokos showed Her mercy upon the Russian land, upon the people living in the Russian Church. Today we see Her icon before us. The Most Holy Theotokos appeared to the right-believing Prince Andrew Bogolyubsky. And we bow before it, we pray before this icon and receive mercy and blessing from the Mother of God. When we see this mercy of the Most Holy Theotokos, that She has so often and so greatly shown us Her favour and helped us, we conclude that the Mother of God especially loves us and honours our people. Therefore we too must love Her; She is worthy of our love. She is the all-honourable vessel of God’s grace. She contained within Herself the uncontainable God. She became the one who served the great mystery of the Incarnation.”
Concluding his archpastoral sermon, Metropolitan Vikenty reminded the faithful that we Orthodox Christians are now keeping the fast of the chief Apostles Peter and Paul, the great ascetics and pillars of our Church, noting: “They are for us an example of true repentance. That is why we keep this fast in their honour and prepare to glorify them on the day of their memory, 12 July. Each of them in his time sinned before God, but they repented not only in words — ‘Lord, forgive me! Yes, I am guilty’ — they repented every day throughout their whole lives. And so the Apostles Peter and Paul call us to constant repentance throughout our whole lives. We must live with this sense of repentance, with an awareness of repentance. When we have such an awareness, we sin less.”
