The Meeting of the Lord ( 15.02.2005 )
Today in Štip, in the church of Saint Nicholas, the feast of the Meeting of the Lord was celebrated with Hierarchs’ Divine Liturgy officiated by Metropolitan Timothy of Debar, Kičevo, and Plaošnik and his concelebrants, Metropolitan Nahum of Strumica and the diocesan Metropolitan Agathangel of Bregalnica, in the presence of a number of priests and deacons. The present faithful at the Liturgy partook of the Holy Mysteries of Christ.
“The heavenly gate did open today: the beginningless Word of the Father received beginning in time, remaining Divine, from the Virgin as a forty-day-old Child, with His Mother willingly offers Himself in the Church of the Law, and an elder receives Him in his hands, crying out: Let Your servant depart, Master, for my eyes have seen Your salvation, that came to the world to save mankind, O Lord, glory to You!” (stichera at Vespers)
“Let us hasten to the Mother of God in desire to see Her Son, born by Symeon, He Whom the bodiless, watching from the heavens, admired, saying: A wonder do we see now, most glorious, unreachable and ineffable, He Who created Adam is borne as a Child, the uncontainable in an elder’s hands is contained, He Who cannot be portrayed in His Father’s bosom, willingly with flesh is portrayed, not with Divinity, the only philanthrope.” (ikos of the festive canon)
