Monday, July 24, 2023

It is the 24th of July 2023. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org, I’m Dan van Voorhis.

A very happy Monday to you- as a side note, there will be no trade for Shohei, so stop talking about it. If he leaves, however, all is vanity.

I got a request from a listener- Jason, in Lafayette, Indiana. Of course, I do him a favor with trepidation as Lafayette is the Shelbyville to West Lafayette’s Springfield, the birthplace of Gillespie. The two towns don’t get along, but we respect Lafayette proper as the home to half of the band Guns N Roses—no word on if they were referring to the original Lafayette in Paradise City.

Ok- Jason has a Facebook project, “Great Cloud of Witnesses,” where he collects biographies of Christians and asked if I knew of Elizabeth of Hesse and By Rhine. And Jason, yes I do… and yes, this is a remarkable story- thanks for the encouragement to tell her story.

She was born Princess Elizabeth of Hesse and by the Rhine in 1864 to the Grand Duke of Hesse and his wife, Princess Alice of the United Kingdom- a daughter of Queen Victoria. She grew up speaking both English and German, visiting the court of Victoria, and eventually being courted by many of the great heirs of European nobility. Her sister and mother would both die from diphtheria- she would be raised by the Duke’s mother until she accepted the proposal of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia. This would put her on the front lines of the late Russian Empire's chaos and tragedy. Her younger sister would also marry into the Russian family marrying Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia.

Elizabeth and Sergei would be married in 1884 in the Chapel of the Winter Palace. As a compromise, it was a Lutheran service held in an Orthodox Church.  They would live in the Imperial Court in St. Petersburg before moving to Moscow.

She was beloved by many of the Russians for her service during the Russo-Japanese war leading Red Cross efforts and also sending out priests to perform services and distribute communion amongst the soldiers.

On February 4th, 1905, as she was working when she heard an explosion. Outside the Kremlin, an assassin threw a bomb into the carriage of the Duke. She ran towards the carriage to find her husband dismembered.

She mourned him and, in preparation for Sergei’s funeral, asked to be taken to the cell of her husband’s killer: Kalyayev. She asked why he did it. He claimed Sergei was an enemy of the people. She presented him with a Bible and asked him to repent. She told him that she forgave him and could ask the Czar for his release. The assassin refused and asked to be killed as a martyr of the state.

Elizabeth would find comfort in service. She divested herself of the family wealth and took Religious orders as a nun in the Church of the Sisters Mary and Martha. Stories of her selflessness abound in the literature on her- visiting and comforting those with Tuberculosis, dressing the wounds of a woman with gangrene. When the Revolution broke out in 1917, a contemporary report retells the story of a mob coming to the Monastery to arrest Elizabeth. She invited them in to pray with her, allowed them to search the grounds for the contraband they claimed was there, and then left her be when they found nothing. When her sister and the Tsar, and the other Romanovs were sent to Siberia, she was amongst the last nobility still in Moscow. In 1918 she was arrested and exiled to the East, where one evening, she and her companions were taken to a mineshaft. Elizabeth was beaten and thrown some 60 feet down the mine. There are various stories as to whether she died from the beating, the fall, or from starvation. She and her companions' bodies were recovered, and the body was received in Jerusalem by English authorities, who then had her buried on the 16th of January in 1920.

Jason- the story is amazing. Some versions have some pious embellishments (it’s standard, and sometimes the historian has to be judicious in what they accept), but the bare outline alone- her commitment to her faith, her forgiveness of her husband's assassin, and her own martyrdom certainly do meet remembering. Thanks for the encouragement to tell her story. If there’s a story you want to hear or a question you have, please email me at danv@1517.org

The last word for today comes from Revelation 14- an apocalyptic word, but fitting for a martyrdom:

12 This calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.

13 Then I heard a voice from heaven say, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.”

“Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 24th of July 2023, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man from the other side of the Wabash- amongst the Boilermakers, he is West Lafayette’s own Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man in Lake Forest, that Paradise City, where the grass is green, and the… never mind... I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.