Legions of Justinius, Easter 1997, said, Therefore I command you: become Spartans to the finish, and let that finish be the ultimate finish of the fallen angels. Do you know, beloved, why many fallen angels are not taken from this planet? – It is because the fallen angels are so powerful that they overwhelm the children of this world. And oft times even the sons and daughters of God do not rise to the levels to which they ought to rise in order to challenge the evil ones. And therefore the fallen angels are still allowed to come and go in the earth, for it is up to the children of Light and the sons and the daughters of God to rise to the stature of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and of the Archangels who move with him.

So we would welcome sons of God and we would be sons of God who have the will to rise to the stature of Archangels, who have the courage and determination to take up the sword of the Lord and the sword of the Archangels and rise to the stature of Archangels in the earth. We look for sons of God who will stand and stand and stand again, and who will not falter.

The expression from Sparta comes to mind: “Come back with your shield or on it.” Some of you will be familiar with this expression, and some not. It’s worth an explanation. The actual expression in Greek is Τέκνον, ή ταύτην ή επί ταύτης, literally: “Son, bring this or come on it.” These words were spoken by a Spartan mother to her son as she handed him his shield as he departed home heading for his first battle. The shields in those days were quite large – they went from one’s chin to well below one’s knees. And they were heavy – they were made of wood with oxhide covering and bronze fittings. And so the soldiers of the day would use the shield the same way we use stretchers on the modern battlefield. If a soldier fell dead or wounded they could lay a shield down and his comrades in arms could roll his body on the shield and carry him off the battlefield. By the same token, if a soldier was going to run away the first thing he’d want to do is divest himself of his big heavy, cumbersome shield. So when the mother said, “Son, bring this or come on it”, she was saying, “Son, come back victorious or come back dead, but do not come back a coward having dropped your shield and run away from your enemy”.

To contemporary sensitivities that may sound harsh. But we see in it the fierce and abiding love of the Divine Mother that says, “Son of God, better you lay down your life in agony on some grimy, dirty battlefield than drop your shield, and with it, your honor”.

It was an army of men raised in that kind of an ethos that marched with Leonidas – an embodiment of Serapis Bey – to hold the path at Thermopylae . And when they got there Leonidas sent a scout to observe the enemy host. The enemy was a vast army of Persians invading Greece from the North. Greece at that time was the light of the Western civilization, and had that light been snuffed out the consequences would’ve been beyond imagining. We in this era are participants in a planetary Thermopylae . If in the struggle between light and darkness earth falls, then vast portions of the cosmos fall with it.

Leonidas sent out his scout, and the scout observed the enemy army. Leonidas had marched North with three hundred Spartans and he had maybe a thousand allied troops – it was a mere handful, compared to the Persians’ tens of thousands. The scout went out, observed the enemy army, and came back and reported to Leonidas. The scout said, “The enemy army is so vast, that when they shoot their arrows there will be so many arrows in the sky they will blot out the sun”. And Leonidas, in words that echo down the corridors of history said, “Good, we’ll fight in the shade”.

We are now what we have always been on this planet – a line of fire against the darkness in the earth. And if the darkness is vast--we’ll fight in the shade. But we will stand. We will stand and we will fight because of who we are. We are sons and daughters of God. We are Knights and Ladies of the Flame. We are stalwart, seasoned chelas, veterans of the countless campaigns and physical and spiritual battles spanning the ages. We are angels of fire in the earth, and we stand with flaming swords, and we will not turn this planet over to the fallen ones. We will not drop our shields and quit this planetary field of battle. We will not yield, and they shall not pass! That is what this sword stands for, it is what the Archangels stand for, and it is what we stand for.

Amen.

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