John 10:9-16

⁹ I am the door. If anyone enters in by me, he will be saved, and will go in and go out, and will find pasture. ¹⁰ The thief only comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly. ¹¹ I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹² He who is a hired hand, and not a shepherd, who doesn’t own the sheep, sees the wolf coming, leaves the sheep, and flees. The wolf snatches the sheep, and scatters them. ¹³ The hired hand flees because he is a hired hand, and doesn’t care for the sheep. ¹⁴ I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and I’m known by my own; ¹⁵ even as the Father knows me, and I know the Father. I lay down my life for the sheep. ¹⁶ I have other sheep, which are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice. They will become one flock with one shepherd.

2 Corinthians 5:1-10

¹ For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens. ² For most certainly in this we groan, longing to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven; ³ if so be that being clothed we will not be found naked. ⁴ For indeed we who are in this tent do groan, being burdened; not that we desire to be unclothed, but that we desire to be clothed, that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. ⁵ Now he who made us for this very thing is God, who also gave to us the down payment of the Spirit. ⁶ Therefore we are always confident and know that while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord; ⁷ for we walk by faith, not by sight. ⁸ We are courageous, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord. ⁹ Therefore also we make it our aim, whether at home or absent, to be well pleasing to him. ¹⁰ For we must all be revealed before the judgment seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

Priest-Martyr John Kochurov was a Russian Orthodox priest who served for several years as a missionary in the United States, including at a parish in Chicago, before returning to Russia. On October 31, 1917, during the fighting that accompanied the Bolshevik seizure of power, he was seized by a revolutionary mob in Tsarskoye Selo and shot, becoming the first member of the clergy to be killed in the wave of persecution that followed. He is venerated as the protomartyr of the new martyrs of Russia in the twentieth century.