The objection, stated at full strength
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5, KJV). Put at its strongest, the objection runs like this. The heart of the Gospel is that access to the Father was opened by one person at one cost, and that nobody else is needed at the door. To direct a request to a Christian who died in the fourth century looks like reinstalling a chain of intermediaries that the Cross removed.
That is not a weak argument, and in the mouths of most people who make it, it is not a hostile one either. It is the strongest objection brought against this Orthodox practice, and it is usually raised by Christians who are guarding the sufficiency of Christ because they love him. An Orthodox reply that waves it away has not replied at all.
So the honest method is to leave the verse exactly where it is and read the sentences around it, then look at what the rest of the New Testament says about Christians praying for one another, and then say plainly what Orthodox Christians think they are doing.
In the Protestant world, we have many examples of people with soft hearts, who, for the love of Christ, are kind to other people.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, talk on simplicity (1979), in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 87 (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)
What Paul is doing in that paragraph
The paragraph containing the verse opens with a command to intercede. “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men” (1 Timothy 2:1, KJV). Four verses before he writes that there is one mediator, Paul instructs Christians to stand between other people and God in prayer. If intercession by a creature were a rivalry with Christ, this is the first place it would have to be excluded.
What makes the mediation of Christ unique is stated in the very next line: he “gave himself a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:6, KJV). That is an act of a different order from asking. No saint died for anyone's sins, no Orthodox prayer suggests that one did, and the Church's hymns say the opposite several times in every service.
Paul also asks for prayer constantly, and not as a formality. He begs the Romans to strive together with him in their prayers, tells the Thessalonians twice to pray for him, and asks the Ephesians to pray that he would be given words to speak. James states the principle: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16, KJV). Scripture treats the prayers of other Christians as genuinely effective, and singles out righteous ones.
Asking for prayer is not the same act as praying to
English blurs a distinction that matters here. To pray, in older English, simply meant to ask, which is why characters in Shakespeare say I pray thee to people who are plainly not divine. Orthodox prayers addressed to saints are requests in that older sense, and their grammar shows it: pray for us, intercede for us, entreat Christ our God on our behalf.
What is never asked of a saint is what only God can give. No Orthodox Christian asks a saint for the forgiveness of sins, for the gift of the Holy Spirit, or for the Body and Blood of Christ. Every service ends by referring everything to the Holy Trinity, and every blessing is given in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
In practice the difference is easy to see. A parishioner in Kovan asks the woman next to her at coffee hour to pray about a hospital appointment on Tuesday, and that evening asks St Panteleimon for the same thing. She regards those as two instances of one act, differing only in that one of the two friends is further along than she is.
Can the departed hear anything?
Underneath the theological objection lies a practical one, and it is often the real question: the dead cannot hear you, so whom exactly are you addressing? Orthodoxy does not answer that the saints are omniscient, because they are not. The answer is that they are alive in Christ, and that whatever they know of us, they know in him rather than independently of him.
Scripture is not silent about this. Christ says of the patriarchs that God “is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him” (Luke 20:38, KJV). He also says that there is “joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:10, KJV), which means that particular events in particular lives on earth are known in heaven.
Revelation goes further. Under the altar are the souls of those slain for the word of God, and they cry out with a loud voice, asking God how long it will be until he acts (Revelation 6:9-10). They are conscious, they are aware of unfinished business on earth, and they are asking God to do something about it. Whatever else that passage is, it is intercession offered by people who have died.
What Revelation shows happening in heaven
Two scenes in Revelation are quoted in almost every Orthodox discussion of this subject, and it is worth reading them slowly. When the Lamb takes the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fall down before him, “having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints” (Revelation 5:8, KJV). The prayers of Christians on earth are in the hands of others, in heaven, being offered.
The second scene is plainer still. An angel stands at the altar with a golden censer, and there is given to him much incense, “that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne”; and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, “ascended up before God out of the angel's hand” (Revelation 8:3-4, KJV).
Whatever one concludes from those verses, they do not describe heaven as a sealed room. They describe creatures in the presence of God handling the prayers of the Church. This is also why an Orthodox service is full of incense, and why Vespers opens with the verse “Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense” (Psalm 141:2, KJV). The censer is a statement about how prayer travels.
What Christians did before anyone argued about it
The practice is older than the arguments for it, which is usually a sign that it grew rather than being invented. In the shrine beneath the church of San Sebastiano in Rome, visitors scratched requests into the plaster asking Peter and Paul to pray for named individuals; the graffiti are generally dated to the middle of the third century. These are not treatises. They are the handwriting of ordinary Christians.
Manchester holds the oldest known prayer addressed to the Mother of God, the Sub tuum praesidium, on a Greek papyrus. Its date is disputed, with scholars placing it anywhere from the third to the fourth century, and an honest account should say so rather than claim the earliest figure. It asks for her protection and her prayers, and it is still sung in Orthodox churches.
By 787 the practice was old enough that the Second Council of Nicaea described it as received tradition, speaking of honouring the Theotokos, the angels, the apostles, prophets and martyrs, and of seeking their intercessions. For a Protestant reader a council of that date does not settle the question, and it is not offered here as though it did. As historical evidence, though, it shows what Christians were already doing and had long been doing.
The honest worry: the line really can blur
Here is the part that Orthodox writers should not hurry past. Popular piety does drift, in every century and every country. A saint can be treated as a specialist consulted for one kind of trouble, prayer can slide into bargaining, and the Mother of God can be approached as though she were gentler than her Son, which distorts the Gospel at its centre. Anyone who has spent time in a large parish has seen some of this.
The Church has known it for a long time and has acted. The Synod of Laodicea in the fourth century forbade Christians to forsake the Church of God and invoke angels in separate assemblies, calling that covert idolatry, and the same error appears to be the one Paul warns against in Colossians 2:18. Commentators note that the same council takes the honouring of martyrs for granted elsewhere, so the target is a rival cult rather than intercession as such.
An Orthodox priest draws a conclusion from that history, and it is not a defensive one. Where a parishioner's practice has become superstition, the answer is to correct it, not to explain it away. The distinction between veneration and worship exists precisely because the line is crossable, and nobody draws a line where nobody can stray.
What is actually being asked
Strip the distortions away and what is left is modest. A Christian believes that the Church is one body, that death did not dismember it, and that asking a member of that body for prayer is not an insult to its Head. Every request made to a saint is a request that they ask Christ, which is why the answer to every such prayer comes from him.
Nobody supposes that asking a friend after church to pray for a sick child sets the friend up as a competitor to Christ. Orthodoxy extends the same ordinary courtesy across the grave, on the ground that the friend who was buried last year is not less alive than the one sitting in the next chair. That is either true or it is not; it is not idolatry either way.
There is also a quieter point. A Christian who asks nobody to pray for him is not closer to Christ for it, only more solitary, and the apostolic writings do not commend solitude of that kind. The letters of Paul are full of people holding one another up. Orthodoxy simply holds that the list of people available to hold you up is longer than the parish register.
Where this leaves a reader who disagrees
Nothing here asks a Protestant visitor to begin asking the saints for prayer. It asks only that the practice be weighed for what it is rather than for what it resembles from a distance: a request for prayer, addressed to Christians who are alive in Christ, answered by Christ alone.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, the American hieromonk whose books bring many enquirers to this subject, was raised in a Protestant family and wrote at length about how Orthodox Christians should speak to the people they came from. He held the traditional Orthodox teaching that the Church is one and that the sacraments are given in her, and he refused all the same to pronounce on where any individual stands before God.
The parish in Kovan serves the vigil on Saturday evening and the Liturgy on Sunday morning, and the litanies in both include prayers for the living, prayers for the departed, and requests for the prayers of the saints. A visitor is welcome to stand through all of it and agree with only part.
There is no reason why we cannot call them Christians and be on good terms with them
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)