Sermon on the feast of Stephen
At Christmas time, of course, we celebrate the incarnation – the self-revelation of God through the life and work of Jesus. There is always debate about whether or not the nativity scenes described in the Bible are strictly true or not, but I don’t think this really matters. Boxing Day is not the occasion to have a detailed discussion on Biblical Interpretation, but I think there are two things in particular we need to focus on.
First. what is important is that we should be able to see in Jesus Christ – the one whose birth we commemorated yesterday – the ideal to which every Christian should aspire.
Secondly in our services at Christmastide the important thing is the atmosphere, the sense of a mystical, otherworldly occasion, the retelling of the story which goes beyond the literal: a spiritual occasion when one might just begin to sense the otherness of the divine. The God that can just be perceived beyond the veil.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “Boxing Day” dates from the mid-18th century, and refers to the practice of giving tradespeople like postmen and other tradesmen “Christmas boxes” following Christmas Day.
These boxes, which are referred to by Samuel Pepys in a diary entry for 19th December 1663, contained gifts offered in gratitude for their services throughout the year. It is also a day on which servants were given time off to go and visit their parents – similar in that sense to Mother’s Day
But as well as today being Boxing Day, it is also St.Stephens day and I will spend the rest of this address talking about St.Stephen. There is very little that we know about this saint – he was a deacon and protomartyr or first martyr of the Christian Church – and most of what we know about him is told by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 6-7). He was appointed to distribute alms and to help in preaching. He taught that the mosaic law would be superseded by Christ who was the greatest of prophets. He eventually attacked his hearers for resisting the spirit and killing the Christ. He was then stone to death
It is not often that I use the internet to get sermon material but on this occasion I came across some work by Patrick Comerford (A canon in the Anglican Church of Ireland) who has made quite a study of Stephen,
Saint Stephen was one of the first seven deacons and was the first martyr (see Acts 6-7). In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Lion’s Gate is also called Saint Stephen’s Gate, after the tradition that Saint Stephen was stoned to death there, although it probably took place at the Damascus Gate.
Saint Stephen’s Day on 26 December, Holy Innocents’ Day on 28 December, and the commemoration of Thomas à Beckett on 29 December all remind us that Christmas, far from being surrounded by sanitised images of the crib, angels and wise men, is followed by martyrdom and violence.
In the interlude in TS Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, Thomas à Beckett preaches his Christmas sermon shortly before his murder. He explains that the “peace to men of good will” that the angels announced at the first Christmas was “not peace as the world gives,” but, to the disciples, “torture, imprisonment, disappointment … [and] death by martyrdom.” He links the birth at Christmas with the death of martyrdom, asking: “Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means.”
Close on the joy of Christmas comes the cost of following Christ. As the popular expression says: “No Cross, No Crown.”
Among the early users of this phrase was William Penn, founder of the Quaker colony that became Pennsylvania, in a tract first published in London in 1669. How well it encapsulates the story of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, whose name in Greek, Στέφανος (Stephanos) means crown.
In many parts of Ireland, it was traditional on Saint Stephen’s Day, 26 December, for the “Wren Boys” to go from house to house with a holly bush dressed with ribbons, singing traditional, seasonal songs, including this song:
The Wran, the Wran,
The King of Birds.
Saint Stephen’s morn
Was caught in the furze.
We hunted him up
And we hunted him down
And in the wood
We knocked him down.
Usually, they were given a small amount of money, and the evening concluded in the local pub.
There are different legends about the origin of this custom. One is that Saint Stephen hid from his enemies in a bush but was betrayed by a chattering wren. The wren, like Saint Stephen, is then hunted down and stoned to death.
Another legend claims that during the Viking raids in the eighth century, Irish soldiers were betrayed by a wren as they were surrounding a Viking camp at night. A wren began to eat breadcrumbs left on the head of a drum, and the beat of its beak woke the drummer, who sounded the alarm, leading to the defeat of the Irish soldiers and the continuing persecution of the wren.
Saint Stephen’s Day: Luke has it that witnesses to the death placed their clothes at the feet of Saul who had consented to the stoning. Stephens last words were. “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”. And when he had said this he fell asleep – And Saul (later t become Paul). was consenting to his death. Perhaps this traumatic occasion led in part to the Damascus Road vision and conversion, maybe, maybe not.
But the important thing to think on and which I will leave you with is William Penn’s phrase No Cross, No Crown
Dr David Greenwood. D.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk December 2021
Brislington Community News 