Day: November 20, 2009

Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of Saint Edmund

The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, delivered this sermon at King’s College, Halifax, on the Feast of Saint Edmund, 2008.

“Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ”

November is the grey month of remembering. It embraces at once the great harvest festivals of All Saints and All Souls as well as the secular remembering of those who gave their lives in the service of their country in the great and defining wars of that most bloody of bloody centuries, the twentieth century. It ends with the spiritual summa of the parade of sanctifying grace on the Sunday Next Before Advent that equally brings us, in turn, to the renewed beginnings of Advent itself, the start of the progress of justifying grace, yet again. In between are a host of minor commemorations which provide a kind of meditative faux bourdon, the sweet middle at an interval of a fourth below the melody, a poignant resonance of individual spiritual lives illustrating in a personal way the grander themes of our spiritual remembering.

Edmund, King and Martyr, is one such November commemoration. Along with Hilda, the remarkably tough-minded Abbess of Whitby, two centuries before, whose commemoration was on Monday, November 17th, Edmund contributes to an early English interlude in our November reflections on the pageant of glory and grace. Edmund was the King of East Anglia, martyred in 870 at the hands of the Danes, raiders whose incursions and visits to the England and other places wrought great terror in the hearts of all who met them. His life complements and illumines the spiritual scenery of the great epic poem of the English language, The Epic of Beowulf.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Edmund

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Edmund (841-869), King of the East Angles, Martyr (source):

O eternal God,
whose servant Edmund kept faith to the end,
both with thee and with his people,
and glorified thee by his death:
grant us the same steadfast faith,
that, together with the noble army of martyrs,
we may come to the perfect joy of the resurrection life;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St Peter 3:14-18
The Gospel: St Matthew 10:16-22

Saint EdmundEdmund was raised a Christian and became king of the East Angles as a young boy, probably when 14 years old. In 869 the Danes invaded his territory and defeated his forces in battle.

According to Edmund’s first biographer, Abbo of Fleury, the Danes tortured the saint to death after he refused to renounce his faith and rule as a Danish vassal. He was beaten, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, and then beheaded.

His body was originally buried near the place of his death and subsequently transferred to Baedericesworth, modern Bury St Edmunds. His shrine became one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England, but it was destroyed and his remains lost during the English Reformation.

The cult of St Edmund became very popular among English nobility because he exemplified the ideals of heroism, political independence, and Christian holiness. The Benedictine Abbey founded at Bury St Edmunds in 1020 became one of the greatest in England.

St Edmundsbury Borough Council has posted a history of Saint Edmund’s legend.

Artwork: St Edmund the Martyr, c. 1420-40. Stained glass, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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