Sermon for the Feast of Saint Edmund

admin | 20 November 2009

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 17^th, 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.

Composed sometime between the 7^thand the 10^th centuries, The Epic of Beowulf deals with events in Denmark by warrior forces from Sweden who paradoxically save the Danes from the monster Grendel, his mother and the Dragon-Guard of the golden hoard. Written in Anglo-Saxon, it becomes the defining story for the development and emergence of English as a language and a culture. I wonder, though, what we are to make of such things. After all, in the intellectual world, Edmund doesn’t rate much of a mention, compared to other ninth century intellectual giants such as Eriugena, that outstanding Scot from Ireland, whose Periphyseon remains one of the great wonders of systematic thought with backward glances only to Origen and Plotinus, Christian and Pagan, as it were, and forward nods to such figures as Thomas Aquinas and Hegel, Medieval and Modern, as it were. That ought to give some of you a headache at least for a few hours, with or without quality time in the Wardroom!

King and Martyr! What a concept! How intriguing and interesting for us in the endless agitato and mind-numbing atmosphere of the contemporary market-state and the endless hubris of the so-called global economy. We would do well to remember some of the earlier encounters between Pagan and Christian and to reflect on the neo-paganism that creeps and feels its way into the marrow of the so-called Christian witness of our Church and day. The life of Edmund, like The Epic of Beowulf itself, provides an interesting illustration of the interplay of things Pagan and things Christian.

A holy King, “religion and piety,” one of his hagiographers notes, “were the distinguishing marks of his character,” he belongs to a long tradition of sacral kingship that never quite goes away. A time which we are inclined to dismiss as simply “the dark ages,” the light of Christ shines brightly through the witness of kings to the Gospel of Christ. The kingly graces, as Shakespeare suggests, are the holy virtues, the very qualities of Christ that define us. The scriptural lessons of the late and long Trinity season exhort us to put on such qualities, not as “borrowed robes” but as the signs and symbols of what we profess, as the marks of our identity in Christ. Whether as King or peasant, prince or pauper, there is the call to holiness, to a way of life. We strive for something which can never be fully achieved in us temporally and which can never be conformed to the world’s demands. Yet things celestial are the realities in which we participate by the grace of Christ.

Nowhere are such celestial virtues more powerfully presented to us than in the Beatitudes, the Gospel reading for November’s grand overture of remembering in the Feast of All Saints’. An octave of eight blessednesses with a concluding coda that makes them personal, from blessed are they to blessed are you, the Beatitudes turn the world on its head. Their uncompromising and compelling teaching is captured in the first and eighth beatitude. “Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” The reward, the promised reality, for both is the same, “For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Proceeding through the paradox of difference and the paradox of the same, the Beatitudes open us out to the mystery of God. The poor in spirit are the humble, not the proud who are so full of themselves. Trials and tribulations, suffering and death become the situation in which blessedness, not happiness, can be known and experienced and lived. In the midst of suffering and sorrow, there is the clarion call to rejoice. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” We are to be defined by what we profess; it remains the constant challenge for all of us, the challenge to be what we believe. “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven.”

The Beatitudes provide the underlying theme for all our holy remembrances, especially in this month of remembering. “Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ,” St. Peter tells us, words which are nothing less than a commentary on the Beatitudes. Take up [your] cross, deny yourself, “for whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it,” Jesus tells us. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” There is something infinitely precious about our humanity in the sight of God. The saints help us to realize our vocation and calling and to appreciate its stark other-worldliness in the midst of all the trials and tribulations that are always and everywhere part and parcel of our world and day.

Anointed King on Christmas Day in 855 at the tender age of fifteen, Edmund undertook the monastic discipline of seeing one’s whole life and labour as a work of prayer, learning the psalms, for instance, off by heart. His kingly rule was distinguished by compassionate justice. He was, as Butler puts it, “the father of his subjects, particularly of the poor, the protector of widows and orphans, and the support of the weak.” In 870, his kingdom was beset by the marauding Danes, led by two brothers, Hinguar and Hubba, names that could have come straight out of The Epic of Beowulf. They laid waste the land of East Anglia, particularly the monastic and ecclesiastical establishments for which they had an especial aversion, not unlike Grendel’s hatred of our social joys in Hrothgar’s Hall, Heorot. The Epic of Beowulf wonderfully captures the sense of the times and the contrast between Pagan and Christian.

“These were hard times, heart-breaking…
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offerings to idols, swore oaths
that the killer of souls might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way,
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge
of good deeds and bad, the Lord God,
Head of the Heavens and High King of the World,
Was unknown to them. Oh, cursed is he
Who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul
In the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help;
He has nowhere to turn. But blessed is he
Who after death can approach the Lord
And find friendship in the Father’s embrace.”

Despite an initial success at repelling the invaders, Edmund recognized that he was completely outnumbered and rather than risk the slaughter of his people and of some of his enemies, he disbanded his little army and retreated to his castle in Suffolk to await the demands of the Danes. What was demanded was incompatible with his Christian faith and his kingly duties to his people; so Edmund refused. Taken captive he continued to refuse to renounce his faith. Cruelly beaten, he was tied to a tree and used as target practice; his body was covered with arrows like a porcupine, not unlike St. Sebastian from an earlier period of persecution. Finally, he was beheaded, only to become the occasion of holy remembrance and miracles over the succeeding centuries.

“Blessed is he who after death can approach the Lord and find friendship in the Father’s embrace.” These haunting words from The Epic of Beowulf echo the scriptural teaching of the Beatitudes and of this evening’s lessons, the tough but joyous teaching about our life in Christ. It is this that turns the world on its head and forever challenges the structures of power. Our Christian liberty is found really in “the disenchantment of the world,” in the complete inversion of the forms of pagan and neo-pagan religion and indeed even of the higher religions of the axial period that are tied to the political. It is this inversion, the atheist philosopher Marcel Gauchet remarks in his book “The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of the Religion,” that makes us Christian, that makes those who are atheists, he is saying, Christian! There is something inescapably wonderful when intellectual atheism recognizes its own indebtedness and identity, as it were, to Christ, the God made man, whose grace turns the world on its head. We find our enchantment, our blessedness not in the turning gyre of the world but in the redemptive mercies of Christ. Nowhere are such things more immediately and personally before us, perhaps, than in the commemoration of the saints. We learn from St. Edmund, King and Martyr, to rejoice even in the dark and hard times, learning that our life is at once hidden and found in Christ. We have one to whom we can turn because in Christ, God has turned to us.