Sermon for the Feast of St. Patrick
“To them which sat in the region and shadow of death, light is arisen”
We are those, too, who sit or have sat in “the region and the shadow of death”, having heard and seen and then, perhaps, have forgotten the light that has arisen upon us and is in our midst. The story of St. Patrick is the story of the conversion of Ireland, of a turning from “the region and shadow of death” and darkness to the light and glory of Christ. The paschal light lit upon Tara’s hill marks the transition from paganism to the beginnings of Christian culture. There is nothing about shillelaghs or shamrocks or snakes in Matthew’s Gospel, let alone about green beer; only something about sea-girt places such as Ireland and, I suppose, Nova Scotia, which while meaning New Scotland, has had its full measure of settlers whom are designated as Scots-Irish., not unlike St. Patrick himself born in Scotland in 387 AD.
More importantly, the Gospel appointed for the commemoration of a Missionary such as St. Patrick, speaks about the preaching of Jesus seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about light coming to those in places of darkness, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, all the things that belong to the turning to God through God’s turning to us in the Gospel. It is very much a part of the meaning of Lent. It is all about the turning.
And the epistle, too, underscores the same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied”, Acts tells us, meaning what, exactly? A new gospel, new things added to the essential proclamation of the faith? This is, unfortunately, a feature of our contemporary confusion, a kind of arrogance, really, which assumes that we know more and better than others before us about the nature of God and even about our humanity. Don’t we, though? Have there not been discoveries that challenge and overturn older ways of looking at things? Are we not always progressing?
