by CCW | 26 December 2020 12:00
They are familiar words from the liturgy known as the Benedictus. It follows immediately upon the Sanctus and then carries us into the Anaphora, the prayer of consecration in our modern Canadian Book of Common Prayer, which begins with the words “blessing and glory and thanksgiving.” Here words which echo the Gospel of the First Sunday in Advent (and Christ’s triumphal Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of his Passion), are equally the words that end the Gospel for the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr. Such words illuminate for us the radical meaning of Christmas, the radical meaning of Christ’s holy and blessed birth.
What is always God, always with God, and always of God, is with us. Such is the meaning of Christmas. God’s Word and Son is the Word made flesh. The God who ever is is God with us. We are being gathered together under the wings of Christ’s mothering love in spite of our sins and its destructive follies. The Gospel thus complements the powerful and disturbing lesson from Acts about the martyrdom of Stephen.
He is the proto-martyr, the prototype of all martyrdom or witness to Christ, not by being stoned to death, but as revealing the qualities of loving sacrifice which are at the heart of Christmas and at the heart of the meaning of Christ as Saviour. For centuries upon centuries, this feast followed immediately upon Christmas Day, memorialized in the carol, Good King Wenceslas, “on the Feast of Stephen”. Yet in our contemporary culture, the Feast of Stephen is better known as Boxing Day. The contrast is striking. It is the contrast between endless acquisition and loving sacrifice.
What began as a tradition of care for the servants of the aristocrats who were allowed to take the left-overs of the Christmas feast in boxes for themselves on the day following Christmas has become a day of special sales, a day of getting and spending which contrasts with the idea of sacrificial giving symbolized in the reversal of roles in the carol. The king goes out into the winter snows to bring Christmas cheer to the peasant in the woods. Christmas is for all, omnipopulo, and not just for the rich.
It means the sacrifice of oneself to the good of others and it signals a change in attitude. Stephen’s death imitates Christ’s death; thus his life, the life of Christ. “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”, he says even as Christ prays on the Cross, “Father, forgive them.” The blessings of Christmas are about the qualities of Christ’s life in us; he in us and we in him, just as at Communion we pray “that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us,” not on the presumption of our own righteousness “but in thy manifold and great mercies.” We come in the name of the Lord and not on our own. That is the blessing.
Stephen as the first martyr and proto-type of every form of Christian witness points us to the one in whom we live in the face of the world’s enmities and disorders. He shows us a new and better way, the way of endless love. Such is the love of God. With Stephen, we may say as Perpetua, a later saint, puts it, “another lives in me.”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of Stephen, Christmastide 2020
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/12/26/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-stephen-10/
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