Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen
“How often would I have gathered thy children together,
even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”
The Feast of St. Stephen marks the first day after Christmas and inaugurates the three Holy Days of Christmas which are a profound commentary on the radical meaning of Christmas. Christ would gather us into his love. If the Feast of St. Thomas affirms the radical nature of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Christ by way of holy questioning about the intrinsic goodness of creation and of the body, then St. Stephen’s Day highlights love as sacrifice in forgiveness in the face of persecution. He is the first martyr and prototype of martyrdom in the Christian Church even before its coming to be. But the Feast of St. Stephen signals the deeper meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. God’s engagement with our world is in the face of its animosities and evils, but they are our animosities and evils. It means love as service and sacrifice in forgiveness.
“I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes,” Jesus says, ”and some of them you shall kill and crucify”. It is a strong critique of those in power and authority. While Stephen is the proto-martyr of the Church, his feast is equally a commentary on all institutions of power whether sacred or secular, to use a later terminology. More importantly, it is about the transforming power of forgiveness, the central point which Collect and Lesson explicitly reference and which is implicit in the Gospel.
Philosophy as learning to die is an ancient theme without which we cannot know how to live. Gilgamesh, in the great Epic which bears his name, is catapulted into the quest for wisdom by the death of his friend, Enkidu. “As my brother is, so shall I be”. He confronts his own mortality in Enkidu’s death which leads him upon the journey to see Utnapishtim “to question him concerning life and death”. It marks the beginning of a long, long journey of the understanding in human culture; in short, of philosophy as a way of life. But only by way of learning to die.
The Feast of St. Stephen, too, is about learning to die in order to live. His death, as the lesson from Acts makes clear, follows explicitly the pattern of Christ’s Crucifixion. As with St. Thomas, once again, we see the integral connection between Christmas and Easter, a connection which so many of the carols of Christmas also make. “Now ye need not fear the grave”, “Christ was born for this”, to cite but one example.
