Slane

+ I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three in One and One in Three.

We commemorate today Saint Patrick, one of only two saints we will note during this season of Lent. The other is Saint Joseph, whose feast falls on Wednesday, and I don’t suppose that anyone can be very much surprised that we should stop to pay due tribute to that man who took the Blessed Virgin Mary into his home and raised Jesus as his own son. But with Patrick, people will ask, why should we care? This is all the more true because in Patrick’s case, as with so many of the saints, we don’t really know very much for certain about his life and teaching. A few weeks ago, when I talked to you about Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, that hymn from which I just quoted--when I talked about that hymn, I commented that we didn’t even know whether Patrick really wrote it. And the same thing is true for most, though not quite all, of Patrick’s life. A few people have even questioned whether he really existed, though I think most historians agree now that he did. But granted that he did exist, what does he have to do with us? St. Patrick’s Day plays a big role in American popular culture today, but it doesn’t have much more religious significance than St. Valentine’s Day. Jimmy Fallon joked on Saturday Night Live last week about all the fake Irish people who crowd into his neighborhood bar on St. Patrick’s Day: I’ll bet you that you wouldn’t see a lot of fake Irish people crowding into his neighborhood church on the same occasion, not even if they dyed the communion wine green and made little breads in the shape of shamrocks.

What does the real St. Patrick have to do with us, with us as Christians in the year of our Lord 2003, with us here in the midst of Lent, and on the brink of war, with us who gather, not all that willingly, day by day to do our duty in prayer to praise God and make intercessions for people we don’t even know? Let me start with music. The hymn we sang on the way in, "Be Thou my Vision," is a translation of an Irish poem, not as old as St. Patrick, but still probably written more than twelve hundred years ago. The tune we sang it to is an old Irish folk-tune, and the composer who dusted it off and put it in the hymnals named the tune Slane. Now Slane is the name of a place in Ireland that is famous because of its part in one of the legends of Saint Patrick.

According to the legend, back in the fifth century when Patrick lived, non-Christian Ireland celebrated the Spring by starting things over. This is a very common thing in cultures around the world. Think about the Jewish Passover, for instance, where part of the celebration is to eat bread with no leavening, bread that hasn’t had a chance to rise. The reason is that Passover is, among other things, a spring festival, and part of the spring starting over for the ancient Jews was to throw out all of your old grain, in preparation for the spring harvest. But the only kind of leavening people had in those days was sourdough starter, which takes a while to grow. So when you started things over again with new grain in the spring, it would be a few days before you could have sourdough: and hence, unleavened bread. Well, apparently for the ancient unChristian Irish, the thing that they started over new every spring was fire. They would deliberately let all the old fires go out, and then the High King in his capital at Tara would begin the new year by starting a new fire, I suppose by using a flint and steel. And as you can imagine for any religious ceremony so important that the High King himself led it, the penalties for not putting out your old fire, or starting a new one before the High King did the ceremony, were pretty severe. The complication was that Christians, too, in Patrick’s time and today, celebrated the Spring by putting out their old fires and lighting a new one: specifically, the priest lights a new fire in the darkness at the beginning of the Great Vigil of Easter, as the first symbol of Jesus rising from the dead. So--and again, this is a matter of legend--one spring not too long after Patrick arrived in Ireland for his missionary work, Easter fell at the same time as the Irish spring festival, and Patrick, on the hill at Slane, lit the new fire, the Light of Christ, before the High King, twenty miles away at Tara, lit the new fire for his pagan subjects. Now the King had been Patrick’s bitter enemy, and in fact St. Patrick’s Breastplate is supposed to have been written when Patrick was hiding from the King’s soldiers. But when the King heard what Patrick had done at Slane, he was so impressed by the missionary’s courage that he allowed him to go on with his work, though he did not become a Christian himself.

So Patrick, in the legend at least, defies the High King and the whole religious establishment of pagan Ireland in order to celebrate Easter. It’s an impressive story, which may be a sign that somebody made it up: but I think it’s consistent with what we know for sure about Patrick. What we know is that Patrick was not Irish; Patrick was, rather, a Welshman (though "welsh" is a derogatory English nick-name and Patrick’s people certainly wouldn’t have applied it to themselves). Patrick’s first experience of Ireland came when he was kidnapped as a sixteen year old, maybe around the year 400, and taken to Ireland to work as a slave. He escaped after about six years, but many years later went back to the land of his captivity to preach the good news of Jesus Christ. I think the sort of man who would go back to bring good news to the people who held him in slavery is also at least the sort of man who could defy the High King at Tara to celebrate Easter on Slane.

In any case, for many Easters, if not that first one, and in many places in Ireland, if not in Slane, Patrick took flint and steel, and started a new fire, and from that new fire he lit a large candle, the Paschal Candle, to burn throughout the Great Fifty Days of Easter, and at baptisms, and at funerals (or, at least, that is how the candle would burn today). He lit a candle to shine in the darkness as a sign of the Lord’s resurrection, to shine as a symbol that Jesus Christ was victor over sin and death, to shine at baptisms to show that each newly baptized person joins Jesus in the tomb and to shine at funerals to show that even when we die we die in the hope of the resurrection. He lit a candle to symbolize the very heart of the faith he had come back to Ireland to preach.

And what does it have to do with us, with us as Christians in the year of our Lord 2003, with us here in the midst of Lent, and on the brink of war? It has to do with us in that we still light that candle: that this very morning here in this community as we prayed for the repose of the soul of a departed loved one, we lit that candle; that every year on All Souls’ Day we light it, that during the Great Fifty Days of Easter to which now, in Lent, we especially look forward, we will light it. And if, God forbid, we cross the brink of war, and our friends, or family, or even some of you sitting here in front of me should die, again, we would light the candle as we committed their bodies to the elements in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life. Patrick and his candle on Slane hill have to do with us exactly what Saint Paul said, and what we still say at the beginning of the baptismal service: There is one Body and one Spirit, there is one hope in God's call to us, One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, One God and Father of all. That was the good news Patrick trusted, and returned to the land of his slavery to proclaim: it is the good news still for us today, and as we trust it, we too may be called to proclaim it, in the places which seem least likely to us.

I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.
Of Whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

--John Wm. Houghton