Sermon: Feast of St George, martyr, patron of England

Preacher:

Date:

Tuesday 23rd April 2013

Venue:

St George’s, Campden Hill, W8

Readings:

1 Maccabees 2: 59-64

2 Timothy 2: 3-13

John 15: 18-21

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I wonder what colours you most associate with St George’s Day. Red, white and… green? Red for the blood of the martyr, white for the resurrection of Christ and the triumph George now shares in, and green…that’s for the dragon; after all, in a Disney style honouring of George, Dover Castle has hired a green seven foot tall foam dragon. As we honour today the martyr, the great martyr, George and patron of England and of this church, those three colours give a particular tone to our celebrations. I will come back to those colours.

The definitive book which every Church dedicated to St George should have in its library – and I am indebted to my 10 year old son for this - is the classic tome, ‘How to train your dragon’. In we learn about Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, who, as the blurb says, “is an awesome sword-fighter, a dragon-whisperer and the greatest Viking Hero who ever lived. But it wasn't always like that. In fact, in the beginning, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was the most put upon Viking you'd ever seen. Not loud enough to make himself heard at dinner with his father, Stoick the Vast; not hard enough to beat his chief rival, Snotlout, at Bashyball, the number one school sport and CERTAINLY not stupid enough to go into a cave full of dragons to find a pet... It's time for Hiccup to learn how to be a Hero.”

Training the dragon, making the dragon his pet, wasn’t our George’s approach, for famously he slew the dragon. The trouble with the legend of George and the dragon is that it easily leads us to think that our task is to go round looking for dragons and to slay them. We only ask that question if we think George was simply about heroism. Dragons become the most almighty distraction from the point of the Great Martyr. If that is all there is to who George was then we are stuck in the world of myths and legends and not in the real, vivid, animated world of being a disciple and soldier of Christ. George was not called by God to be a hero, but called by God to be his disciple and his martyr.

You and I are not called to be heroes in a mythical world; rather we are called to be faithful servants of Jesus Christ in the real world. Heroes are bound up in a world that sees violence and slaying as the last word. The faithful servant, the disciple, is one who sees the Cross of Jesus Christ as the facing down of violence and the invitation to life through life in the Body of Christ. This is what we call martyrdom. Martyrs may not be heroes, although they may display heroic qualities in being one. Martyrs are faithful witnesses, faithful witnesses to another way of seeing the world, faithful witnesses to the kingdom Jesus proclaimed: the Kingdom amongst us, the Kingdom that we pray will come.

Martyrdom is problematic for us in our society today. So often we catch ourselves saying, things like, ‘God may call you to be a martyr, but let’s hope it doesn’t mean you’ll have to die for it…’ This may sound shocking but I believe all Christians are called to be martyrs in a very particular ways. This where our colour coding comes in: it’s not a hierarchy of martyrdom but the light of vocation refracted through the prism of being a faithful witness to Jesus.

Red, white and green. St Cyprian of Carthage in the third century speaks of different types of martyrdom and colour codes them. It helps us sees martyrdom beyond heroism, sometimes including it, most often not.

The red martyr is the classic martyr who sheds blood in his or her fidelity as a disciple of Christ. Too many Christians face the very real dragon of persecution: it seeks them out, not them it: I have in mind Christian witness in Pakistan, North Korea, China, and more besides. It is a matter of tremendous regret to me that in our Church of England today there are Georges who seek out the dragon of persecution that almost put the experience of the Church in this country on a par with their suffering. White martyrdom is the self-sacrificing compassion and acts of charity in times of peace. And it is said that the Irish added to this a third colour: green. This is martyrdom as freeing oneself from evil desires by means of fasting and labour and pursuing the ascetic way in one’s homeland; in other words, the day to day business of being a Christian. Some, like George, are called to the red; all are called to the white and green. Since being a martyr is being one who bears the cross of Jesus; something that has happened to us all in baptism.

This is about day to day fidelity to Christ exercised in not seeking to be competitive, rivalrous and envying – those cold blooded, calculating sins to which we are all so prone. Putting those desires to death is to slay a dragon.

Martyrs, across the palette, prefer nothing to Christ; they see in George not a hero but a brother, not a flamboyant knight in shining armour but a faithful witness in the everyday, someone who like them endures to the end, whose death, in the words of the Preface of martyrs, ‘reveals [God’s] power made perfect in our human frailty.’ It continues, ‘you choose the weak and make them strong in bearing witness to you’; it does not say you choose the heroic, or the strong or the eloquent. The martyr abides in Jesus as surely as Jesus abides in him or her.

So, priest and people of this church of St George the Great Martyr, may you be faithful witnesses to the crucified and risen Lord and may the flame of love that was kindled in George’s heart, be a raging flame in your lives as a community and individuals to the glory of God the Father.