We think of this day as a cute little folk festival, beloved by Irish-Americans. But what is almost never talked about is St. Patrick himself, who was a real human being, a dedicated Christian, who changed the lives of millions of people, including, incidentally, yours and mine.
To understand this, you need to know Patrick’s story. To begin with, he was not Irish, but British. He was born around the year 400 in Roman-occupied Britain (at a time when the Roman Empire was on its last legs), and was raised in a Christian family but never took the faith seriously. But at age 16, he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland. Ireland in those days was a wild and dangerous country, outside the Roman Empire and therefore not civilized in the same way as the rest of Europe at the time. It was a land full of marauding bands of warriors, landowners who terrorized slaves, and religious leaders who performed human sacrifices to appease gods. As a slave, Patrick was mistreated, beaten and starved, and suffered from fear and desperate loneliness and homesickness.
In his loneliness, Patrick rediscovered the Christian God of his childhood and began to pray. He wrote in his memoirs: “After I came to Ireland, every day I had to tend the sheep, and many times a day I prayed – the love of God and his fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many as night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountains; I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me.”
After 6 years as a slave, God came to Patrick in a dream and said it’s time to go home, your boat is waiting for you. Patrick walked 200 miles to the eastern coast of Ireland and found a boat waiting there, as God had promised. He went home to Britain, then to France where he studied to become a priest, then home to Britain again, where he assumed he would spend the rest of his life. But then he had a second dream, in which he heard the voice of the Irish people: 'We beg you, young man, come and walk among us once more.’” He heard it as God’s call to return to Ireland.
He obeyed that call and went to Tara in Ireland, the seat of the great high king of Ireland, and confronted the king on the feast of Beltine, the Spring Equinox. The king had forbidden anyone to light the first fire of Beltine before him. But the feast coincided with Easter that year, and in the darkness before the dawn, standing on a hillside opposite the king’s castle, Patrick lit the first fire of Easter ever lit in Ireland, and called down God’s protection with these words:
At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the Sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And Fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along the path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of Darkness.
It’s not clear exactly what happened next (it’s lost in the clouds of myth and legend), but by the end of the confrontation, the king of Ireland had become a Christian. It was St. Patrick’s first conversion in Ireland – but in 30 years, he converted most of Ireland to Christianity, put an end to human sacrifice in Ireland, abolished slavery, and founded dozens of monasteries that went on to “save civilization” by preserving it in Ireland when the Roman Empire fell, bringing the Dark Ages to Europe – meaning he has a continuing influence today that touches all our lives.
The reason Patrick succeeded in converting an entire nation was this: he would look around him at the people of Ireland, and try discover where God had been there already working, and join in. Patrick looked for and found common elements between Christian and native Irish beliefs.
Christian love for creation was one reason Patrick found Irish receptive. The ancient Celtic peoples had a deep and abiding love for nature; they saw God as profoundly immanent, deeply present with every living thing. Our Judeo-Christian tradition has always revered creation, as we see in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” We do not worship nature, but we believe that nature points to God and proclaims God’s glory, and we honor it as the work of God’s hands.
The ancient Irish believed that holy things came in threes, and Patrick found that this belief paved the way for him to explain the Trinity, three in one. The Irish native plant, the shamrock, with its three leaves, was not just a decoration on a leprechaun’s hat – it was how Patrick demonstrated the idea of the Trinity to the Irish – one being, expressed in three persons.
Ancient Celtic peoples believed in the power of place – that there were certain places in the world that were “thin places”, where the boundary between heaven and earth was stretched so thin that heaven could break through at any moment. And so they found a kindred belief in the traditions of Jews and Christians, and our ancient stories of mountaintop experiences, like the story of Moses, who stood in a “thin place” on the mountain of God, as he received the 10 Commandments in our Old Testament lesson today. As Rabbi Caplan told us last week, there is an ancient Jewish tradition that not just Moses, but all humans were present at that holy moment – Jews, Christians, pagans, and all peoples who have ever lived. And therefore we, with the ancient Jews, with Jews of all times, with the wild Irish and the Celtic Christians who are our spiritual ancestors - all of us stood in that thin place on Mount Sinai. All of us heard the God of Israel say: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of slavery; you shall have no other gods but me.
Patrick understood at a deep and personal level that God had brought him out of slavery, and out of gratitude he devoted his life to living God’s way. Which is the pattern the Ten Commandments, and that moment on the mountain, lay out for us as the life of the people of God: the Jews were already free from slavery before they arrived at Sinai.
First God leads us out of slavery into freedom, then we devote our lives, every day, every moment, waking, sleeping, working, loving – to living God’s way. If we look at the 10 Commandments and set aside the notion that they are simply a set of “thou shalt nots,” a prison to limit our freedom, we can begin to understand that the whole of the law that Moses received on that holy mountain is built on the foundation of a relationship with a God of freedom, a God who reminds us that freedom is God’s divine gift to us. And we can begin to understand that living in freedom means living in life-giving ways, refusing to fall back into slavery, which is our constant temptation. It means refusing to become slaves to material possessions by stealing or coveting. It means refusing to become slaves to false gods who want to keep us small by forgetting the true God. It means refusing to become slaves to our own self-interest and our hurtful passions by committing murder or adultery. It means refusing to become slaves to our work by insisting on a day of rest, Sabbath peace.
In farming, a “demonstration plot” is where new ideas are tried, farmers can watch crops grow using new seeds or new methods and see how they work. The 10 Commandments became the foundation of the Jewish law, the way of life that formed Israel into a “demonstration plot” for the world. The Jews became a people who lived differently from the world around them, who saw every part of their lives as grounded in their relationship with the God who set them free. Christians understand this too: Our ability to accomplish things for God rests not on our abilities, but the foundation of our relationship with God, who has set us free in Jesus Christ and given us the gift of life-giving love.
The ancient Celts believed that the gods were intimately involved with everyday life, that every moment of the day was holy. Imagine a woman getting up and lighting her hearth fire in a dark, damp Irish morning, and praying, “I will kindle my fire this morning in the presence of all the holy angels of heaven.” They had similar prayers for everything they did during the course of a day. Christians believe every moment is holy too, which makes sense for a religion whose God took human form, knew what it felt like to hold a tool in his hand, what it felt like to fall in bed after a long day’s work, or to take a drink of water when he was thirsty.
This belief in the godly nature of everyday life came to life in Irish monasticism. Patrick’s method of conversion was to establish Christian monasteries, colonies of Christian men, women, and children, lay and ordained, married and unmarried, throughout Ireland. In the daily monastic life of prayer and work, study and sleep, worship, hospitality and community life, every moment was considered holy.. Monasteries became “demonstration plots” for the truth of Christianity. Monasteries were the visible fruit of the Christian life, and people found them attractive reflections of God’s hope for humans.
As a new church, we at Nativity, maybe more than most churches, are called to a ministry of evangelism – helping others to know the good news of Christ’s love for us. And evangelism can be a scary word: but we can take heart from the example of Patrick: who was not a silly little leprechaun with the gift of blarney, but a man who had an abiding sense of the personal care and comfort of God in affliction, that a slave led to freedom by God must feel as few others can.
Patrick’s life, dedicated to following Christ and proclaiming the good news, gives us an example of what our own calling as Christians should be. Evangelism for us, as for Patrick, is not a matter of arguing people out of one set of logical propositions and into another, or of telling people they’re going to hell. We too, like the people of Israel, like the Christian monastics of Ireland, are a “demonstration plot” for Christian truth. We are people who are called to live day to day with our lives demonstrating the truth of God’s love in Christ.
By our love of God, and love of neighbor, we make God’s love visible. Evangelism is living the good news of Christ, in such a way that we become a “demonstration plot” for the way of life that is a gift to us from the God who leads us out of slavery to sin into a new land of freedom to love.
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