Brigid and Olaf

Scripture: Candlemas, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

Jesus Christ is the Light of the world. That’s the message of Candlemas.

40 days after Jesus’ birth, Joseph and Mary took the Christchild to be presented at the Temple in Jerusalem. There they encountered two aged prophets, Simeon and Anna. Simeon had been promised by God that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah, the Christ, with his very own eyes. And as soon as Simeon witnessed the Holy Family bringing their newborn into the Temple, he took the baby Jesus in his arms and cried aloud, “Now, Lord, your servant may depart in peace, for just as You promised I have seen the Messiah with my own eyes. The salvation that He brings will be not only the glory of Your people Israel, but a Light to reveal You to all the peoples of the world!”

So on this day, the 40th day after Christmas, the Church blesses candles, for use both at home and public worship, to remind us that the Light of Christ has dawned for all peoples, and that we too are now called to reflect His light for the world.

Everywhere that Jesus goes, He dispels the darkness of superstition, ignorance, hatred, and fear. But He does not do this by Himself. Rather, He chooses to bring His light to the world through you. We are each of us called to be little reflectors, little mirrors, of God’s own light, illuminating all those around us. This is why the Virgin Mary is often compared to the Moon; because the Moon illumines the night not by shining on her own but by reflecting the light poured out upon her by the Sun.

The poet Dante famously described Heaven as all the saints and angels gathering in a sphere around the blazing radiance of God’s light in the center. Each angel and saint acted as a mirror, revealing to all the others an aspect of God that only he or she could see. With every new soul that came to Heaven, the whole assembly grew brighter, because each newcomer unveiled an aspect of God that the others could not see on their own. Wherever the light of Christ is shared, we all shine more brightly together.

What I love about this image is that each person uniquely reflects the same God. We are not called to be uniform, all sharing the same vanilla flavor of holiness. Rather, the saints come in wondrous variety, all reflecting the infinite love of God. Saints appear as scholars, barbers, fishermen, soldiers, introverts, extroverts, elders, youth, Jews, Gentiles, barbarians, Greeks, and everything in between. There is no one way to reflect the light of Christ.

Jesus calls us not to live for ourselves but to live and die for Him—because it is only in this way that we find our true selves and our true life. The more we strive to reflect Jesus’ light in the world, the more clearly our own uniquely created beauty shines through, like stained glass in a sunlit cathedral. This is, after all, what we were born to do: to rejoice and participate in Holy Trinity’s dance of Creation. God has called each and every one of us to play a part, to dance a step, that only we can perform. And without us, the dance itself, Creation itself, is that much duller, that much dimmer, than God intends the world to be.

Take, for example, two very different saints: Brigid and Olaf.

Brigid was born to the Celts of pagan Ireland. Her father was a Gaelic chieftain, her mother a Pictish slave. The Irish were a deeply religious people, intimately concerned with curses and wonders and propitiating their myriad gods. They valued mysticism as highly as they valued strength in battle. Brigid’s mother had been taken captive in a slave raid, but not before she had been converted to Christianity by St. Patrick, the great liberator of the slaves.

When she became pregnant by the chieftain, the chief’s wife insisted that the child be sent away, and so young Brigid was given into the care of a pagan druid priest. She was named after the Celtic goddess Brigit, a goddess of fertility and the hearth. Well, it didn’t take long for miracle stories to start following the young Brigid about, much to the frustration of her druid guardian. By the age of 10 he sent her back to her father—her being a chieftain’s daughter, after all—where her compassion for the poor proved no end of grief for her old man. She kept giving all his stuff away!

One story tells of her distributing her mother’s entire store of butter to the hungry. When her father heard of this, he flew to the pantry in a rage, only to find that the butter had been miraculously restored. Brigid refused to wed, having dedicated herself as a nun, and so her father, unable to marry her off, took his daughter to the high king of Leister seeking advice. The chieftain left Brigid in his carriage as he went in to speak with the king, and while they were trying to figure out what to do with her, she leaned out and gave her father’s jeweled sword to a beggar, that he might barter it to feed his family. Upon discovering this, her father threw up his hands in exasperation, but the king wondered at her obvious holiness and convinced her father to set her free, that she might pursue life as a nun. In time, Brigid would come to convert the king himself to Christianity.

The stories only get wilder from there. She healed the sick, prophesied the future, played matchmaker for her would-be suitors, and founded nunneries all along the island. At one point she prayed that she might brew a lake of beer for the Holy Family. At another, she was miraculously consecrated a bishop in response to a vision, by special dispensation of God. To this day, Brigid is still considered the only female Roman Catholic bishop. When she grew old, her fellow nuns kept a constant fire burning in the hearth so that she might stay warm. After she died, they kept that fire burning for 1,000 years, in honor of the woman who had brought the light of Christ to Ireland.

Brigid was Celtic through and through. She loved creation and song and generosity and beer. For a people who respected wild forest goddesses, Jesus raised up a wild goddess of a saint. She reflected God’s light in a way that no one else could.

St. Olaf, meanwhile, was a Viking, and his were the virtues of the Vikings: strength, indomitability, and relentlessness in battle. Olaf wanted to unite Norway into one kingdom, and during the various conflicts involved in this endeavor he wintered in Normandy where he was baptized a Christian. Now he had two missions: to conquer all Norway, and to baptize all Norway. Those who opposed him were savage in battle, and he was savage right back at them. When they burned a Christian church, he burned a pagan temple. When bands of sorcerers attempted to whip up storms to sink Olaf’s ships, he took their threats quite seriously—and drowned them in the sea.

At one point Olaf, sometimes known as Olaf the Stout, ran into the Viking earl of northern Scotland, Sigurd the Stout. He ordered Sigurd to recognize him as king and accept baptism, or—and I’m quoting here—“I’ll have you killed on the spot and I swear I’ll ravage every island with fire and steel.” These were harsh words from one harsh man to another, but they were terms that Viking warlords like Sigurd could understand and respect. The Stouts were baptized by Olaf, and today I am living proof that it stuck.

You could not have two more different saints than Brigid and Olaf. For the Celts who respected mysticism and miracles, God sent a wonderworker in the guise of a goddess. For the Vikings who understood only victory in battle, God called the strongest of them all to unite their warring bands into a single, stable, Christian nation. To call them saints is not to say that they were not also sinners. Olaf in particular was a brutal man for a brutal time, and we should not strive to emulate his more savage attributes. But both of them brought the light of Christ to suffering and violent peoples, peoples who eagerly embraced Jesus as the King of Kings. They reflected true images of God—Brigid reflecting His generosity and wonders, Olaf His power and strength—and thus brought Light to the darkness.

You, brothers and sisters, are called to reveal Jesus Christ as the Light of the world. You are called to be a true image, a reflection, a little mirror of Jesus, showing to all of us a side of God that we cannot see without you. Put us all together, all the broken sinners called by God to be His saints, and together we might begin to reflect the fullness of Jesus Christ still shining His light in a darkened world.

What aspect of Him will we see in you? What beauty of God will you show to the world and perfect in Heaven? I for one cannot wait to find out.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.