St Nicholas

Propers: St Nicholas Day, A.D. 2016 A

Homily:

He was the most famous saint in all the world, and they had come to steal his bones.

It was the Year of Our Lord 1087, when the three Viking ships sailed into the city of Myra on the Lycian coast, in the country we know today as Turkey. At first there seemed little reason to fear. Theirs were merchant ships, after all, rather than the dragon-headed longboats which had so terrorized both East and West since the time of Charlemagne.  Moreover, these were not typical Vikings. They were Normans: Viking pirates who had settled in the northwest coast of France, and from there had captured several towns in Italy. Once the Normans had been the scourge of all Christendom; now they were the faith’s greatest champions.

Thus, it was not so terribly odd that these three ships would cross the Mediterranean to the port city of Myra, nor that their crews would visit the basilica erected in memory of Myra’s world-famous saint. The Vikings prayed at the altar and then turned politely to the monks. “Where are his remains?” they quietly asked. The monks were immediately suspicious. Myra, you see, was an ancient Christian community, but the surrounding country had fallen to Muslim conquerors. The monks feared that Christians from the West would come to steal their relics, rather than risk them being captured by Islam. “Why?” demanded the monks. “Have you come to carry him away?”

The Vikings hemmed and hawed for a moment, but then did what Vikings do best: they drew their swords, placing the frightened monks under guard. One particularly burly Norman, given the Christian name Matthew, hefted an iron mallet and smashed his way into the saint’s white marble tomb. Immediately a glorious floral smell overcame him, as if he were entering the gardens of Paradise. Everyone knew that the saint’s corpse was said to exude a wondrous holy oil, of which a single drop could illicit miraculous cures. Lowering himself into the sepulcher, Matthew discovered so much of this legendary oil that the saint’s skeleton was submerged in it, with bones floating about! Quickly as he could, the invader hurriedly scooped the relics out of the fragrant oil by hand, and he and his compatriots fled to their ships, sailing triumphantly back to their city of Bari, where they built a glorious new church in the saint’s honor.

They had done it! They had captured—or rescued, as they saw it—the relics of the most famous saint in all of Christendom. They had stolen the bones of St Nicholas.

Santa Claus, brothers and sisters, is easily one of the most recognizable figures in the entire world. He has become synonymous with winter joys, the giving of gifts, the laughter of children, and even with Christmas itself. Yet most people have no idea that Santa Claus was, in fact, a real person—born in Turkey to a family of Greek Christians around the year 280 A.D. What we might find even more shocking is that he was far more famous than we Americans could imagine, long before Europeans came to the New World. Cities and ports, monasteries and cathedrals, have been raised in his memory and honor. Indeed, for most of the Church’s history, the only Christian more famous than Nicholas was the Virgin Mary! In a world full of saints, he was the most beloved of all.

Now, the story of Nicholas begins, as do so many good things, with a mother’s prayer. Theophannes and Nonna were a wealthy Greek couple living in Lycia. They had it all: money, respect, an honorable bloodline; everything except a child. Nonna prayed to Christ that she might be blessed with a baby, and so she bore a son, whom she named Nicholas, after the boy’s uncle in the monastery. He grew faithful and true and even as a youth there were rumors of miracles surrounding him. Alas, the day came when Theophannes and Nonna were lost to the plague, and Nicholas went to live with his uncle the monk. Suddenly, in response to a vision, the bishops of the Church appointed this astonished young man as Bishop of Myra! He protested, but the bishops were adamant.

Nicholas would go on to have one of the most phenomenal careers of any churchman. He stood up to Roman generals and corrupt magistrates; he cared for the poor and ever spoke out for justice; he stayed true to the faith even through imprisonment and torture, and all the while stories of his gentleness and love—especially towards children—would abound and be carried by ships leaving Myra to the far corners of the globe.

“Nicholas the Wonderworker!” they called him. It was said that he could levitate during prayer, and sailors swore that they saw him, decked out in his bishop’s robes, flying over the masts of their ships to protect them in the midst of murderous gales. He was also purported to have the gift of bilocation, an ability attributed to only the most holy of men, whereby he could appear in different places while in the midst of prayer. In this manner people claimed to see him comfort the dying Pope, and even rebuke the Emperor in Rome! Some went so far as to claim that St Nicholas could raise murder victims from the dead.

But perhaps the most famous story told of Nicholas is also the most mundane. You see, when he first entered the service of God, back in his youth, he decided to give away the considerable inheritance left to him by Theophannes and Nonna. He soon learned of a previously wealthy family that had fallen on hard times and could not afford dowries for their three lovely daughters. Stricken, their father wailed that he would have to sell the maidens into slavery, lest the poor girls starve. So one night, Nicholas gathered a wealth of gold in a sack, disguised himself, and tossed the gold through the family’s window.  Some say he dropped it down the chimney. Regardless, the gold landed in a shoe or stocking left by the fire to dry. The family was saved! There was far more than enough to marry off their eldest. Twice more Nicholas repeated this feat, paying for the other two dowries, and on that third excursion the father caught him in the act and prostrated himself in gratitude. Nicholas asked the man to tell no one—so of course, everybody heard.

Upon his death, the legend of St Nicholas only grew. You’ve already heard about the copious volumes of healing oil his bones were said to produce. There was so much of the stuff floating around that they called it “The Manna of Nicholas,” and to this day you can find prayers for its proper application. He became a sort of ur-saint, the patron of everyone and everything, but his generosity and love of children have ever remained foremost in our minds. We still look for a white-bearded man flying about in a red suit, bringing gifts down our chimneys. Only now, we call St Nicholas by his Dutch name, Sinterklaas: Santa Claus. His feast day falls on December 6th, but we love him so much that we just can’t separate him from the Christchild whom he so loved and adored.

So now the question: what does this have to do with God? Many Christians today fear that celebrating Santa Claus—or any mere mortal, for that matter—takes away from our love of Jesus’ birth, in effect, stealing the Christ-Mass from the Christ. But to take such a stance, alas, is to woefully misunderstand the nature of Christ’s Body, and how our Lord continues His work of salvation in this world. At Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation: God become Man, become one of us, to join us and share with us all things, purely out of grace and love. That Incarnation—God serving as Man—continues today in the Church. We, all of us, all the saints, have been given the incomparable gifts of Jesus’ own Holy Spirit, of Jesus’ own Body and Blood. We are the Body of Christ now. We are the hands and feet of our Lord still at work, healing, blessing, giving freely to the world.

We look to St Nicholas, and to all the other sinners whom Christ has redeemed in His Name, and we praise and celebrate them not for their own innate abilities, but for what Christ does in them, how God works through them, just as He would work through all of us. Santa Claus does not take away from Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ lives through him. Jesus lives through all of us, through Baptism, through Communion, through the faith and hope and self-giving love of charity that we share in Christ’s Name! That’s what all this Advent preparation is about: not the gifts and the consumerism and the toys, but the joy of selfless giving, the wonder of miracles worked through our neighbor, and the magic of a Creation redeemed in gracious Christian love.

Wouldn’t it be something if Jesus’ self-giving love shone through us so clearly that 2,000 years from now people said of us, “Remember his love for all children? Remember her care for the poor? By God, what wholeness that brought to everyone around! Why, I bet even his bones could bring life to the dead.” May Christ be born so clearly, so purely, in each and every one of us, that we might forever embody Christmas to a world in need of wonders.

Thanks be to God in Jesus’ Name, and through Nicholas His servant. Amen.