Patrick

St Patrick, by Jim Fitzpatrick

Children’s Sermon

9 March 2025

Gather ‘round, kids, and let me tell you the tale of Patrick!

Patrick lived a long time ago in what one day would be Wales. His childhood was pretty posh—Patricius means “noble”—until one day pirates came from across the Irish Sea. They captured Patrick and sold him as a slave. His owner sent him out alone to tend the master’s sheep. He’d gone from a life of leisure to a land of loneliness. He was cold, and hungry, and he missed his family.

Patrick didn’t think a lot of church when he was young, though his parents had been Christian. But out there in the wilderness, with just the sheep and trees, he started to pray. And one day, wouldn’t you know it, he finally got an answer. After six years as a slave, he heard a voice telling him to go home, for a ship had been prepared to take him. His prayers guided him some 200 miles to the coast, avoiding capture all the way. He was, after all, a runaway slave.

There he found the promised ship, and managed to convince the crew to let him come aboard, largely because weird things, wondrous things, kept seeming to happen around him. God, Patrick knew, was guiding him and carrying for him along the way. And so he made it home, back to his family. Soon thereafter he became a pastor, then a bishop. And then he had a dream of an Irish slave asking him for help.

Patrick went back to Ireland, back to the people who had taken him from his home, who had made him into a slave. He came with no weapons, no armies, not much in the way of money. And he taught them about Jesus. Oh, to this day the Irish still tell stories of St Patrick; of how he battled druids’ magic; how he knocked demons from the sky. Ireland became the great medieval center of Christian learning, of art and of poetry and of history and of myth.

If I’d been taken from my home, I’d probably hate those people. But Patrick learned to love them, because Jesus loved them. And sharing that love of Jesus changed not just one country but all the countries that that country touched—all over Europe, all over the world—all because one young man responded to the wrong done unto him with forgiveness, and love, and the Good News of Jesus Christ. And that’s why we celebrate St Patrick every year.

Sound good? Okay. Let’s pray.