13th Sunday after Pentecost Sermon
Today is the Feast Day of St. Helen – a rather minor saint. In fact, I don’t think she’s even included in the Episcopal Church’s roster of saints and holy people. But she’s dear to our family, nonetheless. Cynthia and I were married on the Feast Day of St. Helen, 23 years ago today at St. Helen’s Anglican Church in Vancouver, Canada. We have a photo of Cynthia in her wedding gown, standing beside a stained-glass window of St. Helen. When our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, we named the baby Helen, and buried her in the memorial garden there at the church. So whenever I see a sculpture or painting of St. Helen, I always pause, with a smile in my spirit – this moment of kinship with a woman who died sixteen hundred years ago.
Helen (or “Helena”) was the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine. She was a convert to Christianity, and – as quite an old woman (nearly 80!) – she made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on her son’s behalf, to seek out the holy sites and relics of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Constantine himself was in the process of conversion and, I imagine, the identification of these sites and the bringing of relics back to Rome lent authenticity to the faith.
So that’s what she did. And if you visit Rome today, you can go to the Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the “Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem” where these relics are enshrined. The most important one is a large segment of the “True Cross.” There’s also a nail and thorns from his crown and various other things.
Are these relics the “real thing?” Did Helen actually find the cross of Christ? Who knows. Maybe.
This whole idea of relics is quite foreign to me. I wasn’t raised in a Christian culture that had any value for them. We certainly didn’t venerate them. (Or even mention them, for that matter.) Likewise, in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican communion, we aren’t really “relic people.” (Some people are.)
But, go back far enough in church history and it’s an entirely different issue. Relics were enormously important. So far as I can understand, they were believed to hold a kind of spiritual power – this tangible connection to Christ himself (in the case of Helen’s relics), or as was more often the case, to a saint. They were an embodied remnant of that which was holy in a way most people did not believe themselves to be. But by being in the presence of that holy thing, if done so with a spiritual posture of reverence and devotion (perhaps even pilgrimage), it meant that saint’s holiness could be imparted to the beholder.
It’s easy, now, as 21st century, post-enlightenment people, to dismiss this whole concept as primitive and medieval. And perhaps it is. But in a spirit of, “Well, you never know, Eric,” whenever I’m at a church that has a relic I do my best to stop before it, availing myself to whatever potential “something” may come of it. I can’t report “something” ever happening that I was aware of. But at the very least, it’s a spiritual practice; it’s a deliberate way of posturing myself – body and soul – and saying, “God, I don’t know how the spiritual realm functions. But I do know this: I desire you. I desire to know you, to follow you, and to grow in your likeness. My deepest desire is oneness with you and all that is holy. So here I am.”
There’s something to be said for opening yourself up to something entirely different from what you know or trust or think you understand. It can be rather enlivening: Might something happen?
But the more I think about it, I think there is something in this concept of relics that is actually very familiar – to all of us.
We are, after all, incarnate; we are embodied people which means physical things matter to us. Tangible things have worth – things that, like our very selves, we can see and touch and hold. And, we are a people whose existence is embedded within time and the ceaseless march of time. The present moment of the “now” is perpetually being ceded to the past and to our memories.
So as embodied people on this unstoppable journey forward, it makes all the sense in the world that our most valued possessions are usually those that come from our past. They are those things that represent for us all those significant events and relationships that made us who we are. The events are now ended. The people are now dead and gone. But we are still here – we who know ourselves to have been formed by all that came before. And so these artifacts that remain – the theater ticket stub from that one perfect date; the scarf she wore, our parents wedding rings, and ten thousand other things – they are, in a word, “relics.” They are infused with power because of what they mean to us. They matter because we matter. Their tangibility informs and validates our own existence and worth: “I have a story. I have come from somewhere. I have belonged to a people, to a place, to a time.”
The power of these relics becomes most obvious to us if we ever lose them. The pain is intense, like part of ourselves has been lost. After my grandmother died, my grandfather remarried. And his new wife, making herself at home, cleaned out the kitchen and threw away my grandmother’s recipe box. I’m fairly certain my mother never forgave her. The loss was intense and permanent. Those recipes, written in her mother’s hand, were every holiday meal; they were the smudge of flour on her mother’s cheek as she greeted her in the kitchen after school; they were her mother, in whose love my mother most knew her place and belonging in the universe. And now they were gone, tossed out by the stranger who now deigned to replace her.
The power of our relics is their ability to embody eternal truths across the span of time. In most cases, they are very personal or private: the rock I picked up on a beach while praying for my son, then kept in my pocket for the rest of the trip – it held my love for him, and still does. For families, the relic is shared: the letters Grandma and Grandpa exchanged during the war – they are the relationship that birthed the family. For a nation, it’s shared even more broadly: the tattered flag from the War of 1812 that inspired our national anthem, now on reverent display in the Smithsonian – it is the hope of our nation’s enduring union.
These relics are treasures because of the elemental truths of our existence we ascribe to them.
But it just may be that we are not alone in doing this. What if this very human impulse is, in fact, a reflection of the divine impulse? To put it another way: Is our human instinct to create and venerate relics a mirrored behavior of the God, in whose image we are made, who makes sacraments?
Think about it: how bread and wine become more than bread and wine. They become Christ himself. The bread becomes his body; the wine becomes his life blood, now given to us, to be ingested by us, such that his body becomes our body and we become one with God and one another. And, by God’s grace, it is offered to us in a relic (if you will), in a tangible little object rendered holy for us, holding within it the substance of all human desire. It is our memory of Christ. It is our future with Christ. It is our union with God in Christ – the goal and the yearning of all spiritual pursuit.
And baptism: The water holds the memory of the primordial waters over which the Spirit flew before creation. The water becomes the Flood of Noah’s time and the Red Sea through which Moses and the Israelites passed and the Jordan River of Christ’s own baptism. It becomes the amniotic fluid of the womb of God in whom we are reborn. And it becomes the tomb of Christ – receiving his lifeless body, and our own. And from this water we arise, now one with Christ in his resurrection, which has also become (and will become) our own resurrection. We are made one with Christ through the waters – made holy for us.
And not just for us alone. These sacraments, filled with grace, filled with meaning and hope, are shared throughout time. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one meal. Through all time, we each have our time, to come to the waters, to come to the table, for nourishment, for life.
And we are changed.
And this change – signified by the sacraments – is made manifest by love. For if we become one with God through Christ, we now become as Christ with love for one another.
The substance of the sacraments is revealed when the church gathers as family for Alanna and Michelle – cooking, making flowers, shouting, “We will” in support of their marriage. It is the church gathering as fellow pilgrims with Dennis as he makes his own journey of faith, giving permission to have doubts, and proclaiming again, “We will!” when asked, “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support this person in his life in Christ?”
God became flesh and dwelt among us.
The flesh of God became perpetually ours in the sacrament of bread and wine.
And now we become the dwelling place of God, perpetually loving one another, manifesting in our flesh – in our lives – the eternal hope of God with us, in whom we now live, forever and ever. Amen.