Sermon at St Margaret's Feast of Title Eucharist Sunday 19 July

19th July 2009 at 11:00 am

The Reverend Canon John Rees, Principal Registrar, Province of Canterbury

First, my thanks to Robert, and to your colleagues, for the invitation to join with you in your worship this morning, as you remember and celebrate your patron, Saint Margaret of Antioch.

We know hardly anything for certain about her.  Much of what we have received comes from highly fanciful sources, embellished with fable, mythology and large doses of wishful thinking. But we can be fairly sure that she lived, in the last years of the third century, and that she died as a martyr in about 304 AD during the persecution of Christians that took place in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian.

She would still have been a young woman when she died, but it does not take too much reading between the lines to see that she must have been a source of immense irritation to a number of people during her short life.  Saints often are irritating, and as the father of two daughters of about the same age as Margaret must have been, I have to say that young women often are too.

Her father was a pagan priest.  She irritated him so much by converting to Christianity that he disowned her.

She seems to have been a startlingly attractive young woman, as well as a strong-minded one, and this brought her to the attention of the Roman governor. He found her irresistible, but resistant to his advances. His attempts at seducing her were rebuffed. This irritated him beyond measure, and he seems to have resorted to threats and intimidation. 

Her faith made her vulnerable to arrest at a time when loyalty to Christ was seen as disloyalty to the State.  He seems to have played on this, and had her arrested, then tried, found guilty, and condemned. She was eventually beheaded, but the stories surrounding her imprisonment have caught people’s imagination for seventeen centuries.

Legend has it that in her cell, the devil appeared to her as a dragon, and swallowed her whole.  But as she went down his throat, the cross she was holding so irritated his insides that his body burst open, and she emerged whole and unscathed.  So in the many pictures you see of her, she is often depicted with the dragon she defeated through the irritation of the cross.

Make of that what you will.  Without doubt, she was a strong-minded young woman, unswervingly devoted to her faith, who irritatingly would not betray herself or her faith in God, even though it cost her her life. Throughout the Middle Ages, her reputation flourished, first in the Eastern Mediterranean, and then into Western Europe, so that by the time this church was established shortly after the Norman Conquest, it was one of two hundred or more churches in this land dedicated to her as their patron saint. 

Perhaps because of the legend about being delivered whole from the belly of the dragon, she became particularly the patron saint of pregnant women, women hoping to become pregnant, and women in labour.  Through Margaret, they found renewed faith in a God who would protect and deliver them in their fears and their anxieties.  

So what has Margaret of Antioch got to say to us, in our very different world?  Let me suggest two things.

1. Faith in Christ is always irritating

It is right for the Church to question and challenge the assumptions of the societies we are called to live in – whether that is morality of cloning, or assisted suicide, the policies of a dictator like Robert Mugabe, challenged by our own Archbishop of York, or the oppressiveness of regimes such as those in Uganda which led to the death of Archbishop Janani Luwum in the 1970s, or Archbishop Oscar Romero in South America in the 1980s. In many parts of the world, and not least through the fellowship and networks of our own Anglican Communion, the Churches are often the only effective opposition, challenging and exposing the shortcomings of governments and dictators.

For years, the bishops of our own churches have been warning against the sickening consumerism of our own society, and the challenge to us now is how to go beyond saying simply ‘I told you so’, and to offer constructive, and probably rather irritating, suggestions about the values our society should be espousing as it seeks to go forward through the hangover following the orgy of consumption we have indulged in, while we have been spending other people’s money. 

I am glad that this church stands in such close proximity to Parliament, as a symbol of our Church’s ‘critical solidarity’ with the State, and providing ministry to so many of our politicians – who need our prayers as well as our criticism in the often thankless tasks they undertake.  It is right that we should be irritants to government, asking awkward questions, publicly and privately – and make no mistake, we will all be the poorer for it if the voice of our bishops in Parliament is diminished in tomorrow’s Constitutional Reform Bill.   Margaret of Antioch was willing to be an uncompromising irritant to the powers that be in her day, and there is a beautiful appropriateness in her being your patron in this church! 

But the Christian faith isn’t just an irritant for those we can point the finger at so easily.  Each time we point at others, three fingers point back at us. Saint Paul puts it succinctly:  ‘The good that I would, I do not; the evil that I would not, that I do…’.  It’s not just ‘society’ that’s wrong, or my employer that’s perverse, or my neighbour or parent or child that’s being unreasonable; no, the questioning and challenging comes home here – am I really living the life God has given me to live, or have I allowed myself to be seduced by some other set of priorities?

Margaret reminds us that faith in Christ raises irritating questions.

2. Faith in Christ always brings hope

But she also reminds us that in all of it, faith in Christ brings hope.  That is why the legends about her were seized on so enthusiastically by the women of the Middle Ages.  Through her example, they found the courage to face the pain and uncertainty of childbirth, under the ever present shadow of death. And Saint Paul too ends this morning’s reading not with a final hopeless lament but on a note of confidence: ‘Who shall deliver me from this body of death? I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord…’

We’re being reminded this week of one man’s first tentative steps on the Moon, forty years ago; seeing again those images of our colourful planet floating in the immensity of space.  It’s a forceful reminder of just how fragile this world of ours is, the responsibility we carry not to wreck it still further, and the potential we have to do just that.

Nearly ten years earlier, Yuri Gagarin went into space, and came back saying that now he knew there was no God, because he had not seen him there.  By contrast Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin came back, reading the psalms:  ‘When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him… O Lord our governor, how glorious is your name in all the world’ (Ps 8).  Faith puts mankind in perspective and that gives us hope.

Even in the face of the crises confronting us today, faith in Christ always brings hope.  ‘Who shall deliver me…? I thank God, through Jesus Christ’. I think Margaret of Antioch would have been proud of Armstrong and Aldrin, as they ventured into the blackness of space, passing round the dark side of the Moon, courageously putting his faith in God to carry out the momentous assignment given to them.

The purposes God has for us may not be on that scale.  But the God they recognised, and Gagarin failed to find, is the same God who sustained Margaret of Antioch, and who walks beside us today, irritating us with his challenges to all our assumptions about ourselves and our world, but strengthening us and giving us hope, if we will only open our lives to his loving purposes for us.  And we can start that adventure again today.

Father, give us the simplicity and faith of your servant Margaret of Antioch, that loving you above all things, we may be what you would have us be, and do what you would have us do, through the power of your Spirit, and trusting in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen