The St George's Day Sermon: Jesus First

April 30, 2017
St. George’s Day Evensong
St. Paul’s Cathedral
Matthew 10: 16-22


Come Holy Spirit: Touch our minds and think with them, touch our lips and speak with them and touch our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. AMEN.

This is always quite a day. A bit of a parade, Banners, bag pipes, choirs, anthems, and such. I have so often encouraged folks who are not a part of the Episcopal Church to come to this service because of the pageantry, the fun and the beauty. I mean: how many times to you get to experience a slain bread dragon as a part of a church procession and then eat it at the reception following?

On this side of the pond, our commemoration of the patron of England and our rejoicing in all things Anglican is a celebration of what we see as good and hallowed in our heritage. A brief survey of the centuries would surely touch on Augustine of Canterbury, Julian of Norwich, and George Herbert. We would note the importance of the Magna Carta and common law. And we would certainly give thanks for common prayer and the Anglican worship and music that imbue this very service.

As a relatively new nation, with a great deal of pride in our own history, we anglophiles readily associate with British history, culture and custom. After all, which one of us would not die to live at Downtown Abbey? We take the Facebook quiz wondering which character we are most like! And now, even as we grieve the last season—what will we do without Cora’s rapier repartee, we now are saved by the first season of The Crown and Victoria. And so we do well to remember this day our shared English heritage and how it has blessed and given to our church and our culture. We are proud of our Anglican identity and association; we are proud of our heritage as citizen of these United States. Whether we are English, Welsh, Scottish, or United States citizens, it is good to love one’s country.

And yet, even as we rejoice in national heritage and identity on this day, there are troubling signs around the planet of a strident resurgence of nationalism which divides rather than unities. There are forces that are drawing factions and creating a withdrawal from common interests. In an age when so many challenges are global, we need to be very careful with national pride and ambition. Today, we celebrate our Anglican heritage. But we need to be careful that this does not weave into some of the darker chapters of both US and British history where this pride bleeds into a not so subtle sense of superiority of race which was at the heart of British Colonial oppression and at the core of US slavery, imperialism and Jim Crow. Throughout our shared history, we have much to celebrate, but we also have much to mourn. We need to be careful.

A quintessential part of being Anglican and Episcopalian is to love our country so much that we call each other and our leaders to our highest ideals. Think of William Wilberforce fighting the slave trade, Bishop George Bell’s speech on the floor of the House of Lords criticizing the bombing of German cities in World War II, Presiding Bishop John Hines marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Think of our church standing up for LGBTQ rights at tremendous cost. Think of us standing up for neighbors who are fearful because of their immigration status. At the core of our heritage stands one who is not English, one who is not documented—a refugee and ultimately a convicted criminal—Jesus of Nazareth. We stand with him and all he teaches us—all he calls us to be.

We stand with him just as a saint of another age did. We remember St. George, not because he slayed a dragon, but because he stood up with Jesus and claimed his faith in face of brutal persecution. He was absolutely clear about his singular allegiance to Jesus as Lord. And so he was martyred in the Diocletian persecution. He was a man who could be described as a lover of country with loyalty to the emperor serving as soldier and tribune. But when Diocletian tried to purge the army of Christians through arrest and execution, George stood up for his faith and his Lord Jesus.

Where do we stand? Where are our allegiances? Parades and banners, political parties and pageantry are seductive. We can get caught up in passions of power and be overwhelmed with fear and suspicion of the other. Or we can say centered in Jesus and connected to the whole human family.

Today, we celebrate who we are as Anglicans. We love what we should love about this heritage. But let us rejoice and give thanks for the Asian, the Mexican, and the First Nations of this land. Let us rejoice in who we are but confess our own sins of pride and hubris. Let us stand with Jesus who calls us to love our neighbor.

Last summer, both major presidential candidates endorsed American exceptionalism, the belief that this nation has a special responsibility to the world. The new president in his inauguration echoed and amplified this notion with the phrase, “America First.” This is not a new idea but one that has warped both British and American core values of human dignity for generations. Rome First didn’t work, England First didn’t work, Britain First didn’t work, and America First will not work. As St. George demonstrated and witnessed with his life, for us it must be Jesus First! The Jesus Movement is a movement of love that does not divide but unites. It is selfless and giving. It is about hope not fear; love not hate.

On this day, we will sing two national anthems. We will remember the queen and a star spangled banner. Some of us may note that those rockets’ red glare were fired by the Royal Navy just weeks after burning the Capitol and White House. Don’t worry: all is forgiven!

It is good to love our country. After all, we pray for the queen, the president, and all in authority, even as we call them to goodness and generosity. God bless the queen; God bless the United States. And yet we then remember St. George and close with the immortal hymn, Jerusalem. William Blake’s anthem which has been appropriated as the veritable hymn of England is not satisfied with the way things are but rather calls us to a higher place, the image of New Jerusalem where creation will be made new.

And so, let us strive for that common place which brings together all the nations and peoples of this world into one. Let us seek a kindred understanding and heart that love our distinctive character as English, as African, as Native American, as Mexican as….whatever…and calls us to being neighbor, brother and sisters, the family of God. For St. George, for us and for all the saints, it is Jesus First.

The Rt Rev James R Mathes

St George's Day Sermon: Of Beasts and Bravery

‘There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.’

So J. R. R. Tolkein describes Bilbo Baggins first encounter with Smaug, the centuries’ old dragon of his masterpiece The Hobbit. Smaug had conquered the mountain kingdom of the dwarves, leaving no male alive, and bringing such devastation to the surrounding area that the mountain became known as the ‘Desolation of the Dragon’ as ‘there was neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished’. For the decades that followed his conquest, Smaug lay upon the great treasure trove of the dwarves, ‘his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed’.

My friends, tonight is the night of dragons! There is one waiting for you in the Great Hall after the service, so if you need to go to the restroom before then, do so in pairs! For Tolkein, dragons were a serous business. In a 1938 lecture, he describes them so: ‘In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was a profound desire. I desired dragons with a profound desire’.

If he were here this evening, it might have appeared a little odd to Tolkein that our dragon is made out of bread, pieces of which we will give to our children to eat. The eating of dragons is of course something that all good parents should seek to expose their children to. Yet the real danger in our celebration tonight is that there is no danger, no fear, no trepidation that we too might stumble upon a profoundly destructive desire.

The dragon of Tolkein’s fertile imagination was so smitten with desire for gold that it had become on it another skin. Smaug the dragon, had quite literally put on an armor of desire, of gems and fragments of gold. A fitting image to place in contrast to the one that Esdras paints for us of the great number of people assembled on Zion, who have put off mortal clothing and put on the immortal. No longer clothed by human desire, but clothed by the defeat of desire, the way not of self-aggrandizement, but of self-donation, the Way of the Son of God.

And so, lacking in danger as we are with our bready beast awaiting on the banquet table, it is, of course, St. George, who valiantly rides in to the rescue. As you can read at the back of your service booklets this evening, the legend of St. George is of a rescue from the danger not only of fire-breathing scaly monsters, but of what people will do, even to their children, when they become desperate enough for their own survival. For as the story goes, when faced with starvation from the siege the dragon had laid upon their town, having run out of sheep to feed the ghastly creature, the people of “Silene” in Libya, drew lots to decide which of their children would be offered up. And it is only when the King’s own daughter is put forth for sacrifice that our hero George rides up, slays the dragon and all is well that ends well. God save the Queen, indeed.

For Tolkein, when he wrote his books about Middle Earth the dragon of desire for destruction loomed large throughout that period in the form of Nazi Germany and the terrible power to obliterate that we are capable of visiting upon one another when the desire for destruction goes unchecked, witnessed in the slaughter of the Holocaust. It was not hard, in the years that people first read his work on dragons and those who dwelled in the shadows, to see how art not only imitated life, but offered a profound warning of what happens when we put on the armor of darkness.

So what of us, in our own time of sieges from Donetsk to Homs? What of our vocation to cry for God and St. George in our own communities where desire lives large in our relentless quest for more? What of the Church in a world still beset with dragons?

One answer to that challenge of how we might live out the Christian vocation in this world might lie in us asking what it is, exactly, we are up to here this evening. On the face of it, we have the appearance of something akin to an ecclesiastical version of Mardi Gras, with special costumes, and loud music, and seemingly endless processions. At first glance, then, this evening’s service appears to be something of a show, a piece of liturgical theater. And in many respects, that is exactly what it is. the liturgy is the great drama of the Church, it is how we put form, through song and word and action to the ineffable, to that which is beyond words. And Anglicans, Episcopalians among them, believe particularly that it is through this dramatic act of worship that we come to know God. ‘Lex orandi, lex credendi’ – literally, the law of praying is the law of believing, or more colloquially, praying shapes believing.

Given this, and given the centrality of this way of approaching the mystery of God in the Anglican tradition, what does our worship say of what we believe about God and one another that might be good news for a world still under siege?

I think there are a couple of useful answers to that. The first is particular to this evening’s festal evensong in celebration of St. George. For over 50 years, this cathedral has celebrated George, not merely because it might be true that there are one or two anglophiles living here in fair San Diego, but more deeply because in celebrating St. George, in singing ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘O say can you see’ at the same service, we are proclaiming that this church community has a connection not only to the Church of England, but to all Anglicans around the world. Tonight is more than 50 years of celebrating the truth that as Anglicans, we belong to one another, that we have a part in one another. And in a world where sectarianism and the desire not to be in fellowship with others is as strong as perhaps it has ever been in the past century, that we are still a global Church held together with bonds of friendship that are no more than the desire to be in communion with one another, is a witness to the potential power of unity in diversity that is well-worth maintaining for the sake of what is often a fractured world.

Beyond this, though, the second thing that our worship here this evening says is an even more profound mystery: it says that we belong to God. More profound, because when your news station next alerts you to another modern day siege of power over others, you will know that those people, far away across the globe, belong to God as equally and immeasurably as you do. More profound, because when everyday people continue to go about their daily lives oblivious to the homeless man or woman who begs for a morsel of food and a crumb of recognition, you will know that those invisible children of God belong to Him as mysteriously and completely as you do. More profound, because when you encounter your deep desire to be known, your burning passion to be loved, your unending search for the beyond, you will find on that long pilgrimage that the One you seek is already with you, poised to place a crown upon your head and a palm in your hand, and to die in your place as the God who gives it all away for you.

Tonight is still the night of dragons, but it is also the night of saints, not this time riding in on white horses, but walking out into this world looking much like you and I. The world needs people exactly like you. It needs you to love it, to nurture goodness within it as if it were indeed a precious gem or a fragment of gold. It needs you to believe that in the end, love prevails over hate, that the darkness cannot overcame the light, that it is life not death that has the final word. And the world needs you to sing songs loudly of hope and freedom. It needs you to live bravely for the sake of a gospel that would see all people set free.

God bless you St. George. God bless you St. Paul’s Cathedral. Here’s to another fifty years.

Rev. Dr. Simon Mainwaring 
50th Annual Festal Evensong of St. George, St. Paul’s Cathedral, 
April 26, 2015

St. George and the Dragon: Homily for St. George's Day Evensong

One of my earliest childhood memories is of taking family vacations in southern Austria. We always stayed in the same little town on the Worthersee lake, a place where my father had been one of the liberating Allied troops at the end of World War 2 and where he was always welcomed back as a hero. We frequently took the ferry across the lake to see the Lindwurm in the center of Klagenfurt am Worthersee. The Lindwurm is a great stone representation of the swamp-dwelling dragon that a millennium ago roamed the area around the Worthersee lake and which was eventually killed by a brave knight, allowing the establishment of the town. So you could say my association with dragons goes back a long way.

I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1960's, and the display of a St. George cross was a good way to get shot in some parts of the province, even if it was somewhat camouflaged by the overlay of other flags in the Union Jack. I remember having to learn the component crosses: St. Andrew's diagonal white cross on a blue ground; St Patrick's red diagonal Cross on a white ground; and the red St. George's Cross on a white ground, dominating the whole thing. Perhaps tellingly, the flag of Wales, which features a red dragon, is not represented in the Union Jack at all. The dragon has been completely vanquished by George. No wonder the other British peoples look a little askance at the union flag.

All the best adventure stories feature dragons. The ancient Greeks had the Kraken; the Bible has the Beast of Revelation; Tolkien has Smaug; and CS Lewis includes a dragon in one of his Narnia books, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Perhaps you remember the story: Eustace, an obnoxious, greedy, and imagination-challenged little boy, goes off on his own and gets predictably lost. Lewis describes Eustace's discovery through the boy's own eyes.

At the bottom of a cliff a little on his left hand was a low, dark hole the entrance to a cave perhaps. And out of this two thin wisps of smoke were coming, And the loose stones just beneath the dark hollow were moving just as if something were crawling in the dark behind them. Something WAS crawling. Worse still, something was coming out. Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books. The thing that came out oft he cave was something he had never even imagined - a long lead-coloured snout, dull red eyes, no feathers or fur, a long, lithe body that trailed on the ground, legs whose elbows went up higher than its back like a spider's, cruel claws, bat's wings that made a rasping noise on the stones, yards of tail. And the two lines of smoke were coming from its two nostrils. He never said the word "Dragon" to himself. Nor would it have made things any better if he had.

Eustace witnesses the death of this dragon, and he takes a nap on top of the dragon's hoard of treasure. When he wakes up, he has been transformed into a dragon, and he instantly realizes why. "Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself."

Eustace the dragon quickly realizes how horribly lonely it is to be a terror. He is utterly miserable and pathetically grateful when his human friends accept him in his new form. His dragon experience is mercifully brief, as Aslan the lion soon comes to him and invites him to strip away his scaly armor. Eustace is unable to do the whole job by himself, and the last layer has to be removed, very painfully, by the lion. Eustace tells the story:

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.... Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off ... and there it was lying on the grass. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch... Then he caught hold of me and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment... I had turned into a boy again."

Eustace the dragon is restored, even reborn, as Eustace the boy, and in that rebirth he has begun a spiritual transformation into someone much more lovable than he was before. Maybe you know someone who needs to be undragoned. Maybe you need to be undragoned yourself. Maybe there are layers of armor or scales on each of us that need to be stripped away by divine power. Maybe St. George himself, the pure and virtuous knight that he was, slew a dragon within himself when he gave himself to Christ. According to historians, the real dragon in the story of St. George is the Emperor Diocletian, who had George put to death for his Christian faith.

There are dragons in our world today: dragons of hatred, poverty, greed. The center of Africa is filled with the dragons of greed: their hoard includes blood diamonds and so-called conflict minerals, including minerals that my iPad uses in its touch-screen. We feed the dragon with our appetite for new technology. Meanwhile the people who live in Congo are devastated as the rule of law breaks down and greedy individuals and factions form armies and lay waste the towns and farms, just as deadly as any dragon breathing fire out of the sky.

We Americans hoard so much of the world's wealth: does that make us into dragons? Who will slay the dragon of greed in our lives? Like Eustace, it is impossible for us to strip off that layer of dragon's skin: we will have to ask God to do it for us. And having done it, having been reborn in the character of George, courageous, pure, and loving, perhaps we will find the grace to go out and slay other dragons.

May the memory of St. George and the cross of courage be our companions in the battle.

The Very Rev. Penelope Bridges

May 4, 2014 

Photos from St George's Day

The Dragon awaits the parade, skewered by a sword 

Look closely at the gravity-defying thurible!

Multiple images of St George

Hard working children carry the dragon

Verger Almira shepherds the choir

Verger Stephanie leads the flagbearers

Loose canons?  Cathedral Canon Christine and Diocesan Canon Howard

Last but not least, Head Verger Lisa, Bishop's Chaplain Roger, Dean Penny and Bishop Jim

The streamers lead the way in the church

Choir in excellent voice

Dean Penny shows off a dragon on the pulpit

Finishing off with a sumptuous feast!

More here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stpaulscathedral/sets/72157644108516197/

St George's Evensong (Slideshow)

A new look at St George

The Rev. Canon Andrew Rank shares with us:

Leave it to Louie Crew, a retired professor from Rutgers and founder of Integrity, the LGBT organization of the Episcopal Church, that things aren’t always as they seem. This posting of his on Facebook page tells us something about good old St. George that probably few of us knew and perhaps why next year is the 50th anniversary of this celebration at our beloved Cathedral. Thanks and a pull of the dragon’s tail to Louie, one of our church’s great contemporary leaders from New Jersey.

St George the Dragon Slayer (click the link to read the whole thing!)

I’ve always been somewhat amused by the idea that St George, with no discernible link to this country, known primarily for an obviously mythical reputation as a dragon slayer, should have been adopted as patron saint of England... 

That he should have a claim to a status as a gay icon increases the appeal. To cement the deal, the nature of his claim, to a mystical experience in which he is described as the "bridegroom of Christ" pretty closely resembles the central experience of the most intense retreat of my own life. 

I think I should change my middle name to "George". 

Now, consider the dragon. The value of plainly mythical beasts lies in their potential as symbols. If we use the dragon image to represent ignorance, homophobia and the institutional hostility from heterosexual theology, can we all march under his banner?
I’d like to think so.

Honors and Privileges

Sunday evening at Evensong, I was installed (sort of sounds like a kitchen appliance) as a verger at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I am deeply honored at being asked to join this august group of worker bees who keep the services humming at the cathedral. The ceremony promised to be brief during which I switched from my black cassock to a cathedral purple one and then donned a white vest called an anthem. They then gave me a ‘virge’, a ceremonial stick, with which I led the procession out of the nave at the conclusion of the service.

Ah, but that’s not all. Next week we celebrate the Festal Evensong of St. George, an annual tribute to our Anglican roots, and in that parade, I get to carry the Union Jack. Why, you may ask, is someone with my last name presuming to carry the banner of the British Empire, representing the Queen and all the pomp and circumstance that has been handed down to us from our British forebears?

Well, I’ll tell you. My mother’s maiden name is Allison, a part of clan McAllister, and according to her oldest brother (long deceased) who researched our roots, our clan arrived on these shores sometime around the 1680s or 1690s, supplied troops for the Revolutionary War, gave us such distinguished ancestors as Daniel Boone (I have no idea how he fits into this), and later, a renegade named Morgan who staged raids into Ohio during the Civil War. There was also some whiff of a bank robber who showed up at family reunions before he was caught and hanged in Kentucky. All stemming from clan McAllister, a Scottish family of worthy reputation and colorful descendents.

If that’s not enough, my adopted family name is related in some mysterious way to the Wellendorfs of Saxe-Coburg who were distant cousins to the Hanovers, the family that spawned Queen Victoria and the current reigning monarch of what remains of the British Empire. This last piece of astonishing news came from my paternal grandfather, who was wont to talk on grandly about this connection to anyone who would stay still long enough, often begging the question from my grandmother, looking askance at him, as to why we hadn’t been invited to the coronation nor to any of the royal weddings.

With such upstanding credentials as these, I take up my duties as flag bearer alongside a splendid US Naval officer who will be carrying the Stars and Stripes. I won’t cut as fine a figure as he will, but we will each in our own way be proud to be a part of what has become a St. Paul’s Cathedral tradition, even if my name doesn’t seem to be British in the least. But now you know the facts that should curb any disdainful whispering among the congregation next Sunday evening as I swan down the aisle toting the Union Jack.

Come join this wonderful Evensong, and don’t forget to bring your sandwiches (or whatever Anne Walter got you to sign up for) to the reception afterward.

Robert Heylmun

St George's Day

Visit the Cathedral Flickr site for more photos from today's grand event!