The Seeds of Saint Patrick's Day

I have never done much celebrating of St. Patrick's Day. I don't drink green beer, and if someone else served me corned beef, I'd eat it, but I don't love it enough to make it for my own homestead. Occasionally I make Irish soda bread, and I wonder why it isn't tastier. I've made a cake with Guinness beer occasionally, and here, too, I wonder why it isn't more delicious. I'm not braving the crowds to go to an Irish pub--I like my pubs deserted.

I may spend some time contemplating Celtic aspects of Christianity, but I might do that any day, whether it's a day that celebrates the life of a famous Irish saint or not.

I am intrigued by the crowds of people who have no connection to Ireland or Christianity or any of the reasons we celebrate today. But I'm not critical. I believe in injecting festivity into daily life in whatever way we can.

Today I will go to church, people may wear green. That's fine.  I am preaching a sermon that thinks about Saint Patrick, the Oscars, the U.S. presidential race, and today's Lectionary text: John 12:  20-33, a text about seeds and the necessity to die so that we may live again.  Many would preach this text as an eternal life text, but I'm encouraging us to look at our current lives.  What bulbs do we need to be planting?  Where are we stuck in the mud of life?

Saint Patrick, before he was a saint, surely felt stuck in the mud, sent to a distant outpost to help solidify Christianity in Ireland in the 500's, when Ireland was a wild and wooly place, when the empire of Rome was in a state of slow collapse.  Yet he used his gifts to transform the community of faith--and one of those gifts was the 6-7 years he spent as a teen enslaved in Ireland before he escaped.

Here's how today's sermon ends:

Our sprouting and blooming will almost surely not look like the success that our larger culture has trained us to value. We’re not likely to win an Oscar or to be a presidential nominee. Even though I’d vote for just about any of you, our system isn’t set up that way. But the life of Saint Patrick reminds us to be of good cheer. Even if we feel like we’re stranded in a distant outpost, we are making a difference just by living our lives in an authentic way, the way that God calls us to live. Even if we feel like we’re stuck in the mud, in truth, we are bulbs in the process of transformation to blooms.