Today is December 26, the day after Christmas. Sigh.
In the world you and I live in, each year starts on January 1, possibly with a hangover.
Then time grinds inexorably through days, weeks, and months, headed for the Promised Land of Christmas. We can tell when we’re getting close. Retailers provide mileposts as we enter and traverse the preparatory season of HallowThank-mas en route to the Big Day.
Christmas is the climax, the thrill, the big payoff. We are told repeatedly that “it’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
If you can’t believe Johnny Mathis, who can you believe?
After all the letter writing, card mailing, buying, wrapping, baking, cooking, traveling over the river and through the woods, the Big Day itself can feel anticlimactic. My wife and daughter both said yesterday, “It went by so fast.”
Still, when it’s over we’re tapped out. We are ready to welcome a season of tranquillity—that week that falls after Christmas but before the New Year. It’s the one week of the year we are neither joyfully anticipating Christmas nor desperately cramming for it.
#
If you feel a bit “so what?” after Christmas, be of good cheer.
It will interest you to know that today, December 26, is the Feast of Saint Stephen.
When Christianity was being invented, church leaders dotted the calendar with special dates so that believers—as they tilled their fields, planted their crops, and scanned the skies for portents of prosperity or disaster—could also ponder and celebrate heroes and events of their faith.
Christmas, when God sent his Son to save the world, became an important day; but it was not the only important day. Easter, when the Son performed the miracle of salvation, was even more important. Days were also named to mark the Annunciation to Mary that she would bear God’s son; the Transfiguration, when Jesus became radiant with light and conversed with Moses and Elijah on a mountain; and the Ascension, when Jesus, resurrected from death, rose into Heaven. Likewise, known martyrs of the faith were honored on appropriate dates.
The whole of Christendom was one gigantic, universal—“catholic”—church, and this calendar of special days helped its adherents move through each year in a somewhat organized way. Even in 1054, when the one great church split in two, with Eastern and Western branches, the old church calendar marched on, with minor adjustments.
But five hundred years later, when we Protestants rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, that system of date-marking was called into question. Those of us in what is now called the Reform Tradition—that is, Puritans—utterly rejected the notion of holy days in the year, whether special masses, feasts, or saints’ days, because their observance was not commanded, or even mentioned, in the Bible.
In the United States, a nation heavily influenced by Puritanism, large parts of the population, as lately as two hundred years ago, celebrated neither Christmas nor Easter, much less any of the lesser feasts or saints’ days. Saints, in fact, were not considered to be persons canonized by the Church for special holiness, but simply any believing Christian who led a blameless life.
Then a funny thing happened. We found we could not thrive within a faith tradition so plain and featureless. Celebration of certain days and repetition of certain rituals in Sunday morning worship came back into use, even among us Congregationalists—spiritual heirs of the Puritans—because people simply hungered for them. The mid-nineteenth century became a time when the simple, “low-church” assemblies of former days began to sing new hymns, accompanied by fancy organs, in buildings ornamented with stained-glass windows, and with recognition of Christmas, Easter, and certain other special days of worship. This did not happen all at once, nor did it happen completely. But it did happen.
#
Stephen was a Jew—likely a Greek-speaking, Hellenistic Jew—chosen to be one of seven deacons of the Jerusalem church in the earliest days of Christianity, within a few years after Jesus was crucified.
In a well-known passage in the Book of Acts, Stephen was stoned to death by a crowd of people who held him guilty of blasphemy against Moses and God, while Saul of Tarsus—not yet known as Paul the Apostle of Jesus—held the stoners’ coats and approved of their violence. This incident became the first known and recorded martyrdom of a Christian for his faith.
What seems the point of the story, as recorded in Acts, is that in the very throes of death, Stephen interceded with God for his killers, praying for their forgiveness.
It was on December 26, 415, that a priest named Lucan unearthed the remains of Stephen from a grave in Jerusalem; so December 26 became a day for veneration of the saint. Stephen was a saint both in the Puritan and Catholic senses of the term, having been canonized by the Catholic Church on account of his saintly life as a witnessing Christian.
#
Today, the Feast of Stephen is known to millions of people mainly for its association with another saint: Duke Vaclaw I of Bohemia, better known as “Good King Wenceslas.”
A nineteenth-century Anglican clergyman, John Mason Neale, earnestly working to restore the veneration of Christian martyrs and saints to the previously-Puritanized Church of England, published in 1853 a hymn he had written about the pious Bohemian duke (who was posthumously dubbed a king).
Good King Wenceslas looked out,
on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
deep and crisp and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night,
tho’ the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight,
gath’ring winter fuel.
The ruler was moved to inquire the location of the poor man’s house. Armed with that information, he set out to bring food, drink, and firewood to the straitened peasant’s hut. Snow and wind daunted the page whom Wenceslas brought along to help carry, but the king replied,
“Mark my footsteps, my good page.
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
freeze thy blood less coldly.”
The monarch’s response strengthened the page’s will, and so—
In his master’s steps he trod,
where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod
which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
shall yourselves find blessing.
#
Perhaps the Anglo-Catholic hymnodist, John Mason Neale, wanted to suggest the feast day of Saint Stephen had something to do with the good king’s act of charity.
Was Wenceslas inspired by Stephen? Did the saint’s holy day serve to focus the Bohemian duke’s mind on his Christian duty?
Is there anything in all these notions from which you and I can draw inspiration?
December 25 and December 26.
It just seems like one day Love comes into the world, and the very next day we are shown the way of loving service.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
