As usual, we have another “Christian” holiday that is more about cartoon characters and what we can get rather than celebrating, you know, the actual person and what they stood for and believed. That would be too “religious” I guess, so we should just drink a lot of green beer, pinch each other for not wearing green, and butcher Irish accents. Because that’s what St. Patrick was about.
If you haven’t heard the story about St. Patrick, it is an epic one. I would love to see a quality film made based on his life, but that’s probably not going to happen for a while, if ever. The powers of Hollywood are busy with their own agenda; real history and great story are sacrificed for that.
Patrick was a Briton under Rome and somewhat educated in the Christian religion. As a young man, he was abducted by Irish pagan raiders and brought back to Ireland as a slave. While a slave, he learned Irish language and culture from his captors/masters and began to seriously pray to God. God spoke to him and told him to start walking and leave his life of slavery. Through a series of amazing events, he returned to his family and began to pursue a life as a Catholic priest.
While studying and moving forward with his religious career, Patrick had a dream where an Irishman begged him to come and preach the Gospel to them. He struggled with that, as anyone would, but ultimately got the sanction from the powers that be to go be a missionary to Ireland.
This was more difficult than you might imagine. The Catholic church at that time saw “barbarians” like the Irish as practically unreachable. There was no effort to do so. Patrick’s request was unique and met with resistance and skepticism. But Patrick pushed forward. That’s what happens when you get a word from God.
Patrick was criticised and even sanctioned, to a degree, for how different he was with the Irish. He spoke to them in their own language, used their own culture to express the absolute truth of the Gospel in a new way, in contrast to the Roman way of making a people learn Latin and Roman culture and “civilization” before ever thinking a people could hear the Gospel. Patrick took ideas from Paul and the New Testament and miraculously changed an entire nation with the Gospel. He loved those that hated him and transformation happened.
A brutal and violent people were changed. Patrick used their love of poetry and song and education to teach them about the love and truth of Christ. And within a couple generations, Irish missionaries went out into Europe as the Roman Empire fell away and their government/religion along with it, and those Irish missionaries did what Patrick taught them to do – they preached the Gospel out of relationship and love and re-evangelized most of Europe.
As Seamus McManus said in his amazing book, The Story of the Irish Race, “The coming of Patrick to Ireland marks the greatest of Irish epochs. Of all most momentous happenings in Irish history, this seemingly simple one had the most extraordinary, most far-reaching effect. It changed the face of the nation, and utterly changed the nation’s destiny. The coming of Patrick may be said to have had a sublime effect not on Ireland alone, but upon the world. It was a world event.”
Patrick changed a nation, and history itself, with the love of the Gospel.
So of course, we should drink lots of green beer and put leprechauns on our FB pages. Makes sense.
To be fair, I will be drinking some beer today, hopefully a Guinness, because I am of Irish descent and that’s how we roll.
But more importantly, I will be reminded of the world-changing power of the Gospel as we celebrate St. Patrick, because I am a child of God. And that’s how we roll.
Peace.
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