The Story

4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. 5 Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. Revelation 2:4-5

GOD: ILLUMINATION (THE GOAL IS TO RESOLVE THE TENSION

The story

It begins in the late fourth/early fifth century after the time of Christ.

The then-known world was ostensibly ( apparently or purportedly face value but perhaps not actually) Christian, and had been since Constantine.

Illustration

Ran into a young man in high school from Iran. He believed you was with Christians, muslims or jews and you were born that way nominal Christian.

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 (NIV)

9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 1 John 4:9

Near the edge of the Roman empire, somewhere in northeastern England, there lived a Roman Briton named Patricius (later known as Patrick), who was 16 years old.

He was born into an aristocratic Christian family and although his grandfather was a priest ( 1123, 1139 priests celibate could not marry), Patrick’s own family was only marginally practicing the faith.

Patrick was himself a bit of a rebel who ridiculed the local clergy and, by his own admission, lived on the wild side of “alienated” and “ungoverned” youth. Some would say that he was like many, but not all, 16-year-olds then and today.

Sometime during that year, a band of Celtic pirates sailed from Ireland and conducted raids in that part of England. The Irish were famous for plying the slave trade, and in these raids, they captured and carted off foreign people to serve the chieftains and warlords of that pagan island.

Patrick was captured during one of these raids and taken against his will far from home.

Once in Ireland, Patrick was sold to a tribal chieftain, a Druid. (Druid a priest, magician, soothsayer ( foretell the future) in the ancient Celtic religion)

named Miliuc (mill chew), who promptly put Patrick to work herding cattle in the hills. It was lonely and dangerous work. He was given little food or clothing and was constantly exposed to the elements of those windswept places. Alone with his thoughts, Patrick began to pray to the God he had previously ignored.

He writes in his Confession: “After I reached Ireland I used to pasture the flock each day and I used to pray many times a day.

12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— John 1:12

More and more did the love of God, and my fear of him and faith increase, and my spirit was moved so that in a day [I said] from one up to a hundred prayers, and in the night a like number;

besides I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time.”

2 Corinthians 5:14-15

14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 2 Corinthians 5:14-15

Patrick began to identify this presence with the Triune God he had learned about as a child.

Without any outside help, Patrick was becoming a devout Christian and his captors began to notice a change in him.

At the same time, he somehow began to identify with the very people who had enslaved him. He learned their language and culture, understood their own view of the world and their religion. In time, he even came to love them as people who might one day turn to the Triune God.

In a very real sense, Patrick, who had grown up with the privileges of a Roman insider, came to identify with the outcasts.

He began to see them as human and not the barbarians most Romans considered people outside the empire to be.

Love in his heart

The Call

Still, Patrick was a slave and sought his freedom. After six years in captivity, he received a vision one night in a dream where a voice said to him, “You are going home. Look! Your ship is ready.”

He awakened the next morning, walked 200 miles to the seacoast and negotiated his way on board a ship bound for Gaul (present-day France) and eventually made it back home to England.

Shortly after he had rejoined his family, however, Patrick had another vision. In this dream a man named Victoricus, whom Patrick may have known while in Ireland, came to him with letters from his former captors in Ireland. As he read the letters, Patrick says: “I read the beginning of the letter: ‘The Voice of the Irish,” and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea, and they were crying as if with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.’”

When Patrick awoke, he interpreted this dream as a “Macedonian call” much like the apostle Paul had experienced (Acts 16:9-15).

Patrick believed that he was being called to go back and “walk among” the very people who had enslaved him. He would now be the captor, capturing these people with the good news of Jesus Christ.

He studied for the priesthood and got permission to go back to Ireland despite the protests of his family and some church superiors.

The task in front of him was a difficult one. After all, it had been 200 years or more since there’d been a successful organized Christian mission outside the boundaries of the Roman empire.

The church assumed that barbarians were impossible to reach for they were neither literate nor intelligent enough to understand Christianity, let alone have the capacity to become civilized if they did understand it.

Places like Ireland were isolated from the Roman empir, and church officials knew little about the people there other than that they weren’t Roman, were fierce in battle, were known to practice human sacrifice and carried the heads of their defeated enemies around on their belts.

They were a tough crowd, to say the least.

But while the Roman church knew little about the Irish Celts, Patrick did know them and knew them well.

He had survived in that violent and superstitious culture, knew the common language and had in his own soul a burning desire to bring these people a new hope and a new future.

Sometimes the struggles and sufferings we go through prepare us for service and ministry.

Seeing God sin the everyday the mundane

Typically, the Roman church wanted new converts to be “Romanized” culturally and “Christianized” religiously.

Once a civilized population became Christian, they were expected to read and speak Latin, adopt Roman customs and do church “the Roman way.”

As George Hunter III has written: The rule had changed from “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” to “When anywhere, do as the Romans do!”

Patrick adopted a radically different approach, however. Rather than set up a church as the center of a parish and get people to come, Patrick and his entourage engaged in a relational strategy.

Patrick’s strategy

Arriving at a tribal settlement, Patrick would engage the chieftain in conversation, hoping for a conversion or at least for his permission to camp nearby.

The team would then meet with the people, engage them in conversation and look for those who were receptive.

They would pray for sick people, counsel those who needed it and mediate conflicts. On at least one occasion, Patrick blessed a river and prayed for the people to catch more fish.

In this way, he made sacred the mundane. He found God and revealed God in the plainest of circumstances.

He and his team engaged in some open-air speaking, using stories and parables that engaged the Celtic imagination and connection to nature. Legend has it that when Patrick wanted to preach about the Trinity he would pluck a shamrock — a three-leaf clover — and use it to describe how God is one and three at the same time.

Patrick encouraged the people to ask questions and express their hopes and fears. After a while, a community of faith emerged, and Patrick and his entourage would move on, leaving behind a priest to nurture the fledgling community. About 700 churches and monastic communities were planted by Patrick in this way.

Women were usually a part of Patrick’s ministry team, with men and women serving side by side in many cases. Patrick and other Celtic Christian leaders had a high view of women, which contrasted the Roman view, expressed by Augustine and others, that women were merely temptations of the flesh.

The effects of ministry

The effect of Patrick’s ministry on Ireland was nearly a complete transformation.

By the end of Patrick’s life, or shortly thereafter, the slave trade had disappeared in Ireland.The previously illiterate Irish soon became the people who, according to Thomas Cahill, “saved civilization” by copying by hand many of the classic works of Europe that may have been lost forever in Europe’s Dark Ages.Irish missionaries began to move out to places like Scotland and converted the Picts to Christianity following many of Patrick’s methods.

Legend has it that Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. Well, the truth is that there were never, nor are there today, snakes in Ireland (at least not the slithering kind). That legend may be symbolic of the fact that Patrick did, in fact, drive out much of the evil and violence that had existed for so many centuries on that beautiful island. Patrick had first come to Ireland as a slave, but it was there that he would voluntarily spend the rest of his life capturing people with the love of God.

So now what?

On this Saint Patrick’s Day, we celebrate someone who was willing to use a tragic and unfair circumstance in his life as a springboard to make a difference among the very people who had enslaved him.

Rather than run away from conflict or opposition, Patrick moved toward it.

Rather than buy into fear and say, “Well, they’re a lost cause,” he instead grew to love the outsiders and gave his life over to them.

His tenacity, dedication to gracious hospitality and devotion to Christ serve as a model for all of us who call ourselves Christians.

YOU: APPLICATION (TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO DO AND WHAT THEY HAVE HEARD)

So go ahead and wear your green, but if you’re really going to seek vision wold you pray for vision here.

honor Saint Patrick, the best way would be for you to:

offer some holy conversation to a person who needs it, (Salvation related)

engage that person at work who may be difficult for you,

offer some help to a neighbor without being asked,

drop a note to someone who could use some encouragement,

and to begin by connecting with someone you don’t know.

That is too difficult! Love melts difficulty!

Know that the second you walk out the church doors you are a missionary who, like Patrick, is called to “walk among” the people of your community, offering them hospitality, friendship and the good news of Jesus Christ.

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