The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Vincent of Saragossa, January 22, 2010, Diocesan Convention, St. George’s Church Nashville

“Then he said to me, ‘These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14).

“Martyr” means “witness,” in the sense of offering testimony. In the early days of Christianity, the Roman Empire brooked no opposition and no divided loyalty. The Roman state was a sacred system of traditional civic values, and in the person of the Emperor the system was divinized as the final authority under heaven and earth. This process accelerated as the old Republic faded and the power of the Emperor grew. (If this story sounds hauntingly familiar, you’re not wrong, because this page of history is where George Lukas found the material for Star Wars.) In such an environment the witness of Christians was problematic. Christians gathered to worship Jesus as Lord, as kyrios, a term reserved to the Emperor, and embedded in that worship was a witness that scandalized Roman power and sensibilities. What Rome could not tolerate was a community gathered for the worship of, and witness to, a power that was not rooted in its own sacred world.

It was in the process of suppression that early Christian witness became synonymous with the offering of one’s life. The story of Vincent, chief deacon of the Spanish city of Saragossa, whose feast we celebrate today, is a case in point. Vincent’s bishop, Valerius, was accustomed to call upon him as a preacher, to supply his own lack of skill in speaking; when arrested and brought before the magistrate, Valerius once again called upon his deacon to testify. As the story goes, Vincent was so skilled in dealing with the cross-examination that in the end Valerius was simply exiled, but Vincent was put to death. The testimony of his words in court, testimony to the lordship of Christ, became for Vincent the prologue to the witness of his death. As our reading from Revelation makes plain, in the eyes of the early Church the martyrs were privileged to share in the witness of Jesus’ own cross and passion, becoming inheritors of his resurrection life. These things happened, to Valerius and Vincent and many others, in the last great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian, over 1700 years ago.

What is our own witness today as a Church, as Christians many years later? If we look to the spiritual forebears we remember today, we’re aware that we are a counter-cultural community of faith, with a different orientation from the cultural norm. This is very complex, because we in the West do not live in a pagan world like Vincent, but in a post-Christian world that (culturally speaking) is not un-baptized but has largely forgotten its baptism. The imprint is still there, a tracing of the cross, undeniably. Novelist Flannery O’Connor once remarked that “While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted”, and I think that says a lot about where many of our peers are today: that is, haunted by the memory of faith if that memory hasn’t been lost altogether.

Still, our call is to be salt and light; to be leaven in the lump, as St Paul says. This is a good time to do our mission, because the need is so great. We are witnesses to the power of God, and to the life that is in Christ through his death and resurrection. What undid the old pagan world was most fundamentally the Church’s critique of pagan despair and hopelessness in the face of overwhelming challenges. The Church brought hope for new life in the midst of death, the death of an old world and an old way of life that could no longer be shouldered or sustained. It was not Vincent’s eloquence, really, that confuted the Imperial power, but the transcendent message of life-in-death that his martyrdom conveyed. That’s still our message, counter-cultural as all-get-out.

Our gathering this weekend in Annual Convention is part of that witness. We’re making our testimony today, reminding the world of faith, hope, and love, and some other things that it’s in danger of forgetting. We’re witnessing that Jesus Christ is Lord, in all times and places, binding the world and all history together, sitting in judgment over all nations and peoples and cultures. Our world is as much in need of the counter-cultural proclamation of the Gospel as it ever was; and if our situation as a Church in the modern Western world is complex and challenging, calling for discernment and courage, let us be found equal to the task through God’s grace. These times will call for the offering of our lives, of all that we are, just as surely as 1700 years ago. The context has changed, but the witness remains the same.

- The Rt Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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