We remember the Christian past by reading the Bible. Every Sunday we gather to listen to the Scriptures. In the liturgy, we retell the ancient stories of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs. We hear again the letters of the apostles to the Churches. We recount the words and deeds of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This public reading of the Scriptures shapes our corporate memory and identity as God’s people.
We remember the Christian past by sharing in the Sacraments. In English, the Holy Eucharist is called the memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection. But the Greek word for memorial, anamnesis, means something more like “making present” or “calling into our midst.”
Christian Eucharistic devotion rightly focuses on the change of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. But no less miraculous is the Eucharistic transformation of time. Both present and future are telescoped into one present moment, and we are there—at the Last Supper, at Calvary, at the empty tomb, in the upper room, and again at the great banquet that awaits us in God’s kingdom.
So, the two primary means of remembering the Christian past are God’s Word and God’s Sacraments. There are other means, secondary to be sure, but nonetheless of vital importance to Christian faith and devotion.
One such means is Christian art. When we walk into a church we often see paintings, statues, and stain glass windows depicting our Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the saints. In the Eastern Christian tradition, icons are understood to be windows into heaven, portals through which their heavenly prototypes are made visually present in our midst.
Another means of Christian remembering is sacred music. Ancient Church music such as plainchant or polyphony offers us a sense of connectedness with all the generations of previous Christians who have worshipped and prayed with this same music. The same goes for church architecture. While it’s true that we can worship anywhere – including contemporary church buildings that look like conference centers – gothic and Romanesque church buildings particularly evoke a sense of the Christian past.
From very early times in church history—the fourth century if not before—Christians have remembered their past by visiting holy places such as Jerusalem where our Lord and his apostles lived and died. Everyone I’ve ever known who has visited the Holy Land says that you return able to visualize the stories in the Bible as never before, because you’ve been in the physical environment where they took place.
And we remember the Christian past by means of relics. We’re all familiar with relics whether we realize it or not. In the purely secular sense, a relic is simply any artifact associated with a particular person or event in history. The Smithsonian is full of relics of our national history, from the original Star-Spangled Banner that flew over Fort McHenry to the gowns worn by First Ladies at Presidential Inaugural balls. In the National Archives, visitors line up to view an original copy of the Declaration of Independence, set in a display case that resembles nothing so much as a sacred shrine. We treasure such secular relics because they visibly and tangibly connect us to our past as a people.
And then there are relics in the sense of human remains—chiefly bones. From the very earliest days, Christians have preserved the relics of the saints. The Bible attests that the Hebrews took great care to preserve the tombs of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the Exodus, the Hebrews brought the bones of the Patriarch Joseph up out of Egypt, so that they could be buried in the Promised Land.
Evidence for the early Christian veneration of relics is found in the second century account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna in Asia Minor. Convicted of the crime of being a Christian, Polycarp was burned at the stake. The eyewitness author writes: “we afterwards took up his bones which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place; where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together, as we are able, in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom …”
As early as the second century, then, Christians were gathering at the burial places of the martyrs to celebrate the Eucharist on the anniversaries of their deaths and possibly at other times as well.
After the legalization of Christianity in the early fourth century, great churches such as Saint Peter’s basilica in Rome were built over the sites of the tombs of the apostles. Relics of the saints were brought out of the catacombs and placed under the altars of newly constructed churches in other places. Indeed, it is sometimes said that many of the cathedrals of Europe are best thought of not so much as great churches that happen to contain shrines of saints, as shrines of saints over which great churches have been built.
The departed saints, of course, are in heaven with God. Yet the physical presence of their mortal remains serves as a tangible sign of our continuing spiritual fellowship with them. St. Augustine of Hippo wrote in The City of God that when we pray in the presence of a saint’s relics on earth, that same saint prays for us before God’s throne in heaven. Even if in some cases their authenticity is questionable, they nonetheless remind us that Christianity is not a religion of timeless myths and archetypes, but rather the history of God’s dealings with real live flesh-and-blood human beings, who’ve left us their mortal remains to prove it. The veneration of relics testifies above all to the Incarnational principle at the heart of the Catholic faith.
So, with great joy we celebrate our summer patronal festival of the finding of the relics of Saint Stephen in the year 415 by the priest Lucian in the small town Caphar-Gamala outside Jerusalem. Our joy is multiplied by the presence of a relic of Saint Stephen in this church. After today’s liturgy, those who wish to do so will have the opportunity to venerate the relic in the Lady Chapel following the closing organ voluntary.
As Christians we have a definite orientation to time. We look back to the past and forward to the future. Our relic of St. Stephen links us back in time to the earthly life of the first martyr, our patron saint, for whom our church is named. And it speaks the promise that just as Stephen now prays for us in heaven, so also in the future we shall be dwell together in heaven with him, with each other, and with all the saints of God.
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