Vigeon Post

TARSICIUS AND DANILOLA

Overshadowing all the events of the past week - and indeed over the past two years or so - has been the way the fate of a ten year old boy on the way back home from the library in Peckham has kept popping up to disturb us. And the disturbance is not ended even though the trial of those accused of his murder is over. I imagine it will be some time before questions are no longer asked.

I was pondering over today’s readings and thinking how demanding they would be in terms of sermon writing; I had spent a long time reading and thinking and praying and inspiration was sadly lacking. But just before getting up yesterday morning an idea flashed into my mind. Danilola, I said to myself, would not find himself without a welcome when he got to St Peter’s gate. Let me tell you this story and you will find why.

It is around the year 300 AD and the city is Rome. You would think that three hundred years after the life of Jesus Christ that people would have got used to those strange people called Christians even though they persisted in affirming that there was a higher authority than the Emperor of all the Romans. But no - one of the last great persecutions of Christians were under way. You will find it difficult to imagine but all you have to do is to think how easy it has become to be suspicious of Muslims in our society when the right sort of rumour and innuendo is spread around. So too, pagan Rome saw the Christian community as a threat to its way of life. If Christians were not regarded in quite in the way we regard terrorists today, yet perhaps they constituted a more subtle yet just as real challenge to the traditions of the greatest empire ever known. they were stripped of their assets, their books were destroyed, their leaders were arrested and interrogated under torture; many of them were incarcerated in the Roman gaols and used as fodder to feed the ghoulish entertainments at the Coliseum.

It is Sunday 15th August and the church is worshipping in those burial chambers we call the catacombs so as to escape the possibility of a police raid. In those days, Christians who could not attend because of sickness or prison would receive the sacrament by the deacons who would go out immediately after Mass was ended. On this day, they took counsel. There were many brethren in prison and they would be expecting their Sunday communion. None of that "I’ll have it when I’m better and back in church,Vicar" syndrome in those days. The trouble was that the police knew most of the clergy by sight so it would not be safe for them to do this task. So in the end they decided to send one of their altar boy servers, an acolyte called Tarsicius. The police would take no notice of a kid, they argued. So that is what they did and Tarsicius set out to visit the prison carrying the sacred bread in a box inside his robe; and very conscious of the great privilege he had been given of carrying Jesus to his friends in prison.

All would have been well - but at a certain street corner were lounging a gang of teenagers with nothing to do and all the time for a bit of trouble. As T went past, one of them stuck a foot out and tripped him up to everyone's delight. T got up saying nothing while the gang surrounded him and whistled and gestured and poked at him . T’s silence got to them; they were angry that it was no fun because they were getting no reaction from him. "You know what" said a leading lad "I reckon he must be one of those effing Christians" and suddenly they were jeering at T with renewed anger. They picked up rocks from the street and threw them at T; still he said nothing. In the end he collapsed . The gang frisked his pockets thinking he must be carrying something very valuable for him to be a messenger of that ilk. They found nothing and they ran away. Later, distraught members of his congregation found the boy in the gutter dying of his injuries. When they got back home he was already dead. When they stripped him for burial they found the box of bread tucked away next to his chest. He had been faithful to the end.

St Tarcisius is the patron saint of altar servers and of first communicants. I am sure too that he is regularly on duty at St Peter’s Gate to welcome the Danilolas of this world to a better place.

The story reminds us of more than one important thing. The first and obvious one is that life in the inner city in the year 300 ad was no more safe for the unwary than it is today. Danilola’s fate is simply what happens when teenagers have nothing very much to do but look for mischief; and where society does not provide safety on the streets; and where twisted and wicked untruths are banded about as truth in ignorant and vicious circles. It is healthy for us to be reminded that there have been times when victims of this kind of crime were not blacks or Muslim or Pakistanis but Christians. It is in the end nothing to do with these classifications - it is something nasty in the human psyche which fills us with envy and suspicion of people who are different in some way as our selves. It reminds us that the other six deadly sins are in the end just as dangerous and certainly more so than the sexual ones . But perhaps that is another story.

This has certainly been part of our Christian story from the beginning. For there is a connection with today’s scripture. We heard that not too long after the first Easter Day an early Christian leader called Stephen was stoned to death by a mob. The fact that his executioners considered themselves to be doing God a good turn does not make it any the less a dreadful piece of mob violence. Stephen was a brilliant man who could hold his own with the best of the Pharisees and Saducees and all the other establishment voices in Jerusalem. He was convinced that the death of Jesus was a terrible blasphemy brought about by those who were supposed to be God’s respresentatives; and he told them so. Thus he became the first of all those who down two thousand years who thought that Jesus and all that Jesus stands for was so precious and wonderful and true that the last thing they would do was to betray him. Sometimes like Stephen they were people of great intellect and robust personality; other times they were just an altar boy like Tarsicius. But they all knew that loyalty is the supreme Christian necessity. So I will end with two enquiries of you.

1. Do you know that when you receive communion, you are doing in Christian terms what a Roman soldier did when he signed on. The word Sacrament literally means an oath of allegiance. You seal yourself body and soul to Him.

2. Did you know that when you pray "Lead us not into temptation" that the word temptation means betrayal. To deny Christ was the greatest sin for those early Christians. Temptation was being in the situation of being able to save your skin by denying Jesus. So you needed to be delivered from the wiles of the evil one, the enemy of your soul who would tempt you to betry not only Jesus but yourself.

Both Tarsicius and Stephen were led into temptation but kept their allegiance and were delivered from the evil one. We may be reminded of some words we heard from S Peter last Sunday - do you remember ?

Christ suffered for us , leaving us an example, so that you should follow in his footsteps.

From time to time someone takes that seriously.

And that is why they are called saints.