Episcopal Church
of the Good Shepherd
SERVICES
SUNDAY AT 8:00 AM (2nd & 3rd Sundays)
SUNDAY AT 10:30 AM (every Sunday)
WEDNESDAY AT 6:00 PM (in Chapel)
Jolly Old St. Nick?
Saturday December 6th is the feast day of St. Nicholas, a great saint of the church whose compassion for the poor and devotion to his flock have made him one of the Christian world’s most beloved and well-known saints. But the Santa Claus of modern commercial Christmas bears little resemblance to the St. Nicholas we honor in the Church.
Nicholas was born in the year 270 in a province of the Roman Empire called Anatolia (Turkey today). He was born to a Christian family, and from his youth he loved the church and going to services. There is a legend that he was so devout that even as a baby he wouldn’t nurse on Fridays, but kept the Friday fast! That same devotion drove him to go on pilgrimage as a young man to the holy places in Egypt and Syria. On the way there, his ship became caught in a storm. Even the experienced sailors were in despair, and it looked like all would be lost. But Nicholas stood on the deck and called on God to calm the storm – and God did. Because of this, St. Nicholas would become the patron of sailors and travelers.
During his travels in Egypt, Syria, and the Holy Land, Nicholas encountered the monks of the desert, and learned from them how to give oneself over to prayer completely. But Nicholas didn’t become a monk. He wanted to serve his people, so he returned home and was ordained a priest, and then very quickly became a bishop. He was raised to the episcopacy in the city of Myra, on the coast of the province of Lycia. Myra was a major port city and the capital of Lycia, and its bishop quickly came to the attention of the authorities. Bishop Nicholas was imprisoned for a while during the persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian, and his steadfastness strengthened his flock. About 15 years after Diocletian, Constantine became Emperor, and converted to Christianity. He called a council of all the bishops in the Church, summoning them to the imperial city of Constantinople. The council met in a city just outside Constantinople called Nicea, and Nicholas was among the bishops who gathered there to write the Nicene Creed.
One of the reasons for gathering the council was to hammer out Christian doctrine and teaching, especially about the nature and person of Jesus. The bishops were divided: some said that Jesus was God, some said that Jesus was a man who became God, and some said that Jesus was both God and man – “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father,” in the words of the creed they eventually wrote. As you might imagine, discussions at the council became heated. Most of the arguments centered around a priest from Alexandria named Arius, who openly taught that Jesus was just a man. There is a story that says that Nicholas got so enraged listening to Arius speak that he punched him in the face on the floor of the council!
Most of what Nicholas is known for was not punching people out, but helping those who needed him most. Our tradition of Christmas gift-giving comes from Nicholas, who had inherited great riches from his family and whose chief delight was to give that money away anonymously. Whenever possible, he wanted people to give the glory and honor to God, not to him. One story tells of a man with three young daughters who fell into poverty. He could not bear to see his daughters starve to death, so he came up with the only solution available to people at that time – he agreed to sell himself and his daughters into enslavement. Hearing of this, Nicholas refused to let this happen. Nicholas sneaked to their house by night and climbing on the roof, dropped a bag of gold down the chimney. He did this for three successive nights, until the family had not just enough to live on, but enough to provide dowries for each of the young girls.
The greatest gift that Nicholas gave people was life itself. He had a heart for social justice, and he advocated for the imprisoned and those under sentence of death. One of the best attested stories we have about Nicholas is the time he stopped an execution. Three innocent men were about to be executed for a crime they had not committed, and Nicholas showed up at the place of execution to intercede for them. He threw his body between these men and the executioner, stopping the sword with his hand and publicly calling out the juror who had been bribed by the real criminal.
When he was unable to stop death, Bishop Nicholas refused to be defeated by it. His heart was especially tender toward children, and he could not stand to hear of children being hurt in any way. There is a story that a wealthy merchant and his wife had three young apprentices – children who had been sold to them to work in their shop. These children were abused, starved, and eventually beaten to death by the merchant. In order to hide what he had done, the merchant stuffed their little bodies in barrels. Too late, Nicholas heard about what had happened, but his faith in Jesus was so great that he did not accept the “too late.” Bursting into the merchant’s shop, he beat the merchant and tore open the barrels with the little boys’ bodies in them. Calling on the Lord who had raised Lazarus from the dead, Nicholas resurrected the three boys and restored them whole and sound to their parents, to whom he also gave enough money to support each family and keep all of them out of enslavement.
Bishop Nicholas died on the 6th of December in the year 343, having served his people long and well. The fame of his sanctity, his generosity, and his miracles had spread so far that his tomb became a shrine at which people continued to ask the holy bishop to intercede for them – as indeed we do today.
The modern idea of “Santa Claus” comes from a combination of several sources: the Dutch Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas), the English Father Christmas, and the American poem “The Night Before Christmas,” which first gave us this idea of St. Nick as a “jolly old elf.” The Coca-Cola Company later capitalized on this idea in a 1931 advertising campaign that fixed the image of a fat man in a red suit firmly in our minds. This idea of St. Nicholas is not just a weird distortion, but a profound dishonor to a great saint of the church. There is no need to make up stories for children about a Santa Claus who lives at the North Pole and makes toys with elves in a magical workshop, because the stories about the real St. Nicholas are so much better!
There are all sorts of ways to incorporate honoring St. Nick into your Christmas traditions. One custom is to leave your shoes out for St. Nicholas on the eve of his feast, recalling the bags of gold he threw down the chimney that landed in shoes warming by the fire. The shoes can be filled with little treats – candies and chocolates and small gifts to brighten someone’s day. You can set aside St. Nick’s Day as a day for Christmas decorating, or a day for giving to the poor. However you choose to honor the day, let’s remember St. Nicholas as he was and as he is: a great saint who has not ceased to intercede for his people, and whose heart for Jesus still shows us the way of love today.
Collect for the Feast of St. Nicholas: Almighty God, in your love you gave your servant Nicholas of Myra a perpetual name for deeds of kindness both on land and sea: Grant, we pray, that your Church may never cease to work for the happiness of children, the safety of sailors, the relief of the poor, and the help of those tossed by tempests of doubt or grief; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen