“Here is something for all of us at least once or twice in our lives to stop and consider. Keeping someone else’s secrets, especially those secrets that would reflect poorly on them, is a triumph of human conduct and a mark of unusual godliness. Indeed, when you are given to know something significant to another’s discredit and you carry that knowledge with you to the grave, no one else ever hearing it from you, the Bible says you are covered in glory. Almost no one keeps juicy secrets, which is why newspaper reporters and bloggers have so much to write about every day. But it ought to be a truism that Christians do. You may remember Mark Twain’s wonderful simile, it’s my favorite Twain simile: “The man was as confident as a Presbyterian with four aces.” Well, let’s invent one of our own: “That person is as tight-lipped as a Christian with someone else’s secret!”

Next Saturday is St. Patrick’s Day. If you remember the story of his life, you will remember that when he had been bishop of Ireland for some time he ran afoul of the bishops of Britain who were the very men who commissioned him to his work in Ireland, a country that before Patrick was only a missionary field and a particularly hard and dangerous one at that. Indeed, if you remember, as a teenager Patrick had been captured by Irish raiders, sold into servitude, and spent some years doing hard labor as a slave in Ireland. The trouble began when an English warlord by the name of Coroticus, undoubtedly a Christian in name himself, raided Ireland and attacked a group of Patrick’s converts who were returning home after Easter celebrations in which they had been baptized with their wives and children. Many of them were still wearing the white robes in which they had been baptized. The men the raiders didn’t kill and their wives and children were taken back to Britain to be sold as slaves. Enraged, Patrick sent to Britain many copies of a letter to Coroticus and his subjects, excommunicating the general, threatening damnation to his soldiers, exhorting the the British church to have nothing to do with these men, and ordering the captives released and sent home with their property. This letter, however, angered the British bishops because they saw it as an interference in their affairs. If anyone was to discipline Coroticus, it should be they; though Patrick understood rightly that they would do nothing of the kind. For Patrick the gospel itself and the future of the fledgling Irish church was at stake and there was no time to lose.

The British church replied with formal accusations against Patrick and a summons for him to return to Britain, which summons he wisely refused. But, in the spirit of thinly disguised revenge, the charges the British bishops listed against him began with a sin he had committed many years before, when a teenager – we don’t know what the sin was – and which he had confessed to a friend before he was ordained to the Christian ministry. The confession of his sin at that time, when he was still a younger man, was no doubt to clear his conscience before he should take up the office of minister. Patrick’s friend had kept the secret for years, but now, for some reason – we don’t know what it was (he was known as Patrick’s friend, perhaps he had been pressured by the bishops; perhaps he was jealous of Patrick’s growing international reputation) – he chose to disclose Patrick’s ancient sin to others. That sin became the pretext for a long list of accusations, all of which others were untrue. His reply to those accusations is today known as his Confession, one of two great works from St. Patrick’s hand that are in existence today.

Still, how sad that a man who had kept a secret for a long time couldn’t keep it when it mattered most. How sad and how typical. No, brothers and sisters, when God’s providence entrusts you with someone else’s secret, as it will, give thanks to God that you have been given the opportunity to overlook a fault and to get glory for yourself and give glory to God, the keeper of your secrets, by never telling it to anyone, ever! More Christians should relish the opportunity to do this and it should be our reputation together that we are a community in which the worst secrets of other brothers and sisters are safe and sound.”

An excerpt from the sermon entitled, “Miscellany” March 11, 2012 PM, By Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn, From: Proverbs