Sermon-Forward people of Christ, forward people of the Cross

The Crypt Chapel at St Olave Hart Street

A brief Thought for the Day given at a lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street, City of London on Tuesday 29th July 2025 – the Feast Day of St Olaf. The service, the last before the summer break, took place in the medieval crypt chapel, using the altar there for the first time in several years. Services resume at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 2nd September at 12.30pm when I will be back preach and celebrate.

Happy St Olave’s Day! 

 

Today we have come down to our medieval crypt chapel – the most ancient part of the building - to celebrate the patron saint of our church, who, as Olaf II, King of Norway died in battle on this day in the year 1030.

July 29th also happens to be the feast day of Martha, Mary and their brother Lazarus – companions of the Lord.

Martha, you might remember from an account in Luke’s gospel is particularly associated with hospitality, cleaning and housework – and is often contrasted with her sister Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet, hanging obediently on his every word.

This year we mark our patronal festival while the parish searches for a new Rector. Times like these call for both Mary and Martha like activity. Prayerful discernment as well as a great deal of tidying up and cleaning of the church and rectory.

While doing both down here, some words were rediscovered carved on the front of the altar –which remind us that whether in prayer or action everything we do must flow through and from Christ.:

“Forward Christ men, Cross men!” it reads.

Today we might say ‘forward people of Christ, people of the cross’.

It's part of the battle cry of King Olaf II from his final engagement at Stiklestad, in which he died aged thirty five. Among his opponents were former courtiers who had switched allegiance to King Cnut of Denmark, who, like Olaf, had been baptized Christian.

The little we know about Olaf comes from much later poems and sagas, the most extensive of which date from the thirteenth century – about the same time as this chapel was built.

Records reveal that Stiklestad was not the first time that Olaf had faced the Danes in battle. Fifteen years or so earlier he fought Cnut’s men – or possibly those of Cnut’s father, the rather evocatively named Svein Forkbeard – at the Battle of London Bridge. At that stage fighting alongside the English King Ethelred the Redeless, we are told that it was Olaf’s own ingenuity that came up with the plan to bring London Bridge falling down – and with it, the death of the would-be conquerors, standing on top – and provided the inspiration for a popular nursery rhyme to boot.

St Olave Hart Street is one of several churches originally built around the site of that battle, which were dedicated to St Olaf, who was canonized just a year after his death and became Patron Saint not just of numerous churches across Europe but of Norway itself.

Just as it is tempting to see Mary and Martha through the singular lenses of prayer and action, it is easy to see Olaf entirely as a man of conflict. The most recent account of his life was written by a military historian. Whilst the poems and sagas portray his attempts to spread Christianity in Norway often by force – sword (or axe) in hand (as shown in the caring over there) - they also reveal a more complex character.

Someone who showed mercy to his enemies – and not just to those with whom he shared a blood relationship. Someone who was concerned for the welfare of all his people – marching his army across the mountains to avoid depleting limited food stocks in the lowlands. And, in the later stages of his life particularly, the centrality of meditative prayer – not least on the night before his final battle.

Olaf was canonized not in spite of these contradictions – but because of them. He was committed to following Christ with all he had. All he was. And through Christ, all Olaf’s limitations, his anger, his violence, were reconciled with his missionary zeal, his mercy and his love. He embodied his final battle cry – becoming a person of Christ – and in his death, a person of the cross.


It's only eighty years since the end of the most recent battle to affect this church. World War Two saw the church roof here and much else besides destroyed. Speaking at a patronal festival following the restoration of the church after the war, the then Rector Augustus Powell-Miller remarked how visitors who came in to view the handiwork of the talented craftsmen were moved by something much deeper.

“In the quiet and silence of this Sanctuary” (he said) “we can know that we are ‘compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses’ and that the past mingles with the present and can inspire us for whatever tasks the future has in store for us.”

As we look forward to a new chapter in that future here at St Olave Hart Street, may we offer every part of our broken bodies, all that is good and not so good about us, our past, present and future to be fully reconciled by the amazing grace of our Saviour, Jesus Christ – so that St Olaf’s words, carved into this altar - may cry out from our own hearts, and together we go:

Forward, as people of Christ. Forward, as people of the cross.

Amen.