Half a pound of tupenny rice,

Half a pound of treacle.

That’s the way the money goes,

Pop! goes the weasel.

Well that must be a first, children! A nonsense rhyme in a sermon! Perhaps I really have lost it now. What silliness is this? Well actually, I was not being foolish at all. I have a very serious point to make by singing that song which will become more clear as I tell you the stories of two great saints of the Church and, later, a third who will make his appearance.

The first saint is one we commemorate today, St Xenia of St Petersburg. She, together with the others we shall hear of, is called a fool-for-Christ. Just like your reaction to my song, “Pop goes the Weasel!” many people thought her behaviour to be that of a mad woman, totally foolish, indeed an unacceptable in polite society. St Xenia was widowed quite young and took this to be a sign from God that she should henceforth live her life in radical obedience to the gospel, but not as a nun, rather as a wandering foolish woman.

She wandered the streets of St Petersburg for years dressed in her husband’s clothes and calling herself by her husband’s name. She pretended this madness, as many had done before in the history of the Church, to protect herself from the praises of men. A liking for praise leads many astray and can distract us from serving God while seeking to please men.

She lived a life of intense prayer and was greatly loved by the people who saw through her disguise to the burning heart of holiness that she possessed. She lived among the poor and asked for nothing. She slept in fields overnight and took no care for herself. God in turn gave her great gifts, foreknowledge and discernment. She helped many people through their troubles and many healings took place through her prayers. Yet to the unseeing, she remained simply a fool, a stupid old woman.

My second example of a fool-for-Christ is the Syrian ascetic from our own Church of Antioch called St Simeon of Emesa. (Homs is the modern Syrian city formerly known as Emesa.) St Simeon took his folly very seriously. Again he wanted to be despised, laughed at and scorned in order to preserve his humility. So having already lived a life of self-denial as a monk, he entered the city of Homs, Emesa, dragging a dead dog behind him tied to his foot. In this he was only just beginning to offend and people were truly scandalised. When attending church services, he threw nuts at the clergy and snuffed out the candles.

He danced with girls of ill repute in the arena and in the street he would trip people up. He developed a theatrical limp to the great amusement of all and sometimes would shuffle himself forward on his buttocks rather than walk. In the baths he would run naked into the women’s section, quite chastely of course, but to the horror of all present. Of fasting days, he would consume huge quantities of beans with predictable and hilarious results. Sometimes he would go to the other extreme and on one Great and Holy Friday he sat on the doorstep of the church as people were leaving eating sausages. The anger and contempt that many of the worshippers showed for him earned a rebuke from the holy fool since this showed that they had not really fasted.

Only after the saint’s death did his true holiness become known to all, but even then his saintly exploits were, what shall we say, decidedly quirky. For example, he turned a mule driver’s vinegar into wine, taking pity on his poverty, so that he could then open a successful tavern. He saved a rich man from certain death by throwing a triple six on his behalf at a game of dice. He saved a young man from adultery with a married woman by punching him in the jaw to bring him to his senses! Eventually, of course it was his extreme holiness that was a scandal to the world. I am reminded of that great saying by St Anthony the Great, father of monks, whose feast we celebrated last Sunday:

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’

St Anthony correctly identifies that the Christian life appears insane to a mad world but actually it’s life as it should be lived by all. Holy fools only appear foolish because their wisdom is not of this world. This is what St Paul wrote about such foolish wisdom and wise foolishness in his letter to the church at Corinth, chapter 1 and verse 18 and following:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” [Isaiah 29:14]

Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

The death of Christ on the cross is indeed folly to the world but to us it is the power of God unto salvation. It is a way of life that exposes the craziness of the infinite love of God for all creatures. When this philanthropy of God gets expressed in radical Christian living, such as that shown by the holy fools, we know the reality and presence of the kingdom of God among us. That can be true in our own lives even if we, most of us that is, are not called to be holy fools. Most of us are not holy enough to become fools of Christ. However, we can at least begin to deepen the conformity of our own lives to Christ our God: to think as he thinks, to act as He acts, to live as He lives, even in small measure to love as He loves.

Earlier I mentioned that there was one other saint we can learn from. This is the fool-for-Christ, Blessed Basil of Moscow. Basil habitually walked through the streets of the city wearing nothing more than a long beard. He threw rocks at wealthy people’s houses and stole from dishonest traders in Red Square. Few doubted Basil’s holiness. Tsar Ivan the Terrible feared no one but Basil. Like St Simeon of Emesa before him, Basil would sometimes eat meat on Great and Holy Friday. Once he went to Ivan’s palace in the Kremlin and forced the Tsar to eat raw meat during the fast saying: “Why abstain from eating meat when you murder men?” Countless Russians died for much less, but Ivan was afraid to let any harm come to the saintly Basil. The famous Cathedral of St Basil in Red Square with its highly coloured cupolas was commissioned by Ivan in his honour.

Blessed Basil exhibited another crucial aspect of foolish wisdom and wise foolishness. He told the truth and was afraid of no one. For this reason, as we have seen, even Tsar Ivan came to respect him and fear him. We have countless examples of this fearless honesty in world literature in the person of the court jester. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the fool was a truth teller but he was also fiercely loyal to his king when many others had deserted him on account of his madness. I like to think that Shakespeare was referencing, at least in part, the long-standing Eastern Christian tradition of the holy fool, the man or woman who lives out the gospel to the full. Holy fools challenge our conventional definitions of ‘normal’ and ‘sane’ in the manner of St. Anthony. In conclusion, I offer you the following reflection from Jim Forest, author and secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. Jim writes:

Holy fools pose the question: Are we keeping heaven at a distance by clinging to the good regard of others, prudence, and what those around us regard as ‘sanity’? The holy fools shout out with their mad words and deeds that to seek God is not necessarily the same thing as to seek sanity. We need to think long and hard about sanity, a word most of us cling to with a steel grip. Does fear of being regarded by others as insane confine me in a cage of ‘responsible’ behaviour that limits my freedom and cripples my ability to love? And is it in fact such a wonderful thing to be regarded as sane? Adolph Eichmann, the chief administrator of the Holocaust, was declared ‘quite sane’ by the psychiatrists who examined him before his trial.

Holy Xenia, Holy Simeon, Holy Basil pray to God for us that we might be wise in love and foolish as to the world for in such is Christ the King of Crazy Love glorified.