St.Edmund : A Saint for 21st C

At first glance, St. Edmund is not the first saint one would turn to when looking for a patron today. And that begs the question, Why bother with a patron anyway?
 How might 9th Century life and death of the last king of East Anglia be relevant ?
Edmund regarded himself as a Christian monarch. We can only guess at his education and understanding of Christianity, but the Latin speaking churchmen around him, were well versed in the Psalms and Old Testament. A great deal of the Old Testament, for example, King David and the Book of Psalms - had roots in a very similar contexts to those of 8/9th East Anglia. It was Old, rather than, New Testament narratives, that gave rise to their ideas about Christian Monarchy.

 From a modern Christian perspective, such an approach would seem to produce a Christian Monarch who is rather less than Christ-like. Yet, this has been the way of things until our recent history. One does not need to go any further back than Victorian times and the heyday of the consciously Christian British Empire, to find the same thinking being applied. 

 On reflection, there are real problems for a nation state in "turning the cheek", "loving the enemy" etc..  The questions around, "How to be a Christian  a warring and competitive world?" remain moot points.  It is difficult for nation states, just as it is for other sorts of organisations and for individuals, who must fight for a place in a competitive market.

 There was and is ambiguity, then and now, in being servants of Christ the King


Disrupters, next! We face no end of disrupters in the 21st C! The one major disrupter Edmund and the Kingdom of East Anglia faced in the 9th C was the Great Heather Army



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