Above: Stefano Maderno’s Saint Cecilia
Sermon on Saint Agnes and Saint Cecilia
Bro. Andrew Aelred Morehead, OC
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Diocesan House
Song of Songs 2:10-13, 2 Corinthians 6:16-18, Matthew 18:1-6
“Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Agnes and Saint Cecilia, two women of the Roman empire who dared to just brush against the grain of Roman cultural norms. Saint Agnes, a young virgin of only twelve or thirteen years of age, young in our eyes but perhaps not to Romans, refused to be wed to pagans who had proposed to her. She was summarily executed for holding on to her Christian faith and her convictions of the sanctity of her whole self, her bodily security.
Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, organ builders, and poets also protested the violation of her body after her marriage. She was successful in converting her household to Christianity. However, the peace did not last long. She was executed shortly after burying her martyred husband and brother-in-law. While she is often painted holding a portative organ or violin, she is also remembered as having been executed via multiple sword blows to the head whilst singing.
Agnes and Cecilia’s lives were marked by a mature commitment to a humility of innocence, or a humiliation of cultural expectation. They had become the children of God. As women of the Roman empire, the only thing they could possibly have was their bodies, and even then the culture at the time marked anyone aside from, or better yet read below or beneath, a Roman male as fair game. And as Paul built his overarching metaphor of our selves as both the members of the body of Christ and as temples of Christ, emptied for his embodiment, early Christian followers saw anything that violated that holy wholeness as a violation of their entire being.
But as we know, empires have a horrid tendency to violate bodies indiscriminately. For the Egyptian empire, it was the Israelites. For Renaissance and Classical Western European Empires, it was the Africans and First Americans. For Nazi Germany, it was the Jews. And for today’s empire, well it’s just about anybody that doesn’t look or behave as expected. In the machine of empires ancient and contemporary, bodies are expendable. The empire doesn’t see innocent children, the empire doesn’t see temples of the All Holy, and the empire certainly doesn’t see Christ among us, even when they’re nailing him to a tree.
And so today we mark the memory of Agnes and Cecilia, who from the winter of their persecution, arose and went away with Christ, witnessing to and singing into being a fairer, more beautiful vision for humanity into existence.
Saint Agnes, pray for us.
Saint Cecilia, sing for us.
Photo: By Alvesgaspar – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45349140