Sermon by the Rev. Dr Donald Orr

“Very truly I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor messengers greater than the one who sent them.” In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Aidan, may have been Scottish but was probably Irish, part of that great wave of Scotti that came over to Argyle and brought Christianity with them. He is first noted officially in 635AD on Iona as one of the monks. Given that Columba died in 597 on Iona it is very doubtful that they met but the power and fame of Iona had already spread through the Celtic world and beyond. Aidan was singled out to replace one of his colleagues who had singularly failed as a missionary in Northumbria because of the roughness of his methods – the mind boggles! The journey from Iona to Northumbria was no mean feat in itself in the 6^th Century and he was consecrated Bishop and made his headquarters on Lindisfarne. So much for the broad brushstrokes of history, but what is certain is that Aidan was a devoted and powerful missionary. His support of the King who went on to become St. Oswald secured Lindisfarne and allowed him to train and educate local boys to go out and be missionaries amongst their own people. Aidan never stopped traveling, he was not greater than his master and his message was more important than his own comfort. In addition to this he never allowed wealth to accumulate within the Church. Any surpluses were given to the poor or used in the manumission of slaves. It was Aidan who made St. Hilda of Whitby an Abbess of a convent in Hartlepool. A few years later she would found a new one in Whitby where she stayed for the rest of her days doing great work for rich and poor alike throughout the North of England. After the death of Oswald, Aidan supported his son Oswin to the throne and he too proved to be a strong Christian ruler and was martyred for his faith in 651. The message of Christ and of the Gospel was Aidan’s driving force and he powerfully spread the word across Northumbria. The Venerable Bede noted that he “was a man of remarkable gentleness, goodness, and moderation, zealous for God but not fully according to knowledge”. This seeming blot on his copybook comes about due to the nature of the Celtic Church. We must remember that when people speak of the Celtic Church all too often they are referring to a romantic notion of the Celtic twilight. A great deal of alleged Celtic prayer and Celtic Christianity has practically no basis in the life and times of the Celtic monks and while the awareness of weather and tides would have been of vital importance to them the jolly bonhomie of the wind always being at your back and the road coming up to meet you should be left to one side. The lack of knowledge that Bede alludes to was the Celtic Church’s attitude to the date of Easter which did not coincide with the rest of the Church and was finally resolved at the Synod of Whitby in 664 many years after Aidan’s death. Aidan and his followers lived in a hard age where the work of the Gospel had to compete with the work of the sword, where power and might was held by pagan warrior kings, where justice was dispensed by warlords. Against this background Aidan’s master was from another world; love and compassion were not the orders of the day and while the messenger was not greater than the one who sent him he would have to be as tough and resilient as Jesus in his travels and as reliant on God’s care and blessing as he moved from one tribal territory to another. All this Aidan appears to have done quietly and to great effect. His organizational skills in terms of the design and construction of Lindisfarne, his educational skills as he taught both boys and monks and sent them out into the country to increase the impact of the Gospel, and his political skill in keeping successive kings and their families within the church and thus keeping the church at the forefront of society reveal a man of great tact and understanding, an individual whose drive and energy were focused sincerely on the betterment of society, and a man whose faith in Christ and his Gospel was total. All that Aidan achieved was accomplished with authority and reason. There was no question in his mind as to the worth of what he was doing nor of its purpose in establishing the word of God in the community. He was the messenger of Christ and all his skill and ability was centred on the task of broadcasting that message to as wide an audience as possible and neither weather nor war, travel nor pagans would deter him from that course. His was a diverse society, a huge mixture of beliefs where faith and trust could easily be based on strength and might and self preservation was the order of the day – take what you can get your hands on and defend your own. Does that sound recent and somewhat familiar? The secularist web that surrounds us, the dangerous notion that the rich can only get richer and the poor poorer which has caused so many problems recently were the very aspects Aidan was fighting against. If we want a model of how to resolve many of our society’s problems we would do well to consider Aidan and the methods he employed, because the evils that beset our own communities are the very ones he was dealing with in Northumbria those many many years ago. Talking, reasoning and offering them freely something that was far far better – a society based on compassion and care where health and the nurture of the young and elderly were an integral part of life. It is not a new message and the tragedy is that in many of our cities the message of Aidan has been forgotten. We can only pray that the spirit of Aidan arises again and that young people are led back to the love of God and a sense of community where everyone is cherished.

As you fed your sheep by the word of Christ and led them by a good example, give us grace to keep the faith of the church and follow in your footsteps, through Christ our Lord. Amen.