Sermon by the Rev. Bryan Owen
Katy, Catriona and I are delighted to be back here at St Aidan’s after so many years. Stuart, who was born while we were here, is taking an exam at St Andrew’s University tomorrow morning so he’s at home studying – we hope! He’s now 19 and studying physics, maths and local hostelries although not necessarily in that order!
From here some of you will remember that I went to Scottish Churches House in Dunblane but after the dreadful events of 1996 which we were much involved in I took a parish down in Surrey before taking early retirement from parish ministry in 2001 and devoting myself to writing among other things.
But here we are once again at St Aidan’s celebrating your Patronal Festival and reflecting once again on the gentle monk after whom this church is named.
I guess you know most of the stories of St Aidan, the monk from Iona who became the apostle to the kingdom of Northumbria back in the 7th century.
The Romans first brought Christianity to Britain probably in the 2nd or 3rd centuries but after the Anglo-Saxon invasions paganism once again became the dominant religion in the seven kingdoms although pockets of Christianity continued to survive here and there.
Oswald, from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, lived among the Gaels of Dalriada after being banished when Edwin became king. During his exile Oswald visited Iona and he knew the monks who lived there. He subsequently converted to Christianity and was baptized. In 634 he regained the kingship of Northumbria at the Battle of Heavenfield. On the night before the battle Oswald claims to have had a vision of Saint Columba in which the saint predicted that Oswald would be victorious. Apparently Oswald raised a cross and prayed to God for victory. Afterwards he was determined to replace the people’s paganism with all its human sacrifices and daily fears with Christianity and its teaching of love and forbearance.
Because he had been treated with such kindness and generosity among the Christians of Iona and because he believed that the God of the Christians had restored him to the throne of Northumbria he requested missionaries from Iona to come to Northumbria and teach the people the ways of Christ.
The story I have always valued from Aidan’s life is the one about how he came to be chosen as the missionary to Oswald’s kingdom. As you probably remember, Iona at first sent a bishop by the name of Cormán but his time in Northumbria was a miserable failure. He was strict, he was rigid, he was unpleasant and he met with no success at all so he returned to Iona and reported that the Northumbrians were far too stubborn to be converted.
At the chapter meeting Aidan criticised not the Northumbrians but Cormán and his methods. The fault lay not with the pagans, he said, but with the preacher who was sent to them - his methods were too rough and inflexible. Aidan said that the pagan peoples of Northumbria should be treated with gentleness. They must be fed with the milk of mild teaching and loving encouragement before they could be ready for the full meat of the Gospel. As happens so often in church life when you come up with a good idea you get the job – so Aidan was consecrated a bishop and together with a small group of monks as companions he was sent as a replacement in the year 635.
On arriving at the Northumbrian capital of Bamburgh Oswald decided to give Aidan the island of Lindisfarne so that he could set up a community for the new group of monks just like the community he had known on Iona. And so Aidan’s mission began. He was gentle with the people and walked among them just as Jesus would have done had he lived there himself.
Of course, Aidan did not speak the English of Northumbria at first so King Oswald, who had learned Gaelic after his years of exile, often accompanied Aidan on his travels to act as his translator.
By patiently talking to the people on their own level Aidan and his monks slowly brought Christianity to the villages and hamlets of the Northumbrian kingdom. He also took in twelve Northumbrian boys to train at the monastery on Lindisfarne so that in future the church’s leadership would be able to speak to the people in their own language.
We know that the conversion of the Northumbrians was a gradual process and took more than a century to complete. Anglo-Saxon paganism involved the worship of several deities the most significant of which was Woden. And we know that their religion involved the sacrifice particularly of bulls and occasionally of people. You can see how Christian teaching about Christ’s sacrifice on the cross being sufficient ‘once and for all’ for the remission of sins was an attractive belief.
Anglo-Saxon wooden-framed temples were not destroyed but re-commissioned as Christian places of worship. Anglo-Saxon pagan beliefs, however, remain with us in the names of the days of the week – Woden is Wednesday and Freya is Friday, for example, and in the spring festival of Eostre which we now call Easter. The tradition of well-dressing in Derbyshire is one of those ancient Anglo-Saxon religious traditions that continue – the ancient practice of asking the gods to bless their water supply.
After Aidan’s death the monastery he founded grew and helped found churches and other monasteries throughout what is now the north of England and the south-east of Scotland. Lindisfarne also became a centre of learning and a storehouse of scholarly knowledge.
St Aidan, unlike Cormán, was one of those clergy Geoffrey Chaucer speaks of in ‘The Canterbury Tales’:
‘There is nowhere a better priest, I trow.
He had no thirst for pomp or reverence,
Nor made himself a special, spiced conscience,
But Christ's own lore, and His apostles' twelve
He taught, but first he followed it himself.’
Aidan’s story, like the stories of so many saints old and new, confronts us with the way we live out our own faith. To what extent do we truly follow Christ’s own lore, as Chaucer puts it, ourselves? And I guess, if we are honest, we are all genuinely aware of our faults and failings. Even St Paul, from whom we heard in our first reading, confessed that he found it difficult to live up to the high ideals of Jesus Christ. In his letter to the Romans he writes:
‘For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate... I can will what is right but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want but the evil I do not want is what I do...’ (Romans 7:15-19)
In other words all of us are deeply, deeply human! As Christians we have our high ideals but so often we fail to live up to them. That is why the Church, in its wisdom, includes an opportunity for confession at every service followed by the assurance of God’s forgiveness in the words of the Absolution. For all our failures it’s better, though, to have high ideals and recognise that from time to time we fall short than to have no ideals at all.
Here’s a poem I wrote about another incident in the New Testament – Jesus’ invitation to Peter after he betrayed their friendship in the courtyard of the High Priest on the night Jesus was arrested:
Don’t forget Peter
In spite of Peter’s blazing betrayal
while warming his cold hands
by the flames of the beckoning fire
the young man in the garden
early that one uncertain morning
gave the women carrying balm
the Message:
Tell the disciples and Peter
He will meet them in Galilee.
Don’t forget Peter,
the young man said.
The emphasis was deliberate.
The Carpenter was waiting for him -
for even a fisherman who falls
needs to be told
that after his brush with hell
all will be well,
and he can return to the fold.
Peter knew he had betrayed his friendship with Jesus but Jesus later invited him to return to the fold. On the night before Jesus died he failed, and failed spectacularly, but he wasn’t condemned. Jesus loved him and Jesus forgave him.
Paul kept on committing his besetting sins and he admitted that even he, an apostle, failed to live up to the high ideals he preached but he wasn’t going to be condemned either.
In fact, Paul goes on to write those wonderful words in chapter 8 of his Letter to the Romans: ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...’
At the heart of the Christian Gospel there is something that actually doesn’t exist in our so-called Christian society as a whole – in the Gospel there is forgiveness and there is forbearance and there is starting over again.
And these Christian qualities are denied day after day on the front pages of the tabloids whenever someone gets it wrong.
For example, the woman who put the cat in the bin the other day was vilified in the tabloids and subsequently threatened with death by people all over the country. How can anyone justify murdering someone for putting a cat in a bin? I am in no way excusing what the woman did but do two wrongs make a right? Is murder a Christian response? Indeed, doesn’t that kind of response show human nature at its worst? The rule of the mob, the desire for a lynching, is still bubbling under the surface of human behaviour. The high ideals we as Christian people aspire to do not include a rush to judgement. Remember what Jesus said about motes and beams...
In your own lives, then, have you behaved like Bishop Cormán – the first apostle to the Northumbrians? Have you hurt people the way he did? Have you made demands on people they simply can’t meet? Have you rushed to judgement and condemned people without a hearing?
Or are you more like St Aidan... gentle and tolerant and patient recognising that people generally take time to change their ways, recognising that everyone should be treated with respect even if they disagree with us?
And isn’t that a lesson those of us who were members of this congregation learned back in 1989 after the sad events that happened here in the year before I became Rector when the congregation then was split and dispersed?
St Aidan’s story calls us back to the Gospel of Jesus. He took his time teaching the people, and he tolerated their differences and he showed respect to everyone he met. As disciples of Jesus today we can do no less.
Let me finish with another quote from Chaucer speaking about the Parson in his ‘Canterbury Tales’:
‘He was a learned man also, a clerk,
Who Christ's own gospel truly sought to preach;
Devoutly his parishioners would he teach.
Benign he was and wondrous diligent,
Patient in adverse times and well content.’
May all of us be like that – patient in adverse times and well content for we know that God forgives us each one and we are all safe in his love.
Amen.