Sermon of 30th August 2009 is below

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Thanking God for Miracles

Yn enwyr Tad - A’r Mab - A’r Ys bryd Glaan

(or perhaps you’d prefer it not in welsh)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

We’ve been subjected to/ gladdened by Scots gallic, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and all accents that go with them, Newcastlian Jordie, Yorkshire as well as politically incorrect ‘proper’ BBC English.

And we’ve worshipped on Sundays with wonderful people and in an amazing variety of places. Before our family travels, I worshipped at Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of St James, and also with the Quakers in Colchester because of Coggeshall’s unfortunate connection with them from the 17^th century. And then these last weeks we’ve been at Paul White’s Ordination in Canterbury diocese, we’ve worshipped with the Iona Community (a wonderful sunny Sunday, a month ago, when they were installing a new leader of the community, a once-in-every-seven-years event). We’ve joined with pilgrims at the mass at the modern basilica shrine of our Lady of Knock. We’ve worshipped at the Cathedrals in Durham, Brecon and St David’s. We went to a very moving Assumption day mass at Holy Cross Abbey near Tipperary (it’s one of the few places which is still acknowledged to have a ‘real’ relic – a tiny fragment of the true cross given to the abbey by the Vatican recently – so we felt a little reminder of Colchester, where St Helena began her travels to Jerusalem back in the 2^nd century). And we’ve worshipped with the CoS in Edinburgh and the CoI on the edge of the Killarney National Park.

And each week we have thought of you here, knowing that, in most cases, you’ll have heard the same scripture readings that we heard (common lectionary) and so we in some way shared in worship and shared in our common love of Christ, even though separated by distance.

And here we are safely back again. My sabbatical officially ends next week. It is always a joy to return home (if a little ‘lost in familiar places’, as the title of a book has it, after such a long period away!) – and thank you for giving us such a warm welcome back and for enabling me to be away for this period. And it is wonderful return on this Flower Festival Sunday – celebrating in the flowers around us “God’s Miracles”.

The first miracle I want to celebrate is that the flower Festival seems to get better each year. How is it possible to improve what seemed so perfect last time!?

The second miracle that I want to celebrate is that the Banks family have travelled the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland with no serious mishaps! Only one broken brake light glass (yes, I reversed the caravan into a fence post.). One roof leak (now I know why the Holy Spirit prompted me to pop a mastic gun into the caravan hold before we left). And the scary moment having to reverse in a narrow York street. And perhaps driving onto the ferry to N Ireland up what seemed to us was the steepest ramp known to man – in torrential rain and with the ominous smell of burning clutch rubber. Would the car ever slither up to the top with the caravan’s weight pulling against it?...

So although “God’s Miracles” are depicted around us in flowers, his miracles are not, are they, just restricted to the pages of scripture and to the past. I’ve no doubt that you can think of ways in which God has touched you or your family or someone you know in a ‘miraculous’ way – either the little, small events, or the larger things in life. Travelling to  Ireland again was a real eye-opener as it brought us in touch with Irish history, and was a reminder of the way in which the peace process finally bore fruit. The picture of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley shaking hands, was for the Irish people both sides of the border nothing short of a miracle. And that miracle, of course, is also a sign of hope – hope for other places which need a miracle:  Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe . And we need to pray for miracles, knowing that they are not just a thing of the past.

Our travels also brought us back in touch with the Celtic saints, and the miracle that surrounded their journeying. Pilgrimage for the Celtic saints was never a journey ‘to’ a holy place. Rather pilgrimage was about taking ‘the holy’, the gospel, to a new place, to establish the message of the Gospel in a in places that it had not reached before. That was their mission and ministry. We certainly heard about plenty of miracles associated with the places we visited. St Patrick’s dream in which God tells him to take the faith to  Ireland and the miracles he performed there, especially miracles of healing, led him subsequently to become Ireland’s patron saint. Or the holy well at St David’s which, it is said, sprang up at the moment of David’s birth – and the miracles of healing which have been recorded there ever since.

One particular celtic site that we visited that will, I think, always stay fresh in my mind was Whithorn priory and the story of St Ninian. He learnt about the Christian faith in Rome as early as the third century – brought it back to south west Scotland – and what a miracle that was – that he got safely back to Scotland at all – and then the miracle that in those dark times the right chemistry was at work – his holiness of life, his words, the connections he had or the local politics of the place – who knows which of these or what combination – but the result  you can still see today - the priory and his burial place,  visited down the centuries by kings, the rich, the poor, all who came for healing and blessing - and Ninian is remembered to this day as one of the fathers of Christianity in Scotland.

What is particularly wonderful is to visit St Ninian’s cave, right on the sea shore nearby, where he regularly retreated for prayer. You have to abandon your car by a small farm where the road ends, and then walked the 2-3 miles. It was a beautiful and evocative and very lonely place. In the cave, people had left candles, crosses, prayers, photographs of loved ones – many people had carved/graffiti-ed crosses on the cave entrance. We were really touched by the place, and were moved rather eccentrically to sing a Taizé chant in the cave, and then we enjoyed making some small crosses there from little bits of driftwood and fishing net that had washed up - one Janet left there with the other things there, and two we brought back to put up in the caravan for the rest of our journey. Samuel says he wants to show to his friends at school.

Then the amazing story of the birth of Christianity in Ireland with St Patrick, of St Columba’s bringing the faith from there to Iona in the sixth century, and St Aidan taking it from there to Lindisfarne – and emerging from there Cuthbert and Chadd and Cedd – Cedd finally bringing the faith to Essex at Bradwell on Sea. All of that in the Dark Ages, when Roman protection and rule had gone and the threat of Vikings and Pagans were so great. And yet – miraculously, these early Christians made sure that the story of faith lived on. 

When we compare ourselves in Christian ministry, lay and ordained alike, with those celtic saints from the dark ages (I speak for myself!) I feel like a pale reflection – we have it so easy here! Not everyone does – we need to pray for and support those who live in countries today where it is still dangerous to be a Christian. Yet – we have the same calling, the same God of miracles invites us to do his work on earth, the same challenge to make the story and power of Jesus known to the people of our own generation.

In a sense the readings for today are about just that. How do we make the gospel relevant to the people we come into contact with? The theologians call it ‘contextualisation’. In other words, the church always has to listen to two ‘stories’ – the Scriptural / Christian story and also the story of the culture of the age it which it is set.  The church has always lived at the crossroads of these two stories – and the early saints knew, and we should know, that effective church mission and ministry only happens when the church truly tries to hold these two stories together.  In the gospel today, Jesus is having a go at the Pharisees because they are stuck on traditions – not scriptural traditions, but human-made religious traditions (washing and pots and so on). And Jesus simply states the obvious (which irks them) that what we eat will not cause us to sin, rather our sins come from within us, from our hearts.

Now those early celtic saints had no churchy traditions, as we do, to fall back on – they had, literally, to ‘make it up as they went along’ – it kept them on their toes – they carried only the gospel, the news of Jesus, of his miracles, of his miraculous power to heal, to save, to restore. They had to find immediate and fresh ways of linking that good news of Christ with the culture of their day. They did it spectacularly well! As I come back from re-visiting the places that those saints trod and re-visiting their stories, what I want to ask myself is what can we learn from their experience in our own day for our church and for our personal lives.

St James’s epistle, our second reading today, helps us a little on the subject of our personal ministry. I love his directness. “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger”. In other words, if we are grumpy, impatient, bad tempered, difficult, obtuse – we immediately give a bad witness to Christ and his church, don’t we. And the converse is true. If we are joyful, positive, affirming, honest, generous people, others will see those qualities and recognise that our faith has had an impact in how we live.

So – God’s miracles, the theme of our Flower Festival this weekend: we are all part of God’s miracle of creation. And the biggest miracle of all is that by the ever-present Holy Spirit, by the word of God is Scripture, by the sacrament of the breaking of the bread: God is present with us at all times and places. God is present with us here. That is the greatest miracle.

For me, that miracle gives life and energy and fire to our Church life knowing that, as a Christian family, we meet here week-by-week in an act of love – love of God – love of each other – knowing that we are not always perfect at it – but knowing too of God’s eternal love for us, however much we fail – and reminds us of our need to be simple in our trust and love of the great God of miracles.

So, like the saints of the past, the God of miracles calls us in our pilgrimage of life to follow him; like the saints of the past God calls us to follow his voice; like the saints of the past God call us to be the sheep of his fold and to be the people he would have us be.  May we truly know his blessing and the miraculous touch of his Son, Jesus Christ, today and always.

Oh, and PS - speaking of miracles, perhaps I shouldn’t really tell you this, as it isn’t all that good for St Columba’s credibility - but when we visited Loch Ness, the visitor centre likes to tell you that one bit of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster was that St Columba, when he was travelling across to the East coast up the Loch, apparently encountered Nessie. Nessie was about to eat one of his fellow monks. So Columba’s miracle was that commanded the beast to desist, which it did! Make of that what you will.

Yn enwyr Tad

A’r Mab

A’r Y Sbryd Glaan