ST MARGARET OF SCOTLAND

16^TH November 2014

Readings:

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Matthew 13: 44-46

Revd Andrew Bain

She seeks wool and flax and works with willing hands. She rises while it is still night, considers a field and buys it, girds her arms with strength, makes her arms strong, plants a vineyard, opens her hand to the poor, makes linen garments and sells them.

It’s enough to make you feel exhausted just listening to it. This is the Old Testament view of the Good Wife, otherwise known as superwoman. Sort of Nigella Lawson, Charlie Dimmock and Mother Theresa all rolled in to one. But in fact if you look beneath that breathtaking to-do list what you see is the Bible saying: this is the creativity, the energy that just overflows if you seek wisdom and love.

This is what you look like if you seek the Pearl of great price above all else. Our two readings have always been chosen for St Margaret’s Day because that’s what people saw in her. She lived up to her own name – Margaret means “Pearl”. Born a princess, heir to an earthly kingdom, nevertheless she knew the kingdom that really matters, namely the one that grows secretly in the heart – the one that’s worth giving up anything else in order to possess it and be possessed by it.

I still have my copy of the Ladybird book of saints from primary school days, which shows Margaret arriving at Dunfermline to be met by her future husband, Malcolm Canmore (his name unflatteringly meaning “big head”), Malcolm in my picture looking a bit like a young Howard Keel, and Margaret both regal and demure. I suspect the truth was something different. Margaret probably fell off her tiny ship, green with seasickness having battled up the North Sea coast for days, only to be confronted by a husband who possibly made her heart sink: this rough and ready king of a very rough and ready kingdom. One writer describes Malcolm as a fiery Celtic ruffian who when Margaret first met him, when her ship was blown on to the Northumbrian coast, he was busy sacking the Saxon church at Wearmouth and slaughtering everyone, young and old alike.

So really you couldn’t have blamed Margaret if she’d just given up the ghost at this point. Because Malcolm and Scotland were definitely Plan B. Margaret, a Saxon princess from the court of the King of Hungary, had been destined for return to the English court for a far more gracious life than anything Scotland had to offer. Only a certain William of Normandy, and an arrow in the eye for Harold, got in the way of all that. Life didn’t work out. The glittering prize was snatched from her hands by that unsympathetic thing we call life, so here she is making the best of second best.

Only Margaret clearly didn’t see it that way. Margaret embraced her new husband, her new country and her new life not as if they were some cheap consolation prize but as the joy of her heart. This man, this country, this life was the field wherein lay, for her, the pearl of great price. What a lesson. Can you or I believe that the place we land up, those regions of the spirit or of our emotions that we never planned on visiting – these are our precious field? Just scrape away some mud and there is the pearl of great price.

So here’s an astonishing thing that maybe one of the first and most outstanding figures of our history was a woman, a foreigner, someone who never planned on being here at all; and yet she’s perhaps one of the first of our famous figures whose personality you can almost feel. She is Proverbs woman, beyond a doubt. I like to think of her as our Grace Kelly – bringing into the grim circumstances of a dark and violent Scotland just a touch of stardust, a bit of Hollywood.

But more than that Margaret brought faith. Some today question whether the Roman version she brought with her finished off the last remains of a Celtic Christianity people sometimes idealise. But the Church needed the organising energy of Proverbs woman, needed that discipline which is the grit in the oyster that forms the pearl. Christianity is a tough, sinewy, get your sleeves rolled up kind of religion every bit as much as it’s a faith of contemplation and prayer – maybe more so – and Margaret understood that. And my Ladybird book of saints picks up at least one thread of that. Margaret feeding and washing poor children who came daily to her castle door. Margaret reading gospel stories to her children, and especially her son, David, who would be king and saint in his turn, founder of all those monasteries that would for centuries be our schools and hospitals, centres of light and learning.

Not a bad record for someone who never aimed to be here at all. Malcolm probably felt he was the luckiest man alive: Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all. She knew that you can find your Pearl anywhere, when things don’t work out, when you’re not where you want to be. Dig and you’ll find it.

I think there’s something inspiring in the fact that the oldest remaining building in Edinburgh is Margaret’s chapel. It’s tiny and how it hasn’t been swept away by the ravages of our violent history and countless sieges, heaven alone knows. It’s vulnerable and unimposing, but it has clung to that great rock for almost a thousand years, just like Margaret clung to Christ. At the heart of the city, that amazing, busy, industrious woman’s place of prayer and the source of her strength still stands.

So this is her message for all of us: however your life events, your history may buffet you, cling to the rock that is Christ; and wherever you find yourself dig for the pearl of great price. Amen.

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

9^TH November 2014

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

Amos 5: 18-24

Matthew 25: 1-13

When you go home, tell them of us and say: For your tomorrow, we gave our today.

When I was a boy at school, Remembrance Day was one of the most important in our school calendar. We were all trooped off to Palmerston Place Church for a service, then solemnly led back into school past the great bronze war memorial in the entrance hall with the names of all the boys who’d died in two world wars and flanked by two cadets who stood with heads bowed and arms reversed. A piper played the Floors o’ the Forest. We were left in no doubt that this was a very significant day.

I suppose one of the main things we felt was a sense of history. We were remembering boys not much older than ourselves, many of whom – certainly in the First World War – were turned into instant officers with a life expectancy measured in weeks or less. But we were also a generation for whom the Second World War was even nearer. The comics we read were full of it, as were our games – running around Corstorphine Woods playing “Japs and Commandos”, with Tommy guns. This was before the phrase political correctness had even been thought of. But more seriously, our parents still bore the scars of a conflict that had ended only ten years before we were born.

For them remembering wasn’t about history at all. My father and his two brothers and his sister were all called up in 1939, and one of those brothers would never return. One uncle spent the entire war in Japanese captivity and never recovered. The whole family, none of whom had ever been further than an annual summer holiday in Aberdour, were suddenly scattered across the world. And that experience you could replicate across the entire nation and indeed across so many countries, so many real people, real families, just torn apart by the horrors of war.

So this isn’t history, it’s a deep and abiding wounding of the human spirit. And there probably isn’t a family here that hasn’t been touched by that shadow. My father couldn’t watch the annual Festival of Remembrance without tears in his eyes,  especially that part where the poppies fall onto the shoulders of today’s young service men and women.

Today’s reading from Amos is a cry from the heart of God through the lips of his prophet to turn from the ways of violence. Don’t bring me your songs and your sacrifices: Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And the Gospel has the same urgency: Stay awake! One of the best of many new books on the First World War is called “The Sleepwalkers” because it tells how the so-called leaders of the world almost sleep-walked into evil, through pride and brinksmanship, each never thinking that the other would take that final step beyond the point of no return. It’s said all that’s necessary for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. But the Prince of Peace, the bridegroom, is always coming and his kingdom demands that we stay awake. Peace has to be worked for with every fibre of our being.

The Remembrance services of my school days did seem, in some ways, to be about history and rows upon rows of faceless names on war memorials. Today’s young dead have young, happy faces we see on television. They have valiant young widows whose pain and pride we actually get to listen to, in a way we never did before. Afghanistan may be a world away, but the pain of it breaks into our consciousness every day – and it should.

Because the sacrifices others make in our name should deeply question us. Just as the Cross questions us – this is the greatest love, so will I take up my share of the Cross and follow? Will I stay awake? Young people are dying in my name – whatever my views on the conflicts now going on – so, what am I doing to make a world where war no longer consumes the lives of young and old? After the First World War, there was much talk of homes fit for heroes and a country renewed for people who’d given and suffered so much – much of which turned to ashes as we know. But that doesn’t mean that that instinct of hope was wrong. Because here’s where the Christian way of seeing has to be different, never cynical, always hopeful.

Every Sunday we stand at the foot of the Cross, witnessing the death of a young man; but we also, and even more so, stand by the empty tomb, met by a young man transformed, whose first word to us is: Peace, (don’t be afraid). Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Can tribulation or peril, or nakedness or sword, or 21st century terrorism, or anything else? No, because in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

The best, the very best way we can honour the young Jesus and the even younger dead of today is by not giving in to despair. In a dark world we’re to keep our lamps lit and be ready to welcome the Prince of Peace every day – indeed, whenever we pray: “your kingdom come, Lord”. We owe that to the children whose Dads – and Mums - aren’t coming home and to the young men and women returning with such terrible wounds. That’s why our Peace Pole is almost an act of defiance. No matter what today’s news may bring, we will honour the hope our young have died for time and again, and we will put their hope right in front of our church, in the very heart of this busy community, so that what they died for is always before our eyes: May peace prevail on earth. Amen.

When you go home, tell them of us and say: For your tomorrow, we gave our today.

ALL SAINTS

2^ND November 2014

Readings:

Revelation 7: 9-17

Matthew 5: 1-12

Revd Andrew Bain

One of the things I like about saints is their sheer variety. There’s no sort of one size fits all way of being a saint. At Holy Trinity I worked with a team member one of whose duties was to compile a list of saints to be commemorated at our Wednesday service. This could result in my turning up of a morning to find that I was celebrating, for example, the feast of Sts Boris and Gleb. Who? Boris and Gleb were Ukrainian princes, considered martyrs by the Orthodox church, having died by the command of one Sviatapolk the Accursed (not a nice man by all accounts) – Gleb we’re told, having his throat cut by his own cook.

Now you may well ask, who needs to know that at 9.15 on a Sunday morning a thousand years on, or at any time. But these commemorations are an invitation to join in that great cavalcade that streams through those gates of pearl – all those whom Jesus calls blessed and invites us to be one of them. And it’s like they call back to us over their shoulders: Come and join us. Join the pilgrimage. Put your feet in the footsteps of the Man of Galilee.

A few years ago I saw a film of the art critic, Brian Sewell making the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James, Santiago de Compostela. He aimed to end up in that amazing cathedral famous for its huge hanging censer, the one that takes a whole team of beefy men to swing it from one side of the cathedral to the other and which Pope John Paul memorably watched almost as if he was at Wimbledon. But Brian’s pilgrimage was extraordinary. Much of it done in a Mercedes, be it said, but nevertheless he made an amazing journey. Not just to the shrine of the saint, but meeting saints along the way, and indeed making a journey in his own heart.

At Lourdes his aesthetic soul was appalled by all the tackiness of the shops with their holy trinkets: Luminous blessed Virgins; holographic pictures of Jesus that show him crucified if you hold them one way and risen if you tilt them the other; or wind-up holy grottoes that play the Lourdes hymn. But still he could see beyond that to the faith of all the people with broken bodies or minds who find their way there and the compassion of all the helpers there to care for them (like the Duchess of Kent who after her conversion to become a Roman Catholic went to Lourdes as a helper and was happy to clean loos).

Lourdes is a place of joy. It’s a place where one peasant girl, Bernadette, met another peasant girl, Our Lady, and had an encounter that literally opened up a well of healing and joy for millions. So it’s a place of a love and a faith so alive it makes saints. It’s a place for going beyond yourself, which is what saints do.

By the time Brian Sewell reached Compostella he was beginning to see this. The pilgrim route is punctuated by amazing buildings and shrines, but far more moving than any architecture was the experience of meeting so many people travelling with joy. At journey’s end you see him, his mind not much changed intellectually about Christianity, but his heart reached and touched to a depth that truly astonished him.

The saints say to you: Get on the pilgrim way. You don’t have to physically go anywhere to follow the saints. Brother Laurence, author of The Practice of the Presence of God, worked in his monastery kitchen for 15 years and he says: "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament."

You can be a saint in the kitchen. And you can be a saint in the lion’s den of worldly power if that’s where God takes you. Like Sir Nicholas Winton, aged 105, honoured this week for rescuing nearly 700 children from Nazi occupied Czechosovalia in the kindertransport.

Ukrainian princes and peasant girls, kitchen saints and unsung wartime heroes, we need them all – we need us all - and they say to us: join in the pilgrimage of saints, even if the travelling’s in your heart; be open to being reshaped and turned upside down and emptied until you know truly the joy of the blessed who see God. Amen.