Psalm
107:23-30, Isaiah 58:6-8 & 2 Timothy 2:2
Some ministers walk the pilgrim route
to Santiago de Compostela. Some even cross the Pyrenees to get there. This
summer I confined myself to visiting Holy Island with Helen during a short
visit to Northumberland. Going to Holy Island has long been on my bucket list
and we weren’t disappointed.
In the church there is an inscription
bearing some words of the first English historian, the Venerable Bede, who said
of the Celtic missionary Aidan, ‘He never sought or cared for worldly
possessions. He always travelled on foot. His followers lived as they
taught.’
Aidan and the first Celtic missionaries
remind me of St Francis of Assissi, who - many centuries later - is supposed to
have told his followers, ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. If you must, you may
use words.’ What he actually said was, ‘All the Franciscans brothers should
preach by their actions.’
I like the quote about Aidan better:
‘His followers lived as they taught.' Bede doesn't say that they didn’t speak
to people about their faith, only that their actions echoed their words,
or - if you prefer - that they lived out what they said they believed; they
practised what they preached.
It struck me as a perfect motto for us
all - even for people who aren’t Christians. Everyone has opinions and most of
us can’t help sharing them. It would be a wonderful epitaph if people could say
of us that we lived as we taught.
But Bede had more to say about Aidan,
describing him as 'a man of remarkable gentleness, goodness and moderation.'
Apparently, the only respect in which his character tipped over into indulgence
was in his 'zeal for God'.
A moderate and gentle zeal sounds like
a contradiction, and even zeal as a force for good seems implausible to some
people, because we've seen far too many examples of people who've allowed zeal
for God to take them in completely the wrong direction. They’ve convinced
themselves that being zealous requires them to hate God's supposed enemies and
justifies a callous indifference towards the fate of people whom they
believe are not deserving of God's love.
Can this kind of misdirected 'zeal' be
redeemed? Can zeal for God be set free from extremism and intolerance? Must it
always bring out the nasty, hateful side of religion?
The answer must be that zeal can
become godlike, because Jesus’ disciples said that ‘zeal for God’s house’ had
‘consumed’ him. That was when Jesus cleansed the temple of moneychangers
and traders, so admittedly it was one of his angrier moments, but Bede said
that zeal becomes a force for positive change and salvation when, as in the
character of Aidan, it is tempered by 'gentleness, goodness and moderation'.
I’m not sure how far Jesus believed in moderation, but he certainly gave a very
high priority to gentleness and goodness, and he encouraged the people who
wanted to throw stones at an adulteress to moderate their zeal.
Bede said that Aidan’s ‘remarkable
gentleness, goodness and moderation’ were hallmarks of his ‘zeal for God.’
Again, wouldn’t it make a wonderful epitaph if people could say of any of us
that ‘remarkable gentleness, goodness and moderation’ had always characterised
the way we went about the things we believed in most profoundly?
If Aidan was a moderate zealot then it
can fairly be said of John Wesley that he was a reasonable enthusiast. His
opponents accused him of whipping up too much enthusiasm in his followers,
instead of encouraging them to moderate their behaviour. There was always the
fear that in Methodist meetings people might get carried away somehow and do -
or say - unreasonable things. There are similar fears about the impact of
religious zeal today,
Wesley defended himself by asserting
that he only encouraged people to be enthusiastic so long as they also
remembered to be reasonable. In the same way, Aidan only encouraged
‘zeal for God’ when it was tempered by ‘gentleness, goodness and moderation.’
The world would be a better place if more people heeded these examples.
One last quote from Bede about Aidan:
‘He cultivated peace and love, purity and humility. He was above anger and
greed, and despised pride and conceit. He set himself to keep and to teach
God’s laws. He was diligent in study and prayer. He used his priestly authority
to check the proud and the powerful. He tenderly comforted the sick. He
relieved and protected the poor. To sum up what could be learned from those who
knew him, he took pains never to neglect anything that he had learned from the
writings of the apostles and the prophets, and he set himself to carry them out
with all his powers.’
Clearly Bede was quite a fan of Aidan
and perhaps that was helped by the fact that he never knew Aidan personally. He
only knew of him, from the reports of those who had known him. And, of
course, after their death we sometimes choose to gloss over people’s weaknesses
and concentrate on their strengths. Perhaps that’s because it’s only when
they’ve gone that we really begin it appreciate what we liked best about them,
what we will miss as we carry on without them.
If only a fraction of what Bede said
about Aidan is true he was still a very remarkable man, and a very remarkable
leader and pastor. People remembered that he somehow managed to keep the peace
within his community, but in a loving way and without downplaying the need for
purity and for people to treat one another with humility. The other side of the
coin was that he couldn’t stand pride or conceit and only used his
authority to stop other people from misusing theirs. Somehow, he also
found time to show compassion to the sick and the oppressed. And all of this
was rooted in prayer and in his study of the scriptures. He tried to carry out
the lessons he learned there ‘with all his powers.’
The example of Aidan has inspired and
dismayed ministers and priests in equally measure. Obviously we all want to be
that kind of leader, but equally we know that we can only do so much and we’re
bound to fall short.
People will say, ‘Would Aidan have been
so able to be this kind of leader if he had had to deal with fifty or a hundred
emails every day, or if he had been required to make the Preaching Plan, or
oversee the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults and countless other
rules and regulations, or balance the cares and concerns of his own family life
with his work in the Church? But in the end, isn’t the point that - whether or
not he really was quite as nice and all-sufficient as he is portrayed by Bede -
Aidan’s character flowed from his relationship with God and his love of
scripture, and from his determination to live ‘with all his powers’ the faith
he read and prayed about ?
Of course, all of us can have a go at
this. We can all try - with all our powers and with God’s help - to
allow the peace, the love, the purity and the humility that we read about in
the Gospels to shape our actions and our thoughts, our hopes and our ambitions.
We too can challenge the misuse of power and seek to support those who are
oppressed or unwell. And in doing so we can become what the Lindisfarne
Community says Aidan, who was the first Bishop of Lindisfarne, became in his
day: someone who is able to impart to others what we ourselves are learning
about God’s grace and which we carry as a torch to light the way for them.
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