Homily - All Saints' Day Year B 2009

Feast of All Saints Year B Eucharist – 1.xi.2009 (Wisdom 3.1-9; Revelation 21.1-6a; John 11.32-44)

Last week I had a few days away staying at Rydal Hall in the Lake District. Rydal Hall is the Retreat Centre for the Diocese of Carlisle, so I‟m a bit wary of booking up there for a holiday. You don‟t want to find that everything is focused on a house full of people who are doing the Ignatian Exercises in a 30 day retreat when all you want is a non-religious chat and the evening in the bar. But it was OK. Most of the people in residence were there for a meeting of the Manchester Music Lovers, a group which seems to meet for its shared enjoyment of Wagnerian Opera. This year it was Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, strains of which occasionally escaped from the Drawing Room in which they were for the most part confined - good for the rest of us, except Rowan, whose room was directly above the Drawing Room.

But there were some other people not involved in the Wagner experience - and we spent most of our time over meals chatting to them: a mathematician working in the steel industry, the Queen‟s Head Gardener at Sandringham and his family, people up from Yorkshire, and one lady from Sunderland. She was more definite as to where she was from. I‟m from Monkwearmouth, she announced. And she told us all about it. The people who have put together the joint bid by Monkwearmouth and Jarrow for United Nations World Heritage status might do well to recruit her to their cause. She didn‟t go to any church, she said. But that didn‟t stop her being proud of St. Peter’s Church, Monkwearmouth. And that‟s a place I want us to think about today. It‟s one of the oldest churches in the 1

country, the oldest in our diocese I suppose, though it‟s easily missed. St. Peter‟s stands on the north bank of the Wear, not far from the river‟s mouth where it enters the sea in Sunderland. Only part of the west wall and the lower section of the tower date back to its foundation date of 674, though the entire tower dates from before the Norman Conquest. But the building has been the victim of Viking raids and periodic invasions by the Scots. By the nineteenth century it was almost buried in mounds of gravel, where ships visiting the Port of Sunderland discharged their ballast before they took on their loads of coal.

Most of the present building dates from Victorian times, I think. And its setting even since those days may not readily be thought of as the most auspicious. The shipyards amongst which it lay were in decline through most of the twentieth century - with none left at the century‟s end. Housing was poor, got demolished, and by the 1980s consisted mostly of undistinguished tower blocks, whose residents were unlikely to cross the four lanes of fast-moving traffic which left the church isolated between the river and the inner ring-road within its own wasteland. And in 1984, an arsonist made a pretty effective job of burning the church down. But now it‟s a church, risen from the ashes, with a newly re-kindled life and that World Heritage bid. And its surrounding area has experienced a resurrection, the better appreciated on a beautiful sunny day with blue sky, boats on the river, and the gleaming shiny steel and glass of the new St. Peter‟s Campus of Sunderland University set just below.

What had been hidden, what had fallen into disuse over centuries of time, what had been almost covered over in rubbish from the port and had been cut off so severely from the community in which it stood is still there, re2

built and re-newed, a witness to the Christian faith as it has been proclaimed since the earliest days of Christian Northumbria.

I tell you all this at such great length, because that church of St. Peter, Monkwearmouth, is just an example of what we may easily miss, something readily neglected, ignored, hidden. How many people see it today and realise its significance? How much do we miss the significance of buildings we take for granted – perhaps see every day? How much do we simply take for granted the people around us, family and friends? – let alone people from the past? Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints. All Saints‟ Day has that name because it‟s a reminder to us of the great host of saints who are without number, whose names on the whole are forgotten – but whose significance is infinite. The saints who are the witnesses to our faith, who form the foundation of the church – without whose witness, courage, and perseverance we simply wouldn‟t be here.

Most people can name a few saints: Peter, Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, our own St. Cuthbert. Some people would name as saints people from our own time, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. But on the whole we can‟t get very far in that exercise, and we simply don‟t expect to find much in the way of sanctity around us. But it‟s there, if only we look. Travel into Sunderland along the north bank of the Wear, and the road is dominated now by retail developments, new offices, and then the massive Stadium of Light, centre of the modern worshipping community made up of the disciples of Sunderland Football Club. It‟s not surprising if visitors passing that way on their way to the 3

National Glass Centre should miss the significance of St. Peter‟s. But the church‟s presence bears witness to so much that is at the root of our region‟s and indeed English history. The first man to write about an “English Church and People”, the Venerable Bede, began his education as a seven-year old boy in the monastery at Wearmouth. And this was in the early years after its foundation by a saint now hardly remembered.

Benedict Biscop, the first abbot, was a man who perhaps above all opened Northumbria and the other Saxon Kingdoms to a wider European culture. He did it by seeing where his faith led him. His five journeys to Rome found him become a monk and a priest – they were the means by which his faith was to grow. What he brought back was to enrich the life of his community still more. From his second journey to Rome, he was entrusted with escorting Theodore of Tarsus to England to begin his ministry as Archbishop of Canterbury. He could have stayed at the centre of ecclesiastical power as abbot of the monastery near Theodore‟s palace, but he went back to his journeying and then returned home to found the monastery at Wearmouth. And with him he brought learning and a yearning for holiness. He built up a library which would make possible the researches of Bede. He brought skills which would make the monasteries of Northumbria a great centre of scholarship. He taught his monks to sing, and set the life of the worshipping community on a new invigorated course – „he who sings, prays twice,‟ as someone else has said. And he started building churches in stone – to the glory of God, with windows finished off in glass, even though he had to send to France to find people who could make it. Benedict Biscop would no doubt approve of the National Glass Centre being next door to the church he built – the first ever to have glazed windows.

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And then he has the vision and discernment to identify the people who could carry on his task: Ceolfrith, Sigfrid and Eosterwine, each of them local men who were to be hailed as saints; men who for most of us have names we‟ve never heard before. But these are people who would build up the life of their community – who would point people to God – in ways that are fundamental. Ceolfrith was entrusted by Biscop with the task of building the monastery at Jarrow – and he did it, working there for seven years, and then a further 28 years as abbot of both Wearmouth and Jarrow – in all a priest for 47 years. He‟s barely known now. But without his work it‟s hard to envisage how our history would or could have developed. These are just a few – largely forgotten – names of people who have set our course for us, even though we don‟t know it. Working from a building which has been reduced to ruins, pillaged, buried in rubbish, and rebuilt only to be ignored by most passers-by. And all this says something about the vocation of a saint. It‟s simply about living a life of holiness without any thought of its worldly benefit. It‟s not about being remembered by other people, but about being close to God – and helping other people come close to God. For most saints, it‟s a hidden life. Biscop and Ceolfrith have found their way into obscurity as far as most people are concerned, though Biscop has now been adopted as Patron Saint of the city of Sunderland (sadly, not a lot of people know that) – and most of the saints have names which were never even known in the first place.

Yet for all of them we give thanks today. St. John in that last Book of the 5

Bible called the Revelation tells of a new heaven and a new earth – the “holy city, the new Jerusalem.” It‟s the place where God will dwell with his people – a place of heavenly calling. But it‟s known only in relation to those earthly cities, and towns, and villages, in which we live out our lives now. “See the home of God is among mortals,” a loud voice tells Saint John. God is to be found in the here and now – not where other people are at work, where other people are better equipped to do a better job than us – but in the midst of us. God in Christ speaks not to other people but to us. It‟s us that he is calling to.

Do we hear him? John in these last chapters of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is like a man in shock. It‟s a loud voice which he can‟t avoid hearing that addresses him. It orders him, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true...” It‟s saying, “Hey you, are you listening?” It‟s a voice which can be heard even by a dead man, when Jesus calls into the grave – again with a loud voice – “Lazarus, come out!” There‟s no avoiding the God who in Christ speaks to his people.

We can try hiding ourselves away. We can try to pretend that we are not important enough for God to notice us. But he does. He speaks to John on Patmos, to the lifeless body of the unremarkable Lazarus in the otherwise un-noticed little village of Bethany. He speaks through seventh-century Christians like Biscop and Ceolfrith living on the frontier of civilisation in the place we now call Sunderland. And he speaks to us, calling us to holiness and witness, drawing us to be one with all his saints.

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