Sermon: The Most Reverend John McDowell

May all the words that I say to you be in the name of the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (repeated in the Gaelic). Amen

If I could, first of all, thank the Dean for his very kind invitation to preach in this remarkable place and at this particular time so close to the feast of St. Patrick, the apostle of the Irish people, wherever they may be found throughout the world. I’m truly grateful and I’m especially grateful today to Canon Cope for the warmth of her hospitality when I arrived early this morning, for the lovely salmon bagel.

It’s probably a little unusual to be able to say that we know for certain the first extant words in the records of Irish history, written sometime in the early fifth century, but we do indeed know them. And they are these: “Ego Patricius, peccator rusticissimus et minimum omnium fideles.” “I am Patrick, a sinner, the most unlearned of men and the least of the faithful.” And those few words tell us not only a good deal about St. Patrick’s view of himself, but also about what we would nowadays call his spirituality, how he related to God. Patrick is a bit of a paradox in the ancient world. With many of the ancients we know when they were born, we know when they died, and we know a few details of their lives.

With Patrick we have to guess where he was born and we have to surmise when he lived and died. But in the two very brief and authentic documents that he has left to us, that have come down to us from his hand, we have the deepest insight into his psychology, into his inner life in a way that is only paralleled in the ancient world by Augustine, who was a contemporary of St. Patrick. And I think I should probably begin by saying that Patrick’s understanding of God and of humankind belongs very firmly to the tradition of early Latin Christianity and not to what is sometimes called Celtic Spirituality. And what he believes also contrasts very sharply with our own conceptions of God and of humankind. For Patrick and for the Christians of Ireland in those first few centuries of the common era, the dominant conception of God was of a mighty king who had been offended by our sins. In our day, for us, he is more like a father whose heart has been broken by our sins. And of course, both conceptions have much truth in them, and it is one of the glories of the Church that she tries to hold together things that can be difficult to cut square or to resolve into a scheme. We do our best in the Church to hold together the riches of the treasury, which has accumulated through study and prayer and reflection from every age.

But if I had to summarize the picture of Jesus, which Patrick and the early Church in Ireland and elsewhere had in mind, and theirs was a very Jesus centered piety, it would be something like this: For Patrick and for those early Irish Christians, there is in Jesus no guileless simplicity of nature. He is perfectly sure and self-sure, knowing his own mind and carrying it through with an unparalleled energy. When he stood before the civil authorities near the end of his life, he knew he was hurrying on events on a world scale. He had a proud royal sense of himself, and yet he sat happily amongst children. He loved the religion of his people, and he had an intense reverence for Israel’s past, but it was too small for him. And although it broke his heart to do so, he tore it apart. He was an austere man and he could be a severe critic, especially to those who misrepresented the character of his Father. And for that reason, he ripped through the pedantry of the scribes, the scholars of their day. And developed himself a simple pictorial way of speaking that brought his Father close to the simplest minds. And he spent many nights alone on the cold mountain to search out his Father’s heart. And he spoke with such power because he loved silence. And although he had a sacramental idea of all human relations, he avoided for himself any tie of property or family. Yet he was gentle in the last degree with those who were poor or shunned or sick. And there is not a single instance in the gospels of Jesus telling the mentally disturbed or the physically ill to reconcile themselves to their sufferings. He healed them.

And all of this is the more remarkable because he had such a short life in which to wrestle with the turbulence of his vast soul. Patrick, who was a disciple of this Jesus, was not the author of some kind of fluffy version of Christianity. And if you read the Confessions, you’ll find that many of the quotations and allusions to scripture are on the rather stern side of the ledger. And our reading this morning from Philippians about those “who turn their back on the cross, that their end is destruction, that their God is their belly, that their glory is in their shame, and that their minds are set on earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven.” Those words would’ve come very naturally to the lips of St. Patrick

In every age of the world, by and large, we fear being poor. Patrick, like Jesus, seems to have dreaded that any person should be rich. And upon whose souls, materialism and the practical cares of life have closed down like a coffin lid. “Tell that fox, Herod, from me that on the third day I will finish my work. Herod Antipas wanted to kill Jesus and Jesus escaped that in order to voluntarily offer up his own life according to the will of his Father. And in a parallel that Patrick is very well aware of, he, Patrick, had been brought on the first occasion against his will to Ireland but had returned on the second location as a servant of God to offer his life voluntarily as a willing sacrifice. And that is the only form of sacrifice that God wants or that God can accept, a sacrifice like his Son’s, born out of love and therefore full of redemptive power. And so it is for us today, the sacrifices of heart and life that we bring this morning to this Eucharist, whether they are big or whether they are small, doesn’t matter. God will only weigh the love with which they have been carried.

And Patrick’s asceticism and his austerity weren’t an eccentric oddity in the Irish church, the first centuries. Here are a few words of a hymn written by St. Colmcille, St. Columba. “Alone with none but you. Oh God, I journey on my way. What need I fear If you are here near, O king of night and day. More safe am I within thy hand than if a host did round me stand.” And compare that to the words of our Psalm. “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?” And here are a few typical lines of a poem written by an Irish monk in the sixth century. They’re translated from the Irish and the translation’s a little bit clumsy. “Cells that freeze the thin peel monks upon their knees, bodies worn with rights austere, the falling tear. Heaven’s king loves these.” Those old Irish Christians did indeed love the natural world, but they did not derive their spirituality, their relationship to God from it. It was the other way round. Nature was transformed by the attitude which they brought to it.

And for the most part, we take our idea of Celtic spirituality, not from early Irish Christianity, but from the grandson of an Irish Anglican Parson, who was, by turns, a theosophist and a pagan, William Butler Yeats. And for Yeats, human life had a falling grace of weariness, which drew the whole world closer to a dream than to reality. And that was never the way that Patrick and those monks in their beehive cells saw the world. Yeats probably remains in Irish terms, our greatest poet. And because everything he wrote is so well made and is the rhythmic creation of beauty, it’s easy to assume that his poetry is natural, that he wrote his verse the way a bird sings. But again, just the opposite is true. He’s also our most intellectual of poets. And anything that passed through that unique mind and that remarkable temperament was bound to take on a strange shape as it emerged into the inevitable twilight. Anyway, we better move away from our best known poet, back to our best known saint and to his discipleship of Jesus. Because for all his humility, his rusticissimus, his unlearnedness, Patrick was in no doubt about the important part he had to play in God’s plan for the salvation of the world. He was convinced that he was the apostle who had been sent to the ends of the world at the end of the age.

And in that sense, he shared in the apocalyptic vision, which seems to be common to Jesus and to Paul. Ireland was the most extreme region of Europe beyond even the reach of the Roman Empire. And in his Confession, Patrick describes his vocation as bringing the gospel to this remote place. And he firmly believed that in doing so, he was completing God’s work on earth. So there is an urgency about him, which there is about anyone who has that sort of messianic consciousness, as I think you will have experienced in another sense in the United States of America. Perhaps the one thing, and it’s very clear in that reading to the Philippians, perhaps the one thing that distinguishes the church of the New Testament, or the Church of St. Patrick, from the Church of our day and of almost every other day, is that sense of the nearness of the end time and the return of the Lord. They expected it to happen. They wanted it to happen. And they prayed for it to happen. And for all sorts of reasons, good and not so good, we find it impossible to share those expectations. We are rather tied into the world as it exists in our day.

And indeed, it is largely for that reason that the church introduced and developed the season of Lent, as a time to take time to examine our desires, to examine what it is we want most, and to see if our desires line up in any way with God’s desires. Because the Christian life is a great drama of desire, a great unfolding or even a great battle of whose will shall be done. And you know, we don’t need to expect that the end of the eon will come the Friday after next to know whether our God is our belly or whether our citizenship, our belonging, is in heaven. However, a bit of self examination might help. And that will require a little self suspicion and a little humility, and the spirit of the living God and much courage to examine ourselves in Lent. It’ll be rather like those brave people who cross rivers and seas and mountains all over the world to live in a new country.

They may not know the language or the customs very well, but there is something very deep inside them that tells them that they were made for freedom. And so they risk much to go on their pilgrimage of freedom. And Patrick, of course, went a stage further. He didn’t come to Ireland on the second occasion to be free. He was already a freeborn citizen of the Roman Empire, and more importantly, a servant of Jesus Christ who service his perfect freedom. Instead, he came to proclaim the gospel so that the Irish people could be free. So maybe we too need a bit more of the spirit of Patrick and of the refugee and of the sojourner, to travel a bit lighter and perhaps even a bit slower and be prepared to learn a new language. And perhaps that language will condition our thoughts to see through that mist of tears, which is the true gift of the Celtic twilight. And to catch a glimpse of the Son of Man, the foregone conclusion of all history, drawing himself towards us, even as he comes to meet us and is placed in our hands at this Eucharist. As we say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Amen.