St Wilfrid '1300' Anniverary

Sermon preached at Whitkirk Parish Church

St Wilfrid-tide - 11th October 2009

When we planned our rotas back in June I thought that this year was the 1300^th anniversary of the death of a 
local saint, St Wilfrid of Ripon, and tomorrow is his feast day.  This is because the Church’s calendar gives 
his death as 709 and Ripon Cathedral is celebrating Wilfrid all this year.  Even the Oxford Dictionary of Saints 
is confused!  I have done a bit of mugging up on Wilfrid, because I didn’t know much about him and thought I 
ought to, and have learnt that we have got out dates wrong.  According to more recent scholarship the 
earliest records show that Wilfrid died on 24^th April on a Thursday.  The Thursday is significant because
24^th April was a Thursday in 710 not 709.  So this festival year is actually the warm up act and I am working 
on getting the calendar changed.  That said he is one of our local saints so it is worth commemorating him as 
we approach his 1300^th anniverary.  A brief biography to set him in context.

Wilfrid came from  an aristocratic family and was born in the kingdom of Northumbria in the 7^th century.  He entered the monastery on Lindisfarne, though there is no evidence that he became a monk.  He was educated there.  He went to Rome, on his way spending a couple of years at the monastery in Canterbury and was instructed in the Roman way of singing the psalms – where one singer would sing on behalf of everyone else from memory, the rest of the community joining in with a response.  He made a further stop on his way to Rome at Lyon, a great centre of learning.  He arrived at Rome and seems to have been blown away by the architecture.  We can’t really take in what hit him but he came from a land of mud huts and found himself in a city of stone buildings and basilicas.  He would never be the same again.  He was instructed in various things, including the way of calculating Easter and rubbed shoulders with some of the leading thinkers of the age.  It was a real university awakening.

Rome at that time was in political crisis (some things don’t change) and there were theological controversies as well (which also doesn’t change!).  I spoke about this a few weeks ago, when I mentioned the snappily titled monothelitism crisis over how we see Jesus.  Did he have his own will separate from God the Father or was he of one will.  It’s about how human was Jesus or was he just playing at it.  It touches the heart of our faith, but like all religious controversies the fine details get a bit lost in the thick of the arguing.  One of the leading champions of what became regarded as the orthodox position, Theodore of Tarsus, later became Archbishop of Canterbury and stamped his authority on the English Church along with Wilfrid – as in he stamped his authority on the English Church and also on Wilfrid!

Wilfrid returned to Northumbria and became Abbot of the monastery at Ripon.  He seems to have put his new found enthusiasm for Roman architecture into practice and brought over stone masons to construct the first stone church in Britain.  This was built on the site of the present cathedral in Ripon and the crypt dates back to that time.  It is an extremely interesting structure, though because of vandalism by a Dean in the 1970s pouring concrete over the floor it tends to resemble a grubby wine cellar.

The purpose of this crypt seems to have been various.  One was to store relics directly underneath the main altar, imitating Roman basilicas of the time.  Another was to be a replica of Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem.  The twisting passages that take you in were an allegory of the Christian journey eventually arriving at a glimpse of holiness in the inner chamber and then we leave to live in renewed light and hope.

Wilfrid’s big moment came in 664 at the Synod of Whitby, so called because it took place at Whitby Abbey.  This was to sort out different ways of calculating Easter.  The impetus for this came partly from the Royal household which had the king following the Celtic practice of dating Easter as the 14^th day of the lunar month regardless of what day it fell on – like at Christmas – while his wife followed the Roman and more universal practice of celebrating Easter on the nearest Sunday immediately following, the first Easter having been on a Sunday.  The latter practice was championed by Wilfrid and he won the day.  Ideas that religious disputes show us at our worst are not new and those who lost were deprived of posts, or slunk off into the extreme reaches of Cornwall, Wales and somewhere near Liverpool.  Adherence to various local saints was scrubbed and there was a general purging of the Church.

Wilfrid’s arguments on this were to do with getting it right.  He appealed to the practice of the Apostles, whom he claimed had made Sunday a perpetual celebration of Easter so each Sunday was a mini Easter, so keeping Easter on a Sunday was important.  He also appealed to the place of the local church in the wider church and forcefully pointed out that this was the practice of the wider church so Britain should fall in line.  The Council of Nicea, from which we take the creed we will say shortly, had also confirmed this as the way for working out Easter.

What Wilfrid did was bring the Northumbrian Church, and Leeds was then in Northumbria, into harmony with the world wide church.  He challenged the individualism that can so creep in and keeping Wilfrid’s anniversary today reminds us that there is a balance between making decisions locally and belonging to a world wide body.

This is a balance that confronts us in every age and the Anglican Communion is having to struggle with this at the moment.  At what point does something become so central that it should only be adopted with the agreement of everyone else?  The place of women in the church is such an issue that there is disagreement over and there is some logic in seeking agreement.  But there is also the place of the prophetic and challenging established practices that have missed something extremely important and Wilfrid connects us with that too.  So he’s not an easy ally to recruit.

Wilfrid was a missionary bishop.  He established churches and monasteries.  He converted the Isle of Wight and Sussex.  He offers a robust Christianity, that doesn’t suffer fools lightly and confronts people with truth and taking faith seriously.  He speaks his mind and could be bolshie.  Churches need Wilfrids who have a grasp of the bigger picture, are intelligent and will get us back on track.  We need people who will not let us off the hook easily and who will challenge muddled thinking and the easy excuses that we so often make.  He had a bad press for his robust style, but those on the other side were no gentler in their style.  It was a robust age, one where battles were still taking place and England didn’t exist, but was a series of battling kingdoms.  He fell victim of power struggles and spent various periods in and out of office.  He was a force to be reckoned with and was sidelined by the politicking of his day because he could be inconvenient.  But he kept his nerve and stood his ground.

So we commemorate Wilfrid, close to his 1300^th anniversary.  He links us to the missionary bishops who established Christianity in its earliest centuries in this land and whose heritage of faith we have inherited.  Wilfrid stands for robust thinking and that broader perspective which we so often need reminding of.  Churches are not islands on their own, but we belong to a wider body and being in touch with that wider body keeps us on track, sustains us when we are wavering and provides a balance when we have new ideas.  Wilfrid does not reflect Jesus meek and mild.  He gives us Jesus with attitude, overturning the money changers’ tables.  He gives us a confrontational challenge with truth.  This is often not an easy place to be, it is uncomfortable to face, but actually what we all need and, if we are honest, are grateful for in the long run!

© Ian Black 2009