Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

One central Christian teaching is that through the mysteries of Christ’s life we call the Ascension and Pentecost, what was known in Christ’s particular ministry on earth, is now unconstrained by the boundaries of space. That is to say, although Jesus’s own ministry was mainly lived on and around the Sea of Galilee, although his crucifixion and resurrection took place just outside Jerusalem, the gift of his Holy Spirit, known through prayer, now assures the believer of their closeness to Jesus in the age of the Church. Yes, Jesus lived in a particular place, at a particular time; and yes, his risen life is now to be known and encountered across the world, as vividly in Jesmond as in Jerusalem, and as profoundly in an asylum detention centre as in St Peter’s Basilica.

So what about holy places? Places of pilgrimage and devotion? Why do they matter, and what might they offer us? During sermons at Evensong this month, I am going to explore four British holy sites, and ask what they might tell us about our faith, its devotion and its practice. We are going to start on the Hebridean island of Iona, off the West Coast of Scotland, before heading south to Walsingham in Norfolk, across to Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire, and finally to the great Cathedral in Canterbury. Each of these holy places will have something to teach us about discipleship.

But before we set off, let’s just focus for a moment again on why within the broad sweep of Christian teaching which tells us we can pray as truly and as trustingly in a dug-out trench as in a church, holy places might still have value? Well, ours is an incarnational religion: that is to say, God in Christ took flesh. Real flesh. And his incarnation was a time-involving event; not hovering above it all, beckoning a few religious professionals to ‘come up higher’, but rather an embrace of creation itself, a fundamental and final expression of the fact that God saw all he had made, and found it to be good, as the first creation myth in the Book Genesis teaches us. Despite our rejection of God and God’s promises, the message of God becoming human continues to pulsate through time, discoverable again in every age, as an eternal truth offering salvation, shaping lives and communties. Put simply, as many have said before, ‘matter matters.’ The ground we are made from and to which we shall return, the water which hydrates us, and the sun which warms us, are not incidental to who we are as human beings. We discover God, and hear Christ’s call, where we are as embodied people. And some places, some sites, appear to act as particularly strong signposts in the journey of Christian discipleship. These signposts can be especially discernible through our senses and through our imagination, key instruments in the toolkit which we have been given through which we may come to love God and one another more fully.

The Christian story of Iona, a small island in the middle of the Sound of Mull, begins in the middle of the first millennium. We will turn to that in a moment. But much of Iona’s contemporary popularity goes back to an extraordinary Church of Scotland minister, George Macleod, who founded a popular Christian movement on the island in the aftermath of the First World War, having worked amidst the grinding poverty of inner city Glasgow. The Iona Community today has rebuilt parts of the earlier monastery, and offers a daily pattern of distinctive worship alongside a ministry focused on issues of social justice. Macleod chose Iona for this work because he called it a ‘thin’ place between heaven and earth, where it was possible to encounter the Kingdom of God slightly more tangibly. That’s a phrase which has become very popular to describe a multitude of settings, but it was Macleod who popularised it. Holy places as ‘thin’ places, where the veil between heaven and earth, just seems to twitch a bit more regularly.

But Iona’s own history reminds us not to over-romanticise this concept too quickly. When the Irish monk Columba first landed on Iona, these islands and the land masses around them, were still pagan. This was not Christian territory, and the Atlantic Ocean itself was seen as a place of great danger. Columba’s monks travelled up from the west coast of Ireland, across perilous seas to finally settle on an outcrop which was as prone to violent storms and seas then as it is today. These monks, living in small communities or as hermits, were strongly influenced by the tradition of desert monasticism emerging out of the Syrian and Egyptian deserts. These northern reaches became known as the ‘Green Desert.’ There was nothing comfortable or particularly consoling about this wildly beautiful environment, rather it was a place at the edge of the world, where heroic feats might become possible in the spiritual life. The veil here may always have been thin, but the intensity of its energy was as untameable as the weather.

Columba established a monastery here in 563AD which would offer a profound contribution to the Christian culture and identity of Britain, initially through the evangelisation of the Northen Pictish kingdoms. Columba himself was well connected, aristocratic, a diplomat, a writer and what we might call today a bit of an operator. Increasingly Iona’s geography was less remote, amidst the trading routes of the 7th and 8th centuries. Although St Augustine brought the Gospel to the south coast of England in 597, just a few decades later it was two monks from Iona who sailed down to the Essex coast to found a church dedicated to St Chad at Bradwell-on-Sea. Most famously, from Iona was founded the great monastery at Lindisfarne, by the monk St Aidan in 634, sharing the distinctive liturgical practices and theological emphases of these Celtic monks. The life and personalities of this community – supreme among them St Cuthbert - would itself begin to shape the British Church, before the Synod of Whitby in 663 aligned this Church more fully to Canterbury and through it, to Rome. There was an evangelistic energy about Iona, a bold red-faced commitment to the Faith. Around the end of the 8th century, Iona was frequently subject to bloodthirsty raids from Viking longboats, who terrorised these communities from 795 onwards, martyring 68 monks on one day on a small beach in 806. We are more used to reading these kinds of stories in the Acts of the Apostles, or in other accounts of Eastern Mediterranean early Christianity. And yet, here we are off the rugged west coast of Scotland in the middle of the freezing ocean. St Columba’s biographer and successor, Adomnan, recounts how Columba would sleep on a bare rock exposed to the elements, and would stand in the sea reciting the psalter whilst exposed to the harsh winds and rain of the early mornings. It’s astonishing to think that these same monks were responsible for the creation of the great illuminated Book of Kells, one of the artistic treasures of the second half of the first millennium; art, geometry, and imagination fusing in patterns of astounding complexity and beauty. The energy of this green desert could clearly be harvested in hugely diverse and creative ways.

If you go to Iona today, for its natural beauty, its history, or its community of faith, it is perfectly possible to imagine some of the spiritual acrobatics pursued by these athletic monks, trained in the ascetic traditions of the Syrian desert. Whilst the island is startlingly beautiful – it’s been called ‘Scotland in miniature’ – the speed at which a storm can whip up, and the sheer power behind the waves crashing into the coves, reveal a wild and untameable energy which is typical of that coast. From one side, you can see Mull – itself an island – and from the other (the side at which Columba approached), nothing. Just the Atlantic, vanishing into its horizon. This is a place which won’t quite be controlled. Perhaps that is its secret. Perhaps that is what it teaches us about holiness. A holiness which has revealed itself in the shape of monastic prayer, in the appreciation and creation of great beauty, in the costly vulnerability of blood seeping into the sand on a beach, but a holiness which will not be controlled, strategized or managed. In the end, we have to give ourselves to God’s holiness if we want to participate in it, or even begin to know its beauty. We can do that anywhere. But sometimes we have to step aside from the ordinary to expand our own horizons, to know ourselves challenged and humbled by the waves.