Sermon: Growing the Kingdom with Oswald

In 1899 there was an excavation of Cuthbert's tomb in the feretory of this cathedral.  Afterwards all was reinterred in a new coffin, the lid of which carried two symbols, St Cuthbert's cross and a crown.  That crown was incised in to mark the presence in the coffin of the head of the man who Bede called a ‘most holy and victorious king', Oswald of Northumbria.

Oswald met his death on this day in the year 642 on the battlefield near Oswestry.  When the dead king's body was presented to Penda, king of the Mercians, he had it dismembered. The head and the hands were set up on sticks, like a macabre scarecrow, to intimidate all who saw it.  It was a year before those relics were taken down by Oswald's brother who then took the head to Lindisfarne and the limbs to Bamburgh. That head has been in Cuthbert's coffin since the time that the saint's body left the Holy Island which is why both Cuthbert and Oswald are commemorated in the banners in the feretory and why images of Cuthbert often show him carrying a royal head.  .

The Venerable Bede is unrestrained in his praise and celebration of Oswald and his achievement.  And his account is cheered to the echo Sabine Baring Gould's entry in his Lives of the Saints.  The Victorian offers us a picture of a man whose integration of faith and life, of kingly duty and Christian obedience, is worthy of the most exalted praise.  ‘Where shall we find in all history', he asks,  ‘a hero more nearly approaching the ideal, more richly gifted, more worthy of eternal remembrance and it must be added, more completely forgotten?'

Forgetfulness of Oswald, while a feature of ecclesiastical life more broadly, is not a complaint that can legitimately laid at our door here in Durham. And as we remember him today I want to do so in this sermon in a way that might at first seem rather odd and anachronistic. For I am going to put Oswald's life alongside the key stratagems of our own diocesan development plan. Visitors will be excused for not having this at the top of their minds, and others may well be grateful of the reminder that this is our common project called ‘Growing The Kingdom' and that it is based on five ‘building blocks'.  They are ‘restoring the sacred centre', ‘focusing on mission', ‘learning discipleship', ‘acting collaboratively' and ‘developing leadership'.  What happens, then, when we put the life of Oswald, King of Northumbria, into dialogue, as it were, with these five building blocks?

There is, it must be admitted a certain amount of jargon in these diocesan phrases and they are not always accurately interpreted in the parishes. The phrase ‘restoring the sacred centre' for instance has been taken by at least one church as the suggestion that the inside of the parish church could do with a good clean up if not some redecoration.  But it is meant to refer to the prayerfulness of the Christian community.  Translating this to a question about an individual, we are thus inclined to ask whether Oswald was a man of prayer.  Bede says that he was, reporting that ‘very often continued in prayer from matins until daybreak; and because of this frequent habit of prayer and thanksgiving, he was always accustomed, whenever he sat, to place his hands on his knees with his palms turned upwards.' This is an interesting observation because it suggests that not only did Oswald pray but that he was an observably different person because of his praying. Of course it might be that the impact his praying had on his posture was something of an affectation. But his seems unlikely in a king and soldier. More likely is it that it had a genuine impact on his bearing and attitude.  And this is what we must be after as a diocese. Not only people who pray, but people whose approach to life and attitude to other people reflects this prayerfulness.  That Oswald was reputed to be humble, generous and kind is connected with his being a person of prayer.

The suggestion that he was a man of prayer might also be supported by the story of the Battle of Heavenfield, his first great victory. For it is reported that he took a personal and hands-on role in erecting a cross before the battle started and committed the cause to God.  And Bede tells us that it had become ‘commonly known' that in his final battle, as he was breathing his last, Oswald prayed for his soldiers in these words, ‘may God have mercy on their souls'. As an aside, I might mention that it seems at least questionable to call Oswald a martyr.  He did not die defending the faith but the boundaries of his territory.  But if Oswald was confusing the boundaries of his own kingdom with the boundaries of God's Kingdom - well he was, and still is, in good, if not entirely righteous, company.  This is a fault which often lies in the heart of those who, to take us back to the diocesan programme, ‘focus on mission'.

As a child, Oswald was exiled with his siblings in Western Scotland where, among Irish monks on Iona, he was baptised and educated.  I want to stay on the point about education for a moment, for one of our diocesan imperatives is to ‘learn discipleship'.  The tendency in the church today is to think that people learn discipleship by attending courses.  But very often far more is learnt by sharing the life of a Christian household, whether domestic or monastic, than by attending evening classes.  Christian learning is often done by osmosis, as it were, from example and by imitation. Within this pedagogy the events of everyday life set the curriculum.  I wonder whether the church of today, often dominated by late modern individualism and anxiety, runs the risk, even while it cranks up the rhetoric of education for discipleship of missing out on many of the most homely and effective methods. To put it another way, people become Christian disciples, and are opened up to the possibility of sanctity and indeed martyrdom, not by ‘education' but by something much more ad hoc and holistic and for which the word ‘formation' is perhaps the most adequate.

Oswald's formation was not only in the ways of Christ, however, Clare Stancliffe, for instance in an essay on Oswald in a collection based on a conference to commemorate the 1350^th anniversary of his death in 1992, is of no doubt that he would have learnt the ways of war while in exile, and that he probably fought with his hosts in battles on the Irish mainland.  So I wonder whether it is sensible to suggest that it was among the Irish warriors that he did his apprenticeship as a leader; that the tribal wars of the Irish mainland provided him with the Celtic equivalent of a Harvard MBA. Certainly, for all his piety, prayer was not the only string to his bow.  And this, as I understand it, is one of the points the diocesan programme is making.  It is saying that the church needs to invest far more in developing the leadership potential of its leaders, in particular its ordained ministers.  This is a point echoed in an article in yesterday's Guardian and while aimed at the Roman Catholic Church's lack of management and leadership savvy the same criticism can with some justice be applied to the Church of England.  The Guardian article refers to management writer Charles Handy who draws several of our own considerations together when he writes that ‘The leader's first job is to be missionary, to remind people what is special about them and their institutions; second it is to set up the infrastructure.' 

Oswald had learnt how to do both and to stunning effect. Baring Gould's epic prose paints a vivid picture for us.

‘every day saw the Christian religion spreading further and taking deeper root; every day joyous crowds hastened to feed on the bread of the Divine Word and to plunge into the waters of baptism; every day numerous churches, flanked by monasteries and schools, rose from the soil'. 

Eat your heart out, John Wesley - and for that matter Billy Graham.  And it certainly is a very different picture to that of church life in, for instance the deaneries of Easington, Gateshead or Stanhope today. This is life-changing, culture-changing mission.  Just the sort of thing that our diocesan development programme is designed to encourage and enable.

Leadership and mission go hand in hand but integral to Oswald's strategy was another of our diocesan priorities - ‘collaboration'. The way in which he worked with Aidan gives us a powerful series of lessons.

Lesson one: get help.  Oswald sent to Iona for support.

Lesson two:  if the help is no good, let it go.  The first missionary to be sent from Iona, Coman, made no headway and quickly returned to Iona.

Lesson three: learn the lessons as to why the first help was not effective. And, whatever else you do, don't blame the people you are trying to communicate with for not listening. The analysis was that Corman was too rigorous and unyielding.

Lesson four: send for help again and work closely with your new partner.  Oswald did this very literally by translating for him before he had mastered the local language.  But maybe there was more to his translating than this, maybe he was able to help Aidan adapt his methods to the capacities of the local people.

Lesson five: provide your colleague with the resources they need to develop capacity to achieve the vision.  Lindisfarne became a base where more missionaries were formed as good Christian disciples 

Lesson six: inspire your colleague and collaborator. Oswald famously did this one Easter when some beggars came to him as he was about to eat a good meal from a silver plate.  He not only gave them the food but also broke the plate up and gave them all pieces of silver.  Aidan was very impressed indeed and while Bede records a rather pious response (may this hand never decay) we might wonder whether this is the sort of inspiration that both helped to motivate Aidan and to encourage him in the humility and generosity which are integral to successful Christian mission.

Leadership and collaboration certainly seem to be reconciled in the partnership and friendship between Oswald and Aidan and that might well be the main thing to take into our thinking about mission and ministry today.  As Sabine Baring Gould put it:

‘The tender friendship and apostolic brotherhood which thus united the king and bishop of Northumbrians has, perhaps more than anything else, contributed to exalt and hallow their memory in the annals of Catholic England'.

The grace of God, as we know, works in mysterious ways, and the word of God comes though strange channels. If, however, we learn from the legends and memory of Oswald that mission and friendship are integrally connected then we will have learnt something of tremendous and transformative relevance, and something which like Oswald himself, is all too easily overlooked in the church of today. 

I have come to the conclusion, and hope that I am not alone in this, that putting the life of Oswald alongside our diocesan strategic priorities is an illuminating exercise.  We can find a great deal in the story of Oswald to encourage us to continue to develop the life of the church by ‘restoring the sacred centre', ‘focusing on mission', ‘learning discipleship', ‘developing leadership' and ‘acting collaboratively'. And this in turn suggests to me that there remains hope that the church in the North East might continue to live faithfully and purposefully, that we are, in the words of Baring Gould's most famous hymn (which I fancy might have been be inspired by Oswald) ‘treading where the saints have trod'.  

Stephen Cherry