Sermon: Welcome Back to Cuthbert

I once preached on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and visited that most characterful of  all American cities, New Orleans, enjoying Breakfast at Brennans, the French Quarter and street jazz.  I stayed with an elderly Christian couple in their lovely home on the sea front between Gulfport and Biloxi.  It is, or was, a beautiful coastline.  They showed me, not without some pride, a line high up on their living room wall that marked the height the waters had reached when Hurricane Andrew struck that coast in 1992.  They had lost everything in their old age, had had to rebuild their home and their lives from scratch.  If you live on the Gulf Coast, you run the risk, they said.  And now, after Katrina, you would think an atomic bomb had exploded somewhere over the Mississippi.  Our thoughts and prayers are with our friends in the southern states at this desperate time. 

The awesome power of the storm is embedded deep in the imagery of the Bible.  The psalm speaks of Yhwh the God of Israel thundering over the mighty waters, his voice shaking the wilderness and stripping the forest bare.  There is a terrible glory in this that puts us in our place, brings us to our knees.  In the stories Bede tells of Cuthbert are at least three where storm and sea are at God’s command.  For instance, the boy Cuthbert sees monks in their rafts being blown out to sea at the mouth of the Tyne.  As peasants shout and jeer from the shore, gloating over this judgment on the monks’ suppression of pagan practices, Cuthbert tells them it would be better to pray for their safety.  As he intercedes, the wind changes direction and brings the rafts safely to land.  It would take a Cuthbert to divert hurricane Katrina.  But Cuthbert and his like scarcely walk this earth these days.

And yet….  for us in Durham, and for our friends on Lindisfarne where he was first prior and then bishop, Cuthbert is not only a figure from the past who stilled storms, taught the faith and fed the poor.  He is our contemporary.  Here, as this cathedral was being built 901 years ago, his cherished remains were placed in the feretory behind the high altar to be honoured for all time by worshippers and pilgrims and people in need of a saint’s prayers and touch.  Today is the feast of the Translation of the Relics of St Cuthbert.  He had already been brought here over a century before by that loyal band of fellow-travellers known as the Community of St Cuthbert, his Haliwervolk, who, after their exile from Lindisfarne by Viking raids, carried his coffin, together with the Lindisfarne Gospels, around the north of England for so many decades.  It is one of the most moving stories of English Christianity.  And while Cuthbert would hardly have welcomed being interred at the heart of a building that speaks so forcefully of human conquest and power, nevertheless he has made this his home now; indeed, the stories tell of how he specifically chose this place and gave this rocky peninsula its marvellous destiny.

I often say that Durham Cathedral is not a church in which a shrine has been installed, but a shrine around which a church was built.  And to say this is not to attribute magical qualities to a saint’s relics but to recognise both his central part in the history of this place, and the drawing-power of the humility, the holiness, the zeal for the gospel, the care for ordinary people and the sheer devotion to God this extraordinary man stood for.  Helen Julian in her thoughtful little book The Lindisfarne Icon: St Cuthbert and the 21st Century Christian tells how she was in this Cathedral one day and felt an irresistible pull towards the shrine.  ‘I sped up the central aisle, through the crowds of visitors, left at the choir screen, down the side aisle, and up the short flight of steps to the shrine.  I sank to my knees, half crying, half laughing.  “I’m here, I’m here”’.  She calls it a kind of falling in love.  If you see people running towards the east end, don’t try and stop them. 

There are storms and storms.  And in the history of this place, one period stands out as tempestuous almost to the point of swamping the great ship Durham Cathedral.  In 1537 the King’s Commissioners stripped Cuthbert’s shrine of its jewels and precious metals, and attempted to smash the relics to dust, an action thwarted by the awkward fact that the skeleton was still intact and defied destruction.  How typical of Cuthbert to make life difficult for authority.  So he was reburied and left alone.  Two years later, on the last day of 1539, the monks of the Benedictine Cathedral Priory sung their last office of compline, and next day Prior Whitehead surrendered the monastery.  The Prior and his senior monks had co-operated: so they were allowed to stay on as the first Dean and Chapter.  But the tide of reform was unstoppable.  In May 1541Henry VIII enacted new statutes for the re-founded secular cathedral.  These suppressed the name of Cuthbert from the Cathedral’s title: shrines and pilgrimages and a saint’s bones had no part in the new order.  From then on, we were known as ‘Christ and Blessèd Mary the Virgin’. 

Now we have put Cuthbert back into the title of the Cathedral which is now dedicated to ‘Christ, Blessèd Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert’.  We did this by altering the Cathedral’s constitution and statutes, a legal process provided for under the legislation governing cathedrals.  The canon lawyers agreed with our view that a church dedication is given in perpetuity: not even a Tudor monarch has the power to change what has been effected forever at the consecration of a church.  I confess I take some satisfaction in subverting, even in a small way, the arrogant divine right of kings:  only one King has divine right, the one Cuthbert followed and whom we worship here.  I should like to think that what we have done is to recognise who and what we are as the church of God in England: not the creature of a human king, still less his divorce but a living part of the church catholic, that worldwide society of God’s people for whom Cuthbert and Blessèd Mary the Virgin  are among the saints in whom we honour Christ’s living image and in whose company we are inspired to travel on towards the celestial city.

What we do today can be understood at many levels. We honour the north-east’s best loved saint whose shrine this Cathedral is. We celebrate what Durham Cathedral means to this region called Cuthbertsland (how good it would be to see signs on the A1M as you cross over the Tees welcoming you to the land of St Cuthbert).  We are re-connected in a symbolic way with our Saxon and Benedictine past.  But at its heart, we are reminded of what matters most for Christian believing, whether in the middle ages or our own era.  To be true to Cuthbert means that we should seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, as Jesus urges us in our gospel reading, the kingdom for which he says we must strive, and which it is our Father’s good pleasure to give us.