Sermon: The sacred spot of Jarrow

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In about 1074, Walcher, the first Norman Bishop of Durham, appointed the monk Aldwin and two others to, I quote, ‘the sacred spot of Jarrow'. Aldwin's task was to restore the ancient monastery, which had been left devastated after the Norman Conquest. Aldwin had been inspired by Bede's Ecclesiastical History, and he was determined to revitalise the place, the ‘sacred spot', where Bede lived, studied and wrote. It seems to me that Aldwin was acting in the spirit of tonight's first reading from Ecclesiasticus 39:

Many will praise his understanding; it will never be blotted out. His memory will not disappear, and his name will live through all generations.

I have a personal interest in all this because the Bishop endowed the restored monastery with adjoining lands, including to the immediate south-east, the Township of Simonside, the place of my childhood and youth. I grew up only a mile away from the ‘sacred spot of Jarrow'.

And it is that phrase, ‘the sacred spot of Jarrow' that stands out for me. And that made me think about Jarrow as a sacred place.

Today, of course, the town of Jarrow is part of that large conurbation bounded by the southern bank of the Tyne and the North Sea that we call South Tyneside. And South Tyneside proudly declares itself to be ‘Catherine Cookson country'. And we all love ‘wor Kate', but how extraordinary that, despite the presence of  St Paul's Church and the monastic ruins, and the creation of Bede's World Visitor Centre, the popular tourist market should be sought to indentify the area in favour of the ‘father of English learning', the only Englishman to be honoured as a Doctor of the Church, the one English saint mentioned in Dante's The Divine Comedy, the one who made the ‘sacred spot of Jarrow' sacred.

Of course, until the advent of industrialistion, Jarrow was a place known only for its ecclesiastical significance. In the sixteenth century, St Paul's went through its conversion from monastery to Parish Church, serving the small resident population. But in the 19^th century, how things changed. The River Tyne and the North Sea and the expansion of ship-building and coal mining meant that the town saw massive expansion. It was famous for ship-building, especially the great Parsons yard opened in 1852, while much of the coal from the great Durham coal-field was moved by train to the massive works of Tyne Dock. My generation can remember the famous Tyne Dock Arches, five huge edifices erected in the 1880s perched between Tyne Dock and East Jarrow, carrying up to 7 million of coal in their heyday to the port for transportation and export.

The great depression of the 1930s saw massive unemployment and great poverty and led to the famous Jarrow March of 1936. Today, now that the collieries and ship-yards and industrial railways are all but gone, Jarrow strikes me as a place of economic disadvantage, and how in today's climate can that be overcome? Also, I sense that there is for many an alienation from the Churches. Sometimes when I shop in Morrison's in Jarrow Town Centre I wonder, despite a large Roman Catholic population and a strong tradition of ministry from both Anglican and Free Churches, how many people know and love God. In what sense is Jarrow ‘a sacred spot' - is that simply an historical allusion of a sacredness long since dispersed by the all-pervasive spread of religious apathy and secularism. How can we begin to re-evangelise places like Jarrow so that sacredness becomes manifest in active discipleship and holiness?

But there is more to the story of Jarrow. If you go there today, part of the town is a huge building site with the building of the second Tyne Tunnel or perhaps I should say the third as the pedestrian tunnel was the first, opened in 1951. Here Jarrow is a gateway, a point of transitus, where a natural barrier is overcome. Millions of cars and lorries pass through Jarrow.

And now I have a more personal link with the Town. For the Dementia Clinic serving South Tyneside is in Palmers Garth Community Hospital, and so it is there that I take my elderly mother to the Alzheimer's Clinic. And that is all about memory.

What has all this to do with tonight's celebration of Bede and our own Christian discipleship?

Well, simply this. I began by referring to ‘the sacred spot of Jarrow'. Bede made Jarrow sacred by his learning, by his consecration to Christ. Like the author of the concluding words of the Gospel reading, Bede wrote his Biblical commentaries, his lives of the saints, his Ecclesiastical History in order

that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name

Bede had a passion to teach the faith, because he too could see that the very faith that had taken such strong root in our region through the great missionary enterprise from Iona and Lindisfarne was fragile, and that we need to be converted and converted again if we are to become mature in Christ.

Jarrow, and the history of Christianity in that town and in our region, reminds us of the imperative of teaching the faith, of explaining the Gospel and the Scriptures and the doctrines and story of the Church, so that Christianity might once again capture the imagination of people long alienated from it. The presence of Bede's relics here is a challenge to us in our task here at Durham Cathedral, as a place to which many local people come, adults, teenagers, children. Surely, Bede provokes us to give our energies to this very task.

Then Jarrow as a place of industrial expansion and decline, of prosperity and poverty.

For so many of our people, up to the 1970s, work gave a sense of worth, of purpose, of security. But in these days of clawing back unimaginable budget deficits, and dire economic predictions, perhaps something of the spirit of Bede's simple, monastic community, might restore a more connected form of living, where riches are found beyond material wealth through sharing. 

Then Jarrow as a place of transitus, a place of expansion of limits. It is said that Bede spent virtually all his life in that one place, and yet he brought the world to himself, through education, through reading and study. Bede was a man who over overcame barriers. And there is another calling of the Church, whether those barriers be class, social status, creed, history, culture. There is a wisdom out there to embrace and learn from.  

And Jarrow as a place to which I take an elderly lady with an obliterated memory. It makes me realise how vital and important memory is. Without Bede, much of what we know about Cuthbert and the coming of Christianity to our region would be forgotten, gone. And of course here tonight, we make anamnesis, remembrance of those saving acts, accomplished once in time, and yet wonderfully and mysteriously beyond time. The grace that first flowed from the Cross flows again tonight and is re-applied. And remembering Bede, he continues to speak to us as the guardians of his relics, to us and to Jarrow, as the guardians of his memory.

All this reminds me that Jarrow, like this great Cathedral, is a sacred spot. And because of that we have big prayers we must offer and we have hard work we must do.