Sermon: THE IDEA OF NORTH

‘Before I ever went there, the North of England was the Never Never Land of my dreams… to this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins.’  That was W. H. Auden, who found his poetic voice in this county high in the North Pennines.  In Rookhope I was first aware / Of self and not-self, death and dread… / There I dropped pebbles, listened, heard / the reservoir of darkness stirred’ I empathise.  As a London boy I was fascinated by ‘the idea of north’.  On the platforms at Kings Cross I would watch Gresley pacifics set off for exotic places like Doncaster, York, Newcastle and Berwick upon Tweed and wished I could venture to these remote lands.  Then I came to Durham as a teenager applying to read maths at the University.  It made a deep impression that bleak November day: its Castle and Cathedral, of course, its narrow streets and grey buildings, the traffic policeman in his box in the market square (how we still need him today!), the Mackem brogue, coal dust and a whiff of sea hanging in the air, and all somehow in an understated minor key.  I knew I would come back.  

In the landscape of the mind, we cherish what gives the north its sense of place: its great skies, wildernesses and natural beauty, its proud industrial history of lead and coal mining, railways, shipbuilding and steel; its close-knit communities and the warmth of its people;  and the richness of its Christian history in this land of saints.  Here we claim Aidan as the true apostle of the English people, for he and his followers Christianised not only Northumbria but much of the rest of England.  And with the civilising influence of Christianity came the intellectual and cultural renaissance of Northumbria’s golden age, and, because this is always a central concern of Christianity, a renewed concern for the virtues of charity and justice.  The spiritual geography of the north is closely aligned to the long journeys made by the Lindisfarne community and the lands they acquired as they sought a permanent home safe from the Vikings.  Here at Durham they finally settled with Cuthbert’s body and the Lindisfarne Gospel Book.  Cuthbert is still here, and we look forward to welcoming the Lindisfarne Gospels to this World Heritage Site in 2013 when these ancient treasured Christian symbols will be reunited. 

However, we should not rhapsodise about the north without recognising that it has a shadow.  When I came to Northumberland as a young incumbent nearly 30 years ago, I began to learn how distant the north can feel from the centres of political and economic power.  The miners’ strike and its bitter legacy gave special force to this, but the perception was of a piece with the sense that the tides of prosperity were ebbing.  The decline in manufacturing industry is not unique to the north, and the memory of the Jarrow Crusade reminds us of a longer history of anxiety and trouble, but the effects of decline are keenly felt here.  And in terms of life in the north-east, the statistics speak for themselves.  Very likely you will earn less, your house will be worth less, your employment prospects will be less good, you will be less healthy and live less long than in the south-east.  Danny Dorling in his book So you think you know about Britain? contrasts the prosperous sprawl of the south-east with the runt of the country that is left over and ‘beyond’, ‘a tract of worried England with no advocates or spokesmen’, defined by negation: it is somehow ‘not-south; a foreign country: they do things differently there.  So ‘north’ is a place not only of gift but of need. 

This service is an annual opportunity for us to thank God for the public institutions that bind our life together and to pray for them as they serve our communities.  The administration of justice and the preservation of the Queen’s Peace are central to the wellbeing of our society.  Like yesterday’s Durham Miners’ Gala, today’s service has a strong northern sense of place.  And this is reflected in our biblical readings today which echo the importance attached to geography and place.  In the first, a northern prophet, Hosea, draws on the old ‘northern’ themes of Israel’s primal innocence in the appeal to abandon falsehood and return to the source of truth.  In the gospel, Jesus comes to Galilee his homeland.  Galilee was unequivocally northern: not south, not Judea, above all not Jerusalem. His first followers came from there: Peter, whose northern accent would betray his origins to a servant girl on the night of Jesus’ trial; and Philip and Andrew from lakeside Bethsaida.  The north had always been disparaged by the south ever since the northern tribes had seceded and gone their own way ten centuries earlier.  ‘Can anything good come from Nazareth?’ asked Nathaniel, a Galilean who was perhaps quoting a tag-line that echoed a general sentiment about a town with a dubious reputation.  Yet in the geography of the gospels, it seems that God chooses perversely to begin with Galilee because it was disparaged and neglected.  Who could imagine that the divine would reveal itself there: not in the temple at Zion with its religious professionals, not in the galleries and courts of proud Jerusalem but in lowly Galilee, in Capernaum, Cana and Nazareth?

If Jesus spoke with a northern accent, could this be a metaphor of how God regards the idea of north?  I am not saying that God is not committed to every patch of ground on this planet that is for someone their place, their homeland.  ‘Gilead is mine and Manasses is mine’ says our Psalm with its litany of place-names all of which God claims as his own.  So it is right to inquire what is specific to this place and how God sees it.  In the 1980s, a group of theologians under the chairmanship of Professor James Dunn wrote a book called The Kingdom of God and North-East England.  Not ‘in’ but ‘and’: they did not claim that the north-east was especially privileged by God (in the Bible, always a false and dangerous claim), but they did explore what insights the gospel might bring to the particularities of life in this region. This is to affirm that a God who came in Jesus at a particular time and in a particular place must always care about the particularities of every place and its people.  So we dare to say that God cares about north-east England.  He cares about its economic fortunes, the quality of its environment, its human life and relationships, its administration of justice and the safety and welfare of its citizens. 

Above all, he cares about the poor.  In the light of the severe economic and social challenges that we face, we need to have confidence that it matters to God that Durham is one of the most deprived counties in the land, that this diocese is the poorest in the Church of England, that where employment is so dependent on the public sector, government cuts are eroding quality of life for many people in ways that we can perhaps only just begin to glimpse.  At the same time, our regional institutions such as One North-East are being dismantled, and indeed the very discourse of regionalism is disallowed.  But the north-east region still exists.  So who will speak up for its ‘passionate places and passionate people’?  Who will garner the vision and energies of our people so as to make a difference to our most deprived communities? 

In this Diocese, we made this a specific request of our next Bishop.  We asked for a spiritual leader who would regard the north-east as home, and would be its champion and advocate.  But in our public roles in the institutions of church and state, we can all demonstrate our care for and our commitment to this region.  I include in this the administration of justice and the preservation of public order, for we undertake these tasks in the particular context of this part of England with all its gift and need.  The judiciary, the police and the prison service among many other agencies both statutory and voluntary all add to the social capital that helps create a good and generous and wholesome society.  Christians believe that God is looking to transform the base metals of human existence into the gold of abundant life and in our public duty we serve that divine work whether we know it or not.  Its marks are truth, reconciliation, justice, charity and peace, the qualities Jesus spoke about when he began to teach in his northern homeland of Galilee.  These are the values we want to cultivate and grow in north-east England today, where Christianity once flourished as nowhere else in England, where mercy and truth once met together, and righteousness and peace kissed each other, and where the poor began to hope that there could be good news even for them. 

 Psalm 60, Hosea 11.1-9; John 1.43-end