There is an old joke: someone lost in the wilds of, say, County Durham asks for directions only to be told, ‘well, I wouldn’t start from here’.
The here that I start from is this University’s Department of Theology and Religion, but to be clear: I am not a theologian, I am a historian. My theologian colleagues spend their time in rapt contemplation of the beatific vision, raising their eyes to perfection. Bede was, for most of his life as a scholar, a ‘theologian’, though the word was not yet coined. His most influential work, indeed, in his lifetime and for centuries afterwards, was on the perfection of the heavens and how they might be used to calculate the passage of time, lifting his eyes from the messiness of this world. But that is not what we treasure him for now. Now we remember him chiefly as the author of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written at the end of his life, which made him that patron saint of church historians, not only here but worldwide. And like all of us who try follow him in that vocation, in that book he deals not with perfection but with mess, confusion, ignorance and downright wickedness.
Anyone born on Tyneside in the later seventh century and aspiring to be the founding father of church history would be told: I wouldn’t start from here. Bede was born in a recently converted kingdom, still unstable and contested in both religion and politics, at Christendom’s farthest edge; when he joined the monastery at Jarrow, it was swept by plague and he was one of the few survivors. Life and faith were both fragile; learning seemed impossible. This was not Rome, or Constantinople, or even great kingdom of Francia. You wouldn’t start from here.
And that perhaps is his gift. For Bede knew that the story of God’s people on earth was not one of grandeur. As a scholar of scripture, he knew from the Old Testament that God’s chosen people were not lords of a vast empire, but rather, divided tribes struggling intermittently to hold on to their treasured scrap of land. He knew from the New Testament that God became human not as an emperor but as a provincial hick who died a slave’s death. If you were setting out to be the saviour of the world, you wouldn’t start from there. And yet he did.
It is for me the lesson of our readings today: stories of God’s people starting not from where they should, but from where they are and with what they have. In our first reading, Moses tells the Israelites to offer gold and silver – but also various yarns, linen, goat’s hair and sheepskins. These things are not offered because they are precious to God; or rather, they are only precious to him because they are precious to the people who give them. The story is even more vivid in New Testament reading. You will notice that the text breaks off at an unusual place: that is where Bede left it when he died. It is the question he left hanging. There is a vast hungry crowd. A boy comes forward with a pitifully inadequate amount of food, a few loaves and fishes. And there, right at the end of Bede’s life, hangs the question: ‘What are they among so many people?’ What use are the meagre gifts we can bring, so plainly inadequate to the need?
To which Bede suggests two answers: one as theologian, one as historian.
As a theologian, the point is obvious: here may not be the best place to start from, but it’ll have to do. The heart of the Christian doctrine of grace is that God does not give up on us the moment we go wrong, throwing us away like an old toaster. He does not break a bruised reed or quench a smoking wick, and he does not tell a wandering sheep that it’s it’s own stupid fault. He works with us, in patience and through all disappointments. And so however inadequate what we can give is – whether it is goat’s hair and sheepskins, or a single fish sandwich to feed a crowd, or a few words inked onto a parchment in a plague-ridden monastery hanging on on the freezing edge of the world – we can hope and trust that our gift will be received, and even that it may, by grace, be returned to us thirty, sixty, a hundredfold.
But I’m a historian; so I prefer his second answer. Here is how Bede explained the purpose of his history: ‘If history records good things about good people, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good; or if it records the evil of wicked people, the godly listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and bad, and to do what he knows to be good and pleasing to God.’ It is all very well to contemplate God’s perfection. But we live here. Here is, almost by definition, not where you would start from; but here is where by grace we have found ourselves. History, maybe especially the history of Christianity, is often not edifying. It is, I fear, more about the wicked than the good, and even the good have a way of getting things horribly wrong. Much like we do. Yet it is still worth receiving the gift Bede gives us. To learn from our forebears’ mistakes while we carry on making our own. To learn that we, too, will stand in need of our descendants’ and successors’ forgiveness. And to learn that the place where grace actually happens is not in the perfection of the heavens, but in all the places that you shouldn’t start from. In Jarrow. In Bethlehem. Perhaps even here.