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Saint Columbanus, an Irish Celtic Saint, isn’t one of the major saints in our Church calendar, at least not in England. Yet Robert Shuman, the architect of the European Union called him the patron saint of all involved in the construction of a unified Europe. His lengthy and legendary journeys across Europe restored to a Continent that had all but abandoned God, the Christianity it had forsaken. As such, he united Europe again in a common belief in Jesus Christ. Columbanus came from the "edge of the world to the very heart of Europe"; and he believed in the concept of a united Europe, a community of different nations that shared common values and a common goal. For Columbanus those values and goals were not economic or political but founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is this Gospel and common belief which brought unity to a divided Europe of the 7th century and which can be a hope for Europeans today. For Columbanus, however, the unity of the Gospel was not simply to be found in Christians working together for a common goal but also involved the sharing of a common vision. This vision is not rooted simply in ways of getting along together but in a commitment to a Kingdom which whilst active in this world has its real point of reference elsewhere. To understand where this ‘elsewhere’ is we need to hear some words of Columbanus himself:
Let us concern ourselves with heavenly things, not human ones and, like pilgrims always sigh for our homeland, long for our homeland. It is the end of the road that travellers look for and desire, and because we are travellers and pilgrims through this world, it is the roads end, that is of our lives that we should always be thinking about.
For Columbanus this road’s end is the Kingdom of God and this is goal of our pilgrimage is to dwell in heaven, not on earth. Columbanus called us travellers, pilgrims, who were guests of the world and so he exhorts us to not get entangled with worldly desires but rather to fill our minds with heavenly and spiritual things.
Jesus, in today’s Gospel, reminds Peter of much the same thing. When Peter rebuked Jesus for what he saw as a kind of fatalistic approach to his own future, Jesus tells him that he is not thinking straight. He is looking at things from a human rather than divine perspective. You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.
This is something we need to hear today because all too often we look at the Church, at the World, through human eyes. Inevitable perhaps because we are bound by the limitations of our humanity. But we are also caught up in Glory. All our liturgy, for example, points us to the Glory of God which both transcends and transforms our human understanding.
Of course we can be forgiven for getting bogged down in human thinking because it seems that the Church, and the Church of England particularly, is going through yet another crisis which doomwatchers love. In the popular press as well as in the Church we are told that the Church of England is in danger of imminent collapse or, as one article I read in a daily newspaper put it this week, in meltdown.
Whether it is the financial crisis, or the supposed decline in vocations to priesthood, or in specific areas of human sexuality, or in the realm of authority or the possibility that there might be women bishops, there is plenty for people to snipe at. What is especially sad is that members of the Church not only collude in this but seem, at times to be oddly gleeful that the Church is in a mess.
Now that is not to say that there are very real issues which currently divide Christians – not just within the Anglican Church but in Universal Christianity. Not all these issues are what we might call ‘domestic’. Perhaps the biggest issue is one we have hardly begun to tackle which is the relationship between Christianity and other Faiths, not least in a pluralistic, multi-faith society such as Britain is today.
In the Global faith world the relationship between Jew and Muslim, for example, is at the heart of the current crisis in the Middle East but there are even bigger issues. There is a real crisis, for example, within the Muslim world itself between fundamentalism and more tolerant and open views. Fundamentalists in any religion tend to be fanatical about their beliefs and will stop at nothing to overcome opposition to what they believe is the only truth. It is but a short step from that to violent action – hey presto we move from fanatical preaching - towards what we might call terrorism but what holy fanatics call a fight for truth.
Moderate Muslims, like moderate Christians prefer to seek a consensus and middle ground but are all too often forced into a battle by and with their own unruly elements. In the face of suicidal acts done in the name of faith, our own domestic issues are small fry. Yet, it is important that we enter into real dialogue with each other on these issues – a dialogue which must be rooted in charity and in prayer.
Too often, however, such a dialogue lacks grace and falls quickly into the realm of destructive language designed to wound and hurt and dismiss those who do not hold our view – whatever that might be. Nothing is ever one sided – there are biblical texts to support almost every viewpoint - and there is the constant danger of clinging to a view from which we refuse to be moved. When such views are held in opposition to differing views then disunity follows – not healthy disagreement but with a blindness resulting in a refusal to meet each other and seek a common ground. Therein lies all the Schisms of the Church throughout the ages. It is perhaps a small crumb of comfort, therefore, to find that this is not new to Christianity.
We have a tendency to look on the Early Christian Church as somehow perfect and ideal but, the truth is rather different. As early Christians worked out their beliefs there was confrontation and, at times, confusion. Paul’s letters were written, quite often, to divided communities and the Epistle of James, of which we heard a portion today, is hard-hitting about those who have turned the Christian faith into a battleground.
Today, for example, the writer of James has a great deal to say about the power of the tongue to destroy others. Nothing hurts the Body of Christ more than malicious gossip. The tongue is a fire, says today’s Epistle, and how great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire. The tongue with which we praise God is also capable of the worst iniquity. It cannot be tamed. It seems hell-bent on destroying people as we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. It must not be so! Cries the writer of James. The Gospel is not proclaimed by hatred of those it is meant to save – and, of course, amongst those it is meant to save are the ones who speak hurtful things about others.
So what are we to do? We are to engage in honest but compassionate dialogue. We are to stop bashing each other with Scripture and we are to avoid that kind of tittle-tattle which undermines Christian communities and turns them inwards on each other. And, we are to bear in mind what both Jesus and Columbanus urges of us – to think not earthly thoughts but heavenly ones.
In the 2nd Century a highly-placed pagan, Diognetus wrote a letter to a high Roman Official about the Christians he had encountered. Some of the things he had to say are reminiscent of what Columbanus was to write 4 centuries later. Of Christians, Diogentus said:
there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labour under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonour, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. …
If that description could be used of us, the followers of Christ today, then we could be justifiably proud because we would be people who do not get bogged down with earthly things – not even earthly churchy things – but would be people who had such a vision of God and of His Kingdom that our hearts would be united in the common purpose which led Columbanus to travel throughout Europe with the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only uniting force in a disunited world and in a fragmented Church.
Our World is in desperate need of that unity and we have the means and the power to bring it. But if we are to do this, then we have to let go of those wranglings which draw us away from our primary purpose – which is to love the world with Christ’s love and Save the world from itself in the power of the love of Christ – a love which took Christ to the Cross and which, as he reminds us today is the place where we begin His work Take up your Cross and follow me – is not a spiritual exercise to improve the soul. It is a battle cry to join the greatest force of Love the world has ever known and will ever know – and, whatever the personal and corporate cost – to love sacrificially with a love that costs us everything.
This is not the work of the squeamish, nor of the back-biter but of the genuinely redeemed and loved People of God.
It is the work of those who, loved by God, love each other come what may – and who accept each other – warts and all – as Children of the same Heavenly Father – Pilgrims on earth but most definitely Citizens of Heaven.
If we understand that and live in its truth, then nothing will stand in our way for we will be walking proof of something we ought to believe – that the gates of hell will never prevail against the Church – not the loving, serving, Church which follows Christ - of which we are proud to be a part.