Rev 7.9-end, 1 John 3.1-3, Mt 5.1-12
I hope you said hello to St Edith on the way into church today, my offering for the Halloween scarecrow trail around the village. I thought I would put the Hallow into Halloween, and honour our local saint – hallow is just another word for holy, or saintly.
In fact, she is really one of two local saints, because her mother Wulfthryth, was also regarded as a saint, and for very good reason, it seems to me. I wondered about making a scarecrow of her as well, but time ran away with me, and I wasn’t sure so many people would know her.
In some ways, though, Wulfthryth showed the greater courage and determination, and deserves to be honoured.
I am sure many of you will be familiar with the story, but in outline, here it is. Around 960 AD England was ruled by the 18 year old King Edgar, known as the Peaceable, but only because there were no major wars in his time. He was a bit of a lad, a womaniser, who had at least four children by three different women in the space of five years, and one of those women was Wulfthryth. She was either a nun or, more likely, a nobleman’s daughter entrusted to the keeping of Wilton Abbey near Salisbury, where she could be educated and kept safe from unsuitable men. The defences of a convent couldn’t keep a king out, though, and legend has it that he was entranced by the sound of her voice reading aloud during a meal in the convent. He either abducted her or eloped with her, depending on who you believe, but either way, she probably didn’t have much choice. She was a woman; he was a man, and a king to boot. Soon she was pregnant, so he installed her in what was either a royal house or a convent in Kemsing. He doesn’t seem to have married her, though marriage was a fairly flexible concept at the time, and in any case, very soon after Edith’s birth his roving eye had roved on to another woman, Elfrida, who he definitely did marry and who eventually became his queen.
Edgar always acknowledged Edith and supported her, and seems to have been on good terms with Wulfthryth too, but, discarded by a king, the best she could have hoped for was to be married off quietly to someone who would turn a blind eye to her past, and Wulfthryth wasn’t going to put up with that. She insisted on going back to Wilton, where she became a nun, and eventually Abbess. She brought Edith up in the convent, where she became a nun herself.
Edith died in her early twenties, but Wulfthryth lived on many years afterwards, dying around 1000 AD, with a reputation for holiness and loving care, having built up Wilton Abbey and influenced generations of nuns. One of her more tangible achievements was to build a stone wall around the Abbey, perhaps in the hopes of giving the nuns in her care more protection against rapacious kings than she had.
It would have been easy for Wulfthryth and Edith to have been consumed with bitterness, but they weren’t. They decided not to let their past dictate their future – our history doesn’t have to fix our destiny. Instead they found within the difficulties of their lives real and living faith in God which enabled them to serve others and make a difference to the world around them. They chose to make their own lives, and what lives they made!
The truth is that those who we call saints are often people who at the time would have seemed to those around them unlucky, awkward, cursed rather than blessed, people with no obvious success or attractiveness to recommend them. Jesus’ words to his disciples in today’s Gospel reading sum that up. The disciples had seen the crowds flock to Jesus, needy people, battered people, “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” as the Gospel puts it elsewhere. I can just imagine the disciples rolling their eyes and tutting as yet another leper, yet another woman hysterical with grief because her child was ill, yet another man whose life had gone off the rails, yet another prostitute stretched forward their grubby hands to try to touch him. What was the point of helping these people? What use would they be to God’s mission? Surely the chaos of their lives was proof that God wanted nothing to do with them? Surely they should be written off, as people might have been inclined to write off Wulfthryth and Edith.
But Jesus takes his disciples aside and calmly, cooly overturns all those unspoken thoughts in the words we now call the beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit, he says, the meek, the mournful, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are those who don’t play the power games of the world – the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for righteousness’ sake. In them God is doing a holy thing, he says. In them, the kingdom is coming into being. The rewards he talks about aren’t some arbitrary prize they are given after death. They grow out of the situations they face. When we are poor in spirit we don’t have the security that comes from wealth and status, but that means we value much more the loving support of others and the loving support of God. It is impossible to be comforted unless we truly mourn. Being hungry and thirsty for righteousness, knowing we need it, is the first step on the road to justice and peace. Jesus knew the truth of this because this was his experience.
In John’s Gospel Jesus says “I am the Way – no one comes to the Father but by me”. Being a Christian isn’t a matter simply of praying the right prayers or believing the right things; it is about following a way, the way that Jesus walked before us, which led through the squalor, hardship and shame of the cross. Yet in that suffering, not despite it, hope was born.
Our first reading, from the book of Revelation echoes that truth. It starts out sounding like a fairly standard image of an earthly court, with rank on rank of loyal subjects, waving palms and cheering, a glorious throne surrounded by triumphal music. But who is on the throne? The sacrificial Lamb, that symbol of the crucified, humiliated, powerless Christ.
Our natural sense is that when things are falling to pieces around us we must be doing something wrong – we feel ashamed - but God doesn’t see it that way. That is the message of Jesus’ beatitudes, and the message of his life too. When Wulfthryth found herself pregnant, unmarried, and discarded, I doubt whether she felt blessed. When Edith was growing up, illegitimate, dependant on the whim of a father who might or might not support her, I doubt whether she felt blessed either. And yet they discovered the blessing of God in their vulnerability. And that meant they could become blessings to others.
“Beloved” says the letter of John, “We are God’s children now”. Now when we are in a mess. Now when our lives have gone awry. Now when our plans seem to be backfiring. “We are God’s children now” he says, but then he goes on, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” The past doesn’t have to define the future. The things that have happened to us, the things we have done, are not the last word. God has that word, and whatever it is, it will be a word of love.
So, let’s thank God for our local saints, for Wulfthryth as well as Edith. Their lives remind us that the things that seem like the end of the world can, in fact be a new beginning. Others may think we will never amount to anything. We might think that others will never amount to anything. But God sees us all as his beloved children, heirs of his kingdom, and if we can see that too we are truly blessed.
Amen
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