St David
Today we celebrate St David’s Day – the Patron Saint of Wales…. There are many stories about St. David which
are well known, although the accuracy of some of them has been questioned at
times.
I know one particular story which some of you may
have heard about a referee who arrived at the Pearly Gates and was met by the
man in charge.
"Welcome” said the man. Before you can enter
Heaven I need to ask whether there is anything you would want to confess."
"Well," said the referee in some
embarrassment, "I suppose I should admit one thing. In an international I
was refereeing between England and Wales, I gave a penalty for Wales that won
them the game. I saw the replay afterwards and I don't think it was a penalty.
It's been on my conscience ever since."
"You don't need to worry my son. You
certainly made the correct decision."
"Oh thank you St Peter," said the
referee. "That's a real load off my mind."
"Oh By the way," said the gatekeeper,
"It's St Peter's day off. I'm St David."
Anyway moving swiftly on... I think perhaps it’s particularly
appropriate that this year St David’s Day falls in Lent, because without
dwelling on the details too much it seems that David lived a very frugal life –
something we might associate with Lent.
I won’t dwell on the history of St David because we don’t know an
awful lot, but we do know he lived in the 6th century and we know
that he founded a monastery. It is thought that he came from a noble family...
There is often discussion of people who have been well brought up having to
remain in the manner to which they are accustomed – but this was not so for
David.
David’s lifestyle did not encourage comfort. The idea of remaining
in the style to which he would have been accustomed was thrown out of the
window... He seems to have believed that the world was tempting, and the less
you indulged within it the more time you had to get closer to Christ. The
lifestyle would have included times of pain such as wading in freezing water to
pray, and eating horrendous foods - all in the pursuit of the ultimate holiness
and access to heaven.
It may not be a life which is very appealing to us at all but
there is something important that we can learn from it and that is the need to
continually try to get closer to God in our lives. As we go through Lent we
will be asked to challenge ourselves to follow the instruction of Jesus who
said, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me.’
The whole sense that is being portrayed by Jesus is a sense that
David understood well – that whatever material benefits we have and enjoy in
our lives they ultimately mean absolutely nothing.
During Lent we are called to consider our own relationship with
God – we are called to make changes where they are necessary. We are called to
get closer to God through prayer and the study of his word in the Bible as we
continue our journey through life.
As I mentioned we have few actual historical facts about David but
many of the ideas have come from the writings of Bishop Rhigyfarch who was
writing some 500 years after the death of David. He describes St David as :-
“the supreme overseer, the supreme protector, the supreme
preacher, from whom all received their standard and pattern of living
virtuously. To all he was their regulator, he was their dedication, he was
their benediction, he was their absolution, their reformation. To the studious
life he was instruction; to the needy, life; to the orphans, upbringing; to
widows, support; to fathers, a leader; to monks, he was their rule; to
non-monastic clergy, the way of life; to all men he was all things.”
It’s quite an incredible tribute to a man and if David followed
this life as Rhigyfarch suggested then he is undoubtedly a man to admire hugely
as we do, but all of the things that were mentioned are things that we can
follow even more closely from Jesus…
As we celebrate the life of St David we don’t worship him but we
use his example and his life to point us to the life of Jesus and the gifts
that he offers to us today and every day.
So another thing we learn from St David is to look to God for all
of our support, our strength and our wisdom. We are dependant on God, whether
we know it and accept it or not... As we think of Lent we think of the time
Jesus spent in the desert being tempted by the devil. And we think perhaps of
times of wilderness in our own lives. Times when God seems distant, or we just
don’t seem to be able to find peace in our lives...
And through Lent it’s a chance for us to just evaluate again what
we’re doing in our own lives with regard to Jesus – what prominence do we give
him ? Is he just for Sunday, is he just for last resorts in prayer, is he just
someone to think of occasionally day by day, or is he guiding us constantly on
our journeys of life?
Are our lives transformed by knowing Him ?
And as we celebrate the life of David or any Saint, one of the
things that we think of are lessons we learn from the past...
Many traditions have been built up around St David – Helen
sometimes tells the story of a time when she was 16 and on a mission in
Brighton. Whilst there she met a girl from Hove and this particular girl told
Helen how great we were in Wales and also how well we celebrate St. David’s
day. By this stage Helen was a little
bit fed up of this fascination people had with meeting a Welsh person, so when she
was asked what we did on St.David’s day, Helen said she had the day off school;
dressed up in national dress, went into the garden and picked daffodils.
Then she informed the rather naïve listener that we crushed the
daffodils and made soup out of them – which funnily enough tasted lovely and
then we danced around our gardens singing the national anthem… Her response was
“Wow, see we do not do anything like that on St.George’s day.” Helen did later
admit that she had stretched the truth somewhat.
There’s another tradition that says that we have leeks as a
national symbol because David used them as a weapon in battle !
And so we think of tradition and its value or not, and its always
a rather touchy subject… ! As shown by the traditions that have been built up
around the life of St David it is relevant to the Church today though.
David sought to follow Christ more closely and to let nothing get
in the way and as a Church we must always examine ourselves to see what is
getting in the way of our relationship with God – Is it tradition, is it being
too busy to make time for God, is it that we think we can manage quite well
without him anyway…?
Certainly with regard to tradition we must never be bound by it –
I don’t mean that we should throw away everything from the past – we certainly
shouldn’t do that, but we must make sure that we engage with the present.
In our worship, in our welcome of people and in our outreach we
are challenged to offer a relevant message today. As a church we don’t have the
benefit of being a private club – we invite anyone in and from what we do and
say we hope they will see something of Jesus.
Most people in the Church don’t want or like change, some don’t even feel that its needed, but most people outside of the Church think change in the Church is long overdue. Somebody once said that ‘the world at its worst needs the Church at its best.’ We must continually ensure that we are offering a Church that people want to be a part of, and that they see is relevant for them.
We must see that we are a Church that is continually
developing new initiatives for touching the lives of people in a way that they
can never ignore or forget. The Church in Wales is going through a period of
huge change – it’s not going to leave any church in the country untouched – we
can embrace it and move forward or we can resist it and slide backwards...
St David put aside the material comforts of life
– he tried to remove from his life anything that separated him from God, and we
are called and challenged to do the same today…
As we rightly celebrate the lives of the Saints
of the past, we recognise also that we are called to be the Saints of today,
offering Christ’s very relevant and life changing message of hope to all
people.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians Paul
wrote that ‘we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in
the face of great opposition.’ Today in this country we may not be faced with
great opposition in terms of physical persecution – but we will be faced with
apathy and indifference and we must seek the power of God to break down that
apathy and banish that indifference.
Those who wrote about the lives of the Saints,
and St David is no exception, wrote about the best, the juiciest and the
holiest parts of their lives.
They may have led exceptional lives and done
incredible things, but they were however, and we must never forget this, normal
people, but normal people who allowed themselves to be used by God for his
service…
As we consider the example of St David and we
give thanks for his life and for that example, we seek God’s help and God’s
strength to help us to allow ourselves to be used for his service and in doing
that, to help change the world today. AMEN
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