The Feast of Saint Aidan 2025

Matthew 19:27-30

We stand at a tumultuous and challenging moment. War pervades many areas of the world, including in Ukraine, Israel, and Sudan; poverty, mental illness, and drug addiction still haunt so many human bodies around us; abuse and corruption twists through the Church; the natural world around us continues to suffer and be scarred by human hands and efforts. How do we face these challenges? What can we, mere, culturally insignificant individuals, in a small, culturally insignificant church, do to respond to the evil and chaos around us? 

Several years ago when we set out to start this mission of St. Aidans, and now as we set out on a renewed effort, I thought of these questions. I will until the day I die, I suspect. St. Aidan is the patron saint of our humble effort then and now because I saw in the record of his life what I thought it ought to look like: Our response to the evil in the world around us must be “gentleness, simplicity, and strength.” 

“Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first,” Jesus says to Peter, who asked what their reward will be for leaving everything behind to follow him. If Peter wanted thrones in the world as it is then and now, power to crush enemies and wealth to acquire all he could ever want, then he was in the wrong group, following the wrong rabbi. Following Jesus was not a good path towards comfort and ease, nor wealth and stature. Following Jesus was and is, however, the way to receive the promise of immortality, to see the world as it truly is, and to play a part in its future, the “renewal of all things.” This was the promise embodied in Christ himself, who has saved us, by showing us how to live as truly human, by dying on a cross for us, by rising from the dead to defeat death, and by now in the presence of the Father ruling all things, one day return to us to finish the work of renewing all things. 

Aidan understood this. He was a monk, having taken vows of poverty and chastity, giving up so much of the worldly goods. Yet, even he had something to risk, to lose. When he was called to leave his home in the monastery, travel over 300 miles to Northumbria, and strive to renew the Church there, he was leaving his home, his community, the place where he was secure. He was an Irish monk going to an English land which, due to an unfriendly king, had driven Christianity out. But when the new king asked for someone to come, Aidan answered the call at the urging of his brothers. 

His life was characteristic of the apostolic mission of the Church. See, the Gospel calls us to live in a certain way, a way that resembles that of our Savior, though never perfectly; and that means we respond to each moment differently, according to the need. When he was walking (for he walked everywhere instead of riding, a sign of wealth), Aidan spoke to everyone he met, and to those who were not Christian he urged them to be baptized (medieval shorthand for receiving the Gospel), and to Christians he exhorted and encouraged them. When he was invited to the homes of the wealthy, he would attend but would not shy away from calling out sin if present, knowing that their worldly power did not excuse them from responsibility. Even better, he would often take gifts given by them & use them to buy people out of slavery, taking that which was quite possibly ill-gained and redeeming it, using it to humanize and raise up those laid low.

Aidan the bishop was simply continuing the apostolic mission. He would agree fully with the words of Paul from 1 Cor. 9: “If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe betide me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel…I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” Proclaiming the Gospel, to each person as they needed to hear it, the lowly and the powerful, the slave and the free, the Christian and the nonChristian.

And this was done for the renewal of the Gospel in Northumbria. I believe we live in a similar moment, a moment where the Gospel needs to be renewed in this place. I don’t much care if this nation endorses Christianity or not; it isn’t about winning a culture war, but about the people who are called God’s children truly living according to this proclaimed Gospel, and inviting others into this Kingdom, the Kingdom that exists within and alongside all the earthly powers. I am not convinced that the churches of the West are much in tune with the Gospel of Paul, Aidan, and all the rest who have faithfully handed it down through the millenia. I think we, like every generation, face our own unique challenges, and the Church must rise to those and meet them. What I don’t believe is that we meet those challenges with the sword, with contentious arguments, or with political power. We face the challenges of hyperindividualism, overconsumption, prejudicial fear of those not like us, and an insecure reliance upon political power. So how do we meet these challenges? By attending to the Gospel of a self-sacrificing Savior, and by living in this moment lives of “gentleness, simplicity, and strength.”

With those who are weak, who are dispossessed and trodden down, with those who have been abused, and those who have been hurt by the Church or others, we are gentle; we must strive to live in simplicity, not hoarding and seeking to fill the existential hole that lives inside us with more stuff; and we must live with strength, facing our own suffering or failures with dignity and responsibility, and facing those who would use their power to abuse others with the truth of their actions and the call to repent. As we return as a body, as St. Aidan’s steps into the next season of its life and looks to the future, my prayer, my goal, and I pray our shared vision, is to be a small, maybe insignificant, but faithful place where people can meet Jesus and face the world and life with the gentleness, the simplicity, and the strength of Jesus Christ. Amen.