June 9, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Journeying Saints

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 30
Galatians 1:11–24

“Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia and afterwards I returned to Damascus.”

Galatians 1:17 (NRSV)

And now, may
kindly Columba guide you
to be an isle in the sea,
to be a hill on the shore,
to be a star in the night,
to be a staff for the weak.
Amen.

Iona pilgrimage prayer

Today, June 9 is in the Christian calendar the day set apart for the Feast Day of Saint Columba. Saint Columba is the Irish saint who traveled to what is now Scotland and evangelized the people of that land. You might think it is somewhat unusual that here we are gathered in a clearly Protestant church, a Presbyterian church, coming out of the Reformed tradition, and I’m battering on about saints of the church.

Indeed at the Reformation there was great challenge to the cult of the saints, which had grown up surrounded by myth and by belief in relics and miracles. The reformers really challenged that understanding of the saints, and yet part of the experience of Reformed churches in the past thirty or so years has been what is known in church circles as liturgical renewal, rediscovering some of the old styles of liturgy that had gone out of fashion in Protestant circles and yet were truly and deeply Christian. Our observance of Ash Wednesday would be one example of that. Along with that, I think, there has been growing interest as well in some of the ancient figures of the church whom we know as the saints.

Columba is important to me as the “apostle to the Scots”—which is how he is known—for it was essentially through Columba that the evangelization of Scotland happened. He was born in 521 in Ireland. He was of royal descent in Ireland and was ordained a priest and became a monk. And then, the story is told, that Columba, while a monk and a priest, was also a warrior. And for reasons that are never really clear in the mists of time, he engaged in a battle with another clan in Ireland, the result of which was the death of 3,000 men.

Columba was the victor but went to confession, and the penance he was given for waging this battle was to leave Ireland and to gain as many souls for Christ as lives that were lost in the battle. In 563 Columba left Ireland and the tradition tells us that he kept going from island to island off the west coast of Scotland; every island he would land on he would turn back, and if he could still see the outline of Ireland on the horizon, he would keep going. It was only when he landed on Iona that Ireland was finally out of sight.

On the island of Iona, Columba, with his twelve followers who came from Ireland, formed a monastic community built around an abbey. Iona became not only the center for the spreading of the gospel throughout Scotland and northern England, but it became an important center of Christian thought and of Christian art through the production of illuminated manuscripts. Many believe that the famous manuscript the Book of Kells was begun on Iona.

The other reason that I’m marking Saint Columba’s day today is that actually my name derives from the name of the saint. Columba comes from the Latin word colomb, meaning “dove,” and his nickname was the “Dove of the Church,” which in Scots Gaelic is Calum Cille, so it’s where my name, Calum, comes from. It’s a derivation of Columba as is the English spelling of my name, which is Malcolm. So Saint Columba we know as the Dove of the Church.

The church in which I was ordained into the ministry in 1996 in London was named for the saint—St. Columba’s Church of Scotland. One of the lovely traditions while I served there was that on the Friday closest to Saint Columba’s Day, June 9, the Dean of Westminster Abbey would invite one of the ministers from Saint Columba’s Church of Scotland to lead the prayers of the people during Evensong in the great abbey. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Westminster Abbey or if you’ve ever been to Evensong. Evensong is a beautiful, sometimes haunting, service in the Anglican or Episcopal tradition, and I had the opportunity twice to lead prayers during Evensong marking Saint Columba’s Day. In the bulletin at Westminster Abbey, it says that worship has been offered at that site every day for more than one thousand years. It is an extraordinary experience to hear your voice—my voice as I’m leading prayer—reaching up into the high rafters of that beautiful building and being joined with those saints who had prayed and preached and spoken and celebrated sacraments in that place before—just a magical experience.

In Columba we have an exemplar of a saint who, when called by God, takes a journey. And we read today of another saint for whom that is true: St. Paul. The letter to the Galatians is a fascinating document. It is a document in which you come across a real sense of anger on Paul’s part. Some scholars look at Galatians and say that it’s like looking at one side of an argument, and so you can infer from what Paul is writing what he was arguing about and with whom. Essentially Galatians is a letter in which Paul is challenging the people in churches that he had found to revert back to the gospel that he had preached. It would seem that some Christians had followed Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, but that these people had argued that in order to be a Christian you had to first be Jewish and therefore you had to follow the Torah, the law, and men had to be circumcised.

Paul challenges this belief in the beautiful writing that there is in Galatians, but right here at the start we see one of the arguments that Paul is trying to refute. Those who came after him, who would have come from Jerusalem, would have known the apostles who knew Jesus, and they argued that Paul had no authority, but he claims otherwise. He claims that like an Old Testament prophet that God had known from before he was born, he was called to be an apostle and to proclaim God’s love. And Paul even makes a point that after the experience of the revelation of Jesus Christ that he went on a journey. He went to Arabia and then to Damascus for a period of three years.

We don’t really know what Paul did during that time, but it’s that theme of journey as a response to God’s call that can be such an important one—not just in the lives of the saints as we understand them, but in our own life of faith. Journey is an important theme in scripture and in life. One of the overarching stories, what scholars might call a metanarrative, in scripture is the Exodus story, the journey of the children of Israel coming out of slavery into new covenant with God in the Promised Land. We evoke that story in our prayer at baptism: “Moses led his people out of slavery through the waters to freedom.” In that sense, as we mark these children with water and pray for the Holy Spirit to descend upon them, we are sending them out on their journey with the mark of baptism, the promise of God’s love present with them.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on saints and journeys recently. I had the privilege to journey part of the way with a saint of this church, John Boyle, whom we lost yesterday, who yesterday fulfilled his baptism in completing the journey. I was with John on Tuesday and took him communion. His wife, Kathye, and son, John, and John Boyle, and myself shared the bread and the cup. It was, as he said, “A foretaste of the great banquet.” And after we’d received the bread and the wine and given thanks, John reflected on how as his journey has gone on, more and more he has come to firmly believe in that which we call the communion of saints—the gathering not just of the famous people in Christianity, but of all of God’s faithful children who have responded to God’s call and been faithful on the journey. Like Paul and Columba, John Boyle was a journeying saint who undertook the journey faithfully.

When I got back to the office on Tuesday after sharing communion with John, I went to my bookcase and pulled down a volume of poetry, Edwin Muir’s Collected Poems, because there was a poem I remembered that I wanted to read to hold that moment. It’s called “The Way,” and it’s a dialogic poem, a poem in two voices.

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I’ll make here my place,
(The road leads on),
Stand still and set my face,
(The road leaps on),
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey’s done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on.

Thanks be to God. Amen.