Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

In the year, 1061 St Edward the Confessor, whose Shrine stands behind the High Altar here, was King. The Norman Conquest was still five years away; in 1061, they were invading Sicily. But, that year, the Scots sacked the great monastery at Lindisfarne, and there were various crises in the life of the English Church which led Edward the Confessor to send an embassy to Rome. Also, that year, in a small Norfolk manor, a pious woman called Richeldis, was believed to have had a vision. She had seen the Virgin Mary appear in the village of Walsingham. Mary took Richeldis in spirit to see the house in Nazareth in which she had heard the Archangel Gabriel’s message at the annunciation. Richeldis was instructed to build a replica of this house—England’s Nazareth, as it would become known—at a site indicated by a spring of water which gushed out at her feet. Over the ensuing centuries, this water would become known for its healing properties. For those who could not make the dangerous, long journey across water and land to the Holy Land itself, Walsingham would be holy ground, a centre of devotion, and a shrine to Christ’s incarnation. A popular ballad written down in the mid-15th century, puts it beautifully:

And this is the cause, as it apereth by lyklynesse,
In the is belded newe Nazareth, a mancyon
To the honoure of the hevenly empresse
And of hir moste gloryous salutacyon,
Chyef pryncypyll and grounde of oure salvacyon,
Whan Gabryell sayd at olde Nazereth 'Ave',
This joy here dayly remembred for to be.

The pilgrimage to Walsingham quickly became very popular: a large community of Augustinian friars cared for pilgrims, and every monarch up to and including Henry VIII was counted amongst their number, until the Shrine was destroyed by the King’s men in 1538, and the prior executed. By 1600, an anonymous author would recall in mournful verse how many of England’s remaining catholics must have felt at this holy place, like so many, turned over to pillage and ruin:

Weep, weep, O Walsingham
Whose days are nights,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.

Sin is where Our Lady sat,
Heaven turned into hell,
Satan sits where Our Lord did sway,
Walsingham, oh farewell!

This month, at Evensong on Sundays, I am talking briefly about four British holy places. Last week, we were on the wind-swept and sea-buffeted Scottish island of Iona, and later this month, our journey will take us to Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire, and to the great cathedral at Canterbury. In last week’s sermon, which if you’re interested you can find on the Abbey’s website, I asked why holy places might matter within the wider context of Christian prayer. Surely, one of the great truths after Jesus’s Ascension and the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is that the whole world is now the site of God’s mighty acts. Our prayer is no different whether it is offered in a war trench or a basilica. So, why do holy places matter, and what might they teach us in Christian discipleship? 

Ours is a religion of incarnation. Of God becoming human. When we speak of the incarnation, we speak of God’s absolute involvement in human vulnerability and particularity; costly vulnerability, bearing the pain and hurt of the world. Not pretend flesh, but actual human flesh, shot through with all its glory and its limitations. When God came to earth, he stooped to look us in the eye, as he embraced us and picked us up. Our context is not unrelated to how we learn our faith, and how we receive it; the modern founder of the Iona Community, George Macleod, coined that much-used phrase ‘thin places’ between, as it were, heaven and earth, where it is perhaps possible to discern the twitch on the curtain which seems to be separate us. But perhaps this is the first thing that Walsingham might offer us. We need to very careful if we assume a sense that heaven is just ‘up there’ and we are ‘down here.’ That is not quite what we believe. Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God, or Kingdom of Heaven, is ‘within’ us, ‘amongst’ us, but not above us. The Kingdom of Heaven is love, joy and peace, in the Holy Spirit. In other words, it is to be aligned to God’s purposes. That 15th century ballad testifies that at Walsingham, that little village near Fakenham, the ‘joy’ of Gabriel’s greeting and Mary’s ‘yes’ to God is remembered daily. That ‘yes’, of an ordinary teenage Middle Eastern peasant girl, living in a land of complex Roman occupation, whilst seeking to be faithful to the covenant promises made to her ancestors: that ‘yes’ is an opening to the life of Heaven. 

Like many holy places, Walsingham has its fair share of strange dynamics and traditions. It has become known by many, in our own church, as a centre of traditionalism and a certain kind of Catholic Anglicanism. For many, it is a place which highlights divisions in the Church. And yet, Gabriel’s greeting, and Mary’s absolute trusting openness to God’s promises, which would lead her through the joys, pains and frustrations of motherhood, to the agony of the Cross, the joy of Easter, and the community of the infant Church, is the story of Christ’s people throughout the ages. As Bishop Philip North, the current Bishop of Blackburn used to say with a wry smile when he was Administrator of the modern Anglican Shrine, ‘Here, everyday is Christmas Day.’ 

To get a slightly deeper sense of what Walsingham might have to teach us about holiness, about God’s ways with the world, we need to hear a little more of its twentieth century story. In 1921, the local Vicar was a remarkable and strange man called Alfred Hope Patten, who sought to reignite pilgrimage to the village and had a shrine set up in the parish church. He was then given some land by a local aristocrat upon which he was encouraged to rebuild the replica of the Holy House of Nazareth. Fr Patten chose the exact spot for the first dig, and the excavators uncovered a medieval well, stuffed full of 16th century rubbish. It seems that those who destroyed the shrine in the 16th century tried to desecrate its holy waters. This well is now the source of water from which pilgrims drink from all over the world. It brings comfort, strength in faith, and many believe, healing. 

According to Eastern Orthodox tradition, when the Archangel Gabriel first visited Our Lady, she was visiting a well to draw water. When God came to earth, he kissed it and water burst out: the water of salvation, water for healing, for refreshment, for baptism, for recreation. How frequently we try to jam that spring up with all our rubbish. How often our violence, greed and selfishness obscure and cloud the life-giving water of Christ? But the water remains, an eternally fresh source of newness. God’s unending faithfulness to every human soul, and every patch of earth. 

Mary’s ‘Yes’ to God and to God’s promises, is an opening to heaven. And it is an opening we share in, a home in which we can belong, if we, too, allow our hearts to be open to the transformative power of Jesus Christ, God’s living water poured out for the life of the world. Mary’s cooperation with this mission was not an eradication of her free will. Far from it. It was her delight to find joy in the freedom which comes from this living water, and to choose to align her life with it. Yes to God, and yes to God’s promises. Because that is how we encounter the Kingdom of Heaven.