Sermon from Sunday 12 July

 

This was part of the sermon was given by Bruce Hartnell at St Mark.

If you knock on my door at home I shall invite you into a small porch where the Celtic cross shown below hangs to welcome you too. It was made by our son Tim who (in the way of vicarage families had taken over a double garage as his workshop). This shows that his work was worthwhile. I have brought it this morning to point to the decorative pattern which is so common in Celtic art, all the way from standing crosses ten feet high to the carpet pages and borders of the Lindisfarne Gospels in Northumberland and, if you cross to Dublin, the Book of Kells.

At its simplest the pattern is like a cord or thread folded in half and laced about to surround the page, unbroken, if winding this way and that. According to the poet Malcolm Guite, it is ‘a miraculous fusion of the Celtic and English cultures, all the more miraculous because these peoples had once been at war with each other’.

The teasing interlacing can be of eels or sea-monsters that threaten to lose us in a maze. But in time the apparent tangle gives rise to a beautiful overarching pattern - often an image of the radiant cross of Christ.

Those of us who have the privilege of coming into your pattern of worship for a number of weeks sense something of the constant pattern which surrounds and upholds you. I was last Sunday in the congregation of St Alban’s Abbey for the first time in a year and recognised a few of the faces with us. There too was a sense of the unseen unbroken cord enveloping and supporting us.

Let’s remember this often unnoticed interlacing of our lives which adds up to something beautiful and full of God-given reassurance.