Feast of St. Margaret of Scotland
Sunday 1030 am 16th November 2008

Readings: Proverbs 31 : 10, 20, 26-31, Matthew 13 : 44-46

A few weeks ago, there was a short article in one of the newspapers about a man who regularly goes to a seafood eatery for some oysters.  It was an ingrained habit, and he always enjoyed what was provided for him.  But on this particular occasion, he opened the oyster shells to discover a pearl inside.  Clearly a bit of sand or foreign matter had got inside the shell, and - as happens both with mussels and oysters - the sand was surrounded by some thick liquid, to protect the growing oyster crop, as part of nature’s reaction.  In time, the sand and the liquid become a pearl.  It’s a bit like the layers of granulated tissue that have spread all over the inside of my mouth, to protect it from the invasion of the ulcers that began to appear there a year ago, but have now gone. But back to pearls: they come in various sizes, different shades of off-white, even light pink, and they’ve been worn for centuries as earings or brooches or necklaces, or other kinds of decoration, including on some ecclesiastical vestments and altar frontals.  They’re mentioned in the bible, including in this morning’s gospel, as precious stones that  symbolise purity and goodness, and are often highly valued.

In recent weeks, I suppose we’ve all become amateur economists.  We’ve come, many of us, to question why certain things cost more than others, why a house that’s a certain size in my part of the country should necessarily be given a higher value  than another house, which might be much bigger, that’s somewhere else.  We seem to live in a world of shifting values.  Pearls don’t quite have the fascination in our day that they once had, but that only goes to underline my point even further.  Take the example of amber, you might find that prices vary considerably, from countries along the Baltic coast like Poland and Latvia, where it’s very much easier to get hold of, to Spain where it’s not.  

But do all values shift?   We may alter exchange rates and prices, but some values don’t change.  This morning’s Old Testament reading expresses the bible’s traditional appreciation of the good, devoted, and faithful woman.  And that’s why it’s chosen for the feast of St. Margaret of Scotland.  Margaret means pearl, and more than just in name.  Here is a holy woman, exiled first from her native England to Hungary, and then to Scotland, where she  marries  King Malcolm ‘bighead’ Canmore. Here, her simplicity and her dedication to the poor and to education  resulted in a memory that’s still around in her adopted country, and expressed in the many churches dedicated to her.  But however precious they can be, pearls are, no more than a result of a piece of sand that somehow got inside the shell and overtaken by a chemical reaction to protect the growing oyster.  You could say the same of human beings, even the holiest ones.  On the one hand, we’re a collection of different organisms, that change all the time.  That’s the biological explanation of what we are.  On the other hand,   we’re a bit more than that: in spite of Richard Dawkins and his colleagues, we believe that we’re made in the image of God.  All these organisms work together to produce potentially the most creative living creature on this planet, and also potentially the most destructive. 

As Margaret understood well, you can’t just believe that we’re made in the image of God without doing something about it.  We may be created from dust, from nothingness. But we become something greater, something far more creative, and we have the capacity to think, to feel, to dream, as well as to get things wrong.  That’s why we need a church, not just a community, but buildings to worship in, and to be a base for service and witness to the community.  It’s not about going it alone, and pretending that we are all that matters – otherwise a Bishop’s visit, representing the wieder church, becomes rather meaningless.

This month, I’ve made a ‘Call to Prayer’ to the diocese, and I have asked each parish to pray through the weeks of November for God’s guidance in our work together of ministry and mission in the future.  I’m well aware that we live in an age that can be cynical about  leadership, and the Church is unfortunately no exception.  But I’ve made that call nonetheless, so that  each week people can ponder one of the ‘I am’ sayings from John’s gospel.  This week’s image is of Jesus as the gate – ‘I am the gate’: the gate of the sheepfold, the gate through which we pass to huddle together and be nourished, and the gate out of which we go in order to walk into the future, with all its uncertainties.  And I’m asking you to pray for more ordinands, because we need them. It may be difficult to see bishops and clergy as pearls, but at least we know that like the rest of the people of God, they begin like pieces of sand that have been surrounded by something new and different, in order to emerge as precious in God’s sight.   Margaret of Scotland knew all about that – the all too human church, needing to be recalled to holiness, with a bit of sorting out as well through the mercy, energy and forgiveness of God himself, the God who walks ahead of us on every terrain where we may find ourselves, however unfamiliar and challenging it may be.

+Kenneth
Portsmouth