When the Feast of St James falls as it does this year on a Sunday it’s a very big day in Spain. Indeed its part of what they call a Holy Year, defined as the years their Patron Saint’s feast falls on Sunday. The King and Queen go to the Shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela for High Mass during which the famous Botafumeiro, the giant Thurible is allowed to swing up and down the Cathedral nave.
The origin of the Thurible or incense burner is in thousands of sweaty feet. Santiago de Compostella is at the end of the world’s most famous Christian pilgrim route.
Eighteen years ago there were two extra pairs of sweaty feet in the Cathedral – those of my then 12-year-old son James and I. We had completed a foot pilgrimage to the Shrine of St James covering the minimum distance required to attain the Compostella, the Latin certificate you receive from the Cathedral Office at the end of your journey, wearing our pilgrim badges (show) - scallop shells - linked to the legend of St James’ relics being washed up on the sea shore at Santiago.
The 100km hike required weeks of preparation including walking with packs on the Downs. We had no back up team so all we would need had to go on our backs as we travelled from refugio to refugio on the ancient pilgrim way.
The most important part of our preparation was deciding what not to take! Trial walks with laden rucksacks helped sort our priorities. When you're a beast of burden with a choice about that burden you soon thin your load! Though I'm an avid reader I was forced to shed all books but the Bible. James and I settled for little more than one change of clothes. My luxury was a short-wave radio. His was a Gameboy Advance. Off we went to Santiago de Compostela, or rather to the 100km point from which we hiked day by day along the pilgrim route and with much lighter burdens than we’d first planned.
One of the great things about being a Christian pilgrim is you travel light! Preparing to go on our pilgrimage gave me an enduring spiritual lesson. We brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing out of it. The lighter we travel the easier and more joyous our tread on life's pilgrimage to the city of God! It served us well when we had to move 4 years ago from Horsted Keynes Rectory to our little house in Haywards Heath and let go of an enormous amount of stuff!
The call to detachment is part of the call to poverty intrinsic to the Christian Gospel. It goes alongside the confidence we should have as children of God in Our Father to provide for us in all circumstances.
Although today’s Gospel includes a rebuke for St James and his brother we assume that he took the message: whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant. Or, as the Lord puts it elsewhere, blessed are the poor in spirit – those who have a right and humble assessment of themselves before God. Such folk see what they have – including any worldly achievement or status – as counting for nothing other than when it's use for the praise and service of God. They are detached from material possessions
The wealth of the rich is their strong city we read in Proverbs 18:11-12, in their imagination it is like a high wall…but humility goes before honour. The ‘high walls’ riches can literally raise up – you see them scattered around Mid Sussex – can all too easily put worldly honour before humility.
This ‘honour’ is the ultimate evil of materialism into which we are brainwashed day by day – the valuing of people by what they possess rather than for who they are as those loved by God and bearing his image!
What does it mean to be ‘poor in Spirit’? It means to have such a godly value system, to know God for who he is and ourselves for who we are. To know God in his infinite grandeur is to know oneself as loved deeply despite being a relative nothing and a less than nothing through sin.
When Our Lord spoke in the Gospel to James and John he was asking for poverty of spirit.
When attained this would be the sign of discipleship since a true knowledge of God in his infinite grandeur brings with it a recognition of one’s nothingness!
If we were but ‘nothings’! Our capacity to do harm brings us down one peg further, even if it is balanced by the capacity to do beautiful things as well.
Our poverty is like that of a song compared to the singer. We are like a song of the Lord – he is the singer, we are the song. How can the ‘song’ compare itself to the singer?
Yet it is our privilege to be able to live singing God’s praise - very much this morning as singing returns to St John’s! Here at the Eucharist, the great thanksgiving sacrifice of the Church we can admit this truth to God our Father: all things come of you and of your own do we give you… through Christ and with Christ and in Christ!
We are to welcome Jesus in a moment in the Blessed Sacrament. God in the material order, hidden in bread and wine. As we welcome him here, may he open our spiritual eyes to see him elsewhere in the material order and in the forthcoming run of our lives this week, that we may encounter him especially in the needy, those enduring personal ordeals and seriously in need of attention – our attention, our time, our money if needs be.
God free us to travel lighter in our Christian pilgrimage with deeper detachment from material things, abandoned more and more to his purposes. May Our Blessed Lord deepen our confidence in his provision and our humility before that grace. We need both confidence in him and humility before him to serve him right. Not just confidence in self - that is good of course - but it comes and goes, as the widespread reality of depression shows us. Deepening humility goes hand in hand with building confidence in God as author and completer of our lives
As we own up more and more to our own spiritual poverty we see Jesus more and more working around us, within us and through us. May the prayer of St James and St John our patron be with us so that like them we see Jesus so at work. Blessed, praised and hallowed be Our Lord Jesus Christ, upon his throne in glory, in his holy word, in the most holy sacrament of the altar, in the hearts of the poor and of all his faithful people now and for ever and to the ages of ages. Amen!
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