St David's Day 2013

Welsh Sea Coast -- Alfred Sisley

1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
Mark 4:26-29
Psalm 16:5-11 or
Psalm 96:1-7

March 1st is the commemoration of David, Patron Saint of Wales, who lived in the second half of the sixth century, and died around 601 AD. Relatively little is known about him, except that he was Welsh, a missionary bishop, and instrumental in founding a dozen monasteries.

The most famous of these was known as Menevia. Positioned on the coast of West Wales, it amounted to no more than a simple collection of wattle and daub huts, surrounding a stone Cross. Today this is the site of Britain's smallest city, named, along with its Cathedral, St David's.

Celtic Stone Cross

The Gospel appointed for David's feast day is remarkably short and contains this important sentence: "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how". The image is a very fitting for the commemoration of St David since, given the unsettled nature of his times, he must have planted the seed of the Gospel in precisely this spirit, faithfully leaving later generations -- perhaps as many as five centuries on, which is when his biography was first written -- to "go in with the sickle, because the harvest has come".

Welsh Tribes at the time of St David

David's life and witness is set within a faith that contrasts very sharply with the modern tendency to judge success by tangible results. For him, as for those of his time,  the missionary task was just to sow the seed. Since it is the Gospel of God that is being sown, we can have complete faith that the seeds we plant will sprout and grow. But the time scale, it is essential to see, is God's good time, not our own.

To believe this is wonderfully liberating. It relieves us of all sorts of stressful pressures. Nor is there any reason to dismiss this as escapism borne of wishful thinking. What other figure from medieval Wales is being commemorated around the world fourteen centuries on?