We celebrated St Bede a day early at the inter-church school that bears his name in Cambridge because that was the date when both I and the RC Bishop of East Anglia could both be there to bless their new and rebuilt works making good and more than good the damage of their fire last year. We then moved to the Sports Hall where Mass was celebrated for 700 (it's the RC's turn this year) and I was kindly invited to preach. Not quite Michael Curry I'm afraid, but by the end the students had found their voice and the hurrahs lifted the roof. Not literally: we don't another rebuild just now. So read on and see and what I said:

We’re in St Bede’s School and it’s St Bede’s Day tomorrow – but who on earth was St Bede? Now I’ve got to be careful here because I’m told that some of you are world-class eggheads on the subject. But it has to be said he did live a long time ago and had a pretty strange name, well strange to us anyway, because when he wasn’t writing Latin he spoke a pretty strange language, a sort of Geordie Anglo-Saxon.

Here’s a bit of it to give you an idea of how it sounded:

Nū scylun hergan     hefaenrīcaes Uard,

metudæs maecti     end his mōdgidanc,

uerc Uuldurfadur,     suē hē uundra gihwaes,

ēci dryctin     ōr āstelidæ

It probably sounds like gobbledygook to you – but Bede in fact became called a Doctor of the Church, not because he knew much medicine, but because he knew just about everything there was to know at the time, and it was his teaching (the word Doctor originally meant Teacher) that probably did more than anyone else’s to pass on the learning of the ancient world to Europe as we know it.

It was all a long time ago – but hang on, there are some really important points for today and for this school too hidden in there somewhere.

First, teaching and learning really mattered to Bede. And it really matters to us. Not just swotting it all up, but putting it to use, passing it on. Bede like all the great scholars and saints of his time knew that school and education is about the whole person, about enabling us to become the people fully alive in Jesus Christ that God intended us to be. So, here’s a first cheer for St Bede and for a St Bede’s School where education is growing great people for the great future of God. Hip, hip – hooray!

Second, Bede was amazing, he didn’t just write Bible commentaries – he wrote science too: on how the tides work (essential stuff if you live by the sea) and time as well (really important if you wanted to keep all the feasts at the right time, and not end up like Morecambe and Wise with all the right masses, but not necessarily in the right order). Bede knew that all learning is one; that things like RE and science aren’t enemies but actually work together to give us the full picture about the world we live in. So, here’s a second cheer for St Bede and for a St Bede’s School where all the colours of the rainbow of learning are shining brightly and building into the one light of Christ. Hip, hip – hooray!

Third, back to Bede’ funny language. It might have sounded like gobbledygook to you, but it doesn’t to me, because I studied it at university and was born near where Bede was a monk, so ah can doo a reet good northern Ac-cent if ah let missen goo. And there’s an important point here, that for Bede and for us all the amazing education I’ve been talking about is absolutely for everyone, because God loves every one of us and has commanded us, yes commanded us, to love one another too – even the ones with the funny accents or names we’ve never heard of before. So here’s a third cheer for St Bede and a St Bede’s School where every child matters, and no-one is ever pushed to edges or given a raw deal. Hip, hip – hooray!

Just one last point. The bit of Bede I read out is his version of the very first Christian hymn ever written in English, by a cow-herd called Caedmon, and its words sum up exactly the praise and thanksgiving I want to give to God for our saint and our school today, the God of wonders who has blessed us from the beginning:

Now let us honour the guardian of heaven,

his might as a maker, and the purpose of his mind,

the work of the glorious father as he every wonder

established in the beginning, the eternal lord.

And so for one last time, for St Bede and St Bede’s: Hip, hip – hooray! Hip, hip – hooray! Hip, hip – hooray!