Preached at St Oswald’s, Widford
Psalm 121; 1 Corinthians 15.50–58
“Therefore, my beloved brethren … know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”
St Oswald’s Widford © Gerry Lynch, 5 August 2026
The life of St Oswald, on whose feast day we gather in this church dedicated to him, might easily be accounted a failure. He ruled Northumbria for nine years, before dying in battle aged just thirty-eight in the incessant wars between Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Picts, themselves multiply factionalised, that disfigured these islands in the 7th Century. Providence decreed him a more important role than might be supposed from those bare facts – after his father’s death in war, he had spent his childhood in exile in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, home to the great monastery of Iona. In exile, he converted to Christianity, and full of fervour on his return to Northumbria, he granted the island of Lindisfarne to Bishop Aidan as the site of another monastery. That Holy Island had such a significant impact on Church history that Oswald’s cult spread deep into continental Europe. As far away as Slovenia, the town of Ožbalt is named for him.
The great Bard was wrong. The good that men do is often not interred with their bones – indeed, seeds sown in our earthly lives are often only ready to be harvested long after our deaths. We all admire the person who plants trees that will only reach maturity in the time of their great-grandchildren.
It is in that light that we should look at Caroline’s political career. She joined the Secretariat of the Conservative Group in the European Parliament in 1974, before being elected herself a decade later, serving in the European Parliament until 2009. For more than a third of a century, she served the British people and those of the whole continent, during a period of extraordinary change which saw the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the European Economic Community’s transformation into the European Union, and its expansion firstly to the newly democratic states of southern Europe, and then to the formerly Communist East – to Ožbalt in Slovenia, and well beyond.
Caroline developed significant expertise in environmental and public health matters, and was one of those British MEPs who made a serious contribution not only to the detailed legislative work of the European Parliament but to the construction of Europe – work of which she was immensely proud.
St Paul writes, “be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” Future historians will judge how fruitful the seeds that she and her British colleagues sowed prove to be; I suspect more fruitful than it might seem in the still relatively close aftermath of Brexit. Let us remember that this last decade has seen tens of thousands of Ukrainians give their lives not only to preserve the independence of their nation, but to prevent it being wrested out of the European family of nations.
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord…” In the wee hours of a midsummer morning a decade ago, I quoted those words in a leisure centre sports hall to a clergyman friendas the votes were being counted and it became clear that we had lost.
Ultimately, all human efforts in this universe must fail. We are here imprisoned by entropy and decay, by the frailty of our bodies and shortness of our lives, and the way that sin dooms us to undermine our own best efforts. St Paul writes that, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”
But that is not the end of the story. Already centuries before Christ, the Psalmist wrote that “he that keepeth thee shall not slumber… he shall preserve thy soul… from this time forth and even for evermore.”
Our bodies may be frail and short-lived, but all our instincts tell us that we are more than just material beings, made for survival of the fittest – that there is something in us that inhabits far more than this physical universe; something that we sense is profoundly animated by truth and goodness, beauty and love; something immortal.
“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” Exactly how is a mystery, but this sense that, even in our most glorious moments, we are longing for a true home beyond this life has been recorded by people across millennia of time and vast cultural gaps.
For the Christian, it was Christ who, in facing the tragedy of a pitiless early death and the wickedness of humanity at its most sinful, shattered the power of death and evil so that “the dead shall be raised incorruptible”.
For the Christian, it is through God’s gift of Himself in Christ that death is swallowed up in victory. As we commend her soul to the God who has given us the victory, let us thank Him for the life and work of Caroline Jackson.
Amen.
