St. Wilfrid appears to have been a man who was not particularly easy to get along with - the brief biography in 'Exciting Holiness' ends with these words, "His gift to the English church was to make it more clearly a part of the Church universal, but his manner and methods were not such as to draw people close to him at a personal level." 

Which I think makes him a fab saint to have amongst our collection of patrons - a reminder of the universality of our Christian identity, and all that we share, and also a reassurance to us when we do inevitably have to work a bit harder on our relationships that that too is part of our inheritance (the church, after all, is a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints).

The reading we'll be looking at on Sunday will be Mark 8:1-12, which I've picked because it has one of my favourite lines in the whole of scripture, "Some Pharisees came to Jesus and started to argue with him. They wanted to trap him, so they asked him to perform a miracle to show that God approved of him. But Jesus gave a deep groan and said...  "  I just love that moment that (whether I'm right or not) always read as pure exasperation from the incarnate God himself - here (possibly) is Jesus, like St. Wilfrid, like us, getting grumpy with those around him!  

In this case he has good reason - being pestered again by the Pharisees for a sign, literally right after he's fed 4,000 people from seven loaves of bread... what more could they possibly want?  Him to die and come back to life?!  That would be something wouldn't it?  And yet maybe the frustration comes from knowing that even that might not be enough for some people.

Like I say, I might be a wrong, but I do like the idea of a God who lets our a frustrated groan because he's so desperate for people to realise just how much he loves them.  And I really love that our God loved us so much he became that human.