For a Dedication Festival
A sermon for the Festival of the Dedication of St Peter’s, from Mthr Cara Greenham Hancock
As we celebrate this anniversary of the Dedication of our church, there is one very particular message which I would like to share with you. It’s a message which I myself received, earlier this week. To make my life slightly more difficult, though, I was not given this message in words; rather, it was written on the face of someone as she stood here, at the chancel steps of St Peter’s. So I will do my best, with the help of God, to preach to you in words what this women preached to me with her face.
First, though, to help us get to that point, it’s worth setting our context.
Why do we celebrate the Dedication of our church today, in addition to the festivities we had here just a few weeks ago to mark our patronal festival, St Peter’s Day, a weekend kept with great conviviality and rejoicing? One answer to that question would be that it’s never a bad time to celebrate God’s gift to us of the church, to rejoice in it, and to pray that we may be worthy members of the body of Christ. But another, more useful, answer, is that they have different emphases as we reflect upon what the church is. At our patronal feast, we look, appropriately, to our patron, St Peter, to celebrate him and the model he gives us for our life of discipleship. It’s a chance to think about our own opportunities to serve, to learn, to grow in holiness and love. At our patronal feast, we look around at ourselves as the body of Christ here in this place, committing ourselves to being ever more and more the people of God in sincerity, and joy, and faithfulness.
The feast of our Dedication, however, is not focussed on the life of our patron, or, particularly on our own lives, but on the action of God. This feast is a declaration and a celebration of the fact that God has chosen to make himself present to his people in this specific place, consecrated and set apart as a dwelling place for him to be available to his people: the source of our life, our joy, our salvation. Today’s feast, for those who are interested in the distinctions of liturgical rank, is therefore of a higher degree of solemnity than the patronal festival. It is a feast of the Lord himself: a chance to rejoice in the reality of his presence here, amongst us, in this place.
God, being God, is omnipresent and eternal – he does not, for his own sake, need a house to dwell in. But the people of God, that is to say, us, are the focus of God’s loving attention and compassion. We have become the recipients of this great gift, out of his generosity and his love. God has consecrated this church, this and every church, as a place where his presence will be faithfully available for his people. We see here the whole sacramental system: of God being faithfully, reliably available to his people through specific, particular, tangible ways of relating. In bread and wine. In oil and water. In gesture and word. In brick and stone. God may exist beyond time and space, but the people whom he loves do exist in time and in space, so he comes to be with them here. This is the story of the Incarnation, and this is also the story of God’s presence in his church.
The building of a church, the effort and prayer and dedication it calls forth from the people of God, is a co-operation with the work of God, who is the one to bless and crown the effort, the one who truly consecrates a place. The reading from Genesis we hear today is a beautiful example of this – Jacob, resting one night, has a vision of the glory of God, and hears God’s promises to faithfully abide in that place. Jacob’s response on rising is to set up a stone – to start to build something, and to declare “this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of Heaven.” A place – a particular, specific place, becomes a site where, astonishingly, God’s boundless and infinite glory can be discovered.
So, when one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, on the first Sunday of August in 1848, the first service of divine worship took place here, this patch of ground, these bricks and walls, became part of the sacramental system: part of God’s action in the world, his way of making himself available to give to his people his love and compassion, to guide them into the truth and make their lives holy.
The dedication festival of our church is a cause for the highest celebration and solemnity: today we proclaim and give thanks for the reality that for one hundred and seventy-seven years (and counting!) God has faithfully bestowed upon us the gift of his own abiding presence in this place. He is here, as the source of our life, as the heart of our sacramental system. With Jacob, we can rejoice and say “this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” The gate of heaven. Both a house and a gate: a doorway. For not only is this the place where God draws close to us at our level, the level of space and time, it’s also the gateway through which he lifts us up to share in the life of heaven, draws us into his eternal and sublime dwelling place.
But what has all this got to do with what I saw in one long moment on Wednesday afternoon on a woman’s face as she stood here, at the chancel steps of St Peter’s? She was a recent widow, and we had just finished offering the requiem mass for her late husband. The two of them had been married here, at St Peter’s, sixty years ago, exchanging their vows before this altar, in the presence of God and in his name. They had then brought their babies here, to our font, to be baptised into the family of God. They had come here time and time again through the decades, to mourn, to rejoice, to seek the comfort and solace of prayer. This had been the place that she, her husband, and all their family had known and trusted for their encounters with the presence of the living God – his blessing, his mercy, his healing, and it was now where he had received the final gift the church had to offer him, in its funeral rites.
Her face, as she looked from the door, to the altar, to the font, to the pews where her family had gathered to seek God so many times, and had just gathered once more, showed a lifetime of understanding this truth: a life of loving trust in the presence of God, which is the promise he makes when he consecrates a church, a building of bricks and mortar, walls and windows, to become a house for his own dwelling, and to be a gate of Heaven: a place from which his blessing for all his people can be known, and shared, and sent out into all the world. Amen.