Sacred Space - Dedication Festival

Sacred Space – Dedication Festival

“This is the house of God, and gate of heaven.” Gen 28.17 (Introit verse for Dedication Festival)


I Google Earthed the house I grew up in last night – 160 Old Shoreham Road, Shoreham-by-Sea – to see if the shed is still there. And it is!

I listened to the Third Programme in that shed, built radios, did my homework and said my prayers.

In the house, we four boys were in one room, my granny and my two older sisters in another, and mum and dad and my baby sister in the box room. The shed was a Godsend. It was a poustinia, a retreat, a place for a young boy to dream about another life.

Most humans have a strong sense of place. So returning to the place of their birth, or a place associated with their first love; a place of great happiness or a place of deep anguish - these places are more than mere geographic locations.

Through memory and its linked emotions, space becomes differentiated for us, divided by familiar tracks. It’s not homogenous, but interrupted by either memory, or in some places where we have never been before, by a sense of mystery.

On a Dedication Festival such as today, we are giving thanks for the building itself, but in so doing we are recognising that it is far more than the sum of its masonry. It is full of memory and mystery.

In today’s epistle, the writer to the Hebrews reminds Christians that when they gather together in earthly temples such as this, they are drawing on the collective memory of the church, and uniting in the unseen mystery of heaven.

He could have been looking at the angels and saints which are depicted everywhere in this building, and as his eye moves from the roof to the walls, to the cross, to the altar he declares:

You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12.22-24)

We maintain this memory year after year in our liturgy, the Bible readings, the music and vestments and in the very architecture of the church.

The Baptistry is at the entrance, for Baptism is the sign of admission to the Church of Christ.
This is why we should have a stoup of Holy Water at the door – to remind us every time we enter that we have been baptized. Perhaps some of you can remember when ours disappeared?

The altar and cross is the obvious focus – the place where the Gospel is re-enacted.

The pulpit and lectern stand either side of the rood screen, for the reading of the word and the interpreting of the word, the pulpit on the north, nearer the barbarians who came from the north.

In New York last week I went round that wonderful mediaeval museum up at the top of Manhattan, the Cloisters.

It gave me two new ideas for St Paul’s: the great ivory liturgical comb, used by the priest to purify his hair before the mass; and the golden straw or pipette to help the faithful in receiving the wine. I don’t know how we’ve managed without them all these years!

So we could go on, using our collective Judaeo-Christian memory to differentiate this sacred space, following the writer to the Hebrews in re-ordering the world of human ‘things’ to reflect God’s order for salvation.

But a Christian church is not just about order and memory. It is also about mystery.

There are some Sacred Spaces of course that need no ordering: places and events that produce awe and a sense of the transcendent - the total otherness of a vast universe and the feeling that there is continuity and meaning to human life. And yes, even the feeling that there is a God.

Mountain tops and seascapes; quiet gardens and vast deserts; friends in candlelight; the beauty of music, poetry, art…

However, for a Christian, these Sacred Spaces, whether ordered or ‘natural’ bring the sense of mystery to a focus.

The general feelings of awe and transcendence, of longing and loving, and occasionally the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto) - the compelling and fascinating mystery at the centre of life and existence - these feelings find particular focus in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

This is the sacred breaking into the profane.

For Christians these sacred spaces - these houses of prayer - although they do not fully explain the sacred, nevertheless give shape and form to what we believe to be a Christian explanation of truth.

Many people in our post-Christian society today do not know how to use them. They are unaware of the meaning of the symbols.

They are even in danger of worshipping the created rather than the Creator; they follow the ‘line of beauty’ in a curve that turns in on itself. Sadly, they miss the living messages of a house of prayer, a gate to heaven.

We live in a culture where people don’t like Christian focus, because it brings responsibilities and duties. The answer to everything is a sort of blurry thing. The revelation of Christ as Lord of Sacred Space necessitates response and an effort to live differently.

This is the sort of focused, prayer-infused Sacred Space St Paul’s should be, and I believe, is. I hope you continue to support the daily offices and mass. This is at the heart of maintaining the Divine energy of this sacred space, the presence of Christ.

Yet we still have more work to do in helping people who sense the numinous here to take another step: to meet the risen Christ and be transformed by him.

And then another miracle occurs. Our reality of time and space is so infused by the presence of God, that we are caught up in the voiceless mystery of the love of Christ.

At the altar, as the priest raises the body of Christ towards the heavens, eternity touches earth and our bodies and souls are fed with manna from heaven. The sublime is made tangible.

We give most hearty thanks today for this Sacred Space, and for all the lives from around the world whom God has touched through it for over 165 years.

And as again we offer gifts of bread and wine; we offer prayers of thanksgiving and wonder, or sometimes of anxiety, pain, bewilderment; but we remember with faith and hope that

“This is the house of God, and gate of heaven.” Gen 28.17 (Introit verse for Dedication Festival)

Review - SCM Studyguide: Christian Spirituality

SCM Studyguide: Christian Spirituality
Ross Thompson with Gareth Williams
SCM, 2008, £16.99
ISBN 978-0-334-04093-4

In many ways this is my sort of book: classifying, diagrams, spreadsheets, all you need to know about a mystic in 2 paragraphs. I can already see my PowerPoint presentation emerging. I suspect the book will annoy others for whom its schematizing and over-simplification is anathema. They might argue that it uses the very methods that are so antithetical to spiritual understanding to explore that same spiritual understanding. But then you have to remember Thompson's audience.

It is a very readable introduction for any thoughtful person, although it is obviously aimed at the undergraduate market and written to give a broad overview in just 250 pages. Also it is written with students who have no faith backgrounds in mind, sometimes stating the obvious for those of us who have grown up in confessional Christianity. The large type and classroom format help draw you through the schema of the book. The style is like a very long Grove booklet, but with a much more liberal groundswell.

Part One is a selective history of spirituality, running from the Old to the New Testament, through Patristics, the 'Dark Ages' and Medieval period, to Reformation and the post Enlightenment. It is inevitably patchy, and your particular gurus may not be selected. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), for instance, gets a bigger mention than Pentecostalism. It attempts an almost impossible task which Thompson admits emerges as something of a 'fireworks display', designed to introduce some of the main concepts and to give a sense of the shifting understanding of spirituality over the last three thousand years.

Part Two is more substantial and looks thematically at the intersection of spirituality with Experience, Science, Theology, the Body, the Psyche, Ethics and Difference (Postmodernity and Pluralism). This is more intellectually demanding and the language and quotations will sometimes be a challenge to readers. It is very much a teaching text, which in the hands of a good teacher will open up the subject. The bibliography is extensive and some more restricted suggestions for further reading and a feel for some of the key texts would have been useful. For the target audience a shorter, annotated bibliography would have avoided intimidation.

Thompson acknowledges that the book approaches the subject in a 'middle way' (which is well suited to Anglicans): 'self-implicating rather than confessional or detached'. In this sense it is a contemporary approach to spirituality, although there are times when the author's 'self-implication' inevitably skews the content. A look at his website (holydust.org) explains something of the direction permeating much of the work. However, this is a book I will keep and browse, and recommend to those wanting to learn more of Christian Spirituality.

Church Times

The Wedding Banquet - Justification

The Wedding Banquet. Matthew 22.1-14

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord… for he has clothed me in the garments of salvation.” Isaiah 61.10

As a young working class lad, I remember being very nervous in my first few terms at Cambridge, every time an invitation appeared in my pigeonhole to some dinner or lunch or blessing of the university beehives... What was I to wear?

Sometimes the invitation would bear the enigmatic phrase: “Doctors will wear Scarlet.” But I wasn’t a doctor. That didn’t help.

Gradually I learnt the dress codes and visited the charity shops where I picked up tail coats and dinner jackets and patent leather shoes – all of which I still have in my wardrobe. They have survived the last 40 years considerably better than my body has.

Many of us have dreams about being inappropriately dressed on posh occasions. Or worse still, there is the nightmare that we are completely naked. Of course Mr Freud had plenty to say about that.

And this surprisingly common feature of human dreams around the world, is what gives something of an edge to today’s parable of Jesus – and to the plight of the poor man being bound in the picture by Merian the Elder which adorns the front of our service sheet.

This parable, sometimes called the Great Banquet or the Wedding Feast, has a twist at the end which is not in Luke’s version of the same parable. (Lk 14.16-24)

Let’s do a little Bible study on the Gospel this morning.

The context of the story is Jesus’ teaching that many of the Jewish leaders had rejected the message of the Gospel that he was proclaiming. “He came unto his own and his own received him not” as John put it. (John 1.11)

Matthew also used a perfectly legitimate Jewish teaching method of interpretation – called pesher – which embellished the original parable in the light of what had happened since Jesus delivered it.

So the slaves being beaten and killed is a description of what happened to many in the Christian church in the four decades after Christ – especially the early missionaries.

Matthew adds too that the King was furious and sent troops to destroy the City. Certainly Christians after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD could not see this as anything other than God’s judgment on a nation that had rejected the Messiah.

So Jesus came to the Jews and they did not want him, and the Gospel was then thrown open to the whole world. The servants were to bring in good and bad, Matthew tells us – everyone was welcome to the Banquet in honour of the King’s Son.

But what about this man without a wedding robe?

The king immediately spots him: ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.’ (Matt 22.12-14)

Now that’s worse treatment than you get if you turn up at the Athenaeum wearing trainers!

But why does Matthew add these curious verses?

Well think for a moment about how the other guests managed to get wedding robes. They were dragged in off the streets.

I can remember my embarrassment at turning up to a friend’s club for dinner, one summer evening, without jacket or tie. It was like the scary dream.

But very politely I was ushered into some cubby-hole where there was a selection of ill-fitting jackets and hideous ties – they certainly didn’t want to encourage you to do it again! But they clothed you in an acceptable way for dinner, even if you felt the style police were about to arrest you at every mouthful.

The simple part of this parable, in both Luke’s and Matthew’s version, is that we are invited to the Gospel party and should accept the invitation.

The more complex part, has to be teased out, and contains a doctrine explained most fully in the subsequent writings of St Paul – the doctrine of justification.

The King in the parable is hugely generous.

He provides his Son - whose wedding feast it is.

He provides the food and the wine.

But what Matthew adds in his version, is that the King provides also the fine wedding robes.

“In this way, nobody need be ashamed of their rags, and nobody can be proud of their party frocks; there is room neither for embarrassment nor for pride in the feast of the kingdom – at this Table. Both attitudes ruin the enjoyment.” (pace Michael Green)

In the words of one of Charles Wesley’s great hymns: “Clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach the eternal throne.”

Or as our text from the prophet Isaiah has it: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord… for he has clothed me in the garments of salvation.”

The biblical doctrine of Justification is simply this: that when we feel all unworthy of stepping into the presence of God; when we feel, again in the words of the prophet Isaiah, that “all our righteousness is as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64.6); when we feel stripped and naked before the loving gaze of the Judge of all the earth – then God clothes us in the righteousness of Christ; he looks on us with unreserved acceptance, because we are in Christ; in the Beloved Son in whose honour the wedding banquet is spread.

The offending guest was offered wedding robes like all the rest. But he chose to wear his own robes – he was good enough for God and didn’t need any charity from the King; any grace and forgiveness from God. He was arrogant and proud in his heart.

So this parable is not a threat or a warning, that if we don’t make the grade we will get bound and cast into hell.

Rather it is a loving invitation, that whether good or bad, as long as we come pleading only the merits of Christ our Saviour, clothed in his righteousness, then we are welcome to enjoy the banquet.

Never believe the self-deception that you are unworthy to receive the bread and the wine. Of course you are unworthy. We all are!

As I shall say in a few minutes as I invite you to receive the Bread and Wine of the kingdom: “Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.”

And we will all respond, priests and people: “ Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.”

The Banquet and the wedding robes are gifts, to be received joyfully.

As the choir will sing as we eat and drink:

O sacred banquet, wherein Christ is received;
the memorial of his passion is renewed;
the soul is filled with grace;
and a pledge of future glory is given to us.
Alleluia!

[O sacrum convivium a 6
Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611)

O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur;
recolitur memoria passionis ejus;
mens impletur gratia;
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
Alleluia!

Words: Antiphon to the Magnificat, Second Vespers, Corpus Christi]