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)
