Dedication Festival
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let’s cut to the chase: this is not how we hoped to celebrate our Millennium. There was meant to be more pomp and circumstance: hundreds in attendance, a civic celebration, perhaps the Mayor and University dignitaries lining the rows, a Millennium peal ringing from the tower, and the Bishop preaching in sonorous tones. Instead, we are dispersed, only a few meeting for a stripped down service, and you’ve got me preaching, while I’ve got one foot out the door. For me, it’s especially bitter not to say good-bye to all of you in person.
It seems a cruel way to ring in 1000 years of parish life. Yet it’s keeping with these times and with time itself as we know it. Haven’t we learned the lesson again and again these many months? Created things are being shaken. Millions are sick, hundreds of thousands dying. Political life is corrupted; our cherished customs are constantly being swept away, and once venerable institutions crumble.
The Church of God is not immune to such realities. Like this parish, it stands in the middle of the earthly city. We mourn with those who mourn; we weep with those who weep (Rom 12:15); were the whole country to be carried into exile, we would go into exile too, and seek there the prosperity of another city (see Jer 29:4-7). We are fully a part of this world’s life and therefore of its sorrows, its deaths, its changes.
So it has ever been.
In our Gospel reading, the Lord Jesus takes his stand, not in a pure Temple, immune to the manipulations of rulers, the ambitions of the money hungry, or the decay of time. No: Jesus stands on a spot where temples dedicated to the God of Israel rose and fell many times, since that moment when Solomon himself stood before the Lord and prayed in a newly built sanctuary, shining with gold and filled with the smoke of incense and with God’s glory (1 Kgs 8:22-30).
Solomon prayed then that God would keep his promises, preserving the line of Davidic kings and hearing prayer in the temple. But Solomon did not hold up his end of the bargain, the covenant. He did not stand faithfully, nor did the people of God.
What did God say of that great house? “My name shall be there” (1 Kgs 8:29) And: “My house shall be called a house of prayer.” But it was “made a den of robbers” and it fell (Isa 56:7; Jer. 7:11). It was rebuilt after the exile, and it fell again. It was rebuilt in greater splendour by Herod the Great, until it was a wonder of the ancient world. But many in that time consider the temple’s ministry and leadership wholly corrupt. And it, too, fell beneath tramping Roman boots, the armies of Vespasian and Titus in AD 70.
It is the nature of created things that they change, fall, pass. That is true not only of people and institutions, countries, buildings, ways of life, but of everything. Even experiences. The Letter to the Hebrews gestures in this direction, saying:
You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. … Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear’ Heb 12:18-19, 21)
The author describes the scenes recounted in Exodus, when Israel stood at the foot of Mt Sinai and it blazed. We have not come to that place, that moment, for it passed away. We may read of it; we may enter it imaginatively; but we cannot touch it or see it, smell the fire’s smoke, hear the trumpet’s blast, taste the bitter water at its foot. The specifics of that divine encounter teach us, but they have passed into the pages of Scripture and the memory of God.
We have not come there today, as surely as we have not come all together in one place to celebrate our millennium or to say our good-byes. Things change; time passes; we are shaken.
Yet all is not lost. We have not lost God or each other. ‘Heaven and earth may pass away; but God’s word shall never pass away’. We have not come to something we may touch or grasp or sense, to Solomon’s Temple or the fires of Mt Sinai, but we have come to something far better:
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 (Heb. 12:22-24).
Created things are being shaken, even removed, ‘so that what cannot be shaken may remain’ (12:27). The ageless, the matchless, the unshakeable kingdom of God! — that is what we are receiving right now. We are surrounded by God’s angels; we are surrounded by God’s saints; we are with Jesus in his city and we are touched by his ‘sprinkled blood’. There could be nothing better.
This is the reality of life, and it remains wherever we go. When we leave this building, the kingdom remains. If these stones were razed to the ground, the kingdom remains. If we parted ways today, never to see each other again before death, the kingdom remains, and we are inseparably united in it. ‘Our heart and our flesh may fail’ — we will all go to the dust — but ‘God is the strength of our hearts and our portion forever’ (Psalm 73:25).
On this dedication festival, we give thanks for this parish, which has testified to God’s faithfulness for 1000 years. By the grace of God, may it stand 1000 more. And may we all be kept standing in faith until that day we receive the kingdom in its fulness.