Homily 25 June 2023
On the 50th Anniversary of the Consecration
of
Christ Church St Lucia on 23 June 1973.
Thank you to the Rector, Shane, for invitation to preach. Delight to be back here to mark the 50th anniversary of the ‘consecration’ of this church building. The church was built and ‘dedicated’ in Sept 1962, and just eleven years later – on 23 June 1973 – was fully paid for and so ‘consecrated’. There are plaques at the entrance remembering each of these occasions.
I had three thoughts.
· the date of a church’s consecration is less important than other dates: the date of your baptism, for example.
Today we mark the baptism of Edward. For Edward and for his family, this day, 25 June 2023, will always be a far more important date than the anniversary of any church building’s consecration, because his baptismal day is the day he was welcomed as a living member with us of the Body of Christ, as an inheritor of the Kingdom of God, and began to participate in the life of the Holy Spirit.
If you don’t already know the date of your own baptism, then it is worth finding out and marking the anniversary each year with thanksgiving to God – it is a really important date.
· The consecration of a church building is far less important than the people who built and paid for it, and the people who today gather in it.
When I look back to the people who built this church in 1962 and then paid it off in 1973, (people like Harold Carthew, whose craftsmanship we recall today, and his wife) I see faithful Anglicans, our spiritual forebears in the faith. Older parishioners may have memories of some of these faithful people.
When we think about faithfulness, Christians think first of God’s faithfulness to us. ‘God’, we say, ‘is faithful’, meaning that he is steady in purpose (our salvation) and steadfast in love. God’s love does not blow hot and cold. There is nothing capricious about God: He is constant in his love. Our faithfulness is an echo of God’s faithfulness to us: we are called through our baptism to be steady in purpose (to follow the Lord Jesus Christ) and steadfast in love.
I know none of us ever matches up to that ideal from one week to the next, but God is merciful and compassionate, and His Holy Spirit helps us to do our best.
So when I look back to the date of the consecration I see, not a building, so much as the people who built it: men and women trying to be faithful to God as God is faithful to us. We are called to the same a faithfulness.
· More important than any anniversary of consecration is the one for whom this building exists: Jesus Christ. The reason the church was built in the first place is to worship God through Jesus Christ our Lord; and to encourage and enhance our following of the Lord Jesus. I find Jesus compelling.
Not all in my family always thought the same way! I can remember one day when rector, I came home and said to my then 16 year-old daughter Catherine that I had been invited to her school (St Aidan’s Girls School) to address the senior students. You could see her eyes growing wide in alarm! I said what should I say? Without hesitation she replied: ‘Dad, it doesn’t matter what you say. Just keep it short, tell a story and Don’t Mention Jesus! I think I replied that ‘mentioning Jesus’ is for clergy an ‘occupational hazard’.)
C S Lewis described Jesus as a man of peasant shrewdness, irresistible tenderness and intolerable severity.
o I love Jesus’ peasant shrewdness, he all the time is beating the Pharisees who come to him with their tricky questions, designed to entrap him.
o I love his irresistible tenderness – forgiving, healing, helping, teaching: he is all the time trying to help those who have fallen outside the boundaries of acceptable Judaism to come back within. His message is that no one lies outside the embrace of God’s love.
o Then there is his intolerable severity. We have some of it in today’s gospel: ‘do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth, I have come not to bring peace but a sword’, and ‘whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’. When we come across these passages of intolerable severity it helps to know something of the context.
It helps to know that when Matthew wrote his gospel the church was beleaguered and to be a Christian excited suspicion, hostility and antagonism. That suspicion and hostility reached even into families. Matthew is saying that following Christ can, at some times and in some places, be costly; that Jesus does not necessarily offer his followers an easy ride. It is true even today, maybe not so marked here in Australia, but certainly in other parts of the world, where to be Christian means to excite hostility and discrimination. Eg the Coptic Christians of Egypt. (Having said that, I once knew young mother whose baptism caused her family to completely cut her off; I can also recall a police car patrolling the street outside here, when a convert from another religion was to be baptised here – he was petrified physical action would be taken against him by those who did not want him to convert. And I can recall a family who migrated to Australia who could point to clear discrimination in their country of origin because they were Christian. There was no advance in a career if you were Christian.) So Jesus’ words, recorded by Matthew, are not so far away from us. They continue to ring true for some: to choose to follow Christ is to choose a path that will not always bring peace.
A man of peasant shrewdness, irresistible tenderness and intolerable severity.
From our baptism we are called to put on the mind of Christ: to think with his mind, to work from his values, to cultivate his virtues. A simple way to start to get into the mind of Christ:
· Read a gospel, say St Mark’s Gospel, in one sitting. It will take you less than an hour. Pencil in your hand. Tick the bits you like; put a cross against what you don’t like; and a question mark against what you don’t understand. Take the crosses and question marks to Shane and he will explain everything! But chew over the ticks: that is where Christ is speaking to you. This exercise will help get you into the mind of Christ. It is his mind we need to put on.
So on this day when we mark the consecration of this church, let us
· recall other dates that are more significant for us (eg baptism anniversary);
· give thanks for the faithful men and women who built and paid for this church of which we are the privileged heirs; and let us be encouraged by their example of faithfulness.
· recall for whom this building exists, Jesus Christ, and let us try and put on his mind and his heart.
Finally, remember that being faithful and following Christ are not all down to our own efforts. The Holy Spirit is an energy of goodness from God that helps us do what we are called to do, and to become who God is calling us to become. The HS, given to us at our baptism, will help us go on being faithful: being steady in purpose (to follow Jesus) and to be steadfast in love; and help us to put on the mind of Christ; so we see with his eyes, understand with his mind, and learn how to love as God in Christ loves.