Dedication Festival 2007  - A Sermon preached by the Reverend Robert Atwell

Genesis 28.11-18; 1 Peter 2.1-10; John 10.22-29

One of my happiest childhood memories is sitting in front of the telly on Christmas Day with my parents, grandmother and sister, and watching The Morecambe and Wise Show and laughing until our sides ached. Judging by the current television schedules, this unique British method of child/adult bonding is now focused around watching Little Britain. Whilst David Walliams and Matt Lucas put the hypocrisy of many aspects of our national life under the microscope and make us all either laugh or cringe, they do so by focusing on the basest of things. They quite literally rub our noses in it. Indeed if television schedules are anything to judge by, we seem gripped by crudity and voyeurism. Just consider programmes such as Shameless, You are what you eat, Big Brother, and detective stories that revolve around endless post-mortems. Come back Sherlock Holmes – all is forgiven.

Today it is quite possible to entertain ourselves to death, but without liberating us for living in a more wholesome way. In our affluent and individualistic society we seem to have swapped wit for crudity, and in the midst of it to have lost a sense of the holy. Vicki Pollard and the other larger than life characters that populate Little Britain have no sense of the sacred because they are so self-engrossed. And when we are self-absorbed we have little capacity to embrace the self-forgetfulness that is the prerequisite of perceiving the sacred in life.

I say this by way of a commentary on the significance of our Dedication Festival today. In a noisy fast-moving city like London it’s easy to overlook what a gift this building is and why we need to treasure it. In Primrose Hill this church represents sacred space. It says, ‘Come, stop and be still, so that you don’t end up like Vicki Pollard.’ It subverts our everyday habits by inviting us to forget ourselves, to think and pray for others, and above all to make room for God in our lives.

I would be the first to admit that in the busyness of our lives it is easy to be distracted from our conversation with God and, as a result, from realising our capacity for holiness. It’s easy to get self-absorbed. But God calls us into a more profound way of living in which the ego is not king. He calls us to holiness and wholeness, to become more truly ourselves, to be the people he knows us to be. And in that process of spiritual growth, this building can have a significant part to play.

Church buildings are not ends in themselves. But they are statements in brick and stone which keep alive the rumour of God in a place. As Jacob said in our first reading when he awoke from his dream in which he saw a ladder going up to heaven with angels going up and down on it, ‘Truly, the Lord is in this place and I didn’t know it.’ But once he recognised that God was indeed present, it changed his life.

As we become aware of God’s presence here and within ourselves, so we become awake to God’s presence everywhere and in everyone, and that includes the Vicki Pollards of this world.

People in Britain today are searching. They fed up with being offered consumer solutions to their problems. They are looking for something deeper and more durable. Some are looking for a place of refuge from the pressures of modern day living; others for a community of faith where they can belong, where their ill-formed feelings can find a language and a shape. People are looking for ways to inhabit their lives more fully.

Each of us has a deep capacity to know and respond to a sense of the holy. As Christian people we are tasked with creating a sense of the sacred here at St Mary’s for the people of Primrose Hill, to help them in their conversation with God, that journey of personal transformation of which Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. And that’s where the quality of our welcome and the integrity of our own search for God count.

I sometimes ask new curates if they’ve ever been into a betting shop or know how to put a bet on for the 3.30 at Aintree. With one or two notable exceptions, they don’t. Actually I don’t either. I feel all at sea and don’t know what to do. My point is that that’s how the vast majority of the population of this country feel when they turn up at church. They feel puzzled. What’s going on? What do you do? What book is it? Let’s face it, church culture is an acquired taste, particularly our brand of smells and bells and processions and pretty frocks. It’s all pretty bizarre.

None of us, assuming we were born in England, can remember the years it took us to learn to speak English. But slowly we found ourselves at home in our mother-tongue. We learnt to be at home in the conversations of our families and our friends. When people come to church for the first time they are entering a strange world in which they don’t understand the language. It takes time, for some years, to feel comfortable in the language of worship, to find in the vocabulary of the church words that can express what is in their hearts, and to discover in the Bible God’s own word to them.

And just because I’m a priest, don’t think I’ve got it all sussed. Sometimes I feel as if I am only touching the fringes of reality – like a child playing with pebbles on the beach, I often ignore the unexplored ocean at my back, but then I hear the roar of its waves upon the shore and I am moved to wonder and worship. Such is the mystery we call God.

In 1872 when St Mary’s was built and dedicated to the worship of God there were no grants, no money from the government or indeed from the Church of England. The congregation built this church out of their own pockets, and we stand for ever in their debt. Today we give thanks for their faith and sacrificial generosity, but it falls to us to pick up the baton, which is why our stewardship renewal campaign, which we will be launching at the end of the month, is so important. This building is a huge asset. We must care for it, keep it repaired and clean and open. There are too many locked doors in this world.

Let me close with a story. I recently heard of an English farmer visiting an Australian farmer in the outback. He was amazed at the size of the farm – literally hundreds of thousands of acres. What particularly struck him was that there were no fences. ‘How do you control the cattle?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ came the reply, ‘we may not have fences but we do have wells. We don’t spend time and money putting up and mending fences. What we concentrate on is keeping our wells full of pure water and then the cattle come to us.’

In the end it will not be this building that will convert people, but you and me. We need to live what this building proclaims. Our own lives and homes need to be sacred spaces in which God dwells, so that when people look at us they see Christ alive in us. We should not get preoccupied with constructing theological fences. More often than not they only succeed in keeping people out. Instead we need to concentrate on tending the wells and people will come.

So my message to you on this Dedication Festival is this: be thirsty for the living water which is Christ himself. So may our parish be blessed and God’s name be glorified.