May 23, 2010

Carolin Telford

Pentecost Sunday     Acts 2:1-21     Phil 3:4-11

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

So, here we all are. Not out and about in the fresh air, or downing our second cappucino, or having a well-deserved Sunday lie-in. Here we all are – here. We have chosen from a wide range of alternatives to be the church at St Matthew’s today. We have all turned up. And today is a great day to have turned up, because it is Pentecost, sometimes called the birthday of the church.

Today we re-tell each other the story of that morning fifty days after Easter when the disciples sat down once more in a room together. It was Shavout, the festival of the blessing of the harvest, seven weeks after Passover, and Jews from far and wide had come to be part of the festivities and to plead Y-H-W-H’s blessing on the crops beginning to swell with grain in the fields.

Then some thing which was not any other thing, but something like a wind, something like tongues of flame, poured, swept, leapt through the room and caught everyone there up along with it. It set the disciples alight, it swept them up to a new level of awareness of their gifts; it brought clarity to their vision of who Jesus had been and still was to them, and who they could be if they followed him authentically. Life and power were breathed into them. Uncertainty and hesitation evaporated away. Thus inspired, they poured, swept, leapt out into the world and news about Jesus began to spread like wildfire. And so, from that ignition spark of Pentecost two millennia ago, the church began.

Ten years ago, my phone rang at four o’clock in the morning. It was two days before Pentecost, in the year 2000. A phone call at that hour is always a portent of doom, and thus it was. It was the Vicar of All Saints West Dulwich, in South-East London, ringing to tell me, as Churchwarden, that there was a fire at our church. His description did scant justice to the reality. As I drove down the south circular towards the church I could see the column of flame and smoke, which was rising several hundred feet from the roof straight up into a limpid sky. You couldn’t have imagined that in a brick, slate and stone church there was that much to burn. But burn it surely did. Not to the ground, but it certainly burnt out, almost entirely.

For those less wedded to the joys of the Victorian gothic revival as an architectural form, irritatingly enough the ‘footprint’, the external shape of the building, remained after the fire much as it had been before it – it takes a lot to completely incinerate brick and stone. But the interior surfaces were severely corroded and fractured by the heat, and irreplaceable treasures had been lost – including a fantastical carved wooden font cover from Bavaria, about two meters high, which had a white dove resting on a golden ball hovering above it, suspended on a very effective counterweight system over the marble font. The font itself, donated by a family in memory of their son who had died in WWI, was scattered into pieces, exploded by the heat. The timbers supporting the roof burnt out, falling the considerable distance to the floor and in some cases punching holes through this down into the crypt. One knocked the beak off the brass lectern eagle as it fell.

The Millennium… Pentecost… a conflagration… it seemed that subtlety wasn’t God’s strong suit. And just in case we hadn’t managed to join up the dots, when the fire was eventually damped down and an inventory could begin to be compiled of the little that had survived, it was discovered that one page of the Bible, picturesquely charred around the edges, but perfectly legible, lay on top of a pile of sodden cinders by the beakless lectern eagle.

‘Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, …’

It was, biblically enough, seven years, and nearly seven million pounds, before All Saints was reopened by the Archbishop of Canterbury in April 2006. Seven years of a process which was as democratic and inclusive of church and local community members as it could be made: seven years of debates, investigations, reports, recommendations, meetings, consultations, proposals, surveys, plans, permits. And, it has to be said, seven years of prayer and discernment, of reflection on the unfolding meaning of each aspect of the process which was absorbing so much of our time, illuminated by those words Paul wrote to the Christians at Philippi.

For all this was laid over the same seven years of services, visiting, teaching and preaching: the ordinary time of being church, but being church in school halls and people’s living rooms. The process of rebuilding required our utter attention and concentration, as faithful stewards of a richly symbolic repository of church history and theology, yet we were aware that the building was not and could not be permitted to become the focus of who we were as church.

Circumstances, often pain-filled, unbidden or unchosen events, sear and singe us and reveal to us the heart of the matter of being Christians and being church. And the heart of the matter is not glorious architecture, or beautifully crafted music, or fulsome singing, or the word of God being proclaimed, or being caught up in a vision of what is possible through inspiring sermons, or a sense by the grace of God of belonging to something of enduring significance and meaning in this troubled world, or the joy of being accepted just the way we are, or the satisfaction of finding a place of welcome within a collective in which we can use our gifts and which fulfills our needs, or the blessing of offering this level of hospitality to others. Or rather it is these things, and many others besides, but it is infinitely more than just a composite of all of them.

Our sentence this morning is from the accounts of the sayings of the desert fathers, those Christians who felt that to allow Christ into the desert of their hearts they needed to place themselves within the immensity and isolation of the physical desert. Abba Joseph is replying to a question put to him by Brother Lot, who asks, ‘Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer, and meditation and quiet: and as far as I can I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?’

What else, indeed?

To be church is to be learning and practicing together in company, the opening of our hearts and our selves to the Spirit of God. It is to allow ourselves to be breathed into and our hearts and minds to be broken open by that Spirit, as we are blown about and re and re configured into church. It is learning to be able to live fruitfully with provisionality, despite this being belied by the physical evidence of constancy around us in the four walls of this, and other, church buildings. It is learning to discern, and to be willing to wait, and to stay with difficult processes. It is a discipline of attention and faithfulness. It is to be in company together with people whom we haven’t chosen, and who haven’t chosen us, learning how to be together as God’s people in this place, and in all the places we will go when we leave here. So, welcome to the church, Riley. And happy Pentecost, happy being church at St Matthews, here in this city in 2010, to us all.