ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEDICATION

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury

 

I Kings 8:22-33

Psalm 84:1-6(7)

I Peter 2:1-5,9-10

Matthew 21:12-16

 

Today is the one day of the year when we get to celebrate the gift of this church building. Most Sundays, the building is the medium through which we direct our attention to higher things. When we look at the stars through a telescope, our primary attention isn’t on the apparatus itself but on the heavenly bodies we’re looking at through it. Similarly, the church building is a kind of lens through which we lift our hearts and minds to God. But today we step back, as it were, to appreciate and give thanks for the architectural setting itself. 

 

In confirmation classes, I’ve often asked young people to define “church.” Their first answer is usually something like the place where we go on Sundays. That kicks off a discussion of the various meanings of the word “church”—not just a building but also a parish community, and beyond that the whole body of all Christians throughout the world, the Church Universal. It often comes as a new thought that we’re the Church and the Church is us. So, the Church isn’t just a building.

But we can also go too far in the opposite direction. I once attended a clergy gathering in which an earnest young curate argued that the church building is—and I quote—“just a tool.” His contention was that so long as we’re preaching the Gospel and engaging in Christian mission, it really doesn’t matter whether we meet for worship in a storefront, warehouse, or gymnasium. He warned that congregations with beautiful historic churches often end up worshiping the building rather than God. I suppose he had a point. Yet it seems to me that he was overlooking at least three profound truths.

 

First, a church’s consecration really does make a difference. This building was consecrated 165 years ago yesterday, on September 17^th, 1857, by George Washington Doane, the second Bishop of New Jersey. In the preceding decades, Bishop Doane had visited Woodbury regularly and had preached to large crowds in the courthouse. But these crowds included few Episcopalians in a town that was then predominantly Quaker. Then, in 1854, he appointed the Reverend William Norris Missionary to Woodbury. Norris began holding services in the third floor “Upper Room” of the Temperance Hall, located on the site of the Jubilee Garden; and the present church building was constructed in 1856.

 

In his last diocesan convention address in 1858, Bishop Doane reflected on the consecration service:

 

On Thursday 17 September, I consecrated Christ Church, Woodbury. … This was a day of gladness, and of gratitude, in many hearts, besides my own. Year after year, for many years, I have preached to large congregations, in the courthouse; never to more than two or three families, that professed and called themselves Churchmen; and it has passed into a proverb, of the vicinage, that the Church could never be planted in Woodbury. Nor could it, in the ordinary way. But the Missionary and his admirable wife gave themselves to the work. They had counted the cost, and they had incurred it … Their vocation was to build a church … God has blessed them … From that upper room, up the steepest of all stairs, their worship was transferred to the holy and beautiful house, which has been the object of so much exertion, and so many prayers. And Christ Church, Woodbury, solid in stone and “beautiful, exceedingly,” stands, in the eye of God, the very gem of the Diocese.

 

A consecrated church can never be thought of in purely instrumental terms, as we might think of a civic auditorium or convention center. Before September 17^th, 1857, this building was no more than an exalted meeting hall. But on that date, it became a church in the true sense of the word: an edifice set apart, standing on holy ground and enclosing sacred space, where the God whom heaven and earth cannot contain has promised to be specially present and available for his people.

 

Second, there’s a deep and intimate relationship between a church building and a worshiping congregation. Over the years, the community shapes the building—adding a stained glass window here or a memorial there, and undertaking periodic renovation and remodeling projects. Gradually, the building’s physical characteristics come to reflect the very human stories of its people, their joys and heartbreaks.

 

Conversely, in subtle and subliminal ways, the building shapes the community. Because God has created us as embodied creatures and not disembodied spirits, our material surroundings profoundly influence our spiritual lives. As we worship in a particular place over the years, its physical surroundings become part of who we are. I submit that if the same group of people were to worship for a period of years in a different church building, their corporate character would be different—not necessarily worse or better, but different. So, it’s a reciprocal relationship: the community shapes the building; and the building shapes the community.

 

Third, the old canard that “the church is the people, not the building” misses the most profound point of all: namely, that the Church is a mystery. It can’t be reduced to any particular building or any particular community. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. With Christ as head, it comprises all Christians who’ve ever lived and all those yet to be born. For the Church isn’t just a human institution, but a divine society, a supernatural organism.

 

Still, today’s liturgy celebrates the Universal Church’s physical embodiment in one particular place: this building. Here we encounter the basic incarnational principle of the Christian faith: just as the eternal Son of God came down from heaven and made himself present to us as the human being Jesus of Nazareth, so the invisible Church, the mystical Body of Christ, takes concrete expression not only in human communities and institutions, but also in material edifices such as cathedrals, churches, chapels, and shrines.

 

As embodied creatures, after all, our principal way of knowing the spiritual realm is sacramental. That is, we encounter the infinite in and through the finite, the invisible in and through the visible. An ancient text associated with today’s liturgy remarks that these visible buildings “are but the figures” of God’s true House of Prayer in heaven. Nonetheless, it’s precisely in and through these earthly figures that we catch glimpses of heaven itself.

 

So, a church building isn’t just a utilitarian meeting place, but a spiritual home to a living community of faith. A congregation without a church building is like a family without a dwelling—homeless: a condition of deprivation to be remedied at the first opportunity. 

 

Today, then, we give thanks for all the ways in which this church building has shaped our lives. We recommit ourselves to its care as a gift entrusted to us by those who’ve gone before us. We give thanks for the parish family that worships here and calls this place home. Above all, we rejoice in our membership in the Church Universal, of which this building stands as the visible symbol here, in this time and place.