ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEDICATION

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R.I.

 

 

I Kings 8:22-33

Psalm 84:1-6

I Peter 2:1-5,9-10

Matthew 21:12-16

 

Today is the one day of the year when we celebrate the gift of this church building. Most Sundays, the building is the medium through which we raise our attention to higher things. In this sense, it’s a bit like a telescope. When we gaze at the stars through a telescope, our attention isn’t normally on the apparatus itself—at least not when it’s working properly—but on the heavenly bodies we’re looking at through it. Similarly, the church building is a kind of lens through which we focus our vision on God. But today we step back, as it were, to give thanks for the architectural setting of our worship.

 

In confirmation classes over the years, 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 congregation, and beyond that the whole body of Christians throughout the world, the Church Universal. It often comes as a new thought to them that we’re the Church and the Church is us. So, the Church isn’t just a building but a community.

But we can also go too far in the opposite direction. In a clergy gathering I was once attending, an earnest young curate argued that the church building is—and I quote—“just a tool.” His contention was that as 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, a warehouse, or a gymnasium. His concern was 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 a number of profound truths.

 

This Wednesday marks the 68th anniversary of the consecration of this church building by John Seville Higgins, the ninth Bishop of Rhode Island. In a spiritual sense, a church’s consecration by the bishop really does make a difference.

 

A consecrated church can never be thought of in purely instrumental terms, as we might think of a civic auditorium or a convention center. Before October 9th, 1956, 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: a place 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.

 

Furthermore, there’s a deep and intimate relationship between a church building and a worshiping congregation. Over the years, the community shapes the building—adding new furnishings here or a memorial there, and undertaking periodic renovation and remodeling projects. The building’s physical characteristics thus come to reflect the very human stories of its people, their heartbreaks and joys, their disappointments and dreams.

 

Conversely, in subtle and subliminal ways, the building shapes the community. Because God has created us as embodied creatures and not as 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’ve always suspected that if the same group of people were to have worshiped for a period of years in a different church building, their corporate character and identity 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.

 

As I was reading the parish history written in 1998 for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the parish’s founding, one paragraph stood out. It describes a period in the early 1950s preceding the church’s construction, and it reads as follows:

 

Meanwhile, the size and design of the church had still not been settled. Understandably the Diocese, with the bottom line in mind, was urging a bare bones no frills structure. The people of Saint Mark’s rejected this sort of compromise. They wanted first, a church building which would be a suitable witness to the greater glory of God. Secondly, they wanted a structure worthy of their faith, determination and hard work.

 

I’m glad they stood firm and ended up with this beautiful building made of good quality materials. I’d say it’s stood up very well over the past 68 years!

 

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 cannot be reduced to any particular building or to any particular community. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. With Christ as its head, its members comprise 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 straddling heaven and earth, the past and the future, the life of this world and life of the world to come.

 

Still, our observance today celebrates the Universal Church’s physical embodiment in one particular place: this building. Here we encounter and experience 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, finds concrete expression both in human communities and in material edifices such as cathedrals, churches, chapels, and shrines.

 

As embodied creatures, our principal way of knowing the spiritual realm is through sacramental signs. What that means is that 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 this visible building and all its furnishings “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 visible symbol of the Universal Church in all times and places. As such, it becomes the spiritual home where a living community of faith encounters the living God. A congregation without a church building is like a family without a dwelling to live in—homeless. And, in most cases, homelessness is a condition of deprivation to be remedied at the first opportunity. (Experiments in “churches without walls” are the exception that proves the rule.)

 

Today, then, we give thanks for all the ways in which this church building has shaped the life of this community. 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 and now, in this time and place.