ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEDICATION

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R.I.

 

Genesis 28:10-17

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. In a sense, a church building is like a telescope. When we look at, say, the stars through a telescope, our attention usually isn’t on the apparatus itself but on the heavenly bodies we’re observing through it. Similarly, the church building is a kind of lens that focuses our vision on God. But today we step back, so to speak, and give thanks for the architectural setting of our worship. 

 

In confirmation classes over the years, I’ve asked the young people to define “church.” Their first answer is usually something like the place where we gather for worship on Sundays. That kicks off a discussion of the various meanings of the word “church”—not just a building but a congregation, and not just a congregation, but all Christians everywhere, 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 living community.

But we can go too far in the opposite direction. I was once present in a clergy gathering where an earnest young curate argued that the church building is—and I quote—“just a tool.” He contended that if we’re preaching the Gospel and engaging in Christian mission, it doesn’t matter whether we meet 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 several profound truths.

 

In a spiritual and sacramental sense, a church’s consecration by the bishop really does make a difference. Today marks the 114th anniversary of the consecration of this building, known then as Saint Matthew’s Chapel, by James DeWolf Perry, the seventh Bishop of Rhode Island. 

 

A consecrated church can never be thought of in purely instrumental or utilitarian terms, as we might think of a meeting hall, a civic auditorium, or a convention center. On September 21st, 1911, this building was set apart from all profane and worldly use to be holy ground and sacred space. True, God is everywhere and can be found anywhere. But a consecrated church is the one place where the God whom heaven and earth cannot contain has promised to be specially present and available to his people whenever they call upon him.

 

This understanding is entirely biblical. Following his dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder connecting heaven and earth, the patriarch Jacob exclaims, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” The psalmist rejoices in God’s Temple in Jerusalem: “How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts! My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord…”  And Jesus reiterates the point that God’s house must never be put to profane use: “‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.” 

 

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

 

Conversely, in subtle and subliminal ways, the building shapes the community. Our material surroundings profoundly affect our spiritual lives. As we worship in a particular place over the years, it becomes part of who we are. As St. Peter says in today’s Epistle, “like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ.” 

 

I’ve always suspected that if the same group of people 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.

 

Within living memory, some here have come from Saint Mark’s, Warren, and Saint Mark’s, Riverside. Those church buildings and their congregations helped shape the spiritual gifts you brought here with you—and I understand that you also brought with you some of the furnishings from Riverside. But now, this humble but beautiful house of worship, dedicated to Saints Matthew and Mark, has become your adopted spiritual home. And it continues to form the identity of the merged congregation that gathers here every Lord’s Day.

 

I expect that we’ve all heard the old saw that “the church is the people, not the building.” Yes? But, with all due respect to those who say that, it’s not true. First, it misses the most profound point of all: namely, that the Church is a mystery. It cannot be reduced 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, all those alive now, and all those yet to be born. So, the Church is a divine society, a supernatural organism spanning heaven and earth, the past and the future, this world and the world to come.

 

Still, today we celebrate the Universal Church’s embodiment in a particular place: this building. Here we experience the incarnational principle of the Christian faith. Just as the eternal Son of God came down from heaven and made himself known to us as the human being Jesus of Nazareth, so the invisible Church takes visible shape not only in human communities but also in material edifices—cathedrals, churches, chapels, and shrines.

 

An ancient text associated with today’s liturgy remarks that this building and 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 consecrated church building is a visible symbol of the Universal Church. As such, it becomes the dwelling where a living community of faith encounters the living God. To those who repeat that “the church isn’t the building but the people,” I answer that a congregation without a church building is like a family without a home—that is, homeless. And in most cases, homelessness is a deprivation to be remedied at the first opportunity. (Experiments in “churches without walls” are the exception that proves this rule.)

 

Today, then, we give thanks for all the ways in which this church building continues to shape the life of our 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 Universal Church, of which this building stands as the visible symbol here and now, in this time and place.