CONSECRATION: WHAT DO THESE STONES MEAN?

A Sermon preached at Edington Priory Church on Sunday 3^rd July 2011,

The 650^th Anniversary of Consecration.

1 Kings 8: 22-30                                Hebrews 12: 18-24                                    Matthew 21: 12-16

Of the Temple of Solomon, whose consecration two and a half thousand years before that of this Priory was the subject of our first reading, nothing – except, perhaps, for a small, ivory pomegranate – remains. The Temple of Herod, which Jesus so spectacularly and controversially “cleansed” a millennium later (our Gospel reading), was utterly destroyed just a generation afterwards (as Jesus had predicted it would be).

So it would seem – as we come to celebrate this holy building on this great day – that the themes Scripture offers us about holy buildings are challenging, if not downright discouraging!

“Will God indeed dwell on Earth?” asks Solomon. Well, history shows that human constructions are transient and fleeting, inadequate in every way to “contain” the eternity of God and all that that implies. “Tower and Temple” ­– indeed, as the hymn reminds us – “fall to dust”, this one, eventually and inevitably, among them, uncomfortable – even unseasonal, as you may be thinking – though it is to be reminded of the fact.

And yet here we are to celebrate, with joy and deep thankfulness on this day, this place, this building and all that it means to us, all it has meant to those who have gone before us (those we remember and others before them) and – in faith – what it may mean for generations yet to come.

We celebrate the vision and generosity of William, who endowed it; of the generations of Canons who inhabited it and imbued it with their prayer for two centuries until the Reformation; of the Watson-Taylor family (and others) who cared for it and protected it through generations, of Ponting, the Victorian architect, who restored it – and that of so many others, down to and into our own memory and experience , who have served it and loved it, been inspired by it; who have made music in it and painted it and in so many ways given glory to God in it and through it.

All of this – inspiration and faithful, worshipful activity – all of this is Consecration: that which makes this place holy. And so all of this is the subject of our celebration today. These stones – “grey-flecked with golden lichen” as one of the old guidebooks poetically describes them – are in a sense, as well as the inspiration and locus of the holiness we celebrate, also its summation and enduring symbol.

There’s more to today, in other words, than simply 650 years of a building.

This is important. These stones are more than stones and this building is more than a piece of art or engineering. This place – consecrated (made holy) by people and prayer, faith and exploration, relationship and shared experience – quite simply is its own story.

When the Children of Israel finally after so many long years of wandering in the wilderness crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land, Joshua instructed them to make a great cairn of stones, each picked from the miraculously dry riverbed, so that in years to come their children would ask, “What do these stones mean?” and they could answer with the story of God’s faithfulness to them, his bringing them out of slavery and giving them a home.[1]

When we look on these stones – “grey-flecked with golden lichen” – we see not the transience of human achievement (“tower and temple fall to dust”), but the prompt to the question in our own time and for our own generation: “What do these stones mean?”

And we tell the story of consecration that is the answer to that question: the story of William of Edington and the Bonshommes, of the Reformation and all that followed, of the restorations and embellishments – yes, all that guidebook stuff – but also (and far more importantly) the story of God’s faithfulness and God’s reality in the people of this place. That means historical people, like Bishop Ayscough, who was dragged from the altar of this Church to his death, and the poet George Herbert, who came to the altar of this Church to be married; but it means, too, the people we have known and loved here. It means those we have seen baptised and confirmed and married here; the ones we have bidden farewell to in this place, in Resurrection faith. It means people from whom we have learnt and with whom we have laughed and cried, people who have inspired us and irritated us, people who have shocked us and people who have affirmed us, people with whom we have shared both puzzlement and enlightenment.

In all of this is consecration: the answer to the question, “What do these stones mean?”

Consecration, then, is holiness and the act and activity of making holy, and this Priory Church is holy because it has been consecrated not simply in a great service somewhat like this by Bishop William six and a half centuries ago, but by generations of worshippers and enquirers, searchers and offerers, who have formed and shaped its life and witness in all those years since.

And this means that we, the people of this place – both residents and returners and visitors alike – play our part in its consecration, in the ongoing work of holy-making, in our own time and through our own ministry and witness.

For holiness is not something received and preserved – a sort of culture like the golden lichen that adheres to the stones – which we gratefully appreciate and hope to hand on undamaged. No: holiness is an active, palpable quality, not of stones but of hearts and lives.

It is not he past that makes this Priory holy (or not the past alone, or even primarily): it is the present and the reality of God’s presence and reality and grace in the here-and-now, in the people of this generation, in other words. It is this that makes for holiness, the holiness we celebrate on this day of consecration, of holy-making.

That means that it is our worship and our prayer, our study and learning, our care and kindness; the quality of our debate (and our disagreement), our welcome and openness to others and to newness: these are the marks and guarantors of holiness – of consecration – in our time and into the future.

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This, surely, was the reality that lay behind Jesus’ withering and deeply shocking attack on the consecrated place which was provided for our Gospel reading on this day of consecration celebration. The life of the Temple as Jesus experienced it was not holy: there was commerce and exploitation; the injured and disadvantaged were marginalised; the voice of the little children in the place of worship was resented (and how familiar is that?). Consecration – for Jesus – inhered not in the stones or the history, not in faithful adherence to ritual or tradition, but in prayer and welcome. “A house of prayer for all the nations”, as Mark’s account of the event records.

And that must constitute the challenge for us in our day. It is a challenge not merely to preserve. (This place would not have a tenth of its appeal or authority if it had simply been preserved.) Nor simply to receive, as if holiness were a gift from the past.

The challenge is to a renewed holiness – a renewed consecration – of our own common and shared life: in witness, in service, in discovery and exploration and, above all, in worship and prayer. For it is in faithfulness of this kind that we will find the answer to the question, when our children ask it, “What do these stones mean?”