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St Augustine's Centenary Celebration
By Bishop Ross Bay Some of you may remember the name of Cardinal Basil Hume who was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster from 1976 until his death in 1999. Hume was ordained within the Benedictine Order and served for a time as Abbot of Ampleforth in England. I have a treasured little book called “Searching for God” which is a collection of short addresses given by him to the monks of Ampleforth during that period. There is immense wisdom and depth of spirituality within the simplicity of much of what he has to say. One address is entitled “Safe in the market place because at home in the desert”. Hume uses the metaphor of market place to indicate the monks’ engagement with others, their place of work and ministry, and that of desert to speak of their times of solitude and prayer, the ways in which they find spiritual resource and refreshment. Hume says that both are essential to Christian life. The whole point of the gospel is about God’s engagement with humanity. Likewise, our lives cannot be lived in isolation from other people. But the place of engagement can be risky. We make ourselves vulnerable through engagement, and especially so when we live in a closely knit community, such as the monks of Ampleforth. So Hume says, some kind of withdrawal to nurture the soul is vital. We can only effectively and safely engage in the market place, when we know how to make our home in the desert. So we gather to give thanks for this Church of St Augustine, which stands in this community as a sign of spiritual life, of God’s life. But I would suggest that it also represents a desert place, that is a place to which people can come in order to find refreshment for their souls for their ongoing engagement in work and ministry and community life, as they give of themselves to others and live with a sense of gospel vulnerability in those interactions. Perhaps that is partly what lies behind Jesus’ action in driving out the money changer s and the traders from the temple, for he cries out “my house shall be a house of prayer”. The place that for Israel was meant to embody the presence of God had become what Jesus calls a den of robbers. The common interpretation of the cleansing narratives in the various gospels presume it was to do with economic exploitation by the traders. But Jesus throws out the buyers along with the sellers, so it would appear to be a protest that they are there at all when previously this practice had belonged beyond the temple precincts on the Mount of Olives. Furthermore there is a prophetic element to it, a sign of the rejection of Jesus by the temple establishment. Jesus begins to cure the sick in this place of encounter with God, in contrast to a regime of buying and selling. The authorities are infuriated by the children who call out in a way that identifies Jesus as the Messiah because of his actions. There is confusion about the role of the Temple building; and there is confusion about the identity of the place where God really dwells, not in the building made of stones, but in Jesus of Nazareth, God’s Messiah. This had been the risk with the temple from its beginnings. King David had wanted to build a temple and there are a number of different reasons proffered in the historical narratives of the period as to why he did not do it. The one that stacks up best for me theologically is that God wanted to stay on the move. When David spoke of his desire to build a more suitable place for the ark of God to be kept, the prophet Nathan advised against it, reminding him that God had always been happy to be within a tent, and thus to move about with the people. When Solomon prayed at the dedication of the temple he had built, he pondered the question, will God really dwell on earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built. So was a temple a good idea? Is a church a good idea? Well yes and no. Yes because like so many other human activities, the practice and expression of our faith needs a focus. It needs a place to gather, to give tangible substance to our awareness of the sacred, a kind of a nexus where human and divine can intersect. The Temple at its best offered that. Our churches at their best do the same. But there is always a risk isn’t there? The risk is that God becomes contained within the places of beauty which we construct. God doesn’t of course, but we in our minds restrict God in that way. So the resistance to the building of the Temple in David’s time was around the loss of the sense of the dynamic God – God on the move, not tied down, but always in the midst of the people, wherever they were. Once there is a home for God, it is easy to leave God behind when we walk out the door. For God has consistently shown us that the home for the divine is among and within human people. That is the message of the gospel. God comes to us in human form in the person of Jesus, born not in a temple or palace but in a stable. Jesus dies a human death, a horrible death, the death of a criminal, and in doing so destroys the power of sin and death over humanity. Jesus is raised from the dead by God, and the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, the divine and the human intersecting. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians: Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells within you? And in 1st Peter, we read that we are to come to Christ the living stone and allow ourselves to be built into a spiritual house. So this place draws us together, focuses our sense of the sacred, the divine, the holy, the presence of God. But God in fact dwells in those who take the name of Christ, and thus become the temples of the Spirit, and together are the Body of Christ. We neither find God here nor leave God here. God travels with us and goes before us. That sense of God going ahead of us is important as we think about the mission of which we are part. This Church of St Augustine draws us together in worship, focussing our awareness of the divine come to dwell with humanity, and allowing that faith to be nurtured in us. But I also spoke of it as a launching place for mission. We may find God here, but we shall also certainly find God beyond here. One of the messages at the resurrection is from the angel at the empty tomb who tells the disciples to go to Galilee for Jesus has gone there ahead of them and it is there that they will see him. Galilee was where it all began. It was the place of Jesus’ most intense public engagement with people, the place of healings and miracles. It was the place of mission. The resurrection community is called to follow where Jesus goes before. God in Christ is on the move, at work in the world and in this community. We, the community of the risen Christ, seek to discern all of the places where God is present and at work and to join in what God is doing. That is the task of mission. “As the Father sent me, so I send you” said Jesus. This church then continues to provide a place of refreshment and nurture for the life of this community, a desert from where spiritual resource can be found for the market place. We value our places of worship, but they are not an end in themselves. They serve as symbols of God’s presence, as gathering places for worship and nurture, and as launching places from which we go to participate in God’s continuing mission in this community and in this world. We give thanks today for this place, for all who have gone before us here, for all that they have so generously handed on to us. We bring our worship to the generous God, the source of it all. And we recognise that God is not contained here, but goes before us and calls us to follow in the continuing mission of the gospel. |
