A place of worship and a community of faith.
Dedication Festival 154 years on.
Ordinary Sunday 18: 4th August, 2002
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. (Gen 28)
You are God's temple. (1 Cor 3)
How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord God of hosts. (Ps 84)
Today's set gospel is about the abundant provision of the feeding of the five thousand. It is to be followed by the stilling of the night storm, when the disciples were so frightened on the Sea of Galilee. It was immediately preceded by the gory details of the beheading of his cousin, John the Baptist. That event would have stirred up a religious and political sensation. The whole situation would have been very volatile. And if that could happen to John the Baptist who until his imprisonment had a higher public profile than Jesus of Nazareth and who still had many followers, it could also easily enough happen to the Lord himself. Understandably, he wanted to get away to a quiet and lonely place to think things through. All this would have implications for his own ministry – what he was to say and do, how he was to say it and do it and where. But the people followed him in great crowds, even here well away from the towns and villages – there was to be no quiet getaway.
But in his personal grief and perhaps also in his fear, the Lord nonetheless responded to the clear need in front of him. When faced with this restless and demanding crowd we are told he cured their sick and fed their hunger. He blessed them and provided for them, using the resources they themselves already had. He sent them back from that isolated and desolate place satisfied and fed, before it got dark. And he himself finally found the space and the time to pray before he continued to do what he had to do.
Providing for the needs of the people in a deserted place would have been seen to be one of the first tasks that confronted our forebears here. The first ten or fifteen years of European settlement here would have been pretty rough going. Before gold there was not much money. And there was need – spiritual as well as material. This little town of Melbourne was sufficiently buzzing to be thought to require two Anglican churches – one on the western hill, St James', on the corner of Bourke and William streets and then one on this eastern hill, St Peter's. This was the one on the edge of the bush – 'St Peter's in the bush' as one description had it.
A Dedication Festival is a day to honour first beginnings. Churches are dedicated first and consecrated second – after they have been paid for and completed. So how did we get to this day? The later Governor La Trobe had laid the foundation stone in February of 1846 and had also provided us with our font. Our first bell was procured for the tower. (The one we have now dates from 1863). As we can read on the plaque at the side of the main door to the church, the City of Melbourne Letters Patent from Queen Victoria were read here in February 1848. There was still no glass in the windows. The first full service in the completed church then took place on the first Sunday in August 1848 and that explains our observance of this day, right up to the present. So this is our Feast of Dedication.
This is indeed the anniversary of this church as a fully functioning parish existing in its own right. Bishop Charles Perry preached on the diocesan building fund, according to Fr Colin Holden's parish history. Stirring stuff, but no doubt necessary. This was the pattern of building the bishop would like to have seen spreading, as the settlement spread. The small complex of buildings; simple church, parsonage and parish school, along with a bit of land for the horses, would have been a comfortingly familiar feature of small town life for new arrivals. Its place and function in the community would have been clear and reassuring. Worship, education, weddings, baptisms, funerals, pastoral care and public service: a gathered group of those who valued these things and who took the responsibility on to make sure they happened in this immediate locality, on this Eastern Hill.
We have a great collection of historical paintings and photographs that record the development of this city church. It is possible to see these views, as they were 150 years ago, in some of the collection that is on the walls of the parish hall. As we can see, the building was never done on the grand scale. We have kept that for the liturgy. And I would claim that those are the correct priorities.
There were though real plans afoot in the 1920s for something like the parish hall only bigger to replace this church, but the Great Depression put a permanent end to that. The idea that what we have was not really good enough goes back a very long way. Already, one observer in 1853, when Melbourne was starting to think of itself in much grander terms following the discovery of so much gold nearby, was to write of St Peter's as having
"no architectural merit and [being] unfit for the magnificent site it occupies and, which will be still more felt when in a short time the edifice will be in proximity with the new houses of the legislature and other buildings of a superior character."
But it has to be said that it is this very simple and almost, comparatively speaking, domestic scale to this church, and its modesty in the way it presents to the world, that is so attractive to so many who seek us out. This is above all a place of worship. Something quiet, prayerful and simply beautiful. A place to inspire and to encourage. A place to gather in and a place to love and passionately care for. A place to come to and to go out from, a close knit complex of buildings, a close knit core of committed people, each expressing the purpose and mission of this church, present in and part of what is now a great city. A place of welcome and support, as best as we are able.
It is really interesting to think that this church is now one of only a handful of buildings that someone involved in time travel from say the Melbourne of 1848 to the present, would recognise. They would be amazed and perhaps quietly gratified too. I suspect they would be sorry that we have lost our large expanse of land and that the vicarage and school have been demolished and rebuilt so close to the church. And even to find us might have involved them in a bit of searching, because they would not have been able simply to look for the tower on the ridge. People miss us these days driving straight past! They would have to walk carefully trying to discern the remaining topographic clues of hills and river that are so obscured by the tallness of the buildings now built along them. But those who saw the pressing need in the mid 1840s and responded to it back then with this simple church – then just the rectangular rendered brick nave and tower – would be pleased to know that this is still a going concern.
What about the context? 1848 in Europe was a time of frustrated revolution and insurrection right across the continent. It was looking as if these tensions could easily extend to England. In Ireland it was a time of terrible famine with the complete failure of the potato crop due to disease. The food that could easily have fed all the hungry was tied up with restrictive trade rules and distribution problems. A major regional war was looming in Eastern Europe that was to focus on the Crimea. In much of Asia the political and economic situation was chaotic and exploitative. Latin America was in rolling turbulent change. In America the temperature was rising on the issues of power sharing and the economic structures that included slavery that was to result in the Civil War. The Pacific was being swept by introduced diseases with a terrible death toll. Across Europe and Asia and the Americas the population was expanding significantly. Everywhere there was continuing huge social, political and economic upheaval.
The world that was the context for the foundation of this church was then in short, not a stable and comfortable place. If the Australian colonies were seen to be the end of the world by some, it was still an end of the world with emerging possibilities, where a better life might actually be possible. These Australian communities were still pretty rough and raw. The older ones were only just beginning to emerge from the shadow of the penal colony origins. There was land and there was hope. New beginnings. Large numbers of people were on the move, perhaps including some of our own ancestors and certainly our own spiritual ancestors right here. Anyone who got here could stay, at least then. Many who got here considered themselves lucky.
And enough of them who did, wanted a church. A church that could remind them of home, true. But more importantly a church that could remind them of that bond which exists between Creator and creatures, between God and God's people. So on two prominent hills, our Anglican forbears in that first generation here built two churches, each with a tower. The life here was hard and often short. The first priest here only lasted three years. But life was also hard and short where they had come from. And very uncertain.
In the midst of all these uncertainties some basic unchanging realities were honoured. Again, for enough of our predecessors these included the absolute necessity to have a place of worship and a community of faith. Then, with that as the centre and the context of life as it was unfolding, all things might be possible. In that context then, it is not fanciful to say that the rolling confidence of that section of Romans 8 which was part of this morning's epistle would have been something that the first people who worshipped within these walls would have held very dear:
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rm 8:38-39.)
This and every church honours that God; that relationship. We ourselves honour this particularly on the first Sunday in August, looking back to that day in 1848.
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