Dedication Festival
Ordinary Sunday 18: 3rd August, 2008
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Our first lesson from 1 Kings is a very impressive description of King Solomon's opening prayers for the Temple in Jerusalem. He offers praise to God. He acknowledged that no building can adequately contain or constrain God, but nonetheless 'God's name will be there,' prayers will be offered in the hope and the expectation that they will be seen and heard by God. The request is that God will take notice and be forgiving. The epistle focused on the building up of a whole series of living stones, 'precious in God's sight', 'God's own people' sharing the good news with others, living transformed lives, 'called out of darkness into God's marvellous light'. The gospel warns of how all these good intentions and promising starts can lose direction, can go very wrong: 'a house of prayer' these places must be, not 'a den of robbers'. That is our Scriptural context given us for this Dedication Festival.
On June 18th 1846 Charles Joseph Latrobe laid our now disappeared foundation stone on behalf of our then bishop in Sydney, Bishop William Grant Broughton. Broughton's solid churchmanship was reflected in the words recorded as being used on this occasion, sentiment clearly also endorsed by Latrobe:
This stone is laid as the foundation and corner stone of a church to be built in this place; to be named St Peter's; and to be set apart for the preaching of the right Catholic Faith, which we believe and confess; in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
That occasion marked the official endorsement of the project to establish a Church of England community of faith for this eastern end of the fast-growing town of Melbourne. St James' on its original site was already being built on the western hill on Bourke Street. The first St Paul's would shortly be built down on Flinders Street. So things were happening, and a good institutional foundation was to be in place for the huge expansion of Melbourne that was to come in the early 1850s, with the discovery of gold nearby in Ballarat.
After that 1846 foundation stone laying ceremony, week by week this east end group, this little community, worshipped where and as it could. Trustees were elected, funds were raised, and work was done. Within less than two years, the simple rectangular nave and prominent tower of this present building would stand on this Eastern Hill. There wasn't much else here at the time, as our earliest paintings of the church indicate. Our first claim to fame then followed, even though there wasn't yet even any glass in the windows: on February 13th 1848 the Letters Patent of Queen Victoria declaring Melbourne to be a city were read here. It is not at all clear why — perhaps this was just where the right officials happened to be that day and it needed to be done, but this is where it happened. The plaque reminding us of this is by the front door. A new bishop for Melbourne had been consecrated and had arrived here. In the Empire that meant that a town could become a city. No doubt there was a lot of civic pride around that day.
Later that year, on the first Sunday of August 1848, that bishop, Charles Perry, first Bishop of Melbourne, presided at the formal ceremony of dedication of this church building. That day has been observed as our festival of dedication and our anniversary celebration ever since. Our commemoration is always though not simply the celebration of a building, historic and beautiful though it may be, but always as well the honouring of the ongoing commitment and hope — both of our founders and benefactors in that first generation and also the commitment and hope of each succeeding generation right up to this present day.
So now we are acknowledging more than 160 years of Anglican life on this Eastern Hill of the City of Melbourne. Today there remains here this city church in the Anglo Catholic tradition, very much alive and very much seeking to live out the vision we claim as ours, responding to the challenges that face us and all such communities of faith at this time. Today then we in this generation take renewed encouragement from the example and the dogged persistence of our founding generation. And we give thanks for them.
We face a different task. 'Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house' we were reminded in the epistle form 1Peter. That is something else. True, it was never just about buildings but rather what went on inside them and what they were to be for. We do not have to build buildings, though we do have a constant need for maintaining. We are not a closely connected group of people living nearby wanting that further community amenity that is a parish church, with all the reminders of a homeland far away. Apart from our regular flow of visitors from near and far, we are people who choose to come to worship here, in this particular tradition, and who choose to attempt to be part of and to build and to develop a particular community of faith with identifiable characteristics. Those who respond favourably to such qualities will be attracted to join with us. Others for precisely the same discernment of what is identifiably St Peter's Eastern Hill, will not want to touch us.
We have attempted in our Parish Vision Statement to clarify such issues, including attempting to offer leadership and encouragement for other communities of faith with fewer resources than our own. This is because our understanding of Church reaches far beyond the simply congregational, in both time and space. So too we engage the wider issues of the day, be they to do with the environment and the care of the created order or be they to do with the agonising and distressing divisions in the wider Church over same sex relationships or the role of women. People from St Peter's, both clergy and lay, are involved heavily in these discussions at every level of the Church, locally and nationally.
It is clear that there is going to have to be some hard talking here in Melbourne as some of the points of division internationally are brought home here. We can participate in this as we are able or elected to do, but we need to be able to do this from the base of a healthy local church where, as it were, the doors are open and the lights are on.
Especially now with the resources of the internet so widely used, those people who still against the odds are actually wanting to bother with issues of faith in community with an Anglican catholic cast, will be seeking places like this out. That could be someone who is young and isolated, it could be someone who would enjoy the relative anonymity of a larger city church, it could be someone who is questioning, someone who is disturbed, someone who is simply wanting and expecting more, someone who wants to start afresh, someone who wants to come home. St Peter's, with the range of what we offer here and in the range of who we are, has always been a place where such people come and maybe stay.
Above all we seek to be a place of welcome, care and inclusion for all those who would seek worship God in the way that we do. That is our stated objective. Of course we fall short of perfection. But this is a welcome, care and inclusion into relationship. The growth in that relationship with God and with each other, across our differences of age and experience and attitude, is the way of personal and community transformation and renewal. A re-dedication to that goal of relationship is a very appropriate response to this Dedication festival, more than 160 years on.
The Lord be with you.
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