A couple weekends ago I attended the rededication of St. Francis Church in Weston. The ceremony of the dedication, or rededication, of the church is one of our best liturgies. It’s a very beautiful liturgy. And there’s a number of things that happen as part of it that are unique to that – they only do it then.
There is at one point, the altar is empty, and the bishop literally anoints the altar with Chrism. Chrism that was blessed right here on Holy Thursday by him, is poured on the altar and then rubbed into the altar. And then after that, the pastor of the church, usually – although the bishop can do it –anoints the church by going to the four corners of the church, and literally anoints the walls.
Another thing that’s done is the altar has incense on it, and is lit. The pastor then goes around the church incensing the whole building, and the people in it. The introduction to the rite of dedicating a church says “the incensing of the knave of the church indicates that the dedication makes it a house of prayer”. However, the people of God are incensed first. For it is the living temple in which each faithful member is a spiritual altar.
I mentioned this today because of the language that St. Peter uses in his letter is very similar language. He calls Christ a Living Stone and the people he is addressing– very possibly people had been recently baptized—are living stones built as an edifice of the spirit. The community of believers, then, is the temple, the place where God lives. The temple is not made by human hands or of carved stones, but of Living Stones; men and women—that’s you and me.
I remember a friend of mine being given a tour of a Protestant church. And he at one point said to the woman who was doing the tour, “this church is so beautiful”. And she said “oh sir, this is not the Church. This is where the Church meets.” And that is an important idea, because the word that we get Church from, “Ecclesia” in Greek, doesn’t have anything to do with a building. It literally means “the assembly”.
And so it’s a reminder that the building – of course – and of course we’re going to call it a church. I don’t think I’m going to stop that from happening. But the Church is the community ofb, and we are part of that. That we are the Church. The building in which we meet is important, and certainly we want it to look beautiful and to serve the needs of the community. But it is not as important as those of you that make it up. We, together with Jesus, have the potential for making something more beautiful than even the most beautiful building that we could possibly build. And that is a community bound together in faith, in Christ Jesus by love.
