Dedication Festival 23rd June 2013 8am

As parish priest I get holes in my pocket from these (show)

I carry a lot of keys.

The two porch door keys are biggest, then the sacristy and then the safe.

What a privilege, though, pocket holes apart, for there are no more precious keys in the village than those that open Saint Giles Church.

It is our Feast of Dedication. We recall the day 900 years ago when our current building was set apart, after its construction, for the worship of God.

Church keys take us into church buildings - but what you do there is the real thing.

We worship. We lift heart and mind to God standing on the shoulders of thousands who’ve been here before us in this holy place seeking God’s face.

There was worship in heaven before Saint Giles was built and there will be worship in heaven after this building lies in the dust.

The question is will you and I in a century’s time be part of that worship?

We will need a key to do so.

That will be our faith in Jesus who opens wide the gate of heaven to those below.

By faith, the conviction of things unseen, we unlock possibilities for this world and the next.

The gift of faith gives you access to a sense of belonging, purpose and empowerment that makes life really worth living.

On this Feast of Dedication we have a challenge to deepen our spiritual life.

Take our prayer, yours and mine.

When the church becomes a house of prayer the people will come running. wrote Brother Roger of Taizé

The church’s mission is weak because her prayer is weak.

Refreshing our prayer has enormous implications if we really set our hearts to it – and the Feast of Dedication is good pretext if we will make it so.

Prayer is the key of faith. By it we unlock the eternity we were made for and the eternal love that welcomes open hearts to make them one with the just made perfect .

Prayer is the key that unlocks the way into what God has in store for each one of us.

Through the exercise of faith that is prayer we are able to make better life choices from the countless possibilities that lie before us all.

When I was 21 I remember getting cards with keys upon them. ‘Key of the door – 21’. Life has moved on so that the things I gained access to at 21, to vote, to open a bank account and so on, come earlier than they did years ago.

My church keys open up access to a building where through preaching and sacrament we encounter one whose oversight extends across this world and the next.

Your faith and mine, the Christian faith, owns that oversight and welcomes through it a purpose for living and a reason for dying.  

This is what lies behind what we’re about this morning on our Feast of Dedication: a call to our faith’s exercising itself more in prayer so that we may see even more of God’s possibilities coming about in our lives.