Trinity 17 Enhancing our buildings 4th October 2009

I want to think with you this morning about enhancing our buildings.

This is the last of a three part sermon series on the priorities we identified in July at our thinking day at which those present identified three priorities:
Renewing our worship
Engaging with youth and families
Enhancing our buildings.

If your memories are good you may recall a similar threesome which we looked at before the thinking day – the ABC of the diocesan Life Together vision. Remember?

Attending to God
Building Christian community
Commending God’s love for the world

God is calling us to work for what is upward in renewing worship, who’s around as we gather, young and old into Christian community, and who’s out there as we work to commend God’s love in action and words and through our buildings.

We are wonderfully blessed in Horsted Keynes to have our worship sheltered, by this beautiful building that has heard God’s praise for over 30 generations. Keeping the House of God in good repair so that it is passed on to the next generation is a prime responsibility of mine and yours.

Our buildings, Church and the Martindale, are a given and we aim to make pragmatic adjustments to them in the name of Christian priorities. They need enhancing to meet the evolving needs and expectations, which goes beyond their necessary maintenance.

Bricks and mortar aren’t in the gospel overmuch. Christianity travelled light to begin with. What mattered was the Christian formation of individuals and families within God’s family.

Today’s scripture, for example, from Genesis 2 and Mark 10 sets forth marriage as God’s building block for human society. It has our Saviour Jesus Christ blessing children. A Christian society depends on the faithfulness of husbands and wives and on their faithful love for their children. It depends on the commitment of people to God, the Christian community and the needs of the world.

ABC – commitment to God, the Church and the world – these are priorities to clothe with Christian buildings! Trouble is the buildings are already there, which is not the ideal, and we have to develop them without ruining them!

I’ve been set up by our Thinking Day and the PCC’s desire to forward its three aims to speak this morning of our buildings and how we can enhance them.

Here goes then, and I hope we don’t stray too far from the readings we’re digesting on this 17th Sunday after Trinity!

Enhancing our buildings came down to two main priorities – a toilet for St Giles and refurbishing the Martindale.

There are other buildings we’re linked to. I spoke about Saint Giles’ School two weeks ago in the context of Engaging with youth and families. Then there’s the Parish Hall which stands on land belonging to the Diocese. There’s not much we as a parish can engage with on that account, save making sure any development of the Martindale complements the Parish Hall.

Firstly, then, a word about the proposal for a church toilet. As you know we already have access to the school toilet at this service but it’s quite a long way away. There are also occasions like funerals during term time when we cannot easily use the school toilet.

The annual cost of maintaining Saint Giles Church averaged out over the last ten years is in the order of £12,500. Our parish share is, additionally, around £50,000. Overall expenses are just short of £100,000 which is a lot for a church with Sunday adult attendance just over 50. Finding the extra £50-100,000 we’d need for the toilet would be a challenge but if it is in God’s plan it will bring with it God’s provision.

Every five years church is inspected under diocesan regulations and we are completing the repairs recommended in the 2007 inspection. You should shortly see the porch painted which will greatly enhance access to our church. Other areas due for painting are in the Lady Chapel, Crossing and above the High Altar where damp penetration has now been overcome. The Tower bell frame is to be further stabilised. The Sacristy and Choir Vestry are being renewed to be more fit for purpose. There are shingles to be replaced on the spire. All of these agreed repairs should be covered from designated funds.

The PCC agree with the consensus of the Thinking Day. We aim to raise funds in the medium term to enhance Saint Giles by installing a toilet and refreshment facilities beyond the north door by the font. All church growth theorists, and I was a church growth guru before coming here, all church growth theorists say that however awesome, intriguing and accessible worship is in a building three things will affect attendance. These are car parking, church heating and toilets. It makes sense for us to work on what’s missing here and so enhance this beautiful House of God by making it more accessible to young and old.

Secondly the PCC is working on the best way to develop the Martindale. We picked up the feeling expressed clearly on 5th July that having a church property situated near the middle of the village is a vital mission resource that we should develop to the best of our ability. Such enhancement would serve to make more of a meeting place and to build occasions where church members and non church members meet for a common purpose, such as the Wednesday toddler group and the Thursday coffee morning. In thinking and planning ahead the Martindale committee are aware that the success of any enhancement will depend on the emergence of ventures and leaders allied to Martindale use that are for the good of our community.

The vision needs broadening and promoting if the enhancement is to be useful. We don’t want St Giles left with a facility no one wants to use.

May I commend these two building enhancement schemes at this stage to your prayers?

We need to land a clearer forward plan as well as the human and financial resources to implement them. God willing there’ll be some specific proposals to put to the church and the village around the end of this year.

In reflecting on this third priority of enhancing our buildings the scripture readings for today look at first sight unpromising. What have the Genesis account of marriage and Our Lord’s reiteration of it and commending of children to do with our buildings? A few steps removed, certainly, but there is the business of recovering the main things and making the main things again the main things.

In Our Lord’s day we heard how a man was allowed to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce his wife. Jesus takes us back to first principles and restates the principle, neglected then and certainly neglected now, that marriage is unbreakable in God’s eyes. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

What we are about at Saint Giles is setting priorities as best we can. We have seen some things that we need to major on – renewing worship, engaging with youth and families, enhancing buildings – and this morning has been an occasion to state those principles more loudly so to speak. As a Church we are being called back to these tasks just as the Jews of Jesus’ day were called back by him to a view of marriage they’d lost sight of.

Another Spirit given connection between Thinking Day priorities and the scriptures this morning might be in the importance of using our buildings to strengthen marriage and family life which are just as much under threat today as they were in the Palestine of Our Lord. The provision of toilets is another move towards family friendliness in our worship. Thinking ahead on the Martindale we could see ourselves, with renewed facilities, being in a position to run marriage enrichment and parenting courses which benefit not just church members but the whole community.

Enhanced church buildings in Horsted Keynes would create spaces that better serve to engage families in worship and training in marriage and family life.

I’ve talked about the need to keep the main things the main things. On the ABC model the main thing of the three main things is Attending to God

The St Giles, Horsted Keynes main priorities are similarly headed by renewing worship.

Our worship and attending to God is both corporate and individual. The quality of this Eucharist is the summation of what the church membership aspires to as we offer our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice. Similarly the quality of our individual spiritual life is enriched by coming together in the way we do to hear God’s word and unite our own spiritual sacrifices with the Sacrifice of Christ. We can’t plead Christ’s Sacrifice in public without admitting his purchase on our lives.

When it comes to discerning God’s timing and provision for enhancing our buildings our individual and corporate attending to God will be pivotal.

Let’s keep the main things as the main things at St Giles by lifting up our hearts not just in Sunday Eucharist but in daily prayer, receptive to his possibilities for our lives and for our church.

Trinity Sunday 7th June 2009

This month I want in my preaching to look at the diocesan vision starting this morning appropriately on Trinity Sunday. In Chichester diocese our Life Together vision focus is attending to God, building Christian community and commending God’s love for the world.

So this first Sunday we’ll look at attending to God. This has components in the diocesan vision linked to worship, Christian spirituality and stewardship.

People who love one another often get to look like one another. People can get to look like their pets. Forget the pets! As I’ve been visiting and getting to know you I’ve been marrying you off wrongly at times. Other times I’ve seen it as almost obvious that two of you are an item as they say.

We are here as Christians to attend to God and to grow like him. Remember the memory verse from the Ascension? The Son of God became the Son of Man so that children of men could become children of God?

Theology – the science of God – is vital because the God you attend to will change you. Attend to a wishy washy God and you’ll go wishy washy. Attend to a moral policeman and you’ll get censorious. To an indulgent God and you’ll enjoy yourself at the expense of others. Worship God as the genie in your lamp and he’ll never change you. Worship God as a distant Father figure and you project your own bad life experience and make it ultimate.

Attend to the Trinity and you’ll become a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

The Christian religion calls us to attend to a God who’s revealed in holy scripture and affirmed by the catholic creeds and the church’s liturgy. Today’s collect affirms that the confession of a true faith is to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the Unity.

What does this mean? That God’s shown us through Jesus he’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Trinity Sunday’s slotted in at the end of a five month period when the readings in church have followed the life of Jesus up to his death and resurrection and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost.

This Sunday we sum up all of Christianity as we affirm God to be three persons in one God. Why? Because that’s what he says he is. We’d never work this out for ourselves. It’s revealed from the action of God in history.

There are various illustrations in use by preachers. Take the water one - Ice, water and steam are one substance with three forms – or take the love one - If God is love how could he be love before the world was made other than by being love within himself?

This year a new illustration occurred to me for today’s Feast. It came the other day as I saw a vine supported on a trellis. The word trellis is like Trinity. It means ‘woven with three strands’. God who is three is like a trellis that supports a fruitful vine, the church of Jesus Christ we’re part of.

Unlike the trellis I saw, the Trinity’s a living trellis. Without his life giving support the vine that is the church would be a fruitless entreprise.

Our attending to God has two components. We worship together and we pray on our own. The branches of the vine are held by the vine which is held to the trellis in the vineyard.

To attend to God we gather with the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day around the Lord’s table. We come to celebrate as our gospel reading affirms: for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Or as our second reading from Romans 8 expresses it, more in terms of the implications for us of this good news, that we are children of God, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.

Attending to God at St. Giles is primarily about worshipping him. In the 2007 congregational questionnaire 80% of us said we came to church to worship God. 75% said prayer was an important part of our service. As we look forward at St Giles we will be asking how we can better enter into worship. We’re bound in some measure to address the other two components of attending to God in the diocesan vision which are Christian spirituality and stewardship. The prayer and giving of individuals are the building blocks of the worshipping body.

In that awesome first reading from Isaiah we gain insight into what it means for individuals to attend to the Trinity. Isaiah is caught up with the seraphs before the Lord, sitting on a throne, high and lofty…the hem of his robe filling the temple.

He heard a song that has been used in Christian worship for 2000 years at the Eucharist: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ In those three ‘holy’s the Old Testament text hints at the Blessed Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Incidentally the chant the priest uses at Parish Eucharist in the run up to the Holy holy, or Sanctus the so-called Preface, may go back to Isaiah. It’s an ancient Jewish chant that links what we do here on Sunday right back to the Temple.

Back to the passage. Given this vision of the true God Isaiah senses the falseness within him and says: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!’

So it can be when God shows himself to us in prayer. We’re brought down to acknowledge our inadequacy before God. We make Isaiah’s Sanctus acclamation; holy, holy, holy then we kneel before the altar. Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The live coal comes to touch our lips. It is Jesus who comes to make us worthy of God, he come to us at God’s altar bringing Holy Communion in his body and blood. Then the service ends And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’

Attending to God is something the Trinity calls us to individually and corporately. It’s something that puts a demand not just on our lips but our lives. The thrice holy God seeks to consecrate three aspects of our life: our time, talents and treasure. This, the mantra of stewardship, reminds us that Christian worship goes on beyond the hour given on Sunday. It is a continuous offering flowing from that hour of souls and bodies and bank balances offered day by day ass a living sacrifice to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

Attending to God is our calling from all eternity. We were each of made to see the King, the Lord of hosts, in his beauty. We begin as babies attending very much to ourselves and end, or should end, by attending to the beauty of God for all eternity. What changes isn’t self love so much as the self that we love. As our lives expand in relationships into maturity wee see that our self interest is one with that of the whole human community and of God three in one who made and makes it. This is how the Trinity saves us.

Attending to God is a work of salvation. It’s an offering that’s ongoing. Through it self-love is liberated by grace into the love of neighbour and of God who is within himself relational and holy. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the glory of the eternal Trinity and the power of the divine majesty to whom be praise now and for ever. Amen.