Dean Michael Pitts is presently acting as Archdeacon of Montreal.
The following homily was offered at the Church of St Margaret Tetrauville, on the 21st January 2007, at the final service before the current building was sold, and the community moved to smaller, rented premises.
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
1 Corinthians 12:12-31
Luke 4:14-21
I have to begin with a confession. Because of the way my life has taken me, I have grown rather used to saying farewell to people and places. You see, since my ordination in 1969, I have lived and worked in nine different countries. I have lost count of the number of homes our family has lived in. My children went to public schools in five countries, and had to learn four languages to do so. As a result, I have grown used to not having great attachments in my life and, as an introvert by nature, this suits me fine.
But I have to work very hard to think and feel what it means to you to say farewell to this building today. For fifty years, conventionally two generations, it has been your spiritual home. It has been the place where you have heard the Word of God and celebrated Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. This has been the place where you were married, perhaps, where your children were baptized and went to Sunday School. It is the place where some of them were married. This building has been the centre of the Anglican community, and indeed the wider community, for both worship and social gathering. It has also represented, I believe, a kind of bastion for an English speaking community in a Quebec going through a huge social and demographic change.
But now, after long discussion, and I think very wisely, you have decided that the time has come to sell this building to another Christian community. It is a community which has probably been favoured by the same demographic changes which have resulted in the decline of the English-speaking Anglican community. And so there is sadness today as together, we say farewell to this building and hand it over, as it were, to those whom we hope and pray can continue to maintain and use it to the greater glory of God.
But the natural sadness, for me at any rate, is tempered by the fact that unlike some other parishes in our diocese, what is happening today is not the demise of a community. There is a strong sense, which I heard plainly at a meeting a couple of weeks ago that this community wishes to stay together and continue to worship in the Anglican tradition. You have found a new home in which to meet, which is already a place sanctified by Christian worship. As you will be renting the St Aloisius chapel, you will not have to struggle to maintain it. You can concentrate on what it means to be a Christian community of the Anglican tradition in this part of our city.
The Biblical readings of today’s liturgy offer us, I believe, some important foundations for the process of thinking about and building Christian community, both generally, and for you as you move into your new situation.
The story told in the Book Nehemiah is set in the time when some members of the Jewish community have begun to return from Babylon following their fourty year exile there. During that time they had begun to get used to not having a Temple in which to worship and the scholars, scribes like Ezra in this mornings story, had worked hard in gathering together and editing the oral and written traditions of the people. During the exile period, in fact, the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament, began to take the form in which we know them today, at least the Pentateuch and the books of history and early prophecy. Also during that period the law books of the Pentateuch had come to take preeminence.
If we read a little between the lines there seems to be some tension between the visions of the community between Ezra and Nehemiah. Nehemiah was an official, a civil servant. He saw his task was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem to make it a secure place, and then to rebuild the Temple so that the sacrificial worship could be re-inaugurated. Ezra however was more concerned that the community should gather around its story and its law. And so today Ezra gathers the people to read to them the Torah. He does this you note not in a religious place, but in a public square, “before the Water gate” There is no connection by the way with a certain event in recent American history! Also worth noting is a little detail in the story that the reading was accompanied by interpretation. It is possible that this means translation, since the community no longer spoke the form of Hebrew in which the texts were written. But I think it is more likely to refer to an explanation of the meaning of the ancient laws, and of how they fitted into the new situation of the people returning from exile. There is an important principle here. The text does not stand by itself. Our scriptures, whether Old Testament or New, come to us with a developing tradition of interpretation, which explains them for our particular historical, geographical and social situation. The idea that the words of scripture are infallible guides, in themselves, to life, belief and conduct is a fallacy of the modern age. It is not part of true Anglicanism, nor in my understanding part of historical Christian belief.
But back from my rant to the story. The double tradition of study and application of Torah on the one hand, and animal sacrifice in the temple on the other continued to be the centre of Judaism for some five centuries. There were many schools of interpretation of scripture, some conservative, some liberal, some radical. Never forget that early Christianity was one school of interpretation within Judaism. In our New Testament we see Jesus, the Gospel writers, Paul and the others re-interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures to make sense of them in the light of their understanding and experience.
Fast forward then to our reading from the Gospel. We need always to remember, when reading the gospels, that Matthew Luke and John, and most probably Mark as well, were written two generations after the time of Jesus, and also after a humungously important event, the destruction of the Jewish Temple and most of the Jewish homeland by the forces of the Roman empire under Titus and Vespasian in the years 66 to 70 of the common era. One of the results of this was that the Jewish community, without a Temple right up to the present day, gathered together around the reading, study and interpretation of the Torah in the tradition of Ezra. This gathering became known as synagogue, a word which originally referred to the gathered community rather than the building. Jewish believers in Jesus and later the gentile Christian communities also gathered round the interpretation of the scriptures, but soon began to include Christian writings in Greek with the Jewish Hebrew scripture. But the Christians went further. They also gathered around a common meal, just as Jesus and the first followers had done many times. As the tradition developed this meal took on aspects of the temple sacrifice. And so today we live in the same tradition. We gather around the reading and interpretation of Scripture, which is what we are doing at this moment, and we gather around the common meal which is what we shall do in a few moments. The word used to name the Christian gathering was the Greek ekklesia, (which gives us ecclesiastical). In the Germanic languages this was translated with words like church. Both words refer originally, like synagogue, to gathering rather than to building.
But back to the Gospel reading. St Luke, as I said, is writing a long time after the events he describes, and is seeing them in the light of his own time. We can know this, since he sets the story in the Synagogue at Nazareth. In fact we know through the work of archaeologists Nazareth in the time of Jesus could have been little more than a collection of houses made of mud bricks. There are no remains from that period, no synagogue, at least if we think of it as a building. But in the story Jesus is undertaking exactly what was going on probably in his time, but certainly in the time of St Luke, gathering the community around the scriptures, and interpreting them in the light of his experience.
"Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." [1]
Next week’s gospel will continue the story, with Jesus being thrown out of the synagogue by those who disagreed with his interpretation, an event which absolutely reflects the conflict between Jewish and Jewish Christian communities in Luke’s day. It is not, by the way totally different to the conflict raging within the Christian Church today, and within our own Anglican communion, which is, at base how we understand and interpret the scriptures.
But let us end our look at the scriptures with what St Paul has to tell us. Paul is writing not long after the time of Jesus, and long before Luke. But he too is in the midst of a conflict in the Church at Corinth about the interpretation of his interpretation of Jewish belief and scripture. It is a very complex dispute, too complex to go into today, but I want to draw your attention to two aspects of what Paul is saying. One is relevant to the world wide situation of our church today.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. [2]
Can we find a way in which all of us with our diverse beliefs and cultures can recognize ourselves as part of the one body of Christ, without having to say that we are right and everybody else is wrong?
Secondly, and more generally, St Paul tells us in this passage, that what is of the greatest importance is not belief, and certainly not building, but community, community gathered round Christ as its teacher and savior. As you go forward from today into your new situation, strive to concentrate on what that means for you in Tetrauville in Quebec, in the 21st century. Try to find what it means to be Christ’s community of love and compassion in this place. And freed of the burden and care for a building see if there are not others who can be attracted to your community in this task and commitment.
[1] Luke 4:21
[2] 1 Corinthians 12:12-13