St Paul's, Arrowtown

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

for the 150^th Anniversary of First Service in the Church

 

 

“Spirit of Place”

 

It was years ago that I flew to make a new life in Australia, having received most of my growing up in New Zealand. I tell you that only because at around that time I became aware of the Australian rock band Goanna, and their album The Spirit of Place. Years later, when I knew more of Celtic spirituality, I learned too of the notion of “thin places.” The Spirit of Place. Thin Places. Working with Aboriginal people particularly but not exclusively in the Northern Territory I leaned more of both these concepts. They have informed my Christians faith – but paradoxically my respect for other faiths, ever since.

So I don’t want to delay you with a long sermon breaking open a gaggle of scriptural passages – especially as I am not the person you espected to har as you gathered to remember 150 years. The readings touch on “spirit” at a stretch: the sense of longing for sacred space that the Hebrews had as they journeyed through wilderness years, the joy the psalmist had as he remembered his forebears journeying to freedom … Paul? Well … for him the encounter with Christ in scripture and worship became place in itself. Jesus? The link is tenuous, but perhaps the sacredness of opening ourselves up to the grace of the God who is all around us … but the links are tenuous. Perhaps I just stuck with the readings because I’m lazy! Though in the chaos of recent days I’m glad I did: the chaos of cryptosporidium (yeah, I practised that!), of burst water mains at St Peter’s, of declarsions of emergency and the discovery that the Queenstown church was then wasn’t an emergency centre for the town, the discovery that I was going to have to step up in place of our bishop at short notice.

I wonder what our forebears would have made of it. Mr Coffey, the truculent vicar, the generous benefactors Holmden and De la Perrelle, the first worshippers? Would they see progress or chaos in our days? What would they make of the liturgies that are a far cry from the solemn rites of Book of Common Prayer around which they would have gathered.

The good, the bad, the ugly: I chose traditional hymns today, hymns Mr. Coffey and his parishioners probably knew, and felt comfortable with (alongside those “comfortable words” that were a part of the old liturgies, and “comfortable” in more ways than one). But what would they have made of the one unfamiliar hymn, of Kendrick’s references to social justice: to killing fields, plunder and poison?

So maybe it was or maybe it wasn’t providential that I took the easy path in choosing to use the readings for the day so the bishop could wrestle with them. That came back to bite me! And yet, while we use a different cycle of readings to those Coffey and De La Perrelle and Holmden would have known, the bible is the same, the translation perhaps a little different, but the essence the same. And strangely the readings and the liturgy themselves can become a thin place, a sacred place whee heaven meets earth despite chaos, all the chaos that we see in our community and world.

Enough. The thin place, the spirit of place for us this day is this space of St. Paul’s, dreamed and laboured into being by its founders, kept alive by countless since, some you will have known, some you will not. Yet we meet with the same “bounden duty,” as Mr Coffey’s prayer book would have put it, to encounter, absorb and proclaim the Christ and his God met in our readings. We meet with two generations largely missing now, of course.  That’s a cha;;leneg Mr Coffeey would have been bewildered by. Generations missing would have been sternly rebuked. But that’s not our task.

Our task is to keep this thin place thin – regardless of the ups and downs of our own belief. Our task is to keep prayers whispered, readings read, songs sung despite all odds, because the generosity of those first donors – some of your ancestors – and even the truculence of stern old Mt Coffey the fierce Irish Protestant first clergyman, they were all like you and me tarnished building blacks in the mysteries of God.

Thanks for being here, and let's keep this thin place thin.