Rectorjonathan's Blog

Today we celebrate Mary, the one who bore Christ to the world: the Christ who would not exist only in temples, but out there, in our real, messy world. There’s a story told of a stone thrown by a child at a stained glass window, curiously smashing out the letter ‘e’ of the phrase written in the glass, ‘Glory to God in the Highest’. Which left the window now reading: Glory to God in the High St.

Visitors’ books are wonderful things – they can be a precious record of those who enter our buildings and are touched by an experience within them. Some people have visitors’ books at home too. They are splendid ways to record and acknowledge thanks for hospitality and love shared. The Rectory visitors’ book is inscribed with a traditional Celtic saying: may the roof above us never fall in, and the companions who gather beneath never fall out. Perhaps this should be written in our church visitor’s book too.

People often pop into holy places to pray, just to drop in for some quietness, or to intentionally spend time in God’s company. In one visitor’s book I thumbed through, there were plenty of phrases like “Heaven on earth”, “peaceful and holy”, “an oasis in a busy world”, “I hope this place is here forever”. Then there were those who admired the flower arrangements, the brick, the stained glass windows and even the hard pews.

These comments stood alongside scribbles like “I woz ere” to notes about parents being married in the place, or memories of celebration or sadness – baptisms, weddings and funerals. Occasionally there are also remarks expressing anger at God, the Church and the world, as well as phrases expressing faith, hope and trust.

In this church we also have such a book – although it is still quite new; but there are other lists of people’s names here as well – those who have fallen in war (recorded on the chancel screen), benefactors, memorial plaques, a book of names of the dead…these all witness to the powerful presence of a God who journeys with us, and whose presence we sense, yes in buildings, but especially in love for one another. We are a community, for better or worse – of lifeless old bricks and living stones.

The prayer of George MacLeod – the renowned Celtic Church of Scotland Moderator – his prayer during the rebuilding of the Abbey on Iona draws on the themes of community and the tension between the God of bricks and mortar and the God of Hearts:

It is not just the interior of these walls, it is our own inner beings you have renewed. We are your temple, not made with hands. We are your body. If every wall should crumble, and every church decay, we are your habitation. Nearer are you than breathing, closer than hands or feet. Ours are the eyes with which you, in the mystery, look out in compassion on the world. So we bless you for this place, for your directing of us, your redeeming of us, and your indwelling. Take us ‘outside the camp’, Lord, outside holiness, out to where soldiers gamble, and thieves curse, and nations clash at the crossroads of the word….So shall this building continue to be justified.

MacLeod later went on the pray:

It was your custom to go to the temple, the noisome temple, sometime to the scandalized temple listening to the mumbo jumbo, but it was your custom to go…Give us grace in our changing day to stand by the templ that is the present church, the noisome temple that sometime scandalized temple that is the present church, listening sometime to what again seems mumbo jumbo. Make it our custom to go till the new outline of your Body for our day becomes visible in our midst.

God isn’t to be trapped in a stone, up a ladder, there or here. He is everywhere – God could not be contained in stone, buildings, boxes, temples. This was the God of the whole earth – the God of empty space, and of every space – God present in our space. Bidden, or not bidden, God is present.

Over the centuries humanity has been and continues to be brutalised by those who want God limited to their own versions of temple, shrines and sacred writings. Our church is also part of that struggle. As the hymn we shall sing next week reminds us, ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy….’ V4 of which says: but we make His love too narrow by false limits of our own; and we magnify His strictness with a zeal he will not own. In God’s wideness there is room for all.

The First Letter of Peter was written in a time of impending persecution. The invitation, “Come to him” is an open, ongoing welcome. Christians are those who persevere in new beginnings in Christ. While everyone else seems to reject, God calls you and me as chosen and precious. And we are to be living stones, built up into a spiritual house – offering worship with and on behalf of others.

The stone that is rejected, suddenly becomes not only acceptable again, but becomes the cornerstone, the keystone, holding everything together….there’s a real lesson in there for each one of us as chosen people.

This chosen status means we are to be a community that offers comfort and solace, alongside disturbance and prophetic utterance to the world. As a body which claims a chosen status we are called to invite others to explore what their own ‘new beginnings’ might look like. If you could start over again, what would be different?

Our church is to be a symbol of our faith, a beacon on the landscape of our towns –  a place of promise and welcome, a place of new beginnings. Can St Mary’s be that, I wonder? Will this church, dedicated to the character, the persona of Mary, be a place that is to be womb-like, giving birth to Christ-like-ness in a world so needing to hear Jesus’ words of healing and reconciliation?

When we think of Mary, Mother of our Lord, we recall how God takes the ordinary and when the ordinary is open to him, when the ordinary is determined, joyful, humble, God transforms it into the extra-ordinary. Today he continues this pattern…in a multitude of ways.

In this service today we get the chance to be part of this pattern, to become part of this eternal story. Today we take the ordinary; a chalice of wine, a splash of water, a loaf of bread and God will do something extraordinary with it – it will be food to our souls, and as we eat and drink, Jesus promises to be present.

Today we come together as an ordinary congregation before God: with our faith and our doubts, with our polished halos and our hidden and not-so-hidden skeletons. We come with our strengths and our weaknesses, with our pride and our nakedness: and God, if we let him, wishes to do something extraordinary with us.

I don’t know what that is but I’m pretty sure of some of it because it’s what he longs to do with every congregation. He wants to bind us together as a congregation, so that everyone is cared for. He wants you to be a beacon in Broughty Ferry such that everyone whispers: have you seen what is happening in that church? This is the place where life itself takes place, where relationships get healed, where forgiveness dares to show its face…where love is outrageous and grace amazing.

You are an ordinary congregation, just like any other, with whom God longs to do, and to continue to do, extraordinary things if only we say ‘yes’, and work in harmony with God’s will. He longs to take you and you and you; he longs to take newcomers and those who reckon they’ve been here the longest, and you who have never been singled out before and he wants to take your ordinariness and make something extraordinary.

He wants you to be an ambassador for him, to represent the Lord of hosts, wherever you go, wherever you are. He wants you to feel so loved that your deepest insecurities and greatest vulnerabilities melt away. He wants you to be so alive to him that others come flocking to hear the good news you must have.

What will you do, as individuals and as a congregation?
Will you dare to follow the example of Mary
– to risk being misunderstood?
– to risk pain?
– to risk your joy being scoffed at?

Will you dare to follow her by having a determined faith, a willing heart, a readiness to weep and a faith to allow your tears to be transformed from tears of desolation to tears of joy.
Will you dare to follow her and say ‘yes’ to God?
Will you allow God to take your ordinariness and transform it?
Will you say to him: ‘Here I am, the servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word…’?

God hopes so; and in so doing, may we become a living temple to the glory of God, bringing glory to God, even in the High Street. Amen.