Sermon: Consecration of the Golden Jubilee Altar

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Tuesday 17th May 2011
Service:: Consecration Eucharist
Readings:: Matthew 21: 12; Revelation 8: 5

‘Then Jesus entered the Temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the Temple, and he overturned the table of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves’ – words from the Gospel according to St Matthew. And words from the Revelation to John: ‘The angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, voices, flashes of lightning and an earthquake’.

Tables and altars have an ambiguous presence in Holy Scripture, and a controversial place in Christian history. From the hacking out of the stone altars at St Hilary’s in Cornwall by the Protestant Kensitites in the early 20^th century, to the hours of time spent by Archbishop Randall Davidson and his Chaplain on the rubrics for the Reservation of the Sacrament in the 1927 Deposited Prayer Book, trying to ensure no inadvertent worship should be paid to the Consecrated Species, to the favourite motto carved on low church communion tables, ‘He is not here, he is risen’. In the 21^st century, whether the Holy Table should be made of wood or stone, be fixed or moveable, speaks of dusty controversy, but in fact the ambiguous nature of the furniture in religion is instructive, and in a true sense evangelical, for this very ambiguity speaks of the Gospel, the good news that sets us free.

No sooner had Constantine made Christianity a religio licita in the Roman Empire, than similar controversy about furniture and place began. Did you need to go to Jerusalem to be close to Christ, as the Emperor’s mother thought, or was Christ present wherever the faithful gathered for prayer and the breaking of bread? Could Holy Week be entered into only by pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or could pilgrimage be undertaken with as much devotion in the Holy Week observance of a parish church in Spain, France or England, walking from Palm Sunday to the Easter garden?

In a deep sense our Doctrines of Incarnation and Atonement both focus on the altar, and He who focuses us there overthrows the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves, for the Doctrine of the Incarnation is God known and seen in the flesh, thus lifting up all flesh into the life of God, overturning remote theologies of distance, earthing transcendent glory in the manger and on the Cross. So also the Doctrine of Atonement, which focuses on the altar, for atonement speaks not only of the forgiveness of sins through the shedding of blood, but the cost to God in God’s own self of what we faltering call His self-giving love, that inestimable benefit we ourselves receive in the Holy Communion.

Wherever there is an altar there is a speaking symbol of Incarnation and Atonement, holy ground that overturns and drives out merely human expectation. ‘The angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, voices, flashes of lightning and an earthquake’. Again and again it is the unmerited suffering of the innocent or the horrors of natural disaster that make it almost impossible to believe in a God who cares, or even to use such language of God at all. Therefore the altar must always be a place of mystery for it is a place of encounter with the God who is a consuming fire and whose reality burns up the feeble and the sentimental, the childish and the cheap. An altar proclaims loudly and clearly there is no cheap grace.

At the other end of the Cathedral stands, a loan from the Ingram collection at the Woking Lightbox, the masterful figure of Elizabeth Frink’s Walking Madonna. It was delivered last week, and coming back from a meeting of the County Council at Kingston I went into the Cathedral to see it, and met a little group looking at this remarkable figure. As we began to speak about it, a visitor joined in, offering us her story. Over several years she had been coming for chemotherapy for a cancer to the Royal Surrey. She’s been extremely ill and said that she could only manage the chemotherapy if she could be brought each time to the Cathedral on her way to the hospital. On the day the Madonna was delivered to us, the woman told us she’d just been given five years clearance, five years of healing, and had come to say thank you. She also told us that the purposeful, deeply suffering, but miraculously energised Madonna, striding out from the Cathedral, exactly embodied her own feelings, the Mother who stood by the altar of the Cross.

When we come to the Sacrament of the Eucharist and gather around Charlie Gurrey’s beautiful altar that brings something of his West Front carving from the outside to the inside of this Holy Place, we come ourselves into the ambiance both of Incarnation and Atonement, to a God who speaks through the ambiguity of symbol and sign, of table and altar, and who pours out his own life for our salvation. This altar, consecrated today, is a place where heaven and earth meet, where we shall be changed. For it was in the Temple that the blind and lame came to him and he cured them. And in this Temple of the Holy Spirit, we who are also blind and lame may find grace in time of need at the altar of the Cross.