The Feast of the Dedication
February 13, 2022
O Almighty God, to whose glory we celebrate the dedication of this house of prayer: We give thee thanks for the fellowship of those who have worshipped in this place; and we pray that all who seek thee here may find thee, and be filled with thy joy and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Genesis 28:10-17
1 Peter 2:1-5, 9-10
Matthew 21:12-16
While the parish was founded just over one hundred fifty years go on December 11, 1871, our present Church building was constructed in 1901 under the leadership of our second rector, Arthur Richie, and to the plans of the well-known gothic revival architect, Charles Coolidge Haight. Among his many significant projects, Haight had created the master plan for, and built most of the original extant buildings at the General Theological Seminary; designed and built Trinity School’s Lower School building on 91st Street; the chapel on Governors Island; and numerous buildings at Yale, including four of the halls on Old Campus. While Saint Ignatius was never a socially prominent congregation, in choosing Haight, Ritchie and the wardens and vestry ensured that our church building would be in the company of these significant monuments of Gilded Age culture.
The original plans for the building are preserved in the archives of the Diocese and, along with early photographs from 1905, reveal that the patrons got as much for their money as they could. On a relatively small plot, Haight created a grand and soaring interior, with a sense of reverent austerity. Using architectural elements and furnishing salvaged from the old church on West 41st Street, including the font, the high altar, the stone statues of Mary, Ignatius, and Michael, and the hanging lamps, decoration was kept to a minimum, with significant amounts being spent on the imported English stained glass windows over the high altar, in the Lady Chapel, and of the Martyrdom of Saint Ignatius on the north wall. The stone reredos and altar rail, along the with the English alabaster altar in the Lady Chapel added to the underlying richness of an otherwise unadorned interior. The polychrome wood sculpture and decorations from the workshop of Ralph Adams Cram, including the Lady Chapel altarpiece, font cover, shrines, and stations of the cross were all added later in the late 1920s.
The Dedication we celebrate today, however, did not take place when the church opened for worship in the new nave in October 1902. While Saint Ignatius has always had a small number of major benefactors, we were never, as I have noted, a wealthy or socially prominent parish like Grace Church, Saint Bartholomew’s, or Saint Thomas. In order to build the church the parish had to take out a mortgage and, as Episcopalians are a practical people, mortgaged property can not be formally consecrated. Only when the debt has been paid in full will the bishop come and sacramentally consecrate, that is set apart, a church building. Indeed, once consecrated the diocese almost never gives permission to a parish to give another mortgage to a lender. That is why parishes receive loans for capital work from the diocese, who owns the property in trust for the exclusive use of a parish, and not from a bank, which could seize the property in case of default. It is, therefore, February 8, 1926 that we recall in today’s feast, when the church was free and clear of all debts – which also sounds very Episcopalian. And it was about this time that, thanks to several gifts, that the further embellishment of the Lady Chapel and font, along with the creation of the shrines and the installation of the Stations of the Cross took place. While there have not been many additions to the interior of the building since then, the community has maintained and kept alive this church as a place for our worshipping community, functioning as a beacon to the world of God’s presence here in the midst of the City. Unglamourous as they are – although I think they are pretty spiffy – the new bathrooms are a sign of our unwavering faith in this community and its property as we continue to unite the faithful with God in Christ in the sacrament.
In past years, I have spoken about how careful we must be about fetishising our buildings, investing them with a reverence independent from the life of the living community that gathers there. And this is all true. It is, however, more complicated than that. If the pandemic has taught the Church anything, it is that while worship and community can flourish in previously uncharted spaces like the internet, and that we shall in very positive ways continue to inhabit these spaces to gather the faithful for worship and formation, that there is still something critical, essential, about the physical spaces we inhabit.
In this building, the faithful gather to celebrate the sacrament in which Christ becomes present in this time and place so that we might be united with him and sent into the world to do the work of the Kingdom of God. The place where we gather in person, then, is a liminal space, on the threshold between heaven and earth where one realm physically touches the other.
In Genesis this morning we read about how Jacob, travelling from Beer-sheba to Haran, stopped for the night at what the text simply calls “a certain spot. ” There he went to sleep “and he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! ” In that dream God spoke to him and said:
the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you.
In this dream Jacob learnt of God’s plan for him and his descendants, how God will send them to the corners of the earth, always be with them, and that they shall return to that land. When Jacob “awoke from his sleep [he] said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it. ’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. ’ ”
Jacob came to a spot that he did not know was special – in a way like a undeveloped corner lot in a new neighbourhood – and there encountered God. From that place he was sent forth into the world to do the work God had given him to do. Here we affirm that there are places where we encounter God and, while they do not have to be obvious, like a finely decorated church, they are, none-the-less, special, set apart – places where earth meets heaven and where heaven meets earth. They are locations where we encounter that ladder upon which “the angels of God were ascending and descending, ” and while, as we learn from Jacob’s story, they can be anywhere, it is still unsurprising that we should build, decorate, and maintain structures set apart for this purpose.
These monuments become visible signs, lighthouses, if you will, marking for all to see that places like that lonely spot where Jacob rested his head on the rock still exist. It shows that you can enter here and encounter God, not simply for your own personal spiritual benefit, for an individual ecstatic theophany, but so you may leave this place full of Christ, full of the Holy Spirit and, “like the dust of the earth ... you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south” the Good news of Jesus Christ, the Good news of the inauguration of the Kingdom of God.
We can encounter God anywhere. It is an important spiritual lesson we all must learn. God is with us wherever we go: on the subway or a bus, in a taxi or an Uber, in Central Park, on any street in any borough of this City. We encounter God in Christ in others. This is all true. But it is places like this where the faithful gather as the Church so that we may know that our experience of God is not only an individual, personal encounter, but something that happens in community with others and, ultimately, for others. We exist for those who have not yet found us, we exist for all those not here, for those whom society does not value, like the blind and the lame who came to the temple after Jesus cleared it out of the money changers. Jesus even makes it clear that the temple, the sacred place is for children, equally undervalued in the ancient world.
We have, therefore, been entrusted with this gift of a building, decorated and adorned, paid for and maintained over many years. It is neither a financial asset or a luxury. It is the very gate of heaven, in which we stand, straddling the world that God made and declared good and the eternal world of those choirs of angels and archangels. It connects the finite with the infinite and shows us that the two are inextricably bound together as God is unfolding the Kingdom of God. It shows us, week in and week out, that the infinite and eternal reaches out to us not to grab us and pull us away from the finite, but to re-imagine our lives in that ephemeral world, reorient them and align them with God’s purpose, which is love, relationship, and ultimately reconciliation of all in and with all.
Andrew Charles Blume✠
New York City
Feria, 12 February 2022
© 2022 Andrew Charles Blume