Some of you may have watched the TV comedy that ran for three series called ‘Jam and Jerusalem’. It featured the goings on in The Women’s Guild of a fictitious West Country Village called Clatterford St Mary. The title refers of course to the Women’s Institute popularly known for making jam and singing the hymn ‘Jerusalem.’
Jerusalem is a hymn we could have sung today; a Dedication festival is a time for rededicating ourselves to building Jerusalem, if not in England’s green and pleasant land then at least in Hampstead. Jerusalem is an image which haunts Christianity perhaps rather uncomfortably. It begins on a rock as a small Canaanite town captured by David and made his centre of operations for uniting the tribes of Israel, There his son Solomon builds a Temple which becomes the spiritual home of all Jews. Over the centuries it is besieged, sacked, desecrated, occupied and razed to the ground and yet it continues to inspire the imagination of exiled and wandering Jews. Their prophets speak of its restoration, of the Lord returning to his Temple; yet when in the Christian mind the Lord does come to his Temple, he is put on trial, mocked and scourged and finally enthroned on a cross.
Nevertheless in spite of Jesus’ rejection by the elders of Jerusalem, the city remains in the Christian imagination as an earthly symbol of an eternal reality. It becomes the heavenly Jerusalem – the city of God. This is the unbelievably lovely city, the strong and shining city whose gates are always open, into which the wealth of the nations is brought, their creativity and ingenuity, their self sacrifice and heroism, the richness of their relationships and their joy. And this is the city where grows the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
And yet for all the glory of Jerusalem the golden, it is not possible to forget Jerusalem as it is now, a place of conflict and injustice. Genesis tells us that it was Cain the first murderer who built the first city. Cain was unable to relate to the difference in his brother. Cain’s name means ‘ownership’, Symbolically we might think of Cain building the first city in a quest for the perfect home, the perfect job, the perfect design for living. His city seeks to become a centre of power and control, of defence and exclusion. And all cities even Jerusalem follow in its footsteps, except that in the Christian imagination this oppressive city is given another name – Babylon. And so one of the greatest Christian thinkers. Augustine, comes to write an extended meditation on these two conflicting images of Jerusalem and Babylon called ‘The City of God.’ ‘In it Augustine argues that all human communities are defined by their values, not their activities; you see what a community is about by looking at what it loves. Every community is made up of people united by a shared interest, a shared purpose, a shared love.’ * We are what we love and we are united to other people by what we all love together.
St Paul tells us that we are citizens and members of the household of God. We belong to the city of God but how is that to be worked out in our part of the city of London? At our annual act of rededication it might be appropriate for us to ask ourselves Augustine’s question ‘What do we love? Do we love the right thing?’ A visitor to the church might say that it looks as though we love our building, we love our music and our way of worship, we love being active; on further acquaintance he might say that we love our children and we try to love one another. Such a visitor might, however, wonder what lies behind it all. We are I suspect, some of us at least, vaguely embarrassed about being able to say that we love God, we love Jesus Christ, we love the gospel of salvation.
In line with many other churches we are trying out a new motto or as it is vulgarly known a strap line, a phrase which is supposed to summarise our values, purpose, identity. It hasn’t yet got into the magazine, onto our writing paper or website. When it does it may read, ‘Exploring our humanity, encountering the divine.’ It isn’t quite what one would describe as ‘in your face’. It’s very Hampstead in its reticent thoughtfulness. It implies activity of a kind and a joint focus. We cannot encounter the divine if we’re not engaged in exploring our humanity; we cannot know our true humanity if we are not also open to God. And if we really are being opened up then we shall be met by the grace of God that will challenge us and take us beyond ourselves further than we might have expected or wanted to go. And in this experience of exploration and encounter the human and the divine will come together in an understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. For the more we get to know about Jesus the more we see the human and the divine come together uniquely and for all time. Jesus may even be the person through whom jam and Jerusalem can come together and not be mismatched.
The exploration of our humanity will of course mean the bearing of pain and disappointment and confusion, but it will also mean confronting the ordinary, even trivial events of everyday living. Our humanity has also to be open to what is repetitive, boring, arduous, insignificant. And I suppose jam making might be an image of that even though I’m sure some people enjoy it. And the challenge of faith is to be able to bring such ordinary experience into our encounter with the divine, to bring jam and Jerusalem together.
In his collection of funds for the building of the Temple, David says, ‘Who am I and what is my people, that we should be able to make this freewill offering? For all things come from you and of your own have we given you.’ What would it be like to live as though everything we have, however much or little, comes from God and is through us being given back to God. What would it be like to think of our Christian and human calling as a task of making everything holy by giving it back to God, finding a place for it in the heavenly Jerusalem? What we give to the church financially or in time and effort, what we do for our families, friends and neighbours or for the stranger in need, our leisure and our work, all of it flowing through our hands back to God. And the effort, attention, generosity and love with which we do this makes it worthy to find a place in the city of God. And seen in this way what you do in your daily tasks becomes the equivalent of what the priest at the altar does with bread and wine – he offers it to God to be consecrated and transformed into the sustenance of the city of God. And so your desk, table, cooker, becomes your altar, where you offer what you have and what you are back to God. And thus your home like your church becomes a suburb of the city of heaven. And suburbs are built just outside of the city looking out to the land beyond. Strangers have to pass through the suburbs to reach the city – their first impression of the city is gained from its suburbs – the place where the decision is taken to press on or go back. And the suburb is of course also the city’s first line of defence. The church then is the place to defend what you love, to welcome people into what you love, to nurture what you love in yourself and in others. And yet the suburb will eventually have to be abandoned – it is not an end in itself – for everything we love in this place is only a means to an end, a way into the city, so the suburb is always changing to reflect a new dimension of the city to which it leads.
And so on this day of rededication we have to ask ourselves these two crucial questions: what truly do we love in our life in this church; and how does what we truly love help others to find their way into the city of God. Amen.
* ‘Walking to Emmaus’ by Eamon Duffy p.136