27.10.2014
Kill o’ the Grange Church Family Celebrates Milestone Parish Anniversary
One hundred and fifty years of worship and witness in the parish church of Kill o’ the Grange was celebrated yesterday (Sunday October 27) with a special service. Archbishop Michael Jackson preached at the service which was the latest event in the year of festivities organised by the parish.
The church building was consecrated on Tuesday July 26 1864 and Psalm 24, which was used at the dedication of the church was the opening Psalm at yesterday’s service.
The service was led by the Rector, the Revd Arthur Young who welcomed the congregation. He noted that when the church was first built it was surrounded by fields. Now it is surrounded by buildings. He said the parishioners of Kill wanted to be known as people who loved God. Also in attendance was Canon Billy Gibbons who was Rector for 23 years.
In his sermon Archbishop Jackson gave a history of the church and referred to Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness’s words introducing the commemorative booklet produced to mark the 150th anniversary, One generation shall praise your works to another. In it she says: ‘This is a year of celebration, as we thank God for the 150 years of our church and parish of Kill o’ the Grange. Let us look forward to another 150 years of fruitful and faithful service both to our parish and to the wider community.’
He spoke about hospitality, hope and holiness. He concluded with a challenge to the parish. “As you move into the next one hundred and fifty years and as you take that wonderful description from Catherine McGuinness’s words: faithful and fruitful service, I would ask you to think a little about the inter–relation of hospitality, hope and holiness and to take to heart further words of Isaiah in the same chapter (Isaiah 6.8,9): I heard the Lord saying, Whom shall I send? Who will go for us? I said: Here am I! Send me …” he said. (The Archbishop’s sermon is reproduced in full below.)
During the service, Mary Williams outlined the history of the parish and gave details of former rectors. Longstanding parishioners Fred, Heather and Sheila shared their experiences of parish life and their church family. Afterwards, in the parish hall a celebratory cake was cut by Rosemary Knight, Catherine McGuinness and the Archbishop.
Photo caption: Aideen La Combre, the Revd Arthur Young, Canon Billy Gibbons, Archbishop Michael Jackson and George La Combre.
Kill Parish Church; 150th Anniversary Service October 26th 2014
A sermon preached by the Archbishop
Isaiah 6.3: The seraphim were calling to one another: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
Hospitality Hope Holiness – an earthly trinity
‘This is a year of celebration, as we thank God for the 150 years of our church and parish of Kill o’ the Grange. Let us look forward to another 150 years of fruitful and faithful service both to our parish and to the wider community.’
I begin with a quotation from Catherine McGuinness’s Introduction to the booklet: One generation shall praise your works to another. And right from the outset I pick out and cherish those words: fruitful and faithful service. This admirable volume – and I was privileged to receive a copy – relates both the history and the hopes of this parish, building on the past and moving into the future.
We are rather uncomfortable today with angels, let alone with seraphim. Isaiah somehow is less self–conscious and less squeamish and less uncomfortable. Maybe we genuinely feel it cannot be otherwise for us. And yet, perhaps as Isaiah’s familiar vision lands in our laps today, he is ever so gently warning us that the spiritual is, in fact, as real as the physical – even though almost every hour which has passed since The Enlightenment, if we believe what we are told we are supposed to believe, seems to have delighted in the shrivelling of the invisible in the service of the visible; the diminution of the spiritual in the face of the material; the alienation of the thinking self from the praying self. This is not a caricature that we can accept, endorse or endure.
Our evidence nowadays is more and more based on what is seen and only on what can be seen. Such empiricism has its limitations in the world–view of heaven and earth. Inside and outside the church – You don’t mean to tell me you believe in that sort of thing, do you? – this, in so many ways, is what has left us porous to and lacking in confidence before a world–view that seeks to correct us if we dare to speak of God as present rather than absent. It is, in my understanding, something of an abuse of the physical and the material to use it specifically to dis–prove the existence of the spiritual and the invisible. Anyone here could tell us that such comparisons are not in fact comparing like with like. And, therefore, they are dangerous and destructive of those who are trusting of progress and of disclosure of the world around us and of the world before us as a dynamic relationship between Creator and creation; those for whom the acceptance of the spiritual is part of who they are rather than some sort of optional extra for Sundays and Holy Days or some sort of deficience for those who cannot cope with life in ‘the fast lane.’
The Church of the Farm/Grain–store of the Beautiful Meadow – Kill o’ the Grange of Clonkeen – takes us back into the realm of Establishment and of the Middle Ages; and always it is vital and energizing that we be aware of our origins, our traditions and our history. The Grange belonged to the pre–Norman Priory of the Holy Trinity, now to all intents and purposes represented by Christ Church Cathedral, in the heart of the city of Dublin, the Church of the Holy Trinity who were beneficiaries of the produce of the grange. It is a tour de force of Reformation that we continue to speak naturally and unselfconsciously of Dean’s Grange to this day. The lands of Clonkeen supported successive deans of Christ Church after The Reformation and the dean spent his summers in the demesne of Clonkeen, hence its being called Dean’s Grange.
The church and parish disappeared in the radical sweep of Reformation until 1862 when, even before Disestablishment, the archbishop took to himself the patronage and licensed Thomas Wallace as the first incumbent of Kill, the archbishop having himself replaced the dean as patron in 1860. Today’s church building was consecrated on Tuesday 26 July 1864 – What archbishop would get away with holding such a service on a Tuesday nowadays and who would succeed in getting away from work or school or home and battle through the traffic to attend it? – and so we today have the pleasure of celebrating 150 years of worship and witness in this beautiful and attractive parish church which is greatly loved by succeeding generations of parishioners and clergy alike.
HOSPITALITY
Hospitality, however clichéd it may sound, is where most encounters of meaning and magnitude tend to begin. In the Biblical sweep, it stretches from Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre entertaining angels right the way to the Risen Lord breaking bread with and for the two angst–ridden disciples at Emmaus. It is our challenge as children of God to see and to share in every encounter of hospitality the Messianic Banquet in its Godly generosity. We hear much in the Scriptures between now and Christmas of invitations offered and either accepted or rejected. Often, and rightly, we feel pangs of sorrow for those who turn down an invitation that they understand only in part and understand more fully only when it is far too late. Churches who are hospitable of course do take risks; but they risk for a purpose and they risk to a good end: that of opening doors and offering a seat at the table to those who want to be listened to and heard even more than they want to be given anything in particular. I know that Scripture tells us that it is more blessed to give than to receive; but for many people, and for good reason, it is more difficult to receive than it is to give: we are independent, we spurn help, we recoil from dependency on others. Hospitality is a two–way process but it is not a trade off. It is gracious, it is enriching and it is expanding of our circle of experience and of humanity. And in a church context it is a place and a time where God is present in the giving and in the receiving and God finds us in the interchange.
HOPE
Often when people speak of hope, they spend most of their time telling those who are patiently listening to them abut the lack or the absence of hope. With church people, talk of hope is all too often thoroughly depressing. I want to try not to do this! To begin to get a handle on hope, I turn to a number of different things. It might be a window–box on the third or the fourth floor of a block of flats as I walk into the centre of the city. Why on earth would anyone bother with something so small and so colourful? Hope, then, is on one level about bothering and on another level it is about beauty. Too much of our language today is all about building capacity and setting goals and meeting targets. There are people and situations who radiate hope without such pressures; there are opportunities and possibilities which simply open up to us in giving us graciousness, goodness and Godliness – without having anything specific to do with ‘the church.’
Hope is about enthusiasm and trust: Jacob set out on a journey from his homeland and in so doing he put his trust in God; God entrusted him with the voice and the vision that he would be the father of many nations and in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. But a number of other things happened because he had listened to God and had hoped. God set him on a hilltop shrine for the night and through him turned that very place into the first House of God: Beth El. Take another example, that of the disciples setting out from Emmaus to go back to Jerusalem to tell their fellows that they had indeed seen the Lord Risen. They were filled with hope because, even though it was different form before, it was Jesus Christ and they shared their hope in sharing their news: if the Risen Christ has shown himself to us already, then we are sure he will show himself again to all of us when we gather to remember him.
Hope is about response to situations and spotting the adventure and the possibility in these situations. It is in everyday life an attitude of mind and in the life of discipleship it is a gift of grace. Hope, in the language of 1 Corinthians 13, is about faith and love and it is about connecting us through this trinity with the divine Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. In a particular way the focus of the Holy Spirit is holiness and sanctification. This is not something which is done in a vacuum but it shows itself, if I may put it like this, through faith in the Father; and through hope in the Son who not only taught and healed and gave hope on earth but gave hope of life eternal by willingness to serve and give his life a ransom for many.
HOLINESS
The being of God is holy, so the work of God is holy. In God there is no contradiction; and in God there is no separation of who God is and what God does. The same does not and cannot hold for us because there is a radical difference in who we are (our being) from who God is (the being of God). It is for this reason that, in an act of supreme condescension, God became human in order to give to us a good relationship with God and also to reveal in us the brightness of God’s glory in the world of God’s creation. Holiness, since the birth and life of Jesus, is not about separation; it is about reconciliation. The God of holiness befriended the outcast and the stranger and – miraculously – made the margin the centre by his presence among the marginalized. And so, holiness is not an individual achievement but holiness is a community creation. That is why people gather to worship; that is why fresh communities are formed from and by confident communities of faith and hope and love; that is why there are new churches as well as older churches.
Today I want to worship with you; I want to encourage you and I want to offer you a creative challenge. As you move into the next one hundred and fifty years and as you take that wonderful description from Catherine McGuinness’s words: faithful and fruitful service, I would ask you to think a little about the inter–relation of hospitality, hope and holiness and to take to heart further words of Isaiah in the same chapter (Isaiah 6.8,9):
I heard the Lord saying, Whom shall I send? Who will go for us? I said: Here am I! Send me …