This is the sermon preached by Rev. Kalajainen along with selected pictures from the rededication service for the restoration of the church building and organ. Many people contributed with time, talents and money to make this project a success. The church is very grateful for the hard work put in by the dedicated members of the restoration team: Susan Chadima, Warren Blackwell, Jan Bodwell, Elaine Carlson, Bill Greenwood, Homer Kenison, Bruce Leland, Chet Rice, Harold Wagner, Len Westra and Lois Widmer.

May 23, 2004
Text(s): 2 Samuel 7:1-17; Hebrews 3:1-6
© 2004 L. R. Kalajainen

On the BBC’s online news service, there was a headline recently that caught my eye: “House Proud Britons Boost Sales.” I glanced briefly at the article and the gist of it was that during the Easter holidays, people in England bought so many flowers and other decorative items for their houses that it gave beleaguered retailers a real lift in their economic prospects for the year.

That prompted a further search on the term “house proud” which turned up everything from that article to the names of real-estate agencies, book reviews, and home-improvement suppliers. When I went a little further and actually looked up the term in the dictionary, it simply defined it as “proud of one’s home and furnishings.”

Today is a day for us to be house proud. After all, we’ve just accomplished a major program of desperately needed restorations to “this old house” that has been the spiritual home to many generations of residents of Brunswick. I will not soon forget (at least until the onset of Alzheimer’s) that it was during my very first week on the job here that we discovered the rot in the bottom of the tower that no one knew was there, and that meant the whole tower was going to have to come down, rather than simply the top half of it. And here we are, less than a year later with a building whose beauty is remarked on almost daily by people all over this community. It would be hard to calculate the hours of planning and fund-raising that preceded the actual beginning of the work, the hours spent by the restoration committee with architects, contractors, and building inspectors, not to mention the man-hours of labor by the crews who did the work. The sacrifices of time, energy, dedication, and passion that have gone into this project are nothing short of heroic, and involved a great many people in this congregation and beyond. It’s a little easier to calculate the financial cost: an original project estimated at 2.7 million has now grown to 3.5 million with the additional damage discovered in the tower and in the Chamberlain window that had not previously been known. And there have been generously sacrificial gifts from so many to make that possible, and all of us who are members here know that the sacrifices aren’t done yet; we still have to cover the $500,000 shortfall that we hadn’t been able to foresee or plan for, though I’m confident that we will rise to that challenge as we have all the other challenges.

So, perhaps today, we can wear the “house proud” label gladly as we celebrate all the dedication, all the hard work, all the sacrifices of time, energy, and money to accomplish what has been achieved so far. Last night we began that celebration with a wonderful concert by Ray Cornils on our newly restored organ— an instrument that has enriched the worship of generations before us as it enriches our worship today.

Were we self-indulgent or too much in love with our history when we made the decision to spend so much money and time and energy on rebuilding this house? That very question was raised repeatedly and thoroughly debated in the discussions that took place back when the rot in the tower and the deterioration of the walls was first discovered,. A variety of alternatives were seriously explored, including tearing down or abandoning this house altogether and going elsewhere to build a new (and less costly) house. And if the decision had only been that we ought to preserve a historic monument, preserve the building in which Joshua Chamberlain and Harriet Beecher Stowe once worshiped, then I think we would have ample reason to question whether the decision to stay here and rebuild was a good one. Churches that see themselves as historic monuments have usually already lost their vision and sense of mission, and do not have a very bright future.

But in fact, it was precisely because our historic mission enabled us to catch a vision of our future mission, that the decision was made to stay here and rebuild. The memory of this church’s historic significance in the town of Brunswick was not a nostalgic trip down memory lane, but a reminder of what God has done through faithful men and women who came before us, and what God is still calling us to do and to become in this community.

Having recently returned from nearly a decade of living and traveling in Europe, I can bear witness to the number of glorious church buildings that litter the European landscape that used to house living communities of faith, but which are now only glorious tourist attractions. Today, most of them are maintained by the state as museums, monuments to a faith and vision that has been lost.

Living churches are not monuments but mission stations. Any church building, whether it be a grand cathedral in a great city or a humble white-frame country church or a store-front in a gritty urban neighborhood, is a house for a living community of faith from which that community lives out and proclaims the Gospel in its surroundings. As Emil Brunner once said, “The church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning.” If a fire does not burn, it’s not a fire, and if a church is not in mission, it’s not a church.

Monuments do not transform peoples’ lives or the life of a community; mission stations do. That’s precisely what God told King David through his servant the prophet Nathan. David had in mind building a grand house for God to dwell in, though as God’s response makes clear, it was really intended to be a monument to David’s glory rather than God’s. God reminds David that he is a pilgrim God, a God who is always on the move. The ark of the covenant was the symbol of God’s presence in the midst of his people, and by its very nature, was a portable sanctuary. It was a house designed for mission, not for a monument to earthly power or prestige or legitimacy. So God said to David, “I don’t need you to build me a house; I will build you a house. Your reign will be legitimized to the extent of your own faithfulness to the mission I have for you.” And I believe that’s what motivated our congregation and parish ultimately to rise to the challenge of repairing and rebuilding this house, and why we have reason to be house proud today. We have preserved historic architecture, organ and beautiful windows, not because of some misplaced desire for status, but because of what this building means for the mission to which we are committed in this community. While that mission is enriched and informed by our past, it is a mission that orients us toward the future. Our congregational motto that we print in the bulletin is a constant reminder of that: “A pilgrim people still.” Pilgrim God, pilgrim people.

It’s good to remember that today as we celebrate the hard work and sacrifice of these past few years. In the midst of that work, it’s so easy to become focused on the work itself, that the vision of our mission might get lost in the shuffle if we don’t remind ourselves from time to time, of why we did it in the first place. And that’s why an important element in our celebration is the rededication of ourselves and our building and our organ to the service of God and to our mission in this community.

The focus of that rededication is clarified by our New Testament lesson. The writer compares and contrasts Jesus’ faithfulness to God with that of Moses. Both were faithful, he says, but Jesus, as the Son of God, is worthy of greater honor just as the builder of a house, is worthy of greater honor than the house itself. And then he goes on to say something startling: “And we are his house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope.”

There is the true reason for being “house proud” as we are today. We are his house if we hold firm the confidence and pride that belong to hope. It is not this building, beautiful and historic and precious as it is to us, that is God’s house. We are God’s house. God is not a god whose location is in buildings and temples; God makes his dwelling place is among a people of living faith. It is we, the people, who are God’s building, God’s dwelling place, the place where God’s glory is revealed to the world.

IF, that is, (and it’s a very important IF) we hold firm to the confidence and pride that belong to hope. Hope, you see, is a mode of life that is oriented, not to the past, but to the future. Hope does not face backward. The past is important because it tells us where we have been. The past is important when it inspires within us gratitude to those who have been faithful pilgrims before us and whose faithfulness and vision and sacrifice have given us what we have today. The past is important in that the lives of our ancestors in faith can be examples to us of how to be faithful in our own time and place. We always need to have a good rear-view mirror, so that we don’t lose sight of where we’ve been. But the pilgrim God we serve and the pilgrim path we travel always beckons us to the next station on the journey, revealing the next task we are to perform as faithful sons and daughters in the household of faith. To live facing the future is to live in hope, and that is how we keep this old house a mission station instead of turning it into a monument. That’s what will determine whether the 3.5 million we have spent on our building will be justified. From this place on the hill on Maine Street, we look into the valleys of human need, human pain, human brokenness that are all around us, both here in Brunswick or elsewhere in Maine or in El Salvador or wherever else the Holy Spirit— the God of the future— leads us.

I’m confident that we can be house proud in the best sense— that from all this work and all this sacrifice of time, labor, and money, will come a new birth of vision and mission that will make First Parish Church, not merely the beautiful old church on the hill, but a lighthouse of hope whose beams will shine far out into the darkness and guide more generations of weary storm-tossed travelers into safe haven.