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At last, in June of 1882, Bishop Whittle consecrated the new St. Stephen’s Church.
The church in which you and I now find ourselves.
The church was described as ‘commodious and handsome, erected on the site of one which was destroyed during the war.’ [3]
On that day, the Holy Communion was celebrated, and three persons were confirmed.
Surely, the faithful people gathered in their new church felt both a sense of exhaustion and of gratitude.
Look around you.
Look at the names in the window glass—some of which are only initials.
I suspect some of the early stained glass in this church was given by those generous-hearted northerners that the newspapers had described.
Look at the altar, the lectern, the pews.
At the Holy Communion, look at the silver.
And look at the building—its beams, its floorboards, its doors—
all around you.
It is a handsome church, to use the Bishop’s words.
And the stained glass, the furniture, the silver, this very building—these things all testify to the witness, the dedication, the love, of God’s church in this place in those years of uncertainty after the war and in the many years since that faithful people have given to this holy place.
But the material gifts are not the end—nor are they the ultimate point—of the story.
The church is the people who gather here.
The people who, from one generation to another,
have worshipped God in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood,
who have prayed,
who have come here in patience and exhaustion,
who have come here in joy and love.
And all this whether or not there was even a building standing.
We come to this holy place with our own uncertainties, our own burdens, our own memories of the past, and our own hopes for the future.
The circumstances in which we find ourselves are not those of building a new church destroyed in the Civil War.
But you know something of the challenges that come with sustaining a parish from one generation to another. And you know the joys and gratitude and blessings of sustaining a parish from one generation to another.
I know this about you. I have seen it.
We know there is work to be, resources to be cared for, people to care for.
But the future will not be ours to command.
The 90th Psalm does not teach us that our church will always look the same, it does not teach us that our labor will always bear the fruit we expect. The 90th Psalm opens us to something else entirely:
“Before the hills in order stood, or earth received her frame, from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”
The God who was God before this church was built is God now.
The God who sustained the people who gathered here amid the devastation of war is the God who gathers us here today.
And the God to whom we commend the generations yet to come is not diminished by the passing of our own generation.
We cannot see the end of every undertaking.
We cannot know what this church will look like in ten, fifty, a hundred years from now.
Even so, we worship the God for whom a thousand ages are like an evening gone, and under the shadow of His wings
we pray,
we roast pigs,
we make music,
we tend to the garden,
under His wings we come and give to this place week after week.
We do these things trusting that the God who has been our refuge from one generation to another will continue to be our refuge in the generations yet to come—God whose presence is sometimes so palpable, and other times so mysterious.
And His presence in our work matters not because we posses our future, but because we give it to God.
And it is in that knowledge that we sing:
O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guide while life shall last,
and our eternal home.
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[1] The True Index. Warrenton, Virginia. May 30, 1868: p. 4.
[2] The Staunton Spectator. October 15, 1878: p. 3.
[3] Journal of the Eighty-Seventh Annual Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church [...]. Richmond, 1882: p. 161.
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