| The pilgrim's path was not easy. He had visited this city once before. And he remembered - or so he thought - having immensely enjoyed the journey.
But the truth was that, in his nostalgia, he had forgotten the bad times and remembered only the good.Copyright St Elisabeths.
Weeks, months, it took, struggling upward, through the hard, enchanted landscape to the city on the hill.
And then at last, the door of the city walls came into view.
Copyright St Elisabeths.
The pilgrim approached the door with trepidation. He had staked his life on this quest. And so he knocked. There was silence. He knocked again, shouted, pleaded frantically to be admitted.
Copyright St Elisabeths.
But the door of the kingdom remained shut, locked - to the likes of him.
You see, in time past, the ruler of the city had given the key of the door to one family. They were conscious of this as a great privilege, and made much of the respect that holding this key brought them.
Generations came and went, and the key became merely a symbol of this privileged family's power. They took it with them on civic occasions, held it high, enjoyed shining in its glory.
And, inevitably, they forgot their duty to unlock, to welcome.
But the pilgrim could not, did not, see this. For him, and the others outside the city walls, all that mattered was that the door remained shut.
So the pilgrim returned home, rejected.
It wasn't, of course deliberate, this rejection. Hindsight shows that people in the city didn't even know he existed. They were too pre-occupied with their own concerns, their own search to be valued.
Hindsight is a generous, but never an easy gift. It brings with it responsibilities, and we need always to use it with discernment.
And hindsight often walks hand in hand with a dangerous companion, nostalgia. Hindsight calls us to look back responsibly from where we are at all of our past, the pleasure and the pain.
But nostalgia is always there ready to beckon us to leave today behind, and walk that shadowy path down memory lane, to a never-never land where only good memories survive.
Today we have opportunity to look back, with hindsight, on a special part of history linked with this house of prayer. Today we can reflect on that history perhaps find from it a vision for the future.
And if we try hard to resist nostalgia's illusions of permanent sunny days, sound morals, and perfectly behaved children - none of which ever really existed - we will see that in 1883, when this Church was consecrated, the world was a different place.Copyright St Elisabeths.
Sir William Houldsworth had built here what was probably the largest Cotton Mill in the world. 140,000 spindles turned day and night to produce super-fine cotton which was exported all over the Empire.
It is easy to think nostalgically of those years as a better time when Christianity had a real role in the life of this land.Copyright St Elisabeths.
The reality is that this Church was built to serve the needs of a faith community who were already on the margins.
Yes, even by the 1880's science and rationality ruled, and faith was relegated to the sidelines of many people's lives.
It was all undergirded by the myth of progress. Humankind, it was thought, could better itself. Humankind could be confident in the way it saw the world.
Hindsight is indeed a blessed gift. And perhaps with hindsight we can see from today's perspective those years of the late 19th century not as a new age but as an old world beginning its dotage.
If this is true, we, in our lifetimes, have witnessed that old world become moribund. We - you and me - have seen and lived through what some would call the death of the modern age.
And now we are indeed into something new.Copyright St Elisabeths.
Our new millennium is an age where humankind has to cope with a less confident view of the world. It's a time when old orders and former certainties are always under question. This uncertainty, this rediscovery that science and rationality do not, in fact, have all the answers, has left many with a deep sense of searching and longing for real meaning in life.
Yes, today's global village is full of people trying to discover identity and purpose.
They make their search in all sorts of places: new-age cults, and the rightful rediscovery of the priority to care for our planet.Copyright St Elisabeths.
And many travel mystical paths, longing for a world dis-enchanted by empty rationalism to be re-enchanted by music, art, and yes, even religion.
They have discovered that the angels do indeed keep their ancient places.
But where is today's Church in all of this?
Well, probably, I think, in a state of confusion. Copyright St Elisabeths.
So, at a time when children read the magical tales of Harry Potter and adults indulge in mysticism, the Church throws out enchantment, and becomes, almost internationally, happy clappy.
At a time when people long for authenticity, the Church behaves as if it is embarrassed by offering in its worship the very best to God, and instead idolises the commercial, the ephemeral. Bach, and for that matter, Bairstow, are thrown out in favour of doggerel set to 70's music and performed with a strong mid-Atlantic accent. Meanwhile recordings of plainchant sell like never before.
And at a time when people find the old codes of logic and behaviour things to be questioned and possibly distrusted, the Church insists that its members become "on-message" and confuses faith with certainty - whereas, of course, it really means the opposite.
And at a time when so many feel lost, spiritually stateless, the Church starts to function as a members-only organisation, offering services only for those who truly saved, instead of having the confidence to see its worship as a converting ordinance, through which, more powerfully than any other medium, the good news of God can be communicated.Copyright St Elisabeths.
And we wonder why we have lost the plot.
The reality is that the large portions of the Church today are lost in a strange and crippling nostalgia. Copyright St Elisabeths.
And in their nostalgia for a world now dead and gone, many Christians expend much energy trying to bring back its former certainties, insisting that there is just one right way to live, one right way to be moral.
Perhaps, given hindsight, future generations will look back and see the controversies which occupy today's Christians rather in the same light that we view the flat-earthers, or the anti-evolutionists at the time of Darwin.
These old antagonisms, it seems to most of us today, were battles not even worth fighting. These were not issues at the core of the gospel, the Good News of Christ. But they sapped the Church's energy and in the end, the hard-line stance which some Christians took brought the Church into disrepute among men and women of goodwill.
The heart of the Christian message, is not, after all, a list of forbidden activities, a concern about the minutia of people's private life and predilections.
The heart of the Christian gospel is a call to respond in love, to God's love made manifest in the life of the human being.
The response to that love, the response you and I are called to make does indeed bring with it all sorts of duties.
It calls us to come out of the isolation and autonomy of our homes into the shared and public space of Church to celebrate in the Eucharist the reality of Christ's death and resurrection in bread and wine.Copyright St Elisabeths.
The response to the gospel you and I are called to make demands that we love the poor. It calls us to work for the release of the captive, the binding up of the broken victim, to make a better world of justice and freedom for the oppressed.
Yet so often people in a hungry world cry out to the Church for food - material and spiritual food - and we give a wily serpent instead of a fish, and poisonous scorpions, monstrous beings which reflect our own need to hurt, instead of the seed of new life they are seeking.
The old world tempered these things with a certain limited liberalism. Houldsworth, a man of his time, was content to build houses for his workers because well-housed workers produced better work.
But the new world, our world today, calls us to do much more than this. It calls us truly to recognise the value of every human being and the validity of their perspective of the world.
"Do unto others as you would have done to you" says the gospel. The new world, our world today, will value us, our gifts, our gospel only and if we learn to value it.
The Church has so many valuable gifts to bring to this new world.
It has its international language of sacraments and symbol which still speak when words no longer carry meaning.
It has the means to satisfy today's world's longing for enchantment and prayer.
It has the good news of God made flesh, God with humankind, forgiving and affirming; God saying yes to human aspirations, welcoming everyone while yet sinners, calling people to walk through the ever-open door into his kingdom.
Copyright St Elisabeths.
In the Church of England, when new clergy come to a parish, a ceremony takes place involving a Churchwarden giving the new clergyman or woman the keys to the Church.
It's a ritual which once and for all in most people's minds makes the new Rector a re-incarnation of St Peter, though possibly less butch, and hopefully not quite as fishy, but nevertheless, a person who now and forever will hold all the responsibilities which the laity have, by this ceremony, handed over.
This is all most irritating and misleading, and I think it should be stopped!
Keys keep things safe, secure, out of harm's way. To hand them over means to surrender responsibility. To retain them means to hold on to possession.
Jesus does indeed speak of locks in the telling of the parable in tonight's gospel. But strikingly in his explanation of his parable to the disciples there is no mention of locks or keys.
The door, so it seems, is no longer bolted. It is open to all searchers, all pilgrims, and all who ask shall enter.
Copyright St Elisabeths.
And in our lives, and in our judgements, and in our worship, we are called to the same risk of unconditional welcome to all. Amen.
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