What Will You Live For?

Readings: Ephesians 2.19-22 and John 2.13-22

What are you prepared to dedicate yourself to?  And for what, if it came to it, would you be prepared to die? 

Big questions for a Sunday morning, perhaps.  But they are the questions a Dedication Festival throws at us.  Because a church building is never just about stone and mortar.  It’s about dedication.  Someone—many someones, down the centuries—gave their lives, their money, their sweat, their prayers, their music, their craft, their sheer stubborn faith, to build this place, to keep it standing, to fill it with life.  They dedicated themselves.  And here we are. 

Today we remember that this church is dedicated to St Faith of Aquitaine.  Now, St Faith wasn’t an elderly bishop, or a great philosopher, or even a parish priest who slogged through decades of damp vestries and leaky gutters.  She was a child.  Tradition says she was about twelve years old when she was tortured and killed for refusing to renounce her faith in Christ.  Twelve years old!  That’s the same sort of age as our young singers, “Faith in Harmony”, who grace us today.  Imagine that.  Imagine one of them hauled before a judge, told to deny Christ or die.  It’s shocking.  And it’s real.  The church remembers her not because we relish gore, but because she stands as a sign of the astonishing seriousness with which Christians have held their faith.  A faith worth more than life itself. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus drives the money-changers out of the Temple.  “Destroy this temple,” he says, “and in three days I will raise it up.”  Everyone laughs—because they can only see the stones and mortar.  But Jesus is talking about his body, and about the living temple of God that will be raised up in his people.  Which is where St Paul comes in, writing to the Ephesians: “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.” 

So here’s the connection: Jesus is the true temple.  We are the living stones.  St Faith, even in her young age, understood that her body—her very self—was already part of that living temple.  Her courage was not about defending a building.  It was about belonging to Christ.  And in that belonging, she found something worth dying for. 

But perhaps the challenge for us, in our more comfortable times, is not so much “What would you die for?” but “What will you live for?”  Because dedication doesn’t always come in a blaze of martyrdom.  Dedication is the daily choice to belong to Christ.  It’s the patience of the choir leader who teaches the harmonies week by week.  It’s the faithfulness of a PCC treasurer poring over accounts late at night.  It’s the kindness of the person who sets up chairs, or serves coffee, or welcomes the stranger at the door.  All of it is dedication.  All of it is laying one more stone in the living temple. 

And dedication is also about standing together.  That’s why it’s so good to welcome our friends from St Alban’s today.  St Alban, you’ll recall, was another martyr—a grown man who gave his life in place of a priest he sheltered.  St Faith and St Alban, child and adult, woman and man, both witnesses to the same truth: that God’s love in Christ is worth everything.  To celebrate a Dedication Festival is to place ourselves in that same story, shoulder to shoulder, parish to parish, voice to voice. 

So let’s go back to the question: What are you prepared to dedicate yourself to?  We dedicate churches not just to give them fancy titles, but to remind ourselves that we are meant to be people of dedication too.  What does dedication look like for you, here and now?  It might be as dramatic as standing up for justice at real cost.  Or it might be as quiet as singing faithfully in a choir, week by week, learning to offer your voice as part of the harmony.  For some it may be about giving time, money, energy, love, even when it hurts.  For others it may be about refusing to go along with lies and cruelty, even when silence would be easier. 

St Faith, aged twelve, shows us that Christian dedication is not reserved for the powerful, or the learned, or the old.  It belongs to all of us, young and old, weak and strong.  Together, built on Christ the cornerstone, we become a temple where God is at home. 

So may we, with St Faith, with St Alban, and with all the saints, dedicate ourselves afresh today.  May we be a people willing to live, and if it comes to it, even to die, for the love of Christ.  And may our voices, in harmony, become a song that fills this living temple with praise. 

Amen.