950th Anniversary of St Mary's, Broughton

This is Broughton's Parish Magazine article for February 2015:

You will hopefully know by now that 2016 is the 950^th Anniversary of St Mary's Church and that we are planning a number of events to celebrate. Indeed the celebrations have started already with our Anniversary Songs of Praise on the first Sunday of the year.

One of the readings from that service was Psalm 84, which contains the words: “How lovely is your dwelling-place, Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God...Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere” (verses 1-2, 10). The Psalmist speaks of his love for the Temple in Jerusalem as it is the place where he can meet with the living God. For the Jewish people the Temple was very important as is was the place where God was present in a special way. However, by Jesus' time it had become a place to make profits and also the seat of political authority dressed as religious authority; Jesus opposed both of these abuses.

But what made Jesus really radical was that he taught that the Temple itself was no longer needed, and this was one of the themes we looked at in our Advent course on the biblical letter to the Hebrews. The sacrifices that were made in the Temple would be no longer necessary after his sacrificial, once-for-all death and resurrection. And the true location of God's presence with us was not a building but the person of Jesus himself.

As we celebrate the 950^th anniversary of St Mary's it is right to give thanks to God for the building. It's right to thank God for those who have designed, built and paid for it. It's right to give him thanks for all those who have looked after it and beautified it over the years, as well as those who continue to do that today. But in all our celebrations of such a fantastic and historically important building, we should not be like the people of Jesus' day, who forgot why the Temple was there in the first place.

St Mary's is first and foremost a place of worship, a place for people to come to meet with the living God. Centuries of prayer and praise have soaked into the walls of St Mary's giving it the very tangible feeling of being a special place of God's presence. The size of it reminds us that God is strong and lasting, and it's position in the town reminds us that he wants to be right in the middle of our lives. But God is not limited to St Mary's, he is everywhere and can be found anywhere at any time. Jesus says “Listen! I am standing and knocking at your door. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and we will eat together” (Revelation 3:20). May this year be a special year not just for St Mary's but for you, as you meet with the living God through Jesus his Son.