10 - Dedication of a Church: Sermo in dedicatione aecclesiae (‘A Sermon for the Dedication of a Church’)

Summary

As with the confessor homily edited in the previous chapter, Ælfric's Sermo in dedicatione aecclesiae (‘Sermon for the Dedication of a Church’) belongs to the Common of the Saints and repeats a category he covered previously in the Second Series. He did not, so far as we know, compose this homily at the request of a particular bishop, but it would have been appropriate for one to deliver since the dedication of churches was an episcopal duty. The rite was the ‘most lengthy and complicated’ service a bishop would perform and was performed both outside and inside the church. Most of the service took place in the church interior out of the view of the laity. Still, the sight of vested clergymen lighting candles outside the church, chanting as they processed around it three times, ‘baptizing’ its exterior walls and roof by washing them with consecrated water, and anointing its corners with holy oil made for a ‘spectacular event’ that must have drawn a crowd. Should the bishop have invited the laity to attend the mass that concluded the consecration, that setting would provide a context for the preaching of Ælfric's dedication homilies. The anniversary of the dedication provides another. On that feast-day, the sermons would have served a local priest when the community gathered to renew the dedication and remember the church's patron saint or saints.

Ælfric's Second Series homily (CH II.40) engages with the idea of the church more directly than the Sermo. In the earlier sermon, he takes as his subject ‘not primarily the church as a physical building, the cyrce, but the church or temple as an image for man and for the congregation of all the faithful, the gelaðung’. In this general address, he focuses at length on the fulfillment of Solomon and his temple in the living Church and then equates the Queen of Sheba's material gifts to Solomon as the spiritual virtues believers offer to Christ. He finishes by admonishing the faithful who make up the living Church to build their foundations with the ‘precious gems’ of spiritual virtues, the ‘gold’ of faith and knowledge, and the ‘silver’ of orthodox and eloquent speech to withstand the fire of Judgment Day.