'A Vision for Peace' - Advent Sunday 2019

Today, on this first Sunday of Advent, we join with the Vicar and congregation of St Michael the Archangel, in Litlington, England, in remembering the foremost founder of St Peter’s, Charles Joseph La Trobe, who died on 4th December 1875. A very warm welcome to the President and Members of the La Trobe Society who join with us today.

Our First Testament reading today is from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. The Book opens with these words: “The vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem” (Is.1:1). Our reading today is from the second chapter; the prophet proclaims a vision of peace: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Is.2:4).

Born in London, Charles La Trobe was, however, of French Huguenot extraction. His great-great-grandfather, Henri Bonneval La Trobe, had left France to join the army of William of Orange, arriving in England in 1688. Three years earlier, Louis XIV of France had issued the Edict of Fontainebleau (22 October 1685) revoking the earlier Edict of Nantes (1598) that had granted the Huguenots the right to practice their Protestant religion without persecution from the Catholic state. The La Trobe family, along with so many others from their region, had become refugees.

The family moved to Ireland, and eventually settled back in England. They kept their Moravian faith, one of the oldest Protestant denominations, dating back to the Bohemian Reformation of the 15th century. Charles’ father, Christian Ignatius La Trobe, was an ordained Moravian minister and secretary to the Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel, and was active in William Wilberforce’s anti-slavery movement.

Charles was educated in Moravian Schools, and his father may well have had hopes that he would enter the ministry. One of his first jobs was as a teacher at the Moravian Fairfield Boys’ Boarding School in Manchester, but the ordained life was not for him.

In January 1839 Charles was appointed superintendent of the Port Phillip District; and he arrived in Melbourne on 30th September with his wife Sophie, and their daughter Agnes Louisa to take up this pioneering position. It was in many ways an unusual appointment. He had no career in the army or navy to back him up, and very little administrative experience. Washington Irving, the essayist and diplomat who had accompanied Charles on a pioneering tour of the American prairies, described him as: “a man of a thousand occupations; a botanist, a geologist, a hunter of beetles and butterflies, a musical amateur, a sketcher of no mean pretensions; in short, a complete virtuoso.”

On 18th June 1846 Charles laid the foundation stone of our church. The Eastern Hill of Melbourne was an ancient meeting place of the Kulin Nation, the five language groups and traditional owners of the Port Phillip region. The quaint English country style church soon came to be known as St Peter’s in the Bush. But he did much more than just found our Anglican church. He was a gifted town planner, and he brought his family history of religious conflict and displacement into this task. His apportionments of land on Eastern Hill were a stroke of ecumenical genius. Anglicans, Roman Catholics, German Lutherans, the Swedish Church, the Salvation Army, and the Jews, were all encouraged to build their places of worship alongside one another.

It was a vision for peace. And today we bear the fruit of that vision. Rabbi Dovid parks his car at St Peter’s for Shabbat, and just last week the JCMA Friendship walk culminated after a visit to the Albert Street synagogue at St Peter’s. On Remembrance Day this year, the day after the opening of St Peter’s Place, a “flash mob” of Roman Catholics descended on our little memorial service in a spontaneous ecumenical coming together. On Good Friday, after stations of the cross at St Peter’s and St Patrick’s, Pastor Christoph addresses the thousands in procession from the steps of the German Lutheran church. I am sure that Charles Joseph La Trobe looks down from the heavenly realm with great pride at these great events, and at the numerous smaller ecumenical acts and signs of peace.

So, as we begin our Advent journey in this new liturgical year, may we continue to value and pass on La Trobe’s vision of peace. Ecumenically, and in our own conflicts and differences.

 Brothers and sisters, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Romans 13:11-14