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27th
August 2006: sermon by Monica Ditmas
INTRODUCTION (by Monica Ditmas)
Dave
[Stickland, Parish Priest of St. Mary's] in his
absence has asked the lay folk of our church to offer
the Ministry of the Word at this service. Charmian has
read the actual Word - the greatest honour - and I’ve
written a few comments, which Alison will relay to you.
What is offered will of course incorporate all the
thoughts and responses of everyone present so I hope we
can feel that it is a ministry shared by all of us. May
God bless it and each one of us this day.
TEXT (read
by Alison Stevens)
I thought
we might focus this morning on the first of our
readings; for me it is one of the most poignant
passages in the Old Testament - the prayer of Solomon at
the dedication of the first temple. “But will God
indeed dwell on earth? Behold, heaven and the highest
heaven cannot contain Thee, how much less this house
that I have built. Yet have regard to the prayer which
thy servant prays before Thee this day: that thy eyes
may be open night and day towards this house, the place
of which Thou hast said ‘My name shall be there’. Yea,
hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and when Thou
hearest, forgive.”
Well, here
we are in our ancient and beautiful church, which has
already survived twice as long as Solomon’s temple did -
800 years as against 400 - and which our forbears would
have had no hesitation in describing as the house of
God. Our grandparents could quite comfortably sing
words like: “We love the place, O God / in which thine
honour dwells. The joy of thine abode / all earthly joy
excels”. You have only to look in our visitors’ book to
see that many strangers coming in instantly experience a
sense of indescribable peace. And yet - and yet - God
lives in here?
There was
for Solomon, even in that much less sophisticated age, a
tension within his thinking, wasn’t there? “Will God
indeed dwell on earth? Behold, heaven and the highest
heaven cannot contain Thee, how much less this house
that I have built.” He knew in part that what he was
doing was both beautiful and absurd.
What was
it, in this dedication prayer, that Solomon was asking
God to forgive? The fact that even when they had the
temple they would inevitably go on sinning? Yes, surely
that; and the fact that with their human limitations
they could only dream up inadequate ways of honouring
God? Yes, surely that too. Was there something more?
Did Solomon dimly perceive that it is our human weakness
and fragility of faith that gives us this compelling
need to reassure ourselves of God’s presence with us by
somehow pinning him down? After all, for centuries
before they had the temple the Israelites had located
God in the Ark of the Covenant, which actually had to be
carried into battle to guarantee that He would be there
with them.
This
instinct runs very deep in us, doesn’t it? Look at
Peter’s instinctive response on the mount of
Transfiguration: “We must build something!” But, for
us, this ancient ambivalence is surely becoming ever
greater as the twenty-first century unfolds. We are
only too well aware that our Anglican church in this
country is struggling under the burden of maintaining
all our ancient listed churches. The financial outlay
is huge. Can it be justified while many of our fellow
Christians in Africa starve or die of AIDS without drugs
and certainly worship in open shacks with ugly tin
roofs? We are all aware through Kairos and the whole
drift of events that we are being urged to concentrate
more and more on worship in the community and on
adapting church buildings for community purposes. We
know that the house churches, which do not have special
buildings, are among the fastest growing Christian
cells. There is a growing perception also that, far
from drawing people in, church buildings may even be
seen as a barrier keeping people out, especially the
younger generation.
Yet, I’m
sure that most of us here feel that if St Mary’s was to
be allowed to fall into disrepair or eventually to
close, it would seem to our whole Buriton community that
God had left the village. We feel that, as our forbears
did, we must do everything we can to preserve our
precious heritage not just for our own sakes but for
future generations.
So, is it
right or necessary that we, and the Anglican Church as a
whole, should question the deep seated, centuries old,
very human instinct to designate particular places as
holy? We know that thousands are still inspired by
visiting places like Iona and Lindisfarne. Could it be
that we are being called to look again at this
attachment, to ensure that it is truly, deeply of God?
In a moment
we’ll have a closer look at the scriptures to see what
light they throw on this particular tension or dilemma;
but first consider a few thoughts to illustrate how
deeply it runs in our world today. Let’s start with the
worst case. We all, almost daily, observe with dismay
the chaos and hatred which can arise when attachment to
particular holy places becomes too great. Your thoughts
will, I’m sure, have already leapt ahead of me, to
Jerusalem, to what is still, to Jews, the Temple Mount,
and to Muslims the Haram al Sharif, the Noble Rock. The
mount itself, quite apart from the buildings on it, was
and is sacred to Jews, Christians and in due course,
Muslims, because it is the place where Abraham passed
the ultimate test of faith in being willing to sacrifice
his son Isaac. Muslims, of course, trace their descent
from Abraham through Isaac’s older half-brother,
Ishmael. It was here that Solomon built his temple, and
here, too, some one hundred and fifty years after its
destruction, that the second temple was built by the
returned exiles from Babylon. This was the temple, in
which Jesus worshipped and taught. There is no doubt
whatsoever that in his time it was the absolute focus of
the religious faith of all Jews. Since the destruction
of this temple by the Romans in AD 70, all that remains
to them is, of course, the Wailing Wall, which was a
late addition made by Herod the Great only shortly
before Jesus was born. But the whole site remains
infinitely precious.
Yet on this
mount now stand the most precious of all Muslim
buildings - the Dome of the Rock, a pilgrim shrine, and
the Al-Aqsa mosque where they still pray. These
buildings have been there for thirteen hundred years,
far longer than either of the temples which preceded
them. They commemorate the place where, according to
the Qu’ran, Mohammed was carried by night from Mecca on
a winged horse accompanied by the Archangel Gabriel and
conversed with Abraham, Moses, and, yes, Jesus. He then
ascended on a golden ladder to heaven and into the very
presence of God before returning to earth.
How can
either side ever surrender such claims? The one God,
whom both communities claim to worship, must surely,
like his Son, be weeping to behold this conflict. Luke
tells us that when Jesus, shortly before his death,
“drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying:
‘Would that even to-day you knew the things that make
for peace’.” How much more contemporary can you get
than that? “O Jerusalem, would that even today you knew
the things that make for peace.” We see that excessive
veneration for holy places can dangerously divert us
from the reality of the living God.
Here’s a
second pertinent reflection. One of our visitors to the
Diocesan Retreat House was a former Dean of the
Cathedral in Johannesburg, who had suffered imprisonment
in solitary confinement for his opposition to
apartheid. He spoke thus of his experience: “I got up
and in my cell there were two windows standing high up.
And it was easy to stand there and imagine a great cross
hanging down between them. And there I stood and I used
to go through the words of the Holy Communion service,
which if you’ve said it for thirty-five years every day,
you remember fairly well. And when it came to the time
of the consecration - I didn’t have any bread or wine -
I took nothing into my hands and I said “This is my
body, which is given for you”. And again I took nothing
into my hands and I said “This is the blood of the new
covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the
remission of sins. Do this as oft as ye shall drink it
in remembrance of Me”. And it is my honest knowledge
that the communion I received there in that prison cell,
without the means of bread and wine, were as real and as
glorious and as triumphant as any communion I have ever
received in my own Cathedral, with the organ and the
bells and all the glory.”
And one
more thought. When the poet John Betjeman became very
ill and believed he was facing death, he realised that
for years, when he had thought he was worshipping God,
he had really been in love with the ethos of the church,
the beauty of the stained glass and architecture, the
poetry and mystery of it all; and now, in his time of
need, it had failed him. His poem ends with the urgent,
agonised cry: “O real God, come quick to me.”
So what
more can we learn from the scriptures to help and guide
us? As we’ve seen, there’s no doubt at all
that in the Old Testament temple worship is the
pre-eminent expression of faith. Jesus himself
faithfully observed the traditional rituals all his
life, and so did his disciples after the Resurrection
until they were ejected from the temple. Yet even in
the most ancient scriptures there are subtle hints of a
missing dimension. We considered earlier the
possibility that Solomon may have dimly perceived the
origin of our deep instinct for giving God a special
house; that it might arise from our need to reassure
ourselves that He is truly with us. But Solomon did not
have the New Testament, as Jews and Muslims still do
not. And here, for us, the missing dimension becomes
clear.
You’ll
remember the occasion when Jesus caused shock and horror
by saying that he could destroy the temple and rebuild
it in three days? Of course, his hearers thought he was
either wicked or mad. John, in his account, adds in
parenthesis “But he was speaking of the temple of his
body”. And later in this fourth gospel we find Jesus
saying, in his last hours on earth: “I will not leave
you desolate. I will come to you. If a person loves
me, my Father will love him; and we will come to him
and make our dwelling with him.” And here is Paul, even
more explicit, writing to the Corinthians: “Do you not
know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit
dwells in you? For God’s temple is holy, and that
temple you are.”
So what can
we conclude from all of this? That, being human, it is
right, as Solomon perceived, that we seek to honour God
in all our human ways by seeking to make our worship as
beautiful as we can; that, being human and living in a
society which still needs tangible assurance of God’s
presence, it may often be right for us to seek to
preserve our church buildings as long as they remain a
visible witness to His existence in an increasingly
indifferent and secular age; but, above all, that we
must accept the total reassurance of his presence
offered to us by Our Lord. He is all that we can ever
need so we must never allow our attachment to anything
else whatsoever, however beautiful or sacred, to divert
us from this reality. We must never for a moment forget
where our deepest priority lies. For without his
presence indwelling us, as temples of the Holy Spirit,
we will never solve our problems or find our true path
through the many ambiguities that will always confront
us.
“Come down,
O Love divine / visit this soul of mine.” This has to
be our constant prayer, doesn’t it? A prayer offered
without ceasing until, through the grace given to us, we
ourselves become “the place / wherein the Holy Spirit
makes his dwelling.”
Amen
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