Friends
I visited St Mary’s Hitcham for the first time today. We held our Churches Together in Burnham meeting there and it was lovely to see this little 12th century church rising up to greet me as I drove down the hill through wooded back lanes. Such places remind us that the faith has persevered, survived and indeed thrived through plague, fire and misfortune before and will do so again and the prayers of the faithful have permeated the very walls of the sanctuary.
I feel something of that prayer permeation when we meet fortnightly for prayer in the Cornerstone Chapel where prayers have been spoken for far fewer years than the 850 or so that St Mary’s has been in existence, and where until the 1990’s it was merely the vestibule to the church proper. Yet still, there is a sense of the presence of God in that place where prayers are offered on a regular basis.
There will have been something of that in the Temple in Jerusalem – even more so since there had been nowhere else where it was permissible to offer sacrifices since the time of King Josiah in the 6th century BC. How terrible, how offensive it was for Jesus to talk about the temple being pulled down and rebuilt in three days; how significant and frightening it must have been when the curtain to the Holy of Holies rent in two when Jesus was crucified, and how utterly horrific was the sacking and destruction of the temple in AD70. Yet these three things combined hold within them some of the most powerful understandings of our faith: that God is in his temple, and that the temple is the world; that Jesus is God and thus also God’s temple, and that he was killed and rose again after three days; that any man-made obstacle, be it curtain or wall, that stands between God and the people has been removed by the willing sacrifice of Christ made once for all upon the cross.
As the weather improves and we are able to walk abroad more frequently, let us give thanks for our buildings as we pass them. Buildings that allow us to meet and learn of God but which can never contain him who is to be found in the highways and the byways, the market place, the school, the city and the village. One God, world without end. As we enter Ascensiontide, we remember that Jesus rose from death and ascended into Heaven, but we remember also all that he left on earth as we look forward to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
God bless,
Vicci