The time will come when we
are just a memory; and maybe not even that if the psalmist is right that ‘we
fly forgotten as a dream flies with the opening day’. And if life is transient, so are its most
enduring monuments, even those that outlive us by centuries. In the gospels the disciples are overcome by
the size and beauty of the temple in Jerusalem.
‘Look Master, what wonderful stones and wonderful buildings!’ And Jesus tells them that the day is coming
when not one stone will be left standing on another: all will be thrown
down.
We wouldn’t be human if we
didn’t marvel at wonderful stones and buildings, least of all when we are
sitting among them in a World Heritage Site.
But that doesn’t mean that it lasts for ever. Buildings, like people, are mortal. What Jesus
says about the temple is also true of this place. We can hardly bear to think of these
wonderful stones and wonderful buildings lying toppled one far-off day in a heap
of rubble. And yet, in aeons to come,
when the sun is in its death throes and planet is swallowed up in a vast red expanding
disk, and the history of the human race is done, the Cathedral, like everything
else we have built and cherished, will be dust and ashes. To claim anything else would be idolatry. St Paul says that what is seen is transient;
it is what is unseen that is eternal. We need to judge accurately where
eternity belongs. Temples have their day and are gone: in the celestial city,
says the Book of Revelation, there is no temple.
This Advent has brought good
news for this Cathedral in the form of a Heritage Lottery award of nearly £4
million. This means we can press on with
our Open Treasure project to enhance
this Cathedral’s mission in the way we welcome guests here, and open up our
wonderful medieval spaces round the cloister so that they can see and enjoy and
understand and love the treasures of which we are guardians. And this means not
only buildings and artefacts but this environment of lived Christian experience
as it has been down the centuries and as it is now here in Durham and the North
East.
We need to make intellectual
and theological sense of this word ‘heritage’ if we are not to have an uneasy
conscience about being awarded so much public money. Our legacy from the past
and our commitment to be good stewards of it, isn’t just a matter of buildings,
artefacts and landscapes. It means fostering respect for what our forebears
bequeathed us, whether in religion, culture, public life, ideas, literature, industry
and art, everything that human beings do that has enduring value. We are blessed with the capacity to treasure
memory and draw on it to invest in the future, and where they meet in the
present, to honour goodness, truth and beauty. Heritage connects us in tangible
ways with our past and makes us aware of the passage of time, so it puts us in
our place, reminds us what we owe to those who have gone before. It instils a proper sense of our dignity. It opens our eyes to the wisdom and insights
of our ancestors and invites us both to celebrate and emulate them in our
day. To acknowledge our debt to our
forebears and imitate their achievements is one aspect of the virtue the
classical world called piety. We must not neglect it.
But we can’t be satisfied
with piety alone, important though it is. To build and to renew are not ends in themselves. They are symbols of a larger aspiration, metaphors
of what we should be doing in deeper ways. When we build, what are we truly
building? When we conserve and renew what is old, what are we truly investing
in? We must answer those questions in the light of why we are here today, which
is to worship a God who has larger purposes for us and the human race. So when
we talk about building, it should
ultimately be to create the kind of human society that embodies the goodness,
truth and beauty our structures exemplify. When we talk about renewal, it should be the renewing the
life of all humanity, and our part of it, the church, so that
it is fit to play a transformative role in re-creating a world as God would have
it. This lies at the very heart of Advent as we contemplate the future and pray
to be delivered from all that is disfiguring, degrading and false. So we need
to know that our investment in our treasure from the past will make a difference
to what is to come, open up in new ways the treasure of God’s good news for the
world.
In our gospel reading we
heard about John the Baptist fearlessly crying out that the kingdom of heaven
has come near. It takes courage to summon a brood of vipers to
repentance. These past few days we have witnessed the death of a latter day
John the Baptist, like him giving his life to say no to evil and
injustice. It’s been deeply moving to
see the worldwide outpouring of admiration and love that has followed Nelson
Mandela’s passing. There are few men or women of any century who have had his
power to touch so many millions in every place, an old man who never lost the
capacity to dream dreams. We are privileged to have lived in his times and seen
for ourselves the life-changing effect of a life dedicated to forgiveness,
reconciliation, generosity and hope. If we needed an answer to our question,
what are we building for, surely he gives us it. In his inaugural address as
South Africa’s newly elected President in 1994, he said this:
The
time for the healing of wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that
divide us has come. The time to build is upon us…. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just
and lasting peace….We have triumphed in
the effort to implant hope in the breasts of millions of our people. We enter
into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans,
both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their
hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation
at peace with itself and the world.
There is our mandate. I see
our project, indeed everything we do in this Cathedral, as focused on nothing
less than building in the way Mandela spoke of.
Our mission as a Christian church can never be less than this: building a
just and true society, raising up a kinder, more Christ-like world where all are
reconciled to one another as God in Christ has reconciled us to himself; renewing
ourselves in the service of a God who is always reaching out to us in the Son
whose coming we long for in Advent. A New Testament letter speaks about God’s
people being ‘living stones’ in the temple he is building out of us. Only the virtues of faith and hope and love
can build for eternity, can renew our life together here and now, can make the dry
bones of our stones and buildings come alive so that they become sacraments of grace
and truth.
Yet as our gospel reading
said, God is able out of these stones to raise up children to Abraham. This place
will one day will be no more. But precisely for that reason, it points beyond itself
to a heavenly city where there is no temple, where the wolf shall live with the
lamb and a little child will lead them; to the one who comes as the Desire of
all nations and who even now implants hope in the breasts of millions’; to the
time when the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover
the sea. Here in this sacrament where
God welcomes us to his table, we walk tall with no fear in our hearts. We
gladly seize the whole of the life God holds out to us, and to build a
glory that lasts for ever. And we begin by opening the gospel’s treasure to all
who come within these walls as we utter the Advent cry of every longing heart: Maranatha!
Come Lord Jesus.
8 December 2013
(Isaiah 11.1-10; Matthew 3.1-12) 
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