The first time I stood at the altar here at Mary Mags I was very reassured to find Hugh of Lincoln looking back at me from the reredos. I served my title in Lincoln cathedral, where Hugh was bishop, where he is buried and where he is fondly remembered; he is one of the saints I think of as a companion on my journey, and it was extremely reassuring to have him there as I tried to remember when I needed to step where.
Hugh is depicted here, as you will know, because it was he who had the church rebuilt and rededicated in 1194 – and some of the walls he dedicated then still stand, to the east and to the south. Building churches was in many ways Hugh's speciality. He was appointed to Lincoln largely in order to rebuild the cathedral, which had partially fallen down, and one of the Lincoln stories that is still told about him is that during that rebuilding project, Hugh himself wielded a hod. I'm not quite sure what a hod is, but I gather it's part of the building process!
When Hugh arranged the rebuilding of churches, when he picked up his hod, when he rededicated this church, I wonder if he thought of King Solomon and our reading from 2 Chronicles; about the temple in Jerusalem which Solomon built and dedicated. I suspect he did not emulate Solomon by sacrificing an uncountable number of sheep and oxen – but he may well, like Solomon, have caused trumpeters and singers to make themselves heard in praise and thanksgiving. Unlike Solomon, he did not place the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies. Instead, he celebrated Mass and made Jesus Christ present under the substance of bread and wine, broken and shared.
Solomon was speaking with some hubris when he told God that the temple he had built was God’s place to reside in for ever. God had indeed promised to be present there, but God could not and cannot be confined to the Temple. Yet, as the story of God’s chosen people continued, they increasingly felt – often for very good reasons – that the Temple that Solomon dedicated and its rebuilt successor was the only place where God could be properly worshipped. God, in this theology, is uniquely and inimitably present in the Ark of the Covenant, contained within the walls of the Temple. It’s this theology which the woman at the well questions, a question that looms so large for her that once she perceives that Jesus is a prophet, that is the issue on which she wants his advice.
I would like to think that she questions this theology because she values her own inheritance of faith – the Samaritan inheritance, the theology of the northern kingdom, where there were many holy places in the promised land where the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob could properly be worshipped.
The woman at the well wants to think of God not as confined within the walls of a temple, but as potentially present in the place she lives, and of herself as standing within a particular and valid inheritance of faith – able to worship in the place where her ancestors worshipped.
We, who celebrate today the dedication of a church that has existed for more than nine centuries and rejoice that our prayers are joined with the prayers of all those who have worshipped here in times past, may well have some sympathy with her desire. But in that, we are also the heirs of Solomon’s theology and his desire to make a place for God to dwell – risking losing the sense that God cannot be contained by mortal walls, that God comes to meet us in his real presence by God’s own sovereign choice. Our faith that God keeps God’s promises to be present here, to meet us here, to feed us in bread and wine, must not become our complacency that we have bounded and contained God in a single place.
To us as well as to the woman at the well, then, Jesus says: the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.
Jesus does not criticise her – he reframes her question. He doesn’t deny that places of prayer are good; that the inheritance of our ancestors in the faith is good; that the continuity of kneeling where prayer has been and continues to be valid is also good. He doesn’t deny that God is present in such places according to God’s promise. But Jesus does not want us to stop there. The point of these places, of this inheritance, of places dedicated to the presence of God, of the real presence of God in fulfilment of God’s promises, is to give us somewhere to stand as we learn to worship the Father in spirit and truth. Evelyn Underhill writes:
The walls of the church, limiting the range of our attention, shutting out the torrent of life, with its insistent demands and appeals, make possible our apprehension of this deep eternal peace. The character of our consciousness, intermediate between Eternity and Time, and ever ready to swing between them, makes such a device, such a concrete aid to concentration, essential to us. But the peace, the presence, is everywhere--for us, not for it, is the altar and the sanctuary required--and your deliberate, humble practice of contemplation will teach you at last to find it; outside the sheltering walls of recollection as well as within.
We need places where prayer has been valid; places where the presence of God has been known by our ancestors in faith; places built to God’s glory as a resting place for God’s presence. We need churches like this one – where God becomes present day by day in bread and wine; where we genuflect as we enter to acknowledge that God is here, as God has promised; upon which the glory of God rests and from which that glory streams out to shine as a light in the world. But we need them, not as the whole of our Christian life, but as a gateway to it; in Paul’s metaphor, as a foundation on which we can build.
When St Hugh rebuilt and rededicated this church, a renewed building on an old foundation, he might have thought of the passage from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth – with its warning to take care how you build on the existing foundation, which is Jesus; and with its promise that some work will survive into eternity.
The work that survives into eternity is not physical buildings, but the development of our character; so I think Hugh’s work survives into eternity not in the churches that he rebuilt, places of renewed beauty built on old foundations, but in his ‘wise and cheerful boldness’ that meant that those who knew him remembered him as a saint. Work that survives into eternity is work that truly displays the presence of God – not only in buildings, but in our characters. It is work by which the love of God can be made known. It is work in which the Spirit of God dwells.
The Preface for St Frideswide, used in Christ Church last week, includes the phrase:
In every house of prayer you make your home and by the ceaseless action of your grace you make your people the temple of your Spirit and renew in us your image.
This double focus is right for days when we think about our own church buildings and church communities – remembering that the church is not primarily a building, but the assembly of God’s people.
In this church building, this house of prayer, we are the assembly of God’s people, being made the temple of the Holy Spirit by God’s grace. In Solomon’s Temple, God’s presence was symbolised by the ark of the Covenant. In this church, God’s presence is real in bread and wine. In each of us, part of the baptised people of God, God’s presence dwells within us in the Holy Spirit.
We, collectively, are the church: the assembly of God’s people, If churches are places upon which the glory of God rests and from which that glory streams out to shine as a light in the world, then we too ought to be vessels and beacons of glory. We, individually, are God’s saints: those who are called to worship the Father in spirit and in truth, those who are called to build on the foundation with the best that we can offer, those who are called to know God more closely through the gift of encountering God in this place. And we, the baptised people of God, are those who are called to shine as lights in the world to the glory of God the Father.