I want to reflect this evening on the place in worship of buildings, including our own beautiful church. Our psalm this evening, recalling King David’s resolve to build a temple, belongs to a group called songs of ascents, because they are suitable for the use of pilgrims and worshippers going up to the Temple in Jerusalem. Such psalms are of course particularly appropriate to to-day’s Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, the occasion eight days after Jesus’ birth when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the Temple, in accordance with the law, to be presented to the Lord. This was also the occasion when the aged Simeon, seeing in the baby Jesus the promised Messiah, spoke the words of the Nunc dimittis, which the choir sings for us at every evensong – Lord, now lettest now thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.
The best known of the songs of ascent are Psalm 121 – I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help – and Psalm 122 – I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Last Monday, when Sir David Willcocks came to celebrate his 90th birthday with the Bach Choir, this was one of the two pieces he chose to conduct, in Sir Hubert Parry’s rousing setting, written for the coronation of Edward VIIth, and sung at every coronation since then. Sir David has of course given much of his life to making our greatest churches and cathedrals ring with songs of praise, and I know that this piece, so closely associated with Westminster Abbey where he first sang as a chorister, gives triumphant expression to a truth which he and many of us feel. I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.
Notwithstanding these great psalms, both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospels are really quite ambivalent about temple worship. There was an important symbolism about the portable nature of the tabernacle housing the ark of the covenant, which the prophetic tradition was reluctant to lose. When King David wants to build a temple, the Lord reminds him, through Nathan the prophet, that he has dwelt in a tent ever since he brought the people of Israel from Egypt and led them through the wilderness to their promised land. Travelling with his people, he had never allowed them to suppose he could be tied to one place by a building. He allows David’s son to build him a house, but the house which truly pleases him is the house of his servant David, which he promises to establish for ever – a promise he will ultimately keep through the human lineage of the child whom Simeon identifies as the one who is to be the light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of Israel.
The ambivalence which was there from the very beginning is confirmed by painful experience. As the little kingdom teeters on the brink of annihilation, Jeremiah has to remind the people that the temple itself is no guarantee of the Lord’s favour and protection if they ignore him in the conduct of their daily life. Unimpressed by his prophetic insight, they provoke the anger of the Babylonians and are carried away into exile. At about the same time the prophet Ezekiel sees the visions in which the glory of the Lord’s presence is progressively withdrawn from the temple and its environs as the people fail to observe God’s commandments. Micah puts the point forcefully as he dismisses the rituals of sacrifice associated with the temple, insisting instead that what God really requires is that his people shall do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with their God (Micah 6.8). As Father Stephen reminded us this morning, when it comes to making a home, it’s the family that really matters, even if we do also have to take care of the furniture.
By the time the prophet Haggai is writing the passage which we heard for our first reading this evening, the situation is quite different. A Jewish community has been allowed to return from exile, but the rebuilding of the temple has scarcely progressed. Despite much hard work, the community remains barely viable. ‘You have sown much but harvested little’ we read, ‘you clothe yourselves but noone is warm; and you that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes’ (Haggai 1.6). Haggai asserts that their ill fortune is linked to their lack of care for the house of God, and challenges them to come and rebuild the temple. When they rise to the challenge, becoming a community as they unite around a common project, he looks forward to the eventual construction of an even greater, more splendid temple, anticipating an ideal future of cosmic salvation.
When we come to the New Testament, we find that Jesus himself is a regular worshipper in the synagogue. We know that as a child he accompanied his parents when they visited Jerusalem for the great festivals (Luke 2.46). By the age of 12 he already feels at home in the temple, which he has learned to regard as his Father’s house. In the course of his public ministry he visits Jerusalem on several occasions in connection with the Jewish festivals, which helps to explain why he has friends there as well as in nearby Bethany. But he tells the woman at the well in Samaria not to get hung up on where God should be worshipped. What matters is to worship him in spirit and in truth. He endorses the radical activity of John the Baptist, focussing on repentance and renewal, far from any temple or synagogue.
The conversation reported in our second reading tonight follows the famous incident in which he overturns the tables of the money changers in the Temple courtyard, accusing them of turning a house of prayer into a den of thieves. His orthodox critics want a sign of his authority for doing such a thing, and he refuses to give them an unambiguous sign. ‘Destroy this temple’ he says, standing in the courtyard among the overturned tables, ‘and I will raise it up in three days’. On one level he is anticipating his own death and resurrection, but his choice of metaphor is surely not coincidental. His critics miss the point entirely by taking him literally, but might he not be deliberately suggesting that the structures of religion, not merely our great temples and cathedrals, but our laws and liturgies as well, are fundamentally ephemeral – they will all be knocked down – whereas the restored life which will be released by his death and resurrection will be infinitely more glorious and everlasting. Moreover, as St Paul glimpses in his letter to the Ephesians, if Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the new temple, with the apostles and prophets as its foundations, our destiny is to be built together into a holy temple which shall be the true dwelling place for God (Eph 2.20-22). There is no temple at all in St John’s vision of the new Jerusalem, ‘for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb (Rev 21.22).
So what does all this have to say about our responsibility for this beautiful place of worship? It seems that in this life we need buildings set apart for worship – and we need to fill them, if we can, with all that is best and most beautiful in art and poetry and music – to help us to be aware, and to express our awareness of that alternative reality where God reigns supreme. Having built such structures to the glory of God, it would clearly express the very opposite of our intentions, and fail utterly to respond to our needs, if we then allowed them to fall into ruin, so we have a duty to maintain or if need be restore them, as the people did in Haggai’s day. But the scriptures continually remind us that what matters more than anything else is the way we respond to the needs of our community. It would be an affront to the worship of God if we were to maintain a beautiful building, spending much on the quality of the worship which goes on here, if we failed to respond to the changing needs of our own community and of the wider community which we serve. That is the challenge which we perpetually face in our budgeting. It would be wrong to allow this beautiful building or the high standards to which we aspire in our worship, including its music, to become shabby and run down, but we also know that if we are to meet the needs of our community, we must spend more on appropriate staffing and accommodation, especially for our growing work with children. And we must care for the poor in our community, which is why it is right to-day to focus also on the needs of the Camden Churches Cold Weather shelter If there is a choice, it is the people’s needs that have to come first. That is the view that has determined the strategy followed by our PCC so far, and I hope and believe it will continue to determine our strategy over the coming months and years. But it does mean that those of us who can, at a pinch, afford to dig deeper into our pockets to support the high quality of music that we enjoy, not least at evensong, are going to have to do so, through our support for the Friends of the Music and the Hampstead Church Music Trust.
I was sad when they said unto me, we can’t afford a choir to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. I hope that won’t need to happen next year. For me, and perhaps for you too, part of the gladness which is celebrated in the great psalms of ascent comes from the expectation that our cares will be put into perspective and our spirits lifted by worshipping with great music in a fine building. I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.