Dedication Festival
Dedication Festival
1 October 2023
St Bene’t’s, Cambridge
The Reverend Dr James Gardom, Interim Priest-in-Charge, St Bene’t’s
Matthew 21.13 Jesus said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer”
Today is our Dedication Festival when we celebrate this building, so I want to talk about being a house of prayer.
Colleges are not very prayerful places, and I have spent the last 16 years surrounded by people who don’t pray at all, or who do so solely reactively and naïvely, in times of stress. St Bene't's, by contrast, has an unusual proportion of committed praying people. That has definitely been one of the joys of my recent months here. There are so many people here who think about prayer, who talk about prayer, and who pray and pray. In order to begin to make sense of prayer, you need to grasp two things.
The most important Jewish and Christian perception of God is that God is unutterably and unimaginably Holy. Literally. No name properly names Him. No image properly shows him. God is Holy, completely other, beyond time and space and thought and language.
The second and related Jewish and Christian perception of God is that this completely holy and unknowable God has revealed himself from his unutterable holiness, and made himself accessible. (Of course, this is understood very differently between the faiths.)
God is holy. God is accessible. I’m saying these things in neutral words, and almost as if the words made ordinary human sense. Actually we should be staggered by this – and our breath taken away whenever we begin to reach the very outskirts of understanding what these words are trying to convey – and generally speaking silence feels like a better option. And into that silence, often, and characteristically, emerges the act or the fact of prayer. Caught between Holiness and self-revelation, we find ourselves praying. We cannot help ourselves. Reactively, naïvely, at first, and then with the benefit of better words, and better teachers, we find ourselves praying. Into that prayer goes all the junk and the nonsense and the need and the follies of our lives, but at root it is our unstoppable reaction to the self-revelation of the God who is Holy. And once we start praying, we find that other people have been bowled over by the same thing that made us pray. We come together, here and elsewhere and find that we are rehearsing on earth for heaven itself.
We know, of course that we are not many wise by human standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. But on a good day, we know that we have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven. It turns out that we don’t need to have the words, don’t need to be able to put tongue to these things for them to be real.
Day by day people come in here, and entirely without theory, and often without words they encounter the holiness of God, God’s self-revelation, and are drawn into prayer. They sit. They light a candle. They leave a message. They go on their way. We are Cambridge people, wordy people, but even we don’t come here to talk about the unapproachable holiness of God, and mystery of God’s self-revelation. We come here to experience them. And we can do so, because the building, and the worship it houses symbolise, express to us, the holiness and the self-revelation of God. We see it in the separation of space, both from the outside world, and within the building. You come into a church to find something different, something separate, something indicative of Holiness. You find the font, by the door, the point of entry, with holy water in it. The sanctuary, railed off, used at special times and for special purposes. The altar, treated with special reverence, kissed, senced today by the celebrant. The Aumbry, with the reserved sacrament, with a perpetual light, to which we genuflect to acknowledge the presence of God in the most holy sacrament.
It is not just space. Holiness, otherness is expressed in Singing. Robes. Candles. Incense. Special vessels, special gestures and actions. God is completely holy, from that holiness God reveals himself, and these things are part of God’s self-revelation – of the route God makes for us. And yet, the reading that we are given for this Dedication Festival is the Cleansing of the Temple.
Jesus is in the temple, driving out the money changers and animal sellers. It is a moment of extraordinary anger. The temple, even more strongly than St Bene't's church, symbolised the unknowability, the holiness, the otherness of God. Remember, one man only, and only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, can approach the Holiness. To come close, he will pass through seven levels of separation. Into the Court of Gentiles, open to all. Into the Court of Women which is large, dominated by the Beautiful Gate. Through the gate into the Court of Israel (tiny). Onwards to the Court of Priests, where he purifies himself at the altar. Through the sanctuary and through the veil into the Holy of Holies to pray for the forgiveness of Israel. And even then the High Priest is not in the presence of the Holy God. He arrives at the dwelling place of the name and the glory of God.
So what has gone wrong – why does Christ with anger and a whip or cords drive out the money changers and the animal dealers – and what can we learn from it?
The priests and officials, the daily users of the temple and the pilgrims must surely have loved the temple, no less than we love this building, and must have experienced the holiness of God which it symbolised no less – probably even more than we do at St Bene’t’s. And the purpose of the market was to preserve that holiness, to ensure that only the right things come into the temple, the right coins, the right sacrifices. It did no harm that is also put the Temple on a sound financial footing.
But it one of the great dangers for devout people is that we can slip from worshipping God, to worshipping the system and the symbols that express holiness. And we know that this has happened in this story. God is there, not in the Holy of Holies at the centre of the Temple, but in the Court of Gentiles, at its edge.
Jesus is angry because the Temple authorities are so invested in Religion that they cannot see God at a crucial moment. It does not help that God is visible that day in the challenge of a wandering preacher, in a band of hairy disciples, in crowds of the lame and the blind clamouring for healing, and in wildly overexcited children shouting out the revolutionary chant, “Hosanna to the son of David”.
But then that is God for you. Never really under our control.
It is really wonderful that this house is a house of prayer. Do we need to be cleansed? I think not. I hope not. We try with all our might to ensure that this building is a focus of the holiness of God, a place of prayer for us and for all people. But there is a need for constant vigilance. Worshipping God is hard, because God is holy. It is so much easier to worship something else, and the nearest thing to hand is the system of symbols through which we express that holiness – the building, the services, the beauty, the order, the history.
We must worship God, not religion. And I am sure we do. But really only because there are so many people here who think about prayer, who talk about prayer, and who pray and pray and pray.