I have on more than one occasion begin the sermon with a sonnet. I do so again today except today's sonnet is not of my own composition, but rather that of Pierce Shelley, husband of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. The irony in Shelley's poem has long spoken to me. The mighty king intended for future onlookers to despair because they could never attain his greatness – that the grandiosity of his monument would humble them in comparison. And his monument indeed would elicit despair from the mighty hoping to leave their own legacy, albeit not for the reasons Ozymandius intended. The fact that his monument lie in ruins and was not the imposing statue it was intended to be would cause contemporary mighty ones looking upon it to despair that their own attempts to attain immortality through their legacy were similarly doomed.
Edifices indeed can testify over a long period of time, but without a cadre of generations and generations of tenders to hold them together, they testify as ruins and not in their original functioning form.
Impressive ruins create a sort of conundrum to understand: for grand ruins to exist, the people that created needs to have been strong enough to have created the great work, yet fragile enough to not be able to maintain it. The very existence of a great ruin speaks to the transience of greatness.
The people of ancient Israel would have encountered the oldest great ruins we know of today: the temple towers called ziggurats built by the first civilization, the Sumerians. They surely pondered both how these great works came to be, but even more what happened that they now found such great structures lying in ruins.
Our first lesson attempts to explain exactly that. It is about the building of a ziggurat temple: a tower with its top in the heavens. Humankind came together to create a monument to themselves: look how great this generation was that it could leave behind so grand a tower! It reaches so high that surely these builders rival the gods themselves! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Centuries later, when the people of Israel encountered these ziggurats, they lie in ruins. What could possibly cause people to build so great a temple and then walk away from it? God surely must have scattered and divided them upon seeing the ambition of their construction project.
So our first lesson talks about humanity collaborating to construct a church building really as a monument to human achievement, and God dividing their language and scattering them.
Our second lesson is precisely the opposite: God forms a church by enabling the disciples to speak about God's deeds of power to people of many tongues, all of who can understand what the disciples are saying. In the first lesson, we have the creation of a building, which results in human tongues being divided. In the second lesson, we have the creation of a movement, which results in human tongues being brought together. In the first lesson, we have a monument to human power. In the second lesson, we are speaking about God's deeds of power.
And that brings us to one of the fundamental truths of the Pentecost moment in the church: we can put our energy into church buildings, or we can put our energy into building the church.
Many of you know that I just got back from a trip to Ireland. I visited many holy sites, and was shocked at how few of them were still in use today by the Church! It was simultaneously sad and helpful to see so so many examples on my trip that we are far from alone in our age in building structures whose size and grandeur outlasts the size and grandeur of the congregation that had them built.
If my observations in the past week are it indication, humanity seems to be better at building walls that endure than roofs and better at building roofs than congregations that endure from generation to generation.
So so many abbeys and parish churches, priories and friaries – even cathedrals that now stand roofless, congregation-less, and massless, protected by the historic preservation registry but long out of use to house people singing praises to God, testifying to the architectural brilliance of their builders, but mute in the testimony to God's power for which they were allegedly built.
But then too, I often found historic churches in a state of ruin with a contemporary church nearby. When the historic building no longer served its original function the Church moved on, leaving behind the beautiful historic building for a structure that actually empowered the mission of the church in the generation that needed it.
One of the few examples of a historic building in continuous use, St. Nicholas parish in Galway, where I worshipped last Sunday, was particularly instructive. The building has been in continuous use for 702 years. The walls certainly look old. But looking at the interior, it looks rather contemporary. They just installed a new sound system this year, and last year installed cameras and screens so they could worship both in person and over zoom, and the building, while surrounded by stone that have stood for seven centuries, was a constantly evolving living space, and not a museum.
Kylemore Abbey was an even clearer example of this adaptation. The congregation of Benedictine nuns moved into the former country manor house at Kylemore when their abbey in Belgium was destroyed by World War I. They lived and ran a school in the palatial estate. And then they realized it no longer served their current needs. The ground floor of the manor house is now a museum and source of steady tourist dollars, the school wing rented to an American university, and the nuns are in the process of building a new abbey on the grounds to live and pray in, leaving behind the old palace and chapel for something that can better accommodate both retreatants and older nuns in wheelchairs. They can do this because their focus is on building the church, and not on church buildings.
Ultimately, great ruins are not necessarily a cause for despair. The church’s mission is not to preserve historic buildings. The church’s mission is to spread God’s good news to all the peoples of the earth, in each community, making disciples and baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. When the high king of Ireland granted St. Patrick’s Rock of Cashel to the Church, it made sense for a time to govern the Church in Ireland from that high rock. Two beautiful churches, a dormitory for the choir, and a stone apartment tower for the Archbishop of Ireland and his household all were erected over the centuries atop the high rock. And then, in the 1700s, the Church realized that while Cashel was dramatic and a historic seat of power, it did not advance the mission of the Church to lead the Church in Ireland from atop a rock in the countryside. The archbishop's throne, and household, and governing bodies were moved to a cathedral in the city of Dublin, and Cashel was left behind. When Viking raiders killing your monks and plundering your altarware is the major threat the church faces, a mountaintop fortress makes sense for your cathedral and chancery; you can do that when religiosity is a given but physical safety is not. But in an age when the current challenge is not physical security but rather engaging people in the course of their lives, a fortress becomes not an asset but a liability, a sign of the church's removal and potential irrelevance to the people of God. The church ruins at Cashel are not a sign of the church’s failure, but of its success. The fact that the church was able to walk away from the tower with its top in the heavens, and go into the city to proclaim the Good News to people of every tongue – this is what we have always been called to do. The church is not a museum to the greatness of the way things have been done in the past, as much as I am glad such museums exist (and I spent a lot of time in such museums in my time in Ireland). No, the Church is called to be set ablaze and be a people who go out into the world proclaiming the Good News. We need whatever headquarters serves that mission.
So here we are in Livonia in 2022. We don’t have a palace or a seven century old building. Nevertheless, in the time I’ve been with you, the overwhelming majority of my time and energy, and of so so many of our most active members, has been focused on this building. Buildings indeed can facilitate the mission of the church. But what we have done in the past seven-plus months cannot be the sustainable way forward. If we are to thrive, if this congregation is to survive, we have to get to a point, and very very soon, that our attention is focused not on the church building, but on building the church. We have to find a way to make whatever building space we use a thing in the background, so our energy, our passion, our being set ablaze by the fire of the Holy Spirit can focus on bringing the good news to the people of Livonia, starting with the transformation of each of us sitting in these pews and spreading like a mighty flame throughout this community, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Amen, Alleluia!
