32nd Week OT (St John Lateran): Ez 47.1-2, 8-9, 12; I Cor 3.9-11, 16-17, John 2.13-22
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving


Stark white walls, a table upfront, no cross, no crucifix, no statues or images of the saints, no tabernacle, no nothing to distinguish this Catholic Church from a Quaker meeting hall. The oddly angled light yellow smears on the wall were Stations of the Cross. I left this stripped bare, architectural victim of iconoclastic modernism and went up the street to the Episcopal parish where I found a real church! Stained glass, polished brass, an altar and its rail, and the tell-tale signs of sacraments: the smell of melted bees’ wax, stale incense, and a lingering whiff of Murphy’s Oil Soap. Now, this is where Jesus lives! I was baptized an Episcopalian in a 150 year old stone font with a sterling silver calm shell. Just three trickles on the forehead, a sherry in the parlor, and I was in.

The building mattered. The building won’t matter in the long run. The church is not the building. I think we all know this. Paul writes to the Corinthians: “You are God’s building.” We are the Church. We are the building that God grounds in his revelation. We are the building that God raises up, reinforces, decorates, and dwells in. And Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of this building, rejected and reclaimed and made the one foundation. We are the temple of God where His Spirit does the work of redemption and sanctification, the saving work of perfecting us with His grace.

The building mattered. It won’t matter in the long run. But it mattered in 1982 when I made the decision, based on an immediate rejection of that desolate Catholic cube, to reject the Catholic Church in favor of its late-born cousin. It mattered that the Catholic building made no outward sign of its commitment to the Christian faith. It mattered that this building swore itself to no creed, attached itself to no tradition, and smelled like a damp grocery store. It mattered that there was no lingering evidence that anything sacred went on in this building at all.

The building mattered. It mattered when the Catholics of the parish came together in worship. When the Body collected itself and offered praise and thanksgiving. The Word was proclaimed and preached and the sacrifice made and shared. God’s grace abounded. And the pilgrim church there took a few more steps toward its missionary end. The building served a purpose. It was a utilitarian, multi-purpose liturgical celebration space. Very 1982. It served a purpose, but it wasn’t the purpose.

Jesus makes it clear to us that the church must be both universal and local, global and neighboring. It must be a sacred place—a firmly planted stone—and a holy event—an ongoing consummation of the New Covenant. It must be useful to our final purpose and an enduring witness to God’s glory. God’s temple—stone and flesh—cannot be cheapened by the commerce of the marketplace—the commercialism of monetary trade or the marketplace of ideas where every idea, every thought is traded in equal value. If zeal for the house of the Lord is to consume us, we must be vowed, as we are in baptism, to a truth, a goodness, and a beauty that defies fashion, bucks trends, and endures unrattled across centuries. We must always find ourselves at the front of a faithful pilgrimage going back 2,000 years and behind a glorious parade trailing off ahead into eternity.

There was a stark humility to that Catholic Church that bored me into the Anglican Communion. And there was a weighty dignity to the Episcopal church I so reluctantly abandoned. I found God though when Paul’s question suddenly made sense: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”