Sermon: Building for God's Glory

I never cease to marvel at how this building was built. If you saw the first of the BBC series on climbing Great Britain’s buildings, which came from Durham, you will had rather unnerving views of what it was like for the people building it.  I’ve read ‘The Spire’ and ‘Pillars of the Earth’ so have some idea in theory of what was involved in building a cathedral, but stand me in the crossing and ask me to look up and I’m confounded at how they actually did it. It is too easy to miss the sheer brilliance and bravery of the people who got Frosterley marble from here and sandstone from there, and then got it a hundred feet up in the air.

We talk almost too glibly about the fact that men died in the construction of buildings like this, but it has come home to us tragically in the last month because we can now put a name and a face on the ultimate dedication of craftsmen to their art. I doubt that any of us will ever again underestimate the courage of the unknown Cathedral builders of Durham.

Which is why Nehemiah’s courage in rebuilding the city walls of Jerusalem should not go unremarked. He is cup bearer to the King in Persia. So he’s a slave with a very responsible but risky position in a foreign court – he’ll be the first to taste any poison in the king’s wine – but presumably no expertise in building. Court etiquette forbade looking sad in the king’s presence so, when he heard about the dire state of his beloved Jerusalem, he did all he could to conceal his grief but he failed and risked the king’s wrath. No wonder he was ‘very much afraid’ when the king asked why his face was sad. He spilled out the story, the king put him on the spot by asking what he wants to do about it and after a quick prayer he committed himself to something foolhardy, ‘let me leave your service, travel hundreds of miles to my devastated homeland, and rebuild it’. The king said ‘when will you be back?’ and that was it. He’s off. I wonder if, half way through the long  dangerous journey, when weary, cold and hungry, he ever regretted his precipitous action.

When he got there, the local officials opposed him and kept his plans to himself because he couldn’t trust anyone. He did a night-time recce to assess the enormity of the task, both the actual rebuilding work and the influential opposition. As we heard, he persuaded some people that God was behind this task and they agreed to help him, and if we read on in Nehemiah we hear stories how they organised the teams of workers. Among the fascinating lists of who repaired which bits of the wall we learn that people had to work beyond their skills – we’re told that one of the perfumers and one of the goldsmiths repaired the wall near the Broad Wall while the granddaughters of one of the rulers repaired near the Tower of Ovens. But there were attempts at sabotage, so they had to divide the labour force in two with half of them holding weapons in case of attack.

And when it was all finished, with remarkable speed, they appointed gatekeepers and singers; the scribe Ezra read the law of Moses to them and they had a great celebration as well as a national confession of their past failure to be faithful to God who had brought them back from exile.

Is it so different from what we have been doing this weekend? We’ve installed a window rather than built a city wall (although we’re doing that outside the Cathedral): the Works Staff repaired the masonry around the window, the Friends gave the money for it, Tom Denny designed and made it, Patrick Costeloe and Michael Lassen did the leading, some of us worked to get the necessary permissions, we planned a wonderful day yesterday, hundreds of people came from all over the place, the choir sang, volunteers helped, speakers spoke and the restaurant and St Chad’s fed us. And it culminated in the dedication of the window at Evensong to the glory of God and in memory of Michael Ramsey.

And the window portrays in coloured light and in detailed etching, the story of the transfiguration of Jesus Christ when the glory of God could not be contained within him but was seen shining from him: God’s glory breaking on earth, amidst the suffering of the world shown at the bottom of the window by the distress of the family of the epileptic boy and contemporary scenes of human violence and suffering; suffering that Michael Ramsey himself knew in is life not least when his mother was killed in a car accident when he was a child and his brilliant older brother, in whose shadow Michael appears to have lived, died suddenly just as his academic career was taking off. We know that Michael Ramsey was profoundly influenced by both tragedies.

John, in writing his gospel from which we heard earlier, does not tell the Transfiguration story as a narrative, instead his gospel is an extended reflection on the glory of God made known in Jesus Christ but not recognised by the people he met. John begins his gospel by setting out his theme: Jesus Christ is the light of the world, he was in the world, the world came into being through him and yet the world did not know him. So the reading we heard this morning from part way through John’s gospel is no surprise – Jesus is in dispute with the religious authorities who cannot or will not understand that he is God. All they can see is a human who causes them trouble. They accuse him of having a demon; a charge Jesus roundly rejects and instead claims that God, his Father, glorifies him.

But if these opponents had open hearts and eyes to see who Jesus is, they would have noticed the clues – John structures his gospel around seven signs that reveal Jesus’ glory, the first of which – the turning of the water into wine at the wedding – he concludes with, ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.’ John keeps challenging us:  can we see God’s glory revealed in Jesus?

It is very easy to say that Jesus could confront the religious authorities time and again because he was God and thus somehow immune to the exhaustion of coming under constant observation and attack. If we think like that we deny his humanity. The glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ, which is shown so superbly in our new window, was not obvious to the people around Jesus because he was also fully human and they could not see beyond that. John’s whole gospel is a tightly structured account of what happens when the Word becomes flesh and lives among us, and we see his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

And so as we begin to get to know our new window, designed as it is to repay pondering and being returned to time and again to see things we missed before, it is the glory of God in Jesus Christ that confronts us in that great shaft of light. Glory revealed in the narrative of the transfiguration, glory revealed to pilgrims – one looking remarkably like Michael Ramsey – and to Cuthbert shown on Farne Island, glory that strengthens and renews people, glory revealed in Durham Cathedral which can be seen in its own window, and glory revealed most poignantly in the scenes at the very top and bottom of the window where glory is revealed in the midst of suffering. At the top, the passion of Christ on the cross is surrounded by the colours of glory. At the bottom is the scene when Jesus came down the mountain from the transfiguration and was confronted by the desperate plea of a father that Jesus should heal his son whose epilepsy injured him and distressed his family. Jesus healed the boy and restored him to his family – God’s glory does not overwhelm people in need but heals and restores them. And that was not just there and then, but it is here and now because also at the bottom of the window is a scene of contemporary suffering into which Jesus enters to bring wholeness and peace.

And we can place ourselves among them because our joy at the dedication of this window is shot through with sadness since we mourn the tragic death of Michael Lassen who was working on the window just four weeks ago. His death reminds us of the bravery and dedication of the people who built this Cathedral centuries ago without the technology we take for granted today, and the bravery and dedication of Nehemiah who risked his life to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.

They challenge us, and will go on challenging us as we return time and again to the window, with the delight but also the cost of giving ourselves to live for God’s glory. Jesus knew it; they knew it; Ramsey knew it, we know it. And so, with the scaffolding still in place, three weeks ago people gathered at the foot of the window and from where I stood we were an extension of the crowd in the bottom left of the window, a reminder that our own sorrow at a tragic death is caught up not only in the sorrow of the world but also in the glory of the transfiguration of Christ whose own passion and death is foreshadowed by the transfiguration. We can give ourselves with determined commitment, like that of Nehemiah, to serve God whatever the cost because as Michael Ramsey knew, in the Christian life, suffering is embraced and healed by Christ whose glory was revealed when he lived on earth, was revealed in the transfiguration, and now is revealed in this window. Amen.