The Building Always Wins

Does sacred space matter? If it does, what should it look like? What should it feel like? What story should it tell? And can it tell many stories while remaining faithful to the story of Holy Scripture and the story of the saints across the ages?

Those are the questions that I posed in my sermon a few weeks ago at Church of the Cross.

I began with a tour of the language of “temple” in the Bible which functions as a shorthand for the house of God. Beginning in the Garden and ending in Revelation, both literal and figurative temples underscore God’s commitment to make his habitation with all of creation.

I argued two points that follow from this tour. First, if there were ever any doubt about the goodness of the material world, that doubt is decisively dispelled in Christ’s birth and resurrection. Second, the goal of church buildings is not to “get out of the way” but to perform theologically formative work in our lives.

I summarized the debates between Puritans and Anglicans in the 16th century and I suggested that all church buildings have been telling one of three stories: the story of church building 1) as “divine house,” 2) as “schoolhouse,” or 3) as “domestic house.”

With respect to Anglicans specifically, while acknowledging a great deal of variety of thought and practice, I maintained that three things can be said with relative confidence: we are a sacramental people, we embrace the symbolic, and we walk in the Via Media.

As Anglicans, we believe that there’s room for both lavish beauty and simple beauty, for both Easter feasting and Lenten fasting, for both the greening of the church and the stripping of the altar, for both the beauty of extravagant aesthetics and the beauty of extravagant works of justice and peace.

I concluded my sermon with two assertions: “The building always wins” and “Beauty matters.”

It was a whirlwind of a sermon, and while we don’t have the technology to show both my face and my images (I’ve included a few here) in the livestream, my hope is that it will inspire a more faithful and confident practice of church architecture within my own communion.

You can hear the whole sermon here or you can watch it here.