RESURGAM

The parish boundary of S Andrew by the Wardrobe where I am the Rector runs along the south side of S Paul's. High up on the pediment of the transept  is the figure S Andrew looking over towards the parish church. The Apostle stands above the famous carving saved from Old Saint Paul's the single word: RESURGAM. It is a message of resurrection, and the Phoenix added to it is Greek mythology re-purposed as Christian iconography. After the plague in London of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666 Sir Christopher Wren's great vision was for a new cathedral at the centre of a renewed City, risen from the ashes of the old. All London was to be as it were a symbol of resurrection: RESURGAM. 

The place of the familiar dome in the skyline of London reminds us that in addition to wealth creation symbolised by the skyscrapers and recreation shown by the Millennium Wheel, our city is a place of resilience and selflessness. If that was true for preceding generations it will be for us too in the challenges we face. Amid Coronavirus lockdown the silent proclamation across the unusually quite streets of the building on the top of Ludgate Hill is the good news of the resurrection. 

All this adds up to an extraordinary symbolism, a symbolism which is shared by many of our cathedrals and parish churches whose towers and spires and domes and walls of brick and stone and concrete contribute to the street scape of our towns and villages. A church building is however more than simply a symbol; it has a power to convene. Parish churches up and down the land have been, in some cases for centuries, the places where communities can gather to rejoice and to weep, to celebrate and to mourn, to pray and to party.

Churches become, because of this convening power, the place in which community is able to find a form and shape. For Christians of course this is most powerfully and profoundly expressed in the moment when we come together to celebrate the Eucharist. There, ordered around the Lord's Table the people of God is formed as the Body of Christ, each of the many members working their own part together for the good of all. How we yearn to be able to come together again fully in this way, and how thankful we are that, hidden as it may be, the church has not ceased to offer her sacraments and fulfil the Lord's command to 'do this in memory of me'.

By taking us out of ourselves and away from our own space to a place set apart for God, our churches enable something which, however good the technology, cannot be done simply in our homes. The church building is much more than a space big enough for a meeting or a hall equipped with the right kit; it is a space which is neither mine nor neutral. It is a space in the world set aside for God who needs no space, but who helps us who are limited by choosing places in which to meet us. These are sacred places, places of meeting, which help to make us holy as we enter them. Jacob knew this at Bethel and by the ford of the Jabbok, and the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews (10:18-29) was not guilty of hyperbole in urging the faithful to know the place they entered to be the heavenly Jerusalem itself and to enjoin us to worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our “God is a consuming fire.. No wonder, as soon as they could, Christians set aside places to worship and realised that to enter them was not simply to come to a holy place, but to be sanctified by it.

This is why we feel that even the most ugly church has beauty about it. Ninian Comper famously remarked that a church should bring one to one's knees. It does this because it draws us away from ourselves and towards God. This is not mere aesthetics, but the consequence of the presence of God among us. The One who is ubiquitous nevertheless becomes incarnate in a particular place that we may, limited beings as we are, adore him there. 

Such a place is set aside, in a sense a sacrifice. As well as land and building we sacrifice much for our churches: time, energy, effort and huge amounts of money. Not because they are valuable heritage assets nor because they are useful, though they may be both those things, but because they are set aside for sacred purposes, purposes which would be vain and nonsensical were it not for the life of the resurrection which they proclaim. 

All this points us to the day when the virus lock down will be over and we shall rise again to new things. That day is coming and we should be aware of it and preparing for it now. Even as we are in the depths of the outbreak of disease, at the time that response to the present crisis is most demanding we should be aware that the depth is the point from which we begin to rise again, that a nadir is the beginning of the road towards the zenith, and that it is into the darkness of the sixth to the ninth hour that the morning star rises. 

In resilience planning we say that the first phase of any major incident is the preparation; then there comes the response, and then there is the recovery. We should be planning for recovery now. We must be looking forward to how we will help people to reassess their world and enter a new day which will be the same but different. How do we help them to consider what is new and to be kept from our old ways of doing things? We shall probably be poorer; we shall be tired; we may work form home a bit more than we did, and we use the internet more and travel to meetings a bit less.

More profoundly we shall be a society which after fifty years of pushing death to the margins of life and pretending it is something that is always an avoidable mistake which happens by accident to someone else, will have looked death in the eye. People are dying at home. Those who have never seen a corpse have now done so. We who have good things to say about this, whose whole purpose is to speak of the life to come are uniquely equipped to speak to those disconcerted by death with words of hope and purpose. Let us speak seriously of the resurrection this Easter, and not confine our reflections on the coronavirus to discussions of how to use Zoom or whether we can have online APCMs.

Our churches with their convening power will gather communities that have been bereaved and will need avenues of commemoration and bereavement care. There will be anger - anger at the brutal randomness of death; but also at the restated clarity of what we know already, that the poor and the marginalised will have been disproportionately affected and at the same time find it harder to recover. How can we again offer to those to whom the world offers a grim face the beauty of God's love? There will be those who found us online and electronically whom we shall need the energy to continue to serve.

And there will be those who sought hope in the darkness, and who will look back and ask whether we were then offering it clearly and well; not with a faux domesticity, but holiness seen through sacrifice and love. Sacrifice and love proclaimed in a community which genuinely offered the one thing that could give hope: the unflinching proclamation of the resurrection: RESURGAM.