You Are the Temple

I want to start with a question. When you walked into the Minster tonight - into this quire - what did you think you had actually walked into?

Because the Minster is extraordinary by any measure. The woodwork. The organ. The stonework. The immense height. The light coming in through the west window.

I say all this not to flatter the building - but because when you walk in here, it does something to you. It signals: this matters. Something important happens here.

That instinct isn’t wrong. But I want to spend these next few minutes tonight asking: what exactly is it that matters? What is this place, really?

Six hundred years before Jesus, the community we heard about in our Old Testament lesson found themselves asking exactly that question. After decades in exile in Babylon, the Jews were suddenly allowed to come home - to Jerusalem. And home, for them, meant one thing above all else.

Solomon’s temple. The centre of everything. The place where heaven and earth met, where God’s presence dwelt among his people.

What they found when they made a beeline for the temple mount was rubble.

Their first priority was to rebuild - and that’s where the prophet Haggai finds them. He asks them a question that is painful to answer:

Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?

He wasn’t being rhetorical. He actually wanted them to look. Because some of them were old enough to have seen Solomon’s temple - and they were the ones who were weeping. Because what they were building looked nothing like what had been there before. The proportions were wrong. The materials were insufficient. The gold - the bling - simply wasn’t there.

By every measurable standard, this was a diminishment. A shadow of its former glory.

Now - let’s pause there with that feeling. Because I think it’s more familiar than we’d like to admit in 2026. Standing in front of something and thinking: this isn’t what it used to be.

I’ll confess - a few weeks back, I was in Tesco looking at a Dairy Milk Easter egg, and it dwelt on me: this is nowhere near what it used to be. The quality. The thickness. Shrinkflation, I suppose.

We feel it about the Church of England. The congregation here today might be smaller than some of you remember. The arguments playing out in Synod feel more polarised. Something that was once part of the settled fabric of British life no longer quite is.

Perhaps you feel it about the world more broadly. Or perhaps - more uncomfortably - you feel it about yourself. I used to be more certain than this. I used to find this easier.

Into that feeling - into that precise moment of looking at the rubble and calling it nothing - God speaks to Haggai’s community. Not with an argument. Not with a five-year plan.

Three words, repeated: Take courage, Zerubbabel. Take courage, Joshua. Take courage, all you people of the land. Work. For I am with you.

And then he adds: “My spirit abides among you. Do not fear.”

Haggai’s community weren’t the last to need those words. Do not fear is one of the most repeated phrases in the entire Bible. Which tells you something about how well God knows us.

Notice, though, what God doesn’t say. He doesn’t say: the building will be impressive. He doesn’t say: people will be amazed by the architecture. He simply says: I am with you.

The presence was never in the stonework.

In our New Testament lesson, Paul is writing to a church in Corinth - to make a remarkably similar point.

Corinth was a city obsessed with status. Cosmopolitan, commercially powerful, rebuilt by Caesar - think New York, or London, or Singapore. A city that knew how to perform importance.

And the church had absorbed that culture entirely. They were arguing about teachers. I follow Paul. I follow Apollos. I follow Cephas. Which is to say - they were doing what people always do when they’re anxious about identity. They latch onto the most impressive thing available and attach themselves to it.

We do it too. I vote Green. I vote Reform. I’m an Anglican. I’m a Roman Catholic. For the record - a random assortment. But true, isn’t it? We pick a tribe. We use a label to do the work that our actual convictions should be doing.

Paul cuts right through it.

No one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid - that foundation is Jesus Christ.

The foundation was there before any of your preferred teachers arrived. You didn’t commission this building. You didn’t choose the site.

And then - like a pivot, like a parable - he lands it:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple? That God’s Spirit dwells in you?

After all that architectural language - all the foundations and builders and materials - it lands there. You are the temple.

Not the building you meet in. Not the institution you belong to. Not the tradition you’ve inherited. You.

Which brings me back to where we started. When you walked into the Minster tonight - what did you think you had walked into?

I’m probably a little biased - but it is probably the most epic parish church building in the country. With a long history. Belonging to an ancient institution. All of that is true.

But Paul and Haggai and the psalmist are all pointing at the same thing, from different centuries: the building is a sign. Not pointing to itself - but to the thing it was built to house.

And that thing isn’t the woodwork, or the gold, or the tradition, or the institution. It’s this. Us.

The congregation. The choir. Those joining us online. This slightly improbable, occasionally dysfunctional Minster family that turns up on Sunday evenings to sing ancient words in a building that is entirely too beautiful for us.

Institutions will disappoint us. The Church of England will argue with itself. The BBC will navigate from crisis to crisis. Your local parish council - or any institution you care to name - will at some point let you down. Because institutions are made of people. And people are jolly complicated.

This building (and the kit inside it) will always need repairing. It always does.

But thankfully - none of that is the foundation.

The foundation was laid before any of us arrived. Before the Minster existed in any form. And the promise Haggai gave to a community standing in the rubble of their most beloved thing is the same promise given to us tonight:

My spirit abides among you. Do not fear.

So as you leave the Minster tonight - don’t be preoccupied with whether the institution is getting it right. Don’t worry about whether the building is impressive enough.

Just dwell with this: Do we know what we are? And if we do - what are we building with it?

Amen.