Outside of Salisbury, in England, there sits the remains of the city of Old Sarum. The site is some three thousand years old. Over the course of its history, it had built up walls and at one time held a Cathedral church. I once visited there and stood in what remains of that church. Standing there among the base stones, and walking around in the cross shape outlining where the church once stood, I got a little mystic. “What was prayed here?” I thought. Stopping in the middle of the transept, I thought about the prayers of so many over so many years. Common prayers, prayers for the baptized, for the newly married, prayers for the crops, for those fighting in wars, prayers for the dead, prayers for those who were lost. I saw the penitent kneeling there and asking for forgiveness. I saw the hopeful kneeling there asking for relief. I saw the worried kneeling asking for remission. I saw the grateful kneeling saying thank you. I saw them there, strangers across time. Regular types, like you and me, separated by the orbit of an earth around a sun over a few hundred years, yet strangely united in our belief in a God who hears the prayers of the faithful.
I think about St. Mark’s, and the prayers offered in this space over the last few decades. And those prayers, spoken in a language unknown when Jesus walked the earth, yet heard by a God who transcends us, is beyond us, and at the same time as close to us as the person sitting next to you in this sanctuary. A God who calls to the boy Samuel, and is heard as clear as day as the Son of God walking along the shore saying to Phillip, “Follow me.” A voice that said, “Let there be light,” sounding as clear as the day you and I heard the call to join the ranks of the believers. A voice from Jerusalem, to Old Sarum, to today, a voice calling us to join in this proclamation of Salvation, salvation from sin, salvation from ourselves, salvation from one kind of living into another, a more glorious kind of living. From our prayers to the divine hearing and back again, sound waves reverberating into the air and returning, colliding with the prayers of so many, the quiet petitions of us into the realm of the unknown.
“Oh God heal me.”
“Oh God save me.”
“Oh God know me.”
“Oh God find me.”
“Oh God show me.”
“Oh God forgive me.”
Standing in the ruins of that church I wondered to myself about this faith of ours. What does it require to happen? What does it really need in order to go? Does it need a balanced budget? Does it need a capable staff of clergy and lay people? Does it need to have a youth program and a choir? Does it need to have a women’s group or Daughter’s of the King? Does it need to have a finance department? Does it need lay Eucharistic ministers or lay readers? Does it need me? Does it need you? What does it take? What does this faith of ours, born out of the teachings of a Jewish man, who was put to death, and then the claims of those around him that he had been raised from the dead, what does this faith need in order to go on? Buildings come and go, people live and die, visions come and go, and are often rare and not widespread. So what does it take? It does not need anything, really, because the things that are temporal, that make up the church as we know it now, those things will change, will fade, will ultimately become merely an outline of stones in the ground. Such is the fate of you and me.
We are here a little bit. We are here in a blink of an eye. What will remain are the echoes of our most intimate prayers. This faith of ours needs only one thing, it needs us to speak it. It needs you to say it. Quietly, there in your pew, or up here at this altar, on any given Tuesday, when you sneak in here, so as not to be noticed, and you hide yourself in a pew and you look up at nothing in particular and in the stillness of your mind you say,
“I am here.”
“I am your child.”
“I am so thankful.”
“I am so sorry.”
“I am so worried.”
“I am so afraid.”
We speak to a mystery with the humble knowledge of our place in the world, a place of fleeting time. We speak to a mystery with the humble knowledge that God uses us everyday to answer prayers and be in the lives of those around us, so that the church really is flesh and bone and blood and body. No stones, no budget, no program committee, only you and me, and our prayers and our lives together, right now.
In a few hundred years I will be interested to see what is here. What this place looks like, what happened after you and I were here. I will be curious to see even fifty years from now, actually maybe just ten. But that seems to be a vain game, and not for me to know. All I know is now, where I am and who I am right now. And that is all I have to work with. And what I choose now, standing not in Old Sarum, but in this parish of St. Mark’s is more along the lines of the boy Samuel,
“Speak Lord, for your servant is listening”
and then later to Phillip speaking to his friend Nathaniel about the Messiah,
“Come and see.”
These two prayers bookend a life of faith. Speak Lord, for your servant is listening. And then when we live this place we find others and ask them to come and see. We move from prayers to action. May these prayers echo with the prayers of the saints before me. May they resound with your own. May we each become what this faith exercise is all about. Amen.
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