Grown into a Holy Temple

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

Dedication Sunday

26 October 2025

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

Ephesians 2.19-22

John 2.13-22

You are … built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

The summer between high school and University, the summer after my father had died,  I apprenticed to a stone mason.

The master mason I worked for had come back from the Vietnam War to an island in the Pacific Northwest and begun building stone walls, like one of the Four Sons of Aymon.

In much of his life, he was never at peace. He struggled with addiction and by all accounts with PTSD.

He had a couple of angry dogs chained up in the back yard which he claimed were three-quarters wolf.

And some nights he’d get on his motorcycle and tear up and down the one main road at 100mph.

But when he worked on a wall, a very real peace settled over him.

He’d stand for a quarter hour, and stare at the half-completed wall. Then he’d turn and stare at the pile of rocks we’d gathered from the fields.  He’d look the rocks over, until he saw the one that would fit just right, the one stone the wall needed at that moment.

I’d carry the stone over for him, and he’d set it down into place, no mortar needed. Instantly, the stone would look like it had always been there.

In a market town built only a few meters above the mud of the fens, our houses built of wattle and daub, what was it like a thousand years ago to watch masons settle these stones in their places,               the long and short Saxon quoins instantly looking as though they had always been there, bearing the load in saecula saeculorum…

In the uncertain and violent world of 11th century Cambridge, this tower behind us must already have been a beacon of peace. A thousand years later, it still is.

Visitors and long-time friends of St Bene’t’s alike, speak about the peace we feel walking into this church. I like to say that you can feel a thousand years of prayers soaked into the stones.

For after all: the solid, patient, thoughtful work of those Saxon stonemasons, could have gone into building a fortress, a prison, a palace.

The peace these stones make does not come from the stones, nor even from the skilful hands of the stonemasons. But it does come from another kind of masonry, the soft shaping of these stones through sacrament, song, scripture, story, and silence — perhaps espeically silence.

Our lectionary leaves out a tiny phrase at the start of today’s Epistle, which Jane just read.

Verse 19 actually begins: “So, then…”

“So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens,

               but you are fellow citizens with the saints

              and also members of the household of God, 

 built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets,

with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone…” (Eph. 2.19)

What is the “so then”, the “therefore”? It is, in this passage addressing the Gentile converts of Ephesus, that Christ  “ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us….[reconciling] both to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it”   (Eph. 2.14, 16)

So then — you are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone, because Christ Jesus the mason first tore down the old walls.

The walls that we have built between each other, and between ourselves and God –   the walls constructed around gender, sexuality, citizenship and race — the low-lying walls of petty hatred and the more violent barbicans all the divisions that are violently real, even here in Cambridge.

And the walls we carry in our own selves, our own hearts hemmed in, convinced we are unworthy of God’s love, convinced that our souls must be walled up.

But those walls are being torn down every time we open our heart in prayer, every time we break bread together within these stones, and gather around this altar.

And the stone which the builders had rejected, has indeed become the chief cornerstone.

“In him the whole structure is joined together

              and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, 

 in whom you also are built together spiritually

 into a dwelling place for God.”

Joined together and grown — the stonemasonry that only the Creator of all can do, not merely breaking, carving and hoisting stones, but growing them; for in his hands all things live.

As we commemorate our Dedication, we give thanks for the stones and the hands that raised them.

We give thanks for the generations from that day to today, who have tended these stones and made this place into a house of prayer for all peoples, a refuge of peace in the heart of Cambridge.

But above all we give thanks that by Christ’s Grace, we have been built together in the Spirit into a dwelling place for God.

For as Jesus was speaking of the Temple of his body (John 2.21), Paul speaks of the Church — not the building, but wherever two or more are gathered in Jesus’ name — as a dwelling place for God, a temple not of stone, but of people. 

And especially — for this is the whole arc of Paul’s epistle — that we are a temple built of people different from one another, Jews and Gentiles, Slaves and Free, Male and Female, a new, unified humanity making peace (Eph. 2.15), the very diversity of the Christian community — like the long and short quoins of our tower — lending a strength that homogeny could never achieve.

In this age, no less violent and divided than a thousand years ago, may we rejoice in the great diversity of Christ’s body; and may we have the grace to bear the load God has entrusted to us,

“bearing with one another in love, 

making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit

               in the bond of peace” (Eph 4.2-3)

and so become a living temple acceptable to God, a tower of peace in the midst of our city.