November 24th, 2024
Topping over the crest of the hill, we came in sight of a ruin that stood out in the field, not far from the road.
“Can we stop and have a look?” I asked.
“Yes, let’s!” Cary said. “It looks beautiful.”
Cary and I had begun our day a short drive away at the Backpacker’s Hostel in Kyleakin. We were headed out this lonely road to try to connect with an outfit that, we hoped, might take us out to a secluded loch – a place inaccessible except by boat. Happily, we had some time to spare, so we pulled the rented car to the side of the road and parked.
There is a special kind of silence when you are out in the open, here in Scotland. We felt it immediately – the way that the familiar sound of the car doors seemed unfamiliar here, where such mechanical sounds rarely venture.
It doesn’t feel like the twenty-first century out here.
This isn’t a drive-thru Dunkin Donuts kind of place. There are no stop lights, wifi passwords, spreadsheets, or bank routing numbers out here.
This a place of wind and rain.
A place of gray skies, stonewalls and heath.
A wide land that stretches and heaves gradually up into the hills.
A blackface sheep grazing nearby looked up, and, seeing that we were not a threat, resumed it’s unconcerned ruminations,
With the clank of the latch we were through a black wrought iron gate, looking up a short embankment at what was left of an old church. A collection of gravestones leaned this-way–and-that in the grass of the ruined yard.
A Scottish Natural Heritage sign was provided for the likes of us – tourists stopping on their way. The sign sported an artist’s rendering of what the church looked like when it was in use – not much more than a stone building with a thatched roof. Known as Kilchrist (or Christ’s Church) this building was the seat for the Parish of Strath, here on the Isle of Skye. The earliest historical record of a church standing in this spot was the ordination of a minister named Kenneth Adamson who settled here in the year of our Lord 1505. Kilchrist was left to the elements when a new church was built in Broadford – the larger town at the far end of the road. That was in 1840.
So this church, now in ruins, held services and served the local community for at least 335 years.
**
The passage that Judith read for us from the gospel of Mark tells a similar story, but from the opposite end.
In this story, Jesus and his disciples do not stumble upon the ruins of a place of worship – rather they find themselves near the Temple of Jerusalem at the height of its glory.
What the Jerusalem Temple was like when Jesus was alive? I did some research, and what I learned makes clear why one of the disciples was awestruck by the sight, and said to Jesus:
“Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”
The temple that Jesus and his disciples were looking at was not the same temple that was built by Solomon. That temple had been destroyed when the Baylonians invaded Judah in 587 BC. This temple occupied the same area that the original temple stood on, but it was almost twice the size. The magnificence of this second temple was the legacy of Herod the Great – who is not to be confused with his son Herod Antipas – the man who ordered the crucifixion of Jesus.
Herod the Great was a strategic thinker. He also liked construction projects – and he used them to unify different groups under his rule. The second Jerusalem temple was his masterpiece. Doubling its footprint from 17 to 37 acres, Herod the Great succeeded in making it the largest religious complex in the ancient world. Doing so, he pleased the religious Jewish establishment, the Hellenistic Jews who had seen the magnificent temples in other parts of the Mediterranean, and also (perhaps most importantly) the Romans who had put him in power in the first place. (Anchor Bible Dictionary v. 6 pp.364-5).
So when Christ’s disciple extolled the marvels of the Jerusalem Temple, the complex he was looking at was not only the monumental cultic center of the Jewish faith, it was also the vanity project of the most powerful man in the region. Placing stone upon stone, Herod the Great and Jewish people everywhere, placed their hopes and their ambitions in this immense structure. It was the physical expression of the Jewish identity – an imposing tribute to their God.
Since it was the most impressive structure that any of these people had ever laid eyes upon – and it occupied such an important role in the culture of the Jewish people, the Jerusalem Temple was the most permanent looking thing that could be imagined.
So you would think that Jesus would also wax eloquent about the amazing building! After all, Jesus was a Jew! He must have been pretty pleased with the majestic structure that had been dedicated to God.
But that is not what Jesus does.
Jesus says:
“Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
**
To say that I stepped into the ruin of the church is a little funny, because, having no roof, the church really didn’t have an inside. Above me was the same overcast sky that was above me when I was on the other side of the opening that, for want of a better word could be called a door.
The floor was not wood. It was not carpet. It was not even dirt. It was a rich layer of grass and heath – exactly as it had been in the church yard.
The walls were intact, in the sense that they surrounded the space that had once been the inside of the church. The rocks that made up the walls on the inside of the church were covered with same growth of moss and little outcroppings of some kind of tufting green weed that could be seen on the outside.
The space was just a rude rectangle of stone under a frowning sky, but somehow…
Somehow…
Though ages had passed
And though now one worshiped here except maybe a passing fox, or some nesting songbirds…
Somehow, in this deep past
There was a now.
A now that I could feel in me.
And I named that now…
And I called it a church.
**
When COVID hit back in 2020, I followed an instinct to become a kind of burrowing animal, and began reorganizing my life so that I could spend most of my time in the basement.
I moved a big table down there, and created an elaborate den with my computer, and some old carpet and one of those electric heaters that pretends to be a fireplace.
In my burrowing, I came across one of the strange things that my father left me, when he died.
It was his massive collection of postcards.
He collected postcards from everywhere he went – which doesn’t sound very strange, except that this collection was immense! It must have been a kind of obsession with him. And they weren’t just postcards of places – there were works of art, pictures of odd buildings, strange religious symbols – all manner of thngs. There are boxes and boxes of these postcards!
So one day, I put on a covid mask and went down to the local Aubuchon, and bought myself some wallpaper paste and a paint brush and I started gluing the postcards to the wall of the stairwell that led down to the basement.
Soon things got out of hand.
It wasn’t just the postcards anymore. Now it was old record covers; a school photograph of myself from 1973; an old visa from Thailand with my mom’s picture sometime in the 1960’s; a sticker from an online music merchant; a picture of Cary and her dog when she was about 8 years old; my daughter Isabel standing next to an elephant in 2018; my mother-in-law’s graduation picture from Southern Methodist University in the early 50’s; my brother’s portrait when he was in the army in 1981.
If you think of it one way, the stairwell is a collage. You might call it a kind of record of a family – the one I came from, and the one that Cary and I created.
But it is something else too. In the stairwell to my basement, time is not something that passes. Here, there is no past and there is no future. 1950 is next to 1981 which is pasted on top of 2018 which overlaps 1971 and 1964. To look at this I do not look at my family history. Looking at it, I take in all-of-time-at-once. Time is flattened into a single dimension.
And that dimension is called “now.”
**
It seems to me that maybe God – and Jesus – see the world in the same way that I see the stairwell to my basement.
It seems to me that if God – and Jesus – exist in eternity – not in time like we do, but somehow kind of around it… then the stones that stand on top of each other to make a building now, and the stones that have fallen over are not about past and future, but all a kind of now.
Time, which we humans put into a kind of order, so that we can get to work on time, or get enough sleep – this time is just one kind of time.
Maybe God time is now
Now and evermore.
All at once.
**
But how can any of this have any relevance to us, as we live our lives.
We live our lives in time.
In our lives, a church that is standing is a church that can be part of our lives, and a church that is a ruin may be interesting, but it has little practical use.
If we say that, for God, time is flattened into an eternal now, we see that, when Jesus looked at the temple and said:
Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
He was seeing the now of that standing temple, and the now of the temple’s destruction, all at once.
For, indeed, in 70 AD, the second temple was destroyed, this time by the Romans, in response to a Jewish uprising.
I see two practical ways in which this flattening of time – this now and evermore – can influence our lives.
It is valuable to know that things are not permanent.
It is valuable to understand that those things that look like they are eternal, are actually temporary.
If we know this truly, with our bodies and our souls as well as with our intellects, we will achieve a kind of freedom. We can enter a kind of beauty – as I entered when I stood in that ruin.
Also – if time is now and evermore, Jesus comes into our lives with more immediate reality.
The love that he promised is not two thousand and 25 years ago.
It is now.
Now
And evermore.
Amen.