Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the feast of the Dedication of Westminster Abbey 2026

It was in 1581 that Gregory Martin published his breathless, starry-eyed reflections on his travels. Martin was an English Catholic, friend of St Edmund Campion, and perhaps without knowing it became a key figure in the history of travel writing. His book Roma Sancta represents a sea-change in how travellers understood and experienced the city of Rome. Martin had spent eighteen months in the eternal city between 1576-78, in the wake of the Jubilee Year of 1575. This was a period in which Christians across Europe were doing a lot of soul-searching, establishing narratives to help them cope with the upheavals of reformation and counter-reformation, and refreshing their own identities in the process. In the late medieval world, Rome (although the burial place of the apostles Peter and Paul) was known as a city of brigands, corrupt, dangerous; Martin’s book establishes and promotes a very different narrative. The ruins of ancient Rome juxtaposed with Christian history revealed the limitations of the pagan world, and the triumph of catholic faith over false religion. For Martin, the devotional life of the city, with its diverse religious orders and public acts of piety, led him to acclaim this as ‘the city set upon a hill’, that holy place where God dwells among mortals, to which the whole world is summoned in a spirit of conversion, convergence and pilgrimage. And he bolsters this conclusion by continual allusion to biblical texts from the psalms and prophets about Jerusalem. The inference is that Rome is Mount Zion, Jerusalem, or at least, it shares the qualities and holiness of Zion; this ‘city set upon a hill’ or at the very least, a city with seven ancient hills. This is holy land, and according to his wonderfully descriptive travel-log, uncontested space.

The difficulty is that Gregory Martin’s book is at least partially a kind of propaganda. The typology he deploys to compare Rome with Jerusalem is a tried and tested one. The role played by the holy city of Jerusalem in Christian piety, Christian imagination, and in Christian liturgical practice, is multi-layered and venerable, active right across Christian history. Martin seizes texts and images which are really about the heavenly Jerusalem, or the role of Jerusalem at the end of time, and fixes them in one place and at one point. He is not playing a game here; this is devotion, piety, enthusiasm, all in a context where polemic and overstatement are the language of inter-Christian debate. But if Jerusalem were to be the model, or if what we call the Holy Land might be the inspiration for how we think of Christian holy space, we ought perhaps dig a little into the reality of what characterises life in that holy land.

Even in Gregory Martin’s day, holy Jerusalem was a divided place where the one Body of Christ failed to celebrate its unity. Vibrant, yes, united, no. The Latin Christians played off the Orthodox; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, that incredible complex built over the sites of Calvary and the Empty Tomb, divided so that different churches could worship in different corners. The multi-linguistic and ecstatic diversity of Pentecost formalised into denominations and battles of the most-faithful. For many generations, the keys to the Holy Sepulchre have been kept safely by a Muslim family of custodians, because to choose one Christian community over another would be to risk the status quo. Today, of course, Jerusalem, that Holy Land, is in a situation even more complex, politically, religiously, and over basic questions of justice and human dignity. How can we call that land ‘holy’ and how can those images from scripture of a rejoicing Mount Sion, or a city ‘at unity in itself’ as Psalm 122 puts it, help us in such a situation?

The dedication of church, chapel, abbey or cathedral, sets a space aside for the worship of God; ‘serious house on serious earth’ as Philip Larkin, memorialised here in Poets’ Corner put it. The capacity to worship is something which makes us distinctively human. Worship is our graced, natural response, to the intensity of God’s love, which we see perfectly expressed in Jesus. Homo Sapiens (thinking human), yes, but also homo liturgicus (liturgical human) or homo eucharisticus (thanksgiving or worshipping human). We are fundamentally made for worship. Here, today, we celebrate a space which has been consecrated for that purpose for well over a millennium; a space which has held the hopes, fears, longings, and lovings of many centuries and many communities. As we often notice here, there are many narratives at work within these walls, not all of them harmonious, some deeply contested. But these are relativised because of the line and life of worship which continually opens this space up to God’s promise. The one narrative in which everything else finds its home, its reconciliation, and its final judgement, is in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is, if you like, to tell the whole story from the end. One of the marks of a good church building is that it doesn’t merely celebrate the past or canonise the present – even when that present is artistically rich – it also opens that present up (through beauty, light, colour, shape) to the future. Church buildings comfort, yes, but they should also inspire us, as windows into a harmony and creativity which is still beyond us. That hope and longing resonates with the narrative we remember day by day about Jesus Christ and his victory over sin and death.

The Holy Land is currently a place of profound division and simmering violence. It is called Holy because the events of our salvation occurred there.  But holiness is the character of God, we might even dare say, the ‘energies of God’. Holiness does not stand apart from human pain, complexity, contradiction, sin – it engages it, sifts it, saves it. It was to a situation such as this that Christ was born. Much Christian witness in the Holy Land, in the West Bank and Gaza, in the old city itself, is currently under great threat, not least by settler terrorism. But that holy ground will remain so as holy people – formed by worship – continue to witness to the truth of Christ’s reconciling love. Holy people in holy places tell the story of God’s work, as it were, from the end. They use models such as the heavenly Jerusalem, palaces filled with peace and plenteousness, a mountain such as Zion in which all will be welcome, because that is the confident hope we have in God’s promise and God’s future.

Here in Westminster, this is our holy ground, set apart for worship, in the wider context of a world where division and distrust are so often the debased currency of human interaction. This place stands at the heart of a complex, contradictory and often concerning public life, in which we know we need to learn richer ways of living alongside one another. Those of us who worship here should not think we are better than anyone else; we just perhaps might know our own need of reconciliation and grace that little more consciously. But our prayers, too, contribute towards and share in the holy fabric of this place, holy because it begins with the end. A reconciling vision of God’s holiness, as Christ reaches out to feed us day by day, with his own life.

When Gregory Martin published his Roma Sancta, his thought emerged from debates about what the church really was: who is in and who is out? Where is its centre? What is its identity? These questions really were questions of life and death in the 1500s. Our own public context today is less focused on these questions, and more focused on what a human being is. What do advances in AI mean for humanity? What is the worth or value of a human person/community, especially when assessed against other such humans and communities? What is the destiny of human beings, and how do our political motives or decisions open those questions up or close them down?

In Ephesians, Paul teaches that Christ himself is the cornerstone of the church and therefore of the new creation. As we are formed into his body through worship, from different cultures, contexts and backgrounds, we realise that we are no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens and members, with Jesus Christ – the human being crucified and risen – in whose Body we find our life and our hope. We dare to tell the story from the end, in this new Jerusalem, because there, together, we finally know ourselves to be at home.