The Anglican evening service, for which we have all gathered here tonight, in some ways sits anomalously in the life of this town and even this parish. It is a truism, and I assume that it is as boring for you to hear from the pulpit as it is for me to say it, that we are a preoccupied people. But the fragmented quality of our attention encouraged by constant digital communication and its implements is not just an annoyance: it presents a spiritual danger. Having divided us, evil may chip away at our attention. Saying, “I don’t have time to care about that right now,” can often be the first step down the road to perdition, whether for ourselves or for the neighbors whom we are called to love as ourselves.

A couple of years ago, the Bishop of Texas came to visit Yale Divinity School. In a talk he gave to the Episcopal students there, he remarked – with all the fervor of a prophet – that the future of the church was one that would reach beyond the four walls of the church building on Sunday mornings. It wouldn’t be enough, he said, to evangelize the neighborhood with our zeal for Christ and to be known by our works of mercy and charity; to survive, the church of the future would need to sever its crippling and sentimental attachment to the Sunday morning regime of liturgy and coffee hour, a regime most evident, said the bishop, in the ministrations of the altar guild.

The immediate epilogue to the crucifixion of Jesus does not feature any of Jesus’ closest friends and disciples. Not Peter, or James, or John, or even Andrew. They have all fled, all deserted, and I think that we can understand this. It would have been dangerous to do otherwise, perhaps even fatal. And so Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple, a man who had hedged his bets during Jesus’ public ministry, comes to Pilate, and asks to have to body of the man that had been crucified. “Nicodemus… also came.”

I must say that I am a great lover of church buildings, and that I always have been. I remember, as a child, gazing in wonderment around Europe at the soaring churches in almost every city. They resembled in a vague way the church buildings one knew at home, insofar as the windows had pointy tops, but they were of a different scale and ethos altogether. Notre Dame and its European cousins were built ad majorem Dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God, and an encounter with such buildings definitively produces an encounter with the majesty of God himself, whether we call the focus of that encounter “God” or “the sublime” or some other form or psychological transcendence. They are places within which the mind of man is confronted by something at the limits of his imagination, and that is a place in which he can meet God on something close to God’s own terms.