A sermon given at St Olave Hart Street on Sunday 21st June 2026 during a service marking the seventy fifth anniversary of the start of the restoration of the church after World War II, based on readings from Ephesians 2:19-22 and John 2.19-22 and the words given by Bishop Arne Fjelbu and King Haakon VII at St Olave Hart Street in June 1951. More information and pictures of the service are at this link.
Here at St Olave Hart Street, we often say – only half jokingly – that the whole world is here. A product of our long history at the heart of mercantile and maritime London.
Today that is as true as ever, as we welcome friends from Norway, England; Nidaros and London - and further afield - to celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary since the start of the restoration of this building. King Haakon VII laid the first stone – said to have been taken from a site close to the tomb of St Olaf in Nidaros Cathedral. His son, Crown Prince Olav and the Bishop of Trondheim were also here. You can read extracts from their speeches in the back of the order of service.
Our first lesson reminded us that the church is where strangers and aliens become citizens with the saints – members of the household of God.
Strangers and citizens.
St Olave Hart Street is a place where seemingly polar opposites like that are held in a holy tension.
Dedicated to a warrior, a fighter, who was defeated in battle – and became a saint associated with healing.
Described by the poet John Betjeman as a country church in the heart of the City.
City and country. Warrior and healer.
The Bishop of Trondheim understood the special character of this place. Standing here seventy-five years ago he described St Olave Hart Street as a living symbol of the apparently polar opposite at the heart of our faith and symbolised in our east window, which – almost uniquely - shows two images of Christ on the cross side by side. Christ in his passion, next to Christ in Glory.
Through defeat to victory. From death comes new life.
In our gospel reading, Jesus says: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Those listening do not understand. Not yet. Only after the horror of the Cross. The shock of the empty tomb. John tells us: “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered.”
The meaning of Jesus’s words only grasped after the trauma of Christ’s passion.
Perhaps something similar is true of our understanding of this place.
This beautifully restored medieval building. A Great Fire Survivor, nearly destroyed in the blitz.
To understand its story, to recognise its scars, we must look back and see the photographs of the church as a ruin. The shattered walls. The rubble.
Only then perhaps can we start to fully appreciate what restoration - what new life - means.
And we come closer to understanding King Haakon’s words when laying the stone that began the process of rebuilding - when he spoke of humanity’s perseverance and quoted the ancient hymn we sang earlier:
“Built on the Rock the Church doth stand, even when steeples are falling.”
Earthly ruin and heavenly hope.
Apparently polar opposites held together in a holy tension.
Living between which he found a faithful congregation. One that Bishop Fjelbu described as “a heavenly protest against all ruins”.
Worshipping in semi-exile for nine years in a tin church attached to the ancient tower of All Hallows Staining, next to the ruined Clothworkers Hall.
Uncertainty and hope, loss and expectation held in and through Christ.
Christ is the cornerstone. Not merely of a building, but of a people. Of living stones. Of lives joined together in him.
Our lives.
This term a small group here are exploring the connection between spirituality, faith and healing. Inspired by the accounts of Olaf as a healer and Jesus’s command to spread the good news and to heal.
We have started to become more confident acknowledging that each and every one of us knows something about what it means to live among ruins.
The ruins of hopes that did not come to pass – of lament and regret.
The ruins of relationships - of a throw away comment that continues to hurt us.
The ruins left by grief – the loss of those we love but see no longer.
And we are starting to learn that recognising these ruins – and our own need for restoration – is – like looking back at the photographs of this bombed church – part of re-learning who we are.
The Gospel does not invite us to look away from ruins.
It does not ask us to pretend that defeat is victory.
It invites us to re-learn how we see them. To understand that these apparently polar opposites are held together in holy tension. By Christ himself.
To trust – as our forebears did - that God is at work even when we cannot yet see the finished temple.
To believe that Christ still brings life out of death.
A truth to which this place has testified physically and spiritually for generations and which remains our calling now.
To be, living symbols of the resurrection hope – or in Bishop Fjellbu’s words, “a heavenly protest against all ruins.”
Not because we are deluded – ignoring the complexities of the world. Or because we have some special optimism. But because we know our fragile lives, where success and distress, joy and desolation are held together by the one who said - “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
Jesus Christ. The cornerstone. The one whose life holds together every apparent contradiction:
defeat and victory,
death and life,
exile and homecoming,
stranger and citizen,
earth and heaven.
When we embrace the reality that our lives are built on him, we see our ruins differently. We learn to inhabit that holy tension. We become, by God's grace, living stones in the temple he is still building.
And in a world never far from the trauma of loss, division and destruction, we become what Bishop Fjelbu called this church to be: a heavenly protest against all ruins. Through the power of the risen Christ. The cornerstone who holds all things together.
Through defeat to victory.
Amen.
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