A beautiful church

Thursday July 29, 2021

You yourselves, as living stones, allow yourselves to be built up to form a spiritual house. 1 Peter 2: 5

A beautiful church

In Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, there is a curious building : the Church of St. Anne. Built at the end of the 15th century, of small dimensions, it is admirably proportioned. It is a gem of religious architecture.

The strangeness of this church lies above all in the fact that its facades are built, according to the will of the architect, of 33 different kinds of bricks, not to mention their variety of colors and shapes. At 100 meters, you can appreciate the beauty of the whole, especially if the sun makes the red bricks shine. As you approach, the diversity of the material appears and, up close, the whole shows a remarkable mosaic.

The Christian does not remain insensitive to the similarity which one can find between this work, conceived and built by the man, and that which the Lord, in his love and his wisdom, builds day after day since Pentecost, his Church. (Matthew 16:18 ; Acts 2). Every day, every hour, men, women, young people, children are added to the Church as "living stones". Who are they ? Where do they come from ? What is their race or language ? Their culture ? Their level of education ? Their understanding of the Scriptures ? They are very different from each other, but they have in common that they have eternal life and the Holy Spirit in them since they believed.

The Lord builds his Church with an infinitely greater diversity than the 33 kinds of bricks of St. Anne of Vilnius. As for her beauty, it is all the more incomparable as Christ himself takes care to sanctify her by the Word to present her soon "glorious... holy and blameless" (Ephesians 5:25-27). Let us let him work in us to be a "brick" in accordance with his will to make it an ornament of his Church (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

We are also called to contribute to the building up of the Church, either by engaging men to accept salvation (2 Corinthians 5:20), or by exercising a gift or by assuming a service which edifies believers (1 Corinthians 14:12.26). The glorious eternal state of the Church is being prepared at this time by the patient work of the Lord ; he invites us to collaborate in it.

Source (Pleasing the Lord)