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.

But who was St Patrick? What do we know about him? Well, we know that he was the patron saint of Ireland, thus the annual celebration.

But Patrick was born in Roman Britain around the year 370, somewhere in northern England or southern Scotland. Calpurnius, his father, was a deacon, his grandfather Potitus was a priest, indicating that clerical celibacy is of rather more recent vintage in the Roman Church.

Patrick, however, was not an active believer. According to his autobiography, in his youth, he was captured by a group of Irish pirates and taken across the Irish Sea.

It was a long time ago that Paul wrote those words. But “there is nothing new under the sun,” as another famous passage of Scripture tells us, and here in 2019, I do not want you, my brothers and sisters, to be uninformed. Because we know that – even here and even now – idols that cannot speak are still present to lead each and every one of us astray.

William Wordsworth rather famously wrote a poem on this topic, which begins thus:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Paul tells us how to know when we encounter an idol, something that would cause us to “lay waste our powers”: no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed,” he writes, and that distinction covers more than just the militant atheist or casual agnostic.

The text of tonight’s anthem – a poem by Henry Vaughan – was published in 1650, at the very height of the English Civil War. For faithful Anglicans who lived through it, the execution of Charles I, the abolition of the monarchy, and the suppression of the Church of England was a political and religious calamity without parallel. Centuries later, Hubert Parry set Vaughan’s text to music… in 1916, at the height of another social and religious calamity that was, for those who lived through it, also without parallel: the first World War, or as it was known in its day, the Great War.

If, whether out of curiosity or pure devotion, you were studying the lectionary in your spare time this morning, you will have noticed that this verse and its neighbors were put in parentheses by the compilers of the Prayer Book. These imprecatory verses – that is, verses containing a spoken curse – and those that come up elsewhere in the Psalter are usually made optional, and I think we can understand why. They are unpleasant, they seem ungodly and of questionable appropriateness for reading in church, and the minds behind the lectionary evidently felt it might be better just to leave them out. They are not alone: centuries of reformers of various stripes also have tried to do away with them.