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Good Morning.

This Spring I fulfilled a very long held ambition and got to visit Cologne Cathedral.  For fans of Gothic architecture, like me, it’s one of the must-see buildings of Europe.  I wasn’t disappointed.  It is mind-bogglingly beautiful – as well as being astonishingly big.  

But its history is no less remarkable.  Building started in the late thirteenth century but a couple of hundred years later it still wasn’t finished and work stopped – for most of the next three hundred years.  In the late nineteenth century by some remarkable luck, the original designs were rediscovered and the building was completed exactly as its first builders had intended.  So far so good.  But then came the Second World War and central Cologne was pretty comprehensibly flattened.  Except for the cathedral.  Pictures of the city in 1945 show it – damaged but still standing amidst the rubble.

It hadn’t been miraculously protected from the bombs – at least thirteen fire bombs scored direct hits.  So how had it survived?  One of the Cathedral guides told us the story.

The Cathedral had, in the nineteenth century been completed to the original designs – with one exception –where the original designs specified wood for the roof those who completed them put in steel.  So the Cathedral was able to survive the bombing because it didn’t burn down.

And it seems to me that there is a powerful lesson here for many areas of our lives - and that includes our faith.  Our traditions are often important to us – and so they should be.  But times change and we have to deal with that. Sometimes we need to adapt our structures, our ways of doing things, to use the best of contemporary materials.  Keeping the best of the past but using the best of the present to make it even better.

Father God, Help us as we try to share the eternal truths of our faith, to see that finding new ways of expressing those truths can actually be the best way to protect and preserve them.  Amen