You who once deigned to take flesh for the sake of those who were lost:

make us members of your blessed body.

24 hours ago, the third most read home news story on the Guardian’s website rejoiced in the headline York Minster congregation outraged over ‘deeply inappropriate’ concert. Apparently, this cathedral is facing what the Guardian calls an ‘uprising’ from ‘members of its congregation’ – although, if I may say so, you look as placid as you usually do – because of a concert which will be held here in late April.

In what would appear to be complete ignorance of exactly what will be performed by the band known as ‘Plague of Angels’, if the Guardian’s story is to be believed, then one or more people who claim to be regular worshippers here believe that I and my team have exhibited ‘spiritual and moral failure’ for allowing to take place something that is not merely ‘shocking and deeply inappropriate’, but is, so it is claimed, an ‘outright insult to faith’.

Unless the person who contacted the Guardian has better information than do I and my staff, given that the music that will be performed is a rather unusual form of heavy metal composed to be played, in part, on a pipe organ, it is hard to believe that the real substance of this click-bait headline is about anything other than the undoubted fact that this concert will be very loud.

But, if you were paying close attention to our first reading, you may have realized that, as Jesus once famously remarked, the poor are always with us, and always have been, and that complaining about the state of the church – or, in this case, the Temple – is nothing new.

Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? It sounds as if the ancestors of the ‘disgruntled of York’ who don’t like loud music were hanging around Jerusalem in the late sixth century before the birth of Jesus. Moaning and muttering – at first glance – about a lack of respect being shown for our historical and cultural religion. Has anything changed in over two and a half millennia?

But there is, of course, one vital difference. The voice of complaint, in the passage from the prophecy of Haggai, the voice of complaint, in this instance, is nothing less than ‘the word of the Lord’. The complainant about the state of things in and around the Temple in around 520 BCE is, in fact, the one God.

And God had good reason for complaining about the state of things, because Israelite religion, which, by now, was maturing into something we would recognize as Judaism, Israelite religion was not doing well. The point at which Haggai is prophesying is in the period of restoration, after the Persians – who were the reigning superpower of the era – had shown a much more enlightened approach to those whose lands they controlled than did the Babylonians before them. And, as a result, the Israelites, who some decades earlier had been forcibly led into exile in Babylon, having seen the destruction of Jerusalem and especially the destruction of the First Temple – the children of these Israelites were being allowed to return home and resume some kind of pre-exile life.

But – to the horror of the prophet Haggai, let alone to the horror of the Lord God – in so doing, all they seemed to want to do was to make themselves comfortable in their old stamping ground. They seemed to have had very little interest in the proper resumption of their old religion, especially when it came to rebuilding the Temple – the building which ought, truly, to have been at the heart of everything.

The people of God – so it would seem – had gone off the boil. The people of God were showing a marked preference for putting themselves first, and not the God whom they were called to serve.

And the hard truth is that there is nothing new in that phenomenon. For I would suggest that you and I simply need to look in the mirror with an element of honesty to be reminded how easy it is to put self first, and to edge God out of the picture. In small ways, we do this with alarming regularity, when we make choices about the use of our time, our energy, our commitment, and most certainly our money.

Much of the Bible, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament, contains calls from the prophets, from St Paul, and – most especially – from Jesus himself, that we should refocus our attention and priorities on the service of God and of God’s kingdom, rather than being seduced by the calls of sinful humanity that come either from within us, or from the lips of those around us.

But this is not just about the impact of personal sinfulness. Those who find loud music ungodly, according to the Guardian, feel that there is a duty ‘to protect the sacred’. That’s the kind of statement which – superficially – sounds so ‘right’ and ‘correct’. But it is a sentiment that can easily be misunderstood, and usually is misunderstood by those who attempt to seize the moral high ground and utter it in the first place.

Because God – you may be relieved to know – God does not need our protection. Indeed, it is a little hard to know how we might go about offering ‘protection’ to a God who will allow the temple of his body to be broken, violently and unjustly, for the sake of this world and its sinful inhabitants. But the challenge is that – in the light not just of crucifixion but of resurrection – in the light that, as the Choir sang in the very opening words of tonight’s service, ‘is born of light’ – in the glorious light in which we rejoice, we discover that, as Paul reminds us in a famous passage in one of his letters, we – the Church – have become Christ’s body. And that has implications.

Three days ago, the Bishop of Liverpool resigned in the wake of allegations concerning his behaviour with two different women. Allegations, which, the record should note, continue to be completely denied by him, despite his resignation.

And less than three months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned in the wake of the publication of a deeply damning report not merely about the appalling behaviour of the late barrister John Smyth, but about the way in which Smyth’s behaviour was known about and covered up by some people within the church.

The editorial staff of the Guardian – which is not known for being especially religious – must have raised their eyebrows at the outrage formulated about a concert of rather loud music due to take place here. I suspect they regarded this news story of congregational outrage as being an eccentric and trivial expression of what one commentator once called the ‘slap and tickle’ end of the Church of England.

For the part of the Body of Christ we call the Church of England has – tragically – seen better days than this – but not because of any concerts take might place in York Minster.

The horrors of safeguarding abuses are, quite simply, the most awful symptoms of what happens when, in some form or other, ego triumphs and we Edge God Out. But in plenty of lesser ways we all do this so consistently, and so very often not only do we sin against God and neighbour and cause hurt and distress, but we disfigure the very Body of Christ.

And this includes making fatuous, click-bait level complaints to the press about non-stories in the church. The Guardian claims that its curiously anonymous complainant is a regular worshipper here. I find that hard to believe, because I hope that anyone who is a regular worshipper here would, in the light of pretty express commands of Jesus about how the church should behave, have first of all talked to me or my colleagues about the concert they find so challenging, rather than talk in an uninformed and offensive manner about us to a third party. So, as I say, I doubt that the Guardian’s account of the horror of the impending concert by Plague of Angels is accurate.

But a hard truth remains. In the beautiful introit our Choir sang to start this service, it expressed the prayer: You who once deigned to take flesh for the sake of those who were lost: make us members of your blessed body.

But if we are happy to say ‘Amen’ to that prayer – indeed, if we dare to say such an ‘Amen’ – let us pray that the light of Christ – which, truly, is the light of the world – may so enlighten us that we learn to behave in a manner which builds up that blessed body, that it may honour and live out its call to serve the world for which Christ was content to die, rather than harm it. Amen.