Ezekiel 27. 1-6; Romans 5.1-5; St John 16. 12-15
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth”. St John 16.13
I think it was about four months after I was first ordained. It was before I was married, and I was living on my own in a nice little curate’s house by the estuary coast in Essex. Curate’s houses rarely have any distinguishing features, and don’t announce usually themselves with signs or by being adjacent to any church, so the door to door cold caller is given no forewarning. The door bell rang, and I went to answer it, finding on the other side two smart young men – very young, probably eighteen or so, and very smart, attired in pressed dark suits, white shirts and ties. I of course was dressed differently. Like any other high church deacon only a few months after ordination, I was surgically sealed inside my pristine black clericals, removing them only at night or on a day off, even going so far when playing football as to put my QPR shirt on top of my clergy shirt so that the tonsured collar remained visible. So when the young visitors saw who had opened the door, they were surprised. I smiled and said “Hello”. They said “Hello.” There was a pause. Then one of them ventured “We’re from the Jesus Christ Church of Latter Day Saints.” “Very good to meet you”, I said. There was another pause, and then he said, “You look as though you’re a religious chap yourself.” And I suppose I did look as though I was a religious chap myself. And I suppose that that was as it should have been. Religion is often something the Church of England struggles with, rather than celebrates, and that is a cause for regret, because our religion is the religion of the incarnation and to be ashamed of our Christian identity – lay or ordained – is to be ashamed of the gospel.
The wonderfully uncompromising truth of Christianity is that God is not elsewhere, distant in some far off emerald city, however much we’d like him to be. Each of us is called to recognise the God already among us, who walks alongside us and calls us to fellowship with him from all our particular places. For us, that particular place, is the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. Where we are, is where God meets us. It was tempting, in preparing this sermon, to fix upon Romans 5, and to match Paul’s beautiful progression from endurance through character to hope, with the three words of our newly launched network, “Anglican Catholic Future”. After all, hope is the Christian attitude to the future, and the character of our Christianity is unashamedly catholic. But that would leave us with Anglicanism equalling endurance. And that is not just a cheap shot, it’s essentially misleading, not only because Catholicism is more than character. However much we might have to endure as Anglicans, our identity in the good old C of E is something to be celebrated, and something far more catholic than the good old C of E is generally inclined to admit.
Christianity is the religion of the incarnation. God meets us where we are because God comes among us in Jesus Christ, he does not zap us from afar. The Anglican call to preach and uphold scripture and tradition without fearing reason, is not a call to individualistic self-assertion. Rather, it is a call to accept the fallibility of each of us as human beings, and to acknowledge our need to be part of something far larger than our own individual powers of will or decision, to recognise that truth can never be independent of God. It is a call to be led by the Spirit in the ways of God, precisely because God’s way with the world is not to dictate by distant decree but to identify himself with the mess that is his creation, to endure and embrace its chaos and its confusion, to accept and to transform it from within.
Whether we like it or not, what we call Anglo-Catholicism is thoroughly Anglican. God’s gift of the church is the institutionalization of Christian humanity, and humanity is, among other things, always and everywhere a mess. Christians can claim that we have all the answers. We can claim that every truth about God is plainly and directly revealed in the text of scripture and that there are no theological problems, only a failure to read. Or we can claim that all Christian truth resides in the authority of one individual see or patriarchate and the historical structures which surround it, and that there are no theological problems, only a failure to hear. Or we can, instead, be honest about the mess which we human beings are so good at making, and be honest about our need to be led by the Spirit into truth. The church is the creation of Jesus Christ because human beings are in such need of it. We need God’s help to pray and to worship, we need God’s help to love and to serve. That’s what the church is, the conglomeration of our need and the infinite gift of God’s grace in meeting it in Christ. Acknowledging that need – practising, that is, the Christian virtue of humility – is a thoroughly Anglican thing to do. But it is also an essentially catholic thing to do, because it is acknowledging our part in something far greater and more significant than merely here and now and me and mine.
This is not to plead for a simplistic Tractarian Via Media – goodness knows, Newman is hardly in need of cheer leaders – and neither is it to welcome theological liberalism – those who use the word of Anglo-Catholics ought first to find out what theological liberalism means. It is rather to suggest that Anglican and Catholic belong together as more than words, as prayers and ideas and actions and people, because the incarnate love of God does not remove itself from the mess we are so good at making. God meets us where we are, and calls us to his service. That service is a Catholic service because we individually don’t have all the answers, and because we are part of something far bigger than ourselves. And that, too, is what we ought to be celebrating. Calling oneself Catholic is not something we can limit by criteria of our own making, but it is something which – by definition – invites us to attend to the inspiration, the breathing in of the Spirit, in all aspects of the church’s life. That life is not restricted by time and place, and so a humility about ourselves ought also to be a realisation that we are not alone. It ought to be a recognition throughout the church that, in fact, there have been quite a few Christians before us, Christians who have lived the gospel rather better than we, Christians who, if we only pay attention, might just have something to teach us.
If we are prepared to stop talking loudly about our own new ideas – ideas we’d probably find in Augustine, or Aquinas, if we bothered to look – we might be patient enough to listen to and learn from the universality, the catholicity, of the Christian faith. There is nothing in God’s creation which is not transformed by the incarnate love of Christ, past, present and future. Rejoicing in the physicality of the incarnation by prioritising the mass and celebrating the sacraments; and proclaiming the gospel by prioritising the poor, protesting against injustice, welcoming difference; – these are not alternatives for our Christian lives, they are the necessary consequences of faith in God incarnate, in the universality, the catholicity of God’s love, poured into our hearts, poured out in our world. The Spirit we celebrate in this mass is that love of God in action, giving life to the church which rejoices in the religion of the incarnation, which proclaims the essential practicality of God’s love in the Eucharistic presence, in the grace of the sacraments, in the beauty of holiness, in the example of Our Lady, in the prayers of the saints.
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth”. The future of the church is the truth of God himself. In this time of change for the church here and throughout the world, we do well to heed the words of Jesus. We do not have all the answers, but we are not left on our own. The Spirit leads the church into all truth because she needs to be led, because we haven’t got there yet. To be a Christian is to be a disciple, to be one who learns, to be one who is led by the Spirit into ever closer union with Christ so as to share in the perfect life of the Triune God. The hope to which we are called, is the hope of God’s presence with us, the universal truth of the incarnation, the catholic joy of life in the Spirit. The future to which we look forward is not ours to possess, it
is God’s to entrust. To learn from Christ as disciples, to be led by the Spirit into truth, is to celebrate the God who is present, and whose love is our catholic future.
© 2013, Peter Groves