May 31, Pentecost, Year B (RCL)
As many of you know
I’ve just been to visit
my nephew and godson in England.
I haven’t seen Laughlin for two years, since he was six months old,
and it was wonderful to get to know him.
And as you can imagine,
I took lots of photos and even a couple of videos, trying to catch the essence of what he is like
as a two and a half year old.
And I have a sneaking suspicion
that at least a couple of those photos will reappear at his twenty-first birthday
along with the accompanying stories.
Birthdays are times
when we can’t help remembering
the stories of the birthday girl or boy,
whether it’s the actual birth, that strange mixture of pain and indescribable joy,
the first birthday party
with fronting inevitably on hands and in hair,
or later memories, parties and presents
and the emerging identity
of the growing child.
Birthdays are occasions when we remember those times
that in retrospect
proved to be so central
in making someone
who they are.
Today is the feast of Pentecost,
one of the three major feasts of the year
and one that is often described
as the birthday of the church.
And just like with any birthday
its a time for remembering.
And what we usually focus on
is remembering what is, effectively
the actual birth of the church,
back on that day of Pentecost
that we heard about in our reading from Acts this morning.
But the last three weeks,
as I travelled in England
I was reminded that what makes us who we are as a church
is not just the very beginning
but the times that formed our identity,
the crucial events and people
that make us who we are.
On Monday afternoon,
I stood in the church of St Mary the Virgin,
commonly known as the University Church,
in Oxford.
Its history stretches back over a thousand years, to an Anglo Saxon church that is supposed to have been there before the present church as begun. It held the first University Library,
and the early University offices.
But what it is perhaps known best for
is the people associated with it.
St Mary’s is the church
where John Henry Newman was vicar,
one of a group of clergy who also included John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey
who founded what we know today as the Oxford Movement.
They preached sermons and wrote tracts
recalling the church to its spiritual focus.
One of the key things they did was to reinstate the weekly celebration of the Eucharist,
which had been pretty much replaced by morning prayer.
They put a lot more emphasis on the sacraments, and liturgy, and particularly the importance of beauty in liturgy. We have them to thank for much of our tradition of beautiful vestments and music. They also focussed on spirituality and personal holiness, not just for clergy but for all Christians,
and suggested that our faith should be expressed not just in worship but in service to those in need.
They prompted the revival of Anglican religious orders, like the bothers at Little Portion, though their order wasn’t founded until the early 20th century.
And perhaps most of all, they emphasized the goodness of God
and how much God loves us.
Newman, Pusey and Keble
shaped our church, and their tradition has been especially influential here in the Episcopal Church;
they are responsible for a huge amount of what we consider normal Sunday worship today.
But they weren’t the only significant people to preach at St Mary’s. A century earlier,
John Wesley regularly worshipped there as a student,
and then went on to preach there,
frequently
speaking against the slackness and superficiality
of many of the senior members of the University.
It was a theme he repeated time and time again in his life,
encouraging Christians not to just make do
with a kind of intellectual agreement with Christian beliefs,
but to allow themselves
to meet God
and know him in their hearts.
Like the leaders of the Oxford Movement a century later, he encouraged frequent communion, a disciplined corporate search for holiness, and concern for the poor.
And his open-air preaching and organization of religious societies were aimed at helping ordinary Christians live out their faith.
And even though we know that his followers established a separate denomination that we now know as Methodists,
John Wesley stayed an Anglican,
and is part of our tradition as well.
Stepping back another couple of hundred years,
St Mary’s was the place
where three great bishops of the Reformation,
Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer,
were tried and condemned to death.
Latimer was the great preacher of his time, preaching before both Kings Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth and their courts,
but also to country congregations.
He recalled them to the very core of their faith,
rooted in Scripture
and tied inherently to worship and the eucharist,
pointing his hearers
to Christ and salvation.
Ridley
was the great theologian,
writing especially about the eucharist,
and corresponding with many of the great reformers of his time.
And then there is Cranmer, probably the one we know best.
A memorial to him
stands out in our cemetery,
at the entrance to the new section.
He was responsible for putting together the first prayer book in English - through Ridley and Latimer also helped out -
and shaping Anglican worship all the way to today.
Our Rite 1 service is still pretty much his words.
All three bishops
were tried for heresy in the chancel of St Mary’s;
all three
were burnt at the stake during the reign of Queen Mary,
first Latimer and Ridley, and a few months later, Cranmer.
And Latimer is reported to have said as he was on the stake,
"Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out."
Our worship, our Anglican tradition that holds together the more Protestant emphasis on scripture and faith, and the more Catholic emphasis on sacraments,
is in large part due
to those three men.
But Oxford isn’t the only place for stories.
I spent a week of my time away on a pilgrimage in southern Scotland and northern England,
walking in the footsteps of St Cuthbert, who lived in the seventh century.
Cuthbert grew up living on the moors as a shepherd, living with a foster mother;
as a child he saw a vision,
and as a teenager asked to be allowed to join the abbey at Melrose.
He became a monk and missionary, and eventually bishop of Lindisfarne.
He’s known as a holy man of prayer, but perhaps more important was what he did as a bishop, walking all over his diocese,
climbing the Cheviot mountains through prickly gorse and peat bogs
to search out the families living in remote glens.
Gloriously illustrated Celtic gospels,
were produced at the monastery on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne
in his honor.
He modeled a church
that was for everyone,
from kings and princes
to the poorest of farmers,
and everyone in between, and called them
to a life of faith.
As on all birthdays, we could go on forever with the stories, the stories that tell us
who we are. But there’s time for one final story, this time
not one that’s unique to our branch of Christianity
but one we share with everyone else.
The story of the first Pentecost.
It’s Peter we remember this time,
Peter who had denied Jesus
Peter who improbably
became
the leader
of the early church.
He was there with the other disciples in Jerusalem
when something strange happened,
wind and fire
and power like they had never known
and suddenly they were able to share the good news of Jesus Christ
in the languages of everyone who was there to hear them.
And Peter became the preacher, the spokesperson, the leader,
and called people to faith.
That was the birth
of the church,
a church that has remained alive and grown
through the faith and service
of countless people,
some of them clergy
like Cuthbert,
and Cranmer and Latimer and Ridley,
and Wesley,
and Keble and Pusey and Newman,
but many more
just regular people of faith,
the herders who cared for the animals whose skins were the vellum
that the Lindisfarne gospels
were written on,
and John Day
the printer
who risked his life printing reformation texts,
and the hundreds and thousands
who showed up to hear John Wesley
and took their enthusiastic faith back to their hometowns,
and the people who took on the call of the Oxford movement
and dedicated their lives to God,
day by day, week by week,
not just clergy and members of religious orders
but regular parishioners
finding God in the discipline
of regular prayer and service.
That’s the church.
The church that we have inherited,
the church that we belong to,
the church that we knowand love,
the church
where we meet God
and God meets us,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2009