Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 20 July 2008

‘What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ? And what are the particular duties of sincere Christians, whose lot is cast by Divine Providence in a time of such dire calamity?’

I doubt that any sermon preached in England this morning will be remembered twelve months from now. Preachers’ words are rarely milestones or historic turning-points. Yet last week the Church of England’s Calendar remembered a sermon, a sermon preached 175 years ago. On July 14 1833 John Keble ascended the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, to deliver the Assize Sermon. His words on the theme National Apostasy, with some of which I began, have generally been regarded as the launch-point of the Oxford Movement, and can fairly be said to have changed the face of the Church.

Keble’s world was self-evidently very different from our world, and it is hard for a liberal-minded citizen of our pluralist culture to sympathize with his outrage at some of the societal changes that prompted his sermon. These included moves towards Roman Catholic emancipation and towards the admission of non-conformists to Parliament. A creature of his time, Keble could detect in these only attacks on the Church he loved, the Church he believed to the successor of the Church of the Apostles. What he perceived as the State’s willingness to diminish and marginalize an institution of Apostolic foundation he diagnosed as symptomatic of national apostasy. England was becoming faithless.

Thus was conceived the principal cause of the Oxford Movement: the re-assertion of the Church’s fundamental independence from the State, and its re-awakening to its roots in ancient and undivided Christendom rather than in Reformation England. This re-assertion and re-awakening was timely and welcome and its effects thoroughgoing: they are still visible in this very building in the extension and adornment of the east end, carried out late in the nineteenth century, an attempt visibly to re-connect the Ecclesia Anglicana with the historic life-stream of the universal Church. The Oxford Movement was a moment of confident revival, of the sort that many would like to see in global Anglicanism today.

Yet there is a cost to such moments, to moments when the Church defines herself in opposition to the world. Whenever the Church believes she has uncovered her raison d’etre (whether in her apostolic heritage or in the words of Scripture) she turns her back on the community which she exists to serve. Her new-found confidence and freshly-discovered self-reliance breed a self-sufficient complacency that is ultimately destructive. Early enthusiasm turns to unthinking certainty and bold innovation to soulless repetition. The catholic ceremonial which once offered the worshipper a dramatic glimpse of the world to come becomes instead a tired ritual of this one; the word of God which once spoke liberation to its hearer becomes instead the dead letter of another age. Churches cling onto what once served them well, and they become refuges from the world rather than places of transformation for the world.

So what is to be made of Keble’s sermon? He saw a nation losing faith in its Church; what your preacher sees today is a Church losing faith in its nation, a Church that is trapped in her own self-perpetuation, a Church that has become a refuge for those who do not like the nation, a Church that does not like what the modern word has brought. In no other place in twenty-first century Britain is it considered legitimate (indeed appropriate) to discriminate against people on the grounds of their gender or sexual orientation. We at last (thank God!) inhabit a culture in which such discrimination is as unacceptable as was that on grounds of race a generation ago. By colluding with it in the Church we reinforce our ghetto appearance and our ghetto mentality: it is us who are right; it is them out there who are not.

Keble argued that the Church must not follow slavishly the beliefs and behaviours of the apostate society in which it is set. He was right. But God’s saving action is not limited to (or by) his Church, however rooted it may be in the apostolic tradition or however wrapped up it may be in Scriptural authority. Truth makes herself known through the labours of theologians, yes, but also through every scholarly discipline; through public worship, yes but also through private prayer; through the debates of Synods and councils, yes, but also through public discourse and private conversation. Sometimes the Church needs to catch up to where society has already arrived. That may be a sobering reality, but it is one that is entirely consonant with a doctrine of a sovereign God of limitless creative freedom and boundless loving resourcefulness.

There is much in society of which the Church must be critical if she is to be faithful to her Lord: omnipresent pornography, rapacious greed, rampant inequality, universal commercialism, the naked exploitation and brutal oppression of God’s children. But when she shuts her eyes to the common values that unite the nation (and tolerance and equal treatment are among these) then she loses all credibility and denies herself a place at the table. When the Church discriminates in its ordered life which is apostate – Church or State? No one will listen to a self-sufficient sect, a ghetto church. It is time for us to re-assert our faith in the nation we serve as the place where God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness must be built.

‘I do not see’ said Keble ‘how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolical Church in these realms’. Perhaps the Apostolical Church needs to give similar devotion to the cause of discovering what God is doing in the nation; perhaps she needs humbly to learn from what she discovers; so that then she can be the agent of its Godly transformation. Amen.