Homily preached by The Right Reverend David Robarts OAM on Pentecost Sunday 2009 at Mercedes College Chapel, Perth
To mark the Twentieth Anniversary of the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia (ACCA) in Western Australia.
“Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? And how do you see it now?
The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of Hosts: and
in this place I will give peace”.
IT was the prophet Haggai who addressed these words to the Jewish community at Jerusalem shortly after numbers of them began to return there in 537BC, following 50 years of exile in Babylon.
The people are poor and the land fails to provide for them: bad seasons and hard times are the order of the day. Yet Haggai uses these very conditions to press upon them their failure in taking to heart the greater matter of spiritual priorities: they must turn their attention and whatever resources can be mustered to the rebuilding of the Temple. And so they did.
Yet how does it compare with the splendour of former days? It was a poor thing, lacking altogether the grandeur of Solomon’s Temple which preceded it. However, the prophet goes on to assure his listeners that the glory of the latter Temple will be greater than that of the former. For the promise of God is to come to fruition by means of these less than splendid beginnings.
There is an element of personal historical reminiscence here in choosing these words from Haggai, because they were the text of a sermon I preached at the Centenary Service of St. George’s Cathedral in 1988. They were also the text of a much more historically significant, and truly magnificent address given by Bishop Barry, the then Primate of Australia, at that Cathedral’s Consecration in 1888. Bishop Barry found genuine encouragement for the people of this city from the words of Haggai because he looked to the Glory of God which the Temple was built to house, seeing that Glory as a Divine Presence embodied in Jesus Christ.
This being so, these introductory thoughts as to Temple building and rebuilding, and Church consecration, bring us to that central historical reality which lies at the very heart of our Faith – the Incarnation. We should recall that the Lord Himself was presented in the Temple as an infant. Not however the Temple building of Haggai’s prophecy but the third, final, and most splendid Temple edifice of Herod.
It is here that the child Jesus amazes the Doctors of the Law with His wisdom, and as a man teaches authoritatively in its courts. Then, with a demonstration of even greater authority, He cleanses the Temple. For having clearly identified Himself as the scandalous Presence of God Incarnate, that Temple itself and all it symbolized had become an anachronism – not one stone is to be left upon another. It was not merely obsolete but idolatrous, an empty shell of what it was supposed to contain and therefore fit only for judgement. Built for daily sacrifice and to house the mystery of the Divine Presence, it had failed to deliver the goods.
The truth was that the great God who tabernacled Himself in the womb of Mary had sprung forth from her to become the true Temple made without hands: the Place where all people can meet God, worship and adore Him, and find their home in Him. Here truly is fulfilment of the promise of greater Glory to come prophesied by Haggai – indeed, surpassing anything he could imagine.
First, however, this Temple too had to be destroyed, as He Himself the Lord of Glory had prophesied. Destroyed though, only to be raised up again in three days, having destroyed death itself; ransacking the underworld of its captives and returning triumphantly in the new Temple of His Resurrection Body. So much so, that wherever even two or three are gathered together in His Name, and especially when they gather together in His Name to Break Bread – there He is in our midst .
This morning we come together to “Do this,” as Jesus commanded; not on our own turf nor under the constraints and ownership of Trustees but through the generosity of Ecumenical partners who seem glad to have us, because we believe what they believe: that is, what the Church has always believed. No, not a religion made up as we go along, a religion increasingly manifested in the shallow ephemeral world of “ Do It Yourself” liturgies, and salvation by overhead projectors.
What the Church has always believed: as revealed in the Scriptures, formulated in the Creeds, determined by Church Councils, taught by the Fathers of East and West, and enshrined in Liturgy. Liturgy whereby what we believe is articulated in word and gesture as we clothe our adoration and praise, penitence and thanksgiving, in the beauty of holiness. For here we fall before the Divine Mystery Who has revealed Himself to us in Jesus, daring to reach out for Him in awe and wonder.
The late Anglican Archbishop of Perth Geoffrey Sambell, whose chaplain I was for three years in the 1970’s, warned the Church prophetically in the course of his Enthronement sermon in 1969 that “without an unashamed proclamation of the Person of Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Son of God – fully God and fully man – Christianity could slide into something little more than secular humanism with Christian overtones and Jesus as the archetypal philanthropist”.
From what I can gather there is pretty scant unashamed proclamation of the Incarnate Son of God from Anglican pulpits in this fair city these days. It has been superseded by relativising Christianity to fit contemporary ideological preoccupations, secular presuppositions, and the passionate pursuit of relevance. The problem with such relevance is that the more relevant we are today the more irrelevant we will certainly be tomorrow or the day after.
When I read the sermons of St. John Chrysostom or St. Bernard of Clairvaux – or John Henry Newman for that matter - I don’t find them relativising the Gospel or seeking to “be relevant”. Yet they speak with a refreshing and demanding conviction that hits me between the eyes and spans the centuries with a contemporary impact all too rarely demonstrated today.
This brings me briefly to Pentecost. We traditional Anglicans are the remnant of a truly glorious tradition; one, which I dare to say, resonates with very similar convictions to those of our present Holy Father, Pope Benedict. We too are deeply scriptural and profoundly patristic. We also have drunk deeply from the wells of the theological and spiritual traditions of both East and West. We too yearn with deep longing for unity between separated Christians.
May I also dare to say that not the least of the gifts which Anglican patrimony may bring to the wider Catholic Church is a long standing and close relationship with the Churches of the Christian East. It is in the very nature of our identity and appeal to history that we see ourselves as something of a bridge between East and West.
However, that very word “traditional” I have just employed is often used as a pejorative term. It conveys to many people the notion that we are simply stuck in the past and unwilling to change. I want to assert that on the contrary, tradition is, in fact, a charismatic principle. We believe and practice the dynamic of tradition. We grow from it. We are changed by it.
Let me give you an example from an Anglican priest worshipping at a Greek Orthodox monastery, rising to recite the psalms of the night Office at 3.00AM, led by the Abbot. “I said the Abbot would recite the psalms,” he says. “But that gives the wrong impression. He spoke them as if they were being spoken for the first time, speaking them from the depths of his heart; and yet at the same time speaking them with the weight of almost three thousand years of tradition, a hundred generations of longing after God. It was as if the whole tradition was speaking through him. Scripture comes to fulfilment when it ceases to be scripture and becomes living speech. The Spirit Who breathed in the original psalmist breathed in the man who now spoke the psalmist’s words. They were words filled with the Spirit. One saw very clearly something about the presence of the past, about the self-renewing nature of tradition.” The Word of God is truly a Living Word. And the life of the tradition renews itself constantly from within.
I must return us to the Prophet Haggai. While as a prophet he spoke more truly than he knew, he was also addressing a faithful remnant. His returning exiles were having a difficult time with new beginnings in bad times and with slender resources. He encourages them by asserting the need for spiritual priorities: to give their attention and their resources to the rebuilding of the Temple. In other words to place their hope in God’s future for them and look beyond present difficulties and heartache.
Like Haggai, I am acutely conscious, and painfully so, that we are living among the ruins of what has been; the old Temple of Anglicanism has fallen down around us. Yet we must move beyond nostalgia for what has been along with acrimony, negativism, or doom and gloom at what is, to our ever purposeful God of unfailing hope; for He summons us to the rebuilding of the Temple in our own day.
This is not our Temple though, but that of the Lord Himself who prays, “that they may all be one; as thou Father art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me”. This must become the Divine imperative for us all. We cannot build simply upon Agreed Statements, Concordats, Covenants and the like, important as they may be, but rather upon what I would call the life of the Church’s praying heart.
I conclude with a quotation and then a brief reflection on some words of the late Father Gilbert Shaw, one of the spiritual giants of Twentieth Century Anglicanism. “The place of Prayer is always the House of God whether it be the cell of the solitary, in the midst of men, in the prison cell, or in the building constructed by human hands for the purpose of prayer. It is the moment of submission to God as in humility we give our attention to the heavenly Mount Zion before which we are standing and of which we are members together.”
What God is asking of us all is submissive, obedient, faith; a renewed and renewing personal commitment, and corporate consecration, through struggle and contemplation; that we actually live as the praying heart of the Church in this sceptical, indifferent , and God-forgetful age. While the powers of evil and darkness may seem enthroned on all sides, yet the promise of the Lord of the Church is, that they shall never prevail. However, as T.S. Eliot also soberly reminds us, “the Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without. The Church must be forever building and always decaying and always being restored.”
Certainly, without that costly praying heart the Church will fail, as it has always failed, in its witness to the Truth of God embodied in Jesus Christ. It becomes instead a witness to its own need to exist, and to justify its failing existence; and, blasphemy of blasphemies, insist on telling God that our agenda should also be His.
“The place of Prayer is always the House of God whether it be the cell of the solitary, in the midst of men, in the prison cell, or in the building constructed by human hands for the purpose of prayer. It is the moment of submission to God as in humility we give our attention to the heavenly Mount Zion before which we are standing and of which we are members together.”
