Basics
Sermon preached 2/09/07
Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid (1 Cor. 3.11).
We do well to recall what we are about here. It is possible to drift away from our first purpose. We begin with God. Our meeting here is obedience to his command indeed, but much more our response to him who first loved us. That is the mark of any Christian congregation worthy of the name. We cannot, I cannot, compel the presence of the Blessed Trinity with us. Christianity is not magic, which might try to control God; we are here not to cast spells, but to pray and, please God, to receive his blessing. We cannot compel him, but he is faithful to his promises to his people.
We assemble as his holy people, his Assembly, his Church. You may have heard it said that Jesus did not found a church. That is true, because God had founded it long before when he called Abraham. There has only ever been one holy people of God, of which we were made members in baptism.
We do not imagine for one moment that this congregation, or even the whole Traditional Anglican Communion, is coextensive with that one holy people. The Church of England never claimed in its foundation documents to be uniquely blessed. It is not for us to assert dogmatically which bodies are inside and which not; but I think it highly unlikely and inconsistent with Christ's promise to the Church that the great Churches of East and West (if we have to use the word "Church" in the plural) were ever outside it.
Now this is the context in which we try to understand our Anglican heritage. It is a doubtful one, not free from problems. No major body in East or West accepts that Anglicanism is fully part of the One Church. They may all be wrong; but anybody who remains in any form of Anglicanism, whether in relationship to Nigeria, Sydney, Canterbury, the "episcopalians" in the USA or for that matter the Traditional Anglican Communion, does well to be aware of this judgement passed on us. We in the TAC are in the process of humbly seeking reconciliation with our brethren (for reconciliation with Rome will of itself help us to reconciliation with the Orthodox) and, as a first step, of understanding what still needs to be put right among us. No form of Anglicanism is perfect.
Yet we believe that God has blessed Anglicanism. Not everything that has ever been practised under that name. Long before the recent disputes (about worship, about basic moral duties and about the nature of the ministry which the Holy Spirit taught the Church to adopt) there was better and worse in the Church of England. To speak only of worship, Prayer book English was a good compromise - neither wholly incomprehensible nor ordinary. A heavy diet of Scripture, in Morning and Evening Prayer, could be made to work. But the 1662 Communion rite, though usable, is an emergency device, using rubrics and other comments to prevent Cranmer's original meaning while complying with Parliament's determination that the text should hardly change. (This is the opinion of much more learned and godly people than myself!) The rite is also (as printed) very wordy, and assumes patterns of government which no longer exist. Reform was needed, and our form of worship here accepts that the Church of England in the early 1960s made a good beginning of that reform (later, alas, thrown into confusion).
God has blessed Anglicanism, and as the Church of Rome contemplates the mess it made of its own reforms (which it now acknowledges and intends to correct) it may be that even small continuing Anglican congregations and a few faithful lives have a Christian experience through which God will benefit the whole people of God, or at least a much wider part of it.
If what I have said about the 1662 Communion surprises, I was simply summarising Dr. A H Couratin "The Service of Holy Communion 1549-1662" SPCK 1963. My impression is that this was an entirely uncontroversial text for ordinands.