Opening Sermon at the 1963 Anglican Congress
THE MOST REVEREND ARTHUR MICHAEL RAMSEY
Archbishop of Canterbury
Primate of All England
PSALM 63:1. O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee.
In our act of worship tonight we proclaim once again that the adoration of God is the first privilege and the final goal of us his creatures and children. The claim that worship comes first rests upon the elementary fact that God created us in his own image, after his own likeness, and longs that we shall have with him the closest fellowship possible in love and in converse, a love and converse intimate and yet filled with awe and dependence, as God is our Maker as well as our Father. He made us for himself, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in him.
Beneath the strains and agonies of our modern world there lies the estrangement of man from his Creator. In the midst of such a world as this the Church of God bears witness to the truth about God and man as Jesus Christ has finally disclosed it, and in no way does the Church do so more significantly than in the depth of its worship. “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee.” An unknown Christian writer of old wrote: “As the soul is in the body, so are the Christians in the world.” By lifting up their souls in the simplicity of love towards God, Christians are doing on the world’s behalf what the world has lost the power to do, and they are serving the world by helping it to recover the soul which it has lost. To say this is no platitude. Rather is it a priority which the Church is all too ready to neglect. In the noise of our times there is little enough of the quiet waiting upon God which is the heart of our religion. In the activism of our Church life there is a forgetfulness that the reality of God is not necessarily made known by the multiplying of the things we do. We need to be recalled to St. Dominic’s great description of the Christian way: contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere, to contemplate and to pass on to others the things contemplated. Is it our weakness in the second due to our often being too busy for the first?
It is however in no vacuum that God is worshipped. As our Lord’s going to the Father was bound up with his loving identification of himself with humanity ravaged by sin and suffering, so the Church’s offering of its life to God is bound up with its mission to humanity. As with Christ, so with the Church it is an obedience set within place and within time. Christ’s obedience was on the soil of Palestine, and in the time of Pontius Pilate the Governor. So our obedience is always in a place, and always in a time. Place: the Church serves God in the heart of particular countries, cultures, languages, making itself in the people, of the people as it does so. It must be in turn as Canadian as the Canadians, as African as the Africans, as Asian as the Asians. Time: we remember that in the New Testament “time” is a terrible word, sharp as a knife. It is Kairos: time urgent in opportunity and in judgment. It is less often the year or the day than the hour or the minute, each hour, each minute being a time of visitation: evening, midnight, cockcrow, morning, the Lord may come. We may be leisurely studying an era, when the divine hour or moment passes and finds us asleep and does not come back again. Yes, it is in places and times that our love of God is tested. “O God, thou art my God: early will I seek thee.”
Today’s gathering here in Toronto finds us all belonging to geography, to our homes and countries far distant from one another, and belonging to time, to the mid-twentieth century. But
we serve God in geography and time only because we have citizenship which is beyond both of them. Think how far this is so.
Beyond locality, everyone of our churches, provinces, dioceses is a part of the One Holy Catholic Church of Christ. From that, in Christ, each part derives its strength. Towards that, in Christ, each part looks away from itself in realizing its mission. Integrated with the One Catholic Church in Baptism, liturgy, Creed, apostolic order, we share in a stream of divine life and truth at once outward and visible and deeply interior as well. Wherever there is full communion there is the unhindered sharing in both the interior and the visible unity. It is this which our Orthodox friends call “the holy tradition.” And while our life in Christ is thus a life beyond geographical regions, so too is our mission. As the world becomes smaller by the involvement of every part with every part, so we cannot serve this or that portion of humanity without our togetherness in serving all.
Beyond time, our own generation of Christians belongs to a Communion of Saints reaching across the generations. Time seems to disappear as we find our family union with saints and martyrs of old, with the apostles, with the Mother of our Lord. Let us realize more vividly the Communion of Saints in the bond of prayer and Eucharist, and let us be sure that to do so is not merely looking backwards in history but rather to be looking onwards towards the vision of God in heaven as, in fellowship with the saints who are nearer to that vision, we say, “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee.”
So it is that serving God here or there we know our part in the great Church beyond here and there, and serving God now or then we know our share in the Communion of Saits in which before and after melt into one another. Within this setting there is our own Anglican Communion. It is here that our lot is cast, and it is here that God’s providence has put us. And we ask what this means for us, and what it should mean for Christendom. In a word, I suggest, it means this. The Anglican Communion is the medium whereby while serving in this country or that country we know our place within the One Holy Catholic Church, and while serving here and now we know our place within a stream of providential history.
Thus, while we are striving that the Church we serve shall be as Canadian as the Canadians, as African as the Africans, as Asian as the Asians, it is in our Anglican Communion that we know our wider catholicity, not just ideally or invisibly or federally, but in the sacramental depth of full communion and in practical fellowship. In this fellowship we witness together to a faith and a sacramental life scriptural and catholic. The providences of history have brought this about. Ours is a continuity in history, in catholicity, in mission, with the mission of St. Augustine from Gaul to England, when he built his Church and set his chair in Canterbury. We own much to Rome at whose behest that mission happened. With Constantinople we are one in things deeper than the differences brought about by our very diverse historical experiences. So too our debt to Geneva is great, for Geneva helped us and helps us still to know that all is by grace along and by faith alone. This history is not a bare history. It is a history with a meaning. It passes through localities like the Isle of Thanet and the gates of Canterbury. But the meaning is more than local. Not for nothing do the Anglican chaplaincies on this continent call themselves “Canterbury houses” or “Canterbury clubs.” Not for nothing do you come in thousands as pilgrims to Canterbury. Set as she is in a corner of the island she is a symbol of our widespread brotherhood, a brotherhood of
churches equal in dignity and privilege, the dignity and privilege of serving one another and serving humanity in Christ’s Name.
It is not for us Anglican to speak in self-conscious or self-commendation about our claims. There was a period when other churches used to speak complimentary about our role as a “bridge-church.” Today in an ecumenical age Christians everywhere are ready to go to one another without the aid of our bridge, or perhaps without any bridge to help them. We learn again that self-consciousness and self-commendation have no place in Christ. Yet God gives us a quiet assurance of faith, and in the quiet assurance of faith we look towards the world, towards one another as Anglicans, towards other churches, and towards God. As a new epoch in Christian history may be opening we ask where our task and our duty are going to be.
Towards the world we renew our mission. It will be more than ever, a mission of involvement: as Canadian as the Canadians, as African as the Africans, as Asian as the Asians. Involved with the growing nations we shall be no less involved with the religions, acknowledging the light that lighteth every man present among them while we proclaim Christ as the unique Saviour, Light of Light. No less shall we be involved with the great mass of modern secularism, putting ourselves with sympathy and sensitivity alongside every groping toward God while always adhering to a supernatural faith. In all these ways our mission will be one of involvement, but we know that the power to fulfill it will go with the Church’s otherworldly witness.
Towards one another as Anglicans, our unity will be one of giving and receiving. We must plan our mission together, and use our resources in the service of a single task. The word “missionary” will mean not colonialism of any kind, but going to one another to help one another. Let African and Asian missionaries come to England to help convert the post-Christian heathenism in our country and to convert our English to a closer following of Christ.
Towards other churches we work for unity in truth and holiness. That work is always one of giving and receiving, and we only give if we are humble to receive. What we may give is not our own, it is a treasure of scriptural and catholic faith and sacrament. As to the goal, it is nothing less than full communion in and of the Catholic Church of Christ. In the process parts of the Anglican family may cease to be precisely Anglican, as united Churches come into being in full communion with us. But whether our Anglican Communion itself will disappear is something which we do not know. We do not know what place particular provinces, or traditions, or patriarchates will have within the unity of God’s design and Canterbury may like Rome and Constantinople long have its role in God’s service. Meanwhile the work of unity has its times, its kairoi, in different parts of the world. For all of us there is in this year the great significance of the Vatican Council. Rome and Canterbury are speaking to one another in a new charity without belittling their respective concerns about truth. And though the road to unity in truth is a long one, the new charity means that already Christendom stands more vividly as a fact before the world.
“O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee.” To him we turn, first and last, and only as we do so can we with any purpose turn towards the world, towards one another and towards other churches. To contemplate, and to pass on to others the things contemplated, that is always the order; and we make God known only when we have ourselves been humbled by the vision of
him. It is in the vision of him that he increases and self decreases; so that those who know us may find less of ourselves and more of God. “Early will I seek thee,” says the Psalmist, and our Lord answers: “Seek, and ye shall find.”
Given at Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto.
Transcribed from the Congress Proceedings, pages 13-16.