Opening Sermon at the 1963 Anglican Congress THE MOST REVEREND ARTHUR MICHAEL RAMSEYArchbishop of CanterburyPrimate 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
