I’ve driven a few different cars over the years, beginning with one that cost $50, had a maximum speed of 70kms per hour going downhill in a tail wind, and a bumper sticker that read ‘I have decided to follow Jesus’. One wit pointed out that was just as well given the state of the vehicle.
It’s been a long time since that little Herald Triumph (a wonderfully incongruous name) that sometimes got me from here to there, but it remains a mostly happy, nostalgic memory, despite the times it broke down, or another part fell off.
Tonight we celebrate the Oxford Movement; a renewal movement that has shaped people since the 1830’s to live out the gospel of hope, healing and transformation.
Sitting at table with Christian people is where, as a young person, I saw, heard and received a true revelation of that love which Jesus showed the people with whom he sat, at so many different tables including that table of the last supper; the table at which Christ’s body feeds the body of Christ gathered around it.
This image, this life-giving reality is so very powerfully part of the catholic, ‘the whole, the integral, the complete’. It’s an expression of church that I find almost impossible to fathom how others don’t also see within it the profound grace of this gift of Eucharistic fellowship.
Here we are now more than 190 years later — Australian Anglicans and the 21st century. A time and a place where, just as with the mixed mmories of the shortcomings of that old Herald Triumph, I have mixed feelings about the Anglican heritage which grew from the Oxford Movement — some of what’s been lost, what has been held too tightly, what some people haven’t been able to embrace including the leadership of women, and the agony of theological debate over scripture and doctrinal clarity, to name a few.
And more widely, we know that issues of some tension between church and State have been writ large in recent years. We know that conflicts within Anglicanism form part of our life at the level of parish, diocese, Province and Communion day-by-day. Australian Anglicans are very aware of the impact of our challenges. Increasing secularism. The changing landscape of Australia’s interfaith and multicultural community. The growing acknowledgement of the impact of our church’s historical role in policies and attitudes towards First Nations Australians. The rise of conservative lobby groups seeming to speak for all Anglicans. The shame and responsibility of the church in response to child sexual abuse.
So even as we celebrate all that we hold dear, the depth and breadth of this catholic Anglian heritage and movement, we do so knowing that the ‘good old days’ are not where we live right now. They were not where the first generation of this movement lived either. We, like them, are living into the future, always facing a new day, and doing so in God’s new day.
Despite the good memories, I no longer drive a battered Triumph Herald. I do drive a much more substantial vehicle. And that vehicle may need to change radically, again, and soon, given the climate crisis that the planet is facing.
As Church, we are also facing radical changes. The new beginning is urgent, yet it is taking time to replot and reinvigorate and reimagine, within the power and the gift of the Holy Spirit. What will the wonderfully rich Anglo Catholicism of the 1800’s give birth to in the second decade of the 21st century? What will the way of living out the love of Jesus look like in the next generation of Anglicanism? How do we live and witness to God’s love in the beauty of holiness, along with the grit of pastoring in a world filled with pain and injustice?
Yes, we are here to witness to the gift that was left to God’s Church by our forebears in the Oxford Movement. Yet we are also here as those who ourselves are taking responsibility and making room for the breath of the Spirit to reinvigorate and renew old patterns and pathways.
We know that the table of the Lord is wide and welcoming. We have found the pastoral heart of Jesus as we are attuned to scripture. We’ve taken courage in the sacrament of Christ’s love poured out for the life of the world. We’ve investigated tradition and traditions. We’ve allowed the beauty of God’s world to fire the imagination. We’ve also looked into the face of the ugliness of sin and evil, and we persist in knowing, even there, especially there, the triumph of the Cross of Jesus, the gift of love given in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
At the Eucharistic table, and at many other tables, we keep on meeting Jesus Christ; the guest and host of all that God has given in love, and continues to give in love. A mystery to live.
Edited version of a homily preached by Archbishop Kay Goldsworthy at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne at a service for the Anniversary of the Oxford Movement, 2024.
