We call ourselves liberal Anglo-Catholics. What do we mean? Series of homilies for Advent 2016 Advent 1 - Sunday 27 November 2016 Parish of Saint Matthias (Bellwoods) – Mother Joyce Barnett O House of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord! - Isaiah 2:5

When someone fell through the floor in our beloved jewel of a church building last February, we locked the doors so that it couldn’t happen again. I know that some people thought that we should simply do a quick repair and keep going. But what kind of responsibility would we have, if it happened again a second time? Someone else might also be hurt. Also our wardens would incur the liability on our behalf, and I am pretty committed to making sure that neither of those things happen. There is money in the Diocesan coffers that will go a long way towards helping us fix our little church, making it stronger and ready for a future of sustained use. But they want to know a couple of things. Do we have a good sense of what God is calling us to as the parish of St. Matthias? And are we putting in all the resources that we can? We know that the Diocese sees our potential as a centre for ministry and mission in our neighbourhood. We are in a strategic location in the city, we are a diverse community and we are dedicated to God’s mission at St. Matthias. Most of us remember how we responded when Mayor Rob Ford and City Council were threatening to save money by closing Bellwoods House. We responded on many levels, letter writing, calling councillors and making deputations at City Hall. We are missional people. But we have become a bit too insular over time. Understandable when we’ve felt like we had to run as fast as we could just to keep the lights on. But now, to save ourselves and the Anglican presence in this neighbourhood, we have to step out in faith. I spoke to Fr. David Hoopes, the prior at the Order of the Holy Cross about our need to get in touch with and develop our sense of being called to God’s mission. He told me that the danger for Anglo-Catholics is to confuse Anglo-Catholicism with Ritualism. Our ritual must always be in service of feeding us for our work in God’s world. He told me that sometimes people ask him why he is so faithfully present at the clinic for the homeless at the Cathedral. This participation for Fr. David, comes from his faith, his confidence that he is doing what he is called to do with the people that God loves. Our call to mission and ministry comes from our faith, from our beginnings as Anglo- Catholics. I could begin our history with the early church of course, but for today, we‘re going to start in Victorian England. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the church and the state in England were interconnected institutions. But what kind of church was it, bound up in Victorian strictures and morality? Church was for the most part, well-attended. The Eucharist was not celebrated very often. It was Morning and Evening Prayer. Anglicans were pretty staunchly anti-liberal and anti-Catholic. There were some good works happening because evangelical Christians believed in charity. They worked for prison reform and for the abolition of slavery. They were partners with the Crown in expanding the British Empire, as the Christian Missionary Society went out from England along with the army. There is a famous painting in the National Portrait Gallery in that was painted by Thomas Jones Barker that shows Queen Victoria giving the bible to an ambassador from East Africa. It is called The Secret of England’s Greatness. The in England on the other hand was less influential and at the time, more concerned to preserve the privileges that the church enjoyed. In the 1830s, all institutions were in upheaval, mostly in reaction to the downfall of the monarchy in France. The bishops responded by reorganising dioceses and revenues. But more was needed. The needed to rediscover their spiritual life. As the evangelicals continued their good works supported by a fundamentalist reading of scripture and an uncomplicated theology, in Oxford something very old and very new was brewing. The men, and at this point it was all men, dedicated themselves to a different kind of revival. They wanted to bring holiness back to human culture. To plumb the depths of and bring out the intensity and spirituality of the early church. John Keble, Richard Harrell Froude, Edward Pusey, and the one we know so well because he would jump ship in 1845 and join the Roman Catholics, John Henry Newman. Sometimes, these folks were known as Tractarians because they communicated their ideas using tracts. This was not a new idea, many people published tracts, but these were the first that were written by Oxford Dons, for educated people. There were 90 tracts in all and they were thought to be brilliant. They would concentrate on one topic, whether church services were too long for example (No is his answer, and he quotes St. Paul telling us to pray always!) Or more often a tract concentrated on one article in the creed and illuminated it. People found new hope and meaning in them and at only pennies each, the tracts were affordable. During this period, 1830-1845, there was little thought of trying to create innovation. Neither were they trying to appeal to working people. But country clergy were starting to listen and to pay attention to theological questions. After 1845, a more progressive side of the new movement began to emerge. These theologians were listening to the Christian Socialists and to Frederick Dennison Maurice, who, although he was not an Anglo-Catholic, but rather more broad church, had famously said, “There is no true Christianity without Socialism, and no true Socialism without Christianity.” The original Oxford dons continued to preach and teach under the leadership of Pusey. But the departure of Newman had been a blow. The Church of England was still terribly prejudiced against the Roman church. There were no more tracts. This is of course, the time period of our birth here on Bellwoods Ave in 1873. We were founded to be the mother-house for Anglo- Catholics in Toronto, to be close to Trinity College in Bellwoods Park, but also to be a church for the poor and working class people of this neighbourhood. It was built from the trees that were cut down to make room for the church and with pews that would remain forever free and unencumbered by that blight on the Anglican landscape, pew rents. In those days, as in England, most of the church was evangelical and Anglo-Catholics were looked upon with great suspicion. We were here in time to receive the first Anglican sisters when they arrived from England, because no other Toronto parish would allow them to live within their bounds. Meanwhile in England the Guild of St. Matthew was founded based on Anglo-Catholic and Socialist principles. They were concerned to have beautiful and spirit-filled liturgy, with frequent Communion. They were committed to the study and remedy of social and political ills in light of the gospel. Their theology was particularly focused on the incarnation. For God loved the world so much that God chose not only to be with us, but to be one of us. Guild members fought injustice wherever they found it: they called for a reduction in the hours of work, for decent housing, fair taxation, free education for all. And they did not neglect what they saw happening overseas. They opposed

2 forced labour in East Africa. I appreciate that they were known for attacking injustice wherever they found it and they proposed remedies. Ordained Guild members chose to go to the poorest and most difficult parishes, believing that God was calling them to minister among the miners, the dock workers, the unemployed. Unlike the good works of the Victorian evangelicals which was a charity model, the Anglo- Catholics were being called to live in the midst of the people they were called to serve. As Bp. Poole would say to us, “Anglo-Catholics have dirt under their fingernails.” We are called to live out with this principle today. It can be difficult to be with people where they are. Sometimes it is easier to feed people to invite them to eat with us. One of my favourite members of the Guild of St. Matthew was Stewart Duckworth Headlam. He was regularly in trouble with his bishop because of some of his teachings and some of his actions. He was particularly vehement against the traditional model of hell, and preached an all-loving and all-forgiving God. His bishop also disliked Headlam’s support of actors and the stage, especially when he stood bail for Oscar Wilde, who had been charged with the crime of homosexuality. Headlam believed that his teacher, F. D. Maurice was correct when he taught that the Kingdom of God would be a just and egalitarian society. Not long after this, a woman named Vita Scudder who had studied in England came to the United States and was teaching at Wellesley College. She was a Anglo-Catholic Socialist and a Companion of the Order of the Holy Cross. She nearly lost her job in later years because she supported the mill workers strike in Lawrence Mass. Literature about her merely says that her primary relationships were always with women and so we recognize that she was probably a lesbian. In 1889 the somewhat more respectable Christian Social Union was formed. They had a similar theology to the Guild, fed by a deep spirituality of the sacraments, a critical reading of scripture and were preaching an incarnational theology. They also believed that Christian faith has to do with every aspect of life and human society. They preached that we are called to look outward, that our concern is for the welfare of everyone everywhere. Fr. Radclyffe Dolling said about his work in the Portsmouth slums of London, “I speak out and fight about the drains, because I believe in the Incarnation.” That God came and dwelt among us is one of the central beliefs in Anglo-Catholic spirituality and moves us to be passionate about the well-being of all creatures and creation. Our faith draws us to the altar where we find community and Jesus among us. We are fed with spiritual food and sent back out into the world to continue our work. This is the core of what it means to be Anglo-Catholic. ______

In the worship of Jesus really present in the Sacrament of the Altar before you, all human hearts can join, and especially secularists, for when you worship Him you are worshipping the Saviour, the social and political Emancipator, the greatest of all secular workers, the founder of the great socialistic society for the promotion of righteousness, the preacher of a revolution, the denouncer of kings, the gentle, tender sympathizer with the rough and the outcast who could utter scathing, burning words against the rich, the respectable, the religious. Stewart Headlam “Sacramental Socialism” 1890

The Eucharist is the principal act of Christian worship because it embodies the central truth of the Christian faith: God has pitched God’s tent in our midst, in our own flesh, redeeming our nature, binding us to one another, and filling the whole creation with the effulgence of God’s glory. John Orens “The Anglo Catholic Vision”

3 Advent 2- Sunday 4 December 2016

Parish of Saint Matthias (Bellwoods) – Deacon Alison Kemper For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. - Romans 15:4

These are hard days. As a Canadian born in the USA, with American family, I am terribly distressed by what is going on. The legitimization of racist attacks, the decline of democracy and the rise of fascist movements throughout the world, the nuclear sabre rattling, and the reversal of any progress made on climate change. It’s dispiriting. And there are people out there, posing as Christians, claiming that things I find abhorrent. Joe Walsh, a former Republican Congressman and extreme rightist ideologue, tweeted: If Jesus was back among us, he'd be a law-abiding gun owner. He'd support the Police. And he'd say "Merry Christmas" not "Happy Holidays." I was asked how I coped with the constant sense of sadness and rage that threatens to overwhelm so many of us. How might we have hope? And I said, I am part of a religious community which believes that because we encounter God, we are empowered to engage in defiance, in making justice, in finding hope. I am part of a group that would never say, “If Jesus was back among us”, because we live in the presence of Christ, who need not suddenly and apocalyptically appear for us to know his presence among us. Because of our encounters with Christ at this table, surrounded by these people, week after week, simply or not, we know a God who would never appear as a law abiding gun owner who unquestioningly supported police. So this morning, I am going to talk about how it is that the Anglo-Catholic movement that little St. Matthias is part of, emerged as a force for social change and social justice. How is it that we keep hope alive in this place, in this community? I’m going to tell this story by talking about our Anglo-Catholic hero of the week, John Mason Neale. Neale was educated and ordained priest in England at a time when the Anglo Catholic movement was just starting, the 1830’s and 40’s. Like them, he saw the urgent need for change in the Church of England, for people to realize that the church wasn’t just part of the national bureaucracy. Let me tell you what I found out about the churches in England in that time. Most of them, especially the country churches, had communion very rarely, some as rarely as every 3 years. There were fundamentalists all over England’s diocese, insisting everyone adopt their view of religion. While the dissenting churches, like the Methodists, were increasingly singing hymns, most Anglican congregations seldom sang hymns. There’s still no official hymn book in the Church of England. The services would be joy less. Since the time of the Restoration in the late 1600’s, the practice of wealthy people was to build private family pews in the church, complete with heaters and cushions. Servants sat upstairs in the galleries at the back. Poor people often didn’t attend at all. Many people would chat, read, and not participate in the service.

4 It wasn’t anything like what we would call a Christian community. We know all about the ritual: no vestments to add colour, no candles to add light, celebrating communion from the left or north side, so that everyone could see there was no magic going on. Anglican priests were being pressured to be more and more fundamentalist. It was all pretty austere. John Mason Neale wanted to change everything about the church, and in his 48 year long life, he tried to do it all. The commitment to this new theology, this new worship and devotion, this new form of Christian service, nearly cost him his life. In trying to conduct a funeral for a young nun who had caught scarlet fever due to her care for a sick family, the nun’s father organized a team of thugs to assault and threaten to kill him. He jumped over a back fence and escaped to a pub. What John Mason Neale figured out was that the Church of England needed a new injection of fabulous. Like so many Anglican leaders before him, he used the writings of early Christian theologians, who lived 100-400 years after the birth of Christ, the writings of the Church Fathers. At the time of the Reformation, Anglican leaders read the Ancient writings of Greek and Latin speaking bishops of the early church. It is Elizabeth I who said: “We and our people – thanks be to God – follow no novel and strange religion, but that very religion which is ordained by Christ, sanctioned by the primitive and Catholic Church and approved by the consistent mind and voice of the most early Fathers.” Again during the Revolution and at the Restoration, when the puritans were no longer ruling the country, Anglicans who worked to rebuild the church, looked to these early fathers. Like Anglicans, they weren’t Roman Catholics, but they were catholic. They provided a rich tradition from which Neale and the others could draw to revive the dried out, sensory deprived church in their time. John Mason Neale didn’t stop with reading their theology. He read their liturgies. He read their mystic poetry. He read the hymns they wrote. He realized that the renewal of the Church of England might be richer and happier with the addition of mysticism, of devotion, of singing and of architecture. He translated hundreds of hymns of the ancient church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, hymns long forgotten in the west and never heard in England. * All Glory, Laud and Honour * O come, O come, Emmanuel * Of the Father's Heart Begotten * Sing, My Tongue, the Glorious Battle He published hymnbooks. He slammed the fundamentalists who claimed that their interpretation of the Bible was the only true religion. They could never explain passages which were contradictory. With regard to pews, he wrote a small book on their history, describing all of his objections to the classism and exclusion, the impiety of box pews. Because they replicated the class distinctions so deeply entrenched outside the church, distinctions that were offensive, he believed strongly that they had no place in church. So he hacked down the pews with a hatchet. In his first parish. For John Mason Neale, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist inspired not only devotion, but inclusion. The poor had to be fully included in the liturgy, not sent to sit well out of sight and mind in the gallery. This was radical. It wasn’t just his use of vestments and candles that was noteworthy. He believed that Christ’s presence mandated a new way of being, an inclusive and boundless encounter with

5 God. This idea about the poor wasn’t common. In most of England, debtors were sent to prison, the poor to work in horrible conditions in Poor Houses. Human life wasn’t worth too much. * 30 out of every 100 babies died before they reached 5. * The average life expectancy was only 45 -50 years. * Nearly one in 140 births resulted in the death of the mother. Neale’s responded by forming the Sisters of St. Margaret, a society of women devoted to caring for the sick. For so many of these early Anglo Catholics, the response to their experience of faith was to deal with human suffering head on. In a world in which women had gifts but no way to exercise them, the sisterhoods offered a chance for meaningful work. In a country hostile to religious change, the sisters won public favour through their nursing work. They weren’t set up to seem holy, but to change the world. A deepened awareness of God as a presence, not a theory, drove this work. In turn, the work allowed the greater acceptance of Anglo-Catholicism. In this morning’s psalm, we sing, “May the monarch defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.” I think Neale understood verses like these as a commandment to remake the church. With his hatchet. With human voices. With bread and wine, available to all the faithful, week in and week out. With more and more devotion, a local holiness, centred in each parish Eucharist, totally accessible to everyone. John Mason Neale spent his brief life bringing the fullness of the church’s eastern and ancient traditions to the church in his era. From him, we learned that the richer the liturgy, the better it equips the people to do God’s work. In his example of tearing out pews with a hatchet, we begin to see a relentless commitment to the inclusion of all people in the Eucharist. In his founding of the sisters, we see the strength and power of a lifetime committed to serving God. We can identify with his rants against fundamentalism, a theology that stunts our recognition of God’s ongoing movement in the world. In the Gospel for today, John the Baptist says, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor;' for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” It’s clearly not enough to say “We have the Tractarians for our ancestors” or “We are Anglo-Catholics”. We need to find out what’s next, where Jesus is taking us. How might John Mason Neale guide us as we re-examine our vision and mission at St Matthias? I see three main ways: • First, because of Neale’s work, we know that our tradition is full of beauty and reverence, that incorporating material from the eastern or ancient church usage will open us to new experiences of the holy. • Second, because of Neale’s passion, we know that the common experience of making Eucharist compels us to be inclusive in our worship. OR as Paul says in Romans: Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. • Third, because of Neale’s ability to found and develop a strong women’s religious order, we know that lives devoted to Christ can change the world. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist can transform any and all of us into agents of God’s revolution in the world.

6 Finally¸ because of his opposition to fundamentalism, we know that there are no easy answers. We can and must embrace one another and our new friends and allies as we move forward in an increasingly difficult world. By gathering here, in the presence of a Christ who joins with us, we regain our bearings and our strength. From this table, we go out. Not in certainty, nor in fear, but in hope.

Let us pray that we might abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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