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Sermon Ideas
Suggestion for a sermon/homily outline on Sunday 13th July 2008
to mark the 175th Anniversary of the Assize Sermon.
14th July 1833 - 14th July 2008
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John Keble
preaches the Assize Sermon at the University Church of St Mary the
Virgin, Oxford, on 14th July 1833. The theme is ‘National
Apostasy,’ the background the disintegration of the idea of Great Britain as
a ‘confessional’ state, with the Church of England as the one expression of
its spiritual life.
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The details
of the Assize sermon seem very obscure to us now – an argument over the
organisation of Irish bishoprics. The point is that Keble issues a ‘rallying
cry’ to recall the nation to its spiritual foundation, and the Church of
England to its apostolic inheritance.
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Who is John
Keble? He is the Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, and former
Fellow of Oriel College. In 1836, he becomes Vicar of Hursley in Hampshire,
where he remains until his death in 1866. He is known for his beauty of
character and holiness of life.
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Keble’s
sermon attracts the interest of other young Oxford dons: John Henry Newman,
Richard Hurrell Froude (both Fellows of Oriel), and, a little later, Edward
Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church.
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Together,
these men (and others) issue a series of pamphlets known as the Tracts
for the Times. They cover topics such as the priesthood and apostolic
succession (Newman’s Tract 1), baptismal regeneration, the Real
Presence, fasting, sacramental confession, and other aspects of Catholic
doctrine and devotion. The Tracts enjoy widespread circulation, and
notoriety. Taken in the round, they can be said to address the question: if
the Church of England is more than just the religious expression of the
state, what it is it? The answer is, that it is part of the one, holy,
catholic and apostolic Church, and its priests are priests of the Catholic
Church and successors to the Apostles. The Tracts appeal to the ‘High
Church’ tradition of Anglicanism which flowered in the first half of the
seventeenth century – the so-called ‘Caroline Divines.’
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The Tracts
come to an end with Newman’s Tract 90 in 1841, in which Newman
attempts to show how the 39 Articles of Religion appended to the Book of
Common Prayer can be shown to be compatible with Catholic teaching. This
Tract causes even greater scandal and controversy. In 1845, Newman joins the
Roman Catholic Church. Pusey becomes the ‘de facto’ leader of the Oxford
Movement. In the same year, Pusey assists in the establishment of the
Anglican sisterhood at Devonport, under the leadership of Priscilla Lydia
Sellon, the future first Mother Superior of the Society of the Holy Trinity.
This marks the re-foundation of the Religious life in the Church of England
after the Reformation.
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In the
years succeeding the Oxford Movement proper (which is usually taken as
coming to an end with Newman’s conversion in 1845), a new generation of
priests takes the ideas of the Tractarians out into the parishes of England
and Wales. They give visual and liturgical expression to key Tractarian
doctrines – such as the Real Presence – in the increasingly ritual and
ceremonial celebration of the Sacraments, especially the Mass. Emphasis is
given to the continuity with the liturgy of the pre-Reformation church, and
to affinity with the continental Roman Catholic church. What we might now
call ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ or the ‘Catholic Revival’ is born. It flowers not
only in liturgy, but also via the media of church architecture and the arts.
Anglo-Catholic priests work, notably, in areas of social deprivation,
combining the ‘beauty of holiness’ with a concern for the poorest of the
poor. Catholic societies – such as the Society of the Holy Cross – are
founded. Between the years 1877 and 1882, four priests are imprisoned for
offences under the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, the Act of
Parliament passed in order to suppress ‘ritualism.’ But we are now well
beyond the history of the Oxford Movement itself.
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What can we
learn from the fathers of the Oxford Movement / the early Tractarians? We
might sum up their inheritance to us in three main areas:
Apologetics:
the defence of the catholicity of the Church of England and the apostolicity of
her priests; the centrality of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the
importance of the sacraments; the incorporation of the individual into Christ by
baptism and personal sanctification
Personal holiness: the importance of prayer, penitence and
other spiritual disciplines, creating the opportunities for that personal
sanctification, via the work of the Holy Spirit, mentioned above
Scholarship:
the exhaustive study of the Church Fathers of the early centuries, as well as of
the great Anglican divines of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries.
As we remember John Keble and the Assize sermon, we can give thanks for that
vision of catholic doctrine robustly expounded, married to the call to holiness
of life, for which all our Tractarian forefathers stood, and we can pray for its
renewal in the English Church of our own day.
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