“Unity and the Role of
Experience and Tradition”:
A SERMON for the start of
the week of prayer for Christian unity
preached by Rev Dr John HUghes
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‘That they may all be one’ (John 17:21)
I want to speak today about the
divisions that so sadly separate Christ’s Church and about the goal of our
unity. This might seem like a very easy
topic for a preacher: we all know divisions are bad and unity is good don’t
we? Perhaps we think that our divisions
are all about silly things in the past which a few won’t let go of, and all we
really need to do is get on with loving each other a bit more and we can get
over them. Seems like it’s all fairly
straightforward doesn’t it? But why then
are we still divided? Why are we not one
Church? ‘Because your church voted against it in the ’seventies!’ some of you with
good memories might be inclined to say, and that’s a fair point! More deeply though, why does it feel like the
heady optimism of the sixties with churches coming together, has not only run
aground, but now those Churches seem to be facing new divisions within
themselves. Our problems in the Anglican
Communion, mainly over questions of sexuality, but also over women’s ordination
and other things, are pretty hard to miss when they’re plastered all over the
press. I imagine you’re all only too
aware of similar problems in your own church.
I
believe there’s no glossing over these questions of disagreement. Many of them are real and important and need
facing. At the other end of the spectrum
though, I don’t think we should give up the goal of visible Church unity and
just say that maybe God wants a divided Church.
The Church of England has always embodied a remarkably broad spectrum of
views in one Church (just look around this city!) and in India a couple of
years ago, I was privileged to see the United Churches which came about through
the union of the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist
traditions, so I do believe this can work.
So
today, in an effort to put this into practice, I’d like to think a little bit
about one of the questions that has historically divided
our two Churches, but which also relates to other divisions in the Body of
Christ: the role of experience and feelings in the Christian life. This could be a shorthand
for the split between Methodists and the Church of England, which after all is fairly
recent as Christian divisions go, a mere 200 or so years ago. At the risk of caricature we might say that
this split was a conflict between a living experience of faith and dry dead
traditions, at least if you’re a Methodist; or between decent order and
fanatical emotionalist individualism, if you’re an Anglican. I realise I’m being a little bold in doing
this, like Daniel stepping into the lions’ den, but I hope you will take it in
the friendly spirit of honest dialogue in which it is intended. Anyway, I’ve heard that Methodist people are,
unlike us Anglicans, used to proper long challenging sermons that make you
think, so I hope I’ll be ok!
I
should also say that I’m speaking as an Anglo-Catholic, so I’m at that end of
the Church of England which seems often to be more about tradition and order
than experience and feelings, and there would be those in my Church who would
not share my views on this matter. But
for me, being an Anglo-Catholic is not first and foremost about a certain style
of worship (‘smells and bells’) but about how God continues to speak to us
through Tradition as well as Scripture and how in a sense these stand in
judgement of our individual feelings and experience.
Let’s
look at experience and feelings first.
John Wesley lived during the dreary eighteenth century, when tradition
had become about as dry and dead as it could get. Christian faith was seen as simply a moral
code for civic society, its ministers content with their privileges and
neglectful of their duties, its people having little real living connection
with the faith they loosely professed.
This was a faith which seemed to have no feeling, to be dead. In this world to talk and live as John Wesley
did, as if faith was something that really mattered, something live and
passionate, something that connected with ordinary experience and warmed
ordinary hearts, something that broke the rules, rushed out of the boxes we try
to capture it in, overturned tables, ran out onto the highways and byways, this
was revolutionary stuff! And vital. Wesley saw
that the Church could not just sit around providing sinecures for the junior
children of the aristocracy while the newly emerging industrial society of the
mills had no Christian witness amongst them.
He realised that the politics of the American war of independence could
not stand in the way of Christian mission in the new world. God was bigger than the British Empire! He realised at a deeper theological level,
that to think of God deliberately choosing to save some and damn others for no
reason was monstrous. To renew the faith
in terms of feelings and experience was about saying Christianity isn’t just an
idea, it’s a passion, a life to be lived!
And it’s not just for the rich and clever, it’s for everyone!
But
there are problems with making faith
all about experience and feelings. What
are they? The first thing is that it can
become very individualistic and a bit unthinking. It’s hard to discuss things with someone who
just insists ‘I feel this’. I’m sure
we’ve all known people like this, who simply won’t listen to any reason. Feelings tend to be private,
they’re hard to share with others. If
they’re to become something more than just personal then they will have to take
shape outside of our hearts in the world, they will have to be embodied in all
sorts of practices.
The second problem
with feelings is that they can be pretty fickle and even sometimes misleading,
as any good Romantic film can show you!
It’s all very well making a major commitment in the flush of a passion,
a moment of excitement or ecstasy, whether proposing to a loved one, or making
a life-commitment to Christ. But in both
cases this will need something deeper than just feelings if it’s to become
something more serious and permanent.
Feelings and experience are hugely important then because they are about
the renewal of life. But at the same
time, they need to grow into other things if they are to spread beyond the
individual and become something social and if they are to last beyond the
moment and become something lasting.
Wesley
realised this himself though. He was not
one to repudiate order and discipline for the sake of a chaos of sentimentality
and fervour. The very word ‘Methodist’
began as a term of abuse used in Oxford for this group of academics who were so
conscientious about the Church’s disciplines, about regular reception of
communion as well as visiting the poor and sick.
In
his own life as well, John Wesley knew not only the heights of religious
experience, but also the depths of depression, the chaos of a disastrous
marriage, the rejection of the ecclesiastical authorities, which must all often
have made his life feel like chaos and failure.
What he held to through all this was more than just a feeling,
it was an unshaking trust in God’s grace. This comes out again and again in his
preaching and in all the great Wesleyan hymns: the sheer power of God to use us
even when we cannot see how and when everything might seem to have failed. So we’ve thought a bit about the importance
and the dangers of feelings and experience.
What about the other side of that split with Anglicans? What has all
this got to do with Tradition and order?
What
do we mean by ‘Tradition’? It can sound
like a rather sombre, old-fashioned word, the weight of the past. But tradition simply means ‘handing-on’, the
handing on of Christ which is the life of the Church. Tradition I want to
suggest simply is the way that
experience becomes fleshed out and handed on in communities and through
time. Tradition is a means of grace and
this is why it can act as a check on the more crazy moments of feelings and
experience. In a good marriage, if we
suddenly get terrible feelings of crazy jealousy, it is the experience of the
relationship over time, the ‘tradition’ if you like of trust which tells us
that this is irrational. Similarly in
the Church, if someone stands up and tells us that they have had a direct
experience of Jesus and they felt him telling them to kill everyone, we can
test this experience and feelings and know them to be false because of the
experience of Christ that we share and which has been handed on to us, because
of tradition. In the gospels, as Jesus
is preparing his disciples for his departure he speaks a lot about handing
things on to them: he gives his power and authority to the twelve apostles,
authority to cast out the forces of evil, authority even to forgive sins (‘whosover sins you loose they shall be loosed’). He hands
over to them all that he has received from the Father: his word, his name, his
glory, the responsibility to feed his sheep, his mother on the cross (you
wouldn’t expect an Anglo-Catholic to get away without sneaking Mary into it!),
his body and blood in bread and wine, and his Spirit.
So
you see when Jesus creates this new community, this little flock, he hands
himself over to them. This is a bit of a
problem for those who say they like Jesus but can’t stomach the Church. Because, I’m afraid it’s
Jesus himself who sets up this community and then gives himself completely to
it. Jesus takes the extraordinary risk
of handing himself over to this bunch of no-hopers who have continually got him
wrong, and continue to do so for the last two thousand years. However much we might want to have a private
experience of Jesus without the Church – and believe me, there are moments… -
you simply can’t have one without the other.
Tradition
and order or feelings and experience. For many a bit
younger than my parents’ generation, the post-war baby-boomers, this wasn’t
just about Anglicans vs. Methodists, this was about the culture wars, the
stifling past vs. the liberating future, Victorian prudery or sixties so called
‘free-love’. As that generation comes to
retirement perhaps that choice seems a bit naïve, in the same way that the
debates between Anglicans and Methodists were.
I’ve been trying to argue that Tradition and Experience, order and
freedom must belong together, that they are two sides of the same movement,
each keeping a check on the other. If at
one moment in our history that tension pulled us apart, perhaps today we are
reaching the point where we are rediscovering our need for one another again,
the great treasures we have in common and all that we can learn from each
other. I remember sitting on the grass
when I was training in Cambridge with some Methodist ordinands
from Wesley
College discussing Bishops and women.
But all that detail can wait for another day…! Today I just want to end by saying I think
the whole Church should be thankful to God for that extraordinary mystic and
missionary John Wesley, for his deep trust in God’s grace, and for the
wonderful blessings that have come to the whole Church through his legacy. As he was dying he spoke these words to those
around him: ‘The best of all is, God is with us.’ That is the only basis of any hope of unity
we could have or should want.
AMEN.