SPIRITUALITY
What sort of church is St Barnabas?
I wonder what it would be like to have supper inside the belly of a dinosaur? Such a thing did actually happen 1 ½ centuries ago! The invitations as you might expect, because of the age, were formal.
Mr Waterhouse Hawkins requests the honour of.. at dinner in the mould of the Iguanodon at the Crystal Palace on Saturday evening the 31st at 5 o’clock 1853- an answer will oblige.
Apparently the guests all staggered to their homes afterwards, having consumed an immense meal and a great quantity of wine. Binge eating and drinking clearly is nothing new, but this was a celebration of the brand new science of palaeontology, so maybe that is some excuse .That Iguanodon, of course, can still be visited today at Crystal Palace and is well worth a visit.
But why call one of the first dinosaurs to be discovered an Iguanodon? When it was discovered in the 1820’s by Gideon Mantell, he thought that its tooth looked like that of the modern day Iguana- famous now from all the programmes there have been about the Galapagos Islands. Mantell wanted to call it an Iguanosaurus,- my spell check loved that!-, but a fellow fossil hunter, the Revd William Conybeare, insisted that would be nonsense, because as saurus means lizard, the modern day Iguana is already strictly speaking an Iguanosaurus, so Iguanodon, Iguanatooth, it became. Scientists have subsequently discovered that its teeth were not that like those of an Iguana after all and that the model at Crystal Palace is nothing like the original creature, but the label has stuck.
At a recent PCC meeting a few questions were raised by my labelling of St Barnabas church. I had described it as Liberal Catholic Anglican, and it was pointed out to me that although I might be confident that I knew what I meant, others were not so clear. Like in the case of the Iguanodon, maybe I had slapped an arbitrary and misleading label on a more complex entity. So in this sermon I want to explore St Barnabas’ identity a bit to see how closely that definition, Liberal, Catholic and Anglican fits, and some of what that means for us.
This year is the first one in which we will fully be able to reap the benefit, financially, and in other ways, of the new halls, we will finally be able to put right many of the things that have long needed putting right inside the church- the wiring, the lights, the falling plaster-, we are fortunate to be able to contemplate an exciting art project to be placed behind the font, to enhance the building and our worship . So it seems a very fitting time to reflect more deeply about what sort of church St Barnabas is , and what we would like it to be like. That will be a project we will pay particular attention to throughout this year, but today I will stick to the first part of that subject. So in what way, if any ,are we Liberal Catholic and Anglican?
I will start with the easiest bit; Anglican. Although even that is not so straightforward as it might at first seem! The Church of England is only now a tiny part of the Anglican Communion, which consists of all the churches in the world that are in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Many of those churches abroad were created by the work of adventurous missionaries in the C19th but others have grown in a more ad hoc fashion. If you go on holiday to Southern Spain you will not be far from an Anglican Church, if you hear on the news about murderous attacks on churches in Nigeria many of those churches will be Anglican, or about devastating earthquakes in New Zealand; it will be Anglican Cathedrals in danger of collapsing; if you wonder why the church here is so prominent in speaking up for Palestinians it is worth remembering that Jerusalem has an Anglican Bishop.
And the current controversy about sexuality is made more intense because the cultural divide between the Anglican churches in North America and those in Africa is so great. Probably only in the former would it be thought unremarkable for a clergyman to have 5 wives one after another, only in the latter would it be possible for a church member to have 5 wives all at the same time.!
The recent PCC decision to create a link with the diocese of Matabeleland in Zimbabwe may sound quixotic, but it is an attempt to join with other local parishes is supporting a part of the Anglican Communion where active and brutal state oppression is happening now. The awareness of your plight and that prayer is being offered is invaluable.
Here in England one of the defining characteristics of the Anglican Church, is that it seeks to have a presence in every locality, via the parish system; where it can witness to God by serving the local community by providing a place for worship, where people can come for solace and encouragement, and mark life’s profound transitional moments with baptisms, weddings and funerals and exercise other, perhaps more practical kinds of pastoral care- having a resident priest is a key part of that strategy.
It is the local diocese that makes sure that can happen- which means for us, all the parishes under the care of the Bishop of Southwark. It was our diocese of Southwark who paid for St Barnabas to be built just over a century ago, kept it going for the decades when the church community was too small to pay its own way, and supported us financially and practically while we undertook all the recent development. Our connectedness to other churches and partnership with them, locally and internationally, in allowing ministry to go ahead in the most challenging and diverse places, and learning from them, is fundamental to what it means to be an Anglican.
I quite often speak to visitors at the end of a Sunday service and discover that they are Catholics. They may have come from Italy, or Spain, or France to visit members of their family working in London, but they very often say how at home they feel. The way we celebrate the Eucharist, with vestments and incense is familiar to them from home- some indeed express incredulity that we are not of the same church.
As I understand it from the very first day when St Barnabas opened its doors this catholic style of worship has been used. It was a continuation of a tradition initiated in the 1830’s to put wonder on to the dry bones of dogma. In those days the Church of England tended to preach a rather cerebral and individualistic gospel – whether the focus was your own confidence of salvation or on how to lead a moral life. What came to be termed Anglo- Catholicism brought with it a fresh sense of sacramentality into the Church of England. Wherein the invisible God was celebrated through the senses and the imagination. With new hymns to articulate praise, candles ablaze on altars to signify the divine presence, and solemn liturgies to express the sense that a church is not a gathering place for a holy club but a sacred space where God would be encountered. Incense was introduced to evoke prayer and the use of gestures- bowing, crossing, kneeling in prayer to embody faith, and art was once again placed on whitewashed walls – to tell God’ story, and proclaim God’s glory.
You can see how enthusiastic I am about all that sort of thing, but there is always the danger that this type of Anglican Catholicism, like all other revolutionary movements can ossify. Particularly because from the very beginning it cherished neglected areas of the Church’s past so much, it had, and still has a tendency to conservatism. Which is why, what I very loosely describe as, Liberal Catholicism came into being.
Towards the middle of the C19th some bomb shells began to land upon the Church of England. First Geology, then Palaeontology, and finally Darwin’s theory of evolution raised serious questions about the traditional way of reading the book of Genesis, biblical scholarship revealed that the Bible wasn’t quite as seamless as once thought, and the expansion of cities created a huge population with no churches, no parishes and appalling sanitation. What became known as the Liberal wing of the Anglo-catholic movement was made up of those who broadly speaking responded positively the new knowledge and the culture which produced it, and sought to respond to the new landscape by tackling its most pressing issues. Here are just 3 examples of that liberal tendency plucked from the time just before and just after St Barnabas was built.
New hymn collections, with music by such leading agnostics, as Ralph Vaughan Williams and lyrics by friendly atheists such as Jan Struther, who wrote Lord of all hopefulness.
An Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple whose appointment, caused controversy because he had been one the first prominent supporters of Charles Darwin
Henry Scott Holland’s idea that the Eucharist was socially radical, because it manifested God’s scepticism about class distinctions by inviting all to share in common in a holy meal.
Liberal catholic Anglicanism today is that part of the church which continues in that spirit. Comfortable with what God has revealed to us in the past, but open to what he can teach us now, and excited by where, through his Holy Spirit, he might be leading us in the future.
A prayer by Bishop John V Taylor.
Spirit of God,
Lord and Giver of Life, moving between and around,
Like wind or water or fire,
Breathe into us your freshness that we may awake,
Cleanse our vision that we may see more clearly,
Kindle our senses that we may feel more sharply,
And give us the courage to live,
As you would have us live,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
