Sermon preached by the Rev’d N.J.A. Humphrey, Festal Evensong, 5 Easter - 20 April 2008. Text: Romans 5:1-11.

In 1887 Charles Henry Brent, a newly-ordained curate at St. Paul’s in Buffalo, was given responsibility for this parish, then St. Andrew’s Mission. He immediately got to work making important changes. Father Brent put candles on the altar, celebrated the Eucharist every Sunday, and wore a chasuble. These “innovations” were too much for some to bear, and under a cloud of controversy, he left the diocese after less than a year at St. Andrew’s. Three decades later, the diocese elected Charles Henry Brent its bishop. I imagine he felt some measure of vindication. Now he could put candlesticks wherever he wanted!

I have to wonder, in fact, whether Bishop Brent had the St. Andrew’s candlestick controversy in mind when in 1926 he preached at the consecration of Dr. E.M. Stires as Bishop of Long Island. Standing in the pulpit of Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, Brent proclaimed,

Our light is a light to be set on a candlestick that it may light the whole house. It is not to be kept safe under a cover where it will be protected from the wind…The more catholic a church claims to be, the more should it be found in the thick of things…Catholicity is fearless, never afraid of being snuffed out by contacts with that which is less catholic. In­deed, catholicity, like freedom, lives and retains its power by living perilously. Never is any person so safe as when trying to seize an opportunity which leads into danger. The man and the church who practice catholicity will do more to bring about understanding and cooperation between the churches than any one else, as well as learn the meaning of the glorious liberty of the children of God.¹

Bishop Brent’s words on catholicity are particularly appropriate as we celebrate the 175th anniversary of the beginning of the Oxford Movement, because they get at the very heart of what Anglo-catholicism is really all about: not candlesticks for candlesticks’ sake, but catholicity for the sake of communion and reconciliation in Christ. I imagine this was a lesson that Charles Henry Brent only learned over time, as he progressed from a liturgically-smitten curate (such as I am) to a conflict-tested ecclesiologist (such as I hope to become).

For those of you unfamiliar with Charles Henry Brent, he was a missionary bishop in the Philippines who fought tirelessly against opium trafficking. He was also a committed ecumenist who chaired the first World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1927. He accepted election as Bishop of Western New York, having declined three previous elections in order to remain in the Philippines, but only returned to Buffalo after serving as Senior Chaplain of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I.²

As a missionary and a military chaplain, Brent learned what it meant to be in foreign and hostile territory. Candlesticks on altars dimmed in comparison to the burning conflicts of the opium trade and trench warfare. Yet in Bishop Brent’s life and thought we can detect an overarching concern for unity and fellowship, for love in the midst of enmity. Surely, the words we heard from Romans chapter five this evening, appointed for the feast of St. Anselm of Canterbury, must have resonated deep within his soul: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us…For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”

For Brent, the most concrete expression of reconciliation would be found in working for the reunion of the divided churches of both East and West. As the Jesuit historian Eugene C. Bianchi writes in “The Ecumenical Thought of Bishop Charles Henry Brent,” Brent believed “that the unity of the Church in the world was God’s will…Brent deemed the cause of unity vital to all Christian life and thought. He could not understand those who were idle or indifferent in this cause.”³

At that first World Conference on Faith and Order in 1927, he told the assembly,

It is for conference not controversy that we are called…conference is a measure of peace; controversy a weapon of war. Conference is self-abasing; controversy exalts self. Conference in all lowliness strives to understand the viewpoint of others; controversy to impose its view on all comers. Conference looks for unities; controversy exaggerates differences…⁴

In short, the spirit of conference might aptly be called the spirit of catholicity.

Reflecting on these words this past week in preparation for being with you this evening, I wondered: How well do we contemporary Anglo-catholics actually manifest this spirit of catholicity? And what about Anglicans in general? If the spirit of catholicity is the spirit of conference, what are we to say of the Lambeth Conference this summer—a far smaller and less representative assembly than the first World Conference on Faith and Order! How can those of us of a catholic disposition who aren’t bishops support our bishops in fulfilling Brent’s vision of catholicity? How can we help to remove the obstacles to unity that our church currently faces?

For his part, “When Bishop Brent turned his attention to obstacles in the path toward union,” Bianchi writes, “one theme recurred constantly: sectarianism…which he termed ‘the cult of the incomplete.’ For Brent, the truly catholic mind was rare; most Christians were devotees of the cult of the incomplete.”⁵

According to Brent, there was “no graver offense than to use a Catholic garment to hide a sectarian heart.” Or, as he proclaimed in one sermon, “Churches must be ready to die before they are worthy to live. We hug our tenets because they are ours, and we reject the tenets of others because they are theirs. We look at the brand on this or that embodiment of truth rather than at the embodiment.”⁶

In that word “embodiment” we can find a clue to the link between church unity and the centrality of the Incarnation in Brent’s thought. Brent writes,

The Incarnation means nearness—the nearness of strength to weakness, of wisdom to ignorance, of wealth to poverty, of purity to uncleanness, of God to man. Those churches which claim the highest lineage and the largest deposit of moral and spiritual wealth must be leaders in committing themselves unequivocally and irrevocably to the principle of the Incarnation, for our Lord’s great disappointment of a divided Church is to be done away.⁷

Nearly eight decades after Bishop Brent uttered these prophetic words, the ecumenical situation has not much improved. What is worse, Anglicanism now faces a crisis of internal unity, and some of the strongest proponents of separatism or secessionism dare to call themselves Anglo-catholics. I am here this evening to tell you one simple thing: whether liberal or conservative, you cannot be truly catholic if you are not willing to suffer for the sake of reconciliation.

To commend suffering is easier said than done. For my part, I shrink from pain. My wife, were she here, would tell you I am a real wimp—a paper cut will put me out of commission for at least a day and a half. And I won’t shut up about how much it stings, either! I have a low tolerance for physical pain. Nevertheless, I can with some measure of integrity commend suffering for the sake of reconciliation because this is the way of the Cross, the way of true discipleship. It is not suffering for suffering’s sake, but so that we can share in Christ’s work of drawing the world into God’s saving embrace.

If we embrace suffering for the sake of reconciliation, we can, as Paul in Romans 5 puts it, “boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

“Endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Endurance—now there’s something I find lacking in our church today. If the situation in the Anglican Communion at times seems hopeless, perhaps it is because we are lacking in endurance, without which hope is impossible. We will always be in conflict over something or other, but if we can endure, we will find that hope naturally—even supernaturally—follows.

As Bianchi writes, Bishop Brent “held that constructive loyalty to one’s own communion would contribute to the reunion of the churches. Allegiance to one’s own church often demands positive criticism, and a willingness to call in question familiar patterns of thought and action.”⁸ What timely words to remember. Loyalty and allegiance to communion do not entail any compromise of the truth or of the passionate search for justice—rather, they comprise a way of life that leads to the discovery of deeper truth and greater justice. To be catholic is to desire unity, and to desire unity is never a compromise position. Rather, it is the embracing of the Cross and of the purpose of the Christian life and the very mission of the Church: to restore all things to God and to each other in Christ.

In closing, on this note of mission, I was reminded of one of the collects for Morning Prayer, composed by—guess who?—Charles Henry Brent! Let us pray:

Lord Jesus Christ, who didst stretch out thine arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of thy saving embrace: So clothe us in thy Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know thee to the knowledge and love of thee; for the honor of thy Name. Amen.⁹

1 “The Authority of Christ,” emphases added, in Best Sermons 1926, ed. Joseph Fort Newton, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926. Found online. (Return to text)
2 “Charles Henry Brent,” Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2000, New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2001. (Return to text)
3 “Charles Henry Brent,” Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2000, New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2001. (Return to text)
4 Ibid. (Return to text)
5 Ibid. (Return to text)
6 Ibid. (Return to text)
7 Ibid. (Return to text)
8 Ibid. (Return to text)
9 “Charles Henry Brent,” Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2000, New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2001.