Edward Bouverie Pusey
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
Septermber 18, 2007
For the four years before I came to Seabury in 2005 I was rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr is a fascinating place: one of the earliest developed suburbans in the United States, it continues to be one of the more affluent of the Philadelphia bedroom communities. If you have spent any time in the Keystone State, you know that Pennsylvania is reputed to be the most culturally conservative place in the country. Resistance to change is fierce. There were so many times that I felt I had taken a time traveller’s trip to the past that I came to calling Bryn Mawr “The Land That Time Forgot.”
One way in
which this conservatism realized itself was in resistance to liturgical change. One
of my predecessors had been a national leader in the movement against the 1979
Prayer Book, and Morning Prayer continued to be beloved, especially by our older
parishioners. During my time there I lived with the status quo—a
mix of Rites I and II, Eucharistic and Morning Prayer services, but I did take
on the issue of liturgical space. The Redeemer’s church building
was designed in the late 1870s by a prominent Philadelphia architect, Charles
Burns. Both he and the tractarian rector, Edward Watson, collaborated on
a gothic structure which, on the inside, had a remarkably flexible and open liturgical
space. The building was completed in 1881, and Watson retired in 1886. What
happened to that building over ensuing years was foreseeable but tragic.
Edward Watson
may have had tractarian leanings, but his congregation and vestry did not. So
over the years they essentially “low-churchified” the nave and chancel,
moving the altar back against the wall, installing a beautiful and ornate rood
screen which separated the nave and chancel, and adding a pulpit which would
have been at home in a Puritan church. The modifications to the building
essentially turned it from a Eucharistic space to a Morning Prayer and Sermon
space, and that was fine until the 1990s when the parish tried to do weekly Eucharists
in an inhospitable structure. So, with the aid of my staff colleagues and
a parish community, we tried an experiment. For all of Lent 2004, we built
a platform and moved all the liturgical action to the open space before the rood
screen. I loved it. The staff loved it. The people hated it. On
one Sunday morning, a woman approached me after church and said this: “Every
new idea you bring here seems to come from California. I think you and
your California ideas should go back to the Crystal Cathedral where they belong.”
Now I tell
you that story not necessarily to endorse Anglo Catholic ideas of church space
and liturgy (though we do remember Edward Bouverie Pusey today). I tell
you that story because of what Jesus says in the Gospel this morning:
"Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is
like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and
what is old."—Matthew 13
If I understand Pusey’s career rightly, what he and the other Oxford Movement leaders of the mid-nineteenth century achieved came about by a re-examination of the earliest Christian texts and sources. In response to their perception the Church of England was in danger of being taken over by a pluralistic and secular state, Pusey and Newman and Keble and their colleagues went back to the sources and tried to imagine what contemporary Christianity should look like if it were reformed according to the Early Church model. While there may have been more than a little Romanticism tied up with their vision of the primitive church, the tractarians went to the early sources not to play what one of my Bible professors used to call “first century Bible land” but to reorient themselves in the tradition so that they could respond faithfully to present circumstances. In a deep sense, they were like Jesus’s householder who brings out of the treasure “what is new and what is old.”
And that,
of course, is what happened when the church, in the 1960s, began to look creatively
at liturgical change. Although many accused us of caving into the culture
of modernism, the liturgical movement which led up to the 1979 Prayer Book and
continues today attempted to answer contemporary questions by an appeal to our
origins. Many folks claimed not to like the changes, because they altered “the
way we’ve always done it,” and the change agents weren’t always
the most pastoral people you could imagine as they led the process. But
one thing I learned living through that time and my time in Bryn Mawr is that
many people will call themselves “traditionalists” when what they
are really expressing is what one critic called “nostalgia for the
recent past.”
At this point
in the sermon, please feel free to substitute any of the transformational questions
we are confronting at this point in the life of the Christian movement: Liturgy? Music?
Race? Gender? Sexuality? New forms of Ministry? In a hymn we
took out of the 1940 Hymnal, James Russell Lowell reminded us that “new
occasions teach new duties.” But because Christianity looks both
backward to first things and forward to last things, we most faithfully face
into those new occasions and duties when we look back to see how our brothers
and sisters did them in the past. And the surprising thing, when you look
carefully at the past, is the faithful and creative and radical stuff you will
find there. Simply put: the tradition is probably more radical than
you are.
Today we give
thanks for the life and ministry of Edward Bouverie Pusey, a leader of the Oxford
Movement, one who turned to our original sources for guidance in facing into
the challenges of the current moment. May we, like Pusey, be faithful and
honest and creative enough to search those same sources for clues about what
authentic Christianity looks like in the 21st century. My hunch is that
if we do that we’ll find ourselves living in a community and living out
a ministry which are both faithful and free at the same time. Amen.