Underlying this annual practice is my experience of worshipping in TEC congregations during family holidays the United States, the ministry and witness of friends in US Episcopalianism and Anglicanism, and the hope for a renewed, generous Anglican orthodoxy in the United States.
Today I give thanks for PECUSA's original vocation, here wonderfully summarised in an 1814 sermon by John Henry Hobart, to embody "the primitive faith, order, and worship" it inherited from the Church that is "the glory of the reformed Churches". And, yes, it does sound deeply Laudian.
Happy Thanksgiving.
The particular Origin of our Church - or the particular Christian communion from which she received that apostolic faith, order, and worship, which constitute her a legitimate member of the body of Christ - and that communion, we are proud to boast, is the Church of England.
... in boasting of our origin from the Church of England, he views her merely as a spiritual society, possessing the faith, the order, and the worship which were the characteristics and the glory of the primitive ages of the Church.
We boast then of our origin from a Church, which, in renouncing the despotic claims of the Church of Rome, tempered, with such singular felicity, zeal and ardour, with prudence and moderation, as to reject the errors, the superstitions, and corruptions of that Church; while she retained the primitive faith, order, and worship which those errors, superstitions, and corruptions had debased and disfigured, but with which they were so intimately mingled as to render the separation a work of extreme difficulty and imminent hazard. We boast of our origin from a Church which, in reference to the soundness of her principles, the talents and piety of her clergy, and her efforts in the cause of the reformation, still maintains the proud title which at the first she acquired, of being the glory of the reformed Churches - a Church which Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley, enriched by their blood; in whose cause Chillingworth, and Hooker, and Horsley, exerted the strongest powers of intellect, and employed the most varied and profound erudition; which Barrow, and Tillotson, and Porteus, honoured by their eloquence; in which Andrews, and Taylor, and Horne, displayed the lustre of a fervent piety ...
From such a Church we boast our origin. Church of our fathers! thou hast our veneration, our affection, our prayers - "Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces" ...
My brethren, we honour ourselves, when we discharge the debt of gratitude, by acknowledging, in the words of the preface to the Book of Common Prayer, that, "to the Church of England, the Protestant Episcopal Church in these States is indebted, under God for her first foundation, and a long continuance of nursing care and protection".
And while we discharge the debt of gratitude, it is our duty to show the sincerity of the tribute, by fidelity to the principles of the Church from which we are descended ... maintain[ing] primitive faith, order, and worship.
Comments
Post a Comment