Given the reference to the Solemn Declaration of 1893 in this morning’s homily, it seems appropriate to post Fr. David Curry’s paper “The Solemn Declaration: The Net of Memory”, which was published years ago in the Machray Review by the Prayer Book Society of Canada.
Click here to download “The Solemn Declaration: The Net of Memory” (in pdf format) or click here to read it online.
It is one of those statements which concentrate in the most wonderful way the whole of the Christian faith. It comes from one of the lessons provided in the Octave of the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul (BCP, p. 285). Paul’s statement in 1st Corinthians 3 captures the basis of the faith, like Peter as that rock upon which the Church stands, herself a mystery of the faith. And what is that faith? It is about our being with God through God’s being with us in Jesus Christ.
We forget at our peril that the Church is herself an article of faith. “Where the gospel is preached and the sacraments are administered, there is the church,” as Luther wonderfully and profoundly puts it. That leads to questions about the relation between Word and Sacrament, to be sure, but, in profound ways, his comment counters the more sectarian and institutional views of the Church; all instrumental and calculative, all dead and deadly. The Anglican Church is not the Church Universal, to be sure; its proper and only claim is to be “an integral portion” of the Church Catholic, something spelled out more fully in the Solemn Declaration of 1893 of the Anglican Church of Canada. Nothing proclaims so clearly the real and true vocation and Anglican understanding of catholic Christianity. It is found on page viii of the Prayer Book. You might want to make it part of your summer reading and meditation.
The conjunction of St. Peter and St. Paul brings these thoughts front and present and wonderfully so in relation to the readings for the Second Sunday after Trinity. We are reminded that “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” Here we have an interesting feature of the liturgy of the Church, namely, the ways in which we are gathered into and participate in the substance of things holy and strong, things which are proclaimed and known, and yet which we can only grow into more and more, if only we will. “For all things are yours,” Paul says. Yet, we see but “in a glass darkly,” as he also reminds us. This is the necessary check to our arrogance and to the greater arrogance of our ignorance. The counter lies in John’s wonderful phrase about our hearts which condemn us in contrast to the heart of God which redeems us. All is yours in Christ; not in ourselves. To be alive to the one requires dying to the other, dying to ourselves.
The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD, who never failest to help and govern them whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love: Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 3:13-24
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:15-24
Artwork: Joachim Wtewael, Kitchen Interior with the Parable of the Great Supper, 1605. Oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.