Yesterday, Sunday September 26th, was the feast of Lancelot Andrews. Below follows a sermon I preached for that feast. This was my Senior Sermon at The General Theological Seminary given on Tuesday, September 26th, 2017.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Please, be comfortable, Good evening. For those of you who were here for morning prayer, thank you for giving me a second chance. For those who weren’t, I promise not to sing.
I make no secret of it, I love the saints, not the New Orleans football team, although I was pleased to read that ¼ of the team “took the knee” during Sunday’s game to protest police violence against black lives. But rather the saints who surround us, that great cloud of witnesses we read about in Hebrews 12:1. I love the Roman saints like Theresa of Avilla, and Martin de Porres, or the contemporary ones the Romans haven’t gotten around to canonizing yet like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.
I love our own Anglican saints, those like Constance of Memphis, Henry Hobart, and Alexander Cummwell whose Christian witnesses we’ve heard about so recently from this very pulpit. And I must admit a special devotion to our one “officially” canonized Anglican saint, Charles I, King and Martyr. I especially love the multitude of early saints; those martyrs who likely existed, like Sebastian, or Lawrence, and the many others like Christopher or Catherine of Alexandria who probably didn’t. I love their hagiographies, filled with amazing miracles, and pious legends, narratives that read like adventure stories or fairy tales.
One of the wonderful things about celebrating the daily Eucharist, and following a developed ordo calendar, is having an opportunity to commemorate and hopefully learn something about the multitudes of Christians who came before us. After all, that is a primary purpose behind remembering them, as exemplars of the Christian life. Fr Kevin and the Sacristy team try hard here at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd to include on our ordo calendar a wide diversity of Christian witnesses, trolling Lessor Feasts and Fasts, in its latest version, for those who are underrepresented, for women, for people of colour, and for those from non-western European backgrounds.
That being said, today we commemorate Lancelot Andrewes, one of the folks my woke millennial Sociology classmates at Temple University would probably refer to dismissively as a “Dead Straight White Dude.” Now, don’t get me wrong, all followers of Christ, even the admittedly overrepresented straight white dudes, are our brothers and have their place in that Cloud of Witnesses where there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female, but where all are one in Christ Jesus.
On September 25thof 2015, my Junior year at GTS, I was asked by Fr Clare McPherson to officiate for the first time at Friday’s Evening Rite; a more informal and sometimes a little experimental evening prayer service where we were encouraged to include poetry or other readings. As I looked for a poem or reading for the service, I remembered that the next day, Saturday the 26thwas the Feast of Lancelot Andrewes, I had my poem. I won’t repeat it now, you had to be there, its your loss if you weren’t, but Lancelot Andrewes is definitely a White dude worth remembering. And it stricks me as a bit coincidental that I was assigned the Feast of Lancelot Andrews for my Senior sermon.
Andrewes was born in London in 1555, and came from an academic family. He grew up during the reign of Elizabeth I, and received his higher education at Cambridge. Andrewes can be seen, with a handful of others, as the perfect exemplar of Elizabeth’s Via Media, a High Churchman who defended the independence of the English Church against Rome, while at the same time defending the rights and traditions of the Crown, the Episcopacy, and the Church against more radical Puritan reformers.
In correspondence with one Roman Cardinal, Andrewes wrote of the Eucharist, “As to the Real Presence we are agreed; our controversy is as to the mode of it. As to the mode we define nothing rashly, nor anxiously investigate, any more than in the Incarnation of Christ we ask how the human is united to the divine nature in One Person.”
Andrewes was a gifted linguist, who was conversant in many European languages, as well as the more scholarly Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Ordained to the priesthood in 1580, his clerical and academic careers were moderately successful under Elizabeth, but took off meteorically after the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I in 1603. Andrewes assisted at the Coronation of the new king, and became a close member of the king’s court.
As James imagined his new translation of the scripture, it was Andrewes' name that was listed first among the divines appointed to compile the Authorized Version of the Bible. He headed the "First Westminster Company" responsible for the first books of the Old Testament, not just the Torah, but up to and including 2 Kings. In addition to this responsibility Andrewes acted as a general editor for the entire project. As such Andrewes hand and skill are said to be visible throughout the King James Version of the Bible.
Andrewes was elected in 1605 to the see of Chichester, the bishopric of Ely followed in 1609. With King James, Andrewes laboured unsuccessfully but tenaciously to re-establish the Episcopacy in Scotland, where the Presbyterian Church had been in control for decades. From 1619 to his death in 1626 he served as bishop of Winchester, and Dean of the Chapel Royal, preaching on a daily basis to the King.
Today Lancelot Andrewes is best remembered by many as a preacher and a translator; a large number of his sermons are easily available, and his prayer book, originally compiled for his own personal devotions and only translated and published posthumously, Preces Privatae or Private Prayers, has had a abiding effect on generations of High Church and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans.
For those of us unfamiliar with his sermons or writings, perhaps we should remember him with gratitude for the part he played in creating the Anglican Church as we know it today, a church boldly treading the Via Media, a path neither Roman or Reformed.
As we celebrate Feasts and special commemorations, I sometimes wonder at the scripture passages appointed in our lectionary, often looking in vain for connections, or patterns, but it seems to me that those for Lancelot Andrews are rather clear. From 1st Timothy we read – “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”
Andrewes, while supporting both Elizabeth and James, did not hesitate to speak truth to power, counselling peace and toleration within the church. Our Psalm reminds up of the importance of Andrewes’ private prayer life. He could truly say with the Psalmist, “I will bless the lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. And in the selection of the Gospel, the very words Christ himself taught us to pray. What better reading for a man who through his original works and translations also taught us to pray.
Andrewes sermons, prayers, and poems are much of their age, and the writing styles of the 16thand 17thcentury no longer enjoyable or even easily understood by many of us. But I would like to leave you with a Profession of Faith taken from Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces Privatae that in its 1840 translation by John Henry Newman seems remarkably modern.
Godhead, paternal love, power, providence: salvation, anointing, adoption, lordship; conception, birth, passion, cross, death, burial, descent, resurrection, ascent, sitting, return, judgment; Breath and Holiness, calling from the Universal, hallowing in the Universal, communion of saints, and of saintly things, resurrection, life eternal.
Amen
