“I will seek him whom my soul loves”(Song of Songs 3:2).
It’s an honor to preside and preach today as a part of the Anglican/Episcopal House of Studies and Fons Vitae commemoration of John Henry Newman at Duke University. Before he became a Catholic convert, was named a cardinal, or was canonized, Newman was a noted priest and preacher in the Church of England and a leader in the Oxford Movement, which helped the Church to reconceive an apostolic understanding of its life and mission. Catholics and Anglicans are both inheritors of Newman’s legacy.
If the Church is apostolic, then its mission is in continuity with Jesus’ call of the twelve and the earliest days of the Church; even before that, with the call of Israel. The Oxford Movement’s insight was that the Church of England was more than a department of state; better yet, it was founded upon the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the head of the corner (Eph. 2:20). This insight, of course, was not original, but it gathered force with the Movement, as Anglicans came to a renewed understanding of the continuity of the Church through time, and its Catholic vocation in all times and places.
Newman himself was a noted pastor and preacher, who as vicar of St. Mary’s, the University Church of Oxford, exercised a significant pastoral ministry in the 1820s and 1830s. But it was from the pulpit of St. Mary’s that Newman became best known, as a preacher whose influence extended far beyond the University or City community. Significantly, when Newman’s Parochial & Plain Sermons, preached at St. Mary’s, were first reprinted after his conversion, by his friend and former curate, W.J. Copeland, they appeared unaltered; that is, without the editorializing that Newman felt constrained to add to the reissuing of his earlier apology for the Church of England, The Prophetical Office of the Church. The sermons, in other words, would stand, without correction by Newman, as an articulation of the Faith.
Preaching speaks both to head and heart, no more so than in Newman’s sermons. As it says in our first reading this evening, “I will seek him whom my soul loves”(Song of Songs 3:2). We could take this verse to mean simply that we seek what we love; or we could go further and say that love is the means by which we come to seek what we end up seeking. Love is the motive power.
The Oxford Movement in which Newman was so influential was colored by the romanticism of the Victorian age, with its characteristic appeal to the heart. Newman’s motto on his Cardinal’s coat of arms, cor ad cor loquitur, or “Heart speaks to heart,” reminds us that for Newman, as he says in his sermon, “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul” (PPS, V. 22), “the happiness of the soul consists in the exercise of the affections.” Newman goes on, “Our real and true bliss lies in the possession of those objects on which our hearts may rest and be satisfied”: that is, God himself, realized through the spirit of love.
“One alone can supply our needs;” Newman says in that sermon, “One alone can train us up to our full perfection; One alone can give meaning to our complex and intricate nature; One alone can give us tune and harmony; One alone can form and possess us.” Here, in his sermon, heart is speaking to heart, as the pastor and preacher makes his appeal to the moral conscience of his congregation. If we would be in tune and harmony, as human beings and as Christians, then our complex and intricate natures can only find their rest in God.
To arrive at that destination, there will be a distance to travel, by God’s grace. As we said earlier, love will provide the means of locomotion. Again, “I will seek him whom my soul loves” (Song of Songs 3:2). Newman appealed with moral force to human beings, who even though sinners, desired to be near God. “Yet so it is” Newman says, “that true repentance cannot be without the thought of God; it has the thought of God, for it seeks him; and it seeks him, because it is quickened with love; and even sorrow must have a sweetness, if love be in it.” “Even sorrow must have a sweetness”: there we have Newman himself, both as a stylist, and as a preacher of deep moral seriousness. “Even sorrow must have a sweetness.”
Love, in other words, is the means of human transformation: God’s love shown forth in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which means new life for us. There is the sweetness that lies within the sorrow. Our preaching proclaims this, as “heart speaks to heart.” Not, mind you, through mere moralism: that is, the exhortation of the listener to do something, presumably in order to earn God’s favor, or even just to be on counted among the righteous. A good deal of preaching never aspires any higher than this, and that’s a shame, because we have good news to proclaim
Newman’s appeal as a preacher was to the heart. He knew that openness to grace, and confidence in God, was the way leading to transformation. May all of us bring our own open hearts, and our confidence in God, to hear the good news of God’s transforming love in Christ Jesus our Lord.