The Power and Presence of God – Br. James Koester

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Br. James Koester

Edward Bouverie Pusey

Matthew 13:44-52

In many ways today’s commemoration of Edward Bouverie Pusey, is like remembering the life of a favorite uncle. A generation older than our own Father Benson, it was Pusey who deeply influenced Benson when he arrived in Oxford.

These of course were the days when Oxford was buzzing with what was to become known as the Oxford Movement. In 1833 John Keble had preached the Assize Sermon, National Apostasy, which is regarded as the beginning of the Movement. In the same year Pusey, Keble and Newman began to circulate the Tracts for the Times. In 1843 Pusey preached a sermon drawing attention to the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In 1845, when Newman converted to Rome, Pusey’s adherence to the Church of England was for many, a sign of stability. The following year he preached another sermon which sparked the revival of the use of sacramental confession within the Anglican Communion.

Though his teaching and preaching was thoroughly rooted in the tradition of the early Church and the Church Fathers, Pusey was condemned. After his sermon on the Eucharist, he was prohibited from preaching for two years. Unable to preach, Pusey turned his powers in another direction and was instrumental in establishing the first community of Sisters in the Church of England since the Reformation.

This was the atmosphere that was circulating in Oxford when Benson arrived in 1844. He immediately fell under the influence of Pusey. Twenty years later, when another young man arrived in Oxford, this time from America, it was Pusey who sent Father Grafton to meet Benson in the vicarage at Cowley. The rest, as they say, is history.

The results of the encounter between Benson and Pusey, and later between Benson and Grafton, at the behest of Pusey, are something we live with day after day. Without those encounters, while we may still be here, we would be very different. Our deep and abiding confidence in Christ’s Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar is one of the gifts Pusey has given to us through Father Benson. The awareness that in the sacramental rite of Reconciliation we encounter Christ again in the places of our brokenness and poverty, and allow him to bind up our wounds and set us on our feet[1] is another.

They are gifts, however, which come to us, not from a fascination with the past, but from a deep understanding of the present. Pusey understood that if faith was to be real, the power and presence of God needed to be known, felt, and experienced. For him, for Father Benson, and now for us the power and presence of God are made manifest, not in bread and wine, but in Body and Blood. They are made manifest in the words: [the] Lord has put away all your sins.[2] They are made manifest in community as we bear witness to the social nature of human life as willed by our Creator. Human beings bear the image of the triune God and are not meant to be separate and isolated.[3]

In each of these, Pusey reached into the past and brought out of his treasure what is new and what is old (Matthew 13:52) so that the power and presence of God in Christ may be known, felt, and experienced in our lives, in this place, today.

[1] “Guidance and Reconciliation,” in The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Lanham, MD, 1997), 60.

[2] The Book of Common Prayer (New York, 1979), 451.

[3] “The Witness of Life in Community,” in SSJE Rule, 8.