Christ Church

“Of his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace”

There is a rich fullness to the Christmas season, to be sure. Everything quickly seems all too much. To be sure, Christmas is something which one day cannot presume to capture nor that even an entire season can hope to encompass. There is such an incredible richness to the feast.

And yet, there is but one poor, humble scene of Christmas. It is the stable of Bethlehem. Therein lies all the rich fullness of Christmas. That poor, humble scene contains a great crowd of scenes, a great gathering of Christmasses; in short, it opens to view a rich fullness of grace, even “grace upon grace.” There is more here than meets the eye. It is altogether something for the soul. We are bidden to ponder the Mystery of the Word made flesh. The attitude of the Church is an essentially Marian attitude. “Mary kept all these things” – all these wondrous things that were said about the Child Christ by Shepherds and Angels – “and pondered them in her heart.” Only so can they come to birth and live in us.

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“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.”

Advent celebrates the pageant of God’s Word coming to us. That is its great wonder, the miracle, really, of God’s revelation. There is something more than our words.

Scripture in our Anglican Christian understanding is God’s Word Written. What? Did God write the Bible? No. The Bible is a veritable library of books written by human hands over vast tracks of time and in different places and even different cultures. Writing, after all, is one of the outstanding features of our humanity, the tangible expression of thoughts and ideas which we once knew as distinguishing human beings from the birds and the bees, from dust and darkness. And yet, the Scriptures, literally, the writings, are regarded as God’s Word, conveying ideas and concepts that are literally not of our devising but of God’s revealing to us and through us. That, too, is all part of the marvel. To speak of the Scriptures is God’s Word Written is to make a profound theological statement.

The connection between God and Word is central to the spiritual understanding of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Muslims, God’s Word recited by the Angel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed creates the Qu’ran, a work which is only holy, only the recitation of Allah’s Word, in the Arabic language. It cannot be translated and still be the Qu’ran just as there can be no other Christ than Jesus Christ for Christians, no substitute avatars. For Jews and Christians, of course, the Scriptures are capable of translation from one language to another. Why? Because of the Word beyond, behind and within the words. The idea of God and his Word opens us out to the special qualities of revealed religion; to the idea that God reveals his will for us and, especially in the Christian understanding, reveals himself to us as well as revealing ourselves. Such is the light and the darkness of Advent.

That is why there is such a strong emphasis upon the reading and the proclaiming of the Word of God. What is assumed is that God wants us to know certain things, things that are conveyed through the written word and that word as proclaimed and heard.

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Monday, December 9th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, December 10th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, December 12th
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, December 15th, Third Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
4:30pm Choral Evensong – Christ Church

Upcoming Event:

Friday, December 20th
7:00pm Christ Church Concert Series II, Capella Regalis presents “To Bethlehem with Kings”. $10.00; Pulled Pork Supper & Concert (5:30-6:30, concert at 7:00) $ 15.00; (Supper only – $ 10.00).

The collect for today, the Second Sunday in Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 15:4-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 21:25-33

Artwork: Master of the Bambino Vispo, The Last Judgment, c. 1422. Oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Nicholas (d. c. 326), Bishop of Myra (source):

Almighty Father, lover of souls,
who didst choose thy servant Nicholas
to be a bishop in the Church,
that he might give freely out of the treasures of thy grace:
make us mindful of the needs of others
and, as we have received, so teach us also to give;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-14
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:13-16

Artwork: Ilya Repin, Saint Nicolas Saves Three Inocents From Death, 1888. Oil on canvas, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 155-c. 215), Priest, Apologist, Doctor (source):

O God of unsearchable mystery, who didst lead Clement of Alexandria to find in ancient philosophy a path to knowledge of thy Word: Grant that thy Church may recognize true wisdom, wherever it is found, knowing that wisdom cometh forth from thee and leadeth back to thee; through our Teacher Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:11-20
The Gospel: St. John 6:57-63

“I waited patiently for the Lord, / and he inclined unto me
and heard my calling” (Ps. 40.1)

Pondus meum amor meus. My love is my weight. A powerful phrase from Augustine, it has shaped the medieval and reformation churches’ understanding of human redemption. The question is about what weight of meaning it might have for the contemporary church in all of our confusions and disarray. Augustine’s image captures a significant theological theme which, on the one hand, counters and, on the other hand, complements the inarticulate loneliness of a culture which has abandoned God. Yet it is there for us to think again.

Mary in Advent is Mary in Holy Waiting. The image relates to the Augustinian phrase. What defines Mary is her waiting upon the will of God. Far from a kind of passive acquiescence, Mary’s waiting is an holy activity, a kind of attentiveness to the pageant of God’s Word revealed in the Law and the Prophets and now, on Angel’s wings, it seems, opening us out to the wonder and the marvel of God’s coming to us through her. To what extent are we in her? For Mary, to use Irenaeus’ poignant and potent phrase is the pure womb which gives birth to that purity which Christ himself has made pure: “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.”

It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ and so it is of interest the way in which she quietly and patiently intrudes her presence upon our meditations and thoughts. Mary is an inescapable feature of the landscape of Advent. She plays a critical and crucial role in our understanding of Christ’s coming to us, our Emmanuel, God with us. Through Mary we begin to discover how our humanity is totally and inescapably bound up with the will of God towards us; in short, his advent.

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“The night is far spent”

There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilisations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion – distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. There is the darkness of the fear of death. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness.

In one way or another, these darknesses are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful.

In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh, is changed in his soul and outward aspect by the loss of his friend, Enkidu. He sets out on a search for everlasting life; it is really a quest for wisdom, for he knows, and we know, that is his destiny is not everlasting life but kingship. He is mortal and has to come to terms with his mortality. Wisdom is found in the embrace of the limits of our knowing.

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Monday, December 2nd
4:45-5:15pm World Religions/Inquirer’s Class, Rm. 206 KES
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks in Parish Hall

Tuesday, December 3rd
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I: ‘Advent: Mary in Holy Waiting’

Thursday, December 5th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, December 8th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
2:00pm AMD Christmas Service of the Deaf
4:30pm Advent & Christmas Lessons & Carols with KES (Gr. 7-11) – Christ Church
7:00pm Advent & Christmas Lessons & Carols with KES (Gr. 12) – Hensley Memorial Chapel, KES

Upcoming Event:

Friday, December 20th
7:00pm Christ Church Concert Series II, Capella Regalis presents “To Bethlehem with Kings”.  $10.00. Pulled Pork Supper & Concert (5:30-6:30, concert at 7:00) $15.00. (Supper only – $10.00)

The collect for today, the First Sunday in Advent, being the Fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13

Artwork: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Entry into Jerusalem, 1308-11. Tempera on wood, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena.