Christ Church

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Matthias the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who into the place of the traitor Judas didst choose thy faithful servant Matthias to be of the number of the twelve Apostles: Grant that thy Church, being alway preserved from false Apostles, may be ordered and guided by faithful and true pastors; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:15-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:1-11

The name of this saint is probably an abbreviation of Mattathias, meaning “gift of Yahweh”.

Matthias was chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after Judas had betrayed Jesus and then committed suicide. In the time between Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost, the small band of disciples, numbering about 120, gathered together and Peter spoke of the necessity of selecting a twelfth apostle to replace Judas. Peter enunciated two criteria for the office of apostle: He must have been a follower of Jesus from the Baptism to the Ascension, and he must be a witness to the resurrected Lord. This meant that he had to be able to proclaim Jesus as Lord from first-hand personal experience. Two of the brothers were found to fulfill these qualifications: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas also called the Just. Matthias was chosen by lot. Neither of these two men is referred to by name in the four Gospels, although several early church witnesses, including Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, report that Matthias was one of the seventy-two disciples.

Like the other apostles and disciples, St. Matthias received the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Since he is not mentioned later in the New Testament, nothing else is known for certain about his activities. He is said to have preached in Judaea for some time and then traveled elsewhere. Various contradictory stories about his apostolate have existed since early in church history. The tradition held by the Greek Church is that he went to Cappadocia and the area near the Caspian Sea where he was crucified at Colchis. Some also say he went to Ethiopia before Cappadocia. Another tradition holds that he was stoned to death and then beheaded at Jerusalem.

The Empress St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, is said to have brought St Matthias’s relics to Rome c. 324, some of which were moved to the Benedictine Abbey of St Matthias, Trier, Germany, in the 11th century.

Artwork: Veit Stoss, Saint Matthias (detail from Saint Mary’s Altar), 1477-89. Saint Mary’s Basilica, Krakow, Poland.

“For now we see in a glass darkly”

The most important thing that has happened to you today, and perhaps even the most important thing in your life is that you have heard the remarkable readings for Quinquagesima Sunday. Now and then, nunc et tunc. “Now … in a glass darkly but then face to face.” Now and then. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” A profound statement, it captures an essential aspect of our humanity. This ‘now and then’ is about the recognition that our knowing is at once limited and partial but, and this is the crucial point, something which belongs to the divine knowing and to our participation in that knowing. “[We] shall know even as [we are] known.” This is an amazing insight which checks and challenges, counters and corrects all our assumptions.

It is ancient wisdom in the sense of the realization that human knowing is by definition finite and incomplete and utterly dependent upon an intellectual principle which is beyond our knowing, and which at once unites the knowing and being of everything. It is the underlying assumption without which there can be no scientia, no knowing whatsoever, including our modern sense of science, for instance, and yet it is, shall we say, by definition beyond the unity of being and knowing as well. God, in other words, cannot be tied to us and to our interests and concerns, to our knowing.

Some will conclude, and many have in the culture of secular atheism, that God is completely irrelevant and unnecessary to our thinking and doing. That is the opposite to the kind of thinking that these readings present to us. What is revealed here for thought is precisely how we cannot think ourselves or the world without an awareness, albeit “in a glass darkly,” of that upon which our thinking and being necessarily depend. We see but “in a glass darkly,” yet we see and our seeing is part and necessarily a part of the greater knowing that belongs to God himself.

Such is the suggestive power of Paul’s most famous and intriguing hymn to love which launches us into Lent, into the programme of illumination, purgation, and perfection or union that is the journey of the soul. It begins on Ash Wednesday and it begins profoundly with our awareness of our darkness and unknowing. Yet, more profoundly, it begins with love, the love of God at work in human hearts and minds. It begins with the awareness of something more than ourselves. It begins with love, the divine love which is light and life in itself and in us. It begins with the desire in us to go up to Jerusalem that we might begin to see what Jesus wants us to see and know. That is the connecting point to the Gospel. Knowing and loving are interconnected. There can be no knowing without the desire to know.

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Monday, February 24th
4:45-5:15pm Confirmation-Inquirers’ – KES
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, February 25th, Shrove Tuesday
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-730pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Wednesday, February 26th, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Service with Ashes
12 noon Holy Communion with Ashes
2:35-2:45pm Imposition of Ashes – King’s-Edgehill Chapel

Thursday, February 27th
3:30pm Service – Windsor Elms

Friday, February 28th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, March 1st, The First Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, March 3rd
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I

The collect for today, Quinquagesima, being the Fiftieth Day before Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:31-43

Artwork: Václav Mánes, Christ Healing the Blind Man, 1832. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, Prague.

Why are ye so fearful?

Sturm und drang. I always associate February with this wonderful German phrase which belongs to a literary work but which in turn gives the name to a cultural phenomenon that was the precursor to the rich traditions of German romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sturm und drang means storm and stress. How do we deal with the storms and stresses of our world and day?

There are, to be sure, no end of the storms of nature that beset us in the bleak midwinter of February, the stresses that belong to travel and even survival in the rather harsh winter conditions of the Maritimes, not to mention the winter bruising and beating that Newfoundland has endured. It is a wonderful part of the consolation literature to be reminded that things could be worse and that sometimes for others they are far worse than what we have to endure. It is a way of helping us to face the rigours of winter.

But there is something far greater and far more challenging than simply the storms of nature, the winter storms of snow and ice, of wind and cold. Beyond such storms of nature, there are the endless and never-ending storms of the human heart. How do we deal with those storms and stresses? They are the storms of anxiety and fear within us. In a way, they are far greater than the storms of nature.

In Chapel this week, we read a wonderful story about Jesus in the midst of a storm at sea and about his response to our fearfulness and anxiety. The story has influenced the tradition of consolation literature. Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, draws upon this image in suggesting that out of the tempest, out of the sturm und drang of human life in all its disarray, there can be “sea-change into something rich and strange.” There is something that can be learned in and  through the storms of life, whatever they may be, ranging from our fears and worries about the coronavirus 2019 outbreak, now mercifully shortened to CoVid19, to our worries and anxieties about the climate, the economy, about the interrelation of nations and peoples or the lack thereof, and of course, the endless anxiety of parents about their children which only adds to anxiety upon anxiety.  Lots of sturm und drang, we might say!

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If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities

Courage and prudence are transformed into humility on this Sexagesima Sunday. We are turned not to the vineyard of creation but to something more basic and more humbling. We are turned to the dust and ground of creation with the parable of the sower and the seed. For courage can be at once unwise and destructive, brave but foolish, if it is not tempered by prudence, by practical wisdom; in short, if it is not aware of human limitations, of our own weakness and infirmity.  And prudence can be too cautious and timid unless tempered by courage. Both need justice and charity, love.

We are turned to the ground. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art.” God formed man from the dust of the ground breathing his spirit into us and so we become living beings. In being turned to the ground we are in effect being turned to God and to our connection with the created order. Only so can we begin to reclaim the dignified dust of our humanity. Only so can we be the good ground instead of the waste-ground of the wayside, the rocky ground, or the thorny ground, all of which signal something of the nature of our  falleness and our incompleteness, of folly and sin.

The parable is more than an image, more than an illustration. In Luke’s account, Jesus tells the parable but then provides the interpretation. This shows something of the radical meaning of the Gesima Sundays. They are about an awakening to the inner qualities of grace in us. That awakening means teaching and learning. Thus Paul provides a lesson about the correctives to courage and Luke about the deeper meaning of prudence. In both there is a kind of humility that recalls us to God in the very circumstances in which we find ourselves, a kind of awakening to ourselves in relation to God and creation.

Courage, in the sense of being bold and in calling attention to how well we have persevered in the face of animosities and persecution, can lead to an insidious pride which elevates us above others. We claim a particular identity which we then extol over others. It can easily become the kind of ‘look at me, look at me’ narcissism of our contemporary culture. This is the danger of incurvatus in se, our being turned in upon ourselves but not to the grace of God in us. Instead of self-awareness there is an ignorance of self in our shallow thoughtlessness, in our inconstancies and inconsistencies, and in our worldly preoccupations and distractions as presented in the images of the ground of the way-side, the rocky ground, and the thorny ground.

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Tuesday, February 18th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room: The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Traditions and the Post-Glacial World (2018) by Patrick Nunn, and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) by Peter Frankopan.

Friday, February 21st
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, February 23rd, Quinquagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
7:00pm Holy Communion – King’s-Edgehill Chapel

Upcoming Events:

Wednesday, February 26th, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Service
12 noon Holy Communion & Imposition of Ashes
2:35-2:45pm Imposition of Ashes – King’s-Edgehill Chapel

The collect for today, Sexagesima (or the Second Sunday Before Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD God, who seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do: Mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 11:21b-31
The Gospel: St Luke 8:4-15

Artwork: Marten van Valckenborch, Parable of the Sower, between 1580 and 1590. Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

The collect for a Martyr, on the Feast of Saint Valentine (d. c. 269), Bishop, Martyr at Rome, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who didst bestow upon thy Saints such marvellous virtue, that they were able to stand fast, and have the victory against the world, the flesh, and the devil: Grant that we, who now commemorate thy Martyr Valentine, may ever rejoice in their fellowship, and also be enabled by thy grace to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold upon eternal life; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27

Artwork: Bartholomeus Zeitblom, Scenes from the Life of Saint Valentine: St. Valentine in Prison; The Beheading of St. Valentine, early 16th century. Oil on panel, State Gallery of Old German Masters, Augsburg.

If I have not love, I am nothing

Love, it seems, is in the air, whatever that means. ‘Spirit Week’ at King’s-Edgehill School brings us to Valentine’s Day following upon the Headmaster’s Valentine Dinner and Dance on Thursday night. The challenge in Chapel has been to place the events of this week upon the foundation of divine love which seeks the perfection of all our human loves. This suggests that there is something radically incomplete about our human loves and that, no doubt, is a challenging concept to students and faculty alike.

On Monday and Tuesday, the reading in Chapel was St. Paul’s great encomium or praise of love from 1st Corinthians 13. “If I have not love, I am nothing.” Caritas. Charity, as the King James Version puts it, is love. In English the little word, love, has to bear a great weight of meaning. For the Greeks and the Latins, there are a host of words that express a sense of the different kinds of love, love as defined by its relation to the object of love. Therein lies the problem as Plato intuited in using, provocatively and deliberately, the word eros to speak about the movement of our souls to the truth. Eros which we associate with sexual passion and desire is used intentionally to highlight  “the passionate desire to know.” Brilliant.

So what do we mean by love? How do we think about love? For our culture, I suspect that the demand to think about love is exactly the problem whereas for earlier times not to think about love was precisely the problem. St. Paul’s great and profound praise of love is about the divine love which perfects our human loves. This recognizes the painful truth that our human loves are incomplete and even destructive. We often hurt those whom we love the most. So what Paul is saying here is quite important about the qualities of love. “Love is not boastful … love seeketh not her own …thinketh no evil … Love rejoices in the truth,” and so on. It is a powerful hymn of praise about the power of love which perfects our humanity and belongs to the building up of a community of love. 1st Corinthians 13 is “the still more excellent way” for the understanding of our lives together as a body, as a school, and for our self-understanding as well. “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face.” Faith, hope, charity are the theological virtues which perfect the cardinal virtues or qualities of human excellence, the ancient virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Charity or love is the greatest of the three.

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