Christ Church

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

ALMIGHTY God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 4:5-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-52

Virtually all that we know of Saint Luke comes from the New Testament. He was a physician, a disciple of St. Paul and his companion on some of his missionary journeys, and the author of both the third gospel and Acts.

It is believed that St. Luke was born a Greek and a Gentile. According to the early Church historian Eusebius, Luke was born at Antioch in Syria. In Colossians 4:10-14, St. Paul speaks of those friends who are with him. He first mentions all those “of the circumcision”–in other words, Jews–and he does not include Luke in this group. Luke’s gospel shows special sensitivity to evangelising Gentiles. It is only in his gospel that we hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that we hear Jesus praising the faith of Gentiles such as the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and that we hear the story of the one grateful leper who is a Samaritan.

St. Luke first appears in Acts, chapter 16, at Troas, where he meets St. Paul around the year 51, and crossed over with him to Europe as an Evangelist, landing at Neapolis and going on to Philippi, “concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them” (note especially the transition into first person plural at verse 10). Thus, he was apparently already an Evangelist. He was present at the conversion of Lydia and her companions and lodged in her house. He, together with St. Paul and his companions, was recognised by the divining spirit: “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation’”.

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“Then opened he their understanding”

Luke, “dear and glorious physician”, as the novelist Taylor Caldwell styled him, has been the Church’s spiritual director for much of the Trinity season. Tonight we celebrate his witness and writings – The Third Gospel and The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. What we celebrate are the things which are particularly outstanding about Luke, identified by Dante as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. But what kind of gentleness?

A gentleness that is expressed in compassion and in intellect. Luke alone of the evangelists gives us some especially poignant examples of compassion, such as the story of the Good Samaritan, the great classic of care and compassion, and the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, a classic of compassion. In both “he saw and had compassion”, a favourite phrase with Luke. But as our Gospel for his commemoration reminds us, Luke presents Christ most powerfully as the one who opens our understanding that we might understand the Scriptures. The emphasis is on the understanding, particularly as he says, about repentance and the forgiveness of sins. It is not by accident that the winged ox is the symbol for St. Luke’s Gospel.

Luke tells the story, too, about Mary and Martha in which Martha, distressed and distracted by much busyness in playing hostess to Jesus, complains about Mary “sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to his word.” Jesus’ response is at once most direct and most gentle. “Martha, Martha,” he says, “thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things”, naming precisely one of the diseases of our disordered times, yet, he says “one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” It is a gentle rebuke and a strong reminder to us about the dangers of getting too caught up in all our busyness with all of the stresses and sense of preoccupation and self-importance that comes with it. One thing is needful. What is that? To seek to learn and to understand by listening to his word.

This is not to deny the activities of Martha but to call attention to the contemplative activity of Mary as being the one thing needful in every age. We so easily get caught up in our own busyness and forget the purpose and truth of our being which is found in God. It is a gentle reminder about the opening out of our understanding of the Scriptures without which we cannot really act properly and charitably in the world around us. Contemplation is about that one thing needful without which we lose our humanity in the mindless busyness of our contemporary world. ‘Don’t just do something, sit there’; this is the gentle wisdom of Luke signalled in his Gospel and in Acts and in the witness of his life. Only so will we find healing for our anxious souls.

“Then opened he their understanding”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2017

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Etheldreda, Queen, Foundress and Abbess of Ely (d. 679) (source):

O eternal God,
who didst bestow such grace on thy servant Etheldreda
that she gave herself wholly to the life of prayer
and to the service of thy true religion:
grant that we may in like manner
seek thy kingdom in our earthly lives,
that by thy guidance
we may be united in the glorious fellowship of thy saints;
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: Philippians 3:7-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:29-34

Artwork: Joseph Edward (Eddie) Nuttgens, Saint Etheldreda, 1952. Stained glass, St. Etheldreda’s Church, Ely Place, London.

The collect for today, the commemoration of Hugh Latimer (1485-1555), Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley (c. 1500-1555), Bishop of London, Reformation Martyrs (source):

Keep us, O Lord, constant in faith and zealous in witness, that, like thy servants Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, we may live in thy fear, die in thy favor, and rest in thy peace; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 3:9-14
The Gospel: St. John 15:20-16:1

Two leaders of the English Reformation were burned at the stake in Oxford on this day in 1555. Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, were removed from their positions and imprisoned after Queen Mary ascended the throne in 1553. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, was deposed and taken to Oxford with Latimer and Ridley.

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

Pumpkins, pucks, and parades seem to define Windsor, particularly on this post-thanksgiving weekend! How they relate to the matter of love is another question. For here today love constrains us to speak of love. It might not seem all that remarkable a thing to say but I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world. That heart is the heart of Christ. That love is spoken and shown in the face of controversy and debate; in short, in the midst of the hostilities and animosities of our human hearts and so, too, in the midst of all of our current confusions and uncertainties within and without the Church. “And yet the common people heard him gladly.” Can that be said of us?

Two things are extraordinary here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing, partly because they are so familiar. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;” in short, with the whole of our being. “Hear O Israel,” says the One who is the Word of God himself.

To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is the fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity.” That charity begins and ends with God whose grace defines us against “the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil” as the Collect puts it, reminding us of our baptismal identity in Christ, a far, far different thing that pumpkins, pucks, and parades!

God commands us to love him. This is the first extraordinary thing. What does this mean? Does God stand in need of our love?

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Monday, October 16th
4:45-5:15pm World Religions/Inquirers’ Class
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, October 17th, Eve of St. Luke
6:00pm Prayers & Praises – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion followed by Christ Church Book Club: Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees

Wednesday, October 18th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Sunday, October 22nd, Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Fr. Curry is away Friday to Monday at a conference in Los Angeles. Fr. Tom Henderson (1-902-798-8921) will be priest-in-charge during our absence. He will be the celebrant at 8:00am and Fr. Peter Harris will celebrate at 10:30am.

The collect for today, the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

LORD, we beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 1:4-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 12:28-37

Artwork: Andrea Mantegna, Christ the Redeemer, 1493. Tempera on canvas, Museo Civico “Il Correggio”, Correggio, Italy.

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground

Ah, the curses of work and labour! There is, it seems, no escaping the reality of the Fall. It means a different relation to the world and to one another and all because of a falling out, we might say, with God occasioned by our deceit and disobedience.

We return this week after the Thanksgiving Break to consider the further consequences of the Fall in the Third Chapter of Genesis. In a way, it connects with some of the themes of thanksgiving since bread is very much an aspect of our human engagement through work with the good order of creation. It means that nothing is simply ready at hand; labour is one of the consequences of the Fall, one of the curses. And yet, in and through our labours with the good order of God’s creation, blessings are found. We can learn about what we experience. The Fall means that good and evil, which are known to God through intellect, are known to us through experience. Yet through our experience of estrangement and separation, we may come to learn intellectually and ethically about good and evil.

The so-called curses that are the fall-out of the Fall are also about a kind of falling into reason. The awareness of ourselves as self-conscious beings means our awareness not only of the otherness of God and of one another but of the natural world itself. To live requires now our self-conscious effort at the same time as there is our self-conscious awareness of our connection to the world, to the ground itself: “for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust shall you return”. This is not really news. The two creation accounts have already and amply chronicled our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation and to every other created thing. What is new is the idea of labour and hard work. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Edward the Confessor (c. 1003-1066), King of England (source):

O Sovereign God,
who didst set thy servant Edward upon the throne of an earthly kingdom
and didst inspire him with zeal for the kingdom of heaven:
grant that we may so confess the faith of Christ by word and deed,
that we may, with all thy saints, inherit thine eternal glory;
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 Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 31:8-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:35-40

Artwork: St. Edward, stained glass, St. Augustine Kilburn, London. Photograph taken by admin, 26 September 2015.

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Philip of Caesarea, Deacon, Apostolic Man (source):

Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy servant Philip the Deacon, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to the peoples of Samaria and Ethiopia. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land heralds and evangelists of thy kingdom, that thy Church may make known the immeasurable riches of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Acts 8:26-40
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:18-20

Artwork: Gerrit Claesz Bleker, The Baptism of the Eunuch, 1630-35. Oil on oak panel, Christian Museum, Esztergom, Hungary.