Christ Church

“He had answered them well”

An intriguing and difficult Gospel, it signals the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one who is the fulfillment of the Law, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour is perfectly realized. But that turns on another important point, namely, the idea of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the anointed one of God. Both are the strong truth claims of the Gospel about Jesus as Lord. It is worth unpacking them a bit in relation to one of the scribes who engages with Jesus respectfully and intelligently, so much so that Jesus will say that “thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”

One of the scribes “having heard them reasoning together” perceives that Jesus “had answered them well.” Who was reasoning together about what and with whom? The “reasoning together” is really a disputation, an examination of matters of contention. Jesus is engaged in a dispute with the Sadducees about marriage and resurrection. The idea of resurrection was a matter of debate within late Judaism. The Sadducees were a group within Israel who, as Mark puts it, “say that there is no resurrection.” They undertake to entrap Jesus about the law regarding “levirate marriage” in the Law of Moses: the idea that the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow and raise up children for him. The term “levirate” simply means ‘a husband’s brother.’ The concern, I think, is about a way of providing for the care of the widow and for the continuation of the family line. The Sadducees manufacture a complicated ‘what-if’ scenario of a series of seven brothers who one by one take the first brother’s wife after his death only for each of them to die without a child. The question they put to Jesus is “whose wife will she be in the resurrection since the seven had her as wife?”

At issue is an understanding of the Law and a question about the resurrection. Jesus’ response catches the attention of one of the scribes who has overheard the exchange. Jesus says rather bluntly the Sadducees are wrong because they “neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.” He points out that in heaven they “neither marry nor are given in marriage” so the whole scenario is moot. He reminds them about the burning bush where God says to Moses that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, patriarchs whose lives and deaths are noted in Genesis. His point is that the revelation of God to Moses assumes that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are raised up and are alive. “He is not God of the dead but of the living” Jesus says and, once again, adds “you are quite wrong.”

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Monday, October 21st
4:45-5:15pm World Religions/Inquirers’ Class – KES
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, October 22nd
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, October 18th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, October 20th, Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity / Eve of St. Simon & St. Jude
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
7:00 Holy Communion – KES Chapel

O God, who in a wonderful sacrament hast left unto us a memorial of thy passion: Grant us so to reverence the holy mysteries of thy Body and Blood, that we may ever know within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption, who livest and reignest with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

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: Jusepe de Ribera, Christ the Saviour, c. 1630. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

“Only Luke is with me.”

It is a poignant phrase. “Only Luke is with me,” Paul says. And yet that seems significant. For Luke, too, has been very much with us during the Trinity season. He is, we might say, the Church’s great and primary spiritual director especially in the Trinity season. There is a certain quality to his writings in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles, which work is generally attributed to him. Dante has captured best, I think, the special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption. Luke, he says in a memorable phrase, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ.

I have often been struck by that phrase. It seems to capture the real meaning and truth of our spiritual pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God with God in Jesus Christ. It highlights a special quality to that pilgrimage – gentleness. Not our gentleness but the gentleness of Christ, which at once provides a profound insight into God’s engagement with our wounded and broken humanity and a strong corrective to the negative views of divine judgment.

The powerful teachings of the Trinity season largely focus on the idea of an ethic of action rooted in compassion. Not surprisingly, Luke has been our principal instructor about such an ethic which speaks so profoundly to the confusions and idiocies of our day where either profit or the self is God which neither can possibly be. In the absence of any kind of principled ethical discourse there is only the tyranny of global corporatism, the ideological vacuum of contemporary politics, or the subjective tyranny of the self. But here, almost as a kind of counter to those totalizing concepts, we are reminded that “only Luke is with [us]”. That seems to make a difference.

The Gospel reading for The Feast of St. Luke speaks directly about the purpose of our prayerful reading of the Scriptures in the ordered liturgy of the Church. What is it all about? “Then opened he their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.” In the opening of the Scriptures, a phrase that Luke uses about Christ in relation to the disciples and, by extension, to us, we are gathered into the gentleness of Christ, into the compassionate love of God for our wounded and broken humanity. We are being healed and even more than healed. Once again, in Luke’s insightful account of the healing of the ten lepers of whom only one, and he a Samaritan, “returned to give thanks,” we are being made whole. Luke opens us out to the deeper meaning of Christ’s being with us. It is about our being made whole and complete, but not through anything in ourselves.

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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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And she named him Moses

Who named him? The daughter of Pharaoh, the King (and God figure) of ancient Egypt. And who is Moses? The founding figure of Judaism. It might seem passing strange that the history of the Hebrews as the people of God begins in Egypt and in a situation of uncertainty and tension, of slavery and infanticide.

With the exception of Sanatana Dharma, that is to say, Hinduism, all of the major religions of the world have a founding figure and all of them have birth narratives about their founding figures. There are the birth narratives of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha in Theravada Buddhism and in the various forms of Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism. There are the birth narratives of Jesus in Matthew and Luke (and in a different and much more philosophical sense in John), narratives which reflect intentionally on aspects of the birth of Moses in Exodus. Then there are the Al-sira traditions within Islam that treat the birth and upbringing of Muhammad. They all point to the significance of the founding figure for what defines these religious and philosophical traditions and for what develops within them.

In the case of Moses, the birth narrative marks the beginning of Philo of Alexandria’s treatment of Moses as the great lawgiver and the embodiment of the truth of our humanity, a theme which will be taken up by Gregory of Nyssa’s consideration of Moses as embodying the path of spiritual perfection. In other words, Moses becomes an exemplar of the way of being human through his attention to the things of God.

Exodus is the Greek name given to the second book of the Bible, what has come to be known as the Second Book of Moses in the Torah, the first five books which are traditionally known as the Books of Moses. This does not imply authorship by Moses. Rather it shows the spiritual significance of Moses as the figure through whom God gives the Law to Israel and through Israel to the world.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Etheldreda (d. 679), Queen, Foundress and Abbess of Ely (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: St. Etheldreda, stained glass. St. Peter’s Church, Walpole St. Peter, Norfolk, England. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.

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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The collects for today, Harvest Thanksgiving Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who crownest the year with thy goodness, and hast given unto us the fruits of the earth in their season: Give us grateful hearts, that we may unfeignedly thank thee for all thy loving-kindness, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O LORD, we pray thee, sow the seed of thy word in our hearts, and send down upon us the showers of thy grace, that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit, and at the great day of harvest may be gathered by the holy angels into the heavenly garner; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson Isaiah 55:1-12
The Gospel: St. John 6:27-35

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth:
it shall not return to me empty

The custom in our maritime communities has been to keep Harvest Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day weekend. It is a gathering together of different thanksgivings. The idea of thanksgiving for the harvest is ancient and universal, especially in rural and agricultural communities. The idea of national thanksgiving is more recent and focuses on the political and the social. We would do well to recall the inner spirit of both so I want to try to say something about the spiritual significance of Harvest Thanksgiving in the face of our current anxieties and concerns.

I have always been moved by Harvest Thanksgiving as it has traditionally been celebrated in our maritime communities, especially in our rural farmlands. There is something quite wonderful about gathering the fruits of field and orchard into the churches, something at once aesthetically pleasing and spiritually symbolic. At Christ Church for years sheaves of corn-stalks marked the pews. I always had the sense of preaching in a corn-field! Not a bad biblical image and precedent!

Harvest Thanksgiving has always a sensual and aesthetic quality to it; things seen, and touched, smelled and tasted. But therein lies the danger, the danger of reducing Harvest Thanksgiving to self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption, to a sensual feast of the belly at the expense of the mind and the soul More stuffed than the turkey. Who are we thanking and for what if it is simply about the sensual pleasures of appetite? In our rural and agricultural communities, there is always the danger of losing sight of the more profound meaning of Harvest Thanksgiving. It is not about thanking ourselves for what we have been able to achieve and accomplish. It is not about what we think we deserve, or worse, about what we think we are entitled.

This year the annual Pumpkin Regatta in Windsor will be a much diminished affair because the number of giant pumpkins is much so greatly reduced, owing to the cold spring, the dry summer, and the effects of Hurricane Dorian, which also blasted the cornfields. The world knows but ignores the humanitarian disaster of the continuing famine in Yemen. The current discourse on global climate change is increasingly paralyzing and dispiriting but contributes to the way in which events on the global stage, in which we are all implicated, play out locally, what some have called ‘glocalization.’ All these things challenge us to think more deeply about the radical meaning of thanksgiving. At the very least they remind us that the harvest cannot be taken for granted.

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