Christ Church

Sunday, 1st July -Trinity 5 (Octave Day of St. John the Baptist) (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Thomas’ Church, Three Mile Plains
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 8th July – Trinity 6 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Andrew’s Church, Hantsport
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 15th July – Trinity 7 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Michael’s Church, Windsor Forks
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 22nd July – St. Mary Magdalene/Trinity 8 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. George’s Church, Upper Falmouth
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 29th July – Trinity 9 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
7:00pm All Saints’ Church, Leminster

Sunday, 5th August – Trinity 10 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Thomas’ Church, Three Mile Plains
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 12th August – Trinity 11 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Andrew’s Church, Hantsport
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 19th August – Trinity 12 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Michael’s Church, Windsor Forks
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 26th August – Trinity 13 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. George’s Church, Upper Falmouth
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Fr. David Curry will be Priest-in-Charge for the Parish of Avon Valley and the Parish of St. Andrew’s, Hantsport for the month of July (1-902-790-6173); Fr. Tom Henderson will be Priest-in-Charge for the Parish of Christ Church for the month of August (1-902-798-8921).

Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth

Repentance is our joy. It is the counter to all and every form of self-righteousness. Why? Because we are called to our right mind. The word is metanoia, a turning of our minds to God. It signals the powerful idea of our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away, ‘a kind of circling,’ as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, a return to a principle. We turn back and we are turned back. It is all God in us, and it is all us in the truth of our being. Repentance is itself the motion of divine love in us. That is its power and its joy.

Such is the power and the joy of this morning’s Gospel. It is really about the love of God whose goodness is our joy and our good. It is imaged here in terms of the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep and the woman who seeks diligently for the one lost coin. Those images belong to a third image, the story of the return of the prodigal son, a return which is about the father’s love. Three stories. We have the two parables here; the third is appointed as the Gospel for a parochial mission (BCP, p. 327), precisely to underscore the point of our being returned into the Father’s love. Repentance is our joy.

And yet this is so often ignored, derided and denied. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” Isaiah reminds us, in a passage which shapes the General Confession in our liturgy. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” Why? Because “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We are, however, more like the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmur against Jesus. Such is their self-righteousness. “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them,” they say. It is in response to their self-righteousness that Jesus tells these three remarkable parables. They are told to counter their judgmentalism which is about claiming a kind of spiritual superiority over others. They are told to move our hearts by illustrating the love of God which is “greater than our heart,” our heart of condemnation, as we heard last week.

It was a common complaint about the Prayer Book during the liturgical revolutions of the past decades that it is too penitential. People murmured against the idea of repentance, reluctant, it seems, to “acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness,” wanting, it seems, to assert their own essential self-worth and self-esteem. Such murmurings miss the point that Luke presents to us in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel, the very point about the essential joy of repentance, the very point about the Father’s love to which we are returned, the love which recalls us to our rightful minds.

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Monday June 18th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, June 19th
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Wednesday, June 20th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, June 22nd
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Saturday, June 23rd
6:30pm Brownies Sleep-over – Parish Hall

Sunday, June 17th, The Nativity of St. John the Baptist / Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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

O LORD, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may by thy mighty aid be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 5:5-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 15:1-10

Artwork: William J. Webb, The Lost Sheep, 1864. Oil on canvas, Manchester Art Gallery.

How readest thou?

How do you read? What, reading? You mean, like books? I thought that was all over and done with, you might be thinking, as in Alice Cooper’s 1972 hit song “School’s Out”:

School’s out for summer
School’s out for ever
School’s been blown to pieces…

This was long before such things as the shootings in Columbine, Colorado, and its sad and continuing legacy right up to Parkland, Florida, and more. The song includes the old familiar jingle of uncertain provenance:

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher’s dirty looks!

And concludes:

Out for summer
Out till fall
We might not go back at all!

Well, you will not be coming back here in the Fall, for you are done.

“Accomplished and concluded so far as in us lies,” as an ancient Eastern Orthodox prayer at the end of Mass puts it. Finished. IB done! High School’s over! Or, at least, almost. In just a few hours, you will step up and step out no longer simply as students but as having made the grade. You shall be, quite literally, graduates and alumni of King’s-Edgehill School. Today you are the pride of the School and of your families and friends. You made it! “You shall go out in joy,” as Isaiah puts it, in the passage which Arturo read, and even “the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” All wonderful metaphors that belong, well, to our reading.

So does this day really mean that you are all over and done with reading? I hope not. Because what we have so often talked about is reading as living, about thinking as a way of being. As a 13th century tutor at Oxford advises: “study as if you were to live for ever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.” My hope is that you will always be students, that is to say, those who are always eager to learn.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Basil the Great (c. 330-79), Bishop of Caesarea, Cappadocian Father, Doctor of the Church (source):

Almighty God, who hast revealed to thy Church thine eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like thy bishop Basil of Caesarea, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; who livest and reignest for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 2:6-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:21-24

Artwork: Domenichino, Saint Basil, 1609-12. Fresco, Cappella dei Santi Fondatori (Chapel of the Holy Founders), Abbazia di Santa Maria, Grottaferrata, Italy.

I have called you friends

St. Barnabas is sometimes known as “the son of consolation.” Do we not sometimes find strength and comfort, in short, our consolation from one another? To be sure. And what is our consolation? Simply our abiding in the love of God the Blessed Trinity. The Gospel for this feast complements the lessons from John’s first Epistle which we have heard on these past two Sundays in the early days of the Trinity season about the divine love which commands us to love. And this Gospel follows directly upon one of the greatest Scriptural images of our abiding in the love of God; namely, the idea of the vine and the branches. “I am the vine, ye are the branches,” Jesus says, “abide in me.”

Yet the most powerful statement about our abiding in the love of God appears in this astounding statement where Jesus says “ye are my friends.” Somehow in Christ we are made the friends of God and so, too, friends of one another.

It is a powerful idea and one which has an ancient and profound pedigree. It reaches back to the story of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu is created by the gods to be a second self to Gilgamesh so that in respecting and honouring the other he will be no longer a domineering and brutal king, a bad king but a good king who seeks the good of his people. Friendship appears as the solution to the problem of bad kingship, to the misuse and abuse of power.

And sometimes the Greeks, too, can imagine a kind of commonality between the gods and men. “Two of a kind are we, deceivers both,” Athena says to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, implying a kind of commonality at least of character. And in the Old Testament there is the wonderful friendship between Jonathan and David, a kind of kinship of the soul.

One could go on but the point is that in Christ, God declares himself our friend. This shows something of the deeper meaning of the Trinity mantra that “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” In a beautiful treatise that takes up the ancient theme of friendship, such as in Cicero’s treatise de amicitia, Aelred of Rievaulx’s 12th century work, Spiritual Friendship, goes so far as to suggest that “God is friendship”.

What does friendship mean? It means our attention to the good of one another in the goodness of God. The divine friendship shapes our fellowship, our care and concern for one another. That is our consolation and strength. It is about the goodness of God in us making us good and, indeed, good for one another. Such is the power of the Trinity. It is altogether about our abiding in the love of God intentionally and thoughtfully, attending to the Good that is God in all things.

I have called you friends

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Barnabas, June 11th, 2018

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

O LORD God Almighty, who didst endue thy holy Apostle Barnabas with singular gifts of the Holy Spirit: Leave us not, we beseech thee, destitute of thy manifold gifts, nor yet of grace to use them alway to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 11:22-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:12-16

Artwork: Michel Corneille the Elder, St. Paul and St. Barnabas at Lystra, 1644. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Arras, France.

Hereby we know love

God invites us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” That is at once a privilege and a wonder. To what are we invited? To love imaged as a banquet but as signifying the real meaning of our lives. In the Christian understanding it is about our life in Christ. “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” The love in which we abide is sacrificial love. That love is active and alive in seeking the Good, the goodness of God and that self-same goodness for one another.

Do we accept the invitation? Do we embrace the demands, indeed, the commands of the divine love in which is all our good? Well, that is the problem and the challenge. It is the problem of sin. “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his heart against him: how dwelleth the love of God in him?” This is the problem of our indifference towards one another which separates us from the love of God, illustrated so powerfully for us in last Sunday’s parable, the parable of Lazarus and Dives. It is really all about what is alive in us.

Those lessons are again concentrated for us and developed more fully in this Sunday’s readings. The Epistle instructs but also convicts; the Gospel illustrates profoundly our refusals of the invitation to love and live yet emphasizes the divine commitment to our good. As such they are powerful persuasives to the truth of our lives in Christ.

The paradox is that we are commanded to love. This seems counter-intuitive. How can love be forced or coerced in us and still be love? It can’t. What we encounter is the absolute nature of God’s love as the truth for us. That love is constant and unconditional. It is not changed by our refusals; we are. We encounter simply what God seeks for us even in the face of our disorderly and distracted hearts. Yet “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” It is one of the great teaching insights into the nature of God opened out to us in John’s First Epistle, itself a veritable treatise on love as Trinity and our abiding in that love. “And this is his commandment, That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.” Notice the double emphasis on commandment. What does it mean? Simply that we should want what God wants for us.

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Monday June 11th, St. Barnabas
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Tuesday, June 12th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Wednesday, June 13th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, June 15th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Saturday, June 16th
9:00am Encaenia Service – KES Chapel
10:15am Graduation & Prize Day Ceremonies – KES

Sunday, June 17th, Third Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion