Christ Church

“Rejoice with me”

Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Luke presents us with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the divine redemption of our humanity. The context is animosity and hostility. Tax Collectors and sinners, the despised and the outcast of the world, draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes, religious leaders, murmur in contempt because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised. Doesn’t he know with whom he is associating? How can he be a true religious teacher? Jesus response is revelatory and transforming. He tells two parables; actually, three. We have in today’s reading two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable is the tremendous parable of the prodigal son.

The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke comprises these three parables, each told in sequence. It is a most powerful illustration of the message about redemption and humility. Humility is the counter to our pride which pretends to our self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and our self-centredness, on the other hand. Either we have it all and need nothing outside ourselves or we presume to think that we deserve what we presently don’t have but desire. The gospel of humility is the counter to our pride.

The lost sheep, the lost coin. What do they teach us? Simply this. They teach us the humility of God which is given to shape our souls in the love of Christ. The lost sheep is precious; the lost coin is precious. The shepherd and the woman seek diligently – lovingly – for the one that is lost. Without them the community is incomplete; our humanity less than itself. God seeks the lost. In him we are found.

The third parable captures most fully the dynamic of grace at work in bringing us home to ourselves. We cannot read these two parables without being aware of the third – or at least we shouldn’t. It is the parable of the lost son or the prodigal son.

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“Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness”

It is a tough saying, one of the toughest and, yet, one of the truest. Forgiveness is there for all who want it but if you deny the very possibility of forgiveness then that is to ‘blaspheme’ against the Holy Spirit. The unforgivable sin is about denying the power and the possibility of forgiveness. Nothing captures so completely the Christian sense of the incredible power and dignity of the human will. It is this passage that makes possible Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and the whole power of Goethe’s Dr. Faustus. Our bond with the deceiver is captured in the denial of the possibilities of forgiveness. It is dogmatic and coercive. It means the rejection of any sort of realization of our own weaknesses and shortcomings; for to acknowledge sin is to recognize grace. But even more, it belongs to a denial of the possibilities of God’s grace. It denies God’s grace entirely! It denies to God what alone belongs  truly and properly  to God – mercy and forgiveness. This is actually the great insight of the Christian religion.

While it provides an insight into the nature of God, we might say, it also points to the radical nature of human freedom. We are free to condemn ourselves, to will our complete and utter separation from God. In other words, Hell is us precisely because we get what we want but deny what God wants for us. Heaven – a state of blessedness – is only possible through the grace of God. This, too, is a deep truth of the Christian religion. Hell is entirely our doing.

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“Rejoice with me”

Humility is the condition of our rejoicing, the condition of our redemption in Christ. Luke presents us with a very powerful message about the nature of humility as the counter to human pride and about the divine redemption of our humanity. The context is animosity and hostility. Publican, that is to say, and sinners, the despised and the outcast of the world, draw near to Jesus; Pharisees and Scribes, religious leaders, proud and self-righteous, murmur in contempt because of the company which he keeps. They are scandalised. Doesn’t he know with whom he is associating? How can he be a true religious teacher? Jesus response is revelatory and transforming. He tells two parables – actually, three. We have in today’s reading two of the three, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The third parable is the tremendous parable of the prodigal son.

The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke comprises these three parables, each told in sequence. It is a most powerful illustration of the message about redemption and humility. Humility is the counter to our pride which pretends to our self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and our self-centredness, on the other hand. Either we have it all and need nothing outside ourselves or we presume to think that we deserve or are entitled to what we desire. The gospel of humility is the counter to our pride.

The lost sheep, the lost coin. What do they teach us? Simply this. They teach us the humility of God which is given to shape our souls in the love of Christ. The lost sheep is precious; the lost coin is precious. The shepherd and the woman seek diligently – lovingly – for the one that is lost. Without them the community is incomplete; our humanity less than itself. God seeks the lost. In him we are found.

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday, June 17th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, June 18th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, June 20th
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, June 21st
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
3:30pm Holy Communion – Gladys Manning Home

Sunday, June 23rd, The Fourth Sunday After Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, July 20th
7:30pm Christ Church Concert Series: Ensemble Seraphina

During the month of July, Fr. Curry will be priest-in-charge of Avon Valley; during August, Fr. Tom Henderson will be priest-in-charge of Christ Church (798-8921).

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: The Parable of the Lost Coin, stained glass, St. Jacob’s Lutheran Church, Anna, Ohio.

“I am the vine; ye are the branches … abide in me.”

Somewhere, in the past year, a man or a woman stepped out of the countryside and slipped into one of the world’s cities and, with that one step, the demographics of the world changed from being mostly rural to being predominantly urban. How strange, then, to hear in the Scripture readings about the agrarian themes of seedtime and harvest, of vines and branches, the images of humanity’s engagement with the natural and created world. How strange, too, on this day of leaving to hear about abiding. Yet, we meet this morning in the beauty of the rural landscape of Nova Scotia for your graduation from this School from which you go to into an inescapably urban world.

You made it! In just a few hours you will no longer be students of King’s-Edgehill School but graduates, literally those who have made the grade and now step up and step out as alumni of the School. On this day, you are the pride of the School and the pride of your parents, guardians, grandparents and friends. Today marks a significant milestone in your lives. I suspect, however, that if parents and grandparents, and even you, were honest, it could be said that we hardly recognize you, so much have you changed, and I am not referring to guys in skirts!

We meet in the 225^th year of the founding of this school. You are part of something far greater than yourselves which is now part of you. This School, set in the rural idylls of Nova Scotia, a kind of paradise, you might almost say (forget the bleak mid-winter, at least for the moment!), has been your place of cultivation and learning, your place of abiding. You step out, glad to be free and yet so much of who you are has been shaped by all that you have been a part of here whether for seven years or one. If it has any meaning at all, something abides in you from your time spent here.

These have been some of the most critical years of your formation. Education is nothing if it is not about the formation of character. Nothing could be more counter-culture, yet nothing could be more classical. As soon as education is turned into a means rather than an end it ceases to be education. At issue is what it means to be human. It is a pressing contemporary question. The Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, points out that our question is not simply about what it is that is right to do but about what it is that is good to be. Morality and metaphysics are inseparable; the ethical is also the philosophical.

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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: Pierre Subleyras, Mass of St. Basil (Emperor Valens Before Bishop Basilius), 1743. Oil on canvas, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

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 15:12-16Artwork: Paolo Veronese, The Miracle of Saint Barnabas, c. 1566. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France.

“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”

The Gospel is Christ’s parable about the kingdom of God being likened to a great supper to which those who were invited all made excuse. The Epistle speaks about our hearts in relation to the truth of God revealed.

We are the ones who are invited to a great supper. Our churches stand as the banquet halls of the kingdom of God. “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God,” we may say, as, indeed, did “one of them that sat at meat with Jesus.” Why, then, does Jesus tell this parable to one who was at meat with him about a great supper to which many were invited and yet no one who was bidden came? To make him and all of us realize the nature of our blessedness. It is found in our being with Jesus.

The point of the parable is clear. “Come, for all things are now ready,” we hear. God provides so much and more for us. But, more often than not, it is we who are unready and all because of our excuses. We turn to our own ways, to the ground, quite literally, and to the ways of dust and death. We ignore the vision and refuse the invitation.

The consequence would seem to mean “no feast” and all because of our refusals of God’s inviting grace, as if our convenience and self-interest were to take priority over God’s will. But our preoccupations and our indifference are simply the forms of our atheism, our denial of the will of God for us. No feast for us because there is no God for us. We are unaware of the wonder of grace.

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Monday, June 10th, Eve of St. Barnabas
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Tuesday, June 11th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:30pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, June 13th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

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

Sunday, June 16th, The Third Sunday After Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Morning Prayer
2:00pm AMD Service of the Deaf
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, July 20th
7:30pm Christ Church Concert Series: Ensemble Seraphina ($10 per person)