Christ Church

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Alphege (c. 953-1012), Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr (source):

O merciful God,
who didst raise up thy servant Alphege
to be a pastor of thy people
and gavest him grace to suffer for justice and true religion:
grant that we who celebrate his martyrdom
may know the power of the risen Christ in our hearts
and share his peace in lives offered to thy service;
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: Revelation 7:13-17
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:4-12

Artwork: Martyrdom of St Alphege, carved painting, Canterbury Cathedral.

Did not our heart burn within us?

Our readings in Chapel this week take us from the company of the broken hearted to those whose hearts are on fire with love and joy. And all, in part, because of the breaking of the bread. That action consolidates the teaching and brings it home in the minds of the disciples. It is not just that seeing is believing. It is rather the breakthrough of the understanding, seeing as understanding, seeing things in a radically new way. That is what happens on the road to Emmaus, the story which we read in two installments; one last week, the other this week.

“He was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” Christ’s actions at the Last Supper on the night of his betrayal are now seen and remembered in the light of his passion and resurrection. He opens our understanding by opening the Scriptures, showing us that our wholeness, our wellness and health, if you will, are found in the face of our brokenness and not in spite of our broken hearts. But the opening of the Scriptures to our understanding is not all; what brings the teaching home to the heart is an action related to our being together at a meal.

Food plays an important role in the accounts of the Resurrection because of the body. Immediately after the conclusion of the story of the Road to Emmaus, Luke tells of another appearance of Jesus to the disciples gathered in Jerusalem, it seems, where he proclaims peace and shows them his hands, and feet, saying, “it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones and you see that I have.” And yet, “they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered,” Luke tells us. It is in that context that Jesus then asks what might seem to be an utterly bizarre question. “Have you anything here to eat?” “They gave him a piece of broiled fish” which he took and ate. Nothing confirms the reality of the body more, it seems, than eating. Something powerful is made known through our being together at a meal. Through something as ordinary as a piece of broiled fish comes something extraordinary and powerful.

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“For ye were as sheep going astray;
but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls”

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” Isaiah remarks in a powerful passage that belongs to our Good Friday considerations and indeed to the General Confession in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer: “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But as Good Friday also makes clear “the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The idea of sheep and shepherd takes on a whole new meaning and complexity in the image of Christ as the Lamb of God. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” as John the Baptist says in John’s Gospel. And in an even profounder image, John the Divine in his Revelation proclaims that “worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing,” a passage that serves as the Eastertide Offertory sentence.

The liturgy underscores the image of lamb in the Agnus Dei , which means “lamb of God,” as part of our communion devotion, recalling us to Christ as the “Lamb of God,” “that takest away the sin of the world” whose mercy and peace we seek in the receiving of the sacrament of Holy Communion. The point, too, is taken up in the repeated refrains for mercy in the Gloria which emphasizes Christ as the “Lord, the only-begotten Son,” “the Lamb of God, the Son of the Father, that takest away the sin of the world” and who “sittest at the right hand of God the Father.”

All of these Scriptural references that inform our liturgy contribute to our understanding of one of the most familiar of all Christian images, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The deeper point is that the Good Shepherd is also the lamb of God, the Son of God who is for us “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as today’s Collect puts it. Something has been done for us and something happens in us that revolve around the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd “who giveth his life for the sheep.” We are the sheep, lost and astray, “but [we] are returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls” by Christ the Lamb of God whose sacrifice “takes away the sin of the world.”

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Monday April 16th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, April 17th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-800pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Madeline Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and Bandi, The Accusation

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

Thursday, April 19th
2:00pm Service – Windsor Elms

Friday, April 20th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, April 22nd, Third Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, April 28th
7:00-9:00pm Newfoundland & Country Music Evening

Saturday, May 12th
4:30-6:00pm Annual Lobster Supper – Parish Hall

The collect for today, The Second Sunday After Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given thine only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St .Peter 2:19-25
The Gospel: St. John 10:11-16

Artwork: Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Good Shepherd, 1922. Oil on canvas, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey.

He was known of them in the breaking of the bread

April is the cruelest month of all, T.S. Eliot averred in The Waste Land, making a deliberate contrast with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that “when April with his showers sweet …then do folk long to go on pilgrimage.” But there is a journey, a pilgrimage of the soul through good and ill, a pilgrimage of the understanding, snow and wind and ice notwithstanding. It is all about the Resurrection and it speaks to the sufferings and the sorrows that darken our hearts especially at the loss of lives such as those of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team. We remembered them by name at the Wednesday assembly, placing them and the hearts of those who mourn and are in sorrow with God. Such, too, belongs to the Resurrection.

It gives us a way to face the hard and difficult things of human experience, the things of suffering and death. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb in grief and sorrow only to encounter the Risen Christ; “Touch me not,” he says to her. Doubting Thomas, so-called, encounters the Risen Christ behind closed doors; “reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust in into my side; and be not faithless, but believing,” Christ says. And all in the same chapter! Touch not and touch! Nothing affirms so completely the way in which the Resurrection speaks to the radical nature of human individuality and to the realities of the human body, to human experience, and, most importantly, to the forms of human knowing; yet without being collapsed into them. We are raised up to behold things in a new light, to find grace and consolation even in the midst of our sorrows and griefs. The Resurrection strengthens us.

The Resurrection accounts all turn on one fundamental principle: Christ is the great teacher of the Resurrection whose encounter with us overcomes every paradox, every contradiction. We are challenged to see the past in a new way, to see ourselves in a new way, to think the body in a new way. One of the distinctive features of the Resurrection is that it is inescapably a bodily event. It happens in the body and provides us with a new way to think about the dignity and truth of our humanity. Our bodies matter; they are part and parcel of our individual identity, part and parcel of the truth of our humanity as found in God.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Leo the Great (c. 400-461), Bishop of Rome, Teacher of the Faith (source):

O God our Father,
who madest thy servant Leo strong in the defence of the faith:
we humbly beseech thee
so to fill thy Church with the spirit of truth
that, being guided by humility and governed by love,
she may prevail against the powers of evil;
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: 2 Timothy 1:6-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:13-19

Leo is believed to have been born in Tuscany and served as a deacon and papal advisor before being chosen pope in 440. He is one of the most important popes of the early church because of his achievements in theology, canon law, and church administration.

Leo defended uniformity in church government and doctrine and bolstered the primacy of the Roman see in the church structure. In his letters and sermons, he argued that, as heir to St. Peter, the bishop of Rome holds a supreme authority over the church and all other bishops. This was not universally accepted during Leo’s papacy, but it strongly influenced the future course of the church.

His greatest accomplishment was as a theologian. When the Council of Chalcedon was convened in 451, Leo wrote a Tome to Bishop Flavian of Constantinople that contained a clear and cogent statement of the dual nature of Jesus Christ. He described Christ’s two natures, divine and human, as permanently united “unconfusedly, unchangeably, undivisibly, and inseparably”. When Leo’s letter was read aloud at the Council, the delegates cried, “Peter has spoken through Leo”, and his teaching was accepted as defining the doctrine of the Person of Christ.

Twice during Leo’s pontificate, Rome came under threat from barbarian invaders. In 452, Attila and his Huns advanced on Rome after sacking Milan, but Leo saved the city by persuading Attila to accept tribute and withdraw. In 455, however, he was not as successful dealing with Genseric, leader of the Vandals. Leo did persuade the Vandals not to destroy Rome and murder the populace, but they plundered the city for a fortnight and took prisoners to Africa. Leo sent priests and alms to the captives.

Leo was the first pope to be buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Artwork: Alessandro Algardi, The Meeting of St. Leo I and Attila, 1646-53. Marble relief, Altar of St. Leo the Great, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.

The collect for today, The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canada, 1962):

WE beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Isaiah 7:10-15
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-38

Artwork: Jacopo Pontormo, Annunciation, 1527-28. Fresco, Cappella Capponi, Santa Felicità, Florence. Photograph taken by admin, 17 May 2010.

(This commemoration has been transferred from 25 March.)

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

This text has carried us through Holy Week and Easter beginning with Palm Sunday . March 25th was Palm Sunday but that date is The Feast of the Annunciation , a feast of great significance for our understanding of the Christian Faith. It marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary through her ‘yes’ to God in response to the Angelic Salutation: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee” and that she “shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son, and shalt call his name Jesus.”

Nine months later, we celebrate Christ’s nativity, his birth at Bethlehem. But the conjunction of the Annunciation with Christ’s Passion is immensely significant and reminds us of the inescapable connection between Christmas and Easter , for his “Christmas Day and Good Friday are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day,” as John Donne notes, even as we have noted that Easter Day and The Octave Day of Easter , yesterday, are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day, the day of Resurrection.

But why the Annunciation on the Tuesday after Easter Week? Because the Passion and the Resurrection take utter priority. The Annunciation is for the sake of the Passion and the Resurrection; the meaning of the Incarnation is fully realised in the events that belong to the redemption of our humanity. As Luther, the father of Protestantism, and as Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, both understand, it is per Mariam ad Jesum , through Mary to Jesus. “Mary,” says Luther, “does not want us to come to Mary but through her to Jesus Christ.”

This brings us to the critical and important role of Mary in the work of human redemption. In contrast to Jesus as “just as man” in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, Mary is at once just a woman and more than just a woman. She is the very exemplar and embodiment of our humanity considered in and of itself in its truth and purity. Why? And How? Why? Because of the logic of salvation. Christ cannot be the redeemer of humanity, wounded and broken as a result of sin, if he himself is a sinner. He becomes sin for us only by becoming fully human through the body he assumes from Mary. He does so to free us from all sin and all death. He is “like us in all respects save sin.” Sin after all is privative, a negative; it makes us less than ourselves. She, by extension, too, is understand in a number of theological traditions to be without sin for the sake of Christ’s pure humanity without which he cannot be our redeemer.

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“The same day at evening”

Time, it seems, has stopped. We rest in the morning and the evening of the new Sabbath of the Day of Resurrection, it seems, with Mary coming early in the morning on the first day of the week to the tomb and finding it empty. She runs and tells Simon Peter and John and they both run and find that what she said is indeed true. Now, it is “the same day at evening.” Yet, we are behind closed doors.

It is a powerful image. Like the disciples, we too are behind closed doors out of fear. Our culture is very much the culture of closed doors, the culture of the various ghettoes of our minds, like so many gated communities, as it were. We hear only what we want to hear and see only what we want to see. But the more serious point is our fearfulness, our uncertainties and our anxieties.

We are behind the closed doors of our minds because we are uncertain about ourselves, about our world, and about the very idea of truth. This shows itself in a myriad of ways: from the increasing intolerance about diverse opinions about identity politics to the increasing fragility of ourselves as a self. It means a loss of confidence in being able to think and proclaim what belongs to the Christian faith and to the ways in which it engages the world. Yet the Resurrection breaks open the closed doors of our minds and our souls.

The Gospel for the Octave Day of Easter places us imaginatively on “the same day at evening” to counter all of our fears and uncertainties. Something happens behind closed doors that belongs to the Easter message of Resurrection. It changes everything. It changes us. Such is the Resurrection. It gives us a new perspective and a new understanding about ourselves. We are freed to God and are set in motion.

What is that motion? In today’s Gospel, it is about “the forgiveness of sins”proclaimed by the Apostolic Church. On “the same day at evening,” Christ breathes on the disciples and signals to them and us what his word and action means. “Receive ye the Holy Ghost,” he says.“Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” It is called the power of the keys.

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