Christ Church

The collect for today, Septuagesima (or the Third Sunday Before Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, we beseech thee favourably to hear the prayers of thy people; that we, who are justly punished for our offences, may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness, for the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
The Gospel: St. Matthew 20:1-16

Artwork: Marten van Valckenborch, Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, between 1580 and 1590. Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

The collect for a Martyr, on the Feast of Saint Valentine (d. c. 269), Bishop, Martyr at Rome, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who didst bestow upon thy Saints such marvellous virtue, that they were able to stand fast, and have the victory against the world, the flesh, and the devil: Grant that we, who now commemorate thy Martyr Valentine, may ever rejoice in their fellowship, and also be enabled by thy grace to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold upon eternal life; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27

Artwork: Valentin Metzinger, St. Valentine, c. 1733. Oil on canvas, Franciscan Church of the Annunciation, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

A Still More Excellent Way

In the bleak cold of the mid-winter, we all need a touch of love. Such is the purpose of spirit week at the School. Thus in Chapel, we always read in this week St. Paul’s great hymn to love, 1 Corinthians 13. It is not specifically about Valentine’s Day, if by that one means a focus on the romantic or the erotic, not to mention the commercial. The love which Paul celebrates, however, includes and informs all and every form of love for it speaks about the true nature of love which seeks the good and the perfection of our humanity.

The power of this passage of Scripture in our world and day is intriguing. Often times a couple will want it read at a wedding, even though it is by no means specific to marriage. Yet it seems to speak to a deep sense of the power of the transcendent, of a love which is not simply of us but speaks to the deeper yearnings of the soul. Love, literally and properly, moves us towards one another. Years and years ago, I was particularly struck by how moved a very bright and outstanding student from China was by this passage which he read in Chapel. It moved him to tears and made him see things in an entirely new way.

The word for ‘love’ in the King James’ Version derived from Tyndale is charity which comes from the Latin caritas. The word, charity, has been somewhat cheapened in our own culture by limiting it to the forms of our outreach and care for the poor and the destitute. While such things are most important and belong to charity, they are only a part of its meaning and range. Paul is actually talking about grace, about what comes from God to us precisely in the realization of our own incompleteness and failings, including our failures to love one another as ourselves. He is opening us out to the transcendent power of the divine love which moves in us, if we will be open to it.

The three theological virtues of “faith, hope and charity” are the forms of grace that complement and perfect the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Those ancient qualities of excellence speak to the nature of human character and form a critical part of the ethical understanding of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as becoming part of the moral discourse of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic worlds. But without love, such virtues are radically incomplete. Augustine captures that sensibility in saying that without love, divine love, the virtues are splendida vitia, splendid vices.

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The collect for a Doctor of the Church, Poet, or Scholar, in commemoration of Saint Caedmon (d. 680), Monk of Whitby, first English poet, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who by thy Holy Spirit hast given unto one man a word of wisdom, and to another a word of knowledge, and to another the gift of tongues: We praise thy Name for the gifts of grace manifested in thy servant Caedmon, and we pray that thy Church may never be destitute of the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Daniel 2:17-24
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:9-17

Saint Caedmon is the first English poet whose name is known. Saint Bede the Venerable tells Caedmon’s story in Book IV, Chapter 24, of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Bede records that Caedmon was a herdsman who at an advanced age suddenly received the gift of poetry and song. Someone appeared to Caedmon in a dream one night and asked him to sing. In response, he spontaneously sang verses in praise of the God the Creator. When he awoke, he remembered the words of his song and added more lines.

He went to speak with Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. She and several learned men examined Caedmon and affirmed that his gift was from God.

Caedmon became a monk at Whitby and composed a large body of poetry and song on many Christian subjects, including the Creation story, the Exodus, the birth, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the apostles.

Unfortunately, almost none of Caedmon’s work survives. Only his Hymn, recorded by Bede in Latin and Old English, is known to us. Here is a modern English translation:

Praise we the Fashioner now of Heaven’s fabric,
The majesty of his might and his mind’s wisdom,
Work of the world-warden, worker of all wonders,
How he the Lord of Glory everlasting,
Wrought first for the race of men Heaven as a rooftree,
Then made he Middle Earth to be their mansion.

Source: Bede, A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, rev. ed. 1968, Penguin, p. 251.

A humble and holy monk, Caedmon died in perfect charity with his fellow servants of God.

Photograph: Memorial to Caedmon, St Mary’s Churchyard, Whitby, North Yorkshire, Great Britain. The inscription reads, “To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English Sacred Song. Fell asleep hard by, 680”. © Copyright RichTea and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”

Epiphany season ends this year on a note of reflective judgment. Epiphany season is about the making known of God and of what God wants for us. That alone is an astounding matter. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us; such is redemption. It says so much about the truth and the dignity of our humanity, on the one hand, and says so much, too, about the truth and the mystery of God, the God who makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us, on the other hand. This is an astounding wonder.

The idea of God’s revelation of himself and his will for us also means that something about ourselves is revealed to us. We are in these stories individually and institutionally, as it were. Something about the dynamic and nature of human institutions and human personality is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. We are made aware of something beyond ourselves, a principle of absolute goodness and truth to which we are held accountable and without which we have no freedom and no real dignity. That we close our ears to this is our folly and our wickedness; such is judgment itself.

Judgment. We are uncomfortable about the idea of judgment and well we should be. In our day, judgment is about being arbitrarily judged by others without any recourse to the question, “upon what basis”? What are the principles that inform our moral, social and political discourse?

We live in a world of wheat and tares. Tares is a Middle English word for weeds used by Wycliffe and then Tyndale in their English translations of the Bible. It is not always easy to know which is which or even which are we. That is why we are given sage advice by Paul in the Epistle for today about “forbearing one another, and “forgiving one another” and above all, to “put on charity which is,” he says, “the bond of perfectness,” and by Jesus in the Gospel parable to let both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest. It is about leaving the judgement to God. It requires of us a certain toleration.

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Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2018 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2017 can be accessed via this page.

Monday, February 11th
4:35-5:05pm Confirmation/Inquirer’s Class – KES

Tuesday, February 12th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, February 14th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, February 15th
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, February 17th, Septuagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, February 19th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room: No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe and The History of Canada in Ten Maps by Adam Shoalts

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

O LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion; that they who do lean only upon the hope of thy heavenly grace may evermore be defended by thy mighty power; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 3:12-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:24-30

Artwork: Agostino Carracci, The Parable of the Devil Sowing Weeds, 1580. Copper engraving, National Library of France, Paris.

Mine eyes have seen thy salvation

It is a wonderfully complex and complicated biblical scene, and one which perhaps speaks to some of the complexities of our contemporary world. The story read in Chapel this week belongs to the great mid-winter feast sometimes known as Candlemas. Long before we defaulted to the inscrutable prognostications of rodents (Groundhog Day), there was this remarkable feast which signals the transition from the dead of winter to the hopes of spring and life. And it is a double-barrelled feast: the Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin; in short, a feast of Christ and Mary.

All of the Marian festivals are tagged to the feast of Christ; Mary cannot be understood apart from Christ. As Luther beautifully puts it, “Mary does not want us to come to her but to Christ through her.” Paradoxically, it was the motto, too, for the Counter-Reformation Jesuits, Ad Jesum per Mariam. It states a basic principle of Christian orthodoxy. Here the feasts and festivals of Mary and Christ meet and are one.

Candlemas marks the fortieth day after Christmas and signals the transition from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter but only through the Passion of Christ which is also anticipated in this story. Candlemas is really all about the meeting of cultures, of ages, of peoples, of religions and hopes. For the Eastern Christian world it is known as “hypapante”, meaning ‘meeting.’ Here in the Temple in Jerusalem, aged Simeon watches and waits for the Lord’s Christ whom he beholds in the infant Christ carried in the arms of Mary and Joseph. He breaks forth into the Nunc Dimittis, the evening canticle of the Church’s liturgy. “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace/ according to thy word./ for mine eyes have seen thy salvation/ which thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples; / to be a light to lighten the Gentiles/ and to be the glory of thy people Israel.”

Such is the meeting of the Old Covenant and what will become the New Covenant. Here is the meeting of old and young, of man and woman, of God and man. His words speak about Christ but he also points to Christ’s passion and to the role of Mary in human redemption. “This child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” A profound meeting, indeed.

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Why are ye so fearful?

It is a question for us. Ours is the culture of Humbaba. Humbaba? Who or what is Humbaba? He is a figure from the great Sumerian epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Humbaba is said to be the guardian of the forest which might make him the prototype of Smokey the Bear, protecting the forest from fire, or an appropriate mascot for environmentalists opposed to the ravaging of the forest by clear-cutting. But he is also said to be “the evil in the land,”a terrifying force of nature, we might say, and, intriguingly “a battering ram.” He is in many ways indescribable. A seemingly odd collection of images, to be sure, but ones which are largely summed up in the idea of Humbaba as belonging to “the fearful uncertainty in things.”

For the Sumerian world, the world of Mesopotamia, some 5,000 or more years ago, is perhaps more like our world than what we would care to imagine. For despite our naive over-confidence in technology, a fearful uncertainty lies at the heart of our culture. Apart from the technophiles who persist in thinking that technology is the future and will solve all our problems, we are really no longer quite so “assured of certain certainties,” as T.S. Eliot puts it, no longer quite so “impatient to assume the world.” We are,  as he suggests in the Journey of the Magi, “no longer at ease.” That is, I think, a good thing.

The image of Humbaba as “a battering ram” is most suggestive. Humbaba is one of the images of chaos for the Sumerian culture, a culture which like ours produced an amazing array of practical and technological accomplishments, unrivaled in scope until the modern world of industrial and digital progress, with all of its attendant problems. They were the first, historically speaking, though they had their counterparts in the cultures of ancient China, India, and Egypt – all river cultures – to invent things like irrigation, therefore not being defined by the givenness of the land but figuring out how to bring water from the river to arid ground making it fertile; the first to invent sailing, no longer limited to the directional flow of rivers; the first to develop agriculture and the tools associated with it which allowed for settling on the land; the first to build cities with walls and buildings out of bricks, requiring the use of fire to harden clay, and so on and so on. But, perhaps, most importantly and as belonging to these marvels of human ingenuity; they were the first to invent writing.

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