Christ Church

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

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

O LORD, who never failest to help and govern them whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love: Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 3:13-24
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:15-24

Artwork: Cosmas Damian Asam, See, the meal is ready, come!, 1720. Fresco, Abbey Church, Aldersbach, Lower Bavaria.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Columba (c. 521-597), Abbot of Iona, Missionary (source):

Almighty God,
who didst fill the heart of Columba
with the joy of the Holy Spirit,
and with deep love for those in his care:
grant to thy pilgrim people grace to follow him,
strong in faith, sustained by hope,
and made one in the love that binds us to thee;
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: 1 Corinthians 3:11-23
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:17-20

Artwork: St. Columba, stained glass, St. Augustine Kilburn, London. Photograph taken by admin, 26 September 2015.

Take with you words

Last Chapel services. Yay, God! To be sure, but such endings recall us to a kind of reflection about how Chapel matters and in what ways. At the very least, we confront the questions that never go away, the questions that stay with us. As the philosopher Heraclitus notes, “the way up and the way down are the same.”It is really all about our being with the principle of accountability and truth both in our movement towards such a principle and our going from it. Such is the power of ideas. They matter. Such encounters with the ideas that matter belongs to an education that is worthy of the name, education. We confront things that are bigger than ourselves that challenge our thoughts and actions.

That ideas actually matter belongs to the subversive nature of an education which challenges all of the attempts to control and confine, to conform and comply on the part of the various authorities of our world and day. Instead, we are opened out to the riches of a poetic and philosophical literature that belong to the religions of the world philosophically considered and that speak to the freedom and dignity of our humanity.

Times of ending are poignant and powerful. The poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox reminds us that “it isn’t the bold things … that count the most in the summing up of life at the end of the day./ But it is the doing of old things, / Small acts that are just and right; /And doing them over and over again, no matter what others say; / …. Of walking with feet faith-shod; /And loving, loving through all, no matter how things go / wrong.” And so it has been with Chapel.

Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Jewish Scriptures. His story is itself an image of his understanding of God in relation to Israel. It is about the powerful idea of forgiveness, that there is something more than our follies and foolishnesses, more than our failings and shortcomings. There is the transforming love of God who loves us in spite of our unloveliness. In being open to such ideas, we become learners, discerning and understanding something of what is shown to us.

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The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Boniface (Wynfrith) of Crediton (c. 675 – 754), Bishop, Apostle to the Germans, Patron Saint of Germany, Martyr (source):

O God our redeemer,
who didst call thy servant Boniface
to preach the gospel among the German people
and to build up thy Church in holiness:
grant that we may hold fast in our hearts
that faith which he taught with his words
and sealed with his blood,
and profess it in lives dedicated to thy Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Acts 20:17-28
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-53

Artwork: Cornelis Bloemaert, Saint Boniface, c. 1630. Engraving, Utrecht Archives.

“Herein is love”

“Our life and our death are with our neighbour,” says St. Anthony the Great, according to Athanasius’ biography of the Desert Father. Anthony was an important figure in the development of Christian monasticism. Heaven and Hell, we might also say, are with with one another. Today we are given a vision of both in the Epistle and Gospel. Heaven is the love of God in us in our love for one another and Hell is our indifference to one another and thus to God.

How we think about death and dying says everything about how we think and deal with one another. The great pageant of literature and philosophy which presents us with the images of the after-life are entirely about life itself and about how we think and live with one another. That is really the main point about such great works of literature like The Epic of Gilgamesh in Enkidu’s vision of the afterworld as the house of dust, Homer’s Odyssey in Odysseus’ journey to Hades to speak with Teiresias, Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic, Vergil’s sixth book of the Aeneid, St. John the Divine’s Revelation, Dante’s great summa, The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faustus, the novels of Charles Williams, and many, many more. They are really profound teachings about our humanity in its relation to God and to one another. Such teachings are wonderfully concentrated for us in John’s little treatise on love in his First Epistle and in Luke’s profoundly poignant Gospel story about Dives, the rich man, and Lazarus, the poor man.

That there is a kind of role reversal in the Gospel highlights the significance of our thoughts and actions towards one another. As we saw last Sunday with Nicodemus, we have to learn to think upward, to think into the things of God. The rich man utterly ignores Lazarus lying “at his gate full of sores,” hungry and destitute, bereft of human company. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores,” the dogs who show the compassion and charity that humans ought to show to one another. In his indifference to Lazarus, the Gospel suggests, there is equally an utter indifference to God, to the truth of our lives as lived with God and with one another. That indifference is nothing short of Hell. The Gospel highlights the “great gulf fixed” between heaven and hell. In our refusals to love one another, we separate ourselves from the love of God, the love that John saysis God. Hell is our refusal to let that love live in us.

These lessons follow directly and rightly upon the celebration of the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of God as love: not just our love for God, not just God’s love for us, but God as love. In the Epistle we have the familiar mantra of the Trinity Season. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as found in our liturgy as one of the sentences for the Offices. The King James Version uses “dwelleth” for “abideth.” Without that love, we are nothing. We are Hell.

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Monday June 4th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, June 5th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

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

Thursday, June 7th
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms

Friday, June 8th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

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

The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, commonly called The First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:19-31

Artwork: Fyodor Bronnikov, Lazarus at the Rich Man’s Gate, 1884, Oil on canvas.

That you may know

“How can these things be?” Nicodemus’ question to Jesus is our question too, a question that goes to our lives as students and teachers in this School. In the face of the wonders of learning we might ask with a kind of wonder, “how can these things be?” It might be quantum mechanics, calculus, a sonnet of John Donne, an event in history, a moment of athletic excellence, a quality of character on parade in cadets or on the stage, a lesson read in Chapel, a rare but quiet moment in the stillness of a sunset. All things that might, just might, awaken wonder in us. But do they always?

The story of Nicodemus read in Chapel this week along with a story about the power of forgiveness all speak to this time of endings as we approach the end of the School year. Nicodemus journeys to Jesus by night and is perplexed by Jesus’s words, especially the idea that “you must be born again.” Is that to be understood literally, he wonders? That is the context of his question, “how can these things be?” It brings out an integral feature of education. We learn, I hope, to think not simply literally but metaphorically, to think more intellectually, we might say.

We use the metaphor of life and education as a journey. But what kind of journey? That is the question before us at this time of endings. What has been the nature of your journey throughout this past year? Nicodemus, it seems, comes to learn something from Jesus, “a man come from God,” he says. He wants to learn, we might say. He is committed to the journey of learning. Can that be said of you as you come to the end of the year?

The passage from John’s Gospel ends with a reference from the Book of Numbers. Jesus says, “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” The lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness refers to the stories of the People of Israel journeying in the wilderness. It was meant to be a time of learning, learning what it means to be the People of God, learning what it means to be defined by the Law given by God through Moses. In that journey, the People of Israel are provided with all that they need. Delivered by God from slavery in Egypt they are sustained by God, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of light by night” and fed in their wilderness wanderings “manna from on high.” They are provided for by God. And their response?

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The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Justin (c. 100 – 165), Philosopher, Apologist, Martyr at Rome (source):

O God our redeemer,
who through the folly of the cross
didst teach thy martyr Justin
the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ:
free us, we beseech thee, from every kind of error,
that we, like him, may be firmly grounded in the faith,
and make thy name known to all peoples;
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: 1 Corinthians 1:18-30
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:1-8