Christ Church

“I came forth from the Father and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father”

Today is known as Rogation Sunday. The days of rogation are days of asking, days of prayer, but with a particular emphasis upon the land. Rogation Sunday reminds us of the redemption of creation itself and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The resurrection is cosmic in scope. Prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity. We make our prayers in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer.

Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. What is overcome is sin, the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by our forgetfulness of our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget about the redemption of creation.

There are, it seems to me, three competing and contrasting contemporary approaches to our thinking about nature; they are the broken fragments of a more philosophical understanding captured in the Scriptures. First, nature is viewed merely as dead stuff, simply there for human manipulation. This assumes the dominance of our humanity over nature and our complete separation from everything else in the created order. It is a distortion of the Biblical idea of human dominance which emphasizes instead God as the Lord, the Dominus, and thus our dominance only as in the image of the Creator with the strong sense of stewardship of the world which is emphatically God’s world. Secondly, there is the view that collapses our humanity into nature altogether, such as the Gaia hypothesis, but in this view we are simply natural and material forces therefore what we do is natural. This makes it utterly impossible to account for human actions that are so destructive of nature. While it rightly reminds us of our creatureliness and thus a relation to everything else in the created order, it denies the distinctive features of the human creation. The first and second account contradict each other: the one asserting the separation from nature, the other denying the distinctive qualities of our humanity in creation.

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Monday, May 22nd
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, May 23rd
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Wednesday, May 24th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, May 25th, Ascension Day
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, May 26th
11:00 Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, May 28th, The Sunday after Ascension Day
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St. John 16:23-33

Artwork: Andrea di Bartolo, Last Supper, c. 1420. Tempera on panel, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna.

KES Cadet Church Parade – Friday, May 19th, 2017
Reflections: “Fear in a Handful of Dust”

1.
T.S. Eliot’s classic poem The Waste Land written in 1922 begins with a section entitled The Burial of the Dead. It includes a particularly poignant image of the disorders and confusions that have largely defined the last one hundred years, from 1917 to 2017. It is, we might say, the long and disturbing twentieth century, a time of broken images in a broken and disordered world.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

2.
From 1917 to 2017 we contemplate a relentless litany of death and destruction almost beyond calculation and certainly without precedent: the devastations of the First World War and the Second World War, the horrendous parade of deaths under the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, & Mao, the bombing of Dresden and the obliteration of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by democratic regimes, the slaughter in Rwanda, the Srebenica massacre, the ravages of civil war in Syria, the famine in the Sudan, and so on and so on. It is hardly a complete list of the horrors of a century and certainly not a pretty picture. It is the picture of our humanity in destructive disarray.

3.
“How long” was the refrain “pinched from Psalm 6” and shouted out by hundreds of people in the closing song ’40’ at U2 concerts. “How long (to sing this song).” As Bono reflects, “I had thought of it as a nagging question – pulling at the hem of an invisible deity whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long…hunger? How long…hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious, hell-bent adolescence has been discarded?

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Dunstan (909-988), Archbishop of Canterbury, Restorer of Monastic Life (source):

Almighty God,
who didst raise up Dunstan
to be a true shepherd of the flock,
a restorer of monastic life
and a faithful counsellor to kings:
grant, we beseech thee, to all pastors
the like gifts of thy Holy Spirit
that they may be true servants of Christ and of all his people;
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: Ecclesiasticus 44:1-7
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:42-47

Artwork: Saint Dunstan Writing, full-page miniature from A Commentary On The Rule Of St. Benedict (1170), British Library, London.

“Receive with meekness the implanted word”

In the secular culture of North America, today is Mother’s Day but in the sacred culture of the Church today is The Fourth Sunday after Easter which presents to us yet again, the Easter mantra of Jesus, “because I go to my Father.” In the face of our contemporary confusions about gender and language, it seems almost a kind of miracle that we still have Mother’s Day and the Easter mantra. But there is a great wisdom and a compelling and substantial truth in these images.

The coming together of the secular and the sacred in this way is suggestive, I think, and illustrates the nature of their engagement. The Resurrection is a redire ad principia that changes how we view everything. It signals the way all things are gathered back to God. Sacred and secular are not simply opposed; the challenge is to understand something of their interrelation, something of the way in which the sacred engages the secular and gathers it to God; something of the way, too, in which the secular reflects the Divine.

The mystery of motherhood belongs, as paradoxical as it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. In short, it, too, belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection in its essential meaning. The Resurrection is radical new birth and radical new life. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Having brought us to birth in this new life, the Risen Christ would also nurture us in this new life, like a mother nursing a child.

The point of the Eastertide Gospels is to teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which has been inaugurated and established through Christ’s death and resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give as mothers give – sacrificially and selflessly – through what God has given us of himself in Jesus Christ – sacrificially and selflessly.

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Monday, May 15th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, May 16th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Ross King’s Leonardo and the Last Supper (2012) and Mary Beard’s The Parthenon (2001, rev. 2010)

Wednesday, May 17th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, May 19th
3:00pm Choral Evening Service with The 254 KES Cadet Corps
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, May 21st, Fifth Sunday after Easter/Rogation Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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

O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:17-21
The Gospel: St. John 16:5-15

Artwork: Paolo Veronese, Last Supper, c. 1585. Oil on canvas, Brera, Milan. (Originally at Church of Santa Sofia, Venice.)

The collect for today, the commemoration of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Nurse, Social Reformer (source):

Life-giving God, who alone hast power over life and death, over health and sickness: Give power, wisdom, and gentleness to those who follow the example of thy servant Florence Nightingale, that they, bearing with them thy Presence, may not only heal but bless, and shine as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of pain and fear; through Jesus Christ, the healer of body and soul, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 58:6-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:31-46

Artwork: Arthur George Walker, Florence Nightingale, Crimean War Memorial, 1910. Waterloo Place, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 August 2004.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Cyril (826-69) and Saint Methodius (c. 815-85), Apostles to the Slavs (source):

O Lord of all,
who gavest to thy servants Cyril and Methodius
the gift of tongues to proclaim the gospel to the Slavic people:
we pray that thy whole Church may be one as thou art one,
that all who confess thy name may honour one another,
and that from east and west all may acknowledge one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
and thee, the God and Father of all;
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: Ephesians 3:1-7
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:15-20

St. Cyril and St. Methodius were brothers born in Thessalonica who went to Constantinople after being ordained priests. (Cyril was baptised Constantine and did not become known as Cyril until late in his life.) Around AD 863, Emperor Michael II and Patriarch Photius sent the brothers as missionaries to Moravia, where they translated into Slavonic the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. With his brother’s help, Cyril created an alphabet that later developed into Cyrillic, thus laying the foundation for Slavic literature.

German missionary bishops in the area celebrated the liturgy in Latin and opposed the brothers’ use of the vernacular. In 867, Cyril and Methodius participated in a debate in Venice over the use of Slavonic liturgy and were soon received with great honour in Rome by Pope Hadrian II, who authorised the use of Slavic tongues in the liturgy.

In 868, Cyril became a monk and entered a monastery in Rome, but died soon afterward and was buried in the church at San Clemente. Shortly after Cyril’s death, Methodius was consecrated archbishop of Sermium and returned to Moravia where he ministered for another fifteen years. He continued the work of translation and evangelisation, while continuing to face opposition from German bishops. Before his death in 885, he and his followers completed translations of the Bible, liturgical services, and collections of canon law.

St. Cyril and St. Methodius are honoured for evangelising the Slavs, organising the Slavic church, and pioneering the celebration of liturgy in the vernacular. For these reasons, in 1980 Pope John Paul II named them, together with St. Benedict, patron saints of all Europe.

Artwork: Anna R. Thorová, SS. Cyril and Methodius, c. 1928. Archdiocesan Museum, Olomouc, Czech Republic.