Christ Church

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

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 5:25-6:5
The Gospel: St. Luke 17:11-19

Artwork: Codex Aureus Epternacensis, Cleansing of the Ten Lepers, c. 1035-40. Illumination, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Ninian (c. 360 – c. 432), Bishop of Galloway, Apostle to the Picts (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who didst call thy servant Ninian to preach the gospel
to the people of northern Britain:
raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land,
heralds and evangelists of thy kingdom,
that thy Church may make known the immeasurable riches
of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 49:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:16-20

Ninian was the first apostle of Christianity in Scotland. Born in Cumbria to Christian parents, he went to Rome for his education. After being ordained a priest and then a bishop, Ninian was commissioned by Pope Siricus to return to Britain to preach the Christian faith.

Tradition holds that Ninian’s mission to Scotland began in 397, when he landed at Whithorn on Solway Firth. The stone church he built there was known as Candida Casa (“White House”). Recent archaeological excavations in that area have found white masonry from what could be an ancient church.

Saint Ninian’s ministry was centred in the Whithorn and Galloway areas of Scotland, but he is also remembered for bringing the gospel to the “southern Picts”—people living in the areas now known as Perth, Fife, Stirling, Dundee, and Forfar.

As early as the 7th century, Christians were making pilgrimages to St. Ninian’s shrine. By the 12th century, a large cathedral had been built at Whithorn, but it fell into ruins after the Reformation. Yet today, pilgrims still travel there to visit St Ninian’s Cave, where the saint would go when he needed to pray in solitude.

During his 2010 visit to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Scotland on Saint Ninian’s Day.

Saint Ninian’s Cathedral, Antigonish, Nova Scotia (“New Scotland”), is the Episcopal Seat for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Antigonish. This prayer is posted at the Cathedral website:

Lord our God, You brought to Scotland the faith of the apostles through the teaching of St. Ninian. Grant that we, who have received from him the light of your truth, may remain strong in faith. We ask this through our Lord, Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

Artwork: Saint Ninian, stained glass, Saint Margaret’s Chapel, Edinburgh Castle. Photograph taken by admin, 24 July 2004.

“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”

Our Prayer Book provides a Collect for Holy Cross Day and appoints the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday for its commemoration. There is something quite wonderful and powerful about that sensibility. We are being recalled through a non-biblical feast based upon a set of post-biblical events to what is central and essential to the Christian faith. We are simply recalled to the centrality of the Cross.

Why? The Cross is at once the meeting place of lovers and the betrayal of all our loves. We crucify Christ. The Cross confronts us with the failings and failures of our humanity, of the disorder and disarray of our hearts and minds that lead to devastation and destruction in every age. But the Cross confronts us with the greatest betrayal – our betrayal of God and his friendship with us. To be recalled to the Cross is to be recalled to the Passion of Christ – to what he wills to endure for us. It shows us the divine love which is greater than all and every human love and which overcomes all our sin and folly. Such is the power of forgiveness.

Forgiveness. The Cross is the sign of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the reconciling love that makes all things new out of the violent nothingness of our sins. Forgiveness is made visible and audible on the cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christ carries us in our ignorant folly and violence into the hands of his Father, into the reconciling love which is his Passion and Death. Such is the radical meaning of the Cross. It is then in turn required of us to live and act in the same way. What is that way? It is the way signaled in the Collect. God’s grace is given so that we take up the Cross and follow Christ through life and death.

The Cross speaks to us about death and resurrection and about the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice is about Christ’s life in us. Another lives in me and I in him and only so can we live for one another. It means a dying to ourselves and living to God and one another in the body of Christ, the Church.

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The collect for today, Holy Cross Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O BLESSED Saviour, who by thy cross and passion hast given life unto the world: Grant that we thy servants may be given grace to take up the cross and follow thee through life and death; whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit we worship and glorify, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

With the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday:
The Epistle: Hebrews 9:11-15
The Gospel: St. Matthew 20:20-28

Artwork: St. Martin’s Cross (east face), 8th century, Iona, Scotland. Photograph taken by admin, 30 July 2004.

And God said … and God saw that it was good

It is a recurring refrain that frames the first Chapter of The Book of Genesis and opens us out to the mystery of existence. As Meister Eckhart (early 14^th c.), following a long tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of things, notes, “creation is the conferring of existence”, following the pagan neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus’ proposition that “all beings” – every that exists – “proceeds from one First Cause” (5^th c.). Heady stuff but that is really what the account of creation in the first Chapter of Genesis is really all about. It is about the intellectual principle upon which all knowing and being depend. Wow.

How do we think nature, and, indeed, how can we think at all? Is there only one way to think the natural world and, by extension, our place within it? Is ‘modern science’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think nature? Is ‘religion’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think about reality? It would be a huge mistake, I think, to suppose that modern science negates religion or that religion negates modern science; in short, that there is only one way to think nature, only one way to think period. In a way, Genesis opens us out to the very assumptions that underlie the possibilities of our thinking and knowing anything. The Genesis account understood philosophically identifies a principle essential to our activity as students and learners. We can only think and come to know anything if things are in principle knowable.

We begin with God, with what can be called an intellectual principle. Everything is in God and comes from God. The great Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, writing in the time of Jesus, and drawing directly upon Plato and Aristotle, emphasizes “that in all existing things there must be an active cause … and that the active cause is the intellect of the universe,” echoing Plato’s idea of a world soul. Creation is in the mind of God first, as it were, and only then made perceptible to the senses; the sensible world as modeled upon the intelligible idea. The world has its origins in “that good which is founded in truth”. For the metaphysical traditions primacy is given to formal cause in order to explain the ‘what-it-is’ of things, not material, efficient, or even final cause. As Boethius (6^th c) expresses it, God “bear[s] the beauteous world in [his] mind and form[s] it to be like that image.”

Genesis 1 is not science however much it belongs to the possibilities of science, both ancient and modern. It is a poetic and philosophical way of thinking. It presents us with an ordering intellectual principle. “When creation was begun, when God spake and it was done,” as the hymn we sang on Monday and Tuesday puts it. God speaks creation into being. But “unlike us,” as Eckhart notes, “God’s speaking is his making and also unlike us his speaking is the cause of the entire work and its parts.” After all, we too only come after.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Cyprian (c. 200-258), Bishop of Carthage, Martyr (source):

O holy God,
who didst bring Cyprian to faith in Christ
and didst make him a bishop in the Church,
crowning his witness with a martyr’s death:
grant that, following his example,
we may love the Church and her doctrine,
find thy forgiveness within her fellowship,
and so come to share the heavenly banquet
which thou hast prepared for us;
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 St. Peter 5:1-4,10-11
The Gospel: St. John 10:11-16

Artwork: Sir Ninian Comper, Saint Cyprian, 1903, St. Cyprian Clarence Gate, London.

The collect for today, the commemoration of Edmund J. Peck (1850-1924), Priest, Missionary to the Inuit, Translator (source):

God of our salvation, whose servant Edmund James Peck made the testimony of the Spirit his own and gladly proclaimed the riches of Christ among the Inuit people, give the joy of your gospel to us also, that we may exalt you in the congregation of all peoples and praise you in the abundance of your mercies; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:16-20

“And when he saw him, he had compassion on him”

We know it as the parable of the Good Samaritan. A familiar story, a familiar concept, even in our secular world, it suggests the powerful influence of religion on culture and society. We want to think that we can and should do good towards our neighbours, towards our fellow human beings. But we know, too, that what we want to do and even what we do is never fully complete, never fully enough. We even know at times that our efforts to do good have precisely the opposite effect. We make things worse.

Such reflections do not take away from the power and the truth of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Quite the opposite. They help to make us think more deeply about the Good and to realize that the power of doing good does not simply come from us. It is really altogether about God in us, not as if we are merely ‘passive vessels,’ but as moving our hearts and minds as active agents towards certain actions that arise from a certain kind of thinking. In a way, the parable is more about a certain attitude of mind that is needed in us and which is illustrated so beautifully, so powerfully, and so poignantly in the parable which Jesus tells.

What we see is the radical nature of love itself, the love that is God himself and God in us without which we are not lovely and without which we can only ‘look and pass by’ those in need. The divine love moving in us allows us in the journey of our own lives to come near to those in distress. It allows to see, to have compassion and to act. But it does not allow us the presumption to think that it is all our doing or that we have all the answers to the world’s problems. The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us about what I would call, the humility of compassion.

What that entails is the realization that we ourselves are like that “certain man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead”. And we ourselves are like that “certain Priest” and “Levite” who “look and pass by”. But we are also to be like that “certain Samaritan” who, “as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.” In other words, we ourselves are in this parable in every way both in our intentions and actions and our sufferings and failings. Yet we are called to be compassionate towards one another, both the stranger and the friend, because of the divine compassion which has been bestowed upon us. That is the deeper meaning of the parable, I think, and the only way in which we can understand it in relation to the questions which precede it.

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Monday, September 11th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, September 12th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Wednesday, September 13th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, September 14th, Holy Cross Day
2:00pm Service at Windsor Elms
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, September 15th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, September 17th, Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, September 19th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning and Donna Leon, Earthly Remains.

Saturday, September 30th
7:00-9:00pm Newfoundland and Country Evening of Musical Entertainment – Parish Hall

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

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service: Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 5:16-24
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:25-37

Artwork: Théodule-Augustin Ridot, The Good Samaritan, before 1870. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau, Pau, France.