Christ Church

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.

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2019 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2018 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2019
February 9th, 2020
“Go ye also into the vineyard”

The transitions from one season of the Church Year to another and even from one Sunday to the next are intriguing and instructive. They remind us of the necessity of the patterns and rhythms that belong to spiritual life and to the importance of regular worship, week in and week out. That sense of regularity and commitment has often been a challenge and a problem for the institutional churches, particularly in our rural parishes but also in our towns and cities. At issue is any sense of clarity and commitment to what the Church is and teaches. It remains the principal problem with respect to church attendance and, consequently, to the very existence of the institutional church in the form of parishes and dioceses.

For more than fifty years, parishes and dioceses have had to deal not only with that challenge but with a more modern problem, the re-defining of the churches as franchises of a centralized bureaucracy both at the diocesan level and in terms of the national churches. This ‘model’ replaces the idea of doctrinal unity grounded in the teachings embodied in liturgy and worship with conformity, first, to the ever-changing mantras and agendas of technocratic culture, and, secondly, to the excessive  burdens of a form of taxation that support centralized bureaucracies at the expense of the very existence of parishes themselves. Salvation by allotment alone is simply death by parochial suicide. In other words, faith is defined more in terms of belonging to the institutional structures and the finances required to maintain them than to the principles of Faith belonging to our history and theology. Belonging trumps believing.

While recognizing that polity – the order of the Church – is part of Christian identity since the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” is an article of Faith, the fatal subordination of parishes to the unrelenting financial demands of the centralized bureaucracies of the diocesan and national churches results in the unsurprising yet demoralizing collapse of Parishes and, by extension and consequence, to the diocesan and national structures themselves. This faux corporate model imitates the secular corporate culture of big business (i.e. Bishops as CEOs) but the model betrays the corporate life of faith centered on worship and service. And it is, quite simply, unsustainable. Having bled the Parishes to death, it is not surprising that the national church now forecasts that not much will be left of the Anglican Church by 2040. It is, sadly, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Needless to say, at Christ Church we remain committed to the principles of the Faith that belong to our corporate identity as “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ” united “in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” expressed so wonderfully in the Solemn Declaration of 1893 which references clearly the Scriptures, the Creeds, and the “undisputed Ecumenical Councils” as the ground and basis of doctrine and spiritual life. That includes as well our commitment to ‘Bishops’ and to the diocese and the national churches even in their confusions, knowing that “they may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God,” as Article XXI of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion pertinently puts it. In short, we recognize not the infallibility of the Church in its polity and structures but its fallibility, “wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture” (Art. XXI, BCP, p. 707).

As such we have tried to be faithful to what properly belongs to our corporate life without compromising the existence of the Parish to the demands of the diocesan and national churches and their agendas. What the Church is and teaches is not found in the pronouncements of Bishops and Synods both of which are properly subject to those same principles of the Faith that have been received in our Anglican polity.

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Go ye also into the vineyard

In the bleak mid-winter, it must seem strange to be talking about vineyards. Yet, our province increasingly abounds with more and more vineyards, not to mention hops and craft beer! And while this seems to be a new phenomenon, we should remember that over a thousand years ago, the Maritime provinces, as we call them, were known by the Norse explorers as Vinland – Wine Land. The Medieval Labours of the Months tagged to the signs of the Zodiac sculpted on many a medieval cathedral portal or depicted in stained glass windows or painted in Books of Hours recall us to a profound connection to the land, a connection to the seasons and the human labours that attend them. February is often depicted as a time to sit by the fire while March is the time to tend the vines. Yet that labour too will vary across Europe in accord with climatic zones and climate changes. So perhaps the idea of going into the vineyard even in February is not so strange after all.

It is here an image for the spiritual life and for our reading in the vineyard of the text, the Scriptures. Reading nature in the Book of Nature, and reading the Scriptures means learning about God revealed and made known through both. It is not by accident that the Sunday and Daily Office readings begin today with our reading through Genesis. The point is the connection between land and God. In thinking about creation and about the land we are recalled to the Lord of the vineyard who is the Lord of our souls. Isaiah speaks about Israel as the Lord’s vineyard – something of God’s planting from which God seeks the fruit of righteousness and holiness. It is an image of the greatest intimacy; indeed, a love song. “My beloved had a vineyard … He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes … he looked for righteousness, but behold, a cry!” Isaiah explains the image. “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel … he looked for justice, but, behold, bloodshed.”

It is in that context that perhaps we can begin to appreciate the radical meaning of the Gospel for Septuagesima Sunday which inaugurates the season of pre-Lent. In so many ways, it marks the beginning of the struggle to internalize what we have been given to see about Christ in the fullness of his divinity and in the revelation of God’s will for our humanity. The Gospel of the labourers in the vineyard belongs to that task and challenge. It makes the point that the justice of God is far more and far greater than the justice of man and yet belongs to the divine good for our humanity, a greater form of goodness than what belongs to the limits of human justice.

Last Sunday marked the interesting conjunction between Candlemas and the end of the Epiphany season, thus pointing us towards Lent and Easter. Apart from that providential coincidence of considerations, it was also the day that one of the great men of letters, the Franco-American scholar, literary critic, writer and philosopher, George Steiner died. In 1974, he gave the Massey Lectures entitled “Nostalgia for the Absolute.”

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Monday, February 10th
4:45-5:15pm Confirmation/Inquirers’ Class – KES
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, February 11th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, February 13th
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms

Friday, February 14th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, February 16th, Sexagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, February 18th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room
The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Traditions and the Post-Glacial World (2018) by Patrick Nunn, and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) by Peter Frankopan.

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: Domenico Feti, The Parable of the Vineyard, c. 1618. Oil on wood, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

A light to lighten

The transition from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, is an ancient and universal feature of education, itself a kind of enlightenment. In the fearful confusions of our world and day, we forget about its power and necessity. Yet, it is in our face through the readings in Chapel this week. The reading from the Prophet Malachi, proclaiming the idea of the Lord “whom ye seek” coming “suddenly to his temple,” was poignantly juxtaposed with Luke’s account of Christ’s first coming to the Temple forty days after his birth.

In the Christian understanding, it is a double-barrelled feast, a festival of Mary and a feast of Christ, his presentation – a kind of dedication of the first-born to God – and her purification – a kind of thanksgiving to God for childbirth. Presentation and Purification go together. It concerns how we are prepared for truth, for its presence in our lives. A refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap are Malachi’s images about the refining of metal, on the one hand, and of sheep’s wool, on the other. In the face of the truth of God, all that is not and not of God is stripped bare and made pure. Only as purified can we be awakened to the light that enlightens our humanity, the light which is life.

This week marks an intriguing and important transition, at least for the churches of the Western Christian world. It is the transition, the turning point, from Christmas, the festival of light, to Easter, the festival of life. February 2nd is not so much about groundhogs and their shadows, except to say that without light there can be no shadow. Candlemas, as the Presentation of Christ and the Purification of May is commonly known, marks that transition.

The lessons are wonderful and profound, complex and yet simple. We are called to be light but only in the light of Christ, without which we are really only darkness, indeed darkness upon darkness, abyss upon abyss. “In thy light shall we see light,” as the Psalmist puts it, emphasizing at once the idea that human knowing depends upon God’s knowing and our participation in that knowing.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Anskar (801-865), Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, Missionary to Sweden and Denmark, Apostle of the North (source):

Almighty and gracious God,
who didst send thy servant Anskar
to spread the gospel among the Nordic people:
raise up in this our generation, we beseech thee,
messengers of thy good tidings
and heralds of thy kingdom,
that the world may come to know
the immeasurable riches of 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: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Mark 6:7-13

Artwork: Saint Anskar, Trostbrücke, Hamburg.

“Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also”

It is a parenthetical remark, a literary device which, far from being a throw-away line, reveals profoundly the mystery that lies at the heart of Candlemas and wonderfully, it seems to me, to the end of the Epiphany season. Epiphany concentrates our attention on the mystery of God revealed in and through the humanity of Jesus. Mary, it seems, is an essential figure of the Christmas and Epiphany mysteries and beyond. She “kept all the sayings about Jesus and pondered them in her heart,” just as she “kept all these sayings in her heart” of Jesus, just as she calls our attention to what Jesus says and does. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.” And today, with Joseph, she “marvels at those things which were spoken of him,” by Simeon. It is the meaning for us of her fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word.” She represents and embodies the very meaning of our humanity in relation to God. All these stories speak to the idea of being defined by the word of God. Nothing less and nothing more.

To end the Epiphany season with the double-barrelled feast of “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin,” mercifully concentrated for us in the term ‘Candlemas,’ along with the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, is especially wonderful. Why? Because it concentrates the Epiphany theme about the essential divinity of Christ revealed through his humanity and in his engagement with the natural world. It concentrates that for us through the figure of Mary, the very embodiment of what it means to be human. Here is Simeon’s word to her and about her and by extension for us.

The story of the Presentation and the Purification is somewhat complex and yet quite simple. A kind of service of dedication and thanksgiving to God for childbirth, it is about the customs and practices of ancient Judaism with respect to the Law and to the centrality of the Temple as the focus of worship and life and yet extends beyond that setting to something much more universal. It is found in the theme of waiting for the redemption not just of Israel but through Israel of the whole of our humanity. The cost of that is shown in Simeon’s prophecy about Mary, his insight into her character and witness: “yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also.” The reference is to Christ’s passion. “They shall look on him whom they have pierced.” Christ is pierced – crucified – in the body of our humanity as derived from Mary, thus she too is pierced. It signals the intimacy of Mary and Christ, of mother and son. There is no knowledge, no salvation apart from suffering, apart from the forms of our participation in the life of God. Candlemas signals that truth to us and in a way which complements the Gospel for Epiphany IV.

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Monday, February 3rd
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, February 4th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, February 7th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, February 9th, Septuagesima
8:00am Holy Communion – Parish Hall
10:30am Holy Communion – Parish Hall
Followed by Pot-luck Luncheon and Annual Meeting

The collect for today, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin (also traditionally called Candlemas), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we humbly beseech thy Majesty, that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts, by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Malachi 3:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:22-40

Artwork: Vittore Carpaccio, Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, 1510. Tempera on panel, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.