Christ Church

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

In the beginning God … In the beginning was the Word

The tradition of our first two Chapel services at the beginning of term is for the head boy and head girl to read two short Scripture lessons: one from Genesis (Gen. 1.1-5) and the other from The Gospel according to St. John (John 1.1-5). They are powerful and significant readings about which it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Chapel would not be able to contain all of the books that comment upon, reflect, and allude to these two passages, books that embrace a large range of cultures and intellectual disciplines over a vast array of ages.

How to think about the beginning of term? In Chapel it is about recalling how there is a beginning for all of us because there is something there before us, a beginning that is ultimately about the principles of education that guide and direct the School. Begin with God, the beginning without beginning, and everything else comes after, especially the things that belong to our intellectual and spiritual life and which inform all our other doings. Chapel is an integral part of the School and speaks to the idea of the whole School and to the wholeness of individuals.

The two readings in concert are enormously influential and central to a large number of discourses both within and between different cultures and religions. The idea of creation and of the Creator as an intellectual principle is common to Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, for instance, and all three in a creative relation to Greek philosophy. ‘He speaks and it is,’ as the Qur’an suggests, showing how it is influenced by both texts. The continuing engagement between these texts and the works of Plato and Aristotle all contribute to the idea of the cosmos as intelligible and to the rich tradition of ethical and philosophical reflection on how we think nature and ultimately ourselves.

These two passages also belong to the early modern developments in natural philosophy, even to the works of Newton and Darwin, and to all manner of subsequent debates. They have their counterparts, too, in the works of Hinduism and Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. They belong to our constant reflection on what it means to think the natural world; in short, to think the world as being thinkable.

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“Be not anxious”

What could be more anxious making than talking about being anxious? Anxiety R’ us! Big time. And therein lies the problem. W.H. Auden in 1947 wrote a long and largely unread prose poem entitled “The Age of Anxiety” which provided a convenient image for our world and day, itself a culture of anxiety. The title more than the work itself has had considerable influence in capturing our uncertainties. To be fair, it is not easy to say what exactly Auden meant by anxiety. Yet it has become the default word for so many features of our contemporary culture. His solution, near as one might be able to discern, seems to be the idea of mutual sympathy or mutual love for one another even towards those who are really strangers. That is, I think, powerfully suggestive along with the ideas in the poem about the forms of modern self-consciousness which add to the anxiety, on the one hand, and to the antidote of sympathy, on the other hand, through a kind of toleration – not wanting to disappoint and as such being willing to go along with others.

While there may be something to this not wanting to disappoint others and simply being willing to go along in a kind of sympathy for one another, even the beginnings of a kind of care for one another, it seems to me to fall far short of the antidote to anxiety which today’s Gospel story presents. I have on occasion called it ‘the Gospel of Anxiety’ even though it is really the antidote to anxiety but in ways which are deeply challenging to our preoccupations and concerns.

The words anxious and anxiety are relatively modern, appearing first in English via the German in the 17th century and really only taking flight in the late 19th century before becoming rooted in our lexical imaginations in the 20th and going viral, as things only can, in the 21st century. Tyndale’s 16th century English translation of today’s Gospel does not use the word anxious or anxiety. He has rendered Jesus’ words as “be not careful”, an idea which is also found in Luke’s story about Martha and Mary where, as Tyndale puts it, Jesus says, “Martha Martha thou carest and arte troubled about many things”. Here  his “be not careful” was changed in the King James Version of 1611 to “take no thought,” while it more or less keeps to Tyndale in the passage from Luke with “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.” It was only in the late 19th and 20th centuries, that the shift in today’s Gospel was made to “be not anxious” as in the Revised Version as well as other translations, only to be changed, yet again in the New Revised Versions to “do not worry.” Interesting shifts, to say the least.

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Monday, September 10th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, September 11th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Wednesday, September 12th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, September 13th, Eve of Holy Cross
7:00pm Holy Communion

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

Sunday, September 16th, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, September 18th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room
Bookshops: A Reader’s History by Jorge Carrion, and The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures by Charlie English.

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

KEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:11-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-34

Artwork: Cosimo Rosselli, Sermon on the Mount, 1481-82. Fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. (On the right Christ is shown healing a leper.)

The collect for today, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD Most High, who didst endue with wonderful virtue and grace the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Lord: Grant that we, who now call her blessed, may be made very members of the heavenly family of him who was pleased to be called the first-born among many brethren; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:12-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:39-49

Artwork: Quentin Matsys, Virgin and Child, c. 1495. Oil on oak, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photograph taken by admin, 14 October 2014.

The collect for bishops and other pastors, in commemoration of Robert Wolfall, Priest (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who didst call thy servant Robert Wolfall to proclaim thy glory
by a life of prayer and the zeal of a true pastor:
keep constant in faith the leaders of thy Church
and so bless thy people through their ministry
that the Church may grow into the full stature
of 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 Rev. Robert Wolfall was vicar of the Parish of West Harptree, Somerset, when he became chaplain to Martin Frobisher’s third Arctic expedition to Canada. On 3 September 1578, Rev’d Wolfall presided at the first recorded Holy Eucharist in what is now Canadian territory: Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island.

The service was held on the ship Anne Francis, whose captain later wrote:

Master Wolfall …. preached a godly sermon, which being ended he celebrated also a Communion upon the land …. The celebration of the divine mystery was the first sign, seal and confirmation of Christ’s name, death and passion ever known in these quarters. Master Wolfall made sermons and celebrated the Communion at sundry other times in several and sundry ships, because the whole company could never meet together at anyone place.

A few weeks later, Frobisher abandoned the hope of establishing a permanent settlement on Baffin Island and the expeditionary fleet returned home to England. Anglicans would not celebrate Holy Communion in Canada again for almost a century.

A commemoration of Robert Wolfall, written by Dr. William Cooke, Vice-President of the Toronto branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, is posted here. (See page 5 of pdf document.)

The Canadian Encyclopedia entry on “The First Thanksgiving in North America” is posted here.

A plaque commemorating Rev. Wolfall was recently placed on the inside wall of his parish church. The photograph was kindly sent to us by former Royal Navy Chaplain The Rev. Anthony Marks.

“And one … turned back … giving him thanks”

There were ten that cried out for mercy. There were ten that were healed. Yet only “one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Luke pointedly adds, “And he was a Samaritan.”“Where,”Jesus asks, rhetorically and ironically, “are the nine?”

Certain Gospel stories stand out and bear repeating even in the course of the year. They have a certain resonance. This is one such Gospel. Read today in the midst of the Trinity Season and in the beginnings of the turn to the Fall, it is also appointed for Thanksgiving Day; not for Harvest Thanksgiving but for our national thanksgiving day. As such it reminds us of the larger spiritual dimensions of giving thanks. And so, more significantly, it recalls us to the mystery of thanksgiving. It is, we might say, the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel which highlights the spiritual necessity of thanksgiving as altogether critical for our understanding of human redemption.

Thanksgiving is our highest freedom and yet it is nothing less than the grace of God active and alive in us. To give thanks requires our recognition of others and of God beyond ourselves. The counter to our selfish tendency to take everything and one another for granted, thanksgiving recognises the profound gift of life which God alone has given us in and through one another. It belongs to our life and walk in the Spirit, to our fulfilling the law of Christ, to our bearing one another’s burdens as well as our own.

You are alive. I know, we ‘all’ got problems. “All God’s children got troubles” as the old spiritual puts it. But we are alive only if we are alive to God, the author of life and of all good things. Thanksgiving is the realization in us of God’s surpassing goodness signalled in our recognition of God as life and the gift of life in each and every one of us. That is a kind of radical mindfulness – of God, of ourselves, of our world, and of one another. And all as gifts given – in short, grace. It is not about what we think we are owed. It is about freely giving thanks for the simple truth that we are, that we exist and that existence is itself an unconditional good. Such is the wonder of the God-given reality of creation and of our lives within it despite all our complaints and concerns. We can only have those, after all, because we exist. I know. There may be times when you think that you want to die – a very different matter from causing death – but wanting to die presupposes that you are alive and know yourself to be alive. From this standpoint, even the devil is good because he exists even if he exists in contradiction with the very principle of his being and truth, God. This highlights even more the significance of thanksgiving.

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Wednesday, September 6th
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms

Sunday, September 9th, Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion

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: Christ Healing Ten Lepers, c. 1350. Fresco, Visoki Decani Monastery, Kosovo.