Christ Church - (Anglican) Windsor, Nova Scotia

4 May 20261 May 2026Prayers and liturgy

Monnica, Matron

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Monnica (c. 331-387), mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo (source):

O Lord, who through spiritual discipline didst strengthen thy servant Monnica to persevere in offering her love and prayers and tears for the conversion of her husband and of Augustine their son: Deepen our devotion, we beseech thee, and use us in accordance with thy will to bring others, even our own kindred, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: 1 Samuel 1:10-11,20
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-17

Artwork: Francesco Botticini, Saint Monica Altarpiece, 1470-75. Tempera on panel, Santo Spirito, Florence.

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3 May 20263 May 2026Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Fourth Sunday after Easter

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Fourth Sunday after Easter.

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3 May 20263 May 2026Sermons

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter

“The Spirit of truth … will guide you into all truth”

The paradox of the last three Sundays of Easter is captured in the recurring refrain, “because I go to my Father.” Jesus prepares the disciples for his going away which is the condition of his being with us in his body, the Church. It is all part of the “farewell discourse” of Jesus in John’s Gospel.

The Gospel engages the world. That is not the same thing as being collapsed into the world or being conformed to the world. Nor is it about making accommodations to the world with respect to the agendas and issues of our day. There have always been such tendencies and temptations. They can be, perhaps, the occasion for the discovery or recovery of the deeper truths of the Gospel. “The Spirit of truth,” it is said in today’s gospel, “will guide you into all truth.”

But what is that truth? Is it simply something which we happen to agree upon today only to change our minds tomorrow? Is the truth simply our acquiescence to the loudest voices drumming their mantras of social and political correctness into our heads? Is truth simply the will of those in power? Is it simply our feelings and opinions? “The Spirit of truth,” as we shall hear at Pentecost, “shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.” Somehow truth is found in the divine relations between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; in short, in the divine life opened to view through the Resurrection and Passion of Jesus Christ and which has its culmination in the Ascension. All truth and wisdom belong to God.

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3 May 20262 May 2026Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, May 2026

Sunday, May 3rd, Fourth Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, May 10th, Fifth Sunday after Easter (Rogation Sunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Monday, May 11th, Rogation Monday
10:00am Holy Communion

Tuesday May 12th, Rogation Tuesday
10:00am Holy Communion
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, May 14th, Ascension Day
7:00pm Holy Communion (foll. by seminar on Consensus Fidelium)

Sunday, May 17th, Sunday after Ascension
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, May 19th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Wild Thought (1962), trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavin (2021) & Adam Shoalts’s The Whisper on the Night Wind: The True History of a Wilderness Legend (2021).

Sunday, May 24th, Pentecost (Whitsunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Baptism & Holy Communion

Monday, May 25th, Monday after Pentecost
10:00am Holy Communion

Tuesday, May 26th, Tuesday after Pentecost / Eve of Ember Wednesday
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, May 31st, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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3 May 202622 April 2026Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday After Easter

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: William Kurelek, When Evening Came (from The Passion of Christ series), 1960-63. Gouache on paper, Niagara Falls Art Gallery, Niagara Falls, Ontario.

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2 May 20261 May 2026Prayers and liturgy

Athanasius, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Athanasius (c. 293-373), Bishop of Alexandria, Theologian, Apologist, Doctor of the Church (source):

Ever-living God,
whose servant Athanasius bore witness
to the mystery of the Word made flesh for our salvation:
give us grace, with all thy saints,
to contend for the truth
and to grow into the likeness 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 Epistle: 2 Corinthians 4:5-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:23-28

Saint Athanasius is one of the most inspirational leaders of the early church. His dogged and uncompromising defence of the full divinity of Jesus Christ against the Arian heresy saved the unity and integrity of the Christian religion and church. He saw that Christ’s deity was foundational to the faith and that Arianism meant the end of Christianity.

Arius and his followers maintained that Christ the Logos was neither eternal nor uncreated, but a subordinate being—the first and finest of God’s creation, but a creature nonetheless. Despite being rejected at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, which Athanasius attended as deacon under the orthodox Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Arianism remained popular and influential in the Eastern church for most of the fourth century.

Athanasius became bishop in 328 at age 33 and spent the next five decades fighting for Nicene orthodoxy. For his troubles, he was deposed and exiled five times, spending a total of seventeen years in flight and hiding, often shielded by the people of Alexandria. Six years of exile were spent in Rome, where he gained the strong support of the Western church, and another six years were spent under the protection of monks in the Egyptian desert.

He was finally able to return to Alexandria in 365 and spent the final years of his life bolstering orthodoxy, which ultimately triumphed at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

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1 May 20261 May 2026Theology

Who Are the Fathers?

Who are the Fathers?

Even within (or despite) the narrowing confines of the “age of political correctness”, the term “the Fathers” (Patres) retains an unmistakable, almost magical hold on our imaginations. It evokes a larger world, a universe of doctrine, at once authoritative and compelling in spite of its strangeness, mystical in its remoteness and yet, like all things mystical, near. Very near.

The Fathers are very much with us. If we are strangers to them, it is only because we have estranged ourselves from the “consensus patrum” so essential to the understanding of the Christian faith; in short, to the “consensus fidelium” of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Fathers, in no small measure, are the definitive voices of the essential catholicism of the Christian faith.

There are as well the mothers, too, such as the Cappadocian women: the grandmother of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, Macrina the Elder, their mother Emelia, their older sister, Macrina the Younger; Gregory of Nazianzen’s mother Nonna, his sister Gorgonia, and Basil’s two younger sisters. These women are understood to have contributed to the spiritual themes of deification and monastic devotion in the Cappadocian Fathers. And there is Anthusa, the mother of John Chrysostom, and, of course, there is Monica, the mother of Augustine who figures prominently in his Confessions.There are other important figures such as St. Perpetua and Felicitas, and the 4^th century Etheria (or Egeria), famous for her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in her account, The Pilgrimage of Etheria. To name but a few.

Scripture and Creeds, Councils and Controversies, Traditions and Polities, Liturgies and Prayers – we cannot think any of these things apart from the Fathers in this broader sense. Without them, we cannot begin to say what the Faith is, let alone think it. They would have us think and to think in their company, the company of the Fathers.

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1 May 20261 May 2026Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of SS Philip and James

“Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me;
or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”

The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. For Anglicans, this is captured in Article XVIII of the Thirty-nine Articles; the only anathema in all of the articles concerns the denial of the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ. It is only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ that Christians can and must engage the religions of the world as well as the forms of contemporary culture. And sometimes the pattern of the Sanctorale, especially of the Apostles of the Christian Church, coincide with the themes of the season and illustrate certain features of the Apostolic Faith and teaching.

The Feast of St. Philip and St. James is one of three apostolic pairings in the cycle of the Church Year and falls within Eastertide. The other pairing is found in the late Fall with the joint feast of St. Simon and St. Jude which completes the cycle of the twelve apostles and usher us into the omni gatherum feast and festival of All Saints. At the end of June there is another pairing though of a somewhat different provenance in The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. The readings for all these feasts in the Offices is instructive about the Scriptural witness to their lives, sometimes simply through the mention of their names. The readings for Philip and James canvass a number of important texts about their witness, particularly the witness of Philip. But note that the Epistle and Gospel for their feast complement the Eastertide readings from the Gospel of John and on the next two Sundays, the Epistle of James. The Gospel reading is the beginning of Jesus’s farewell discourse that illustrates the radical meaning of Christ’s going from us in going to the Father and what that means for his abiding in us and us in him. The Epistle reading from James exhorts us to seek the wisdom of God and not to waver in our faith and understanding. James also will emphasize the importance of the works of faith.

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1 May 202625 April 2026Prayers and liturgy

Saint Philip and Saint James the Apostles

The Collect for today, The Feast of Saint Philip and Saint James the Apostles, with Saint James the Brother of the Lord, Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us perfectly to know thy Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life; that, following the steps of thy holy Apostles, Saint Philip and Saint James, we may stedfastly walk in the way that leadeth to eternal life; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Additional Collect, of the Brethren of the Lord:

O HEAVENLY Father, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning: We bless thy holy Name for the witness of James and Jude, the kinsmen of the Lord, and pray that we may be made true members of thy heavenly family; through him who willed to be the firstborn among many brethren, even the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:1-12
The Gospel: St. John 14:1-14

Artwork: Michael Leopold Willmann, The Martyrdom of SS Philip and James, late 17th-century. Oil on canvas, National Gallery Prague.