St. Barnabas the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Barnabas the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD God Almighty, who didst endue thy holy Apostle Barnabas with singular gifts of the Holy Spirit: Leave us not, we beseech thee, destitute of thy manifold gifts, nor yet of grace to use them alway to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 11:22-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:12-16

Cesare Mariani, Paul and Barnabas Taken for GodsArtwork: Cesare Mariani, Paul and Barnabas Taken for Gods, c. 1857-60. Oil on canvas, Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome.

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Columba, Abbott of Iona

The collect for today, the commemoration of Columba (c. 521-597) Abbot of Iona, Missionary (source):

St. ColumbaAlmighty God,
who didst fill the heart of Columba
with the joy of the Holy Spirit,
and with deep love for those in his care:
grant to thy pilgrim people grace to follow him,
strong in faith, sustained by hope,
and made one in the love that binds us to thee;
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 Corinthians 3:11-23
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:17-20

Artwork: The St. Columba stained glass was made by the firm of James Powell and Sons, Middlesex, England, and installed in the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, St John’s, Newfoundland, in 1951. Photograph taken by admin, 7 September 2009.

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Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

“He who loveth God love his brother also”

The Epistle and Gospel complement one another and illustrate the ethical understanding of God as Trinity. Last Sunday celebrated what God reveals about himself and about our humanity in Christ. It is not some abstract speculation or a mathematical puzzle, a kind of mystical Rubik’s cube, as it were. God is love: the mutually indwelling love of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; consubstantial and co-eternal. That divine love is the mystery of God revealed as Trinity which, in turn, speaks to the mystery of our humanity. Mystery does not mean what is hidden but rather what is revealed. What is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures through Word and Spirit is the essential life of God in himself and for us and in us. That  demands our thinking upon what is revealed and our acting upon it.  In short, it speaks to the truth and dignity of our humanity as persons made in the image of God.

It is really all about Heaven and Hell seen in the contrast between Lazarus and Dives in today’s Gospel parable. It highlights the question about acting upon what has been revealed. Dives means the rich man. What is the point of the parable? Simply what is shown in the Epistle about the necessary connection and interplay between the love of God and the love of neighbour. They are inseparable. Yet the parable illustrates their fatal separation: a great gulf is fixed between Lazarus in “the bosom of Abraham,” an image of Heaven, and Dives, imaged as being tormented in Hell.

Trinity Sunday is the revelation of God as essential love and life, the love and life which is revealed and made known as essential for our humanity. Without love, we are nothing. “God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” It is as simple as that and yet so profound. “We love God because he first loved us.” But that love is meant to live in us and belongs to the true end and purpose of our lives as human beings, namely, to love as God loves. Love is motion towards another but if we neglect or ignore one another then love is not alive and moving in us. That is the meaning of Hell, the complete and utter absence of love for one another and for God who is love. Hell is a denial of the ethical, an absence of the good.

The Athanasian Creed shows the intimate and necessary connection between the revelation of God as Trinity and of theIncarnation of Christ which makes known what belongs to the radical truth of our humanity. Who we are is found in God, in God’s eternal knowing and loving of our humanity. In other words, our being known in God’s knowing of us. But that extends to our knowing and loving of one another; in short, the principle of the ethical about what is good to think and be and what is right to do that necessarily concerns our being and care for one another. All of this turns on what it means to be a person.

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Month at a Glance, June 2026

Tuesday, June 9th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, June 10th, Eve of St. Barnabas
7:00pm Holy Communion

Thursday, June 11th
1:00pm Burial & Committal of Barry King, Shelburne, Nova Scotia

Saturday, June 13th
11:00am Encaenia Service KES Chapel

Sunday, June 14th, Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 21st, Third Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Wednesday, June 24th, Nativity of John the Baptist
10:00am Holy Communion (celebrant: Fr. Todd Meaker)

Fr. David & Marilyn away at the Atlantic Theological Conference, Charlottetown, PEI, ‘The Sublime Sermons of Anglican Poet-Preachers’, Tues., June 23rd to Fri., June 26th (giving a paper on Wednesday, June 24th)

Sunday, June 28th, Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
(Followed by a time of fellowship & refreshment – Parish Hall)

Monday, June 29th, St. Peter & St. Paul
10:00am Holy Communion

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The First Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, commonly called The First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:19-31

Codex Aureus Epternacensis, Lazarus and the Rich ManArtwork: Codex Aureus Epternacensis (Manuscript of the Golden Gospels), Lazarus and the Rich Man, c. 1035-40. Illumination, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

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Boniface, Missionary, Bishop and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Boniface (Wynfrith) of Crediton (c. 675 – 754), Bishop, Apostle to the Germans, Patron Saint of Germany, Martyr (source):

God our redeemer,
who didst call thy servant Boniface
to preach the gospel among the German people
and to build up thy Church in holiness:
grant that we may hold fast in our hearts
that faith which he taught with his words
and sealed with his blood,
and profess it in lives dedicated to 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 Lesson: Acts 20:17-28
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-53

Heinrich Maria von Hess, St. Boniface Fells Sacred OakArtwork: Heinrich Maria von Hess, St. Boniface Fells Sacred Oak, 1833-34. Abbey of St. Boniface, Munich. (Original fresco destroyed in World War II.)

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Sermon for the Feast of Corpus Christi

“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and
giveth life unto the world.”

In the spring of 1983, Marilyn and I were in Florence for the Feast of Corpus Christi. We processed around the cathedral with the Sacrament, singing Martin Luther’s great hymn ‘Ein’ Feste Burg’, before attending Mass. More than just an ecumenical moment it conveyed a deeper sense of the larger meaning of the catholic faith.

The Feast of Corpus Christi goes back to the 13th century and became ‘universal’, at least in the West, in the 14thcentury. Through the influence of “Blessed Juliana of Liege,” at whose insistence the institution of the feast is attributed (c. 1240), and along with the Eucharistic devotions of Thomas Aquinas, which have become associated with the Feast, the celebration of Corpus Christi belongs to a Western Christian interest in the question about our participation in the saving work of Christ.

The Feast emerges out of the cauldron of controversy about the meaning of the Holy Eucharist as the central act of Christian worship. Celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, it relates back to the “Institution of the Holy Eucharist” on Maundy Thursday but without the overwhelming concentration on the Passion during Holy Week. In this Feast, the institution of the Holy Eucharist is looked at from the standpoint of our being continually sustained by the fruits of his Passion through the divinely ordained means of our participation by grace in the divine life itself.

The Reformers did not retain this feast in their various calendars of commemoration. Why? Because, in my view, at the time of the Reformation the Feast had become associated with a particular theory about the action of the Mass, namely, “transubstantiation,” albeit in a form hardly recognizable as deriving from Thomas. Cranmer and the subsequent English Reformers were countering what Fr. Crouse called “a superstitiously materialistic notion of the Presence, popularly associated … with a debased idea of transubstantiation”, and one which undermined the Chalcedonian sacramentalism to which classical Anglicans were committed as constituting an important aspect of essential catholicism.

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Justin Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Justin (c. 100 – 165), Philosopher, Apologist, Martyr at Rome (source):

Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, St. Justin MartyrO God our redeemer,
who through the folly of the cross
didst teach thy martyr Justin
the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ:
free us, we beseech thee, from every kind of error,
that we, like him, may be firmly grounded in the faith,
and make thy name known to all peoples;
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 Corinthians 1:18-30
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:1-8

Artwork: Saint Justin Martyr, stained glass, Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, Detroit.

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