Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Harvest Thanksgiving/Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity.
There is nothing more profoundly spiritual than the activity of giving thanks. It is not just a matter of good manners. It is the recognition of something other than ourselves. It recognizes that we are not complete in and of ourselves. Others have labored and we have entered into their labour and even into the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour. Yet human labour depends upon the order and the intelligible character of a natural world which we did not make, a natural world, too, it must be said, which cannot account for itself; hence creation which implies a relation to a Creator.
Thankfulness, in the spiritual sense of this rich and vital word, is a check upon the arrogance and the presumption of all of us, atheists and believers alike. That we can make a mess of the great truths of religion, not to mention the natural world and our lives, is part of the religious story, albeit in the different forms belonging to the integrity of each of the world’s great religions. Atheism is a form of denial of the truth about the phenomenal and intelligible world in which we find ourselves. Sin, for believers, is similarly a denial; a denial of the truth with which we identify rather than reject. We confront this truth continually and constantly in the liturgy where we are called to confess, knowing precisely our shortcomings and failings, our follies and foolishnesses, individually and collectively.
We meet in the autumnal beauty of October in the time of the gathering of the harvest of nature’s year. In our cultural moment of anger, fear, and uncertainty, we nonetheless find ourselves surrounded with the bounty of creation and the fruits of human labour. We meet in the Church. Here things of the spirit and things of nature intersect, reminding us of the spiritual nature of all reality. It acknowledges the great truth that we are part of the created order and, even more, that creation finds its voice of praise through us, in part through our work itself, honouring the order and truth of creation without which there can be no harvest, but, even more, through the liturgy itself.
Tuesday, October 13th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Saturday, October 17th
9:00-11:00am Church Cleanup
Sunday, October 18th, St. Luke / Trinity 20
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Monday, October 19th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club, Coronation Room, Parish Hall: Daisy Dunn’s The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny (2019) and Niall Ferguson’s Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021).
Saturday, October 24th
9:00-4:00 Quiet Day (WORCs)
Sunday, October 25th, Trinity 21
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
(Followed by Time of Refreshment & Fellowship, Hall)
Wednesday, October 28th, St. Simon & St. Jude
7:00pm Holy Communion, followed by Seminar on the Catechism, King Oswald’s Heirs # 2, Ch. 12 – end of Ch. 21, Coronation Room, Parish Hall
The collect for today, the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant, that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 4:17-32
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:1-8
Artwork: Giovanni Balducci, Christ Healing the Paralytic at Capernaum, c. 1581-84. Fresco, Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
Fr. Thomas Plant addresses a world which has lost a sense of the spiritual, of things seen and unseen, distinguishing between the limits of our natural vision and the forgetting of our supernatural vision or seeing. One might think about Austin Farrer’s point that reason versus revelation is a false or at least a poor and incomplete dichotomy.
“We ought to say ‘Natural Reason and Supernatural Revelation’, and we ought to throw the emphasis on the adjectives rather than upon the nouns. We have not to distinguish between God’s action and ours, but between two phases of God’s action – his supernatural action, and his action by way of nature. It is difficult to see how anything resembling Christianity can survive the denial of this distinction. For Christianity is faith in Christ, and Christ is God acting not by way of nature, but supernaturally. If you reduce Christ to a part of God’s natural action, is he Christ any longer?” (The Glass of Vision, p. 16).
Plant suggests that we live in “a disenchanted world,” an idea popularised by Charles Taylor following Max Weber. At the same time, however, his book constantly calls attention to the forms of enchantment for good or for ill in our world, for instance, in literature and poetry in the images of dragons, fairies, and ghosts. The idea of disenchantment suggests the ways in which we are disengaged and disconnected from everything – the world, ourselves, one another, and God. But as has been well noted, the loss of the idea of living in an enchanted world belongs to the “myth of disenchantment” (Jason A. Josephson Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment). There is more than enough superstition and myths in the sense of untruths in our ‘post-truth’ world as there was ever before. The fascination with daily horoscopes is but one example.
‘Science’ in its mechanical, empiricist, and materialistic assumptions has much in common with magic, it is worth noting. Both are modern phenomena and in their modern forms seek to manipulate and control nature and humans, both in the natural sciences and the human sciences. In both cases, there is a problem about the forms of our knowing, about what scientia means in our modern world. One of the questions in the natural and human sciences, so-called, is whether we are primarily interested in trying to understand the world and human behavior or to predict and control both. It is really a question about the ethical, especially with respect to the ideology of progress. The great writers of satire, such as Swift (A Modest Proposal) and Voltaire (Candide), knew only too well that wanting to make the world better doesn’t always mean that we do. Our utopian fantasies turn into dystopias, as in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Paulinus (c. 584-644), Monk, first Archbishop of York, Missionary (source):
Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy servant Paulinus, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to the people of northern England. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land evangelists and heralds of thy kingdom, that thy Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
With the Epistle and Gospel for a Bishop or Archbishop, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43
Paulinus of York was an Italian monk and missionary associated with Pope Gregory the Great’s mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons. Probably born in Rome around 584, he was sent to England in 601, tasked with supporting Augustine of Canterbury in converting the pagan kingdoms.
In 625, Paulinus was consecrated bishop and accompanied Æthelburh, a Christian Kentish princess, to Northumbria for her marriage to King Edwin. Paulinus’s diplomatic and evangelical efforts led to Edwin’s baptism at York in 627, where a wooden church—the predecessor to York Minster—was erected. Paulinus then preached and baptised widely throughout the kingdom. He established churches across Northumbria, serving as the first Bishop of York.
After Edwin’s death in 633, political instability forced Paulinus to return to Kent with the queen and her daughter. He became Bishop of Rochester, where he died on 10 October 644.
The St. Paulinus stained glass was made by the firm of C.E. Kempe of London and installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1913. Photograph taken by admin, 7 September 2009.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Denys (d. c. 258), Bishop of Paris, Patron Saint of France, Martyr (source):
O GOD, who as on this day didst endow thy blessed Martyr and Bishop Saint Denys with strength to suffer stedfastly for thy sake, and didst join unto him Rusticus and Eleutherius for the preaching of thy glory to the Gentiles: grant us, we beseech thee, so to follow their good example; that for the love of thee we may despise all worldly prosperity, and be afraid of no manner of worldly adversity. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Lesson: Acts 17:22-34
The Gospel: St Luke 12:1-9
Artwork: Master of Sir John Fastolf, Saint Denis Holding His Head, c. 1430- 1440. Tempera, gold leaf, and ink on parchment, Getty Center, Los Angeles.
The collect for today, the commemoration of Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175-1253), Bishop of Lincoln, Scholar (source):
O God our heavenly Father, who didst raise up thy faithful servant Robert Grosseteste to be a bishop and pastor in thy Church and to feed thy flock: Give to all pastors abundant gifts of thy Holy Spirit, that they may minister in thy household as true servants of Christ and stewards of thy divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
The Lesson: Acts 20:28-32
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:10-15
Artwork: William Morris from a design by Edward Burne-Jones, Bishop Robert Grosseteste, 1896. Stained glass, St. Paul’s Church, Morton, England.
The collect for today, the commemoration of William Tyndale (c. 1495-1536), Priest, Translator of the Scriptures, Reformation Martyr (source):
O Lord, grant to thy people
grace to hear and keep thy word
that, after the example of thy servant William Tyndale,
we may both profess thy gospel
and also be ready to suffer and die for it,
to the honour of thy name;
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: St. James 1:21-25
The Gospel: St. John 12:44-50
Artwork: Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, William Tyndale statue, 1884, Victoria Embankment Gardens, London. Photograph taken by admin, 30 September 2015.
Inscription on bronze plaque:
William Tyndale
First translator of the New Testament into English from the Greek.
Born A.D. 1484, died a martyr at Vilvorde in Belgium, A.D. 1536.
“Thy word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path” – “the entrance of thy words giveth light.” Psalm CXIX. 105.130.
“And this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his son.” I. John V.II.
The last words of William Tyndale were “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes”. Within a year afterwards, a bible was placed in every parish church by the King’s command.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity.
