Month: June 2012

Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 18 – 24 June

Tuesday, June 19th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, June 21st
3:00 Service at Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30pm Brownies’ Mtg. – Parish Hall

Sunday, June 24th, The Nativity of St. John the Baptist
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
2:00pm Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf Service
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

The congregation of St. Andrew’s Church, Hantsport, will host an Open House with “Best Wishes”, Sunday, June 24th, from 2-4 PM, in the Church Hall, as The Rev’d Michael Boyd, moves into retirement, effective July 31st, having served in ministry of the Anglican Church of Canada since 1976 and from November 15, 1982, in Hantsport.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday After Trinity

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

O LORD, who never failest to help and govern them whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love: Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 3:13-24
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:15-24

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermon for Encaenia 2012

“In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”

At last, the last chapel, the last day, the last year! Encaenia. Graduation. What does it mean? Simply this. You are on your own, kid! At last, I hear you say! At last, I sense your parents saying, with a sigh too great for words, Yes! Today, you step up and step out! In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you will no longer be students but alumni of King’s-Edgehill School, “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars,” as it were. You are on your own, kid!

That may be a frightening idea! No one to prod and push you, no one to coddle and carry you! And it can be altogether frightening especially in the face of a rather fearful and uncertain world, economically and environmentally, socially and politically. But that would be to lose sight of everything that has gone into this moment and milestone in your life.

Because, fortunately, it is not just about you. So much that has been accomplished and done is wonderful and worthy of note, to be sure. It enrolls you in a company of hundreds and hundreds of others in the parade of generations that have gone before you. You are not so much alone now as part of a much larger company. That is the profounder reason to rejoice and give thanks. It means to give thanks for what you have become through what you have embraced and made your own. It is only possible through what has been set before you. And that is altogether about the formation of character, about the ‘you’ that you are becoming.

There is a paradox to this day. Encaenia is the word for this service, even as commencement is the word that belongs to the ceremony that follows. Both words speak of beginnings rather than endings. Both words point us towards the honouring of principles that last, the principles that inform the life and purpose of the School. Encaenia is a Greek word (εν & καινο), referring to a dedication festival, to a renewal of a sense of purpose and identity, that came to be used at “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June”(O.E.D.) and, by extension to many other schools and colleges throughout the world, such as King’s-Edgehill. We are all part of something much larger than ourselves. And that is part of the poignancy of our gatherings today. It all begins to come home to you and to us on this the last day of your high school experience.

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Prayers and liturgy

Basil the Great, Bishop and Doctor

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Basil the Great (c. 330-79), Bishop of Caesarea, Cappadocian Father, Doctor of the Church (source):

St. Basil the GreatAlmighty God, who hast revealed to thy Church thine eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like thy bishop Basil of Caesarea, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; who livest and reignest for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 2:6-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:21-24

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Barnabas

“I have called you friends.”

In the quiet beauty of an evening in June, we meet to celebrate the Feast of St. Barnabas, the Apostle. Barnabas means ‘son of consolation’ or ‘encouragement’. I can think of no greater encouragement or consolation for us in difficult times than to be reminded that Christ has made us his friends! At the same time, it must be admitted, we are most confused about the power and form of friendship in our contemporary world. What does Jesus mean to say that “I have called you friends”?

He is speaking to us about the divine charity which is the formative and foundational principle of our lives in faith, a life that binds us in the bonds of charity, the bonds of heavenly love, the basis of all and every form of true friendship. He is talking about nothing less than the dynamic of charity that makes us one in Christ and without which we have no life and no community and certainly no church.

How wonderful, too, that this gospel is accompanied by the lesson from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles which reminds us that the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch, where Barnabas had been sent from Jerusalem. How wonderful, indeed! To think of being Christians precisely in terms of being made the friends of Christ, and, by holy and theological extension, the friends of God. That is the meaning of Christ’s friendship with us. He has gathered us into his fellowship with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Barnabas the Apostle

Giulio Cesare Procaccini, St.BarnabasThe collect for today, the Feast of St. 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

Artwork: Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Saint Barnabas, 1605-06. Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Antica, Castello Sforzesco, Milan.

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am service

“He proclaimed Jesus, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’”

We are in the presence of wonderful mysteries, the mysteries of God and man. The great creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith are wonderfully set before us in the Athanasian Creed, one of the three catholic creeds of the universal church, but one which, I fear, is little known, and, I am afraid, little used. Tucked away in the back of the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, it must appear to some of you as a very odd thing, a curiosity, something to peruse while suffering through an insufferable sermon, perhaps!

Yet, there was a time in our Anglican history when the Athanasian Creed was appointed to be used thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. And I can think of at least one literary work which refers to the Athanasian Creed, interestingly being used at Mattins on Christmas morning, an intriguing concept; Charles Williams’ novel, Greater Trumps. In that novel, the Athanasian Creed is sung to an antiphonal setting which emphasizes precisely the counterpoint of contrasting and yet complementary ideas about God as ‘this’ and ‘not this’, the back-and-forth of negative and positive theology, and about the union of God and man in Jesus Christ. In the novel, the Creed of St. Athanasius, so-called, signals the dynamic of love, human and divine. The phrase “not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, / but by taking of Manhood into God” was one of Charles Williams’ favourite passages.

The three Creeds of catholic Christianity are the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Three Creeds and yet really one, a point made very clearly by one of the outstanding divines of the 17th Century, Archbishop John Bramhall, whose sensibility about the interplay of Scripture and Creed and about the unity of the Creeds contribute to his wonderful epithet, Athanasius Hibernicus, the Athanasius of Ireland. Athanasius is the father of orthodoxy whose steadfast witness to the essential divinity of Christ resulted in the Creed which we know as the Nicene Creed, though properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, in reference to two of the Great Ecumenical Councils from which it came to birth in the fourth century. As Bramhall observes, “The Nicene, Constantinopolitan, Ephesian, Chalcedonian and Athanasian Creeds, are but explications of the Creed of the Apostles, and are still called the Apostles’ Creed.”

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am service

“We love him because he first loved us.”

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus illustrates powerfully the Christian concept of love, the love which we neglect at our peril. The love of God is the animating principle that drives the love of neighbour. If we are deaf and blind to what is seen and heard about the love of God as revealed in the witness of the Scriptures and which lies at the heart of the Christian Faith, then we shall find ourselves at a great remove from God and from one another; “a great gulf fixed” between where we are and where we would want to be.

Lazarus is lying at our feet. In ignoring him, the parable suggests, we are denying God. The love of God and the love of neighbour are intimately connected. How so? Because of the Incarnation and the Trinity without which there can be no human redemption.

The parable offers a remarkable reversal of situation. The poor man, Lazarus, dies and finds himself in the bosom of Abraham, a lovely image of the intimacy of Heaven itself, while the rich man dies and finds himself tormented in Hell. It is not simply that one was rich and the other poor as if the material circumstances of simply being poor or rich are the conditions of Heaven and Hell. No. At issue is our attitude and approach to one another. “The poor you have with you always,” Jesus says, “you can do for them what you will.” What do we will? Do we step over them and ignore them? Despise and decry them? Blame them for existing and/or pretend that they aren’t there? Have them removed from our sight like some inconvenient heap of rubbish? Nuke them till they glow? How do we treat one another?

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 11 – 17 June

Monday, June 11th, St. Barnabas
7:00pm Holy Communion

Tuesday, June 12th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:30pm Parish Council Meeting

Saturday, June 16th
9:00am Encaenia Service – KES Chapel
10:15am Graduation & Prize Day – KES

Sunday, June 17th, The Second Sunday After Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
9:30am Holy Communion – KES
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday After Trinity

St Lazarus prayer cardThe 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

Artwork: St. Lazarus, Printed Prayer Card, Italy.

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