Month: December 2012

Prayers and liturgy

John West, Missionary

The collect for a missionary, in commemoration of The Rev’d John West (1778-1845), Priest, first Protestant missionary to the Red River Valley, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

John WestO GOD, our heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst call thy blessed Apostles and send them forth to preach thy Gospel of salvation unto all the nations: We bless thy holy Name for thy servant John West, whose labours we commemorate this day, and we pray thee, according to thy holy Word, to send forth many labourers into thy harvest; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 12:24-13:5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:13-24a

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 31 December 2012 – 6 January 2013

Tuesday, January 1st, Octave Day of Christmas / Circumcision of Christ / New Year’s Day
10:00am Holy Communion

Thursday, January 3rd
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, January 6th, Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion – Parish Hall (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion – Parish Hall
4:30pm Holy Communion – KES

Please note that our winter sojourn in the Parish Hall for January, February and March begins on January 6th, 2013.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday After Christmas Day

Labouret Workshop, Annunciation to JosephThe collect for today, The Sunday after Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us thy only begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin: Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:1-7
The Gospel: St. Matthew 1:18-25

Artwork: A. Labouret Workshop, Annunciation to Joseph, 1960. Mosaic, Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal, Montreal.

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Prayers and liturgy

Thomas Becket, Archbishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Thomas Becket (1117-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr (source):

O Lord God,
who gavest to thy servant Thomas Becket
grace to put aside all earthly fear and be faithful even unto death:
grant that we, caring not for worldly esteem,
may fight against evil,
uphold thy rule,
and serve thee to our life’s end;
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 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Master Francke, Martyrdom of St Thomas BecketThomas Becket was a close personal friend of King Henry II of England and served as his chancellor from 1155. When the archbishop of Canterbury died in 1162, Henry, seeing an opportunity to exercise control over the church, decided to have his chancellor elected to the post. Thomas saw the dangers of the king’s plan and warned Henry that, if he became archbishop, his first loyalty would be to God and not the king. He told Henry, “Several things you do in prejudice of the rights of the church make me fear that you would require of me what I could not agree to.” What Thomas feared soon came to pass.

After becoming archbishop, Thomas changed radically from defender of the king’s privileges and policies into an ardent champion of the church. Unexpectedly adopting an austere way of life in near-monastic simplicity, he celebrated or attended Mass daily, studied Scripture, distributed alms to the needy, and visited the sick. He became just as obstinate in asserting the church’s interests as he had formerly been in asserting the king’s.

Thomas rejected Henry’s claim to authority over the English Church. Relations with the king deteriorated so seriously that Thomas left England and spent six years in exile in France. He realised that he had return when the Archbishop of York and six other bishops crowned the heir to the throne, Prince Henry, in contravention of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s rights and authority.

He returned to England with letters of papal support and immediately excommunicated the Archbishop of York and the six other bishops. On Christmas Day 1170 he publicly denounced them from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral. It was these actions that prompted Henry’s infamous angry words, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Four knights took the king at his word and travelled to Canterbury where they slew Becket. According to eyewitness accounts, Thomas processed calmly into the cathedral and refused to bar the doors against his attackers. When the four rushed in yelling, “Where is Thomas the traitor?”, he replied, “Here I am. No traitor, but a priest of God.” As the first blow was struck, he said, “For the name of Jesus and in defence of the church, I am willing to die.” He was hacked to death between the altar of Our Lady and the altar of St. Benedict.

All Europe was horrified and outraged by the assassination of an archbishop carrying papal authority in his own cathedral at the behest of a king. Henry was universally condemned and forced to do public penance.

Thomas Becket was canonised as a martyr by Pope Alexander III in 1173.

In modern times, T.S. Eliot has famously retold the story of the saint’s martyrdom in his play Murder in the Cathedral.

Artwork: Master Francke, The Martyrdom of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, c. 1436. Panel, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Innocents

“In Ramah was there a voice heard … Rachel weeping for her children”

We have heard the weeping of Rachel, the weeping of a mother in Israel, a mother weeping for her children “because they are not.” It is a grim scene of unmitigated grief, a mother who “would not be comforted.” No scene is perhaps more disturbing and troubling than this story and yet it belongs to the mystery of Christmas, to the mystery of human redemption.

We have heard the weeping of Rachel in the griefs of the mothers and fathers of the little ones in Newtown, Connecticut. We have heard the weeping of Rachel, too, in the grief-stricken cries of mothers who have lost sons and daughters in the mindless acts of terrorism and violence that is all too much a feature of our current world. How to make sense of the senselessness of cruel violence?

In a way, it is through this story which only Matthew tells. It is the story of Herod seeking to annihilate a potential rival to his throne by enacting a policy of infanticide, unwittingly following the same programme of political expediency as Pharoah, a thousand years before him, had followed as well. It is expedient to get rid of what seems to threaten you or even worse, perhaps, what might seem inconvenient and a bother to your lifestyle. None of us are completely removed from underlying impulses in this story. It names our violence and its root causes and, no, the root causes here are not social and economic. The causes of such mindless acts of destructive violence are found in the disorders of the human heart.

Such things may indeed contribute to a culture. The mindless acts of violence that we contemplate in our modern dystopian world belong, I argue, to the culture of narcissism and nihilism. They go together. Going out in a blaze of attention-seeking glory while taking as many as you can with you. ‘Look at me, look at me, poor me’, for whatever reason. And if you haven’t looked at me, well, I will find a way to get your attention. All is vanity, an empty nothingness.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Innocents

The collect for today, The Feast of the Holy Innocents, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths: Mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengthen us by thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith, even unto death, we may glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 14:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 2:13-18

Read more about the Holy Innocents here.

This is an appropriate day to remember the victims of abortion.

Galvani, Slaughter of the InnocentsArtwork: Sebastiano Galvani, Slaughter of the Innocents. Basilica di Santa Giustina (Basilica of Saint Justine), Padua. Photograph taken by admin, 7 May 2010.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. John the Evangelist

“These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full”

Endings and beginnings. They focus on things heard and seen, things handled and touched, things written and passed on. They open us out to what is always more than what we can completely and fully grasp. They open us out to the mystery of God with us, the mystery of the Incarnation

It is, to my mind, one of the most wonderful of the little feasts of Christmas week that reveal so much of the wonder of Christmas. The feast of St. John the Evangelist falls on the 27th of December and is part of the celebration of Christmas. It reminds us of the important role that John the Evangelist plays in the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ. And so we read from the beginning of his First Epistle and we read from the end of his Gospel. What is written, he tells us in the Epistle is for our joy, indeed that “[our] joy may be full.” What is written, he tells us in the Gospel, is about the things which Jesus did and yet, as he says, “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

&In and through both readings, there is a remarkable kind of intensity and insistence on two things: the message and the messenger. The latter is John himself. He is testifying to the integrity of what he has heard and seen. “This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things.” We aren’t told a lot about him because the greater emphasis is on the things heard and seen and witnessed to in his writing. What is that? It is the idea of the Incarnation.

It is not too much to say that it is through the eyes of John that we understand the great mysteries of the Christian Faith. His Gospel is often referred to as the Fourth Gospel but we would be mistaken in thinking that it means his is the last of the Gospels, the latest to be written, as it were. In modern times that has been assumed and it may be true but is largely irrelevant to the ultimate coming together of the Gospels and Epistles to form the New Testament. The idea of historical priority is a very late and modern preoccupation among scholars and is fraught with a number of questionable hypotheses. Earliest does not mean simplest, for instance, as if there is a necessary and logical progression from the simple to the complex. And certainly for many, many centuries of the Christian Church, John’s Gospel has exercised a kind of priority of reflection for no other reason than the quality of the ideas and their expression which his Gospel affords.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint John the Evangelist

The collect for today, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

MERCIFUL Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that it being enlightened by the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 1:1-5
The Gospel: St. John 21:19-25

Baccio da Montelupo, St. John the EvangelistJohn and his brother James (St. James the Greater) were Galilean fishermen and sons of Zebedee. Jesus called the two brothers Boanerges (“sons of thunder”), apparently because of their zealous character; for example, they wanted to call down fire from heaven on the inhospitable Samaritans. John and James, together with Peter, belonged to the inner group of the apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. It was John and Peter whom Jesus sent to prepare the final Passover meal.

In the lists of disciples, John always appears among the first four, but usually after his brother, which may indicate that John was the younger of the two.

According to ancient church tradition, St. John the Evangelist was the author of the New Testament documents that bear his name: the fourth gospel, the three epistles of John, and Revelation. John’s name is not mentioned in the fourth gospel (but 21:2 refers to “the sons of Zebedee”), but he is usually if not always identified as the beloved disciple. It is also generally believed that John was the “other disciple” who, with Peter, followed Jesus after his arrest. John was the only disciple at the foot of the cross and was entrusted by Christ with the care of his mother Mary.

After Christ’s resurrection and ascension, John, together with Peter, took a leading role in the formation and guidance of the early church. John was present when Peter healed the lame beggar, following which both apostles were arrested. After reports reached Jerusalem that Samaria was receiving the word of God, the apostles sent Peter and John to visit the new Samaritan converts. Presumably, John was at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). He is not mentioned later in the Acts of the Apostles, so he appears to have left Palestine.

Christian writers of the second and third centuries say that St. John lived in Asia Minor in the last decades of the first century, acting as a kind of patriarch to the churches there. Both Justin Martyr (c. 100-165) and Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-200) say that John lived in Ephesus and wrote his gospel there. It is believed that he died a natural death at a very old age around the end of the first century. That would make St. John the only apostle who did not die a martyr.

With the discovery in Egypt of the papyrus fragment known as P52, it is highly probable that the fourth gospel was in writing by the early part of the second century. P52 is generally considered the earliest known copy of New Testament writing and, given that John’s Gospel is believed to be one of the last New Testament writings completed, is enormously significant in supporting the authenticity of the New Testament.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”

Birth and death. Every Mass recalls the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ; somehow that sorrowing memory is also our greatest joy. It is our celebration at all occasions. No less so than at Christmas when we celebrate Christ’s Birth. It may seem strange but it is the great wisdom of the Christian Faith. As T.S. Eliot in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, has Archbishop Thomas a Becket proclaim in his Christmas homily in 1170 at Canterbury, “it is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason.” In that homily, the Archbishop goes on to speak of the martyrs and of the wonderful yet curious feature of the Christian mysteries of our Liturgy that has the celebration of St. Stephen on the day following Christmas.

A martyr is a witness, a witness to something beyond and more than himself or herself. A martyr is “the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God … desiring nothing for himself” wanting only what God wills to be. That is the witness to which we are all called, in one way or another. We betray the witness when we want God to please us, amuse us, dance and sing for us, give us what we think we need utterly oblivious to the dance and song of God in creation and human lives and in the wondrous birth of Christ, the Incarnate Word.

St. Stephen is the proto-martyr, the first Christian martyr and the one who shows us the shape and meaning of martyrdom, of what witness truly means. What? Being stoned to death? No. Not that exactly but by suffering for and in the name of the One who suffered and died for us. With the spirit of Christ shaping our very being in the hour of our death. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” Stephen cries and, then on his knees, he “cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” His words echo the words of Christ on the Cross, the words of forgiveness and commendation. “Father, forgive them for they – we – know not what they – we – do.” “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.”

Sorrow and joy in one moment. Stephen shows us what it means to worship and adore the child Christ. It means to let his life become our life and to shape our words and deeds. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, that God sent his only-begotten son into the world that we might live through him,” as John puts it in his 1st Epistle. Stephen illustrates the deep meaning of Christ’s birth. He has come for our salvation. He has come to redeem our humanity, to recall us to who we are in the sight of God who is our life. In the Gospel for today, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that persecution and suffering are an inescapable part of the Christian witness especially in a blind and dark and mean world. Christian witness is never about comfort.

We make our witness in what we do and nowhere more profoundly so than in our liturgy. It is your witness, your martyrdom, to be here where the Word is proclaimed and the mysteries celebrated. And here, too, is your blessedness, come what may in the times of death and dying.

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”

Fr. David Curry
St. Stephen’s Day,
December 26th, 2012

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Stephen the Martyr

St. Stephen, Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, CirencesterThe collect for today, the Feast of Saint Stephen, Deacon and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, that in all our sufferings here upon earth, for the testimony of thy truth, we may stedfastly look up to heaven, and by faith behold the glory that shall be revealed; and, being filled with the Holy Spirit, may learn to love and bless our persecutors, by the example of thy first Martyr Saint Stephen, who prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus, who standest at the right hand of God to succour all those that suffer for thee, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 7:55-60
The Gospel: St. Matthew 23:34-39

Click here to read more about St. Stephen.

Artwork: St. Stephen, stained glass, Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Cirencester, Gloucestershire. Photograph taken by admin, 18 August 2004.

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