Christ Church

The collect for today, the commemoration of James Hannington (1847-85), first Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, Missionary to Uganda, Martyr (source):

Precious in your sight, O Lord,
is the death of your martyrs
James Hannington and his companions,
who purchased with their blood a road into Uganda
for the proclamation of the gospel;
and we pray that with them
we also may obtain the crown of righteousness
which is laid up for all
who love the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:14-18,22
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:16-22

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Simon the Zealot and Saint Jude, Apostles, with Saint Jude the Brother of the Lord, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast built thy Church upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the head corner-stone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy temple acceptable unto thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The collect for the Brethren of the Lord, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

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. Jude 1-4
The Gospel: St. John 14:21-27

In the various New Testament lists of the Twelve Apostles (Matthew 10:2-4; Mark 3:16-19; Luke 6:14-16; Acts 1:13), the tenth and eleventh places are occupied by Simon and Judas son of James, also called Thaddeus.

To distinguish Simon from Simon Peter, Matthew and Mark refer to him as Simon the Cananaean, while Luke refers to him as Simon the Zealot. Both surnames have the same signification and are a translation of the Hebrew qana (the Zealous). The name does not signify that he belonged to the party of Zealots, but that he had zeal for the Jewish law, which he practised before his call. The translation of Matthew and Mark as Simon “the Canaanite” (as, e.g., KJV has it) is simply mistaken.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

A miracle story, to be sure. What do the miracles teach us? They teach us something about the nature of God and about the truth of our humanity. But there is something particularly special and important about this gospel story. It is taken from The Gospel according to St. John. There is an important connection between Word and Wisdom that is wonderfully illustrated in this Gospel.

It is a miracle of healing, and so not unlike any number of healing miracles, it might seem. But there is something special about this story and it is not that Jesus is reluctant to make house calls! John tells us that this was “the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” That begs the obvious question about the first sign. What was that? Not a healing miracle per se but the story of the turning of the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, a miracle that points us to the meaning of the Incarnation and to the social joys of heaven which God seeks for us in and through the fellowship of the Church here and now as well as in heaven. This second sign teaches us something profound about the nature of God and about our humanity.

It teaches us that the Word of God is not confined to the limits of time and space. We are being reminded of the eternal Word of God which cannot be constrained to our experiences and expectations. A certain nobleman beseeches Jesus to come down to Capernaum, another town, to heal his son who was at the point of death. Like so many of us, we want God to do something for us immediately and directly. Here we are reminded of the greater truth of God’s Word and its truer movement in us. Jesus rebukes our presumption about wanting signs and wonders without which we will not believe. For we have forgotten, it seems, what The Letter to the Hebrews wisely teaches, namely, that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” There is a greater power and truth to God’s Word.

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“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.”

There is something quite wonderful in the way in which Jesus teaches one of the great and most distinctive Christian ideas, the idea of forgiveness. He takes Peter’s argument about number, about how many times do you forgive someone who has offended you, to open us out to the infinite nature and quality of forgiveness. It is not merely a matter of substituting a greater number for a lesser number, 490 in place of 7, as if forgiveness could be quantified. No. Forgiveness is a divine quality given to us so as to be lived in us. Not to forgive is to deny the forgiveness that has been given to us. It can only result in cutting ourselves off from God because we have cut ourselves off from one another. Love is dead in us.

This is the point of the parable that Jesus tells. “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.” The servant who has been brought to account owes a great debt to his king and is forgiven his debt only to refuse to forgive the paltry debt that another owes him. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive his fellow-servant. We sense the outrage, the wrong, the violation of the ethical idea that you should do as others have done to you. Forgiveness received requires forgiveness to be shown towards others; and if it isn’t, then we are in a mess. There seems to be about this a certain quid pro quo, a kind of justice.

True enough but I think this hides the much more radical nature of forgiveness, its divine nature, as it were, and the seriousness of forgiveness. Forgiveness returns us to the will of God for our humanity. It is really about nothing less than the life of Christ in us. It is Paul’s prayer “that [our] love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”. Forgiveness is nothing less than the love of God ruling in our hearts.

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Monday, October 28th, SS. Simon & Jude
4:45-5:15pm World Religions/Inquirers’ Class, Rm. 206, King’s-Edgehill School
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Tuesday, October 29th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, October 31st
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, November 1st, All Saints’
3:00pm Choral Evensong, 225th Anniversary Service of the Founding of King’s Collegiate School (now King’s-Edgehill)

Sunday, November 3rd, Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity (In the Octave of All Saints’)
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Choral Evensong – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, November 23rd
4:30-6:00pm Annual Parish Ham Supper

Friday, December 20th
7:00pm Christ Church Concert Series II: Capella Regalis presents “To Bethlehem with Kings”

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

LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy house hold the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 1:3-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:21-35

Artwork: Willem Drost, The Unmerciful Servant, 1655. Oil on canvas, Wallace Collection, London.

The collect for a Martyr, on the Feast of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian, Martyrs (d. c. 285), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who didst bestow upon thy Saints such marvellous virtue, that they were able to stand fast, and have the victory against the world, the flesh, and the devil: Grant that we, who now commemorate thy Martyrs Crispin and Crispinian, may ever rejoice in their fellowship, and also be enabled by thy grace to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold upon eternal life; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27

Crispin and Crispinian are believed to have been brothers and Roman noblemen martyred for their faith during the persecution of Emperor Maximian.

Artwork: Aert van den Bossche, Martyrdom of Saints Crispin & Crispinian, 1494. National Museum, Warsaw.

“For wisdom is known through speech,
and education through the words of the tongue”

Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach is not to be confused with either The Book of Ecclesiastes or The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. Like the latter, however, it belongs to a collection of books known as the Apocrypha written in the inter-testamental period, between the time of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, and the New Testament. An interesting collection of writings, they have had a fascinating history of reception and rejection in the history of the Christian Churches. Nonetheless, they are an important collection and for Anglicans they belong to what is received as the Scriptures, albeit in a peculiar fashion, not “to establish any doctrine,” essential or creedal doctrine, that is to say, but “for example of life and instruction of manners.” Passages from the books of the Apocrypha are appointed to be read at the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season beginning on the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity.

These books embrace a number of different forms of literature but the most outstanding form is known as ‘wisdom literature’. Bearing the imprint of the philosophical culture of ancient Greece, these texts provide an important way of thinking about the revealed Word of God and about living a holy way of life based upon wisdom. Tonight’s lesson is a marvelous encomium or song of praise to wisdom personified as a woman, at once the source, perhaps, of Lady Philosophy and/or of Mary, the mother of God, sometimes referred to as the Seat of Wisdom. But more theologically, properly speaking, wisdom is understood to be the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus the Word and Son of the Father. Word and wisdom are inescapably united.

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“For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be
an image of his own eternity”

The long Trinity season runs out in a series of reflections on wisdom. It is on this Sunday that we begin to read in the Sunday offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Books of the Apocrypha.

This follows an ancient understanding about the role and place of those books in the doctrinal understanding of things. At the heart of the Protestant reformation was a new sensibility about the primacy of Scripture and the nature of its interaction with tradition and reason in determining the teaching or doctrine of the Church on matters of essential faith, on matters of morals, and on matters of polity or church government. As a consequence, there was debate and question about a collection of books that arose between the time of the setting down of the Old Testament – the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures – and the period of the Christian New Testament. The debate had largely to do with the claims about certain teachings alleged to be based upon these texts to which the Reformers took exception.

For some Protestant Churches these books are not regarded as part of the Scripture. For others, like Anglicans, for instance, these books are received and read not “to establish any doctrine” – meaning essential or creedal doctrine – but “for example of life and instruction of manners” as Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles states. In this the Anglican Churches understand themselves to be following the example of Jerome, the great translator of the most influential and famous version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible for more than a millennium for the western and European world. Anglicans read the Apocrypha or are encouraged to do so as complementing the Old and New Testament.

In a way this is necessary in order to make sense of the New Testament, since there are several instances where the New Testament writers make explicit reference to events and ideas found in the Apocrypha. Such is the argument for the inclusion of Apocryphal texts in the public reading of Scripture in the life of the Church. But there have been Anglicans of an Evangelical persuasion who would not be persuaded about reading from the Books of the Apocrypha and so for the sake of those of tender conscience, the Prayer Book (Cdn., 1962), makes provision for alternative Old Testament passages to be read instead on the last Sundays of the Trinity Season. This reveals what was once a typical kind of Anglican compromise, a kind of principled accommodation to different theological sensibilities, even a kind of wisdom, at least practically speaking, it seems to me.  It is an approach, perhaps, that has been lost in our church for some time.

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“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

A miracle story, to be sure. The Trinity season and the season of Epiphany abound in miracles. They teach us something about the nature of God and about the truth of our humanity. But there is something particularly special and important about this gospel story. It is taken from The Gospel according to St. John and there are few gospel readings from John’s Gospel in the long Trinity season. Yet that season runs out in wisdom as we are reminded in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer today, the twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. For we begin to read from the Apocrypha and, particularly, from the wisdom literature in the Apocrypha on this Sunday. I want to suggest that there is an important connection between Word and Wisdom that is wonderfully illustrated in this Gospel.

It is a miracle, to be sure, a miracle of healing, and so not unlike any number of healing miracles, it might seem. But there is something special about this story and it is not that Jesus is reluctant to make house calls! John tells us that this was “the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” That begs the obvious question about the first sign. What was that? Not a healing miracle per se but the story of the turning of the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, a miracle that points us to the meaning of the Incarnation and to the social joys of heaven which God seeks for us in and through the fellowship of the Church here and now as well as in heaven. This second sign, the word sign here is significant, teaches us something profound about the nature of God and about our humanity.

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