Month: January 2014

Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 20 – 26 January

Monday, January 20th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00-7:30pm Confirmation Class, Room 206, KES

Tuesday, January 21st
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Amin Maalouf’s novel, Leo Africanus, and John W. Malley’s Four Cultures of the West.

Thursday, January 23rd
6:30-7:30 Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, January 24th
11:00 Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge

Sunday, January 26th, The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion – Parish Hall
10:30am Holy Communion – Parish Hall

Confirmation Classes: Rm. 206 at KES, 7:00-7:30pm. The dates are Jan. 13th, 20th, & 27th, Feb. 10th, 17th, & 24th, & March 3rd . Please contact Fr. Curry, 790-6173

Upcoming events:

Sunday, February 9th, Pot-luck Luncheon & Annual Parish Meeting following the 10:30am service.

Saturday, March 8th
9:00am-4:00pm Lenten Quiet Day, King’s-Edgehill School, on the theme Lent and Original Sin, led by Fr. David Curry, sponsored by the Prayer Book Society of Canada, Nova Scotia and PEI Branch.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday After The Epiphany

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

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who dost govern all things in heaven and earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of thy people, and grant us thy peace all the days of our life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 12:6-16
The Gospel: St. John 2:1-11

Valdes Leal, Wedding at CanaArtwork: Juan de Valdes Leal, The Wedding at Cana, 1660. Oil on wood, Louvre, Paris.

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Prayers and liturgy

Hilary, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Hilary (c. 315-368), Bishop of Poitiers, Doctor of the Church (source):

Everlasting God,
whose servant Hilary
steadfastly confessed thy Son Jesus Christ
to be both human and divine:
grant us his gentle courtesy
to bring to all the message of redemption
in the incarnate Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 2:18-25
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:8-12

Courtois, St. HilaryHilary was born in Poitiers, Gaul, of wealthy pagan parents. After receiving a thorough education in Latin classics, he became an orator. He also married and had a daughter. At the age of about 35, he rejected his former paganism and became a Christian through a long process of study and thought. Robert Louis Wilken describes his path to conversion in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (p. 86):

[Hilary] found himself turning to more spiritual pursuits. In his words he wished to pursue a life that was “worthy of the understanding that had been given us by God.” Like Justin [Martyr] he began to read the Bible, and one passage that touched his soul was Exodus 3:14, where God the creator, “testifying about himself,” said, “I am who I am.” For Hilary this brief utterance penetrated more deeply into the mystery of the divine nature than anything he had heard or read from the philosophers. Shortly thereafter he was baptized and received into the church.

Around 353 he was chosen bishop of Poitiers and became an outspoken champion of orthodoxy against the Arians. St. Augustine praised him as “the illustrious teacher of the churches”. St. Jerome wrote that Hilary was “a most eloquent man, and the trumpet of the Latins against the Arians”. Hilary became known as “Athanasius of the West”.

(more…)

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany

“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Only Luke gives us this story. It is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in all of the Scriptures. We go, it seems, from the infancy narratives of the child Christ to the boy Jesus at the age of twelve, and we go, too, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. There are no facebook pages, no Selfies, no albums of pictures, no stories that have been handed down about the boyhood of Jesus – only ones invented many, many years, even centuries later that portray an entirely different Jesus, a kind of super-brat, you might say, a wunderkind, as it were. For where there are gaps, conspiracy theories rush in to fill them. Such are the stories, fantastic and inventive, told in the gnostic gospels about Jesus as a boy. They have no part in the Canonical Scriptures. We have only this story.

But what a compelling and intriguing story! It is an Epiphany story, we might say, for no other reason than something is made manifest, something is made known, about Jesus and about who he is theologically and doctrinally speaking, we might say, in terms of his humanity and his divinity. It illustrates, too, an essential feature of the Epiphany and the Epiphany Season. It is emphatically a feast and a season of teaching.

It reminds us that ‘teaching, teaching, teaching’ is an essential feature of the life of the Church. The Collect for today makes it abundantly clear that “perceive[ing] and know[ing] what things [we] ought to do” is the precondition for doing them, albeit only by God’s “grace and power.” Human reason participates in God’s reason; human reason expresses itself in human action as well. Our doings are but our thoughts in motion.

As Paul makes it clear in the Epistle reading from Romans, we are “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” This underscores the point about being changed by what we hear and see which leads to sacrifice and service in our lives. It complements the Gospel wonderfully. For our transformation is through the grace of teaching, through the grace of Revelation and through our reasoning upon what is made known to us in the witness of the Scriptures about Jesus Christ.

(more…)

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 13 – 19 January

Monday, January 13th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00-7:30pm Confirmation Class, Rm. 206, KES

Tuesday, January 14th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:30pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, January 16th
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30 Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, January 19th, The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Confirmation Classes: Rm. 206 at KES, 7:00-7:30pm. The dates are Jan. 13th, 20th, & 27th, Feb. 10th, 17th, & 24th, & March 3rd. Please contact Fr. Curry, 790-6173.

Upcoming events:

Tuesday, January 21st
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Amin Maalouf’s novel, Leo Africanus, and John W. Malley’s Four Cultures of the West.

Sunday, February 9th, Pot-luck Luncheon & Annual Parish Meeting following the 10:30am service.

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday After The Epiphany

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

O LORD, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people which call upon thee; and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 12:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:41-52

Veronese, Christ among the DoctorsArtwork: Paolo Veronese, Christ with the Doctors in the Temple, c. 1555-65. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

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Prayers and liturgy

William Laud, Archbishop and Martyr

The collect for today, the commemoration of William Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr (source):

William LaudKeep us, O Lord, constant in faith and zealous in witness, that, like thy servant William Laud, we may live in thy fear, die in thy favor, and rest in thy peace; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: Hebrews 12:5-7,11-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:32-39

A Prayer for the Church by William Laud:

Gracious Father, I humbly beseech thee for Thy holy Catholic Church, fill it with all truth; in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purge it; where it is in error, direct it; where it is superstitious, rectify it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it; where it is right strengthen and confirm it, where it is in want, furnish it; where it is divided and rent asunder, make up the breaches of it; O Thou Holy One of Israel. Amen.

Source: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. (Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004), p. 55.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Baptism of Our Lord

The collect for today, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O HEAVENLY Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ did take our nature upon him, and was baptized for our sakes in the river Jordan: Mercifully grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may also be partakers of thy Holy Spirit; through him whom thou didst send to be our Saviour and Redeemer, even the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson Isaiah 42:1-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 1:1-11

Rublev, Baptism of ChristArtwork: Andrei Rublev, Baptism of Christ, c. 1405. Tempera on panel, Cathedral of the Annunciation, Moscow.

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Sermons

Meditation for Epiphany

“They fell down and worshipped.”

There is nothing more foreign to our contemporary world than the idea of worship, and yet, that is exactly what the Magi-Kings are all about. What is worship? The honouring and commitment to what is greater than yourself. There is no more wonderful an illustration and story of that than in the story of the end and the beginning of Christmas, what we call the Epiphany.

It signifies the Christmas of the Gentiles, to be sure, but even more it speaks to the deeper meaning of Christmas itself. It is about the real significance and meaning of the birth in Bethlehem. Christ is God with us. The Magi-Kings intuit and understand this. Their gifts are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” They are gifts that teach us about the radical meaning of Christmas.

They saw, they came, they worshipped. They are moved to a long and arduous journey, “the ways deep and the weather sharp, the worst time for a journey.” But isn’t that the point? We are all on a journey in and through the weather sharp and deep realities of our world and experience.

Epiphany awakens us to the splendour and glory of the Child Christ. The light now shines from within the world and not just from without. That will be the recurring theme of Epiphany, the theme of school and teaching that illumines the seeming meaningless of human life.

“They fell down and worshipped.”

Fr. David Curry
Short Meditation for Epiphany
January 6th, 2014

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Prayers and liturgy

The Epiphany

The collect for today, The Epiphany of Our Lord, or The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles: Mercifully grant, that we, who know thee now by faith, may be led onward through this earthly life, until we see the vision of thy heavenly glory; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 3:1-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 2:1-12

Artwork: Andrea Mantegna, The Adoration of the Magi, 1460-64. Tempera on wood, Uffizi, Florence.

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