Month: November 2014

Sermons

Sermon for Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf, Christmas service

“Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, good will towards men”

They are familiar words that belong to the hopes and joys of the Christmas season. We forget, however, that they are Angels’ words, words conveyed on Angels’ wings to shepherds first and from them to us.

Christmas is far more than a one day wonder. Apart from the celebrated twelve days of Christmas, there is the interesting feature of Christmas itself, a festival that embraces three masses, three celebrations that emphasize certain distinct but interrelated features belonging to Christmas. The three masses are variously named but they focus on the Angels’ Mass, the Shepherds’ Mass and the Mass of the Divine Word, Mass here being a word referring to the liturgy. Christmas means simply Christ’s Mass, the celebration of the Incarnation, liturgically speaking, from which the term Christmas has carried over into the reality of the season and even into secular culture.

The Angels’ Mass focuses on the role of the Angels in bringing the news of great wonder to the Shepherds and rejoicing angelically in words which become the basis of the Gloria. “Glory to God and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.” Such commemorations by no means exhaust the rich and deep and beautiful meaning of Christmas but they order our contemplations and serve to underscore the great wonder and mystery of Christmas.

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“Cast off the works of darkness … and put on the armour of light”

Advent signals the coming of God towards us. But what is our response? Are we watching and waiting? Are we aware of humanity’s need for the coming of the one who alone can redeem? Are we looking for anything more beyond the dull, dark empty loneliness of our anxious and troubled lives? In short, are we aware of the Advent of Christ? That is the challenge of the readings on this day. Are we aware of the darkness? Not just the darkness of nature’s year but the darkness of sin and wickedness.

So often we think of Advent as simply the season of preparation for Christmas. To be sure, it is, but it is also something more. It is a season and a doctrine which has a real meaning and significance in and of itself. For Advent is the coming. The coming is about God’s challenging presence. There is the constant coming to us of God’s Word in proclamation and celebration.

In the great gospel for this day, Christ comes to Jerusalem. He enters the city triumphantly. It is a royal procession; the King comes to his own city. All is light and grace and glory. “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest”. It is the cry of “the multitudes that went before, and that followed”; in short, them before and us after! Yet at Christmas we will hear that “he came unto his own and his own received him not.” Here the whole city was moved to say in wondering ignorance and in perplexity, “Who is this?” We know the story. The King – God’s own Word and Son – will be rejected. All that is light and life ends in darkness and death; the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the darkness of the cross and the grave.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 1 – 7 December

Monday, December 1st
4:45-5:15pm World Religions/Inquirer’s Class – Room 206, King’s-Edgehill School
6-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, December 2nd, St. Andrew (transf.)
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I

Thursday, December 4th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, December 7th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Evening Prayer

Upcoming Event:

Friday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis Christmas Concert, “To Bethlehem with Kings”. $10.00.

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Advent

The collect for today, the First Sunday in Advent, being the Fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13

Beverly Minster, Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all peopleArtwork: Mine House shall be called an house of prayer for all people, stained glass, Beverley Minster. Photograph taken by admin, 2 October 2014.

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Prayers and liturgy

Catherine, Virgin and Martyr

The collect for a virgin or matron, on the Feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria (4th century?), Virgin and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD Most High, the creator of all mankind, we bless thy holy Name for the virtue and grace which thou hast given unto holy women in all ages, especially thy servant Catherine; and we pray that the example of her faith and purity, and courage unto death, may inspire many souls in this generation to look unto thee, and to follow thy blessed Son Jesus Christ our Saviour; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 9:36-42
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:38-42

Cima, St. CatherineThe cult of Saint Catherine arose in the Eastern Church in the 8th or 9th century and spread to the West at the time of the Crusades. She is not mentioned in any early martyrologies. No reliable facts concerning her life or death have been established. She is now generally considered to be a mythical figure.

According to her legend, St. Catherine lived in Alexandria when Emperor Maxentius was persecuting the church. A noble and learned young Christian, Catherine prevailed in a public debate with philosophers who tried to convince her of the errors of Christianity. Maxentius had her scourged, imprisoned and condemned her to death. She was tied to a wheel embedded with razors, but this attempt to torture her to death failed when the machine (later a Catherine wheel) broke and onlookers were injured by flying fragments. Finally, she was beheaded.

St. Catherine is often portrayed holding a book, symbolic of her great learning. She is the patron saint of teachers and students.

Artwork: Cima de Conegliano, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1502. Oil on poplar panel, Wallace Collection, London. (Originally at Church of St. Rocco, Mestre.) Photograph taken by admin, 16 October 2014.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent, 4:00pm Choral Evensong

“And what more shall I say? For time would fail me …”

“Behold, the days come,” we heard this morning from Jeremiah and now again this evening from Malachi, we hear “for behold, the day comes.” In the order of the Christian Scriptures, Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament and deliberately so, it seems to me. It ends, as we heard this evening, with the prophetic words about those who fear the Lord even if our “words have been stout against God,” provided we repent. “Those who feared the Lord and thought on his name” are those whose names, it seems, are recorded not in the book of the dead, as in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Sumeria, but in “a book of remembrance.” It ends with a sense of the day of judgment, “burning like an oven” that leaves “neither root nor branch” unscathed, but also with another sense of judgment, the sense of hope and healing: “for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings.” It signals, too, the sending of the prophet, Elijah, “before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” who “will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”

Most intriguing words. In the context of Advent, the prophecy about Elijah is understood to be fulfilled in John the Baptist, the one who is sent to prepare the way of the Lord. No wonder that Malachi is placed at the end of the Old Testament, as Christians call the Jewish Scriptures. It points directly to the themes of the New Testament; in short, to the Advent of Christ.

This idea of Old and New, of the interplay and interconnection between the writings of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament is wonderfully taken up, theologically and prophetically, in the lesson from The Letter to the Hebrews. Its authorship unknown, nonetheless, Hebrews offers a profound reflection upon the witness of the past in the history of Israel up to the present of Christ and Christianity. That is, of course, controversial and somewhat polemical; necessarily and deliberately so, for in the Christian understanding of things, the history of Israel has its fulfillment in Christ and that is the point which the lesson tonight makes.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent, 2:00pm service of Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf

“The end of the matter … Fear God and keep his commandments”

A time of endings and beginnings is signalled on this day we call The Sunday Next Before Advent. There is something profound and wonderful in these moments of transition, yet it is not without some ambiguity. Do we end the year on a note of weariness and exhaustion? Too many books, so little time? “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” after all, whether it be books in print or e-books. Are we frustrated and perplexed with the relentless sameness of yet another year, a year in which, once again, there seems to be no progress, no change from the endless and dismal stories of hardship and struggle? If anything, it might seem that there is more grief and trouble, more sadness and dismay. “Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes,” as Leonard Cohen’s song puts it rather cynically. It may seem that we have been “fed with the bread of tears” and have had “plenteousness of tears to drink” as the psalmist puts it (Ps. 80).

Do we end, as Ecclesiastes seems to suggest, simply with the sombre awareness of death and mortality, the feebleness of old age and the barrenness of winter? “That time of year,” as Shakespeare puts it, “when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” an image which evokes at once old age and ecclesiastical ruins; a pile of holy stones, a Tintern Abbey centuries before Wordsworth.

Do we end, then, weary and worn with the attempts to take the world by storm only to find that the mysteries of life continue to elude us? If so, then we end well, it seems to me. Because to confront the vanities of our pursuits and ambitions is to stand on the brink of a great wisdom, the wisdom of God which alone can redeem and heal our weary souls.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“Behold, the days come”

The times of endings return us to our beginnings. We come to the ending of the Church Year and to the beginning of yet another. Today is The Sunday Next Before Advent. With Advent, we begin again.

But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin again? The mere repetition of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces whether few or none or more, “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives, come what may in the distresses and disorders of our world and day?

We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time, as it were, for our souls, a gathering up of the fruits of grace of the past year in our lives, which is why for centuries upon centuries the Gospel for this Sunday was about “the gathering up of the fragments” from Christ’s feeding of the multitudes in the wilderness. But it means too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. “Come and see.” The grace is God’s Word revealed.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 23 – 30 November

Monday, November 24th
4:45-5:15pm World Religions/Inquirer’s Class – Room 206, King’s-Edgehill School
6-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, November 25th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00 Christ Church Book Club: The War That Ended Peace, by Margaret Macmillan; Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; & The Wars by Timothy FIndley

Thursday, November 27th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, November 28th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
3:30pm Holy Communion – Gladys Manning Home

Sunday, November 30th, Advent I
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
2:00pm AMD Xmas Service of the Deaf
4:00pm Advent Service of Lessons and Carols with KES, Gr. 7-11 – Christ Church
7:00pm Advent Service of Lessons and Carols with KES, Gr.12 – Hensley Memorial Chapel, KES

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, December 2nd, St. Andrew (transf.)
7:00 Holy Communion & Advent Programme

Friday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis Christmas Concert, “To Bethlehem with Kings”

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday Next Before Advent

The collect for today, the Sunday Next before Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Jeremiah 23:5-8
The Gospel: St. John 1:35-45

Christ Pantocrator, San Miniato al MonteArtwork: Christ Pantocrator between the Virgin and St. Miniato, c. 1260. Mosaic, San Miniato al Monte, Florence.

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