Day: January 24, 2016

Sermons

Sermon for Septuagesima, 2:00pm service of Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf

“Speak the Word only”

The grandeur of God meets the misery of man in the bleak mid-winter of all our discontents. Such is Epiphany. The season of teaching is also the season of miracles. The miracle stories of the Scriptures make manifest something about the nature of God and about our humanity. The miracles make known what God seeks for our humanity, namely, our healing and our wholeness. Here we have the story of the healing of the leper and the healing of the Centurion’s servant, a story which complements it seems to me the familiar Epiphany story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee where Jesus turns the water into wine, the very best wine.

That story in John’s Gospel was the “beginning of signs” which Jesus did “and manifested forth his glory”. That is an Epiphany but within that story there were some other epiphanies captured especially in the exchange between Jesus and Mary. “They have no wine”, she says to Jesus and, then, she says to the disciples (and us) “Do whatever he tells you”. In between those two statements is Jesus’s seemingly strange and disconcerting remark. “O woman what is that to me and you. Mine hour has not yet come.”

“They have no wine” is an epiphany, a making known of the human predicament. More than just a factual statement about the wine running out – party gone bust, as it were – it is a symbolic statement about human emptiness and futility. We lack in ourselves what we need for our ultimate good and happiness. We lack the wine of divinity that gladdens the heart of man and that brings joy to our lives. How shall we achieve that which we desire but cannot get on our own because of the disorders and disarray of our lives? Only through his “hour”. What is his “hour”? The passion and crucifixion of Christ which belongs to the purpose of God’s engagement with our humanity in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. “This beginning of signs” is connected to the central event in the story of Christ, his sacrifice for us.

Do what he tells you is our response to what God seeks for us. What is asked of us is our response to his word and will.

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Sermons

Sermon for Septuagesima

“He sent them into his vineyard”

January, the forgotten poet of Stanley, Nova Scotia, Alden Nowlan, remarks, signals a truth about Maritime winters, “a truth that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” He was speaking about this kind of week and day here. Charles G.D. Roberts, a celebrated Canadian poet from New Brunswick and a professor at King’s College when the University was located here in Windsor, captures the winter scene as well in a poem entitled The Winter Fields written for the Centenary of Shelley in 1890.

Winds here, and sleet, and frost that bites like steel.
The low bleak hill rounds under the low sky.
Naked of flock and fold the fallows lie,
Thin streaked with meagre drift. The gusts reveal
By fits the dim grey snakes of fence, that steal
Through the white dusk. The hill-foot poplars sigh,
While storm and death with winter trample by,
And the iron fields ring sharp, and blind lights reel.

“Winds here,” he says. I like to think that “here” means the winter fields of the environs of Windsor. But while the octet – the first eight lines of the sonnet – evokes the harsh realities of winter, the sestet, which completes the sonnet, opens us out to another reflection. Hid “in the lonely ridges, wrenched with pain” of the bleak mid-winter landscape is “the germ of ecstasy – the sum/ of Life that waits on summer, till the rain/ Whisper in April and the crocus come.” Lurking beneath the snow and ice of the cold death of winter lies the hope of spring – “the sum of Life that waits on summer”.

These poetic reflections complement the Scriptural readings for this Sunday, a day designated and adorned with what might seem to be a rather antiquated and awkward term, not a little mysterious and strange, Septuagesima. It signals a shift in emphasis. The contemplations of divinity that are so much a strong feature of the Epiphany season with its concentration upon the essential divinity of Jesus Christ give place to the ground of creation, to the vineyard of human labour and work.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 25 – 31 January

Monday, January 25th, Conversion of St. Paul
4:45-5:15pm Confirmation Class – Rm. 206, KES
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00 Holy Communion

Tuesday, January 26th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies/Guides – Parish Hall

Thursday, January 28th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, January 29th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
3:30pm Holy Communion – Gladys Manning Home

Sunday, January 31st, Sexagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
5:00pm Choral Evensong – St. George’s, Halifax
Sponsored by the PBSC NS PEI, Fr. Curry preaching

Upcoming Events:

Sunday, February 7th
Pot-Luck Luncheon & Annual Parish Meeting following the 10:30am service

Tuesday, February 9th
4:30-6:00pm Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper

Wednesday, February 10th
Ash Wednesday

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Prayers and liturgy

Septuagesima

The collect for today, Septuagesima (or the Third Sunday Before Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Millais, Labourers in the VineyardO LORD, we beseech thee favourably to hear the prayers of thy people; that we, who are justly punished for our offences, may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness, for the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
The Gospel: St. Matthew 20:1-16

Artwork: John Everett Millais, The Labourers in the Vineyard, from Illustrations to `The Parables of Our Lord’, 1864. Wood engraving on paper, Tate Collections, London.

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