Month: February 2016

Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday in Lent

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

ALMIGHTY God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 15:21-28

Allori, Christ and the Canaanite WomanArtwork: Alessandro Allori, Christ and the Canaanite Woman, 1590. Oil on canvas, San Giovannino degli Scolopi, Florence.

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Sermons

Scenes of Bethany – I

This is the first of four Lenten addresses on the theme Contemplation, Activity and Resurrection in the Passion of Christ.  The second is posted here, the third here, and the fourth here.

Scenes of Bethany: “Behold we go up to Jerusalem”
Contemplation, Activity & Resurrection in the Passion of Christ

Address # 1

“Behold we go up to Jerusalem”. Lent is a time of purpose and direction. It presents a needful reminder of an essential characteristic of our Christian lives. Lent is more than a season. In a profound sense, it signifies the whole of our Christian life. At the very least, it reminds us that our lives have a purpose and a direction, and, more importantly, that our lives find their truth in the purpose of God towards us.

Nowhere else do we see that purpose more clearly and more powerfully than on the way of the cross. That way means more than just the steps to Calvary. It means the entire life of Jesus Christ. The whole life of Christ is the way of the cross. It is the way of sacrificial love, the way of the Son’s love for the Father eternally and that way in the very flesh of our humanity.

The cross may be veiled before us as, for instance, in Passiontide. It may be dimly seen. Yet it is ever present and its presence ever felt. It belongs to the purpose of Jerusalem: “He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph.1.5,6), as St. Paul writes to the Ephesians. He goes on to say:

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us. for he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (Eph.1.7-10).

“In him we have redemption through his blood”. “He has made known to us his purpose which he has purposed in Christ”. The Lenten season, like the Lent of our lives, is not something aimless and indefinite. It is full of purpose and direction. The going up to Jerusalem is a journey in which the end of the journey is somehow known and somehow present in the means of the journeying.

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

“As dying, and behold, we live”

The conjunction of The First Sunday in Lent and Valentine’s Day is at once fortuitous and providential. Valentine’s Day, to be sure, has largely become a secular event caught perhaps in the tension between the erotic and the romantic, between kitsch and extravagance, overwrought with emotion and expectation. Yet somehow it is about love! No doubt there are temptations too! The temptations of wine, woman and song, perhaps?! The First Sunday in Lent is certainly about love and temptations though of a deeper and more serious nature. Nothing like a bit of Lenten discipline for us too gathering here in the Hall, Valentine’s Day notwithstanding. It is just a wee bit too cold in the Church given the cold snap and wind chill.

The temptations of Christ are our temptations seen in a certain light of clarity and with a kind of intensity. They raise important and necessary questions about love, about what we love and how we love and in what way. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, a journeying to God and with God in Jesus Christ, a journeying that seeks the perfecting of our loves which implies already that there are problems about our loves. Temptation shows us something about those problems. The temptations test us about our loves. Yet temptation is not sin. Sin lies in giving in to temptations in which our limited loves are confused with the infinite love of God. The temptations illumine the true nature of our loves.

Paradoxically it is through the temptations of Christ that we learn what is to be loved and in what way. It takes a struggle and one which belongs to the nature of our Christian identity. The temptations of Christ recall us to our baptisms, to who we are in the sight of God and in the body of Christ. The struggle is about life and death just as in baptism there is explicitly our dying and our living again through our incorporation into Christ, into his death and resurrection. The temptations of Christ illumine the struggle for us in our lives. They reveal what we have to die to and what we have to live for. They recapitulate, in a way, the vows of renunciation in our baptism which are critical for our affirmation of faith in Christ.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 15 – 21 February

Monday, February 15th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, February 16th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I
Scenes of Bethany: Contemplation, Activity & Resurrection in the Passion of Christ

Wednesday, February 17th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, February 18th
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
6:00-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, February 21st, Second Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, February 23rd, Eve of St. Matthias
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme II

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Lent

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

O LORD, who for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights: Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness and true holiness, to thy honour and glory; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 6:1-10
The Gospel: St Matthew 4:1-11

Rivière, Temptation in the WildernessArtwork: Briton Rivière, The Temptation in the Wilderness, 1898. Oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

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Prayers and liturgy

Caedmon, Poet

The collect for a Doctor of the Church, Poet, or Scholar, in commemoration of Saint Caedmon (d. 680), Monk of Whitby, first English poet, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who by thy Holy Spirit hast given unto one man a word of wisdom, and to another a word of knowledge, and to another the gift of tongues: We praise thy Name for the gifts of grace manifested in thy servant Caedmon, and we pray that thy Church may never be destitute of the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Daniel 2:17-24
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:9-17

geograph-263793-by-RichTeaSaint Caedmon is the first English poet whose name is known. Saint Bede the Venerable tells Caedmon’s story in Book IV, Chapter 24, of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Bede records that Caedmon was a herdsman who at an advanced age suddenly received the gift of poetry and song. Someone appeared to Caedmon in a dream one night and asked him to sing. In response, he spontaneously sang verses in praise of the God the Creator. When he awoke, he remembered the words of his song and added more lines.

He went to speak with Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. She and several learned men examined Caedmon and affirmed that his gift was from God.

Caedmon became a monk at Whitby and composed a large body of poetry and song on many Christian subjects, including the Creation story, the Exodus, the birth, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the apostles.

Unfortunately, almost none of Caedmon’s work survives. Only his Hymn, recorded by Bede in Latin and Old English, is known to us. Here is a modern English translation:

Praise we the Fashioner now of Heaven’s fabric,
The majesty of his might and his mind’s wisdom,
Work of the world-warden, worker of all wonders,
How he the Lord of Glory everlasting,
Wrought first for the race of men Heaven as a rooftree,
Then made he Middle Earth to be their mansion.

Source: Bede, A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, rev. ed. 1968, Penguin, p. 251.

A humble and holy monk, Caedmon died in perfect charity with his fellow servants of God.

Photograph: Memorial to Caedmon, St Mary’s Churchyard, Whitby, North Yorkshire, Great Britain. The inscription reads, “To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English Sacred Song. Fell asleep hard by, 680”. © Copyright RichTea and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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Sermons

Sermon for Ash Wednesday

“Remember, O man, that dust thou art”

We begin in ashes. We call this day Ash Wednesday for while we are reminded that we are but dust, it is ashes which are placed on our foreheads on this day. The dust recalls us to our origins. We are the dust into which God has breathed his life-giving spirit. But the greater emphasis of this day lies in the ashes, as it were, and not in the dust. The ashes are the ashes of repentance.

The ashes are made from burning last year’s palm crosses. “Fire ever doth aspire,/And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes” the poet John Donne puts it in a poem celebrating love, actually a marriage. As he suggests, love is unlike fire that ends in ashes; there is something more. “Love’s strong arts” make one, create unity and life, where before there was division and separation and death. All love in the Christian understanding of things finds its ultimate meaning in the love of God.

The ashes of Ash Wednesday mark not an ending but a new beginning, a renewal in love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love. That pilgrimage is a renewal and a perfecting in love. That love is the perfecting grace of Christ, the divine love incarnate who goes the way of our imperfect loves to make perfect our loves. There must be in us the continual purgation and purification of our loves. They are purged and purified in the passion of Christ, in the pilgrimage of his perfect love for us. That is the intent of Lent and the significance of beginning in ashes. It is wanted that that perfect love should move in us. Our loves are to undergo a purgation and a purification through “Love divine, all loves excelling.”

We are called to repentance. There is to be in us the awareness of our imperfect loves. But the ashes do not mark an ending but a beginning again with a twofold emphasis. There is conversion from sin and there is contrition for sin. Fire ends in ashes but love – God’s love in us – is the greater fire which makes something even out of the ashes of our lives. The ashes of repentance are about divine love stirring up our hearts and minds, stirring up our souls and bodies to return again to him from whom we have turned away. We are to arise from the ashes in the renewal of faith, hope and love.

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Prayers and liturgy

Ash Wednesday

The collect for today, The First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Klementiev, ConfessionALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St James 4:6-11a
The Gospel: St Matthew 6:16-21

Artwork: Boris Klementiev, Confession, 1997.

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Events

Pancake Supper cancelled

Owing to the blizzard warnings, the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper scheduled for Tuesday, February 9th, 2016 has unfortunately had to be cancelled.

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Sermons

Sermon for Quinquagesima

“I will show you a yet more excellent way”

We meet in the bleak mid-winter on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday that points us to Lent and to its proper meaning. And we meet, too, in the sweet afterglow of Candlemas, the feast that marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. Central to that feast is the idea of sacrifice, of love in motion that seeks the greater good of our humanity. It is a feast at once of Christ, his presentation in the Temple, and of Mary, her purification and thanksgiving for birth. “This child”, Simeon says, “is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel” and then to Mary, he says, “a sword shall pierce through your own soul also.” And why? “That the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Such is the meaning, too, of Lent! “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face,”as St. Paul puts it, that we may know even as we are known in the love of God. Candlemas marks the first time the Incarnate Christ is in Jerusalem and points us to his final journey to Jerusalem about which today’s Gospel speaks. In that lies the whole meaning of his Incarnation. There is a wonderful correspondence between Candlemas and Quinquagesima in the transition from Christmas to Lent and Easter.

Our secular culture celebrates February 2nd as Groundhog Day and with a certain curious anxiety about the winter weather. But why February 2nd? Why not February 1st? Because it draws upon the far more ancient and far profounder Christian festival of Candlemas, a feast of light signifying life through sacrifice. You have a choice, I suppose, between celebrating a rodent to whom, somehow, we attribute self-consciousness in terms of seeing or not seeing his shadow and skills in weather prognostications (not a little unlike reading the entrails of birds!), and the feast of Candlemas which this year brings us to this Sunday which portends the near approach of Lent.

Lent is about our going up to Jerusalem with Jesus in his final journey to Jerusalem. “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus tells us. He has something in mind that is greater than death. In that going up he would teach us and he would heal us. He would set our love aright. We do not really know what we want. We do not really know what is truly good for us. We do not really know what is rightly to be wanted except through the perfecting path of his love. In the Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem with them.

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