Christ Church

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Keble (1792-1866), Priest, Tractarian, Poet (source):

Father of the eternal Word,
in whose encompassing love
all things in peace and order move:
grant that, as thy servant John Keble
adored thee in all creation,
so we may have a humble heart of love
for the mysteries of thy Church
and know thy love to be new every morning,
in Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Romans 12:9-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 5:1-12

John Keble’s Assize Sermon entitled “National Apostasy“, delivered at Oxford on 14 July 1833, is regarded as the beginning of the renewal movement known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarian Movement. In that sermon, preached at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Rev. Keble condemned the growth of liberalism in the Church of England and took the nation to task for turning away from God and ignoring the prophetic calling of the church. The sermon caused a sensation across Britain.

Between 1833 and 1841, Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and others issued a series of 90 pamphlets called Tracts For The Times (hence Tractarian Movement), in which they presented their views on ecclesiology and theology. Tractarianism emphasised the importance of the ministry and the sacraments as God-given ordinances and ultimately developed into Anglo-Catholicism, which has been highly influential in the Anglican Communion as well as other Christian traditions.

Keble College, Oxford, was founded in his memory in 1870. The College was designed by William Butterfield, a leading exponent of Victorian Gothic who had been raised in a Nonconformist family but later became a convinced High-Church Anglican. He and other architects influenced by the Oxford Movement looked to medieval cathedrals for inspiration and designed churches full of colour as a celebration of God’s creation. The walls of Keble College Chapel are lined with brilliant mosaics showing scenes from the Old Testament and the life of Christ, and patristic and medieval saints. Some see Keble College and Chapel as the high point of Butterfield’s architectural achievements.

John Keble’s page at the Cyber Hymnal lists 72 hymns. Some of Rev Keble’s writings, including “National Apostasy” and seven Tracts For The Times, are posted here. All of the tracts are posted here.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary often falls within the season of Lent. Indeed, there have been times even when it has fallen on Good Friday which moved a poet like John Donne to write a powerful poem about the nature of God’s comings and goings with us, a theme which Lancelot Andrewes develops over and over again as well. In Upon the Annunciation and the Passion falling upon one day. 1608, Donne explores in a rich and allusive way the comings of God to us and the goings of God from us in the double mystery of the Annunciation and the Passion. “At once a son is promised her, and gone,/ Gabriel gives Christ to her, he her to John.” As Donne wonderfully puts it, “All this, and all between, this day hath shown,/ Th’Abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one/ (As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)/ Of the angels’ Ave, ‘ and Consummatum est”, a wonderful contraction of the mystery of God’s turning to us and for us. It is a kind of circling.

The turning is about God’s turning to us and our turning to him. Such are the motions of God’s comings and goings to, with and in us. Redire ad principia, a kind of circling, is all about turning. It is the dominant feature of Andrewes Ash-Wednesday sermons entitled in the collection made by Buckeridge and Laud as Of Repentance and Fasting.

In the first of those sermons preached in 1598 before Queen Elizabeth, Andrewes reflects upon the nature of the turning. He takes as his text what might seem an unusual passage, the 34^th verse Psalm 78, “when He slew them, then they sought Him; and they returned and enquired early after God.” The sermon undertakes to explore “the matter of repentance, expressed here under the terms of seeking and turning.” It focuses on the one to whom we turn just as the Annunciation is about God’s turning to our humanity in Mary and her turning to God in affirmation of the divine will for our salvation. Both Donne and Andrewes have a high regard for the significance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the economy of salvation. In poems and in sermons, they contribute to the tradition of Marian devotion in seventeenth century Anglican divinity, a tradition that is largely shaped by a strong commitment to the doctrine of Chalcedon and to the measured sense of adiaphora, things indifferent though not unimportant, that allow for a breadth of expression about Marian doctrine but without sacrifice to the principles of essential faith as measured primarily by Scripture and Creed.

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“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

March has been brutal, hardly a picnic. And as for there being “much grass in the place,” it certainly hasn’t been here unless in the Cannabis shops, legal or otherwise, or perhaps the Prime Minister’s Office. One way to escape the madness of March, perhaps, particlularly if you don’t like basketball. “Surely the people is grass,” withering away in the cold winds of March. Yet in contrast to the miseries of March we have these wonderful lessons which strengthen and refresh the soul in the things of God.

Our text speaks profoundly and eloquently about the nature of grace and about the meaning of our lives in faith. The gathering up of the fragments, κλασματα, literally, the broken pieces left over from the picnic in the wilderness with Jesus, signals the nature of redemption itself, the gathering up of the broken fragments of our lives, especially, it seems to me in our broken world and in the realization of our own brokenness. The gathering is about the coming together, literally, a συναγωγη, of our wounded and broken humanity in the wilderness of the world. But a gathering to what end? That nothing be lost. Such is the picture of redemption.

The gathering of the broken fragments of our lives is about our being gathered to God. Such are the Lenten mercies of Christ on this day variously known as “Mothering Sunday”, because of the Epistle reading from Galatians which identifies Jerusalem as “the mother of us all.” The nurturing, caring mother is the image of the Church that nurtures and cares for us with the things of heaven. It is also “Refreshment Sunday”, because of the Gospel reading from John about the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness and the further provision for us in “the gathering up of the fragments that remain.” And finally, it is “Laetare Sunday”, because the Introit psalm for the day at Holy Communion is Psalm 122, which begins “Laetatus sum”, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘We will go unto the house of the Lord.’” That psalm belongs to what are called The Psalms of Ascent, the songs of the going up, the pilgrimage, to Jerusalem. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says in the Gospel for Quinquagesima Sunday just at the outset of Lent.

In the Christian understanding, Jerusalem has become less a physical entity, less a geographical city, and more the image of our spiritual homeland, more the city of God, in which the gathering up of our humanity finds its freedom and its fulfillment in God as a gathering, a συναγωγη, a synagogue, if you will, the place of being with one another in our being with God.

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Monday, March 27th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, March 28th, Annunciation (transf.)
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00 Holy Communion & Lenten Programme III: Redire ad Principia: Lenten Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes

Wednesday, March 29th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, March 31st
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, April 2nd, Fifth Sunday in Lent/Passion Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, April 4th, Comm. of St. Ambrose
7:00 Holy Communion & Lenten Programme IV

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

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished, by the comfort of thy grace may mercifully be relieved; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:26-5:1
The Gospel: St. John 6:5-14

Artwork: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Feeding the Multitude, 1670. Oil on canvas, Chapel of Holy Charity, Seville, Spain.

The collect for today, The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canada, 1962):

WE beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Isaiah 7:10-15
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-38

Artwork: Pietro Cavallini, The Annunciation, 1296-1300. Mosaic, Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome.

“Blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears for they hear”

It is all about the turning. Redire ad principia is ‘a kind of circling’, as Lancelot Andrewes notes, by which we turn back to God from whom we have turned away. And while his 1619 Ash-Wednesday Sermon names that return to a principle as repentance, in a way, the whole of the Christian life is about our comings and goings to God through God’s comings and goings to us. Such divine motions are at once external and internal, temporal and eternal. The pattern of the Church Year laid out comprehensively in the classical Books of Common Prayer is not something linear but circular, a constant circling around the mystery of God revealed in and through the witness of the Scriptures in the living tradition of the Church. The intent is that we be constantly drawn more and more into the mystery of the triune God whose engagement with our humanity belongs entirely to the mystery of the divine life in itself.

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present

So Eliot puts it in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets. He is echoing Andrewes’ Ash-Wednesday sermon yet again, the same sermon which has influenced his own poem, Ash-Wednesday.

That sense of the gathering up of time into eternity without which time has no meaning is wonderfully set before us in the commemorations of St. Benedict and Thomas Cranmer on this day: the one, the founder of Benedictine monasticism in the sixth century which contributed to the shape and character of Europe; the other, an archbishop and a martyr, and the architectural genius of the Book(s) of Common Prayer in the sixteenth century. A thousand years separate them and yet they are united in the Church’s eternal medley of prayer and devotion to which they both contributed in such remarkable ways.

’A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For such a journey. And such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Journey of the Magi, the first poem written and published after his conversion to orthodox Trinitarian Christianity in the form of Anglicanism, particularly in its Anglo-Catholic expression. That conversion was more than partially occasioned by his careful reading of the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, particularly the Sermons on the Nativity and his Ash-Wednesday Sermon of 1619. This is more than amply demonstrated in the little book of essays that Eliot wrote to explain his conversion, a book entitled For Lancelot Andrewes of which the first essay is on Lancelot Andrewes and yet whose name is given to the whole collection. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi begins with an almost verbatim quote from Andrewes’ Sermon XV On the Nativity (1622). It bears further testimony, if more were needed, to the strong influence of Andrewes’ “extraordinary prose”, his poetic prose, one might say, on T.S. Eliot’s own poetry. But it argues for something else that connects to the joint commemoration of Benedict and Cranmer. It is that strong sense of the presence of the voices of the past as living voices in the present, voices that belong to the spiritual community of faith.

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The collect for today, the commemoration of Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), Archbishop of Canterbury, Reformation Martyr (source):

Father of all mercies,
who through the work of thy servant Thomas Cranmer
didst renew the worship of thy Church
and through his death
didst reveal thy strength in human weakness:
strengthen us by thy grace so to worship thee in spirit and in truth
that we may come to the joys of thine everlasting kingdom;
through Jesus Christ, our Mediator and Advocate,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 3:9-14
The Gospel: St. John 15:20-16:1

Artwork: Thomas Cranmer, stained glass, Hensley Memorial Chapel, King’s-Edgehill School, Windsor, N.S.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-550), Abbot of Monte Cassino, Father of Western Monasticism (source):

O eternal God,
who made Benedict a wise master
in the school of thy service,
and a guide to many called into the common life
to follow the rule of Christ:
grant that we may put thy love above all things,
and seek with joy the way of thy commandments;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Proverbs 2:1-9
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:27-33

Artwork: El Greco, St. Benedict, 1557-59. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Cuthbert (c. 634-87), Bishop of Lindisfarne, Missionary (source):

Almighty God,
who didst call thy servant Cuthbert from following the flock
to follow thy Son and to be a shepherd of thy people:
in thy mercy, grant that we may so follow his example
that we may bring those who are lost home to thy fold;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 6:1-10
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-33

Artwork: St. Cuthbert, stained glass, St. Hilda’s Church, Ashford, England.