Month: July 2017

Prayers and liturgy

St. Mary Magdalene

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, whose blessed Son did sanctify Mary Magdalene, and call her to be a witness to his resurrection: Mercifully grant that by thy grace we may be healed of all our infirmities, and always serve thee in the power of his endless life; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 13:27-31
The Gospel: St John 20:11-18

Lajos Pándy, Feast in the House of Simon the PhariseeArtwork: Lajos Pándy, Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee, 1933. Oil and graphite on paper, Ferenczy Museum, Szentendre, Hungary.

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Prayers and liturgy

Margaret of Antioch, Virgin and Martyr

The collect for a Virgin or Matron, on the Feast of Saint Margaret of Antioch (early 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 Margaret of Antioch; 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

Master of the Coburg Roundels, Altarpiece of St. MargaretArtwork: Master of the Coburg Roundels, Altarpiece of Saint Margaret, c. 1480. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, France.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;
nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”

Nada, nothing, nichts rien. A powerful word, it captures something of the dilemma of modernity – the sense of nothingness, of emptiness. Is “at thy word” the counter? Or does it reveal a deeper problem? Does “at thy word” mean that suddenly we will have everything? Yes and no. The danger lies in what we think “at thy word” means.

The danger is in our thinking. If “at thy word” means a logic by which we acquire things then reason has become something merely instrumental, a means to an end. But what kind of end? An end where everything is turned into things. We not only get things – a full net of things – but our thinking turns us into things. And this is a greater nothingness, our greater nothingness, the loss of our humanity. It is a betrayal of the deeper kind of thinking that this Gospel along with today’s Epistle presents to us. If we think “at thy word” means getting things then we have missed Peter’s command to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”.

In the Christian understanding, Christ is the Logos, the Word and Son of the Father. But as Word, he is not the means to our domination and manipulation of the world. That is exactly our contemporary problem. It is a problem about how we think about thinking. If we turn reason into a tool, then we become things at the expense of our humanity. We dismiss and ignore all the qualities of life signalled in the Epistle that are true blessings, blessings rooted in the compassion of Christ, the truth of God who is the author and meaning of all life. Life is more than things. It is our evil to turn reason into a machine-making thing.

The point of the Gospel is that Christ wants more for us than a net full of things. Ultimately, he has come that we “might have life and have it more abundantly.” That abundance of life does not mean an abundance of things. It has entirely to do with the quality of our life with one another that turns upon our life with God in Christ. It has entirely to do with the power of the Good alive and at work in us. It is altogether about a meaningful life, a life lived to and for God and with God.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifth Sunday after Trinity

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:8-15a
The Gospel: St. Luke 5:1-11

Jordaens, Miraculous Draught of FishesArtwork: Jacob Jordaens, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, c. 1640. Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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Prayers and liturgy

Swithun, Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Swithun (d. 862), Bishop of Winchester (source):

St. Swithun upon Kingsgate Church, St. SwithunAlmighty God,
by whose grace we celebrate again
the feast of thy servant Swithun:
grant that, as he governed with gentleness
the people committed to his care,
so we, rejoicing in our inheritance in Christ,
may ever seek to build up thy Church in unity and love;
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.

With the Epistle and Gospel for a Bishop or Archbishop, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Artwork: Saint Swithun, stained glass, St. Swithun upon Kingsgate, Winchester, England.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

It is a familiar image and one which appears in the New Testament both in Luke and Matthew; in Luke in the form of a question and in Matthew in the form of a statement. The context of Matthew’s use of the image is the tension between Jesus and the Pharisees. His statement is an indictment about leadership which is also the common way in which this image is understood. We use it to talk about a lack or a problem about leadership. That implies that reason and understanding are important qualities when it comes to political life and to the life of institutions.

Luke’s interrogative use of the image is more intriguing since it is set in the context of mercy and forgiveness and serves as the entry point to the problem of hypocrisy, the problem of judgement. In a way, as his interrogative approach suggests, the image is being applied to all of us – to our judgments that stand over and against others and reveal our blindness. For Luke, the blind leading the blind is not simply about others; it is about us.

The idea and image are not limited to the Christian Scriptures. It is an important aspect of Buddhism in its reaction against and rejection of Sanatana Dharma, Hinduism. The Buddha comes to reject the leaders and teachers of Hinduism directly. The Canki Sutta, recalling, it is claimed, Buddha’s rejection puts it this way. “It is like a line of blind men, each holding one to the preceding one; the first one does not see, the middle one also does not see; the last one does not see. Thus, it seems to me that the state of the Brahmans is like that of a line of blind men.” It is a devastating critique of the Brahmin class, the teaching class of Hindu religious philosophy which is found in the Pali Canon, in a text set down before the time of Christ but sometime after the actual life of Siddhartha Gautama.

And yet, within Hinduism itself there was, far earlier, its own self-critique found in the Upanishads which speaks about the blindness of those who claim to know. “Fools, dwelling in darkness, wiser in their own conceits, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.”

The idea and image receives its most moving visual expression in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous and unique 1568 painting of The Parable of the Blind leading the Blind. (more…)

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday After Trinity

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

O GOD, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 8:18-23
The Gospel: St. Luke 6:36-42

Vrancx, The Blind Leading the BlindArtwork: Sebastian Vrancx, The Blind Leading The Blind, 17th century. Oil on panel, Private collection.

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Prayers and liturgy

Thomas More, Martyr

The collect for today, the commemoration of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Lord Chancellor of England, Scholar, Reformation Martyr (source):

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas MoreAlmighty God,
who strengthened Thomas More
to be in office a king’s good servant
but in conscience your servant first,
grant us in all our doubts and uncertainties
to feel the grasp of your holy hand
and to live by faith in your promise
that you shall not let us be lost;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:13-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 12:13-17

A meditation of Thomas More, written in the Tower of London a year before he was beheaded:

Give me your grace, good Lord, to set the world at nought,
to set my mind fast upon you and not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths.
To be content to be solitary.
Not to long for worldly company,
little and little utterly to cast off the world, and rid my mind of the business thereof.
Not to long to hear of any worldly things,
but that the hearing of worldly fantasies may be to me displeasant.
Gladly to be thinking God,
busily to labour to love him.
To know own vility and wretchedness,
to humble and meeken myself under the mighty hand of God,
to bewail my sins passed;
for the purging of them, patiently to suffer adversity.
Gladly to bear my purgatory here,
to be joyful of tribulations,
to walk the narrow way that leads to life.
To bear the cross with Christ,
to have the last thing—death—in remembrance,
to have ever before my eye death, that is ever at hand;
to make death no stranger to me;
to foresee and consider the everlasting fire of hell;
to pray for pardon before the Judge comes.
To have continually in mind the passion that Christ suffered for me;
For his benefits incessantly to give him thanks,
to buy the time again that I before have lost.
To abstain from vain confabulations,
To eschew light foolish mirth and gladness;
To cut off unnecessary recreations.
Of worldly substance, friends, liberty, life and all–
To set the loss at nought for the winning of Christ.
To think my worst enemies my best friends,
for the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good
with their love and favour as they did with their hatred and malice.

Source of collect: For All the Saints: Prayers and Readings for Saints’ Days, compiled by Stephen Reynolds. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2007, p. 215.

Artwork: Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More, 1527. Tempera on wood, Frick Collection, New York City.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity

Rejoice with me.

“I must have always wanted to rejoice”, Hagar Shipley Currie (no relation), a ninety year old lady says in Margaret Laurence’s Canadian classic novel, The Stone Angel. She is dying and yet in the days and weeks leading to her death, she is beginning to come to a better understanding of who she truly is. It is a kind of confessional moment, a conversion of the understanding. “Pride was my wilderness”, she realizes. She has recognized that she has been like the literal stone angel, a monument erected in memory of her mother but as an expression of the pride of her father in the cemetery in fictional Manawaka, Manitoba. The angel is literally doubly blind; as stone it literally cannot see and its eyes as carved do not even convey the illusion of sight.

Hagar comes to realize that she, too, has been doubly blind; blind about herself and about the needs of others. She was lost in the wilderness of pride but now is found. The catalyst for this self-discovery was the verse of the familiar hymn, All People That on Earth Do Dwell, Rev’d William Kethe’s sixteenth century paraphrase of Psalm 100. The melody and words were composed and written within ten years of each other. The tune, usually attributed to the French composer Louis Bourgeois, first appears in the 1551 edition of the Genevan Psalter; the words may have been composed by Kethe, himself a Scot, while in exile in Europe at the same time. The first verse provides the moment of self-understanding for Hagar.

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him gladly serve, his praise forth tell,
Come ye before him, and rejoice.

The fifteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel tells three interrelated parables, the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, which we heard this morning and the lost or prodigal son.[1] In each case, the parables end on the strong note of rejoicing, signifying the greater nature of the return to wholeness and completeness, to family and community, to self and God. What makes the return possible is the point presented in the first two parables where what is lost is found because, and only because, of the movement of God towards us imaged in terms of the shepherd leaving the ninety and nine sheep and seeking out the one lost sheep and the woman seeking diligently for the one lost coin. We are the one lost sheep and the one lost coin. The principle of return is emphatically and completely God. Neither the sheep nor the coin have any power of movement in and of themselves.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Third Sunday After Trinity

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

Feti, Parable of the Lost DrachmaO LORD, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may by thy mighty aid be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 5:5-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 15:1-10

Artwork: Domenic Feti, Parable of the Lost Drachma, 1618-22. Oil on wood, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

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