Christ Church

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Jerome (c. 342-420), Priest, Monk, Translator of the Scriptures, Doctor of the Church (source):

O Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant Jerome, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 3:14-17
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-48

One of the most scholarly and learned early church fathers, St. Jerome devoted much of his life to accurately translating the Holy Bible from the original languages of Hebrew and Greek into Latin.

Born near Aquileia, northeast Italy, of Christian parents, Jerome travelled widely. He received a classical education at Rome and travelled to Gaul where he became a monk. He later moved to Palestine, spending five years as an ascetic in the Syrian desert. In 374, he was ordained a priest in Antioch. He then pursued biblical studies at Constantinople under Gregory Nazianzus and translated works by Eusebius, Origen, and others.

Travelling to Rome in 382, Jerome became secretary to the aged Pope Damasus. By the time the pope died three years later, Jerome had become involved in theological controversies in which he antagonised many church leaders and theologians. He left Rome under a cloud, returning to Palestine where he lived as a monk in Bethlehem for the rest of his life.

Over several decades, Jerome wrote biblical commentaries and works promoting monasticism and asceticism. Most importantly, he produced fresh Latin translations of most of the Old and New Testaments, based on the original biblical languages. This work formed the basis of the Vulgate, which remained the standard Scriptural text of the western church for over a millennium.

Artwork: Tintoretto, Saint Jerome, c. 1550. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, Prague.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 12:7-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:1-10

The name Michael is a variation of Micah, and means in Hebrew “Who is like God?”

The archangel Michael first appears in the Book of Daniel, where he is described as “one of the chief princes” and as the special protector of Israel. In the New Testament epistle of Jude (v. 9), Michael, in a dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, says, “The Lord rebuke you“. Michael appears also in Revelation (12:7-9) as the leader of the angels in the great battle in Heaven that ended with Satan and the hosts of evil being thrown down to earth. There are many other references to the archangel Michael in Jewish and Christian traditions.

Following these scriptural passages, Christian tradition has given St. Michael four duties: (1) To continue to wage battle against Satan and the other fallen angels; (2) to save the souls of the faithful from the power of Satan especially at the hour of death; (3) to protect the People of God, both the Jews of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant; and (4) finally to lead the souls of the departed from this life and present them to our Lord for judgment. For these reasons, Christian iconography depicts St. Michael as a knight-warrior, wearing battle armor, and wielding a sword or spear, while standing triumphantly on a serpent or other representation of Satan. Sometimes he is depicted holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life, both symbols of the last judgment.

Very early in church history, St. Michael became associated with the care of the sick. The cult of Michael developed first in Eastern Christendom, where healing waters and hot springs at many locations in Greece and Asia Minor were dedicated to him. Michael is supposed to have appeared three times on Monte Gargano, southern Italy, in the 5th century. The local townspeople believed that Michael’s intercession gave them victory in battle over their enemies. These apparitions restored his biblical role as a strong protector of God’s people, and were also the basis for spreading his cult in the West.

The Feast of St. Michael & All Angels is also known as Michaelmas. The Roman Catholic Church celebrates today as the Feast of Sts. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels.

Artwork: Wolfgang Andreas Heindl, Saint Michael the Archangel Vanquishing the Devil, c. 1730s. Oil on canvas, Private collection.

“There was war in heaven”

Dancing with angels is a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives; it is particularly a feature of our life as students and teachers and as priest and people. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak as well, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. The Angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good. We are part of a larger spiritual community, the community of Angels and humans. “The services of Angels and men”, the Collect notes, are “ordained and constituted” by God “in a wonderful order.” We pray to God that “they may succor and defend us on earth”.

Angels? But you can’t see them! True. You can only think them. That, of course, is exactly the point. We can only think them and we can only think with them. We can even learn from them. The outstanding theologian, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, asked the question, “Can a man be taught by an Angel?” (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q.11, art. Iii). The Angels can teach us, he shows, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the forms of violence and abuse, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Perhaps we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know.

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Did God say?

The amazing and world-transforming story of The Fall from Genesis 3 was read in Chapel this week along with the equally amazing and apocalyptic story from Revelation about St. Michael and All Angels. “There was war in heaven.”

The connections to the life of the School and to any educational programme worthy of the name are inescapable. We are being challenged through these Scriptural readings about the moral and ethical principles which inform our lives. In other words, these Scriptures speak directly and profoundly to our humanity regardless of our faith or non-faith commitments. They are in some sense the story of our world.

Genesis 3 is the biblical version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in the sense of providing a powerful critique of reason itself. Looked at in conjunction with the late September Feast of St. Michael and All Angels in the Christian tradition, we have a powerful commentary on the nature of our beginnings intellectually and ethically.

This is Michaelmas Term following the traditions of both Oxford and Cambridge. I think it is marvellous that our school term should begin with Angels. For it is altogether about the primacy of the intellectual which alone can redeem and perfect the physical and the material. The Angels are the pure thoughts of God in creation. To think is to think with the Angels.

But Genesis 3 reminds us of the cunning of our reason, something of which we must also be aware. Genesis 3 provides a profound and necessary critique of human reason. We are being challenged in two ways: first, not to think of reason as merely being about problem-solving and, secondly, to recognize the cunning and deceit of reason.

We need Oedipus Rex as commentary on Genesis 3 and vice-versa. Oedipus not only thought that he knew who he was but thought that his problem-solving kind of reason was the highest, the truest, if not the only form of reason. In that assumption he anticipates so much of our current world and its discontents. To reduce reason to problem-solving is to reduce reason to a tool and an instrument and to deny to its operations anything intellectual, ethical, and spiritual. Oedipus Rex and Genesis 3 counter that assumption brilliantly and effectively, if only we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

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The collect for today, the commemoration of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester, scholar, spiritual writer (source):

O Lord God,
who didst give Lancelot Andrewes many gifts
of thy Holy Spirit,
making him a man of prayer and a pastor of thy people:
perfect in us that which is lacking in thy gifts,
of faith, to increase it,
of hope, to establish it,
of love, to kindle it,
that we may live in the light of thy grace and glory;
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: 1 Timothy 2:1-7a
The Gospel: St. Luke 11:1-4

A prayer of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes:

Thou, O Lord, art the Helper of the helpless,
The Hope of the hopeless,
The Saviour of them who are tossed with the tempests,
The Haven of them who sail; be thou all to all.
The glorious majesty of the Lord our God be upon us,
Prosper thou the work of our hands upon us,
Oh! prosper thou our handiwork
Lord, be thou within us, to strengthen us;
without us to keep us; above us to protect us;
beneath us to uphold us; before us to direct us;
behind us to keep us from straying;
round about us to defend us.
Blessed be Thou, O Lord our Father, for ever and ever. Amen.

Graphic: Tomb of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, Southwark Cathedral, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 October 2014.

“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”

Paul’s words in today’s Epistle stand in stark contrast, it might seem, to the spirit of the Gospel which seems to suggest that we should not worry about the things of the body – “what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” After all, “is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?” Jesus recalls us to the primary and necessary consideration of Providence. “Behold,” he says, “Consider,” he says, and above all, “Seek,” he says.

It is not that the things of the body and of the world don’t matter. They do. At issue is in what way and to what extent. Jesus in the Gospel puts his finger on a perennial issue in the human story and one which is even more pronounced and even more of a problem in our modern dsytopia. Anxiety doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Anxiety is a relatively modern word, largely derived from the German “angst” and freighted with a whole lot of baggage from the psycho-philosophical traditions of Nietzsche and Freud. It captures a certain unease about the world in which we find ourselves. Since the twentieth century it has displaced the word which Tyndale and the Translators of the King James Version of the Bible used in this passage from Matthew. The English word was “carefull” – be not so full of cares or encumbered, burdened with cares. In a way that describes our world a bit better and in a more concrete way than the various therapeutic descriptors that are part of our contemporary landscape, literally littered by a plethora of conditions and symptoms. We miss, I fear, the deeper spiritual understanding which today’s readings offer.

Suffering is real and the forms of suffering are endlessly diverse and individual. Today’s readings belong, I think, to important questions about good and evil, about suffering and redemption that need to be explored more deeply, especially by the Church. Why? Because of the essential question about ‘redemptive suffering’.

Jesus is not saying that there won’t be hardships and suffering. There will be. And that is the point of connection to the Epistle. To bear in our own bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus” is to bear the marks of redemptive suffering. It is to bear the marks of the profoundest form of the Providence of God imaginable.

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Monday, September 25th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, September 26th
6:00pm Prayers & Praises – Haliburton Place

Wednesday, September 27th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, September 28th, Eve of St. Michael & All Angels
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, September 29th
11:00am Holy Communion- Dykeland Lodge
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Saturday, September 30th
7:00-9:00pm Newfoundland and Country Music Evening of Musical Entertainment – Parish Hall

Sunday, October 1st, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity/In the Octave of Michaelmas
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion

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

KEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:11-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-34

Artwork: Jan Provoost, Death and the Miser, 1515-21. Oil on oak panel, Groeningemuseum, Bruges.

“And he arose and followed him”

The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and seemingly arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.

It is a story of conversion but without anything of the inner struggle and conflict displayed in the conversion of St. Paul. Yet the external details suffice. He is a tax-collector and that is associated here with being a sinner. Why? Publicans, as the name suggests, have an immediate connection to the res publica, the public things, the things pertaining to the life of the political community especially in its natural and economic life. There is a certain necessity to taxes, unpleasant as they may seem to be. Why then the association with sin?

There are two reasons. The first has to do with the particular context. Matthew’s tax-collecting is seen as a kind of spiritual betrayal, a form of treason against the spiritual community to which he properly belongs. He is collaborating with the Roman overlords in collecting taxes for them from his own people while benefiting personally. Rome, perhaps, was the first imperial power to outsource tax collecting! Matthew, like Zacchaeus, is despised by his own community. It is an issue of spiritual justice, we might say, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities.

The second reason is more universal and brings out the real problem with each and every form of economic determinism. It is signaled in the Collect for St. Matthew’s day which applies Matthew’s conversion to every one of us. “Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches.” It is a question of disordered love, of love in disarray, a question of fundamental loyalties and identities for each of us. We sense the gospel imperative, “ye cannot serve God and Mammon” – worldly riches – “for what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” The suggestion of the gospel is that we are more than our material acquisitions and more than our acquisitiveness. We are spiritual creatures who cannot, ultimately, be satisfied with anything less than the kingdom of God.

At issue is the relationship between the forms of our spiritual identity and the forms of economic life. What is overlooked in all forms of economic determinism is sin and evil, in the form of our “covetous desires” and “inordinate love of riches” and the willful destructiveness born out of deep hatred and animosity. What is overlooked is how all forms of economic determinism are essentially materialistic and atheistic.

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The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground

And now for something completely different, it might seem. Another account of the creation of our humanity that seems and feels completely different from what we heard in the reading of the first chapter of Genesis. Is it contradictory or complementary? We are being challenged about how we read and think.

Genesis One presents creation as a powerful, orderly and intellectual process and ends with the creation of our humanity. “God created man” – ha’adam meaning human being generically considered and as from the ground, adamah – “in his own image (betsalmo); in the image of God (betsalem ‘elohim) he created him; male and female he created them.” It is powerful concept. Alone of all of the things of the created order, our humanity is said to be made in the image of God. An image both is and is not what it resembles. We are not God. You are not your selfie! All of us, male and female, are said to be made in God’s image. Think about how that challenges us about how we think and act towards one another. To know that you are made in God’s image is to recognise that every other human being is made in that same image.

It speaks to the special dignity of our humanity but to be made in the image of God does not mean that we are God. Both modern science and Genesis agree that nature and therefore our humanity as part of the natural order is not divine. But what does it mean to be made in God’s image? What do we know about God in the first chapter of Genesis? God speaks, commands, names, blesses, hallows, makes and makes freely, looks and beholds, seeks goodness, shows care and concern, sustains and provides. Somehow these verbs suggest some of the features which belong to our humanity. They speak to our rationality.

Our humanity, too, is given dominion over every other living thing. The idea of dominion has been a troubling concept and one which has been often misconstrued. If we assume that it means the power to dominate, manipulate, and exploit nature and, by extension, other human beings, then we become the bullies of creation. Perhaps that has been a feature of modernity and one which worries us, as it should. Yet that expresses a very limited and destructive form of reason that assumes that our rationality is primarily instrumental, as essentially directed to practical actions and outcomes but as nothing in itself. Reason becomes merely a tool, a means to an end. That misses the deeper meaning of dominion. The word (at least in its Latin form) refers to the dominus, to the Lord, to what God does as the model and truth of what humans are to do and to be. It is not about bullying and lording it over everything and everyone. The Genesis account emphasises how our humanity is connected to everything else in the good order of creation as well as having a special dignity within it. That is surely the main point, a dignity that requires our respect for everything and everyone else.

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