Tuesday, December 19th
5:30-6:30pm Pulled Pork Supper – Parish Hall
7:00pm Capella Regalis concert: ‘To Bethlehem with Kings’
Thursday, December 21st, St. Thomas
7:00pm Holy Communion
Friday, December 22nd
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
Sunday, December 24th, Fourth Sunday in Advent/Christmas Eve
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
7:00pm Children’s Creche Service
9:30pm Christmas Communion Service
The collect for today, the Third Sunday in Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD Jesu Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee: Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:2-10
Artwork: Antonio Mancini, Saint John the Baptist, c. 1890. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
This is the second of two Advent Meditations on the Book of Common Prayer Prefaces. The first meditation is posted here.
The prefaces to the Book(s) of Common Prayer are intriguing and instructive. They have a certain quality of restraint about them that is remarkable given the turmoil and controversies about theology and polity in the 16th and 17th centuries. They advance modestly and firmly a spiritual ideal and purpose. The Original Preface of 1549 Concerning the Service of the Church, altered slightly in 1552 and again in 1662, identifies what was a common concern for both Roman Catholics and Reformers; namely, a sense of the primacy of Scripture and the desire to provide a clear and easy method of reading through the whole Bible “or the greatest part thereof” in the course of a year. Cranmer quotes the Spanish Cardinal Francis Quignonez almost verbatim in describing the problem and in advocating the solution.
The only difference between them was about whether that method would be in principle for all people or just the clergy and about translation from Latin to the vernacular. Even on that point there was some common ground. While the Roman Catholic liturgy would remain in Latin, there would be translations of the Scriptures authorized by the Roman Catholic Church and preaching would be largely in the vernacular tongues of the emerging national states.
What the Prayer Book Original Preface by Cranmer discloses, however, is a central and essential principle that underlies the idea of Common Prayer. It has to do with an attitude and outlook towards the reading of the Scriptures as ‘a doctrinal instrument of salvation’ wonderfully expressed in Cranmer’s homily on A Fruitful Exhortation Unto the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture as well as in the beautiful Collect for The Second Sunday in Advent. “He that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place, or temple, of the blessed Trinity.” That means attending to the Scriptures. “The Scripture of God,” he says, “is the heavenly meat of our souls; the hearing and keeping of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy. It turneth our souls; it is a light lantern unto our feet. It is a sure, steadfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation.” Scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation because it is written for our learning. It turns our souls to God “that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.”
Of the reading and marking of papers and exams there is no end, with apologies to Ecclesiastes. For students, too, it may seem that there has been no end to the preparing and writing of exams! But it has, at last, all come to an end.
But what kind of an end? My hope and prayer is that it is also “the beginning of wisdom” for us all. With the end of term we enter into the Christmas Break and while that can be a busy and frantic time, I hope that there will be some quiet times of reflection that are so necessary for the soul and for our life together, for our families and friends. Those quiet times of reflection allow for all of the busyness of the term to take root in us and grow into wisdom and understanding.
“When all things were in quiet silence, then thy Almighty Word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.” It is a beautiful image that speaks to our busy and noisy world as well as to the mystery of Christmas. Taken from The Wisdom of Solomon, the passage has been understood in relation to the idea of the Word made flesh, the Incarnation of God. It is very much about the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity. A leaping down of God’s Word into our hearts and minds.
We live in apocalyptic times. Against the fears and worries of the secular forms of the apocalypse, the sense of the catastrophic ending of all things, there is the power of God’s Word coming to us in the darkness of Advent. It is the counter and the challenge to our fears and worries. How? By awakening us to “the beginning of wisdom” which the religious traditions identify as “the fear of the Lord,” meaning our awareness of the awe and wonder of God. In that idea is found the real worth and dignity of our humanity.
Well, Apocalypse Now to be sure, with “signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear”. Sounds like the evening news. But perhaps you took some comfort even from the Dies Irae last week in the contrast between the forms of the secular apocalypse and the features of the sacred apocalypse; the one seemingly hopeless and in despair, the other precisely about hope and joy. Not however by putting any trust in ourselves but by looking unto God and his Word.
Advent is inescapably apocalyptic. It is about our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s Word coming to us, the Word which awakens us to the truth of God which is the true and only measure of our lives. On The Second Sunday in Advent we are awakened to the presence and the truth of God coming to us in the pageant of Holy Scripture. In the face of the impending doom and gloom of our world and day, we are awakened to hope and joy. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” Paul tells us, referencing the Hebrew Scriptures, though, ironically, what he says will extend to the writings of the Christian Scriptures including his own letters. But learning what? He tells us the purpose of the “things [which] were written,” the purpose of the Scriptures: “that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” That word “hope” is mentioned four times in today’s epistle. That hope is about our life in Christ now and always. The point is wonderfully captured in Cranmer’s celebrated Collect which expresses an Anglican sensibility about the Scriptures as God’s Word which we are to “hear…, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest; ” in short, fully immerse ourselves in them. Why? Because they gather us into the life of God.
In his homily on A Fruitful Exhortation Unto the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture, Cranmer notes that “he that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place, or temple, of the blessed Trinity.” That means attending to the Scriptures. “The Scripture of God,” he says, “is the heavenly meat of our souls; the hearing and keeping of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy. It turneth our souls; it is a light lantern unto our feet. It is a sure, steadfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation.” Scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation because it is written for our learning. It turns our souls to God.
This is a high doctrine of Scripture that emphasizes a learning that is about wisdom and truth in contrast to an instrumental reason which all too often manipulates and destroys by reducing ourselves and one another to machines, objects, and things at the expense of the thinking that makes us truly human. Advent offers a corrective and a critique of human reason at once confronting us with the continuing sagas of folly and wickedness in a world where power trumps truth and opening us out to the redemption of our humanity by recalling us to God through his Word and Son.
Monday, December 11th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall
Tuesday, December 12th
6:00pm Prayers & Praises – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Wednesday, December 13th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme II: Prayer Book Prefaces
Thursday, December 14th
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms
Friday, December 15th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall
Sunday, December 17th, Third Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Events:
Tuesday, December 5th & Wednesday, December 13th
7:00pm Advent Programme
Tuesday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis Concert, ‘To Bethlehem with Kings’
The collect for today, the Second Sunday in Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 15:4-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 21:25-33
Artwork: Pietro da Cortona, Triumph of Divine Providence, c. 1633-39. Fresco, National Gallery of Ancient Art, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.
The collect for today, the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (source):
Almighty and everlasting God,
who stooped to raise fallen humanity
through the child-bearing of blessed Mary:
grant that we, who have seen thy glory
revealed in our human nature
and thy love made perfect in our weakness,
may daily be renewed in thine image
and conformed to the pattern of thy Son
Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Lesson: Proverbs 8:22-35
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-28
Artwork: Stefan Lochner, Madonna of the Rose Garden, c.1440-2. Oil on panel, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.
This is the first of two Advent Meditations on the Book of Common Prayer Prefaces. The second meditation will be delivered on Wednesday, 13 December.
Advent is the season of our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s Word coming towards us. That emphasis upon the Word of God is a distinctive feature of the Christian Faith and a defining feature of the Common Prayer tradition. Tucked away in the back pages of our Canadian Book of Common Prayer (1962), on pages 715-721 are three important historical documents about which it may be of benefit to ponder and consider. They are, first, The Original Preface (1549) altered in 1552 and 1662: Concerning the Service of the Church; second, Of Ceremonies: Why Some Be Abolished and Some Retained (1549), and; and third, The Preface of 1662. They provide, in short, a kind of apology in the sense of an explanation about the whole enterprise of Common Prayer.
Unlike the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles which some of you may have thumbed over during a particularly boring or trying sermon, these documents are probably completely unknown, if for no other reason than the extremely small print in which they are written. But they speak to the form of God’s Word coming to us and to our watching and waiting upon that Word through the pattern of doctrine in devotion that comprises the Book(s) of Common Prayer. They assist us in understanding something of the nature of an Anglican witness to the Christian Faith.
The Original Preface (1549) Concerning The Service of the Church, slightly altered in 1552 and again in 1662, and Of Ceremonies: Why Some be Abolished and Some Retained (1549) were written by Thomas Cranmer and help to locate some of the motivating factors that contributed to the creation of the Book(s) of Common Prayer. The third document along with the slight alterations made in 1662 to the Original Preface: Concerning the Service of the Church were written by Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln. The reason for two prefaces has to do with the English Civil War and its disruptions in the seventeenth century including the abolition of bishops and the Book of Common Prayer for fifteen years between 1645 and 1660. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy after the Cromwellian Inter-regnum brought with it the return of bishops and the Prayer Book but in new circumstances requiring some modest but significant revisions. The changes were in many ways quite few; the most notable being the adoption of the King James version of the Bible for the Epistles and Gospels appointed in the Eucharistic lectionary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, itself the great mother book of the Common Prayer tradition for the next three and half centuries. Once again, it suggests an emphasis on the Word of God and the way it is read. There was also the provision for The Ministration of Holy Baptism to such as are of Riper Years, to use the rather quaint sounding expression, And Able to Answer for Themselves, since infant baptism had been largely proscribed during the Inter-regnum period. A reasonable and understandable provision.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Nicholas (d. c. 326), Bishop of Myra (source):
Almighty Father, lover of souls,
who didst choose thy servant Nicholas
to be a bishop in the Church,
that he might give freely out of the treasures of thy grace:
make us mindful of the needs of others
and, as we have received, so teach us also to give;
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 St. John 4:7-14
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:13-16
Artwork: Girolamo Macchietti, The Charity of St. Nicholas of Bari, c. 1555-60. Oil on wood, National Gallery, London.
