Month: February 2018

Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 5 – 11 February

Monday, February 5th
4:45-5:15pm Confirmation Class KES, Rm # 206
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, February 6th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Guides – Parish Hall

Wednesday, February 7th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, February 9th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, February 11th, Quinquagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion (followed by Pot-Luck Luncheon and Annual Meeting)

Upcoming Events:

February 14th, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Service
12noon Penitential Service, Imposition of Ashes & Holy Communion
2:30pm Imposition of Ashes – KES Chapel

Tuesday, February 20th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I

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Prayers and liturgy

Sexagesima

John Everett Millais, The SowerThe collect for today, Sexagesima (or the Second Sunday Before Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD God, who seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do: Mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 11:21b-31
The Gospel: St Luke 8:4-15

Artwork: John Everett Millais, The Sower, from Illustrations to `The Parables of Our Lord’, 1864. Wood engraving on paper, Tate Collections, London

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Prayers and liturgy

Anskar, Missionary and Bishop

Bendixen, Bishop AnsgarThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Anskar (801-865), Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, Missionary to Sweden and Denmark (source):

Almighty and gracious God,
who didst send thy servant Anskar
to spread the gospel among the Nordic people:
raise up in this our generation, we beseech thee,
messengers of thy good tidings
and heralds of thy kingdom,
that the world may come to know
the immeasurable riches of our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Mark 6:7-13

Artwork: Siegfried Detlev Bendixen, Bishop Ansgar, 1823. Holy Trinity Church, Hamburg, Germany.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 29 January

A light to lighten the Gentiles

Light is such a powerful and important religious and philosophical image and one which pervades even our secular culture in its exuberances and its despair. Candlemas is the popular name for a very complex story and set of feasts that belong to early February in the life of the Christian Church. Candlemas – a mass of candles – belongs to the Feast of the Presentation of Christ and the Purification of Mary. A double-barrelled feast, it speaks to the deeper meaning of our humanity in union with God. It marks the transition from light to life, from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter, to the overcoming of darkness and its parallel in the conquering of death.

Candlemas marks the first time that Christ comes to Jerusalem. It happens forty days after his birth, in the constructed time sequences of the Church, and so is celebrated now on February 2nd. No mention of groundhogs, I am afraid! It also marks, in the Jewish custom, the purification of the mother forty days after child-birth. There is something quite profound in these traditions: the one honouring God for the birth of a child; the other, recognizing the uncertainties and wonder of child-birth itself. In the classical Anglican understanding, for instance, the latter sensibility contributes to a special liturgy known as “The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving after Child-Birth,” which also includes a prayer for the loss of a child in child-birth. Joy and sorrow are powerfully intermingled. Pretty powerful stuff about the realities of human experience and expectation. It is a wisdom we would do well to ponder.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple

The collect for today, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin (also traditionally called Candlemas), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we humbly beseech thy Majesty, that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts, by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Malachi 3:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:22-40

St. Botolph’s Church, PresentationArtwork: Nunc dimittis servo tuo, stained glass, St. Botolph’s Church, Boston. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Eve of Candlemas

“They brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord”

It is a double-barrelled feast; a feast at once of Christ and of Mary. All the festivals of Mary are tagged to the feasts of Christ, but here uniquely they are together in one. This is signaled explicitly in the Luke’s first sentence of this evening’s Gospel reading in the words “purification” and “presentation”. A most intriguing scene, it is also rather complex. The celebration itself is more familiarly called Candlemas, acknowledging the words of the aged Simeon who sees in the infant Christ the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about Israel’s vocation to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” Few passages concentrate so wonderfully the interdependence, connection, and difference between Judaism and Christianity in the interweaving of the particular and the universal.

Candlemas marks the transition from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter. It reminds us that the twin centers of the Christian contemplation are Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each bound up in the other, each incomprehensible without the other. Once again we are presented with something very different from a linear narrative. Instead, the focus is doctrinal. With Candlemas, we learn with Mary about the deeper and truer significance of her holy child. Throughout the Christmas and Epiphany mysteries, Mary has been very much in the picture both in the paradox of virgin and mother and in the activity of “pondering in her heart all the things that are said” about the child Christ.

Here on the fortieth day after Christ’s birth and in accord with the cultural and religious custom of Israel, she and Joseph are in Jerusalem “to do for him after the custom of the law” – honouring God for the gift of the first-born male. It is also “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished” – forty days after childbirth. This has its later expression in the little service “commonly called The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving After Child-Birth” in the Prayer Book (pp.573-575), a service that also acknowledges the frequent loss of children in childbirth. These are very real human realities and experiences. Both presentation and purification are in keeping with the customs and practices of Israel and yet both presentation and purification open us out to something universal and for all.

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