Christ Church

He brought us to birth by the word of truth

Another birthing image, another image of new life in Christ. Eastertide grounds us in the life of the risen Christ. That is not something static but dynamic. We are set in motion, caught up in the motions of God towards us and with us, drawn into the motions of the Son to the Father. And all through the Spirit of truth whom Christ and the Father send to us. “He will guide you into all truth,” Jesus says. The Spirit of truth is also known as the Paraclete, the Comforter, the one who strengthens us in our life with God.

The Easter season abounds with this sense of an orientation and a direction. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.” And in the last three Sundays of the Easter Season, everything that belongs to human experience and human hopes and expectations is gathered into the motion of the Son to the Father captured in the phrase “because I go to my Father.” Again, it is entirely dynamic.

We live in the motions of the Son’s love for the Father through the Spirit, the bond of their love and power. What is being opened out to us is the reality of the life of the Spirit. The resurrection appearances are not just some sort of show and tell. They reveal the greater and more radical truth of our humanity as found in and with God. That is captured for us in the image of the Son’s going to the Father. In today’s Gospel, that fundamental sense of orientation and direction is understood in terms of righteousness.

The Spirit, Christ says, “reprove[s] the world of righteousness.” What does that mean? It signals the contrast between the world of human sin and folly, our unrighteousness, on the one hand, and God’s absolute justice, the divine righteousness, on the other hand. That is found in the Son’s relation to the Father in the Spirit. True justice or righteousness is not found in ourselves but in our relation to God. In these lessons from John’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching us about the Holy Spirit, about the nature of the divine life of God as Trinity. The Resurrection points us to the Ascension, to the homeland of the Spirit. It is all about a kind of orientation of our hearts and minds in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father.

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

Tuesday, May 1st, SS. Philip & James
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Wednesday, May 2nd
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, May 4th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, May 6th, Fifth Sunday after Easter/Rogation Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Baptism & Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, May 12th
4:30-6:00pm Annual Lobster Supper – Parish Hall

Wednesday, May 23rd
3:00pm KES Cadet Corps Church Parade

The collect for today, The Fourth Sunday After Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:17-21
The Gospel: St. John 16:5-15

Artwork: Wilhelm Kotarbinski, Last Supper, 1889-94. Fresco, St. Vlodymyr’s Cathedral, Kiev.

Despising the suffering that brings death

Maccabees . Not certainly well known and yet The Books of Maccabees are profound and important works that belong to the intertestamental period; in other words, works that were written between the setting down of the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures. The Books of Maccabees are among a collection of writings that are sometimes called Deutero-canonical texts by Roman Catholics and Apocryphal texts by Protestants. They have different kinds of standing within the Protestant Churches and the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. For Anglicans they are read, if at all, not“to establish any doctrine” but “for example of life and instruction of manners.”

First and Second Maccabees deal with persecution, with the collision of cultures during the Hellenistic period. Maccabees itself means ‘hammer’ and refers to a family of heroes who stood up against Greek dominance. But more than simply belonging to the conflict narratives that bedevil so much of our own discourse, they open us out to important questions of a moral and an intellectual nature that, to some extent, transcend the divisions and oppositions that are the assumption and conclusion of all conflict narratives. As such, perhaps, they speak to some of our confusions and uncertainties about character and about what it means to be human, what it means to be a self.

In Chapel this week we read from 2nd Maccabees and from 4th Maccabees, the latter most likely completely unknown to most students and faculty and not found in most Bibles. The story in 2nd Maccabees was the powerful story of “the admirable mother” of the seven sons of Eleazar, all martyred because they stood up to the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. The story reflects the conditions of Israel under Hellenism following the conquests of Alexander the Great. In a way, the story speaks to the question, the important question for all of us, about how we face adversity.

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“Speak the truth in love”

Mark is the Eastertide Saint par excellence; his commemoration always falls within the orbit of the Easter Season. As such he belongs to our Eastertide reflections on the radical nature of Christ’s Resurrection.

That this is paradoxical is perhaps not surprising. The so-called short ending of his Gospel, referring to the earliest texts that we have, ends not with the Resurrection but with the statement that “they were afraid.” The longer ending takes us somewhat further towards the Resurrection and its power at work in us.“They were afraid,” however, captures perfectly the condition of our awareness of being broken hearted, our awareness of our lack and insufficiency. Yet, to know our insufficiency is to know our brokenness at the same time as to be looking to our wholeness.

The longer version belongs to the Canonical Scriptures, to be sure, to the texts that are received as authoritative, and yet, the fact of the shorter version remains intriguing and suggestive. In so many ways, it belongs just as firmly and fully to the accounts of the Resurrection as the final ending. Consider it an ending within that ending.

The paradoxes mount up but in ways that belong to the greater paradox of the Resurrection itself, the paradox of dying in order to live. That is the fundamental pattern of Christian life which provides us with a way to face our brokenness and our incompleteness. In facing such things we are in principle open to the one in whom alone we find our wholeness. It means confronting our fears and our anxieties without being defined by them. It means not conforming to the expectations of the world but to the greater work of God with us and in us. The building up of the body of Christ is not about church buildings per se but about what they exist for. They exist only to remind us of our life in Christ.

This is why the Epistle reading from Ephesians is read on The Feast of St. Mark. It speaks to us about the truth of our lives in the love of Christ which alone is the principle“for the building up of the body of Christ.” Speaking the truth in love, as Paul suggests, equally belongs to our being witnesses to the Gospel of Christ even in the face of persecution and worldly troubles of whatever sort, whether it be political or natural catastrophes.

The challenge of The Feast of St. Mark is signalled in the Collect which draws upon both the Epistle and the Gospel readings. We are to stand firm “in the truth of [his] holy Gospel” and not give in to “every blast of vain doctrine”; in short, to be established in truth with love even when everything seems to be falling down around us. To speak the truth in love is to let Christ rule in us. The simple honesty of Mark’s Gospel allows us to face our fears and yet remain firm in our witness, holding fast to “the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark.”

“Speak the truth in love”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Mark, 2018

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

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast instructed thy holy Church with the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark: Give us grace, that, being not like children carried away with every blast of vain doctrine, we may be established in the truth of thy holy Gospel; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:11-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 13:1-10

The author of the second gospel, Saint Mark is generally identified with John Mark, the son of Mary, whose house in Jerusalem was a meeting place for the disciples (Acts 12:12,25). John Mark accompanied his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journey to Cyprus, but Mark’s early departure to Jerusalem caused a rift between Paul and Barnabas, following which Barnabas took Mark on the next mission to Cyprus while Paul and Silas traveled through Syria and Cilicia (Acts 15:37-41).

Paul later changed his mind about Mark, who helped him during his imprisonment in Rome (Col. 4:10). Just before his martyrdom, Paul urged Timothy: “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11).

Also, Peter affectionately calls Mark “my son” and says that Mark is with him at “Babylon”—almost certainly Rome—as he writes his first epistle (1 Pet. 5:13). This accords with church tradition that Mark’s Gospel represents the teaching of Peter.

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The collect for today, the Feast of Saint George (d. c. 304), Soldier, Martyr, Patron of England (source):

O God of hosts,
who didst so kindle the flame of love
in the heart of thy servant George
that he bore witness to the risen Lord
by his life and by his death:
grant us the same faith and power of love
that we, who rejoice in his triumphs,
may come to share with him the fullness of the resurrection;
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 St. Timothy 2:8-10, 3:10-12
The Gospel: St. John 15:1-7

Artwork: Fortunino Matania, St. George Slays the Dragon, 1962. Oil on board, Original cover artwork from Look and Learn no. 15 (28 April 1962).

“Because I go to the Father”

How do we know what is wanted to be known? More to the point, how do we know what God wants us to know? The Easter Season presents us with some remarkable lessons about who we are in Christ. They are the teachings of Christ about the nature of our radical life with God and in God without which we have no life. At the heart of that teaching is the Resurrection.

We find our healing and our wholeness in Christ. All of the stories of the Resurrection reveal ourselves in ourselves as the community of the broken hearted. Only in facing our brokenness and recognizing our unknowing can we begin to be taught and come to understand what God seeks for us, namely, our wholeness. It happens in the face of our brokenness and not in spite of it or in denial of it. Only so can we begin to be made whole. The education here concerns the whole person; in short, matters of character.

Sorrow and grief, loss and suffering, dying and death are not denied. They provide the necessary occasion in which our wholeness is proclaimed and realized. This is a recurring feature of the Easter Season. The last three Sundays of the Easter Season present us with Gospel readings from what is sometimes known as “the farewell discourse of Jesus” in John’s Gospel, particularly John 16, in which there is the repeated refrain of the Easter season. It is the phrase “because I go to the Father.” Jesus is the teacher who prepares the disciples here for what is to come in terms of his death and resurrection. He speaks directly about suffering and sorrow and about joy. “Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

What is our sorrow? Our sense of separation from Christ: “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again a little while and ye shall see me,” Jesus says. This puzzles the disciples and us but reading these passages now in the light of Easter we see exactly what they mean. Sorrow is turned into joy through the triumph of life over death. Jesus uses an image, the image of childbirth, to convey the radical meaning of the Resurrection.

“A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a child is born into the world.” There will be sorrow and suffering “but your sorrow shall be turned to joy.”

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Monday April 23rd
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, April 24th, Eve of St. Mark
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Wednesday, April 25th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, April 27th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Saturday, April 28th
Fr. Curry at St. Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown, for Prayer Book Study on “The BCP: Past, Present and Future”
7:00-9:00pm Nfld & Country Evening of Musical Entertainment – Parish Hall

Sunday, April 29th, Fourth Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, May 12th
4:30-6:00pm Annual Lobster Supper – Parish Hall

Wednesday, May 23rd
3:00pm KES Cadet Corps Church Parade

The collect for today, The Third Sunday After Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who showest to them that be in error the light of thy truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness: Grant unto all them that are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may forsake those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 2:11-17
The Gospel: St. John 16:16-22

Artwork: Jaume Huguet, Last Supper, c. 1470. Tempera on panel, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.