Christ Church

The collects for today, the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul the Apostles, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O almighty God, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst give to thy Apostle Saint Peter many excellent gifts, and commandedst him earnestly to feed thy flock: Make, we beseech thee, all Bishops and Pastors diligently to preach thy holy Word, and the people obediently to follow the same, that they may receive the crown of everlasting glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O God, who, through the preaching of the blessed Apostle Saint Paul, hast caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we beseech thee, that we, having his manifold labours in remembrance, may show forth our thankfulness unto thee for the same, by following the holy doctrine which he taught; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:13-19

Artwork: (left) Marco Zoppo, Saint Peter, c. 1468. Tempera on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(right) Marco Zoppo, Saint Paul, c. 1468. Tempera and gilding on panel, The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Irenaeus (d. 202), Bishop of Lyon, Doctor of the Church (source):

O God of peace,
who through the ministry of thy servant Irenæus
didst strengthen the true faith and bring harmony to thy Church:
keep us steadfast in thy true religion
and renew us in faith and love,
that we may ever walk in the way
that leadeth to everlasting life;
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 Timothy 2:22b-26
The Gospel: St. Luke 11:33-36

Artwork: Lucien Bégule, Saint Irenaeus, 1901. Stained glass, St. Irenaeus Church, Lyon.

“What manner of child shall this be?”

“What manner of child shall this be?”the neighbours of Zacharias and Elizabeth ask, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity we celebrate today and whose feast day marks the anniversary of the landing of Giovanni Caboto, englished as John Cabot, perhaps, though by no means for certain, in Newfoundland in 1497. Thus he has become the patron saint of what later became Canada.

To state this obvious fact of history is regarded by some as politically incorrect; regardless, it is a feature of this country of displaced peoples which is about more than just the encounter between various European cultures and the so-called indigenous peoples, a term which historically would be utterly meaningless to those whom it is meant to describe. That history is about more than just economic and cultural exploitation though that is inescapably part of the story. That is hardly new as one can see from Bartholomew de Las Casas 16th century work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, or Voltaire’s classic critique of his own 18th century European culture in Candide. There is no right side of history which is not to say that there aren’t lessons to be learned about good and evil and about right and wrong. History as an intellectual discipline is inherently revisionist which requires, I think, a recognition of the complexities and the vagaries of the contingent world of human actions and motives rather than forcing history into some sort of ideological strait-jacket such as the idea of progress. Such things on all sides are really a kind of blindness, a lack of awareness and a failure of the ethical imagination. It is invariably a kind of judgmentalism.

There are the ups and downs of history but there are also those moments of the breakthrough of the understanding into “the fullness of time”, an awakening to the truth of our lives in God. There are profound and providential things that happen in the course of history even in and through our follies and sins, despite all our certainties.

Thus the conjunction of this feast with the Gospel for The Fourth Sunday after Trinity about the parable of “the blind leading the blind” is particularly compelling. It concerns our awareness, our vision of the mercy of God, which alone counters our self-certainties and self-assurances, our judgmentalism. This is our blindness. Instead, we are called to Christ who, theologically speaking, is not simply the icon of any one particular culture as the native peoples of Canada themselves amply show; they are, after all, largely Christian. Abusus non tollit usum is an older medieval principle; the abuse of something does not take away from its proper use. Therein lies the real question with respect to the historical interaction of cultures past and present, something articulated very well in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease about the clash between British Imperial culture and the Igbo tribal culture in parts of Nigeria in the twentieth century.

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The collect for today, the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, by whose providence thy servant John Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of thy Son our Saviour, by preaching of repentance: Make us so to follow his doctrine and holy life, that we may truly repent according to his preaching, and after his example constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth’s sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Isaiah 40:1-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:57-80

Artwork: Jan van Eyck, The Birth of John the Baptist, 1422. Illumination, Museo Civico di Arte Antica, Turin.

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

Artwork: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind, 1568. Tempera on canvas, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Alban, First Martyr of Britain, d. c. 250 (source):

Almighty God, by whose grace and power thy holy martyr Alban triumphed over suffering and was faithful even unto death: Grant to us, who now remember him with thanksgiving, to be so faithful in our witness to thee in this world, that we may receive with him the crown of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 3:13-16
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:34-42

Artwork: Saint Alban, stained glass, Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 October 2014.

Sunday, 1st July -Trinity 5 (Octave Day of St. John the Baptist) (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Thomas’ Church, Three Mile Plains
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 8th July – Trinity 6 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Andrew’s Church, Hantsport
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 15th July – Trinity 7 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Michael’s Church, Windsor Forks
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 22nd July – St. Mary Magdalene/Trinity 8 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. George’s Church, Upper Falmouth
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 29th July – Trinity 9 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
7:00pm All Saints’ Church, Leminster

Sunday, 5th August – Trinity 10 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Thomas’ Church, Three Mile Plains
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 12th August – Trinity 11 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Andrew’s Church, Hantsport
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 19th August – Trinity 12 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Michael’s Church, Windsor Forks
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Sunday, 26th August – Trinity 13 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. George’s Church, Upper Falmouth
10:30 a.m. Christ Church

Fr. David Curry will be Priest-in-Charge for the Parish of Avon Valley and the Parish of St. Andrew’s, Hantsport for the month of July (1-902-790-6173); Fr. Tom Henderson will be Priest-in-Charge for the Parish of Christ Church for the month of August (1-902-798-8921).

Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth

Repentance is our joy. It is the counter to all and every form of self-righteousness. Why? Because we are called to our right mind. The word is metanoia, a turning of our minds to God. It signals the powerful idea of our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away, ‘a kind of circling,’ as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, a return to a principle. We turn back and we are turned back. It is all God in us, and it is all us in the truth of our being. Repentance is itself the motion of divine love in us. That is its power and its joy.

Such is the power and the joy of this morning’s Gospel. It is really about the love of God whose goodness is our joy and our good. It is imaged here in terms of the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep and the woman who seeks diligently for the one lost coin. Those images belong to a third image, the story of the return of the prodigal son, a return which is about the father’s love. Three stories. We have the two parables here; the third is appointed as the Gospel for a parochial mission (BCP, p. 327), precisely to underscore the point of our being returned into the Father’s love. Repentance is our joy.

And yet this is so often ignored, derided and denied. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” Isaiah reminds us, in a passage which shapes the General Confession in our liturgy. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” Why? Because “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We are, however, more like the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmur against Jesus. Such is their self-righteousness. “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them,” they say. It is in response to their self-righteousness that Jesus tells these three remarkable parables. They are told to counter their judgmentalism which is about claiming a kind of spiritual superiority over others. They are told to move our hearts by illustrating the love of God which is “greater than our heart,” our heart of condemnation, as we heard last week.

It was a common complaint about the Prayer Book during the liturgical revolutions of the past decades that it is too penitential. People murmured against the idea of repentance, reluctant, it seems, to “acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness,” wanting, it seems, to assert their own essential self-worth and self-esteem. Such murmurings miss the point that Luke presents to us in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel, the very point about the essential joy of repentance, the very point about the Father’s love to which we are returned, the love which recalls us to our rightful minds.

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Monday June 18th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, June 19th
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Wednesday, June 20th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, June 22nd
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Saturday, June 23rd
6:30pm Brownies Sleep-over – Parish Hall

Sunday, June 17th, The Nativity of St. John the Baptist / Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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

O 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: William J. Webb, The Lost Sheep, 1864. Oil on canvas, Manchester Art Gallery.