Month: November 2018

Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Trinity

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

O LORD, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:3-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:18-26

George Percy Jacomb-Hood, The Raising of Jairus’ DaughterArtwork: George Percy Jacomb-Hood, The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter, 1885. Oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 7 November

Ye are my friends

This week brings us to Remembrance Day, always a remarkable part of the educational programme of the School. The largest team that any of you will ever be on is the Cadet Corps. It is the School as a corps, a body, a living body, and not a corpse, a dead body, I hasten to add! Though, to be honest, that partly depends on all of you stepping up and keeping in step with one another; in short, honouring and respecting one another as part of something bigger than yourselves, a community defined by certain principles and ideals. In a way, the corps is the School on parade.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the armistice that finally ended the Great War. It is so significant that November 11th marks our remembrance of the Second World War as well, itself a continuation in many ways of the first. There is something powerful and arresting about the First World War that remains with us and rightly disturbs us as imparting the legacy of something profoundly disquieting about ourselves. We are only beginning to begin to come to terms with the horror and the evil of our humanity. There was something cataclysmic about the First World War which I fear we still struggle to comprehend and have yet to understand fully let alone from which to begin to learn.

Remembrance Day is not about the glorification of war. The Great War, after all, unleashed a wealth of literature, poem after poem, novel after novel, that is profoundly anti-war, opposed in a deep and fundamental sense to the glorification of war. That we should have to be reminded of this points to a deep forgetting and a profound literary ignorance if not insouciance in our contemporary culture, as if we were above and beyond such things, superior and better than those who have gone before us. I fear the arrogance of a progressivism that is so convinced of its own self-righteousness and so oblivious of its own hypocrisy especially in the face of the atrocities of our own times.

Remembrance Day is a sober remembrance of the senselessness and the madness that our humanity in its disarray and evil is capable of unleashing against one another and against our world. It forces us to look within, to look at the evil of our own hearts and to realize with a fall of own hearts that we are not very different from those who have gone before us. Even more, it should provide some critical self-reflection about our technocratic exuberance that instead of providing the solution are simply part of the problem. It is that possibility of a deeper thoughtfulness that is the most necessary and significant feature of our Remembrance Day observances.

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Prayers and liturgy

Willibrord, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Willibrord (658-739), Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle to the Frisians, Patron Saint of the Netherlands (source):

St. Willibrord statue, Echternach, LuxembourgO Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

Artwork: St. Willibrord statue, Echternach, Luxembourg.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity

“Whose is this image and superscription?”

No one talks as much about money as Jesus and there is nothing that Jesus talks quite so much about as money. He knows us only too well, our weaknesses and our temptations. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”, he teaches us. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”, he warns us. And in today’s Gospel, “Show me the tribute-money”, Jesus demands of the Pharisees, who sought to “entangle him in his talk”.

“Whose is this image and superscription?”he asks about the coin. It bears the image of Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, the highest power on earth, humanly speaking, at that time, much as we used to have and still do have currency that bears the image of the Queen here in Canada and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. The point is that money is the concrete symbol of power, of worldly and political power. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” is a true statement, after all, which reflects the political order to which economic matters are subordinate. But can money be the image of who we are in the truth of our being? Can it be the image of us? Are we simply and entirely by definition, homo economicus, economic man?

In my view, money cannot capture who we essentially are. If we think that it can, then we forget and deceive ourselves. We give it a power over ourselves. The question “whose is this image and superscription?” recalls us to ourselves and recalls us and all things to God. More to the point, ‘Whose image and superscription are we?’

The coin may bear the image of Caesar and thus symbolize his worldly power, but as Jesus will say to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above”. Even the power of Caesar ultimately derives from and belongs to God, and so too, for every power and every kingdom.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 5 – 11 November

Tuesday, November 6th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Wednesday, November 7th
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

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

Sunday, November 11th, Remembrance Day/Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:00am Holy Communion (Shortened and said Service)
11:00am Windsor Cenotaph Service followed by the Service of Remembrance at the KES Cenotaph
5:00pm Ringing of the Bell (100 peals) to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, November 17th
4:30-6:00pm Annual Ham Supper

Sunday, December 2nd
4:00pm Advent Lessons & Carols with KES

Wednesday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis Concert ($15.00 – concert; $ 20.00, pulled-pork supper & concert).

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity

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

O GOD, our refuge and strength, who art the author of all godliness: Be ready, we beseech thee, to hear the devout prayers of thy Church; and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 3:17-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 22:15-22

Salomon Koninck, The Tribute MoneyArtwork: Salomon Koninck, The Tribute Money, 1640. Oil on panel, Private collection.

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Prayers and liturgy

Richard Hooker, Doctor of the Church of England

The collect for today, the commemoration of Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith (source):

Hooker Statue, Exeter CathedralO God of peace, the bond of all love,
who in thy Son Jesus Christ hast made for all people
thine inseparable dwelling place:
give us grace that,
after the example of thy servant Richard Hooker,
we thy servants may ever rejoice
in the true inheritance of thine adopted children
and show forth thy praises now and for ever;
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 Corinthians 2:6-10, 13-16
The Gospel: St. John 17:18-23

The statue of Richard Hooker is situated outside Exeter Cathedral, England.

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Prayers and liturgy

All Souls’ Day

The collect for today, The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, commonly called All Souls’ Day (source):

Everlasting God, our maker and redeemer,
grant us, with all the faithful departed,
the sure benefits of thy Son’s saving passion
and glorious resurrection,
that, in the last day,
when thou dost gather up all things in Christ,
we may with them enjoy the fullness of thy promises;
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 Thessalonians 4:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 5:24-27

Fra Angelico, Christ Glorified in the Court of HeavenArtwork: Fra Angelico, Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven, Predella of the Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece (detail), c. 1423-24. Tempera on wood, National Gallery, London.

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Sermons

Sermon for All Saints’ Day

“These are they which came out of great tribulation”

November is the grey month of remembering. Leaves lie scattered on the wind in piles of burnished gold and red, redolent with the smell of decay. Scattered leaves in a culture of scattered minds. And as if in testimony to the pathetic fallacy in which we attribute human emotions to the natural world, there is no end to doom and gloom in our human world that nature seems to mirror. The spectacle of the shootings at the synagogue in Pittsburgh is still fresh in our minds. And then there is all of the folly and frenzy, the fun and frolic of Halloween in our secular and commercial culture. I don’t know exactly what to make of it. I don’t quite understand why one would want to be frightened or to frighten others and while I get the whole matter of costumes and masks, I am uneasy about ‘trick or treat.’ What does it teach? To be a jihadi or a beggar? Just not sure.

Yet as the counter to these features of the dark of nature’s year and the darkness in the heart of our world, there is the wonderful mystery of All Saints’ which provides a powerful way for us to think more deeply and more spiritually about our humanity as gathered to God in whom we find our real truth and dignity. All Saints’ reminds us of our Christian vocation. It is to a sanctified life which is simply about the qualities of Christ living in us in and through our lives with one another.

All Saints’ recalls us to the Communion of Saints, to the idea of our humanity united through its true forms of diversity in the praise and worship of God. In the culture of scattered leaves and scattered souls, there is a gathering. It is to God and it is God in us. The great lesson from Revelation affords us a vision of heaven. It is not future so much as it is present. It is about the truth of our lives as gathered to God and to the qualities of grace that properly define our humanity. All Hallows’ Eve is not about ghouls and ghosts, of horror and gruesome images of our humanity in disorder and disarray, dismembered and ghastly; it is about the dignity of our humanity as found in God through the truer forms of our humanity. “A multitude that no man could number,” Revelation says, a multitude composed of“nations, kindred, people and tongues.” In other words, a multitude that embraces the legitimate diversities of our humanity in relation to cultures and nations, families and people, different languages and ethnicities. A vision that takes us beyond the tribalisms of our communities and churches and that recalls us to the communion of saints. Our lives are grounded in God and not simply in the accidentalities of time and history, of culture and experience.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 31 October

The Blessings of Tribulations

I always approach the week of Halloween and its festivities at the School with a certain trepidation and uncertainty. I am never quite sure culturally speaking exactly what we are celebrating, never quite sure what it means to want to be frightened or to frighten others by way of costume or haunted houses. What does trick or treat really teach? How to be jihadis or beggars? Just not sure what to make of it. Yet I get the idea of play and especially the play of our imaginations with respect to identity.

Beyond that there is something quite wonderful and profound in the meaning of All Hallows’ religiously and philosophically considered especially in the doom and gloom of our culture and, indeed, in the grey darkness of nature’s year. In a world which confronts us with so many awful and frightening events, such as the horrific shooting at the Synagogue in Pittsburg, it is wonderful to have before us the vision of heaven from The Revelation of St. John the Divine and the Beatitudes, the Blessednesses, from Matthew’s Gospel. These are like light in the midst of an worrying darkness.

Is what I see in Chapel each morning something ‘heavenly’? On Tuesday, many students and faculty were in costume: Asians as blonde Goths, Canadians as Ninja warriors, others as dragons and bunnies, eleven apostles (!), and even a Calvin and Hobbes! I always feel obliged to comment on the ambiguity of masks. They both conceal and reveal. Your costumes may say more about your personality than perhaps you realize! Something which Shakespeare knew only too well. There is something equivocal about masks. On the one hand, “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face;” outward appearances can’t simply and completely reveal our inward thoughts. On the other hand, as Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth,“your face, my thane, is as a book wherein men may read strange matters.” Sometimes we reveal ourselves in more ways than we realize even when we think we are concealing ourselves and our thoughts. Macbeth crowns his fatal decision with the words, “false face must hide what the false heart doth know,” recognizing that we can “make our faces vizards to our hearts, disguising what they are.” For all of the fun of dressing up in costume these are important things to consider.

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