Month: December 2018

Prayers and liturgy

The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

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

Albrecht Altdorfer, Nativity of the VirginArtwork: Albrecht Altdorfer, Nativity of the Virgin, c.1520. Oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Nicholas, Bishop

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

Palmerino di Guido, St Nicholas Saving Three Innocents from DecapitationArtwork: Palmerino di Guido, St. Nicholas Saving Three Innocents from Decapitation, 1300-01. Fresco, Chapel of St. Nicholas, Lower Church, Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 December

Behold the Lamb of God

The philosopher, Josef Pieper, reminds us of a deep truth which our world has largely forgotten, namely, the proper meaning of leisure. In our culture, we live to work. This is one of our problems which stands in stark contrast to the wisdom of the Hebrews and the Greeks where we work to live. The Greek and Latin words for leisure are skole and scola from which we get the word, school. School, properly understood is leisure, our freedom from the pressing necessities of everyday life. Aristotle literally says “we are un-leisurely in order to have leisure” (Nicomachean Ethics 10. vii). Work is un-leisure, literally, a-scolia. Similarly in the Latin, busyness is neg-otium, literally, the negating of leisure. Thus, leisure is the freedom to contemplate, to wonder at the mysteries of life, and, ultimately, to take delight in the things of God. A profoundly counter-culture idea and yet how necessary and how freeing! Once again, we are freed to God and to the truth of ourselves in God, to our good as found in Him. Without it we are  lost in all of the distractions of ourselves, unable to focus; literally, uncollected.

The Advent and Christmas Services of Nine Lessons and Carols simply but profoundly amplifies our regular Chapel services. Sitting and listening, standing and singing, kneeling and praying is what we do, to be sure. At the Carol services there was rather a lot of sitting and listening, standing and singing! Up and down and all around! Yet that pattern speaks to the nature and life of the School as a place of purposeful leisure, a place of contemplation and learning. The Advent pageant of Word and Song is all about ethical, intellectual, and spiritual ideas and principles coming towards us and engaging us, but only if we will sit and listen, stand and sing, kneel and pray. A whole person experience, we might say, and certainly activities which connect to the four pillars of the School: to Academics for we, like Mary, must sit and listen in order to learn and take delight in truth and knowledge; to Athletics for we are embodied beings and our bodies matter whether in sitting to listen or standing to praise; to the Arts through our singing and being in the ambience of the Holy expressed in the architecture of Church and Chapel; and to Service because like Martha we are reminded of our service to one another through our service and commitment to truths held sacred without which all our labours are nothing worth.

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Sermons

Advent Meditation: Christ, Light of the World, Part 1

This is the first of two Advent meditations on Christ, the Light of the World. The second is posted here.

“In Thy light shall we see light”
(Psalm 36.9)

Part One:

Advent is about the coming of God as light to a dark and despairing world. The imagery of light is an important and classical feature of the religions of the world and so too for Christianity. Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” He doesn’t just say it once either but twice. It is, I think, an extraordinary statement. What can it possibly mean?

To be sure, Jesus is identified as light by others, too, by prophet and priest, by poet and evangelist. “In him was life and the life was the light of men”… “That was the true light, which lighteth every one that cometh into the world”. And as aged Simeon proclaims, echoing Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus is “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel”.

But when Jesus identifies himself as “the light of the world,” it is something more and something different:  It would seem to be something which he wants us to know. It suggests something which he wants us to know about himself and about the world, and, indeed, about ourselves.

There are things which Jesus wants us to know. The Gospels are at pains to bring those things to our attention. But what Jesus wants us to know does not mean collecting a bouquet of holy facts and figures. It is not about compiling bits and pieces of pious information nor about lining up a series of propositional hoops through which to jump “merrily on high”. Instead, what Jesus wants us to know are the things which belong to our being with him. Such things are relational rather than informational, dynamic rather than static, humbling rather than presumptuous.  And they are inexhaustible. They are the things which we must be constantly learning, constantly engaged with, constantly “being renewed in the transformation of our minds”.

They are the things which are identified and known so as to be proclaimed and celebrated. They are matters of witness. These are connected.  If Christian life is about our witness to Christ, then it is also about our being with him. Both our being with him and our witness to him turn on the substantial matter of who he is and what he means for us and for our world. They turn upon the powerful image of Christ as light.

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Prayers and liturgy

Clement of Alexandria, Doctor

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 155-c. 215), Priest, Apologist, Doctor (source):

St Clement of AlexandriaO God of unsearchable mystery, who didst lead Clement of Alexandria to find in ancient philosophy a path to knowledge of thy Word: Grant that thy Church may recognize true wisdom, wherever it is found, knowing that wisdom cometh forth from thee and leadeth back to thee; through our Teacher Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:11-20
The Gospel: St. John 6:57-63

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“Love is the fulfilling of the law”

Today’s Collect draws explicitly upon the rich imagery of the Epistle reading from Romans, the images of “cast[ing] off the works of darkness” and “put[ting] on the armour of light.” The Gospel reading from Matthew complements and illustrates this teaching. We are awakened to the necessity of an ethical principle and to its presence in our lives. That is the meaning of the Advent of Christ, the coming of Christ.

The Epistle opens with a commentary on the law as fulfilled in the love of neighbour. “Love,” Paul argues, “is the fulfilling of the law.” Law is love? That must seem rather strange yet it goes to the heart of the matter of God as the ethical principle for our lives. The law proclaims God’s will for our humanity and as such illumines the darkness of our lives. Left to ourselves, to “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” we are deadly and destructive, harmful to ourselves and to one another. The biblical story of Cain and Abel, the first murder, inaugurates the long bloody tale of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. Thus it serves to highlight the need for an ethical principle which by definition cannot come from us; it is not a human construct, but something divine through which we learn the true worth and dignity of our humanity.

The story of Cain and Abel is followed by the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, and, then, the Mosaic covenant in an ascending order of completeness and universality, the meaning of which is summarized in Paul’s statement that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.

We often misunderstand the Ten Commandments and confuse the ethical teaching they present with our more ordinary assumptions about laws and legislation, about rules and customs as something constraining and limiting. To the contrary, we are presented with something much more radical and much more freeing. We forget that the Ten Commandments are about our freedom, our liberation, and that they are grounded in the revelation of God to Moses as “I am Who I am,” as the universal principle upon which the being and knowing of all reality depends. “I am has sent you,” God says to Moses. The Ten Commandments begin with God as “I am”: “I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The law is the charter of our freedom, our freedom to God. That freedom is love in its truest sense

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 3 – 9 December

Tuesday, December 4th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I: Christ: Light of the World

Wednesday, December 5th
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

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

Sunday, December 9th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, December 4th and Wednesday, December 12th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme

Wednesday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis – ‘To Bethlehem with Kings’
($15.00 – concert; $ 20.00, pulled-pork supper & concert).

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Advent

The collect for today, the First Sunday in Advent, being the Fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13

Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple, c. 1724Artwork: Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple, c. 1724. Oil on canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

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Uncategorized

‘The Far-spent Night’: Advent Meditation 2018

“The night is far spent”

There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilizations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion: distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness. There is the darkness of the fear of death.

In one way or another, they are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful, of what is true and good.

In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh, is changed in his soul and outward aspect by the loss of his friend, Enkidu. He sets out on a search for everlasting life; it is really a quest for wisdom, for he knows, and we know, that is his destiny is not everlasting life but kingship and mortality. He is mortal and has to come to terms with his mortality. Wisdom is found in the embrace of the limitations of our knowing.

He undertakes the first of the great spiritual journeys of our humanity in terms of literature, which, of course, is where all the great journeys are to be found. He journeys to find Utnapishtim to ask him“concerning life and death.” Utnapishtim is the Noah figure of the much older story of the flood contained in The Epic of Gilgamesh. He has been granted everlasting life and has survived the flood, the flood which was intended to wipe out the human nuisance and yet threatened the gods, too. They “cowered like curs” beside the wall of the city of Uruk. But where is Utnapishtim? At the end of the world and beyond the end of the world, we might say, all alone except for his wife, unnamed and unknown. We may ask what kind of immortality this is.

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