Year: 2018

Prayers and liturgy

The Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity

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

O LORD, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 3:13-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-17

Master of the Darmstadt Passion, Raising of Widow’s Son at NainArtwork: Master of the Darmstadt Passion, Raising of Widow’s Son at Nain, c. 1440. Oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

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Prayers and liturgy

Holy Cross Day

The collect for today, Holy Cross Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O BLESSED Saviour, who by thy cross and passion hast given life unto the world: Grant that we thy servants may be given grace to take up the cross and follow thee through life and death; whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit we worship and glorify, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

With the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday:
The Epistle: Hebrews 9:11-15
The Gospel: St. Matthew 20:20-28

Gustave Doré, The Triumph Of Christianity Over PaganismArtwork: Gustave Doré, The Triumph Of Christianity Over Paganism, 1868. Oil on canvas, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Eve of the Feast of the Holy Cross

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ

Sunday’s epistle reading (Trinity 15) from Galatians complements and informs Holy Cross Day. The major feast days are all about important moments in the life of Christ and of the Apostles and other figures that are named and mentioned in the Scriptures. Holy Cross is a minor feast day which reflects on things or people that emerge in the history of the Church and which have theological significance.

The cross is central to Christian thinking, to be sure. We are signed with the sign of the cross in baptism. The cross is often a central feature of the architecture of the Church as cross-shaped and as in the rood screen here at Christ Church. Rood is an old English word for Cross. Then there are other visible things like the processional cross and the altar cross, as well as the cross above the pulpit and at the back of the Church which bear the figure of Christ crucified on them. We are reminded of the Cross as the dominant symbol of Christian identity. In the liturgy, absolution and blessing is pronounced in word and action, the action is the sign of the cross made by the priest and some people make the sign of the cross themselves. Somehow the cross signals our Christian identity.

A symbol of comfort, it also must discomfort us, a “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert puts it. There have been those who find it a disturbing sign because it recalls the ineluctable cruelty of our humanity; in short, a symbol of violence and torture. Yet the symbolic power of the cross has everything to do with Christ’s overcoming of all and every form of evil: past, present, and future. It is that victory of Christ through the cross that is constantly being recalled to us. It has become a “beauteous form”which assures “a piteous mind,” as John Donne puts it,  a mind in need of pity.

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Prayers and liturgy

Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Cyprian (c. 200-258), Bishop of Carthage, Martyr (source):

Jaume Huguet, Altarpiece of St. Cyprian (detail)O holy God,
who didst bring Cyprian to faith in Christ
and didst make him a bishop in the Church,
crowning his witness with a martyr’s death:
grant that, following his example,
we may love the Church and her doctrine,
find thy forgiveness within her fellowship,
and so come to share the heavenly banquet
which thou hast prepared for us;
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. Peter 5:1-4,10-11
The Gospel: St. John 10:11-16

Artwork: Jaume Huguet, Altarpiece of St. Cyprian (detail), Last quarter 15th Century. Tempera on wood, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 September

And God saw that it was good

It is a wonderful phrase which acts as a recurring refrain in the first chapter of The Book of Genesis read in Chapel this week. It confronts us with certain powerful ideas and ways of thinking that contribute to our lives as students and teachers and, especially, it seems to me, in the climate of our current culture.

Creation is an orderly affair that proceeds from an intellectual principle. It is not exactly science though it provides the essential foundation for the possibilities of science in the idea that the natural world is, in principle, intelligible. Creation is really about the relation of all things to the Creator who by definition is not the same as that which is made. Creation here is about distinction and separation, itself the intellectual activity of ordering and distinguishing one thing from another. The chapter challenges our assumptions about time and our literal ways of thinking. After all, what does it mean to speak of  light or one day or a second or a third day before the Sun and the Moon were created on the fourth day? It is more about the intellectual order of reality.

“God is the beginning and end of all things especially rational creatures”Thomas Aquinas notes. “The Originator of heaven and earth,”the Qur’an states,“when he decrees a thing, he says ‘Be’ and it is.” Such ways of thinking reflect the opening chapter of Genesis as informed, too, by the Prologue to John’s Gospel about the Logos or Word of God, the intellectual principle through which all things are intelligible. All this, we might say,is the great gift of the Jews. It is the idea of beginning, not with chaos or the sexual congress of divine beings, but with God.

Like modern science, Genesis utterly discounts the idea of the divinity of nature or of natural bodies, especially the idea of the heavenly bodies as gods. Humans, left to their own devices, default to the worship of nature, attributing supernatural powers to natural forces. Like modern science, too, Genesis argues for the distinctions between different things in the created world. Darwin’s great work is entitled “The Origin of Species,” implying the same idea that things are distinct from one another.

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Prayers and liturgy

Edmund J. Peck, Missionary

The collect for today, the commemoration of Edmund J. Peck (1850-1924), Priest, Missionary to the Inuit, Translator (source):

Edmund J. PeckGod of our salvation, whose servant Edmund James Peck made the testimony of the Spirit his own and gladly proclaimed the riches of Christ among the Inuit people, give the joy of your gospel to us also, that we may exalt you in the congregation of all peoples and praise you in the abundance of your mercies; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:16-20

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 September

In the beginning God … In the beginning was the Word

The tradition of our first two Chapel services at the beginning of term is for the head boy and head girl to read two short Scripture lessons: one from Genesis (Gen. 1.1-5) and the other from The Gospel according to St. John (John 1.1-5). They are powerful and significant readings about which it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Chapel would not be able to contain all of the books that comment upon, reflect, and allude to these two passages, books that embrace a large range of cultures and intellectual disciplines over a vast array of ages.

How to think about the beginning of term? In Chapel it is about recalling how there is a beginning for all of us because there is something there before us, a beginning that is ultimately about the principles of education that guide and direct the School. Begin with God, the beginning without beginning, and everything else comes after, especially the things that belong to our intellectual and spiritual life and which inform all our other doings. Chapel is an integral part of the School and speaks to the idea of the whole School and to the wholeness of individuals.

The two readings in concert are enormously influential and central to a large number of discourses both within and between different cultures and religions. The idea of creation and of the Creator as an intellectual principle is common to Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, for instance, and all three in a creative relation to Greek philosophy. ‘He speaks and it is,’ as the Qur’an suggests, showing how it is influenced by both texts. The continuing engagement between these texts and the works of Plato and Aristotle all contribute to the idea of the cosmos as intelligible and to the rich tradition of ethical and philosophical reflection on how we think nature and ultimately ourselves.

These two passages also belong to the early modern developments in natural philosophy, even to the works of Newton and Darwin, and to all manner of subsequent debates. They have their counterparts, too, in the works of Hinduism and Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. They belong to our constant reflection on what it means to think the natural world; in short, to think the world as being thinkable.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

“Be not anxious”

What could be more anxious making than talking about being anxious? Anxiety R’ us! Big time. And therein lies the problem. W.H. Auden in 1947 wrote a long and largely unread prose poem entitled “The Age of Anxiety” which provided a convenient image for our world and day, itself a culture of anxiety. The title more than the work itself has had considerable influence in capturing our uncertainties. To be fair, it is not easy to say what exactly Auden meant by anxiety. Yet it has become the default word for so many features of our contemporary culture. His solution, near as one might be able to discern, seems to be the idea of mutual sympathy or mutual love for one another even towards those who are really strangers. That is, I think, powerfully suggestive along with the ideas in the poem about the forms of modern self-consciousness which add to the anxiety, on the one hand, and to the antidote of sympathy, on the other hand, through a kind of toleration – not wanting to disappoint and as such being willing to go along with others.

While there may be something to this not wanting to disappoint others and simply being willing to go along in a kind of sympathy for one another, even the beginnings of a kind of care for one another, it seems to me to fall far short of the antidote to anxiety which today’s Gospel story presents. I have on occasion called it ‘the Gospel of Anxiety’ even though it is really the antidote to anxiety but in ways which are deeply challenging to our preoccupations and concerns.

The words anxious and anxiety are relatively modern, appearing first in English via the German in the 17th century and really only taking flight in the late 19th century before becoming rooted in our lexical imaginations in the 20th and going viral, as things only can, in the 21st century. Tyndale’s 16th century English translation of today’s Gospel does not use the word anxious or anxiety. He has rendered Jesus’ words as “be not careful”, an idea which is also found in Luke’s story about Martha and Mary where, as Tyndale puts it, Jesus says, “Martha Martha thou carest and arte troubled about many things”. Here  his “be not careful” was changed in the King James Version of 1611 to “take no thought,” while it more or less keeps to Tyndale in the passage from Luke with “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.” It was only in the late 19th and 20th centuries, that the shift in today’s Gospel was made to “be not anxious” as in the Revised Version as well as other translations, only to be changed, yet again in the New Revised Versions to “do not worry.” Interesting shifts, to say the least.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 10 – 16 September

Monday, September 10th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, September 11th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Wednesday, September 12th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, September 13th, Eve of Holy Cross
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, September 14th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, September 16th, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, September 18th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room
Bookshops: A Reader’s History by Jorge Carrion, and The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures by Charlie English.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity

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

KEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:11-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-34

Cosimo Rosselli, Sermon on the MountArtwork: Cosimo Rosselli, Sermon on the Mount, 1481-82. Fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. (On the right Christ is shown healing a leper.)

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