Year: 2018

Prayers and liturgy

Florence Nightingale, Nurse

The collect for today, the commemoration of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Nurse, Social Reformer (source):

Francis William Sargent, Florence Nightingale MemorialLife-giving God, who alone hast power over life and death, over health and sickness: Give power, wisdom, and gentleness to those who follow the example of thy servant Florence Nightingale, that they, bearing with them thy Presence, may not only heal but bless, and shine as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of pain and fear; through Jesus Christ, the healer of body and soul, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 58:6-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:31-46

Artwork: Francis William Sargent, Florence Nightingale Memorial, 1913. Main Cloister, Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence. Photograph taken by admin, 17 May 2010.

Florence Nightingale was born in Florence to an English couple touring Europe. Her parents loved the city so much that they gave its name to their daughter.

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Prayers and liturgy

Cyril and Methodius, Missionaries

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Cyril (826-69) and Saint Methodius (c. 815-85), Apostles to the Slavs (source):

O Lord of all,
who gavest to thy servants Cyril and Methodius
the gift of tongues to proclaim the gospel to the Slavic people:
we pray that thy whole Church may be one as thou art one,
that all who confess thy name may honour one another,
and that from east and west all may acknowledge one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
and thee, the God and Father of all;
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: Ephesians 3:1-7
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:15-20

Jan Matejko, Saints Cyril and MethodiusSt. Cyril and St. Methodius were brothers born in Thessalonica who went to Constantinople after being ordained priests. (Cyril was baptised Constantine and did not become known as Cyril until late in his life.) Around AD 863, Emperor Michael II and Patriarch Photius sent the brothers as missionaries to Moravia, where they translated into Slavonic the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. With his brother’s help, Cyril created an alphabet that later developed into Cyrillic, thus laying the foundation for Slavic literature.

German missionary bishops in the area celebrated the liturgy in Latin and opposed the brothers’ use of the vernacular. In 867, Cyril and Methodius participated in a debate in Venice over the use of Slavonic liturgy and were soon received with great honour in Rome by Pope Hadrian II, who authorised the use of Slavic tongues in the liturgy.

In 868, Cyril became a monk and entered a monastery in Rome, but died soon afterward and was buried in the church at San Clemente. Shortly after Cyril’s death, Methodius was consecrated archbishop of Sermium and returned to Moravia where he ministered for another fifteen years. He continued the work of translation and evangelisation, while continuing to face opposition from German bishops. Before his death in 885, he and his followers completed translations of the Bible, liturgical services, and collections of canon law.

St. Cyril and St. Methodius are honoured for evangelising the Slavs, organising the Slavic church, and pioneering the celebration of liturgy in the vernacular. For these reasons, in 1980 Pope John Paul II named them, together with St. Benedict, patron saints of all Europe.

Artwork: Jan Matejko, Saints Cyril and Methodius, 1885. National Museum, Poznan, Poland.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension

Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?

The question seems to capture a critical commonplace about religion: gazing into the heavens instead of paying attention to the things of the world, religion as utter nonsense and of no earthly value. In a way, it is partly true, at least in the sense that religion, in this case the Christian religion, is not to be measured by the world. Though the World Council of Churches famously (or infamously) once opined that the world sets the agenda for the churches, this is at best highly questionable. To be sure, the Church in the form of the churches finds itself in the world but it is not of the world. World improvement is not exactly the role and purpose of the churches, however much the churches have contributed to the stability and order of human communities in the world at times.

The paradox is great. The Church in being true to God contributes to the world but cannot be defined by the world and the world’s agendas. The paradox is poignantly manifest in The Feast of the Ascension of Christ. It marks the culmination or fulfillment of the doctrine of the Resurrection. The overcoming of sin and death is about our being restored to fellowship with God signaled in the homecoming of the Son to the Father in the Spirit. In the going forth and now the return of the Son to the Father, we have the highest expression of human dignity and truth. We have a home with God now in the world because of Christ’s being “at the right hand of the Father.” His going from us into heaven establishes the real truth and meaning of our lives spiritually and sacramentally.

The Ascension is cosmic in scope and signals the redemption of the world and our humanity by the gathering of both to God. We live in that understanding and that orientation. Our liturgy is really the liturgy of the Ascension. “Lift up your hearts!” In prayer and praise we participate in the return of all things to God from whom all good things to come. The whole point is about the world and our humanity in God, not God in the world and in us. It is a question of emphasis and direction.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

Hans Memling, The AscensionThe collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

Artwork: Hans Memling, The Ascension (right panel of The Triptych of the Resurrection), c. 1490. Oil on wood, Louvre, Paris.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 7 May

Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?

The question raises a certain contemporary attitude towards religion. Isn’t religion, after all, utterly useless and of no earthly good? “Don’t just stand there, do something?” Isn’t that the familiar mantra of the culture of busyness? This presupposes the fatal separation between doing and thinking. It might be better and truer to say, “don’t just do something but sit and think”!

It is, to be sure, a post-Christian world and one in which there appears to be no end of suspicion and disdain for all forms of religion. But the triumph of secularism is itself an illusion. Our post-Christian culture is also a “post-secular age,” a point which has been well known for several decades, notably expressed by the self-described metaphysical atheist, Jurgen Habermas. He pointed out the demise of ‘secularisation theory’ in the phenomenon of the modern return of religion. That return is ‘the good, the bad and the ugly,’ perhaps, but it means, at the very least, that religion has to be thought about seriously. The gaping hole in our systems of public education is the place (or non-place) of religion.

There is no area of knowledge, no subject or discipline in the academic world, that does not have some sort of connection to religion as philosophy. The terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are themselves very modern constructs which presuppose a conflict narrative perpetuated on both sides. The term, scientia, knowledge, was for more than two millennia about an inner disposition of the mind, about the discipline of thinking ethically with respect to any number of different areas of knowledge and interest. It was only in the 19th century that the term was reduced to a body of knowledge and a way of thinking, mostly empirical, about the natural world and, sadly, without a sense of the ethical. Ironically, it is easily conflated with a body of knowledge at the expense of us as knowers. The term, religio, religion, too, is at once ambiguous and uncertain and does not easily map onto the earlier forms of philosophical discourse. Religion, historically, was more about philosophy as a way of life; our knowing as knowing and living ethically.

These observations simply go to the important question about how we read and think, speak and act, something which often gets addressed in Chapel. This week brought us to the Christian mystery of the Ascension of Christ. The question about gazing up into heaven is not about the uselessness of all things religious and spiritual but more about how Christ’s Ascension is the fullest possible affirmation of our humanity, soul and body, and of human individuality. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father. At once cosmic in scope, it says something profound about the dignity of our humanity; “the exultation of our humanity,” as the Fathers spoke about it. It highlights the spiritual insight that our bodies and the world of nature are not nothing; they belong and have their place and truth with God. The Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection. It points us to a profound view about our humanity, about who we are in the sight of God.

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Prayers and liturgy

Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop and Doctor

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329-89), Monk, Bishop, Theologian, Doctor of the Eastern Church (source):

Almighty God, who hast revealed to thy Church thine eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like thy bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of thee, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who livest and reignest for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Wisdom 7:7-14
The Gospel: St. John 8:25-32

Peter Paul Rubens, St. Gregory of NazianzusArtwork: Peter Paul Rubens, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, 1620-21. Oil on wood, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

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Sermons

Sermon for Rogation Sunday, 10:30am service

In the world ye shall have tribulation;
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world

Jesus’s words seem to imply a conflict between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. But that would be, I think, a mistake. Rogation Sunday is really part and parcel of the Easter message which is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world. That is an essential feature of redemption, about our being returned to God and abiding in his love. We only live when we are alive to God. Our relation to the world belongs to that understanding. The world is God’s world. Redemption cannot be a negation of creation but its fulfillment.

Rogation Sunday provides us with a wonderful theology of the land. We are greatly exercised and concerned about our relation to the land, to what we call the environment. But how we use words greatly affects our thinking and our living or acting, a point which The Epistle of St. James clearly indicates. “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” What does it mean to be a doer of the word? It means actions, yes, but actions that are themselves words in motion. We are to act upon words that are heard and if heard, then words that are spoken and proclaimed. The Epistle points us to a fundamental feature of the Christian religion and beyond, namely, the idea of a way of life predicated upon a way of thinking.

What kind of way of life? A way of life which embraces an ethical approach to the land in which we are placed. Rogation refers to prayer, to the prayer of asking. That immediately challenges our assumptions about our relationship to the land and to one another by bringing both into relation to God. It challenges the various assumptions that belong to our understanding of ourselves in relation to the natural world.

Eight years ago in 2010, someone somewhere schlepped off a farm one day and moved into a city and suddenly the world tilted and changed. Globally speaking, 2010 marked the moment, statistically, when there were for the first time in history more people living in urban settings than in rural places. This profound shift has lead to a raft of different questions and concerns, one of which is what is called the ‘nature deficit,’ a sense of disconnect with the natural world. This modern malaise is wonderfully captured in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, God’s Grandeur.
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Sermons

Sermon for Rogation Sunday, 8:00am service

In the world ye shall have tribulation;
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world

Jesus’s words seem to imply a conflict between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. But that would be, I think, a mistake. Rogation Sunday is really part and parcel of the Easter message which is not about a flight from the world but about the redemption of the world. That is an essential feature of redemption, about our being returned to God and abiding in his love. We only live when we are alive to God. Our relation to the world belongs to that understanding. The world is God’s world. Redemption cannot be a negation of creation but its fulfillment.

Rogation Sunday provides us with a wonderful theology of the land. We are greatly exercised and concerned about our relation to the land, to what we call the environment. But how we use words greatly affects our thinking and our living or acting, a point which The Epistle of St. James clearly indicates. “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” What does it mean to be a doer of the word? It means actions, yes, but actions that are themselves words in motion. We are to act upon words that are heard and if heard, then words that are spoken and proclaimed. The Epistle points us to a fundamental feature of the Christian religion and beyond, namely, the idea of a way of life predicated upon a way of thinking.

What kind of way of life? A way of life which embraces an ethical approach to the land in which we are placed. Rogation refers to prayer, to the prayer of asking. That immediately challenges our assumptions about our relationship to the land and to one another by bringing both into relation to God. It challenges the various assumptions that belong to our understanding of ourselves in relation to the natural world.

(more…)

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 7 – 13 May

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

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

Wednesday, May 9th
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Thursday, May 10th, Ascension Day
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, May 11th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

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

Sunday, May 13th, Sunday After Ascension Day
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, May 15th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room
Ross King, “Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of The Water Lilies” and Christian Madsbjerg, “Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm”

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

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifth Sunday After Easter

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St. John 16:23-33

Ercole de' Roberti, The Institution of the EucharistArtwork: Ercole de’ Roberti, The Institution of the Eucharist, 1490s. Egg on panel, National Gallery, London.

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