Year: 2018

Prayers and liturgy

Monnica, Matron

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Monnica (c. 331-387), mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo (source):

Piero della Francesca, St. MonicaO Lord, who through spiritual discipline didst strengthen thy servant Monnica to persevere in offering her love and prayers and tears for the conversion of her husband and of Augustine their son: Deepen our devotion, we beseech thee, and use us in accordance with thy will to bring others, even our own kindred, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: 1 Samuel 1:10-11,20
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-17

Artwork: Piero della Francesca, St. Monica (from Polyptych of St. Augustine), c. 1460. Tempera on panel, Frick Collection, New York.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 30 April

I am hemmed in on every side

Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1610 painting of the story of Susanna captures the moment when she discovers that she is being watched by two elders who conspire to have sex with her. The painting shows Susanna’s shock, dismay, and vulnerability at the ‘male gaze’ which reduces her to the object of their lust and violates her privacy and her personality.

While the story may have been composed as early as the sixth century BC, it was added to the cycle of stories about Daniel in the first century BC. Some argue for an Hebrew original but the story itself has come down to us in Greek as part of the Septuagint and subsequently included in the Latin Vulgate. Regarded as canonical, though not without debate, by Roman Catholics and the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, it is regarded as an Apocryphal text by Protestants. Yet the story of Susanna along with the story of Esther, of Judith and of Sarah (in The Book of Tobit), not to mention the admirable mother of the sons of Eleazar in The Books of Maccabees, contribute to a remarkable collection of texts which deal intentionally with strong, virtuous, and pious women in the face of persecution, adversity, and abuse. They exemplify the classical virtues as seen through the lenses of Hebrew law.

Such stories are intriguing and illuminate an important aspect of the philosophical literature of religious traditions. They reveal the concept of self-correction and self-criticism in the awareness of the limitations of human justice and of its betrayal through the various forms of sin. Here the story is about the attempted abuse of Susanna by the elders who have betrayed their office of guarding and governing their people. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guard themselves? The ancient and classic question is our modern question too. “They perverted their minds and turned away their eyes from looking to Heaven or remembering righteous judgements,” as the text puts it.

A gem of a short story from a literary standpoint, it is sometimes regarded as the first detective story. How do we face adversity? How do we face abuse? These are real questions and here those questions are addressed theologically and in terms of character. The story of Susanna has not only influenced a great number of artists, appearing as a fresco in the catacombs of Rome as well the subject of paintings by Tintoretto, Rembrandt, and others, not to mention Artemisia Gentileschi’s achievement. It has also influenced Shakespeare, explicitly in Measure for Measure and in The Merchant of Venice.

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Prayers and liturgy

Athanasius, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Athanasius (c. 293-373), Bishop of Alexandria, Theologian, Apologist, Doctor of the Church (source):

Ever-living God,
whose servant Athanasius bore witness
to the mystery of the Word made flesh for our salvation:
give us grace, with all thy saints,
to contend for the truth
and to grow into the likeness 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 Epistle: 2 Corinthians 4:5-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:23-28

Domenichino, Saint AthanasiusSaint Athanasius is one of the most inspirational leaders of the early church. His dogged and uncompromising defence of the full divinity of Jesus Christ against the Arian heresy saved the unity and integrity of the Christian religion and church. He saw that Christ’s deity was foundational to the faith and that Arianism meant the end of Christianity.

Arius and his followers maintained that Christ the Logos was neither eternal nor uncreated, but a subordinate being—the first and finest of God’s creation, but a creature nonetheless. Despite being rejected at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, which Athanasius attended as deacon under the orthodox Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Arianism remained popular and influential in the Eastern church for most of the fourth century.

Athanasius became bishop in 328 at age 33 and spent the next five decades fighting for Nicene orthodoxy. For his troubles, he was deposed and exiled five times, spending a total of seventeen years in flight and hiding, often shielded by the people of Alexandria. Six years of exile were spent in Rome, where he gained the strong support of the Western church, and another six years were spent under the protection of monks in the Egyptian desert.

He was finally able to return to Alexandria in 365 and spent the final years of his life bolstering orthodoxy, which ultimately triumphed at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of SS. Philip and James

“Ye believe in God, believe also in me”

The most provocative, the most challenging, and the most controversial of Jesus’ so-called “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel, at least with respect to interfaith dialogue is where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Yet the things which Jesus says and does are the works which manifest the truth and the life and the way of God. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

Are there not other ways to God, the ways belonging to other religions, for example? No doubt, the other great religions have much to offer in the way of wisdom and truth, and wonderfully and profoundly so, it seems to me. Each of them, whether it is Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism and so on, has important and distinctive insights. So, too, does Christianity. The point is to be able to respect the integrity of each religion and not reduce them all to some common political, social or psychological idea, subjecting them, in other words, to some feature or other that contemporary secular culture finds amenable with itself. The point for Christians in honouring what is distinctive about Christianity is not to deny and diminish the claim that Christ is “the Way, the Truth and the Life,” but to connect other insights to that idea and to realize that there can and must be a respectful dialogue among the religions of the world only in and through what belongs to each.

The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. For Anglicans, this is captured in Article XVIII of the Thirty-nine Articles; the only anathema in all of the articles concerns the denial of the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ. It is only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ that Christians can and must engage the religions of the world as well as the forms of contemporary culture.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Philip and Saint James the Apostles

The Collect for today, The Feast of Saint Philip and Saint James the Apostles, with Saint James the Brother of the Lord, Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us perfectly to know thy Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life; that, following the steps of thy holy Apostles, Saint Philip and Saint James, we may stedfastly walk in the way that leadeth to eternal life; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Additional Collect, of the Brethren of the Lord:

O HEAVENLY Father, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning: We bless thy holy Name for the witness of James and Jude, the kinsmen of the Lord, and pray that we may be made true members of thy heavenly family; through him who willed to be the firstborn among many brethren, even the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:1-12
The Gospel: St. John 14:1-14

Peter Paul Rubens, Saint James the MinorPeter Paul Rubens, Saint Philip

Artwork: Peter Paul Rubens, Saint James the Minor (left) and Saint Philip (right), c. 1612. Oil on panel, Prado, Madrid.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter

He brought us to birth by the word of truth

Another birthing image, another image of new life in Christ. Eastertide grounds us in the life of the risen Christ. That is not something static but dynamic. We are set in motion, caught up in the motions of God towards us and with us, drawn into the motions of the Son to the Father. And all through the Spirit of truth whom Christ and the Father send to us. “He will guide you into all truth,” Jesus says. The Spirit of truth is also known as the Paraclete, the Comforter, the one who strengthens us in our life with God.

The Easter season abounds with this sense of an orientation and a direction. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.” And in the last three Sundays of the Easter Season, everything that belongs to human experience and human hopes and expectations is gathered into the motion of the Son to the Father captured in the phrase “because I go to my Father.” Again, it is entirely dynamic.

We live in the motions of the Son’s love for the Father through the Spirit, the bond of their love and power. What is being opened out to us is the reality of the life of the Spirit. The resurrection appearances are not just some sort of show and tell. They reveal the greater and more radical truth of our humanity as found in and with God. That is captured for us in the image of the Son’s going to the Father. In today’s Gospel, that fundamental sense of orientation and direction is understood in terms of righteousness.

The Spirit, Christ says, “reprove[s] the world of righteousness.” What does that mean? It signals the contrast between the world of human sin and folly, our unrighteousness, on the one hand, and God’s absolute justice, the divine righteousness, on the other hand. That is found in the Son’s relation to the Father in the Spirit. True justice or righteousness is not found in ourselves but in our relation to God. In these lessons from John’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching us about the Holy Spirit, about the nature of the divine life of God as Trinity. The Resurrection points us to the Ascension, to the homeland of the Spirit. It is all about a kind of orientation of our hearts and minds in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 30 April – 6 May

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

Tuesday, May 1st, SS. Philip & James
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Wednesday, May 2nd
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Friday, May 4th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, May 6th, Fifth Sunday after Easter/Rogation Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Baptism & Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

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

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

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday After Easter

The collect for today, The Fourth Sunday After Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:17-21
The Gospel: St. John 16:5-15

Wilhelm Kotarbinski, Last SupperArtwork: Wilhelm Kotarbinski, Last Supper, 1889-94. Fresco, St. Vlodymyr’s Cathedral, Kiev.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 April

Despising the suffering that brings death

Maccabees . Not certainly well known and yet The Books of Maccabees are profound and important works that belong to the intertestamental period; in other words, works that were written between the setting down of the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures. The Books of Maccabees are among a collection of writings that are sometimes called Deutero-canonical texts by Roman Catholics and Apocryphal texts by Protestants. They have different kinds of standing within the Protestant Churches and the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. For Anglicans they are read, if at all, not“to establish any doctrine” but “for example of life and instruction of manners.”

First and Second Maccabees deal with persecution, with the collision of cultures during the Hellenistic period. Maccabees itself means ‘hammer’ and refers to a family of heroes who stood up against Greek dominance. But more than simply belonging to the conflict narratives that bedevil so much of our own discourse, they open us out to important questions of a moral and an intellectual nature that, to some extent, transcend the divisions and oppositions that are the assumption and conclusion of all conflict narratives. As such, perhaps, they speak to some of our confusions and uncertainties about character and about what it means to be human, what it means to be a self.

In Chapel this week we read from 2nd Maccabees and from 4th Maccabees, the latter most likely completely unknown to most students and faculty and not found in most Bibles. The story in 2nd Maccabees was the powerful story of “the admirable mother” of the seven sons of Eleazar, all martyred because they stood up to the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. The story reflects the conditions of Israel under Hellenism following the conquests of Alexander the Great. In a way, the story speaks to the question, the important question for all of us, about how we face adversity.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Mark

“Speak the truth in love”

Mark is the Eastertide Saint par excellence; his commemoration always falls within the orbit of the Easter Season. As such he belongs to our Eastertide reflections on the radical nature of Christ’s Resurrection.

That this is paradoxical is perhaps not surprising. The so-called short ending of his Gospel, referring to the earliest texts that we have, ends not with the Resurrection but with the statement that “they were afraid.” The longer ending takes us somewhat further towards the Resurrection and its power at work in us.“They were afraid,” however, captures perfectly the condition of our awareness of being broken hearted, our awareness of our lack and insufficiency. Yet, to know our insufficiency is to know our brokenness at the same time as to be looking to our wholeness.

The longer version belongs to the Canonical Scriptures, to be sure, to the texts that are received as authoritative, and yet, the fact of the shorter version remains intriguing and suggestive. In so many ways, it belongs just as firmly and fully to the accounts of the Resurrection as the final ending. Consider it an ending within that ending.

The paradoxes mount up but in ways that belong to the greater paradox of the Resurrection itself, the paradox of dying in order to live. That is the fundamental pattern of Christian life which provides us with a way to face our brokenness and our incompleteness. In facing such things we are in principle open to the one in whom alone we find our wholeness. It means confronting our fears and our anxieties without being defined by them. It means not conforming to the expectations of the world but to the greater work of God with us and in us. The building up of the body of Christ is not about church buildings per se but about what they exist for. They exist only to remind us of our life in Christ.

This is why the Epistle reading from Ephesians is read on The Feast of St. Mark. It speaks to us about the truth of our lives in the love of Christ which alone is the principle“for the building up of the body of Christ.” Speaking the truth in love, as Paul suggests, equally belongs to our being witnesses to the Gospel of Christ even in the face of persecution and worldly troubles of whatever sort, whether it be political or natural catastrophes.

The challenge of The Feast of St. Mark is signalled in the Collect which draws upon both the Epistle and the Gospel readings. We are to stand firm “in the truth of [his] holy Gospel” and not give in to “every blast of vain doctrine”; in short, to be established in truth with love even when everything seems to be falling down around us. To speak the truth in love is to let Christ rule in us. The simple honesty of Mark’s Gospel allows us to face our fears and yet remain firm in our witness, holding fast to “the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark.”

“Speak the truth in love”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Mark, 2018

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