Christ Church

“What are they among so many?”

This morning’s Gospel complements our Lenten Programme, ‘Thinking Sacramentally’. Taken from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, sometimes known as ‘the Bread of Life discourse’, it is profoundly sacramental. The whole chapter is about the idea of the sacramental, the idea of the invisible being made known through the visible. And perhaps nowhere in the Scriptures is the harmony of sign and the thing signified made more apparent than in that chapter as a whole.

This Gospel has exercised a strong hold on the liturgical and sacramental imaginary of the Church. It is read today in the midst of the journey of Lent as a signal and significant feature of the pageant of justifying grace. From Advent to Trinity Sunday in the eucharistic lectionary we are essentially journeying with Christ in his work of the redemption of our humanity. Something of the nature of that journey is wonderfully concentrated here for us. We live, it seems, and live abundantly from the crumbs that are gathered up from the picnic feast with Jesus in the wilderness. There is an echo here to the Gospel reading for The Second Sunday in Lent about ourselves as like “the little dogs who eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”.

This Gospel has also been read for many centuries on the last Sunday of the Trinity Season, on what we have later come to call The Sunday Next Before Advent. There it is read as a signal and significant feature of the pageant of sanctifying grace, as a kind of gathering up of the fragments of grace in the course of our spiritual journey from Trinity Sunday through to Advent Sunday which is all about sanctification. What Christ has done for us is to be lived in us. Such is sanctifying grace.

The two are interrelated. Sanctifying grace always recalls us to the justifying grace of Christ just as justifying grace always requires our taking a hold of it in our lives in sanctification. The interrelation of these two forms is our incorporation in Christ, the meaning of our life in Christ. It is profoundly and necessarily sacramental. It has everything to do with the relationship between God and man in Jesus Christ and the ways in which we participate in his divinity and his humanity through the grand pageants of creation and redemption and the great pageants of justification and sanctification. They are concentrated for us in this Gospel reading.

“O God, who didst wonderfully create and yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our human nature, Mercifully grant that by the mystery of this water and this wine we may be made partakers of his divinity who didst humble himself to share our humanity”. It is a prayer that you may have heard me say quietly and privately at the time of the preparation of the elements at the altar. It captures the nature of sacramental thinking, the idea of our being with God through God’s being with us, through the interplay of creation and redemption, and the union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Today’s readings teach us is that our life in Christ happens through the harmony of Word and Sacrament, through the things of the world being made the instruments of grace and salvation.

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Tuesday, April 2nd
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme: Thinking Sacramentally IV

Thursday, April 4th
2:00pm Ministerial Service – The Elms
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, April 5th
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, April 7th, Passion Sunday / Fifth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

The collect for today, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished, by the comfort of thy grace may mercifully be relieved; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:26-5:1
The Gospel: St. John 6:5-14

Artwork: Juan de Flandes, The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, c. 1496-1504. Oil on canvas, Royal Palace of Madrid.

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Keble (1792-1866), Priest, Tractarian, Poet (source):

Father of the eternal Word,
in whose encompassing love
all things in peace and order move:
grant that, as thy servant John Keble
adored thee in all creation,
so we may have a humble heart of love
for the mysteries of thy Church
and know thy love to be new every morning,
in 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: Romans 12:9-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 5:1-12

John Keble’s Assize Sermon entitled “National Apostasy“, delivered at Oxford on 14 July 1833, is regarded as the beginning of the renewal movement known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarian Movement. In that sermon, preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Rev. Keble condemned the growth of liberalism in the Church of England and took the nation to task for turning away from God and ignoring the prophetic calling of the church. The sermon caused a sensation across Britain.

Between 1833 and 1841, Rev. Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and others issued a series of 90 pamphlets called Tracts For The Times (hence Tractarian Movement), in which they presented their views on ecclesiology and theology. Tractarianism emphasised the importance of the ministry and the sacraments as God-given ordinances and ultimately developed into Anglo-Catholicism, which has been highly influential in the Anglican Communion as well as other Christian traditions.

Keble College, Oxford, was founded in his memory in 1870. The College was designed by William Butterfield, a leading exponent of Victorian Gothic who had been raised in a Nonconformist family but later became a convinced High-Church Anglican. He and other architects influenced by the Oxford Movement looked to medieval cathedrals for inspiration and designed churches full of colour as a celebration of God’s creation. The walls of Keble College Chapel are lined with brilliant mosaics showing scenes from the Old Testament and the life of Christ, and patristic and medieval saints. Some see Keble College and Chapel as the high point of Butterfield’s architectural achievements.

John Keble’s page at Hymnary.org lists dozens of hymns. Some of Rev. Keble’s writings, including “National Apostasy” and seven Tracts For The Times, are posted here. All of the tracts are posted here.

Be it unto me

Chapel and classes resumed after the March break on Monday, March 25th, an auspicious occasion in the Christian calendar and yet one with a considerable resonance with other religions and philosophies. One can’t help but observe that it is exactly nine months to Christmas! At once ‘hooray’, and ‘oh, no’, I suppose! It marks the Feast of the Annunciation, the annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to Mary that she is to be the mother of God, the mother of Jesus, a story which we ordinarily hear in Advent and at Christmas. Yet the feast of the Annunciation marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not by way of biological and sexual intercourse, but intellectually and spiritually and in ways that redeem and sanctify the physical and the natural; hence the significance of the symbolism of nine months to Christmas, to the birth of Christ. “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” as Medieval wisdom puts it. Mary plays a significant role in the Christian understanding of Christ and who Christ is for us. As such she is a central figure in the question which all the great religions and philosophies wrestle with, the question about what it means to be human.

Many of you have just returned from various adventures and travels, journeys to far off places and climes, journeys to Africa and Europe and elsewhere, journeys that are global; others of you have travelled in other ways, through books and thoughts, through dreams and the power of imagination. Yet the one important and interesting thing about all the journeys of our lives is that while we talk about getting away from things, the one thing we cannot get away from and the one thing that we always take with us wherever we go and however we go, is ourselves. You. And so there is the critical necessity of thinking about what it means to be a ‘you’, a self. Mary plays a crucial and critical role in that kind of thinking.

We cannot think of Mary without looking back into such figures as Hannah and Miriam in the Old Testament as well as host of other figures and images such as Deborah “who arose as a mother in Israel” and Jael, “most blessed among women”, whom the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges celebrates, a book which we will be exploring over the next little while. Mary, too, as the mother of Jesus, is present in the Qur’an; she is actually mentioned there more times than in the Christian New Testament. But far from being merely a role model for women, Mary is the great exemplar of what it truly means to be human. She is part of our current quest to think about what it means to be a ‘self’ or whether that is simply an illusion. Perhaps, there is no ‘you’; perhaps, as Yuval Noah Harari suggests, you are merely an “organic algorithm”, and, whatever that means, it means that there is no ‘you’. Your March break journey was, perhaps, merely a fantasy!

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Behold the handmaid of the Lord;  be it unto me according to thy word.

This text speaks profoundly to our Lenten theme of thinking sacramentally. It embodies, I use the term intentionally, the harmony of intellect and sense that lies at the heart of our thinking sacramentally. A text familiar from the Advent and Christian pageants and seasons, it belongs primarily and essentially to the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the very beginning of the Incarnation. The Annunciation is the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not biologically through sexual intercourse but intellectually and spiritually, and not by the denial of nature but by virtue of the grace which does not destroy but perfects nature.

“Those who are not good Marians are often Arians”, as a 17th century maxim notes, suggesting something about the essential role of Mary in the understanding of orthodox Christianity. Arianism, named after Arius, denies the essential and absolute divinity of Christ, treating Jesus as something less and other than “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”, as we say in the Nicene Creed. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer; in short, the mother of God. A celebrated (and contested) term, it belongs utterly and entirely to the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, to the doctrine of God as Trinity, to the hypostatic union of God and Man in the Incarnation of Christ Jesus, and to the doctrine of human redemption; or perhaps should I say, the central dogmas of the Christian Faith. This means that they are the essential and fundamental features of Christianity which embrace a number of different though not necessarily opposed doctrines, meaning ways of thinking about these essential principles of the Christian faith, and which are central to any form of principled engagement with other religions. Mary is therefore not an extra, not a sentimental add-on. She is altogether essential to the understanding and life of the Christian faith and in its engagement with other religions, to boot.

With Mary we are obliged to look back to the Jewish Scriptures to Hannah and Miriam and others even as we can also look ahead to the Islamic Qur’an. Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Qur’an puts it, is mentioned more times there than in the New Testament. But the number of mentions of her name is altogether secondary to the essential role Mary plays in the economy of salvation. In the New Testament, for instance, Mary appears at all the essential moments in the story of Christ and is always to be understood in relation to Christ.

What is that relation? She is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As such she is inescapably an important part of the Chalcedonian definition which argues for the full and perfect humanity and divinity of Christ united in the one person of Christ. Mary embodies the fullest truth of our humanity qua human. She shows us something of what it truly means to be human. She embodies the very idea of one who having heard the Word of God keeps it in her heart and gives birth to the Incarnate Word. At once unique – none of us are without sin and as Augustine and others after him have thought, there is something special about Mary on this score – yet she is totally and perfectly human, fully human we might say.

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The collect for today, The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canada, 1962):

WE beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Isaiah 7:10-15
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-38

Artwork: Master of the Aix Annunciation (Barthélemy d’Eyck), Annunciation, 1443-45. Oil on wood, Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Aix-en-Provence, France.

“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”

I like to think of today’s Gospel as the gospel of despair and one which speaks rather directly to the forms of darkness, death, and despair in the contemporary culture of nihilism. But how can that be good news? Because the nihilisms. the sense of empty nothingness, cynicism, discontent, and despair which pervades our culture and day are named, on the one hand, and overcome, on the other hand. The first is easy to see; the second has become somewhat obscured in the Gospel though it is signaled in the Epistle, “Ye were sometimes darkness but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light”. What do I mean by somewhat obscured in the gospel?

The last words that you heard in this morning’s gospel were “and the last state of that man is worse than the first”. This follows after an account of the folly and vanity of evil as being like a house divided against itself, the soul in self-contradiction. We hear of the finger-grace of Christ by which the devils are cast out of our souls. But if we do not attend to that strong teaching then we find ourselves not with God in Christ but against God in Christ and discover that we are in the obscene company of “seven other spirits more wicked than himself”. Evil begets evil when we ignore and deny the goodness of God. As such “the last state of that man is worse than the first”. But that is not actually the real end of the reading. It goes on to say: “And it came to pass as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lift up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck. But he said, Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Unfortunately, since 1962 in Canada, the last two verses which provide the necessary counter and overcoming of despair have been left out.

Yet they provide a much more fitting conclusion to the encounter and scene and reveal more fully the counter to our despair which arises from the idolatry of our own autonomy. Thinking ourselves to be light we can only discover our own darkness. Paradoxically, to know the darkness of our hearts presupposes the greater light of God’s goodness. To name the darkness is already to be more than the darkness; the darkness is made manifest by the light.

The contradictions of our culture are great, the forms of folly and despair undeniable. In presupposing our own self-sufficiency we can only discover our failings and our sins. That is actually the good news because only then are we open to hear precisely what God seeks for us. The “devices and desires of our own hearts” can only lead to despair. If we think, as we do, that we are entitled to certain things, if we think that we are owed pleasure and security, as we do, and if we think that we deserve certain things, as we do, then we deceive ourselves. We presume too much. Here in this gospel we confront an image of our self-deception. We call God’s goodness in Christ evil. He casts out devils and we accuse him of being a devil. The contradiction is obvious as Jesus shows. Evil is nothing, a privation of all that exists and is good and true, yet we grant to it a substantiality, a quality of ‘thingness’, which it does not and cannot have. The evil lies in us.

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Tuesday, March 26th, Annunciation (transf.)
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme: Thinking Sacramentally III

Thursday, March 28th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, March 29th
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, March 31st, Fourth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion (followed by Simnel Cake in the Hall)
4:00pm Evening Prayer

The collect for today, the Third Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

WE beseech thee, Almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants and stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty to be our defence against all our enemies; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 5:1-14
The Gospel: St Luke 11:14-26

Artwork: James Tissot, Jesus Heals a Mute Possessed Man, 1886-94. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Brooklyn Museum.