Month: October 2019

Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 14 – 20 October

Tuesday, October 15th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room, Parish Hall
New Dark Age: Technology & the End of the Future (2018), by James Bridle, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

Thursday, October 17th,, Eve of St. Luke
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, October 18th
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Saturday, October 19th
9:00-11:00am Bell Tower Clean-up

Sunday, October 20th, Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

“It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord,/
and to sing praises unto thy Name, O thou Most High” (Psalm 92.1)
Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a special and wonderful celebration. It speaks to a deep-seated spiritual sensibility in our souls even in the confusions, uncertainties, and denials of all things religious and spiritual in our contemporary culture. Thanksgiving is fundamentally and essentially spiritual.

Thanksgiving embraces at once Harvest Thanksgiving and National Thanksgiving, our thanks for the bounty of the harvest (whether or not there has been one!) and for the rational and spiritual freedoms that we enjoy (however much we ignore them and however much they are in question and disarray) in our nation and country. Those ‘thanksgivings’ are raised into the great thanksgiving, the Eucharist of the Son to the Father, re-enacted, recalled, and re-presented in “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” in the service of the Holy Eucharist. We are fed with the bread of life, which is Jesus himself who has come down from heaven to give life to the world. That life is about our participation in the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father, the Great Thanksgiving.

The giving of thanks to God, the giving of thanks for what we have, and the giving of thanks with one another and sharing with one another speaks to the highest freedom and dignity of our humanity. We give articulate praise to God for the harvest, for the nation, for our communities, and for one another, but, above all, for God himself. “Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself” as John Donne prays. We are in George Herbert’s rich phrase, “the secretaries of thy praise”. Thanksgiving is a metanoia, our thinking after the things of God in creation, a return to the principle of being and knowing.

Fr. David Curry

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Prayers and liturgy

The Seventeenth Sunday After Trinity

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

LORD, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:1-11

Visoki Decani Monastery, Christ Healing Man with DropsyArtwork: Christ Healing Man with Dropsy, c. 1350. Fresco, Visoki Decani Monastery, Kosovo.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Philip of Caesarea, Apostolic Man

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Philip of Caesarea, Deacon, Apostolic Man (source):

Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy servant Philip the Deacon, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to the peoples of Samaria and Ethiopia. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land heralds and evangelists of thy kingdom, that thy Church may make known the immeasurable riches of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Acts 8:26-40
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:18-20

Jan Both, Baptism of the EunuchArtwork: Jan Both, Baptism of the Eunuch, 1639-41. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

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Prayers and liturgy

Paulinus, Missionary and Archbishop

Cathedral of St John the Baptist, Saint PaulinusThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Paulinus (c. 584-644), Monk, first Archbishop of York, Missionary (source):

Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy servant Paulinus, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to the people of northern England. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land evangelists and heralds of thy kingdom, that thy Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

With the Epistle and Gospel for a Bishop or Archbishop, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

The St. Paulinus stained glass was made by the firm of C.E. Kempe of London and installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1913. Photograph taken by admin, 7 September 2009.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 October

Thanksgiving in Thanksgiving

“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger,” Jesus says in the classical Gospel thanksgiving story of the ten lepers who were healed of whom only one returned to give thanks. The story speaks to one of our current dilemmas: thanksgiving without thanksgiving.

We all like a good meal, to be sure. No one likes a bad meal but is thanksgiving simply an occasion for huge meal, for hedonistic self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption? Is it about celebrating our consumer selves? Something of the more radical nature of thanksgiving is shown in this Gospel story as highlighted by Jesus. More than a healing miracle, it is about the miracle of thanksgiving which is our participation in God’s grace, the true and only basis of gratitude. The root of gratitude is grace – what comes from God to us and in a myriad of ways.

True thanksgiving counters our complacency and our sense of entitlement. The harvest cannot be taken for granted; it cannot be said that we deserve a feast or that it is a right. There are times of famine and pestilence, times of drought and storm. Think only of the catastrophic humanitarian disaster that continues with the famine in Yemen. Here in Windsor, the annual Pumpkin Regatta will be a much diminished affair simply because there are far, far fewer pumpkins owing to the cold spring, the dryness of the summer, and, of course, Hurricane Dorian. Such things challenge our complacency and remind us that we can only work with God’s creation and that we do not have control of nature. They serve as a check upon our rather instrumental and utilitarian relation to the natural world and to one another.

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Prayers and liturgy

Robert Grosseteste, Bishop and Scholar

The collect for today, the commemoration of Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175-1253), Bishop of Lincoln, Scholar (source):

Robert GrossetesteO God our heavenly Father, who didst raise up thy faithful servant Robert Grosseteste to be a bishop and pastor in thy Church and to feed thy flock: Give to all pastors abundant gifts of thy Holy Spirit, that they may minister in thy household as true servants of Christ and stewards of thy divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Acts 20:28-32
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:10-15

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Denys, Bishop and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Denys (d. c. 258), Bishop of Paris, Patron Saint of France, Martyr (source):

Jean Bourdichon, Saint DenisO GOD, who as on this day didst endow thy blessed Martyr and Bishop Saint Denys with strength to suffer stedfastly for thy sake, and didst join unto him Rusticus and Eleutherius for the preaching of thy glory to the Gentiles: grant us, we beseech thee, so to follow their good example; that for the love of thee we may despise all worldly prosperity, and be afraid of no manner of worldly adversity. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Lesson: Acts 17:22-34
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:1-9

Artwork: Jean Bourdichon, Saint Denis, c. 1475-1500. Illumination on parchment (Illuminated manuscript of the Horae ad usum Parisiensem (Book of hours for Parisians), or “Book of Hours of Charles VIII” King of France), Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity (Octave of Michaelmas)

And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.

Compassion. Such a rich and powerful word, and, however much it has been hi-jacked by the therapy culture and greatly reduced in its meaning and  truth, it still retains a hold on our hearts and minds. Its deeper meaning is here for us to reclaim without which it becomes the kindness that kills.

Today’s Gospel shows us that compassion belongs to the spiritual pattern of death and resurrection. This Gospel story, along with the passage from Ephesians, makes it clear that compassion is nothing less than Christ in us. It is about our being “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” It is nothing less than our “being rooted and grounded in love,” knowing nothing less than “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” This is deep love.

The word compassion in Greek refers to the innermost being of a person, to the core of our being as it were, “the inner man,” the inner you. Luke uses the construction of ‘he saw, he had compassion’ three times: first, here in the story of the Widow of Nain; secondly, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan; and, thirdly, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Both the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son in his return to the Father are really about the movement of Christ’s love in us. But here we have an event where the Lord sees and has compassion. Matthew and Mark use it too in relation to Jesus “seeing the crowds and having compassion on them” because “they are like sheep without a shepherd.” The compassion of Christ, too, is used about Jesus seeing the crowd in the wilderness without food. Seeing them and having compassion on them leads to feeding them. The deeper theological sensibility is about our inward relation to God in Christ and through that to our care for one another. Without the first, our relation to God in Christ, I fear the second risks becoming the cover for the agendas of expediency and convenience; the kindness that kills, quite literally in terms of the so-called right to die via the complicity and agency of the medical profession, for example.

We may all want to die someday. There is nothing wrong in wanting to die especially in the Christian understanding of things. But it is quite another thing to cause one’s death or to be the agent of another’s death. These are some of the ethical dilemmas which arise in our technocratic culture where we have the means and power to do many things but lack the ethical wisdom to know when and where not to exercise such power. The larger question is about the good which is rooted and grounded in God and in his goodness.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 7 – 13 October

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

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

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

Saturday, October 12th
9:00-11:00am Men’s Club Decorating Church

Sunday, October 13th, Harvest Thanksgiving / Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, October 15th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room, Parish Hall
New Dark Age: Technology & the End of the Future (2018), by James Bridle, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

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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

Pierre Bouillon, Jesus Raising the Son of the Widow of NainArtwork: Pierre Bouillon, Jesus Raising the Son of the Widow of Nain, c. 1817. Oil on canvas, Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, France.

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