Year: 2019

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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Prayers and liturgy

St. Francis of Assisi

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), Friar, Deacon, Founder of the Friars Minor (source):

O God,
who ever delightest to reveal thyself
to the childlike and lowly of heart,
grant that, following the example of the blessed Francis,
we may count the wisdom of this world as foolishness
and know only Jesus Christ and him crucified,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:14-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:25-30

Luca Giordano, Saint FrancisArtwork: Luca Giordano, Saint Francis, c. 1650-3. Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 October

Tell me if you have understanding

The questions of God call us to account. They humble us, to be sure, acting as a check upon the ignorance of our arrogance, but they also open us out to the greater wonder of God and his creation, and to a deeper understanding about ourselves. The great questions of God to Adam and Eve, echoed in the same questions to Cain, are recalled in the questions of God to Job. And, perhaps, nowhere with greater intensity.

We have too small a view of God, of his creation, and thus of ourselves. The questions of God in The Book of Job counter our small-mindedness. They open us out to the grandeur of God which cannot be reduced to the petty little systems of our thinking, to the ghettos of our minds to which we retreat in fear and despair. The Book of Job counters our attempt to capture God within our thinking, to reduce God to us. In a way, I blame Milton in Paradise Lost. The idea of trying to “justifie the wayes of God to men” runs the risk of collapsing God into our thinking rather than raising us into the mystery of God and his creation which is always greater than what we can know. That the world is in principle intelligible does not mean that its meaning and truth can be fully grasped by us. Such is our small-mindedness that can only lead to nihilism and despair, not to mention the capacity for the destructive and misguided use of our reasoning.

Job is the Old Testament type of the best man in the worst misfortune. He loses everything – prosperity and family. He goes from having everything to losing everything. He is the Hebrew paradigm of the man of sorrows and suffering. He demands an explanation from God. The poet, novelist and theologian, G. K. Chesterton observes that the Book of Job is the most interesting of ancient books but equally the most interesting of modern books because in its philosophical wisdom it is eternal. It speaks profoundly to the assumptions of our middle class world. It challenges the old yet common idea that if you do well you will be rewarded materially, with prosperity. This is often the message projected by parents and teachers to their children and students along with the warning that if you do badly you will suffer poverty and material hardship. The Book of Job undertakes to point out the problem with such a way of looking at things; it is too limited, too small a view of the world and of human behaviour. The corollary of these positions shows their dangerous absurdity. If you are rich, therefore you must be good; if you are poor, then you are obviously bad?! The ethical measure of goodness or evil cannot be material prosperity. The Book of Job exposes the folly of this way of looking at things.

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Prayers and liturgy

Remigius, Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Remigius (c. 438-533), Bishop of Rheims, Apostle to the Franks (source):

O God, who by the teaching of thy faithful servant and bishop Remigius didst turn the nation of the Franks from vain idolatry to the worship of thee, the true and living God, in the fullness of the catholic faith; Grant that we who glory in the name of Christian may show forth our faith in worthy deeds; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. John 14:3-7

Joseph Blanc, Baptism of ClovisRemigius was consecrated bishop of Rheims at age 22. The pagan Clovis I, who had married the Christian princess Clothilde, began his reign as king of the Franks about 20 years later, in 481.

Before entering combat against German tribes at Tolbiac, Clovis prayed to “Clothilde’s God” for victory. His soldiers won the battle, and Clothilde asked Remigius to teach the king about Christianity. Clovis was amazed by the story of “this unarmed God who was not of the race of Thor or Odin”. In the words of Remigius, the king came “to adore what he had burnt and to burn what he had adored”.

In 496, Remigius baptised Clovis in a public ceremony at Rheims Cathedral. Three thousand Franks also became Christians. Under the king’s protection, Remigius was able to spread the gospel and build churches throughout Gaul.

Artwork: Joseph Blanc, Baptism of Clovis, c. 1880-99. Mounted canvas, Panthéon, Paris.

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